On Fri, 10 May 1996, WILLIAM P MCNAMARA wrote: > In my not so many years playing muds I have seen several different > stances on P-killing. The major ones are as follows: > > (1) absolutely no player killing -- > this is nice for newbies because they don't have to worry about a rogue > player beating up on them. However there are times when a player is > being a complete jerk that it would be nice to lop off their head. > Usually the first P-kill results in a warning and the second, your > char is removed. MUDs based around "absolutely no player killing" should have hard-coded restrictions completely disallowing the player-killing. Anything less, IMHO, is like giving a kid $10 and telling them only to spend .50 -- only the really good kids will obey, the rest will do it even if they know they'll get punished. Point being, a MUD that warns you to not pkill *is*, no matter what the implementors say, limited player killing [eg., you can do it once and then have all your friends do it once... not like I've ever done that, heh...] > > (2) limited player killing -- > I've seen this implemented in several ways. Many of the muds i have > visited have had an arena of some sort where players could challenge each > other. The implication of the resulting fight varies. Others allow > player killing within a range of levels. The most fair I have found > tends to be 1 level higher or lower. > See my above paragraph. Personally, I feel it's impossible to name the pkill systems in opperation by whether it's permitted (except for "absolutely no pkilling") perhaps it'd be better to do something different. > (3) free for all -- > These are fine and dandy if you are a higher level player, or make > powerful friend fast. Hard on newbies. > On "free for all" role-playing MUDs, newbies should have a harder time [if you want to get in depth, a newbie with a background of brutality should have an easier time pkilling than a established player with a background of thievery] winning a fight, anyway, so it doesn't matter. On "free for all" non-RP MUDs, newbies and established players should have NO DIFFERENCE IN CHARACTERS at all, with the deciding factors being who's better equipped and what kind of strategy. "Free for all" non-RP MUDs should NOT have levels, IMHO. Perhaps keep around strength, etc. but, levels are ridiculous limitating and make it impossible for newbies to get anywhere. > Being in the middle of constructing my own mud, I am in a delimma about > whether or not to allow player killing and if I do, in what amount. > Looking at the suggestion of giving a player a certain number of "fate" > points and taking away points for each p-kill seems like a very nice > solution. There are, however, some questions to answer, such as: Can a > player earn back fate points, can a player find out how many points > he/she/it still has, etc. While not the one whom suggested it, and never having played a MUD using the fate-point system, I would think that getting back fate points would be a matter of completing quests or prayer. The prayer idea is kind of neat because we'll say they have to pray on holy [translation: good] ground, but if they're evil they can't go on to the holy ground to pray, so in order to get back fate points they have to do good (I think it's silly how people get "good" by killing other things... even if the other things are evil, they're still killing them). --[WARNING: Topic Change]-- Now that I have started on alignment... Has anyone thought of a good way of making alignment a bigger part of the game, and I don't neccessarily mean PK-wise (I've seen too many examples of alignment taking part in pkilling), and to more realistically change the person's alignment. I think when you give money to beggars your alignment should increase, etc. To note, I don't want to use numerical alignment -1000 to 1000, maybe using a rating system like: demonic, chaotic, evil, neutral evil, lawful evil, neutral, chaotic good, neutral good, good, lawful, angelic; for everything rated "good" that you do you'd have a chance at your align rating increasing. Then there's another idea. Since I plan on having various religions (dependant upon race and region), "good" would be relative to the religion. Human sacrafice, for instance, in some cultures and tribes was considered to please the Gods, however, to other religions human sacrafice is considered revolting, disgusting, sacreligous, etc. How could we apply this to MUDs? For instance, JohnDoe belongs to a religion or culture where wedding more than one woman is permitted, JaneDoe [who, because she has the same last name, is probably one of his wives and thusly will be pissed off anyway] belongs to another religion/culture that forbids such things. To JohnDoe and other followers of the same religion, his multiple-wives is no problem, in the eyes of JaneDoe, however, it's evil. Any thoughts? Sorry for changing the topic.
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