[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Michael Tresca]

Ian Macintosh wrote on Wednesday, August 23, 2000 1:17 PM
> But the breaking of the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th are what this whole thread
is about.
>
> 6.  You shall not murder.
>
> 8.  You shall not steal.
>
> 9.  You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
>
> 10. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.  You shall not covet your
> neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or
> anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Thus the Seven Deadly Sins vs. Seven Holy Virtues alignment system.  One of
the things we noticed with our players is that they avoid issues that
require them to communicate in a certain way by using the freeform emote
system.  The freeform emote system was meant to plug the holes of emotes
that don't accurately portray a player's actions.

If I can't give a player "laughs like a hyena" as an emote with the lhyena
command, the player can make up for it with an emote ": laughs like a
hyena."  This is great for role-playing, horrible for tracking a player's
actions for the purposes of any moral judgment.

So we took it away, because ultimately you can make a billion emotes, it's
just a matter of caring enough to create them.  The emotes CAN be tracked
however.

While you can't have every emote contribute to a particular alignment type
(assuming we have 7, or 14 in total since each has a good/evil parallel),
perhaps it only sways your alignment -- if you're already evil in that
alignment type, it makes you a bit worse off.  But it won't make you evil
alone.

Additionally, other actions are a lot easier to track (killing something is
the easiest).

You then get something like this:
Slapping someone is considered a sin of wrath
Eating a lot is considered a sin of gluttony
Picking up gold is considered a sin of greed
etc.

This is far from perfect, but it does distinguish the different alignments
based on different concerns.  Merchants are not necessarily evil in
everyone's eyes, but in the ascetic's view, they may well be -- and thus the
monk better not be gluttonous or greedy, but for the merchant that may be a
requirement.

So Paladins can suffer from the sin of wrath, because one of their
specialties is killing people -- but they probably are allowed to suffer
from the sin of pride -- shiny armor and all that.

This categorizes the "if you kill good guys you're bad and if you kill bad
guys you're good" under wrath vs. justice.  It's just one aspect of the
character's alignment.  Thus, you're not evil because of what you kill, but
evil because of 6 other types of actions that collectively make for your
alignment.

Completely independent of this concept (not implemented yet) is the status
system.  This social standing system is based on how often a player kills a
citizen of a town (separated by world, we have six), how much money they
have, how much land they own, their profession (barbarian types will have a
harder time gaining status in cities than a merchant), and their level.  Get
your status low enough and citizens spit on and even attack you on sight.
Get your status high enough and they bow and greet you with a warm smile.

There's no one simple system.  The above is really eight different systems,
all to just judge player actions.

Michael "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org
telnet://retromud.org 3000




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