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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 03:41 PM 7/24/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up
to say:
>
>It *should* work, but I'm not very fond of it as I suspect that
>attempting to functionally model such heirarchial social models in
>code is both doomed and self-destructive.  That said it offers promise 
>in a much more interesting direction:
>
>  -- As players accumulate RP's they gain in power and gain new
>commands, abilities, and other game and socially useful capabilities.
>
>  -- Vary the RP's exaclty as above.
>
>Thus Bubba is very popular and finds that he can cast dragon toasting
>fireballs without a second thought -- that is until he's in the middle 
>of toasting Tiamat and VeryPopularPlayer logs on rendering Bubba down
>the scale and capable of casting only smoke rings...

WHOAH. Brain flash! Isn't this more or less how the general theory of
deities works?! The more followers a deity has, the higher his power...
that has some REAL promise... or how about this:

Every player has a single rank point. Each player can at his option swear
allegiance to another player. When he swears allegiance to another player,
that player acts as though his current total is the sum of his own points
plus the other players, so you have something like this: Bob, Jim, and Joe
swear allegiance to Pete. Sam, Ed, and Warren swear allegiance to Bob. Pete
swears allegiance to Max. So Pete has a total of four RPs (Bob + Jim + Joe
+ Pete), and then when Sam, Ed, and Warren swear to Bob he also has four
RPs. As a result, Pete's total goes up to seven, since Bob's has gone up by
three. Max therefore has a total of eight RPs.

Now what I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with it if Max swears
allegiance to Joe. Joe's total goes to nine; Pete's goes to fifteen; Max's
goes to sixteen. Max's total has gone up by eight, so Joe's total goes to
seventeen, and Pete's goes to 23, and Max's to 24, and then Joe's to 25...
I don't know right offhand how to stop this. 

I'll be thinking about this for quite some time. ;)