[MUD-Dev] Non-combat advancement and roleplay

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian 'Psychochild' Green" <brian at psychochild.org>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 2:12 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Non-combat advancement and roleplay


> I had a thought about non-combat advancement and roleplay I
> thought I'd share with the list.  Perhaps this could spur some
> good discussions.

<SNIP>

> The core of my proposed system is a stat that is recorded on the
> player.  This stat, called "Prestige", determines how you can
> interact with others.

> If someone has a much greater prestige than you, you cannot affect
> them though violent actions.  You can try to attack them, but some
> in-game mechanism rebuffs you (or even kills you).  If someone has
> much less prestige than you do, then you know they cannot affect
> you.  If someone has about as much prestige as you do, then
> "normal" rules apply. Obviously, there should be some way to
> measure comparative prestige levels in the game.

<Examples snipped>

This sounds like Majesty from Vampire the Masquerade/Mind's Eye
Theater.

> Of course, the devil's in the details.  How do players accumulate
> this prestige?

> In the concept I thought out, it comes from multiple sources.  To
> simplify the example, we'll consider prestige from two sources,
> rank and deeds.

> Rank gives you a certain amount of prestige.  In the above case,
> the king had his prestige because he held the rank of "king" in a
> kingdom of modest size.  Perhaps being king of a larger kingdom
> would be worth more prestige, while being lower on the totem pole
> would result in less prestige.

Makes complete sense. I might suggest weighting it by how that rank
or position is gained. Perhaps a voted political position grants
more prestige than the cabinet members that person chooses. Also,
the vote results could affect the prestige of the position: if you
win by a larger percentage, you gain more prestige from that
position.

> Deeds would be the equivalent of completing quests.  To prevent
> abuse, only the most notable deed would be recorded.  So, someone
> that saves a puppy might get a tiny amount of prestige, someone
> who saves a town from marauding orcs might get more, while someone
> who slays a terrible dragon might get a sizable amount of
> prestige.  Yet, you cannot keep saving that poor puppy in order to
> eventually get the prestige of a dragonslayer.  I would also be
> hesitant to allow the slaying of relatively puny orcs to really
> affect the prestige of a dragonslayer; aren't the orcs below you
> now that you've killed a dragon?  

The Devil [in the detail's] has a forked tongue.. There's two ways
to view these deeds. One is that you gain prestige so others will be
hesitant to attack you. However, the flip side is that the same
deeds may get others calling you out, to show they're better than
you. People want to try their hand against a pro, or want the
prestige and fame which will be afforded them if they, as an
unknown, defeat someone with great deeds.

Deeds are both a shield and a bull's-eye. Or at least they should be
from a role-playing point of view. Is it possible to accommodate
both in this system?

> These two parts combined together (added?  weighted average?) 
> create the sum of a person's prestige.  So, our king in the
> previous example could gain prestige from doing great quests.
> That would allow him to eliminate the potential threat posed by
> the empress as well as possibly be able to deal with the Dark
> Lord.  Or, if Joe really wanted to be able to make demands of the
> King, he should go do a quest to gather some prestige.  The king
> refused to "reward" Joe, the Dragonslayer of Renown?  How rude!

That makes sense. But realize that these deeds are again going back
to combat. So you say, 'Okay, we'll have deeds that can be done
without combat.' Here's Boffo, the man who put out the cottage fire
by running back and forth with a bucket. Or Boffo, the man who
rescued poor Jimmy who'd fallen down the well. A person can
definitely be known by these things.

In your king example, he has guards. But now we have Boffo walking
in the woods, and Joe the psychotic wants to kill him. Why would
Boffo's prestige present him? The King was saved because there were
NPC guards present. Now, every non-combat deed needs to result in
some thematic way of adding NPCs to protect the non-combative
prestige character.

If Joe is not truly psychotic, but just evil or misunderstood, then
Joe might be reluctant to kill Boffo if he's afraid of the
retribution that will come of it [others hunting him down, because,
dagnabit!, Boffo was just a Good Guy!]. However, this retribution is
only a deterrant if it matters to Joe, either by his personal
roleplaying, or in some game sense if he's a griefer.

'Aw c'mon, Boffo is out in the woods. I know the villagers and
Cleric's guild love him. But he's out here alone, and I want to kill
him. He'll come back. So what if they kill me, I'll come back.' This
runs into permadeath, but I don't want to get into that.

So what's my point here? That a non-combative prestige system would
probably need to be location-based. The King can take guards
anywhere with him. Boffo the child-in-the-well-saver,
can't. However, in the villages and in the cities, the citizenry
would protect him as such. So his prestige protection is based on
where he is.

> Obviously, you could add more components to the overall prestige
> score to suit individual tastes.  If you could find an effective
> trust metric, that might be a good basis for a prestige system,
> instead of or in addition to other elements.

> What this system primarily does is prevent non-combat PCs from
> running in fear of every knife-wielding psycho in the game.  It
> also provides a strong, definite path for non-combat advancement.
> As you gain prestige, you become more powerful to others who deal
> with prestige, even if you couldn't fight your way out of a wet
> paper bag without your honor guard.

Again, you need to have guards associated with the prestige for this
to work, or base it by location. Otherwise, just knowledge of great
deeds is no protection from a knife-wielding psycho, same as it is
in real life.

> A few optional rules to consider:

> Flavored prestige.  Prestige could be measured in terms of many
> opposed goals, such as good/evil, law/neutrality/chaos, etc.  This
> is mostly important for combining prestige from different areas,
> it leaves the absolute effect of prestige untouched.

A very cool concept. M. Talien Tresca has a workup of a 7-scale
'alignment' system, which is similar to this. Actions, not just
kills, adjust different scales as appropriate. Reactions to the
character are based on which scales are important to the person
reacting, and which ends of the scale are important.

> So, for example, if you run a benevolent kingdom (good prestige),
> plus you have slain an orc encampment that was threatening a city
> (good prestige), you get prestige that greater than either
> individual part. However, if you run a benevolent kingdom (good
> prestige), and slaughter a peaceful town of miners (evil
> prestige), then your prestige not be cumulative.  The details of
> how to handle conflicting flavors of prestige are left as an
> exercise for the reader.

> High prestige imposition.  You could allow high prestige people to
> impose upon people of much less prestige.  In our example with the
> King and Joe Blow above, the King could have had his guards throw
> Joe out of the throne room instead of having to wait for Joe to
> attack him.  This would help prevent a lot of "soft" PKing
> problems, potentially at the expense of people abusing the system.

> Prestige transfer/investment.  You're a diabolically evil sorcerer
> that wants to get rid of that goody-two-shoes of an empress, but
> don't want to get your hands dirty.  Or, perhaps you're a goodly
> king that wants to rid the lands of the evil sorcerer, but just
> can't fit it in between schedule appointments of running a free
> health clinic for children and personally helping farmers with
> their fields.  What do you do?  Hire a patsy!

> But, with prestige rules, you can't just hire anyone off the
> street. They have to have a certain level of prestige to even
> approach the person.  Allowing individuals to transfer or invest
> prestige can help solve this problem.  When you hire someone to do
> a deed that requires prestige, you can share your prestige with
> them temporarily.  They must complete the task within a certain
> time.  Or, you might "invest" prestige in the task, giving the
> hireling the prestige necessary to do the deed.  If the hireling
> succeeds, it gives you a (temporary?) boost to prestige.  Should
> they fail, you will feel the opposite effect.  You (gain/lose)
> prestige as your enemies (fall before you/uncover your
> questionable plots).

Very cool concept. Not sure how it works in the example you give
though.  Joe the disgruntled kitchen staff worker doesn't have the
prestige to attack the King. The King laughs, the guards throw Joe
out. Billy the evil sorceror wants the King killed. He hires Joe to
kill the King with a knife. As far as the King and the guards are
concerned, it looks exactly the same to them in both cases. Doing
things quietly to keep your hands from getting dirty, doesn't sound
like it'll work.

Now if Joe yells, I've been sent from Billy the Evil Sorceror. You
have seconds to live!

Then I could see Joe temporarily gaining some of Billy's prestige
for the attempt. However, in a roleplaying sense, what's to stop Joe
the disgruntled kitchen staff worker from decided to shout that as a
ruse? The game could know the difference, but then it loses
consistency for me.

Perhaps prestige can be used to 'buy' special items. Billy the Evil
Sorceror could give Joe the hired assassin a potion or some item to
activate that will freeze the King's guards for a short period of
time. The benevolent King could use prestige to gain a boon from the
gods. With this boon, he can annoint a champion who can pass through
the Evil Sorceror's personal [prestige] protections [but not his
self-cast magical ones].  In each of these cases, prestige is
always-on as a defense. However it can be spent (temporarily?) for
offense. Spending for offense won't diminish the defense.

> This could also work so that a group of people with a reasonable
> level of prestige can band together to affect another person with
> greater prestige.  So, again, the king in our example above might
> decide to try to band together with the empress in hopes that
> their combined prestige would be enough to deal with the Dark
> Lord.  The fear here is that it would allow newbies to just band
> together to tackle the rulers with moderate amounts of prestige,
> reducing us back to the original problem.

Now take my above suggestion to this situation. Just attach
numerical values to the prestige defense and prestige offense, and
have the prestige offense attacks neutralize prestige defense
amounts for a short period of time. If there's a coordinated attack,
enough of the defender's prestige could be neutralized to allow them
to be attacked.

To handle the newbie issue here is the fact that prestige offenses
need to be 'bought'. So a minimum amount can be set.

> Thoughts?  Feedback is appreciated.  I'm sure there's holes in
> there somewhere.  I also wouldn't be surprised if someone else had
> a system like this.  Any experiences to share?

Hope that helps, or at least stimulates.

    rayzam
    www.retromud.org


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev