[MUD-Dev] A system for lives, death, old age, PK and perma death

[Eamonn O'Brien]

I had this idea for an expansion on Musashis death system

  http://mu.ranter.net/theory/printversion.html

the other day.

Musashi suggested a lives attribute for players which regenerates
slowly over time, if this ever hits 0 and they die again then they
are wiped completely (permadeath).

I was wondering how this could be applied to control things like old
age, law and order and PK and came up with the following
modification to it.

  1. Everyone has a lives attribute (starts at and is capped at
  around 4, again choose for your MUD)

  2. Every time you die you lose a life.

  3. Every time you PK someone (or a group you are in PKs someone)
  you lose a life.

  4. If you are killed when your lives hit 0 then you are gone for
  good.

What this will tend to mean is that anyone who is PKing for malice
will tend to have 0 lives, whereas anyone who is not PKing for
malice will tend to have non-zero lives. So if a player wants to run
around PKing for fun/malice/whatever then other players can band
together and kill that person, removing them from the world
forever. It also means that anyone who is not losing lives often can
stand up to a PKer that attacks them without having to risk their
character in its entirity.

This system can easily be justified in a fantasy world (The gods are
pleased and restore you to life, The gods dislike your actions and
are less likely to revive you in future) but I think it could lead
to a system where the people of the MUD can actually police
themselves.

For regeneration I would suggest regaining one life every time you
level. Thus newbies get more forgiving deaths than do high level
chars, regeneration over time is also an option which could work,
regenerate faster if your char is young than if they are old, say
double regen for humans under 25, normal regen under 50, half regen
over 75, no regen above that age. This way you can use old age as
the determinant for regen rather than level. But anywhere it is easy
to idle in safety you would run the risk of regen being abused by
PKers.

Lastly if you use old age like so, then long lived races become more
powerful over time so since most xp schemas are worked out with a
formula something like 1000 + (1000 * pow(x, level)) you can have
different values of x for different races, low for humans, higher
for dwarves, highest for elves.

Any thoughts/comments

Eamonn O'Brien
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