[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 10:20 AM 7/23/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up
to say:
>
>Key here, and this is the lesson that M59, UOL, and company seem to
>have been fighting, is the reverse of the old catechism of catching
>more flies with honey

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but if you really want
to catch flies use rotten hamburger.

>You can't stop players from trying to do things
>you don't want them to do.  They're going to try to do whatever enters
>their tiny gourd like craniums.  You can't stop it If you fight it
>you'll just end up setting yourself up as the target de jour, and have
>created an instant confrontational situation.  "How can I work around
>these stoopid admins?".

Something I'm trying to do with my current game is to make the various
things I want to discourage... distasteful. Not impossible, not
administratively outlawed, but distasteful. To use a specific example, if
you destroy the property of the provisional government you receive
punishment in the form of monetary fines. Since players are ostensibly
military volunteers, the destruction of a player is... destruction of
military property, which is government property, which results in a fine. A
pretty big and nasty fine, too. So if you get REALLY rich, yeah, you can
kill a couple players. But you'll have to work your ass off to get enough
money that you can even seriously consider it. And the underlying logic is
completely understandable. There's no "artificial" restriction, and no
admin interference. There are laws here, and if you break them, you get
punished. That's the end of it.

As David Eddings once put it, "The snake is a very logical creature. If you
annoy him, he will bite you. He rarely holds a grudge."


>I have intensely disliked reputation systems for a long while now as
>being both excessively simplistic and presenting a too easily
>trivialised model for players to manipulate for something I see as
>very multi-dimensional.  

I've always wondered exactly what a reputation system does for the game
other than divide your players into groups and "sides" that the game can
automatically sort for the convenient reference of any and all sides. I
don't see any benefit to it. What is it for? To determine NPC reactions? To
determine magic item ownership? There seems to be this "good/evil" division
we create in our games, and I just don't see the point. About eight years
ago, I scrapped the entire alignment system from my AD&D campaign, and
nobody has ever missed it. I've never had to work around anything in my
adventure design, I never had any big issues to resolve, and nothing went
heinously wrong. As opposed to the time I decided to do away with the
class/experience system, which rapidly became a nightmare. The alignment
and reputation ideas seem ubiquitous, but the one question I have never
heard answered is: why? What purpose does it serve? Does anyone use it for
that purpose? What do people here really think about the
reputation/alignment/whatever system that we seem to be working so hard to
perfect?