Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - Of playerkilling, equipment, and roleplay.

thelenian · 06-27-2002, 05:23 AM

It may just be me, but that guy who smashes your head in for that powerful ring is actually roleplaying.

In fantasy settings (especially medieval fantasy), people kill other people who have things that they want all the time. While killing other players for "cool eq" is not exactly social, it's very much RP. Brigands routinely killed the travellers they waylaid simply for the goods they carried with them. Introducing artificial (i.e. arbitrarily hard-coded) limitations on PK, you're actually reducing the amount of RP that goes on in the MUD. If you want to seriously curtail this kind of behavior while promoting RP, the best thing to do is let the players handle it IC (i.e. banding together to drive out the thieves by force... permakilling unprovoked PK'ers etc).

Another thing that a would-be RP MUD needs to consider is the implicit goals it gives its players. Progressions of any type are considered challenges where the goal is to strive for the top end of the progression. When you have piles of increasingly powerful eq, one of the goals of the game is to get good eq. If you want to preserve RP, but dissuade players from killing eachother in order to accomplish their goals (i.e. getting good eq), you need to provide a sufficient deterrant. If you find that the players on the MUD aren't striving for what you consider to be "good RP", the first thing you have to do is analyze what kind of goals you're implicitly presenting the players with, and then eliminate or counteract those whose logical conclusions hinder or prevent the kind of RP you're looking for. In other words, if you don't want players to kill eachother for eq, stop making eq that's worth killing for. It's as simple as that. As long as there is eq that's worth killing for, someone will do it, and it will be very much IC.

06-27-2002, 05:23 AM	#5
thelenian Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 122	It may just be me, but that guy who smashes your head in for that powerful ring is actually roleplaying. In fantasy settings (especially medieval fantasy), people kill other people who have things that they want all the time. While killing other players for "cool eq" is not exactly social, it's very much RP. Brigands routinely killed the travellers they waylaid simply for the goods they carried with them. Introducing artificial (i.e. arbitrarily hard-coded) limitations on PK, you're actually reducing the amount of RP that goes on in the MUD. If you want to seriously curtail this kind of behavior while promoting RP, the best thing to do is let the players handle it IC (i.e. banding together to drive out the thieves by force... permakilling unprovoked PK'ers etc). Another thing that a would-be RP MUD needs to consider is the implicit goals it gives its players. Progressions of any type are considered challenges where the goal is to strive for the top end of the progression. When you have piles of increasingly powerful eq, one of the goals of the game is to get good eq. If you want to preserve RP, but dissuade players from killing eachother in order to accomplish their goals (i.e. getting good eq), you need to provide a sufficient deterrant. If you find that the players on the MUD aren't striving for what you consider to be "good RP", the first thing you have to do is analyze what kind of goals you're implicitly presenting the players with, and then eliminate or counteract those whose logical conclusions hinder or prevent the kind of RP you're looking for. In other words, if you don't want players to kill eachother for eq, stop making eq that's worth killing for. It's as simple as that. As long as there is eq that's worth killing for, someone will do it, and it will be very much IC.