[MUD-Dev] Player run reputation system

[Travis Casey]

shren wrote:
> On Wed, 23 May 2001 lhulbert at hotmail.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 17 May 2001 17:30:24 -0700 (PDT)
 
>> While reading Raph's article "What Rough Beast?"
>> http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/essay2.html I thought again of
>> this post. An extension of this system could be used to provide a
>> player-driven virtue/justice code.  Raph talks early on about the
>> difficulty of Virtues in a Multi-player world.  Expanding on
>> Sulka's idea of player votes arranged by 'home.' could be a set of
>> virtues that players can use to vote on for each other.  Each
>> player could give a vote 0 -2..+2 in catagories such as kindness,
>> humility, strength, generosity, loyalty, lawfulness,
>> trustworthiness(sp?), etc.
 
>> Each town could emphasize a different set of virtues.  Klarg is a
>> warrior society, and values strength and bravery above all other
>> virtues.  Plaren is a peaceful city, where kindness and humility
>> are the most repected virtues.  Based on the virtues of a player's
>> home town, various criminal codes could be set up, where a -20
>> trustworthiness is considered a criminal, or perhaps a -50 loyalty?
 
>> Players could be 'deputized' to hunt others that don't qualify for
>> the local standards.  A virtual 'jury of your peers,' that needs no
>> judges.  The eyes of the law and the respect of the people who meet
>> you become the same.  The reactions of various NPC's could vary
>> depending on your strength of different virtues, as well.  Biff
>> respects strength, and gives a good deal to well-known warriors,
>> while Boffo gives deals to the people he thinks are generous.

> Such schemes are prone to mule accounts and false accounts voting
> about how great a guy Joey the pk is.

I've been meaning to write about something I saw on the rpg-create
list that relates to this...  There, someone came up with an idea for
getting rid of "Appearance"-type stats.  Instead of assigning
characters a numerical appearance score, simply have the the players
describe them. Each player also chooses a set of things that his/her
character finds attractive/unattractive.  To quote the example that
was given:

------------------------------------

Let's say we have Melvin the Couch Potato...

In my system he'd have Will: 10 / 2d10...  This is a bit substandard,
as Average is assumed to be 12 / 2d12, and the "Average People" you
see in Superhero Comics are actually more like 15 / 3d10...  But
Melvin, he's 10 / 2d10...

Now, what do Melvin's tastes run to, regarding the ladies...?
Assuming he's been subjected to Madison Avenue's brainwashing, how
about this as a rating system, assuming Melvin is also 16 or so...

  Female: 5
  Skinny: 2
  Blonde: 2
  Been in a Music Video: 2
  I've seen her navel: 2
  Christine Aguilera: 5

Melvin is just trying to avoid making a fool of himself, so ties
resolve in his favor...  This is also something that is fairly
automatic a large part of the time, so his Attribute is used as a
minimum to his roll...  This means he has no problems at all, unless
he encounters someone with a rating higher than his Will of 10...

Melvin meets a normally proportioned, conservatively-dressed, girl
with black hair and no fame to speak of...  She rates a 5 on Melvin's
scale, so he has no problem...

Melvin meets Paula Abdul...  Whether he has to roll or not, depends on
whether the GM considers Paula skinny...  I'd say not, so with a
rating of 9, Melvin has no problem, though things are closer...

Christine Aguilera steps into the room...  The GM immediately calls 
for Melvin's player to roll 18 or higher on 2d10...  Poor Melvin...

-------------------------------------

You could do a similar thing with reputation -- the player chooses
what things his/her character respects and disrespects in another
character (possibly from a list of reputation attributes that the game
tracks), and the system can assign a reputation score for X's view of
Y based on that.

This sort of system would allow multiple dimensions of reputation --
for example, a "noble thief" sort of character might respect some
things that a paladin finds disrespectful, but agree on some other
things.

A player could also be allowed to have multiple identities, and
multiple reputations to go with them -- especially through use of a
disguise skill.  Coupled with the above sort of idea on appearance,
you could have a system both for determining the difficulty of a
disguise (or even of a mistaken identity!) and the results of donning
a disguise (i.e., if you disguise yourself successfully as Princess
Buffy, you get to use Buffy's reputation scores).

To make things simpler for the player, a default set of
respect/disrespect numbers might be set up based on the character's
race, class, social class, etc.  Then the player wouldn't have to
necessarily determine everything, but could just choose how his/her
views differ from the "standard".  In any case, though, this sort of
system would require a good bit of user input, so it may not be
suitable for many muds.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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