[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[Travis S. Casey]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, Wes Connell wrote:

> How instead of an actual breaking point for permadeath just allow a
> certain amount of lives. Sorta like a video game. I've never seen that
> imp'd into a mud before. When you are a newbie you recieve three lives.
> After they are all used up you die. Quests could be used to give extra
> lives and such. 

A couple of other things that could be done would be to make new lives be
chancy instead of certain, and to remove something from the character that
is difficult to regain with each death.

For example, AD&D has a resurrection survival chance, based on the
character's Constitution score.  Thus, if a character dies, he/she may be
able to be resurrected, but it's not 100% certain.  This means that any 
given death *could* be your final death.

Further, AD&D has a character's Constitution score drop by one point each
time he/she is resurrected.  This degrades the character a bit -- and,
since resurrection survival is based on Constitution, it also means that
you'll be less likely to come back again the next time.

My plans for Psyber Age, if/when I ever get to do anything with it,
include this as well.  A dead character can be brought back, if he/she is
gotten to a well-equipped hospital quickly enough -- but there's always a
chance that the damage will be too great to be repaired, and the longer it
takes to get you to the hospital, the greater that chance is.

In addition, there will be chances of permanent debilitation from death,
depending on what happened to you -- e.g., if someone shot you in the
head, your character might suffer penalties to its mental attributes and
agility, and might lose some skill levels.

Lastly, since it's a cyberpunk game, resurrection will cost money.  You
get one freebie -- but after that, if you don't have enough money in your
bank account to pay for it, the hospital's just going to send you down to
the morgue.

> The problem that I see with a permadeath breaking point is that you would
> hardly ever see any characters over level XX. On non-permadeath muds that
> allow pkilling only after a certain level XX, the newbies coming out of
> the saftey get a very rude awakening when they a slaughtered like the
> fresh meat they are. 

Of course, this problem is really a result of both having that rule and
advertising levels.  If characters didn't have any way to see what level
other characters were, you'd have no sure way of knowing when a newbie
becomes eligible for pkilling, and no way to know whether a character you
haven't seen before and don't know of is new, or someone high level who
logs in at different times of the day than you do or hasn't been on in a
long time.

IMHO, advertising levels is a bad idea... it's much more fun if people
have to try to guess how good others are based on what they've seen and
heard about them.

(Assuming you even have levels, of course.)

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 



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