[smadronia]

My fiancee and I have been discussing how to handle pk if we put it in, and we're drawing a blank. We've played on muds where pk has boilded down to arranged fights only, and if a person is jumped they complain, to muds where once you reach a certain level you're automatically entered into the pk realm and there's nothing you can do about it.

The easiest way to avoid pk deteriorating into arranged fights and lots of yelling and people hiding is to just not put it in at all. However, we'd like to offer it and i'd like to hear what other people have done to keep pk working on their muds.

[Neranz Laverani]

I can think of three types of PK systems off the top of my head.

Anything Goes
Anyone can kill anyone else, anytime, anywhere.
Pro: Does not put any limits on the player.
Sometimes a high level character may have a valid RP reason to kill a relatively new person.
Con: Does not put any limits on the player.
Invariably you end up with someone who kills newbies because they are playing an "evil" character.

Anything Goes ends up being very abused in a hack and slash game. I would not recommend using it if that is the type of game you are creating. (Unless, of course, you are creating a pure PK mud like Genocide).

If using Anything Goes on a RP mud, I would have a guild of players that is in charge of law enforcement. Someone can kill newbies because they are evil, but the cops will come after them. Having the players control this aspect of the mud will also introduce more role-playing possibilities.

Level Restricted
A common way to keep high level players from killing newbies is to restrict someone to killing people a certain number of levels below themselves and the same number of levels above themselves.
Pro: Keeps high-levels from thumping newbies as a form of entertainment.
Con: RPers bristle at the fact of not being able to decide who they can kill for RP reasons.

This method is useful on hack and slash muds. The level of acceptance of it on RP muds varies.

Arena
Like Anything Goes, anyone can kill anyone else (or try). However, the arena is in a special area. When people are killed in the arena, they do not loose experience or their corpse.
Pro: Gives players a venue to see who is hardest without alienating newbies.
Con: Doesn't create the same feeling of danger that the other two methods can. It won't satisfy people who do it for the thrill.

This method is good for hack and slash muds where the players are generally afraid of PK muds. I have not seen it implemented on a RP mud, so I don't know how it would do there.

Neranz Laverani, Seeker of Knowledge

[smadronia]

I can think of a 4th type: clan or guild restricted pk. People have to join clans, cabals, guilds, whatever you want to call them in order to pk. Each clan has it's own rules and regulations about how to act, who to kill, etc. These may or may not be level restricted or arena restricted.

I'm familiar with pk, so finding a system isn't really the problem. The problem is my original question: How do you keep it from deteriorating? How do you keep your pk system from going from the original concept to one where everyone involved in pk only fights arranged fights? If you're a role playing mud where guilds have a purpose, how do you limit the number of people who join a guild simply because their friend is in it, and have no intentions of fighting at all? You could make up rules about it, but then you spend your time babysitting people to make sure they follow the rules, which doesn't sound like much fun to me.

[Neranz Laverani]

Which PK system are you leaning toward and is your mud HNS or RP?

Neranz Laverani, Seeker of Knowledge

[smadronia]

currently we're leaning towards a mix of styles, but at this point we don't have a solid decision. We want to get input from other people on how pk works in their muds before we commit to what we have planned.

The mud is going to be more role play, less pk. Our tentative plan is to allow characters to choose whether they want to pk. Those that do will have a flag showing they're interested. We're also looking at a clan system as well, run by players and imms, where like groups of people can get together. Some clans may be no-pk, some may be all pk, and some in between. The tentative plan is to limit the pkers by a level range of some kind, and let guilds set up rules for their members.

The three problems we've seen that we could encounter (and we know there's more, this is just the ones that come to mind) are: the people with pk flags will disregard the rules, the people in the guilds join to be part of the guild, not to fight, and instead of pk just being where it may, people will only fight by arrangement and bitch if they get jumped.

We want to avoid those problems, and that's why I thought I'd ask for other administrator's input in this. We've put this off for a while because we didn't want to deal with it, but it's getting to be crunch time and we need to start deciding.

[Ogma]

On the mud I admin, we have totally unrestricted PK and it seems to be self limiting due to one reason...permadeath.

[Alastair]

You could also envision a few in-game incentives to encourage depth in PK.

1. obviously, opt-in only PK: players may, after reaching a certain level, activate PK. This is a once-off choice. As an incentive, you could for instance give PK-enabled players a small boost in XP (like 5% faster levelling).

2. Loot: limit to one object in the victim's inventory, and if this is a special object (like a quest object), the killer must fulfill all conditions himself.

3. XP: No XP loss for the loser if he was attacked by a higher-level player, large XP loss if the attacker loses and is of a higher level etc.

4. Bounties: If the initial attacker killed in-town, an automatic bounty is set on his head, and town guards aggro on him. In the wilderness, the bounty is only generated if there was atleast a mob or NPC to witness the murder.
PCs can now apply for a bounty hunting permit and hunt down the killer without any XP penalties nor automatic bounty if they succeed. If the assassin manages to kill them first, he still gets to pick one part of the loop.

Well, that's my ideas on the matter. Better suited for H&S than RP-heavy, probably.

[OnyxFlame]

Yep Ogma said it, but I'll elaborate simply because I like to jabber.

The only restriction on our pk system is that you can't kill anyone in ooc land. (Some players have used this to lay in wait at the ooc entrance and pop their target's head as soon as he emerges from ooc land, but it doesn't seem to be common anymore.)

Due to the existence of permadeath, and the complex political nature of the mud, the only time anyone actually PK's someone is if they think they can handle the target's friends, or if they KNOW they won't get caught (i.e. assassins). The main way people PK is ambush, which doesn't work if their target is in row 2 of a party. Also there's a chance their actions will be observed by others in a room, so it takes someone really gutsy or stupid to kill someone in broad daylight with 5 people watching. PK becomes a really secretive underground thing where one day someone will be permadead and no one knows how or why except those who did it. And people tend to like assassins at the same time they fear them, because a mage isn't gonna up and blow their enemy up when said enemy and any observers can see it, so he'll just try to become close enough friends with an assassin that said assassin won't pop his head for money. (In the old days people hired assassins, but I'm not sure if they do anymore. I dunno about you but I'd prefer having my assassin best friend kill someone to paying some random guy who might tell the next baron who comes along who paid him to kill who.)

We don't tend to have a lot of newbie killing, unless the newbie was being really annoying/insulting, and most people don't see any point in killing someone who doesn't have the skills to threaten them or their power. The main exception to this is ooc cheating, where the killer knows the "newbie" in question is really a new char of the enemy he killed a while back. Let's face it, newbies are plenty capable of finding ways to die on their own without being helped along by someone else's bloodlust.

As for the guild issue, I advise letting the guild heads enforce their rules, or appoint others to enforce them. If they're RP oriented and enforce their rules, I doubt you'll have many problems with Joe joining guild X because his friend Fred is in it. For instance, on the mud I play the healer's guild is really strict, to the point a member can't even date anyone who isn't neutral, and their heads are really picky about who they let join. I suspect you're talking about guilds more like other muds have though, where you HAVE to join a guild unless you wanna be a crappy adventurer all through the game, and I really have no expertise in that area cuz I don't like that kind of mud.

The bottom line: if you're gonna have RP, unrestricted PK, and permadeath, watch VERY closely for ooc cheating. Other than that, there's not much of a problem with it, at least in my experience.