[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:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Exactly.  When I first played Arctic I was still green to mudding, and I
> was used to no-PK-whatsoever muds.  I did not choose to participate in
> PvP activities for some years, and although I saw it go on around me all the
> time, I never had much of a problem with avoiding it.  (I think I was
> explicitly attacked twice, and in both cases I simply ran away with no
> ill effects to my character.)  There were certainly differences - you
> don't just lay down and go to sleep on the road, because you're sure to
> get pickpocketed by the first thief that walks by - but otherwise, all it
> did was keep me on my toes a bit.  Only later did I start to appreciate the
> depth of gameplay and social interaction that the PvP activities on that
> mud allow, and I realized that the game I had been playing before was only
> a pale shadow of the 'true' Arctic.

Right on. That is how I attempt (not always succeed of course) to run a
game. The idea of making people invulnerable to other players just seems
too ludicrous a restriction to put up with (although some very successful
games, such as Terris, basically do that, demonstrating a market for that
sort of thing). Just as in real life, you run a risk, no matter what sort
of lifestyle you lead, of being messed with occassionally. You don't see
people committing suicide in real life because they were mugged, just as
players generally can put up with a random killing here and there (random
killings being probably even less traumatizing in muds than mugging is in
real life).
--matt




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