[MUD-Dev] Alignment

[Richard Ross]

I've been playing a range of different MUDs for quite a while, and they all
seem to have alignment systems that are something of a joke...  it's either
far too easy to swing between absolute evil and absolute good (on one mud I
played it took six kills to go from -1000 (satanic) to +1000 (angelic)!), or
it makes no difference what alignment you are anyway.
What most of these systems seem to do is ignore the question of the nature
of good and evil.  If you kill good monsters you're evil, if you kill bad
monsters you're good, and if you kill both you're neutral.  There's very
little/no account taken for past actions.
Now that I'm coding my own MUD, I decided to do something different with
alignment.  I thought about having the character's alignment fixed, and
intervening when they tried to commit an act outside their alignment (so
stopping a good player from killing an angel), but I've learned that
stopping players doing what they feel they ought to is a bad thing (most of
the time anyway!).
Instead, I came up with a scaled alignment system.  The basic premise is
that if you're alignment is down there with Lucifer it's gonna take a lot
more than a few slain goblins to lift you up to St. Peter's level.  Then I
hit a problem.  Is the reverse necessarily true?  If you're good, doesn't
committing an evil act hit you harder?  Slaying a newborn child may be the
evil guy's normal pasttime (none or a slight alignment shift) but if the
good guy does it he can expect his alignment to plummet.  This basically
results in a world where it's easier to be evil than good, although it's
hard to get to the extremes of either (and hard to stay really good).
So I thought I'd throw this one open for discussion.  Should I go ahead with
this system and risk having a mud full of evil characters (despite the
player's best efforts), or is there a solution?  Has anyone else tried
non-standard alignment systems, and how have they worked out?

Richard Ross




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