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

[Eamonn O'Brien]

Sasha Hart wrote:
> [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?

I tend to agree that it isnt really a loophole, no matter how far
you go there will always be a possibility that someone will run
afoul of the margins, its just a matter of where you want to put
them.

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

I may be getting your meaning wrong here, but taking performance to
mean the rate of progress the player is making, shouldnt the chance
of something bad happening to him be higher with high performance?
If your MUD allows for high level chars to be created quickly you
can have more severe penalties for mistakes in play, but if it takes
months to get a high level char the penalties need to be that bit
more lenient. Ideally you reach the level where your char base is
pretty stable at a given point, if people can create a high level
char every day, then you want to have on average of 1 high level
char per player per day dying out to keep your population stable, if
on the other hand it takes 2 months play to make a high level char
you want to have about 1 high level char per 60 players dying out
every day in order to prevent an unbalanced situation where the MUD
fills up with very tough chars. Adjusting the death rate to
accomodate this might be an interesting idea, either make regenning
of lives proportional to the number of players or just reduce the
cap on lives when there are a lot of players. (hunting season has
begun :)

>> 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.

Yeah, I agree, there will be players who are not the in the target
group for your game, if Bob is going to quit over being killed, then
a permadeath game is probably not for him.

I do like the idea of adjusting the cost based on how you are killed
though and I would certainly look to incorporate that, it would be
interesting to also track some of the sneaky tricks, nasty mobs
being herded into newbie areas, summoning players underwater etc
that players get up to. and make sure they lose lives for those
too. One of the things I do like about a lives system is that it is
relatively forgiving of mistakes. If you accidentally kill a player
(he wandered in as you cast an area spell or sth like that) then you
lose a life, but unless you make a habit of it you are not likely to
be wiped when you die.

The main issue I see now though, is how to deal with large alliances
of players, clans etc. If you get a large enough group of players
they will be able to defray the life loss accross the lot of them,
if a clan member can convince his clan to take out another player,
then they will easily be able to get lots of different people to
kill him, only costing each one a single life. Again the only way I
can see to reduce this is to tie your actions back to those of your
clan, the proportional scale suggested is good for that I think,
suppose you added 1% of each loss for a clan member a modifier for
the clan. Back to Davids scheme:

> 2a. PVE death results in minus .25 points from the character.

> 2b. PVP death results in minus 1.0 points for the instigator if he
> is killed and minus 0.5 points for the challenger if he is killed.

> 2c. PK death results in minus .5 points for the victim and minus
> 1.0 points for the criminal.

suppose you add 1% of this to a clans death cost modifier, so if a
clan member PvPs someone the clan gets a modifier of 0.01, if a
member PVE kills someone they get a 0.0025 modifier, then whenever a
player kills someone they get the modifier + the modifier times the
clan modifier.  If the clan modifier is 0.2 for example and you PvE
someone, you instead lose 0.25 + 0.25 * 0.2 = 0.30 from your
points. and the clan gets another 0.0025 added to its modifier. If
it is very hard for a clan to clean slate this then it will
eventually make life tough for members of PK clans, which fits in
with roleplay well enough, after all members of an assassins guild
are unlikely to be given as much mercy as the newbie helpers
alliance do.

Anyone have any better ideas?

Eamonn.

P.S. Since D&D 3.5 books are coming out I have been thinking about
the standard races. Most roleplay systems allow for Half-Elves or
whatever, and most also allow for MUD marriages or similar. It
occured to me that it might be cool to start out with all "pure"
races, human, elf, orc, dwarf etc and have any players who get
married on the MUD create half-breed chars of that type as their
offspring, so if a human marries an elf, both accounts can now
create half-elf characters. Has anyone ever tried something like
this?  I was thinking that if nothing else it would be a nice easter
egg to give to any players who do get married on the MUD. It also
opens up the whole idea of players selectively breeding to try and
get super chars (if the offsprings attributes were say 0.45 +
(random % 0.1) times either parents stats you could breed supermen
eventually
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