[MUD-Dev] Re: UBE/high: Re: UBE/high: Re: FW: UBE/high: Re: W IRED: Kilers

[Dr. Cat]

John Lambert wrote:
>
> There is a single troubling aspect to this scenario.  There seems to 
> be an insistence here that the tailor still be subject to a 
> non-consentual PKill and/or PSteal, yet to have it occur as rarely as 
> in RL, but not as frequently as in most MUDs.
> 

That's what troubles me about it.  There's a very large solution space of 
"possible ways to make it fun to be a tailor", and yet until your post 
the list has only considered a very small range of that solution space.

> Why is disallowing PKill or PSteal an unsatisfactory solution to this
> scenario?   Why is only allowing "consential" PKill or PSteal an 
> unsatisfactory solution to this scenario?  

Those are both solutions to the tailor problem.  So is "you can pkill in 
dungeons but you can't pkill in cities", since a tailor could easily 
avoid going into the dungeons and probably wouldn't want to go there.

> Can one not play a tailor on Tales of Ta'veren, PaxMagica or Ansalon 
> Dreams?  PernMush?  How about the fisherman class on Nightmare?
> Haven't these games successfully solved the Tailor Dilemma?  

>From the way my partner tells me, many of the MUSHes out there have 
solved the Tailor Dilemma just fine.  (She's very active in the MUSH
community, and has helped to found or run several.  I don't play on 
MUSHes myself.)  It's not necessary to say "players can't have physical 
combat" to do it, you can just broaden your definition of what 
constitutes "a game where players can fight each other".  Some MUSHes are 
operating with little more than the Consent Rule, which says if somebody 
poses something that imposes some effect or result on you, or states that 
you reacted in some specific way rather than letting you choose, etc. 
then you can just treat it like it didn't happen.

This rule would be enough to fix the classic kid's games "Cowboys and 
Indians" and "Cops and Robbers" with their classic "bang you're dead - no 
I'm not" problem.  Except that with kids, this would presumably lead to a 
"nobody ever agrees to be dead" problem.  (Which is probably about what 
they have now anyway.)  Apparently in the MUSH community sometimes some 
of them do choose to voluntarily lose fights because it makes for an 
interesting story, fits with the details of the two characters and who 
would be more likely to win, or whatever.  Go figure.  :X)

'Manda's current fascination is with the "Fate Rule" that they've 
developed on Dark Metal MUSH.  She's devised a variation of it that she 
intends to put into practice in the Furcadia RP area ("The Dragonlands")
later on.  It could basically be viewed as a more complex version of the 
common "PK switch" that many combat muds have, in that it has more than 
two possible states.  The "fate levels" range from someting like 0 to 5,
and determine how serious a consequence your character can be subjected 
to, and what is necessary in order to make it happen.  They go into 
having the possibility of your character getting wounded but not killed, 
or allowing death also, from allowing death only if it's negotiated in 
advance between the players, or allowing it to be imposed on you by the 
built in, dice-roll based combat system.

For anyone who wants to go look up all the actual details of it (I'm just 
parroting what little 'Manda has told me about it), Dark Metal is at:

    dm.ennui.net 9999

'Manda's variant "The Rule of Cool" that she intends to use in Furcadia 
after the next update is written up at:

    http://www.bga.com/~pixel/Fur/cool.htm

It's somewhat simpler than Dark Metal's rules.  There's only 4 levels, 
and there isn't one where you can be killed without your consent.  (At 
levels 3 and 4 you can be killed with your consent.  At level 2 you 
can't be killed at all, ever.)

I think we may well build something more DikuMUD-like with the Furcadia 
engine someday (or maybe like the old unix Empire games, but with 
chatting and roleplaying added in and the combat in real time).  My 
intention has always been that in any combat game I do, the controls 
would be map-based.  You'd have maps where players could only hurt 
monsters, maps where they could hurt monsters or other players, and maps 
where combat isn't possible at all.  That could cause messiness with 
mechanisms like monster summoning spells & tamed monsters, but of course 
there's no rule that says every fantasy game has to have those features.  
So I can conveniently avoid those problems by choosing not to add 
features like that.  And there would just never be monsters in a city, so 
the fact that combat was impossible in cities wouldn't cause any 
weirdness related to interactions with monsters.

Back when we had DragonSpires running, we had one small "arena" with a 
sandy floor where combat was possible, and on the rest of the map it was 
impossible.  We never got one complaint there about anyone being 
attacked against their wishes.  :X)

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   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
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