Lorry's document on wizard-hood

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

JeffK,

This is the document I referenced earlier.  Take it with a grain of
salt.  Realise it was written for amusement and the truth was
occassionally stretched (not as fequently as you'd think).  However
also realise that the fundamentals he describes were factually what
was done, and is and are what is expected in those environs.

--<cut>--

I was pointed in the direction of rec.games.mud yesterday by a 
"student" of mine who had been nominated for some nastiest player 
award. Having read all sorts of fascinating insights into how players 
are considered nasty simply because they victimise someone or how 
player killing is ever so bad and evil, I thought I'd write you a 
little article to show you how it really is, in the world of grown up 
games. 

The article is a padded out summary of something I was considering 
writing based on Machiavelli's "The Prince" giving all you lucky 
people my view on how a good game should be run, this is how I ran 
MIST which, after MUD was the most popular and long running 
non-commercial Multi User Adventure system there was. 

No apologies for any grammatical errors, spelling mistakes or personal
pronoun switches. I will compromise and apologise for the misuse of 
commas though. 


                   The Confessions of an Arch-Wizard.

Background

Before I start, it would be helpful to describe some of the background
 details of MIST, showing why it was run as it was and showing the 
environment the people who ran the game grew from. 

MIST was written in MUDDL, the language for creating and running Multi
User Adventure systems (written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle). 
It originally ran alongside MUD, but in 1986, when Richard left Essex 
and took MUD along with him (to become MUD2), all that was left was 
MIST. In the first few months of it running alone it had no 
administration at all and ran as a complete anarchy. There were lots 
of bugs and it was easy to cheat to wizard. During the anarchistic 
time, a few people rose to prominence through various means; normally 
by being old MUD players, being bloody good MIST players or being 
very quick with the shotgun. I fit into the last category and 
eventually more or less took the game over by force, sheer arrogance 
and good politics. 

In 1987, the account MIST ran from was taken over legally by someone 
in Essex (Simon Smith). He and I then took control of the game 
properly. We fixed all the bugs, deleted all the files and started 
again from scratch. 

MIST ran until about August 1990, when the DEC-10 at Essex was turned
off. It will be returning soon, but whether the atmosphere will remain
 the same I don't know. During the 4 years I ran it, it had a lot of 
changes in the map, the administration style and in the type of 
people who played it - I learnt a lot, which is why I find it funny 
when people who have been running MUA's for 6 months speak as experts 
and say that things like "player killing will never work". 

In Richard's article on MUA systems, he mentions an aspect of MIST 
that some people these days would find odd. MIST had no real rules 
(except ones we were forced to put on for political and diplomatic 
reasons). The basic rule was if someone bigger than you told you to 
do something, you did it. The quote I like to use to sum it up was: 
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. I am the law! 
Anyway, enough background, now you know the scenario I think you 
should know a bit about how to abuse it. 

The nice thing about running the only system of its kind, is that you 
can abuse it to your heart's content and get away with it. People 
aren't willing to believe that a big powerful arch-wizard can be such 
a complete bastard and so with a bit of sweet talking, you can come 
out of most situations looking squeeky clean - In these modern days 
of competition it's not quite as easy but think about it, if you 
annoy 20 players in a night and they never play again, you'll get 20 
more the day after. 

Being nasty is an art form. If you are continually nasty the players 
get set into a learned helplessness mode where they don't have any 
survival spirit any more - You must balance nastiness with generosity 
to a degree. 

The rest of this article looks at various aspects of player abuse, and
 how to get the most out of them. 

Full Purges

A full purge is the simple task of wiping the persona file, the wizard
 list and the player credit list (in MIST's case, the WHOSWHO notes). 
In many cases this remains the ultimate way of killing a couple of 
thousand players with the least effort on your part. 

The main use of the full purge if to keep the wizards on their toes. I
don't like games where everyone and their dog is a wizard, this is 
silly since there seems little point in people playing. If you make 
it known to your wizards that you only want the best to make it and 
you remind them that if there are too many wizards then you will do a 
full purge then this has two effects. First the wizards are forced to 
be nasty and secondly you keep them on their toes and stop them 
getting too complacent. If you do do a full purge, remember to put 
some of your wizards back because if you don't you may end up having 
to run the game yourself! 

Full purges can be great fun if you are bored. If you have a player 
who has been playing for ages and is nearly at wizard. A neatly timed 
'full purge' or accidental persona file deletion can really ruin 
their night, week, month.... To save face amongst the other players 
it is always a good idea to make a show of being sorry and giving the 
good player most of their points back. Remember to kill them later 
though with a cheated character or you'll have ruined the whole 
point. 

One convenient use of a full purge is to get your own back on someone
who is continually whining about the number of wizards or high level
players. All you do here is do a full purge and advertise the fact 
that it was requested by this person (if possible giving their real 
name and university). It normally teaches them not to moan. 

Decimation

This is an old trick coined by those clever Roman chappies.... If
anything it works a lot better than the full purge because with a full
purge everyone starts off equal again. With Decimation all you do is
wipe a tenth of the persona file, randomly. This way everyone worries 
it may be them. You use it in the same circumstances as a full purge. 

An added bonus of decimation over a full purge is that instead of 
doing it randomly you can go through the file wiping the people you 
don't like out. This also gives you a happy few hours whilst you do 
it. 

Singular purges

The singular purge on MIST was a lovely tool. It allowed you to delete
 a player regardless of whether they were on the game at the time or 
not. If you deleted a player who was logged on then when they quit or 
tried to save, it would tell them that they didn't exist any more, so 
saving would be silly. 

Obviously, any good student will by now be able to see the hours of
pleasure that this one command can bring, but for the less promising
amongst you a few examples may help. 

Consider a player is on a game, alone. They have the whole day in 
front of them and a nicely reset game with loads of treasures and 
mobiles to kill. Due to the nature of MIST's closing times, this used 
to happen quite a lot. What you now do is pop onto the game, and 
purge the player - They now spend ages and ages clearing it up and 
scoring points and finally they save, or more to the point.... 
Finally they know they are already dead. This method has the 
advantage that you don't have to hang around to see the finished 
result, since you know it'll be funny anyway. 

Personally, I used to like going onto a game as a wizard and 
threatening someone. They'd normally quit and come on as someone else,
 since arguing with wizards is normally fatal. In this position all
you  do is purge their real character and gradually make it clear to
them.  If you want to make this more interesting, I would suggest
starting  playing as the character you just deleted and being abusive
to  people. 

Heirarchies and red tape

The British civil service invented this one I think and if you use it 
as half as well as they do, you are well on your way to becoming a 
master. The point is that you should build heirarchies and once you 
have built them you should invent a use for the various levels and 
make sure people only channel requests or complaints properly. 
Luckily, games like MIST are naturally designed this way so all you 
have to do is create a new heirarchy at the top. At its best, MIST 
had: 

  mortal-wizard
  berserker-wizard
  wizard
  maintainer-wizard lev 1 (existed in a list as being more important)
  maintainer-wizard lev 2 (who had extra commands)
  Maintainer-wizard (who knew the admin password, note capital "M")
  arch-wizard
  Arch-wizard (I hate the level name 'God')

We had channels of complaint, so if a mortal wanted to complain about
being mistreated by a wizard (which of course wasn't really illegal), 
then they had to complain to the wizards. The wizards could complain 
to the levels above them and as a rule anyone a couple of levels above
 anyone else would ignore people below them. To make it seem fair and 
because forcing people to use the correct channels isn't easy, the 
arch-wizards would often listen to little problems, but most of the 
time they ignored them. 

Once you have created this heirarchy, the most important thing to do 
is to keep changing it. Never keep it stable else people will get 
complacent, also make sure you do make some pretence of enforcing the 
red-tape system as it stands at the time - This has the disadvantage 
that you have to remember what it currently is yourself. 

Wizards

Wizards are there for two reasons. Mainly they are there for the 
people above them to abuse, but as a sideline, they are there to 
abuse the people below them. It's a bad idea to push all the wizards 
too far; as an arch-wizard you need someone to run the game for you 
so that you don't have to do it yourself. If it comes to it, it's a 
good idea to weigh up the fun you'd get in deleting all the wizards 
to the hassle you'd get from the lower players with no-one to look 
after their petty moans. 

Basically treat your wizards badly, but not too badly. One nice way of
really annoying them is to promote a subset of them to a new level. 
This helps because if you have to delete all the lower wizards the 
upper ones still side with you and can continue running the game. 

Arch-wizards

My philosophy on game management has the arch-wizard as an honourary 
position. Arch-wizards are all powerful people who I pick because 
they are a varied set of people with differing ideals and they are not
all socially inadequete MUA players with warped views on the world. It
is important for you to build up a fairly close group of arch-wizards
who you trust and who are not scared to tell you what  they think.
Though it may pain you after all the trouble you go to be  nasty to
people, I think it's a good idea to make arch-wizards immune  from
everything, even purges so they are never scared to tell you  things.
This all sounds very serious but think of it this way, you  need
someone on your side! I find it helps to enlist a few black  belts in
various martial arts as arch-wizards too, in case some mad  MUD-spod
gang decides to beat you up at a meet. Enlisting  arch-wizards for
their worldly skills rather than their game skills  has the added
advantage that more often than not they don't know  anything about the
game and how to play it. This really winds up the  lower levels. 

Game features

Game features can provide no end of amusement for folks who have to
write them; even the most unimaginative of people can think up some
very irritating features to add that will really drive people mad. The
 best way to really annoy people is also a nice way of making the game
 harder, so the more guilt ridden ones of you can feel justified. If 
you have a vital object in the game, for example, in MIST the hammer 
was needed to open up a large section of the game, then put it fairly 
near the start location. This has the effect that the killers and the 
trouble makers run for the hammer and then dispose of it, rendering 
most of the game unreachable. Now what happens is either all the 
players are running round a couple of hundred rooms making easy 
targets for the killers or, if you are lucky, they decide to hassle 
the wizards to give them objects back. If you play this right you can 
have no end of fun, either chastising the wizards for helping players 
cheat, flatly refusing to help them or going to such levels as 
forcing one of the players to sacrifice themselves in order that the 
rest get the hammer. I preferred the latter myself. 

Not many games seem to have much in the way of irritating features 
that totally destroy any concepts of fairness, MIST's pistol was 
probably fairly unique in this. The theory was that when you got to 
legend (one level below wizard) you could get the pistol and play 
Russian Roulette. If the pistol went off, you got half the points 
needed to get to wizard and if not you died... dead. The only problem 
was that it never quite got round to giving you the points if you won 
and so basically it was left to the discretion of wizards or arches. 
As the wizards lived in fear of giving players too many points (they 
tended to just get wiped without question) they weren't often willing 
to comply. As an added bonus, a legend could be forced by a lower 
level character to shoot themselves. 

Straying off the subject of MIST slightly, the only feature I have 
ever seen in a game that comes close is AberMUD's runesword which 
attacks players by itself and doesn't give its carrier any choice in 
the matter. As an added barb, the person who picks it up isn't 
allowed to drop it. Admittedly this is slightly spoiled in AberMUD's 
case by having the runesword as a powerful weapon, if I'd have 
written it I think I would have made it a wooden ruler or something. 

Finally on the subject of game features, I'd suggest you give serious
consideration to making wizards killable and putting in the odd weapon
that can do this quite easily; this keeps them slightly more paranoid 
and makes them behave better. The natural tendency of a wizard faced 
with this situation is to hoarde all the weapons somewhere the 
mortals can't get them - If someone does this, just give one of your 
cheated mortals some suitable tools and go wizard hunting (with the 
help of your arch wizard of course!). 

Cheating

I have mentioned cheating in a few places as something that naturally
happens. Cheating isn't the right word in MIST's case because one of 
the basic premises of the game was that arch-wizards couldn't cheat. 
The problem with running games is that most of the time all the 
players are better at playing than you, they do, after all, have a 
lot more practice. I find it handy to have a few arch-wizard powered 
characters who are disguised as mortals who can go and do your dirty 
work for you and get rid of people you don't like much. Doing it this 
way rather than using a high level character you created can reap all 
sorts of extra benefits; especially when all the players gang up on 
you. Not only do they all die because you are immortal but you get a 
nice warm feeling inside you that for once all the players are 
co-operating in a common cause and that if it hadn't been for you, 
they would never have been such close allies. 

Cheating by players is difficult to deal with. If they know a bug that
 is hard to fix, then you may have problems. I think player cheating
is  a perfectly valid part of the game, so I don't react that badly.
If  it gets annoying, I may do something like ban them from the site
but  that's very infrequent and it was hard to enforce on Essex. I
often  find that giving people who know too much about the game for
your  liking a bit of power takes away their need to abuse the system
and  so everyone is happy. Later you can fix the bug and wipe them out
 when you are in need of a bit of idle amusement. 

Wizard cheating is fairly easy to spot if you log well and have 
reasonable informers. The easiest way to deal with this is just not 
to tolerate it and wipe them and all of their friends out in one fell 
swoop. Make a point of doing it loudly if you want people to take 
note of it. 

Slightly off the subject of cheating, it's often fun to accidentally 
let a wizard or an arch-wizard password be known generally and see 
what happens. This also gives you a good excuse for a full purge. If 
it's an arch and you are really lucky, they may dispose of some of 
the more annoying wizards for you. Of course, if you don't feel too 
safe letting a password be known you could just do it yourself and 
tell everyone a little lie. 

Diplomacy

To keep a game running for a long time, you need good relations with
the people who are above you, like the systems managers of the
machines you run on. This was actually the reason I started running
games in the way I do, because a game running as an anarchy with no
control doesn't do any site's reputation any good at all. Good 
diplomacy is vital, as is good communications and good relations. If 
you are a spoddy computer person who thinks politics are something 
that happens on BBC2 at dinner time then I suggest you enlist the help
 of someone good to do the job for you. This incidentally is the
reason  I became powerful on most of the other Muds outside Essex a
few years  ago, that and my sincere modesty, of course. 

Diplomacy on the game is, of course, less vital. Players will expect 
you, as their all powerful arch-wizard to play middle man in little 
disputes from time to time. The best thing to do is to put your most 
tactless wizard on the job and leave them to it. If you are forced to 
do it yourself, try and be serious and look at both sides of the 
argument. After a while, toss a coin, decide who wins and say 
goodbye. 

Being nice

This may look out of place, but by being nice you can really irritate
people. The odd act of kindness, like say, making a novice with a cute
name a wizard, can really annoy people who have been playing for
months. 

One of the nice things I used to do was take fighting out of the game 
on St Valentine's day and put lots of roses around the game. This has 
an increasingly annoying effect with every day you forget to change 
it back.

Turning fighting off can be used to good effect all the time, but only
 do it when by far the vast majority of players are fighting types and
 always do it for some low level person - This almost guarantees that 
the low level character will be taken revenge on when you next turn 
fighting on, especially if you make a big thing of doing it because 
people were being nasty to them. 

Rules

You need to treat rules in two different ways. Every game, no matter
how anarchistic must have a couple of firm rules. For example if you 
let folks shout hacking hints, you can get in trouble yourself. It 
also helps if you always follow a brief set of rules yourself. If you 
are firm in sticking to them it acts as a buffer to stop you going 
too far. I have one about winding people up - Basically you can wind 
someone up as much as you want but always make sure you leave a big 
hole in it so you can pull yourself out of it if you need to. 

On a happier note the other rules are much more fun. These are the
game rules and they govern things like, who can do what, what they can
and can't do to each other and generally govern "fair play". As should
 be obvious by now, those rules don't apply to you, nor anyone else 
who you let get away with breaking them. The phrase "Do as I say, not 
as I do" is very relevant to an arch-wizard. Making silly petty rules 
and making people stick to them can cause no end of amusement. It's 
also a good idea to change the rules often, and occasionally have 
contradictory ones. 

Players take this sort of thing ever so seriously and they try as best
 as they can to govern by peer pressure - For you this is good and you
should encourage it. Having a new set of rules for wizards is a good 
idea, it makes them feel they have got somewhere to be told they can't
 use their powers to do various things. It is of course up to your 
mood at the time whether you actually do anything about people 
breaking rules and more to the point, what you actually end up doing. 

Off Game Contact

I always discourage off game contact. The address I gave on MIST went
to a mailbox I regularly deleted, just picking out the ones from 
people I knew. If you are really bored and in an evil mood it's often 
fun to reply to a random set of them. Normally, if they whinge or 
moan, I'd delete their persona - If you don't tell them why you 
deleted them they will soon be annoyed enough to send another whingey 
moany message and then you simply delete them all over again. 

If you take the trouble to reply, I often find a reply about the 
current state of the Dutch Tulip Industry confuses them enough to stop
 them sending you silly mail you didn't want in the first place. If 
they think this is amusing and insist on replying them just delete 
their persona or victimise them if you can be bothered to remember 
their name. 

Bribery, Corruption, Creeps and Threats

Being in a position of power, you'll get all of these. I have had the 
most wonderful threats in the past, including a fair number of death 
threats. The most inventive was from someone who claimed to be in the 
Italian Air Force and threatened to bomb my house; He asked for the 
grid references, but I didn't take this one too seriously. A MIST 
wizard a couple of years ago was a much respected thing - An 
arch-wizard many fold more. It was different from modern games in 
that it was the only one, it was something of a true indication of 
status rather than this modern idea that if a spod can't play someone 
else's game, they write their own. Bribes used to flow quite thick 
and fast and how serious they were was sometimes quite funny. Whether 
you take bribes or not is up to you, I never really did except for 
the odd pint of guinness - If you don't take bribes, make sure people 
think you do otherwise you'll miss the fun of people trying to bribe 
you. 

The wizards should be watched. Let them have some leeway, but don't
let them start to get above themselves or corruption will start to 
creep in. Corruption is very difficult to get rid of once you let it 
start. 

Creeps are fun. I am not the sort of person who lets people get 
anywhere by creeping but I enjoy watching people try - It's odd the 
level to which people will lower themselves at times! If you get a 
person who does continue doing it (or doing it to the wizards and 
arches), the best way of dealing with them is to force them to creep 
more and more by slowly giving in to the demands. Build up some 
lovely log files of all this excitement and then, when you are bored, 
dump the player back down to the lowest of the low and stick the logs 
as text files readable from the game. 

Incidentally, if someone had ever offered me a villa in the south of
France in exchange for an arch-wizard (and I'd known they were
serious), I'd have been pretty quick editing that arch-wizard list. 

Arrogance and Ego

To be successful at being a "big" arch-wizard you need to be extremely
arrogant. Take every opportunity to practice, whether it's arguing 
with the muddies or going onto other peoples' games and telling them 
how crap they are. The latter gives you good battle training if 
someone should ever dare to do it to you. 

Even if you are the most modest person there is, you need to appear to
have a massive ego. If you get upset and take things personally then 
you just won't be any good at running MUA systems. It's useful that 
the best way of building a big ego is by squashing other peoples' and 
as an arch-wizard you should be in a good position to do this - If it 
sounds nasty to you, then you really don't have the right stuff in 
you for the job.

With a little practice you can turn all this 'training' into a fairly 
relaxing pasttime. If you are in a bad mood, for example, then going 
onto your system and putting everyone else in a foul mood should cheer
 you up no end. Rather like yoga but without all the stretching. 

The arrogance and ego of the wizards should be watched. If one of the
wizards starts to get too arrogant for their own good, then dispose of
them. If you let them carry on the other wizards will start to resent 
it and too much in-fighting means they aren't looking after the game. 
If you want to be more subtle, simply promote everyone else above 
them, thus giving you the advantage of complicating the heirarchy 
even more! 

Running a popular game is hard work and if you are dedicated to
keeping it going, it'll take a lot out of you. Most of the players 
will never begin to realise this, so there is little point wasting 
the effort of trying to tell them. Think of it this way, the players 
are having fun, otherwise they wouldn't be there, so why should you 
feel guilty about messing them around? The day you stop having fun 
and become a martyr to the game is the day you should either give up 
or have a holiday for a while. 

Finally

Those were summaries and ideas from my way of running a MUA system. I 
imagine my MIST players will be rather surprised to read some of this 
because to them it just looked like it ran fairly smoothly most of 
the time. In actual fact it does, once you have built your regime it 
looks after itself pretty much, all you need to do is tweak it now and
then to stop it becoming stale. I was pretty brutally honest and I 
tried to refrain from making it funny or exaggerating. I expect some 
of you will argue with me but it's ok, I don't imagine many of you 
will be speaking from any degree of experience. If any of you decide 
to take up my ideas then I guess you will at least have fun - Maybe 
you should wait till the proper textbook comes out though. 

Michael Lawrie 

(Or, to keep the spods happy) 

----* Lorry. 

Copyright (C) 1991 Michael Lawrie. 

This article may be freely re-distributed in full as long as you gain 
nothing by doing so. No part of it can be quoted in any other text 
without the permission of the author and a suitable acknowledgement. 

--<cut>--


--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
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