[MUD-Dev] Interpersonal Relationships

[Freeman]

> From: Ronan Farrell [mailto:rfarrell at parthus.com]

> Our mud was primarily a social mud with original some limited
> pkilling allowed.  No perm-death but you'd lose eq and levels.  In
> the past this meant that obnoxious characters could have their
> misbehaviours punished by more powerful players.  Not a fool-proof
> solution.  However after much demand pkilling was removed. This
> has resulted in obnoxious players finding every bug and crack in
> the code to harm, steal and basically annoy everyone else without
> any fear of retribution. There is insufficient immortal resources
> to monitor everything and I am not sure that that is a good
> solution.

Generally, I think, PKilling alone is not sufficient deterrent to
bad behavior.  The people who behave badly can PKill too, and all
that.

I think other tools - ones which do not involve combat at all - are
desirable, whether you have PKing or not.

Giving player the ability to claim part of the MUD as "theirs" and
to restrict access to that part of the MUD is a nice start.  If
people won't play nice together, you have the ability to give THEM
the ability to not play together at all.  Putting something in every
area of the MUD that can be so restricted then encourages people to
cooperate: I can ban you from this part of the MUD, but you can ban
me from *that* part of the MUD, and we both need something that is
in one area or the other, so let's play nice.

The players may even object less strenuously to the re-introduction
of PKilling, if they are handed at the same time non-combat tools
they can use to force each other to cooperate.

Even self-sustaining cliques can be encouraged to cooperate, stop
being jerks to everyone else on the MUD, or whatever it is they are
doing, if those other people on the MUD have some power over them:
Something beyond simply the ability to kill them since, as you said,
simply re-introducing PKing would likely result in the obnoxious
people going on a killing spree anyway.

Do you have any sort of in-game governments, political structures,
territory or the like?  Anything that you could turn over to the
players to bash each other with?

The more fruitless you make that sort of warring, the more they'll
try to work together in order to avoid war.  Even a tight clique is
going to start self-policing if the actions of one of its members
results in ALL of them being "punished" (via denied access to some
chunk of the mud, or whatever it is other players control access to
that they might want).

'Probably not a good idea to do the denied-access thing is the
majority of your players are in the chump-clique, though.
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