I'm fairly new to playing in a world with heavy class/status divisions; in this case a feudal society with your kinds and nobles that runs the gamut through a merchant middle-class right down to the lowest of the low, a sort of homeless class that's not fit to work for anyone and is looked down upon with nearly universal scorn.

I realise there are a whole lot of other feudal mu*es out there, any many with status divisions outside of that. I'm curious as to how, or even whether, the people from these diffeing classes gets in interactive roleplay together. What sort of scenarios do you use? It makes sense, realistically, that there would be some kinds of contact, but when I go to RP I often come up empty.

Recently I saw a scene where a higher-class woman hired a peasant to carry a message to another noble for her, which got the peasant involved in a bunch of RP with two different nobles. I've seen peasants begging by the side of road, and sometimes nobles stop to give them money which involves a little bit of RP. Sadistic nobles could certainly torture peasants, or taunt them.

Does anyone else have ideas on this? Has anyone else negotiated this situation? (Shortish) logs are welcome.

I've farmed out the question to two places, so there may be good answers as well. I'm very interested in any answers.

It really depends on the mud, and the standards they have for RP'ing there.

For example, on Armageddon there's a complicated class system (to the extent that people sometimes get confused about which noble outranks which templar), and the nobles can treat the peasants however the #### they wanna treat them without getting in trouble, usually. The problem is, a lot of times the nobles get bored because they can't just go sit in the peasant bars (which are usually more populated) and jabber. However, given that people tend to get their chars killed off rather fast, there's quite a bit of interaction with peasants wanting to work for the noble houses and so on.

On DM, on the other hand, the nobles don't actually belong to noble families or anything, and so it's a bit more relaxed. (Although the RP in general is a bit more relaxed.) Nobles are expected to act with integrity and honor (at least publicly), and typically come up with all kinds of secret plots, and if a large number of nobles are allied, their plots tend to get in the way of each other. Some nobles are always running around getting their business done and never stopping to just hang out, but other nobles like to sit around in public jabbering with the peasantry. Nobles don't typically grab peasants and torture them, although their plots may involve killing massive amounts of people. Except for the plotting, nobility doesn't really mean a whole lot though, because a house can decide to change nobles at the drop of a hat if the current one isn't doing his job right or if he stops playing for any length of time.

So it really heavily depends on what kind of RP is expected in the game.