[MUD-Dev] Critiquing Muds

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 8 Jul 99,, Marian Griffith wrote:
> On Wed 30 Jun, Travis Casey wrote:
> >  - This brings up the idea of "firewalling" -- something often talked
> >    about among "paper" RPGers, but which I've almost never seen
> >    discussed by mudders.  Put simply, the idea is that characters
> >    should only be able to act on knowledge that the character
> >    possesses, and not on knowledge that the player possesses but the
> >    character shouldn't.
> 

Firewalling is usually done via the OOC/IC mechanism.  How one defines
IC and OOC varies from mud to mud (or perhaps mud to mush).

In "On the Proper Care and Feeding of Mushes", Larry Homer defines OOC
as follows:
"Out Of Character. Refers to anything that you know, that your character 
wouldn't know; or anything you say that your character didn't say IC."
<URL: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/1815/carefeed.html>

> The reason you rarely see this discussed is because muds at present 
> really are strongly game oriented and only tolerate roleplaying, by 
> the way the are set up. The concept however is fairly common in the 
> games that traditionally are more strongly roleplaying or acting o- 
> riented. It is in fact one of the reasons why it is considered such 
> a rude act to kill somebody's character against their will in those 
> situations. 

Well there are variations on this.  Mostly it depends on whether the 
character is used for a scenario or campaign.  The murder mystery party 
or the one-shot scenario is a good example of where consent plays a much 
smaller role.  Generally though, main characters on RP muds are 
considered to be long term personal investments and consent is very 
important.  On the other hand, even long term campaigns and stories will 
require a host of "victim" characters, which is why I think allowing 
multiplaying is important.  Victim characters are really the RP 
equivalent to characters flagged as PK on many HnS games.  Still, 
flagging yourself as a victim is equivalent to consenting to non-
consential play. There is also the area of implied consent.  Rules will 
vary on this, but basically if a player's character is committed to and 
insistss on performing an IC action which simply MUST result in a highly 
adverse IC reaction, then they will be subject to those reactions.  
As Jim Croce sang, "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into 
the wind.  You don't pull the mask off the Lone Ranger and you don't mess 
around with black Aes Sedai" .. or something like that ;)   


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