[MUD-Dev] Alignment

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2000 at 11:27:24AM +0100 I heard the voice of
Richard Ross, and lo! it spake thus:
> 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.

Indeed.
The ease of changing alignments is at times frightening...


> 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!).

An excellent point, and one that never occured to me.
Offhand, I'd think that it should take more 'effort' (however that may be
defined in your world) to do something against your alignment, and doing
evil when you're good should have more effect on your align than doing
good while you're good.  Those are just quick ideas though, be gentle  :)


> 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).

This is a big problem.
Really, what is 'alignment'?  It's how you 'align' with a set of standard
forces, by convention a binary system (good/evil).  IRL, it's often
'harder' to be 'good' than 'evil', though that may not be true for a
fantasy world.

I have a MUD I and a few friends are playing with mainly just to pass
time and try out ideas.  It was originally a ROM codebase (yes, yes, I
know!  Don't lynch me!), and I was examining ideas for making alignment
slightly less useless than it already is.  One idea I came up with was to
have a scale of 'points', where mob kills, actions, etc, were all
assigned a 'points' value.  Your points accrue throughout your
character's career on the MUD, and your alignment is based on how many of
the possible points you could have you do have.  Hm, that's slightly
ambiguous.

An example:
Each mob kill is potentially worth 10 points.  Mobs are assigned a point
value from 0 to 10 based on how 'good' or 'evil' it is to kill them.
When you kill them, you gain the number of points they're worth, and that
adds to your running total.  If you kill all '10' mobs (absolute evil, so
you get the max of 'good' points), you have a 100% alignment, and are
godlike.  Or, if you kill all '0' mobs (absolute good, so you the the
least 'good' points), you have a 0% alignment, and are a politician.

The advantage of this is it allows more precision in how 'good' or 'evil'
you are, and also makes it much harder to change alignments.  It's easy
at the beginning, but the longer you get entrenched one way or the other,
the harder it is to switch.  You can even use the mob number weighting to
make 'good' much harder to achieve than 'evil', and make it easy to
backslide.  To coin an old analogy, life is a mountain; good is the apex,
evil the base.  The apex is much harder to reach, and it's easy to
backslide.  The more you backslide, the harder it is to get going again.
There's also a lot more room at the base than the peak.

Not a great system; as someone else mentioned, there's no reason
'alignment' should necessarily have the moral overtones it does, nor
should it consist of mearly a good/evil or other binary type of
situation.  Then, it becomes less of an alignment and more of a 'favor'
measure, of how much each 'group/caste/religion/etc' favors you based on
your actions.  Interesting idea, that.


--
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)     |    fullermd at over-yonder.net
Unix Systems Administrator      |    fullermd at futuresouth.com
Specializing in FreeBSD         |    http://www.over-yonder.net/

"The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I
      haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"



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