[MUD-Dev] Alignment

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Richard Ross wrote:
> > 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?  
> 
> I'll assume your working in some kind of fantasy setting.
> 
> Another way is to fix the characters alignment at what the player 
> choose upon creation.
> If you are at all able to detect if the character is doing deeds 
> that is 'outside' her alignment you would count them and give 
> apropriate warnings, and if they kept 'straying from the path' 
> you give them some serious penalties to their comming actions, 
> until they 'have changed alignment' or 'have refound the path'. 

Arctic has a simple (but effective) implementation of this, based off D&D.
Rangers and Paladins both must be good.  They *loose* experience (sometimes
very large amounts) for killing anything that is not evil.  If they "stray
from the path" for too long (which is not very long at all), they loose their
special powers (stuff like lay on hands, damage bonus against evil/giants,
spells..) until they can find a good-aligned cleric to cast 'atone' on them.

If they stray from the path again, they are stuck as a weak warrior forever.
Atone only works once.

> Also remember that evil begets evil, and slaying evil creatures
> is not as good a deed as you'd think. 
> 
> Example: Slaying a deamon to eat its heart and gets its dark powers.
>  .... not a 'good' deed.

But by the same token, "just" killing them may not be enough to earn favor
with the forces of good.  Perhaps you need to first bless your weapon before
combat, or give them an oportunity to repent their evil ways before you
slay them.  Perhaps you need a priest of some sort to do a burial ceremony
for the body in order to gain the alignment change for the deed.

And perhaps there are certain rules one has to follow - not fighting during
the Holy Day, not participating in any sneak attacks, etc...

Adam





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