[MUD-Dev] Player run systems (was Player run reputation system)

[J Todd Coleman]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Hopson" <jhopson at nc.rr.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 10:05 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Player run systems (was Player run reputation system)

> At 05:54 AM 6/29/2001, J C Lawrence wrote:
>>On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, John Hopson wrote:

>>> The nice thing about this is it takes all the burden off the
>>> game and its administrators.  Don't like the rating system?
>>> Create and promote your own.  Wish there were a system rating
>>> OOC roleplaying ability player rather than IC criminality?  Go
>>> for it.  The system becomes whatever the players want/need it to
>>> be.

>> Doncha love soft code systems?

> Love 'em.  I'm currently in the process of getting ready to open
> my second rp mud, Azhad, and this time around we spent a lot of
> time putting in these sort of flexible, user-defined and
> -maintained systems.  The following is a snippet describing one of
> those systems, hereby offered for list
> consumption/praise/ridicule.

> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

> The basic unit of the game portion of Azhad is a faction.  A
> faction is an in-character group that can consist of any number of
> players.  They can be any sort of organization, including: a
> family, a guild, a band of mercenaries, the staff of an inn, a
> troupe of actors, a political faction, a school of philosophy.

> The internal structure of a faction can be anything the faction
> wants.  When the faction is created, the founder is given all the
> faction abilities, such as the ability to initiate new members,
> withdraw funds from the faction bank account, and to cause people
> to be arrested within their areas.  Using a coded "delegate"
> command, they can then delegate any or all of these abilities to
> other faction members.

> If the founder wishes, the faction can be a purely democratic
> organization where all members have all of the abilities, or an
> autocratic group where only the founding leader has any authority.
> This also allows for members of the faction to receive a tailored
> set of abilities, so a faction's guard captain might have the
> ability to initiate new guards, withdraw money for their pay, and
> to arrest troublesome opponents.  The faction's accountant might
> only have those commands related to money, and so on.  Even the
> ability to delegate itself can be delegated, so the guard captain
> could empower his guards.  This is regulated by the fact that a
> character can only delegate abilities that they possess.

> There is also a complementary "revoke" ability, which can also be
> delegated.  Once someone has been given the revoke command, none
> of their abilities can be revoked.

Thats interesting! Your 'faction' concept mirrors the Shadowbane
'guild' concept almost line for line.  Guilds are collections of
players that voluntarily arise of a given type : noble house,
barbarian clan, wizard's conclave, thieves den, etc.  In addition to
the type you have three levels of admin : Guildleader/Inner Council,
Active members, and Probationary members.  The guild itself has a
voting structure that determines how the guild can be managed :
republic, monarchy, etc... and within the guild, there are a series
of "ranks" that can be assigned by the GL/IC to any member,
basically allowing them to structure the internals of the guild
however they wish.

We did something similar to this on MoT mud (less the property
ownership) and it was incredibly successful.  The primary
differences were that 1) there were a limited number of guilds on
the mud (say, 20 or so -- so the scale was totally different) and 2)
the game was a "pseudo-class" based system.  (It was actually a
large skill tree, and each "class" was just a package of branches)
so you never had to worry about any particular guild type being
"horribly unbalanced" because all of the players had access to
(almost) all of the branches, regardless of guild type.

For "guild activities" in SB we took the burden off the GL/IC and
made it property based.  Want to control guards?  You need some
land, and a guard barracks, and an NPC ("Captain of the Guard")
trainer.  This way players who aren't at the top of the guild can be
more involved in their own "career path" but (as the guild controls
the land, and is the sole source of protection) they still
ultimately answer to the GL/IC.

Todd Coleman/Warden
Wolfpack Studios, Inc - Shadowbane


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