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This brings up an interesting point which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
Rules should only exist to handle situations which absolutely cannot be addressed by the code. If the code allows a player to do something, they *will* do it, most likely when you're not looking.
When this is the case, two things happen: you have to spend a lot of time investigating and larting people, and the rule loses force because people will manage to get away with doing it anyway. Enforcement will not be consistent.
As an example, we used to have some creators who were steadfastly opposed to player characters changing species. Occasionally they would notice this happening, and they would punish (or, even dumber, threaten to punish) the player in question. It would have been a two line code fix to prevent people from doing it at all. Because not all of the staff agreed with them, a compromise was eventually struck, and the code was fixed to present certain disincentives to race changes. The dilettante creators in question have since disappeared, thank goodness.
By nailing down most of the possible misbehavior with code, we've managed to condense our rules to roughly 5 items which would be difficult or impossible to prohibit with code: multiplaying, multicharing, botting, OOC-abuse, and unnecessary lameness.
Of course, each item has a complete helpfile defining terms and examples for the mud-lawyers and limit-testers.
R.
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