I have thought for a long time about how to keep players from murdering innocents, and have come up with the best way, IMHO.
It is MOB FACTIONS. All that it requires is the addition of one Mob parameter...and integer called faction. The basic idea of factions is this:
When two mobs of the same faction are in a room together, they exchange memory lists.
Thus, if you try to kill a citizen of a town, and fail, and the citizen walks into the same room as another citizen, or a city guard, the mob will "tell" the other mobs your name, and you go onto their memory lists. In this way, your name will spread quite quickly through the MUD town, to all mobs that have a common faction with the one you attacked.
There is one problem...if you kill the mob, it can't tell your name to the guards. Here is the solution...
The wimpy flag works differently with mobs that have faction > 0. These mobs will not try to fight, but instead, run away at the slightest provocation. Once this is done, you are on their memory list. If you walk into the same room as a wimpy mob that remembers you, instead of attacking you, the mob instantly moves away.
Suppose you walk into a new town, and attack a citizen. The citizen immediately flees, and, as you try to attack it again, it always moves to another room. It moves into the room of another citizen, and exchanges memory lists. Now you have two citizens that run away from you, and tell other mobs of the same faction to do the same. This spreads out until all of the citizens, city guards, and any other mobs that have the same faction will run from you or kill you.
There are several other facets involved, such as how to have the mobs "forget" the character after he has been killed by one of them, so that the guards are not always against them.
More on this later,
Blaize Imperator
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