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

[James Wilson]

On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, quzah wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Koster, Raph <rkoster at origin.ea.com>
>To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu' <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
>Date: Tuesday, August 18, 1998 8:34 AM
>Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: UBE/high: Re: FW: UBE/high: Re: W IRED: Kilers
>
>
>>If I had to state this and Dr Cat's Stamp Collector Problem, they'd be
>>stated thus:
>>
>>Marian's Tailor Problem: Given an environment that supports violence
>>between players, and given that it also supports a robust set of
>>features for non-combat-oriented activity and advancement, is it
>>possible to allow the peaceful player to have fun without being impinged
>>upon by combat?

[snip]

>Ok, some muds allow players to buy a room/home/castle and at later
>times, when they have amassed a great sum of cash, they can add on
>to it or whatever. Using a similar approach, we allow the tailor,
>upon creation time, to design their shop. They get to select nice
>things like "Mage-Bubba's magical ward" which allows no spell
>casting in their shop, "Sorcerer-Buffy's unending peace", which
>disallows any physical combat from happening in the building, and
>perhaps, "Boffo's magical inventory." which will prevent the theft
>of any item in said local.

[snip]

As a member of the realism camp, I am interested in ways that
one can construct such mechanisms in a "realistic" manner, 
meaning one in which the internal laws are consistent and do
not break game balance.

Someone very astutely noted that most muds are deeply
deficient in social institutions. Give a mud working social institutions
and you will have given it the mechanisms to deal with crime. Here
are a few which would be a good start:

1. As has been brought up before, a justice system with punishments 
that players will actually feel.
2. A property system, so individuals or groups can have a long-term
investment in some locale. Given such an investment, players will
be loath to risk its loss.
3. A family system where the actions of one's family members can 
reflect upon the whole family.
4. Effective systems of law guiding the actions of the police and
magistrates, so rulers can (for instance) effectively regulate the flow
of weaponry into their domains.
5. Team play could be required for certain tasks, and individual
defenders given almost no chance against groups of attackers.
Thus combat-type players will need to group into parties. Then one 
could treat the party like a family for purposes of enforcing mores.

One factor that doesn't seem amenable to realistic treatment is
death, i.e. in the real world (afaik) you only get one shot, while
presumably in most muds you can try again. Should your slate
be wiped clean if you die and are reborn? Since this whole area
(death and rebirth) would be an essentially religious area in a frpg,
perhaps religion could provide more such mechanisms:

1. deeds could be attributed to the 'soul', and so accumulated
across all lifetimes. Then there could be real-world consequences
for those who have been especially good/bad in previous lives.
2. deities could punish those who harm their devotees. This could be a
variation on 1., or something more like a heaven/hell scenario (don't mess 
with tailors, or you might end up in the Hell Of Needles). This would raise the
interesting possibility of mortals being trapped between conflicting divine
imperatives (cf. Antigone).
3. conversely, deities could be the sole source of 'levels' ("Praise Him from
whom all blessings flow...") and impose systems of morality upon their
devotees in return for advancement. These could be radical (don't 
kill, even in self-defense) or minimal (don't kill anyone of your race
who hasn't physically threatened you, unless it's wartime and they're
an enemy non-civilian). This need not be centered on deities per se;
cf. the hindu/buddhist concept of karma as a fundamental cosmic law
independent of any particular divinity, where one is reincarnated in a
more or less exalted form depending on how lived one's previous lives.

Finally, as quzah suggested, magic could provide more such mechanisms.
All our real-world systems to prevent crime are fallible and allow clever or
lucky evildoers to circumvent all safeguards, so a "realistic" system should as
well. 

1. Tying in with the social institutions bit, magic could make it easy
to determine exactly who did what to whom. Then the magistrates
know who to punish, the families know who to feud with, etc. Mages
could of course invent spells to confound such investigations, and
workarounds for such confoundments, confoundments of the 
workarounds, and so on.
2. Magic makes possible a totalitarian society that would make 
Big Brother look like a piker. A powerful sorceror could imaginably
install wards across a whole city so violence of any sort would
cause loss of breath, paralyzation, teleportation into the gaol, etc. 
Policemen would of course be exempt. However, in a well-balanced 
magic system, this should probably be prohibitively energy-intensive.
More reasonable might be a system which simply alerts police
to any wrongdoing. In some muds I've played, this sort of thing
is just sort of there without any explanation, but a "realistic" mud
would expose the mechanism, so a clever mage could work 
around it. 

James