[MUD-Dev] Life

[Adam Wiggins]

[Chris L:]
> >> If you don't consider the violation of "true RP" a problem, then this
> >> is less of a problem.  If you're not attempting to run (or enforce) a
> >> solely immersive RP game, then I can see little reason to get upset at
> >> the "for no good Rp reason at all."
> 
> >I don't belief you can get out of this very real concern by saying
> >that if you don't consider it a problem it isn't. There are some
> >people who don't want to play at all. 
> 
> Rephrase that to: "...don't want to roleplay at all."
> 
> >They want power, in a petty
> >way. The classical bully who can't contribute anything but misery for
> >others. If the object of the game is roleplaying then that assumes a
> >certain cooperative attitude of the players. 
> 
> If the violation of RP is not a problem (and thus the implicit trust
> and cooperation you describe), then the killing is _less_ of a
> problem. 

Yes...there is one problem I have with the turn the RP threads have taken
lately, especially with the addition of more RP-intensive folks to the
list.  More below..

> I am not arguing that the problem does not exist, but arguing with
> JeffK's concentration on a specific and rather specialised
> value-judgement on the killing and making it the only point of
> evaluation for the game.  His position is only maintainable if you
> accept his evaluation of the RP aspects of the game, and the RP
> integrity of the game as being primary.  If you devalue the RP, for
> instance my moving towards a more "powergamer" centric game, then the
> problem as described fades in proportion.  There is a sliding scale
> here, an axis if you wish, against which games and game actions can be
> measured.  
[more good stuff snipped]

I think what Chris is trying to say in this somewhat long-winded
statement (*wink*) is: "A game based around something other than
role-playing can be just as fun as an RP game; indeed, more fun, depending
on the types of games you like.  If I'm writing a game which is not at
all focused on RP, then people not role-playing is not an issue."

> >You have to do something about those players who don't want to play
> >even by this minimum of courtesy. Or worse, who enjoy upsetting
> >others for the power it gives over their emotions. Just saying that
> >well, you can kill the .... and that's it won't work. At least not
> >all the way.
[yada yada yada]

This is the kind of statement I'm seeing a lot.  Maybe I'm just reading
it the wrong way, but it seems to me that all the RP supporters on this
list seem to think that anyone who would ever want to play a powermud
are automatically saddistic, power-hungry losers who desire nothing
more than to be the direct cause of as much misery to as many people
as possible.  This is hardly true; in fact I've met very, very few people
like this in my several years of mudding, and from my experience it really
has nothing to do with the codebase of the mud.  (In fact, I doubt it
has much of anything to do with muds at all.  Wherever you go there
are always jerks around - muds are no different, although I think the
ratio is a tad better than in RL.)

> Agreed, and here we get into the problems of bad game design.  It is
> difficult to implement free PK in a system without having to rework
> much of the rest of the system design to accomodate.  It definitely is
> *not* a bolt-on in a design sense.

Nothing really works that way.  This is my main problem with people's
arguments about 'realism' in a mud - they say, "I just added realistic
weather conditions (requiring warm clothes in the winder, cool in the
summer) to my stock ROM mud, and players just don't like it!"  Well,
duh.  It's ridiculous to think you can try to make a mud 'more'
realistic by adding in one little feature, in the same way that you think
you can take a mud designed not to have PK and just suddenly enable it
and expect everything to work out just right.

> What I would like to see is constructive discussion of the game design
> issues on how to approach free PK in such a manner that the rest of
> the game remains balanced and slaughter-fests can be constrained.

I've no specific problem with slaughter-fests.  Part of the trick is
to make it bad enough to die that people think twice, and balance the
power levels so that if some badass goes around picking on little folks,
he'll eventually slip on a banana peel and get knocked unconscious and
dragged to jail.
I've played plenty of PK-enable muds (in fact, I can hardly stand
to play those without it) and as long as the design of the mud handles
things correctly, which mainly involves not trying to police it too
closely (like those stupid PK flags on stock circle).  Part of what
I like about it is that it makes the world seem like a more dangerous
place, which adds to the mood and intensity of the world, to my mind.
On a PK enable mud you don't just happily plop down to sleep in the middle
of a long road because you're tired, and you know that there are no
aggressive mobs nearby, because the first enterprising thief that happens
along will happily relieve you of all your cash and maybe that nice pair
of gloves you've got on.  People don't rip you off in business deals, because
they know that they've just bought themselves a lot of trouble.  (Of course,
this is where things like sneak, hide, and invisibility come in handy.)
Etc etc.  Mobs are just too dumb to make the world interesting; requiring
players to do something special in order to do any sort of interaction
with each other (*particularly* if it requires some sort of admin
intervention...ick) is IMO bad and extremelly damaging to the suspension
of disbelief and feel of the game.

>   I don't have a global naming system.  Thus a PK'er can't do a "who",
> and then track down the victim.  Instead they must first locate the
> other player without any implicit way to differentiate them from a
> mobile (there is no command which will return, "this is a mobile" as
> vs "this is a player body").  Then, ocne they have found them they
> must assign a name to them (body specific, not character specific),
> and then track them down from there.

Yup.  My favorite is introducing yourself as a name completely different
from yourself.  Wearing a false mustache and cutting your hair are also
very handy.  One nice effect of making the world more convincing, we've
found, is that you get players less in that mode of "us-vs-them" that seems
to come up on non-PK muds (us being players, them being mobs).  That is -
allowing players to own businesses, leaving mobs to run the shop.
Now if another player kills your shopkeeper, you are going to be PISSED.
If you spend a long time building up a relationship with the old hermit, to
the point that he'll teach you a few skills, you'll be pretty pissed off
when someone kills him for kicks.  (Even if he 'repops', he won't know
you at all anymore.)  If you're a dwarf and all the dwarves in the keep
help you out whenever you go up there, you're going to be pretty mad
when someone starts killing them, and you *certainly* will not kill them
yourself (since you'll quickly be branded a rebel and they'll not let
you into the keep anymore).
One of my personal favorites is assigning bounties.  Just put up a post
someplace in town with a description of the person, known name/aliases,
and a reward amount.  Players can then deliver justice to other players,
for a tidy sum.

>   Additionally as bodies are a fairly fluid thing, killing a
> character's body typically has little permanent effect on the
> character.  He has other bodies, or can easily get other bodies.  It
> is an incovenience and a disruption of the current action.

The thing is, from my experience, this has the opposite effect.  In
a game where there is no penalty for dieing (ie, deathmatch Quake) you
don't mind dieing at all, and thus throw yourself into suicidal situations
all the time.  You also don't feel bad about killing others.
On PK muds, where loss for dying is minimal, death-fests occur all the
time.
On muds where death is permenant or at least sucks really bad, folks
think twice - make that, three or four times - before attacking someone.
Making enemies can be an extremelly bad idea in this case, especially
with balanced power levels.  Even the most powerful character can be
taken out by a dagger between the ribs (watch how quickly assasins guilds
form - you thought you could safely make fun of that wimpy little merchant,
but you forget he has a lot of cash and many connections...).

A lot of what people are saying in this discussion seems to be based upon
the thought that everyone wants to play maliciously, that if the game lets
them their only desire will be to ruin the game for everyone else, etc etc.
This is, IMO, a bad assumption.  Designing a game based on the people that
you *don't* want playing your game isn't really a great idea.  You do
need to consider how to minimize the trouble that the few assholes that
will play can cause, but this should not be either the main thrust
of your design, or even a major factor.  We've found that a good design
takes care of a lot of these problems straight of the bad, and that a
few tweaks here and there can help it a long.  The moral of the story is
that if someone wants to come on and make life hell for people, they will
be able to.  The only way to stop this is keep people from interacting
at all, which is hardly a solution, so why tear your hair out over it?

> The general side-effect I've concentrated on is to render individual
> PK's as inconvenient but not catastrophic to a player, and to then
> ensure that concerted or sustained attacks by a PK'er on an individual
> other player is technically both not feasible and almost impossible to
> sustain.  What this leaves is the player who goes on a PK spree,
> killing eveyrthing he can find.  That is again diminished by
> effectively ensuring that that body will be short lived, and having
> none of that game-specific advantages accrued from the PK spree
> reflect on that character's other bodies.  As such its reduced to
> annoying flash in the pan.  

Yes, my experience is that occasionally someone will snap and go on a
PK spree for no particular reason.  Normally only newbies are really
in danger of dying - any reasonably competent person is able to get away
or avoid them, since it's rarely the really buff players that do this.
After killing or at least molesting a few people, word gets around what
is happening.  Some high level cleric sighs, gets a fly spell, walks
out over the edge of a cliff, and summons the PKer.  Problem solved.
This doesn't help the newbies, of course, but if there weren't PK they
could easily find another way to fuck with people (tricking them into
walking into DTs or agg mobs, summoning agg mobs to town, giving great
weapons to low level mobs to make them hit 3x as hard, etc) - and disallowing
PK brings in so many *other* problems, that I just can't see why you'd
bother.  But if you aren't going to allow PK, consider that part of your
design from the ground up.

> >... My
> >viewpoint in this may be different from that of the average player
> >but for me being attacked (or otherwise harassed) by another -player-
> >is emotionally very upsetting.
> 
> And here is where the out-of-game values start to apply.  I'm very
> leery of treading in these areas as I suspect that a game system both
> has no right to be there (and definitely no obligation or duty), and
> more simply because they involve factors which are entirely outside of
> the game system and cannot be either measured or controllably affected
> by the game system.  Too much chaos.

Right.  The game system, itself, can only attempt to provide a fun and
engaging piece of entertainment that rewards certain acts and punishes
others in such a way that is fun, semi-sensible, and encourages the
kind of gameplay you want.  Trying to second-guess human nature, particularly
the kind of malicious, out-of-game style playing which seems to be
the focus of the discussion, is IMO a waste of time.