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

[Sasha Hart]

[Eamonn O'Brien]

> 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.

It's an elegant way of trading off risk for activeness in combat -
like a lowpass filter for (rate of aggression * probability of
death).

Trouble. There is almost always a symmetry between 'a group of
people can police the game' and 'a group of people can menace the
game.' In the very worst case, you have tyranny of the
majority. Without use of deus ex machina, the two solutions are (A)
to sandbox the menace (B) provide an attacker/defender asymmetry
attackers can't break (but defenders optionally can).

> 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.

I hate it :) Really, wouldn't knowing this just grind down your
morale and encourage you to play a long series of young new
characters who blaze brightly until they die or old age makes it
once again a better option just to reroll? (In truth, I have the
same attitude toward any age-degeneration system.)

Why not make use of the effective size of your pool (your max rate
of combat involvement, assuming constant effectiveness, as
determined by rate of regen)?

For example, having long periods of peace slowly grow the pool would
mean an overall incentive to go longer between fights. For a person
who consistently preferred frequent fights, they would trade off by
having a smaller pool, which would mean both less risk until they
were eliminated (a shorter leash, if you like) and more
vulnerability to reprisals. Conversely, a person who was very
peaceful and applied their risk selectively could sustain more
strenuous bouts. No matter what there is a light incentive not to PK
if incentives are what matter, but if PK is what matters then you
can work within the incentive system (you just can't get a better
deal than a peaceful person in a direct way).

As the raw difference between combating players in death likelihood
increases (due to time spent/levels, or just skill level) this gives
the same incentives to a peaceful person as for a masterful fighter.
His pool would grow and he would dominate even more completely. This
would be a lot better if (hack) there were some good possibility of
dying each battle, or (better) if the battles were at least partly
discretional (e.g. you can be a coward and flee), fairly conducted,
and interesting. Then the master would more appropriately have a
position more like a chess master's than a bully's.

Of course, you could also have pool growth depend on something like
'honorable behavior,' maybe including attacks in some respect.

Then the reward for being honorable would be greater power, but
would run down the longer you were dishonorable, while being
forgiving to occasional lapses or selective actions. The reward for
being skilled but dirty would be being alive and having fun, and the
smaller pool would be something like an automatically adjusted
difficulty level.  (Note that this even assumes a pattern of play
like you describe below, idling in safety until your pool fills up
then going out and spending your lives, because we can assume you
would still be maxing out your kill rate, but that max kill rate
would be set lower by your past behavior). That seems like a good
deal for a powerplayer. And you could switch between the two without
a lot of trouble or accident.

> But anywhere it is easy to idle in safety you would run the risk
> of regen being abused by PKers.

But this has the reciprocal advantage of allowing peaceful people to
idle or socialize to keep their lives topped off even if they get
killed now and then :)

Well, lives should not increase too quickly as a function of time
online. It might be good to just use time instead. You also save
some server wear. You would still need to watch the old problem of
people having a bunch of accounts and just switching among them,
thereby accomplishing a continuous rash of murders :) This might
prompt solutions like having people work for regen, but then you get
scripting.. until you are just turing testing players the whole time
they play, which isn't fun at all. Better, I think, to set the
worst-case life regen to something acceptable. And I think what I
was saying about pool size/regen rate being smaller with
aggressiveness is a good way to get acceptable regen levels which
asymmetrically favor defenders.

If you set the game up so the optimal path to maximum violence is
minimum capability, then the result is predictably OK (even if they
fail to find the optimum). And if you set it up so optimal total
damage is only achieved by good pacing and care, then even an
optimally virulent person could well be playing by acceptable rules.
If you set it up so that maximum power is only achieved by hardly
fighting, then... The only effective way to deal with a player's
behavior without coercion is to relinquish 'control' and bet on her
rather than against her.
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