[MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Travis Casey wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, 9 April 98, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
> > Travis Casey wrote:

[skipped]

> > And/or haunted, with a significant shift to the negative alignment, with
> > all the consequences. But then, also, alignment communities, if you
> > remember what I'm talking about...

That topic had been beaten to death before, I'll just remind briefly the
outline of my system and why I've mentioned it at all - 

First of all (once again, my personal opinion, and, been discussed here)
I consider the world balance the critical issue for a long lifespan of
the virtual world, that's why alignment comes into play. There are two
planes of alignment - good/evil and chaotic/lawful, there are alignment
communities based on good/evil plane, each community may have a weight
factor for some others, within the community the alignment preserves its
absolute value, values of ooutside communities members get adjusted in
accordance with a factor - say, community A considers community B as
-0.5, so usually the members of community B who appear evil to other
members of community B will appear good, but closer to neutral, to the
members of community A.
Chaotic/lawful plane isn't a subject to correlation, accepted as is.
Also, see below.

> Personally, I don't tend to like alignment systems.  In particular, I
> don't like systems where a character's alignment is easily discovered.

It doesn't have to be discovered directly - there are ways to embed that
into the interactions. Also, the objects also may have the alignment and
community.

> > Also, there's a complicated issue here - what is a generic mechanism
> > which will support the concept of 'didn't give up'? Or, more general,
> > for example, I know that killing someone innocent makes me more evil
> > (the detection is clear, just analyze the alignment), but what if for
> > some reason I'm not supposed to use this lamp as a nightpot (due to my
> > guild's rules), but I do?
> 
> > See, here's a possibility to drown in an ocean of particular cases -
> > have anybody come up with a general solution for this problem?
> 
> Well, not liking alignments or similar mechanisms, I'd tend to let
> this be handled in the same way as in the real world -- no one knows
> that you're cheating on the guild rules unless you slip up and someone
> finds out.  This can allow for more internal conflict in the guilds as
> well -- people can make false accusations that a character is
> violating guild rules, or can suspect (or even know) that someone is
> violating the rules, but not be able to prove it.
> 
> In such a system, the only rules that would need game enforcement
> would be those that can actually effect the character's powers --
> e.g., violations of a god's requirements for priests of that god.

I want to eliminate the human intervention into this issue at all and be
able to handle, for example, the broken vow, rule, code, which, in turn,
influences the chaotic/lawful plane of alignment.

I'm thinking about defining the actions with side effects, and the rules
as objects, so if you, say, do something which is expressly forbidden,
your action will notify the 'rule' object. Just made it up, but may
work.

>        |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
>  ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
>       |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'   visit the rec.games.design FAQ:
>      '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)       http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are