[MUD-Dev] Enforcing roleplay on small muds

[Sasha Hart]

[Arnau Rosselló Castelló]

> I plan to give bounties to players that report new words and
> phrases, and i think is in the spirit of the game, trying to say
> things without saying them.

I was initially skeptical about this as yet another discussion of
how to prevent players from using cuss words - (e.g., "his B U T
T"). The above idea and the concept of using people's desire to stay
in-theme (after all, these small games have very self-selected
audiences) say to me that this is not only feasible on typical
text-game scales (say, 30 people online), but also sounds
terrifically fun and novel.

Of course, players can circumvent this stuff in a billion ways;
T.R,E'E, sTREEt, the four letter word beginning with t signifying a
gradually enlarging green, bark-covered organism... the only
solutions I can see involve living with it to some extent.

For example, consider providing players with a means of inter-player
(probably OOC) communication, like tell/page. Then everyone but the
most perverse will just use that to communicate with the other
players.

I think the rest of it can be ignored or mopped up by roleplaying
zealot-players and public measures, e.g., something like reports of
the character, and mild IC discipline (I suppose death is pretty
mild in paranoia, right?), for infractions on public comms. This
last would be facilitated by logging of public conversations plus a
reasonable interface for wizzes to check out conversations within a
certain period. There is ample precedent for even scummier forms of
logging in these games since time immemorial, so you would be (by
MUD standards) extraordinarily decent to notify players that public
conversations were always logged.

The residual stuff, of course, you just have to live with. So what,
players abuse everything at least once ;)

Maybe someone else can provide the optimal solution for implementing
the word-censoring from the massive, probably on-disk dictionary you
will build up with this word bounty system. I'm sure someone can at
least suggest some kind of DB + kitchen sink solution ;)

You do get left without the degree of perfect and pervasive
censorship that might be most appropriate for this TWISTED idea, but
I can see it still being tons of fun.

Sasha


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