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.

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

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.

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

Neranz Laverani, Seeker of Knowledge

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.

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

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.

Re: Managing PK
 

We went with an option to have "lowbie protection" on ours - a flag that can be dropped voluntarily (for returning/experienced players) or that self-drops beyond a certain level. It tends to protect those that are new, or that are happy to roleplay all day and not become the big bads of the mud - sucks to start out on a mud only to get killed off the same day, not much incentive to stay. Of course depending if you have a levelling based system or not, the above may not work for you. We don't have a permadeath setting for most PK's either so it was easier to run with a less restricted system, since the consequences of dying (usually) aren't as dire. In general, in a RP-based MUD we found it was better to have in-game consequences (PK'ers being hunted down/put on wanted lists, cities becoming fearful or aggressive towards the PK'er, etc) rather than out-of-game restrictions.

Re: Managing PK
 

The mechanics of our MUD is quite similar; RP-intensive yet no permadeath. Inside cities is subject to Staff jurisdiction and, hopefully in the not-to-distant future, guard procs. Outside the city gates.. it's a wide and dangerous world.
Our most popular guild (allegiance in MUD terms) is the Legions, the equivelant to the army. Player killing and murder is one of the most direct ways to foster PC-to-PC roleplay! The Legion are constantly hunting out criminals, and some of our most memorable scenes have involved legion vs. murderer conflicts.
We do not restrict player killing (though I might do so for newer people in the future), but we do require players to write a pkill note (around 400 words) to send to the Staff. The contents of the note describe the events surrounding the killing and the result. There are two purposes to this - to curtail constant player-killing & to keep Staff informed about the roleplay surrounding a pkill. As well, player-killers are limited to retrieving one item as a trophy from their kill; they cannot strip someone's corpse bare. This is to curtail grief and killing over depriving a player of all possessions. Some of our killers decline to take trophies.

Re: Managing PK
 

We've handled it in a somewhat similar way.

Our goal was to create a system where the majority of PK occurs within the context of the broader war system, but individuals can still act against others who have personally slighted them.

HELP PK RULES:
HELP PERSONAL CAUSE EXAMPLES:

Re: Managing PK
 

I think it depends on the setting. If you have a world where character killing (I refuse to call it player killing, because it makes it sound personal, and I have no idea why it was called that in the first place,) is not common, then it makes sense to restrict CK.

I've found in RP MUDs that have permadeath and unrestricted killing, that it actually harms plots, because no one's willing to oppose other characters in case their character is killed as a result.

Some kind of system where experience points are reimbursed, to be spent on your next character, I think softens the blow to the player.

Is a player just killing another character because they as a player don't want to lose thier character and are powergaming, or does the character doing the killing actually have motivations behind taking such an action? These are things I would look at as a staff member on my MUD.

I prefer that CK be a last resort really. There are other things you can do to mess up the plans of another character besides killing them, which can be much more fun. There are many situations in which you could choose an alternative course of action, it's just that players can be lazy when it comes to thinking up stuff like that, or the game makes it difficult for them to do so.

Re: Managing PK
 

We like to keep things simple:

Re: Managing PK
 

> 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.

This depends on the type of MUD. Is it a MUD with permadeath?

If not then PK is not really that troubling.

The best way to handle PK is:

- Make it so that the difference between characters is as low as possible.
That way, even if someone trained immensely, he can not "easily" always
win against someone else, at least not in a 100% way.

- Offer safe zones, like guards interfering. These safe zones must be
IC logical.

- Remove all OOC channels. They distract from IC game play.

- Ensure that a player roleplayers a character according to the
personality given and if not, you must remove the player AND
undo his PKs. For this to account, you can use a deity system
that allows souls to return (semi permadeath).

The really big problem with PK is that it is one-sided fun. The
loser does not enjoy to be PKed.

I still think PK is useful though, it can make a game more
exciting. I myself favour non-permadeath, but severe
penalties (and extending safe zones so that murderers
have it very hard).

Re: Managing PK
 

I doubt it was. However the post you're replying to is more than a decade old, and the mud shut down years ago, so it's difficult to say for sure.

Put simply: No. If you (as a player) don't want OOC channels, turn them off. If players want OOC channels you can't stop them, they can always use external applications (such as Skype) - all you're doing is raising the entry barrier for new players, reducing the influx of fresh blood that your game needs to survive and prosper.

Personally I favour minimal penalties, and no roleplaying to detract from the action.

Re: Managing PK
 

In Unwritten legends, you can attack anyone you want. However, it almost never happens. The kinds of people that enjoy being jerks usually don't stay long. People can be charged with assault and murder if the attack happens in the King's territory, and it takes a very long time to be a threat to most of the player characters.

Oh, and you don't get much for it. PC's keep their stuff on death, so the most the slayer would get is some exp, and arrested or beaten.