[MUD-Dev] Life

[Martin Keegan]

On Tue, 24 Jun 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

> >On Wed, 18 Jun 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
> 
> >>   Bubba of house X got special object Y.
> >> 
> >>   Therefore it is reasonable for Boffo of house X to later have 
> >>     Y despite being a newbie.
> >> 
> >> How about abilities gamed by players?  Did they cross reflect to other
> >> members of the house?  I can also see this forming the basis of more
> >> interesting clan and political battles.  

No - the abilities don't pass round to other players. All the players in a
house are separate entities, but they can share the benefits of their
house. Most of them tend to be the same human anyway. A house is like a
family.
 
> >YES! The clan stuff gets interesting. Running more than one house
> >will be disallowed, but if a house takes a newbie under its wing, and
> >the newbie starts to grow strong, he may eventually take over the
> >house when its original player leaves.
> 
> I can also see a lot of interest value if you allow houses to recruit
> other players to be members of their house.  You then, by extension,
> almost get the concept of a house as clan, with player characters as
> actively sought after and even contested resource for houses.

During the Eclipse discussions, this idea grew rapidly from a fun thought
experiment to a raging monster that had to be tamed to prevent it from
permeating every aspect of the game.
 
> This also opens the interesting spectre of a player character being a
> member of two houses, or even an honourary member of non-primary

The motivation for it was to deal with multi-charring, longevity and
advancement. Once you have non-primary membership of other houses, it gets
interesting

> houses.  Add small doses of treachery, treason, and betrayal
> (guaranteed with human players, but also easy to stir up) and you have
> the beginnings of a real political system.
 
> >You've got the picture. BTW, Kill the Keegans was actually the name
> >of a VB game written in 1994 by someone who didn't like me much. 
> 
> Yup.  I played it back when my then SO (she of the very short
> downtime) ran a Windows hawking BBS.

Scarily, I parsed SO as SysOp on the first pass. That downtime euphemism
is ... erm :) "Is the game down" - "No, it's differently up." KK3.0 was
available from my ftp site for about a year until the machine was stolen.

Mk