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Old 02-13-2013, 10:36 AM   #9
SnowTroll
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 183
SnowTroll will become famous soon enough
Re: RPI and PC power: can vs. should

I've seen a lot of this, too. Where things go wrong (with or without permadeath) is when a player gets bored and decides he doesn't want to play a current character any more, or wants to change things up for no good reason. In a mud I played a long time ago, every time a player in my awesome organization got tired of a character and decided to delete it or quit playing it, they could never bring themselves to just type quit or delete and go away. They always had to go out with a bang by, out of the blue, raging against the leadership of the organization and getting themselves executed. They were fine, upstanding members who had no problems with the leaders or anybody in the group, but because the player was bored and made an out of character decision to quit playing the character, they had their character act in a manner not aligned with previous roleplaying that, unfortunately, affected things.

To people on the outside, it looked like the organization's leaders didn't have their crap together, and the organization was badly run and full of silly drama, so people quit joining. The mud administration thought the leadership was unpopular and made arrangements to replace them even though everyone was happy. All from two or three players who decided they were "helping the game" by "adding to the roleplay" and going out with a bang instead of just quitting.

The only "real" solution to problems like this and those expressed in previous posts is to follow the entire playerbase around, log everything, and police roleplaying mud-wide. And nobody wants to do that. So you just trust that most of the players are trying hard and playing well, and you accept that it's just a game, so rolling with the punches and letting some tools get away with silliness is just part of running a mud.
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