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

[Sasha Hart]

[David H. Loeser Jr.]

> I'm not sure that your [Eamonn O'Brien's] system, as I understand
> it, is free of loopholes.

(Bob has 4 lives. Bob gets killed in PVE 4 times, bringing him to
zero. Archbob, an expert player, kills Bob. Bob leaves the game.)

Maybe this sucks, but is it really a loophole?

Now implement your suggestion, where PVE death penalty is 1/16 of
the way to zero:

  (Bob has 4 lives. Bob gets killed in PVE 16 times, bringing him to
  zero. Archbob, an expert player, kills Bob. Bob leaves the game.)

It still sucks for Bob. But at some point, I simply say "It was up
to the player not to make a bunch of stupid decisions" or I have
written lose conditions right out of the game. I don't want to pad
all of the walls.

Here is some half-baked theory. I consider lose states as ideally
being non-relative signals of performance (and not as punishments).

  (A) When performance is high, lose states should be
  low-probability, and when it is low they should be
  high-probability.

  (B) When lose states are low-probability overall, they lose
  sensitivity to performance. If players can choose freely whether
  or not to accept any risk then the loss state simply indicates
  whether or not risk/death was accepted, not performance. And even
  if lose states consistently signal extraordinarily low performance
  when it occurs, extraordinarily low performance will usually not
  occur, making the lose state pretty much non-salient. This is
  desired behavior for many games, such as your typical MMORPG.

  (C) As lose states increase in probability with ordinary play
  (fair warnings, worst case luck, and a handful of stupid
  decisions), the associated punishment should be decreased. I would
  say that the lose state's 'meaningfulness' is retained because it
  is still a good and authoritative signal, and you are keeping the
  degree to which you are hacking off the player under control.

> My point here, is that Bob, a casual player that enjoys battling
> the environment is killed one too many times and is turned off by
> the game.

Well, ultimately Bob could also be cussed out by another player, or
could get bored, or decide he didn't like the setting, or whatever,
and get turned off and tell everyone he hated it. That doesn't
necessarily mean that the game is bad, maybe everyone else is happy
with how it is.

> My suggestion would be to look at altering the second point (Every
> time you die you lose a life) and extend it to list the ways that
> you die and the penalties that the character would take.

I agree that this would be an improvement, on the assumption that
(given whatever the rules of the game are) it is really a reasonable
expectation that someone would die four times running without being
particularly stupid or suicidal.
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