[The Vorpal Tribble]

I've noticed that the detail in which people put into their non-sentient NPCs tells alot about their taste in MUDs. Do you want utter realism and piles of cow patties or animal shapes that you can chew on when you get hungry? Let us know.

[Molly]

I am an animal lover myself, to a point where it actually hampers my mudding. In the good old days, when I was a newbie in  my first mud (mostly stock), I used to be slaughtered by the goblins south of Midgard all the time, because I couldn't bring myself to kill the cute roe deer and other animals in the Holy Grove, which was the main Newbie zone there.


All kidding aside, I find mobs that just stand around waiting to be slaughtered extremely boring. Sure, you have to cater a bit for the 'bonkers' too, but in general mobs that act a bit independant and do some unexpected things present a lot more challenge.

Many of the mobs in our mud are part of Quests too, so it often pays a lot better to save the prisoner or take the lost child back to its mother, than to just slaughter them. Or to talk to the mobs, to get some info about the Quest and general theme of the zone.

I also like mobs that act a bit 'natural', for instance animals that breed, get kids, grow old and die of old age, predators that attack weaker animals, pets that can be trained and things like that.

There are lots of fun things you can do with mobs even without hard-coding it, by just using scripts (mob_progs).

[Wenlin]

It seems like most people are leaning toward voting for the utopian situation. Though we'd like for all the mobs to fully react, its probably a pain to put all that in, and make it good.