[MUD-Dev] The Relationship between pkers and monster AI?

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> 
> For what it's worth, Arctic MUD (mud.arctic.org 2700) has a pretty excellent
> justice system.  Basically it's like this: if you commit some sort of
> PvP action in town, the authorities come after you.  You usually have
> to pay a hefty fine and sit in jail for some (rather large) amount of
> time.  If the crime is serious enough, they will simply execute you outright.

Is there any way to escape from the authorities?

> 
> Note that this only applies *in town*.  Once you're out in the wilderness it's
> free reign, and the justice stuff does not carry over from town to town.
> (Unlike most MUDs, Arctic does not have a "central" town - there are six
> major towns and as many minor ones, so staying out of one particular town
> is annoying but not impossible.)
> 
> As a result, hanging out in town is pretty safe, even though it is not
> necessarily 100% safe.  There's plenty to do in most of the towns, so
> paranoid players can solo in town and stick with large groups when they
> leave.

ahh, right, cool. That's sort of what we do too, with some variations. All
cities that you can become an enemy of are player-run (reasonable
elaborate system of governmental ministries, etc). The Ministry of
Security is responsible for internal security, which includes declaring
people official enemies of the city, and paying for and maintaining city
defences. Examples of city defences are archers on the rooftops taht will
shoot at you, and telepaths which will attack you anywhere in the city. It
IS still possible to walk into a hostile city and take someone out
quickly, but you run a large risk doing it, as the damage from
archers+telepaths (archers only hit you outdoors, and only if you do not
have a magical shield up, which gets broken when you move or attack).

> 
> In addition, it's somewhat interesting to have these outlaws - people who
> are wanted in several towns, and as such are forced to stick to the
> outback, so to speak.  Naturally it tends to make people not trust them
> very much, and rightly so.

Achaea's situation tends to be that major players get enemied from the
cities that the city they are a member of is opposed to. This forces
players to hang out in groups defined by political loyalty, which is a
positive thing to me (provides a sense of nationalism, etc). 


> 
> Of course, Arctic is the perfect antithesis to all the anti-PK talk on this
> thread.  They've had basically unrestricted PK/psteal/whatever there
> and have managed to remain extremely popular for the six years or so
> they've been running.  The justice system was only implemented about three
> years ago, and I would hardly say it was sorely needed, just a nice add-on.

Excellent. We've had the same experience. We have many players who aren't
interested in PK, and who occassionally get caught in the crossfire, but
that's just life. They deal with it fine, 99% of the time, as long as it
doesn't get overboard.
--matt




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