Fair enough, but I wasn't trying to talk about what effects this has on any scenario; my point was to argue that the people who pick up dropped equipment will be basically random.




If you are saying that it is merely a "good thing", and not a "required thing" to have 20% in x be calibrated to 20% in y, then we agree, but previously you argued the point that in order for a game to be balanced, 20%x must, not should, be calibrated to 20%y. (If you will forgive a shorthand in notation.)


I'm sorry, it was a rhetorical question, I even answered it in the very next sentence. :smile: Here was my answer:

"Only if players are also randomly distributed across locations in the first place: you cannot die where you are not located."

In any case, we agree that players are randomly distributed.

But it was the rest of the logic that I was interested in… namely the part that showed how the people who pick up the eq are also going to be random.




Well, I maintain my point, even if it's not every action, but just many of the important ones.


Well, I don't think that definition means that actions consistently have random consequences. I think it means that you change a rule, but you still have a physics of the universe. Random consequences on a large-scale like that isn't really a physics system.



What seems to be bothering you is permanent death, not the concept of randomness. I find it helpful to keep things separated in order to talk about them the most clearly possible. If you look like you're attacking randomness (which you really did appear to be) but then you're really just attacking permanent death, it is fairly confusing (to me, at least) what you're really trying to say.


Ah, see, so we disagree after all. :wink: I don't view it as a problem for balance for some skills to be less interesting than others. It is a problem for fun if skills are uninteresting, but it doesn't make game unbalanced.

Again, this is on the definition of inter-player, not intra-player, balance.



You're saying it's unbalanced when it doesn't go against "the heart of balancing" you described, though. If everybody could join that guild, and aren't ever locked out of it, then players do all face the same curves. They might simply choose to face less profitable curves, sure, but they don't have to. It's not like being locked into a class forevermore and never being able to access another (potentially overpowered) class's skills.

Of course, having a guild like this is very uninteresting as far as the game is concerned, but since it's "equal opportunity" to all players, it doesn't affect balance.

Perhaps you think my separation of "interesting" and "balanced" is superfluous; if you do it might be helpful to pinpoint that exactly so that we know what the source of disagreement is.

This is very true, although, as I was trying to point out, if you're careful in designing your game, there should never be a situation where a player dies who did not "deserve" to die (whether that's through lack of preparation, carelessness, or whatever). I'm certainly not going to have situations in my game where you can be exploring a jungle and fall into a punji pit and immediately lose your character of 7 years; that would be rather absurd ;)



As a player, I also don't like permanent death. As a coder/designer, I can see the benefits to both types of systems, though, and I'd really like to come up with something that incorporates the best of both and leaves out the rest (if it's even feasible). So far, I like the reincarnation, soul, and ghost ideas mentioned in this thread. I also like DavidHaley's "clan" idea, although it would be far outside the scope of my game.

The problem IMO is that you really have to consider trust in other players. If trust in another player is enough to get you seriously, seriously burned – not as a character but also (and more importantly) as the player behind the character – you take away a fair bit of potential camaraderie from the game.

I don't really mind somebody getting burned because they made a very dumb game decision: there is a form of natural selection, anyhow, because high-level characters (the one who you don't want burned) have shown some degree of skill to get there in the first place. But I don't want players to always be wary of each other because the consequences can be utterly disastrous.

Well, I think this is over-simplifying a legitimate concern. While I agree that trust in other players and camaraderie are crucial for a successful game, I think you're not taking into account the fact that it's rather difficult to actually kill someone. Yes, it would be possible with careful planning and the right circumstances perhaps, but it's not like player A could just say "hey, player B, come with me into this room!" and then instantly player B is dead. There are all kinds of in-game factors to consider that would severely limit the likelihood of this kind of a situation succeeding.

That said, I also think it would serve the double purpose of dividing players into factions that are more clearly defined than in most other games (which, for role-playing and general "fun-ness", could be great). If the "outlanders" are supposed to distrust/hate the "citizens", what better system could there be to reinforce this concept than a very real risk? No more "yeah, I'm friends with a couple guys from our clan's rival clan and we hang out once in a while blah blah blah". Of course, this comes down to personal taste as to whether or not you would enjoy such a social system.

I agree that it's not as easy as "hey, come with me" but on games with few players I think it's best to encourage camaraderie as much as possible. It doesn't take many incidents for a very bitter taste to be left behind; I've seen it happen enough times. Your system of competing groups is an interesting one but would require a many active players for it to work out – the reason people make friends across clans is that there aren't enough folks in their own clan/group/city/whatever.

Also, I'm not sure I have enough faith in players to actually role-play enemy nations if there's no real game incentive to do so. You would have to set up a lot more game mechanisms to make the point; it wouldn't be enough to just set up factions and claim victory.

I agree with the points above, and would mention that the scenario I gave we targeted low level people, and mostly they were friends of, or alts of higher level characters.
In the game most equipment was not level restricted, so a high level could off load some of the best gear in the game to an alt or a friend to level.

My friend and I took advantage of this and ended up with 3 or 4 mules with the best gear in the game. The bad part was that we then could never wear it as we were hunted everywhere.
The good part was that in the end almost no one really had it either because we were able to get it from their low levels, and even the end game for those who could not amass the
huge groups to get said equipment.

It was a really intricate balance now that I think about it, allot of specific things came together to make the game what it was, but in the end we all had a hell of a time and some of us
still talk.

I would also like to add that a random pit in the jungle probably is absurd, though in that type of game. In one where dying is not such a big deal its probably fine, and just a deterrent to
speeding through a zone 'if you speed through it you may fall in a pit and die!'

That being said I also think that there should be some avenue for players to use the game world to their advantage, if they are smart enough, to kill someone or thing that otherwise might
not be possible. I am saying this because if you plan for it up front, it wont be as big of a surprise. I think if someone is smart enough to use the game itself (mind you not a bug, or other
actual broken mechanic to exploit) to obtain what they want, or get something that they normally couldnt (within reason here, not some level one training mobs into a pit to get the best gear in
the game) then more power to them.

I think there are some obvious reservations, but overall I would stand by that. In my example the room was entered into from above (it was north from a 'secret' room with a potion and an
enticing desc to go north) once you went to that room, you were 'falling' since there was no falling code, you just had one exit, down. When you went down you found yourself in a rusty
cage with a zombie and bones a plenty. The zombie did not have a key to the door. The door was locked, the door was hidden. So, there was no ability to flee from the zombie, unless you had the
key, and could find the door, and unlock and open it. Now there is an important part here, 1 the zombie was about level 12 or 13 and 2, you could charm agro mobs. This led to many angry drow
critters and a zombie attacking people in a room they could not escape from.

So in that example there was a good circumstance to be able to set up the ambush but unless you had a reall really good charm, and access to high level critters you could only do this to low level people, and further more, being a PK game, the room was nogate. That meant that you had to consider which was more valuable trying to lead everyone there and expose the potentially safe room, or lead new people
who were handed high level gear really fast (most people back then had no clients so if you were fast, good luck finding it) and keeping the room basically secret to use as a flee location.

It was very very fun.

-Syn

Well, nobody is saying that you couldn't be friends with opposing players; just that it would come with much more of a risk. In the case where the game is just starting out and there aren't many players, I'm sure most of them (if not all) will realize that if they like the game and wish to continue playing it and not see their invested time and effort go to waste, that they can't be pulling those kind of stunts until there's a sizable player-base (or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part - I tend to give people more credit than they're due sometimes). Though, certainly this concern can't be too big of a deal, since there have been many successful games that implemented permanent death, and my system (probably) won't even use permanent death.



Well, I'll clarify by saying that I have an extremely loose definition of what I consider role-playing. Two factions simply battling each other is enough in my books to constitute role-playing, given that I create a back story to explain why (the players themselves don't necessarily need to do anything other than play the game).

But I'm still interested to know what kind of in-game incentives or mechanisms you might be referring to. I'm completely opposed to "RP points" and similar systems that reward players for role-playing, though.

I totally agree. I really hate those systems, furthermore.

-Syn

Oh, I wasn't referring to RP point systems – I think they're broken for all kinds of reasons.

I was referring to in-game reasons to stick to your own team. There are many ways to do this; here are some examples, and FWIW I'm not arguing for or against any of them:

- segregate the realms by language: people from nation X cannot (easily) speak to people from nation Y: the game scrambles their text.
- if nations X and Y are at war, there can be bounties for bringing in people from the other team – and therefore, going into enemy territory is a bad idea.
- NPCs from the other realm won't cooperate with you, whereas your own realm will. (E.g., you cannot hire henchman in the other realms; shopkeepers will give you stiffer and unfair prices; guards might be harsher on you.)
- the nations are spread out enough that it takes a while to get from one to the other, and you have what you need at home anyhow.
- you do not suffer legal consequences in your country for killing people from other countries, but you are a murderer if you kill your own people.

… and so forth. These are the kinds of things I was talking about. If you have an in-game reason to stick to your separate nation, that will encourage people to keep to their factions to a greater extent. The difference is that they don't do so for an abstract role-playing reason (e.g. "I don't like nation Y because I was born in X and my town was burned by soldiers from Y" etc.) but for very concrete incentives.

Of course, all of these work best if you have a playerbase large enough to support it. Many of them require that each nation have enough players to be almost considered a small MUD of its own, that happens to be hooked up with all those other nations. Actually, I'm not sure it even makes much sense to have starkly different player factions unless you have enough people to make each faction self-sustaining.


Yes, I agree, actually that's the best fun, in some sense. What bugs me is when this harms other players, as opposed to other characters. Well, let me qualify that: it bugs me when people maliciously harm other players. There are plenty of games where you get killed but it's all well-understood as part of the game mechanics. But there's a difference between that and actively trying to make somebody's life miserable, which I have somewhat limited tolerance for. To that extent, I am wary of game mechanics that give one player too much potential power over another player's enjoyment of the game.

In a pkill MUD, for example, I would be extremely careful about something like permanent death, even if one has systems of non-lethal combat. It doesn't matter if you have non-lethal combat by default if somebody can choose to "finish" the other player once they're KO. If all it takes to permanently destroy somebody is to "finish" them, that is a very wide-open invitation for trouble due to the above malicious players (termed 'griefers' by many).

Well, there will be in-game consequences for doing so (enough to make it undesirable to do so, except in rare cases). And, much as most people hate to admit it, griefers make a game more interesting. After all, someone has to be the proverbial "bad guy".

No, there's a difference between being a "bad guy" and actively, maliciously screwing up somebody's experience of the game. There is a difference between being a bad character and being a bad player; perhaps this can best be expressed in terms of the person on the receiving end: if you are victimizing a character that is one thing, but victimizing the player behind the character is another.

Perhaps it was misleading to throw in the term "griefer" because they're typically understood to just be pkillers. I am referring to people whose goal it is to make other people miserable; I'm not sure that makes thing more interesting…

If their only means of "griefing" is PKing and other in-game/in-character harassment and such (even if its sole purpose is just to make other people miserable), then I'm going to have to disagree with you here. That is, after all, pretty much the textbook definition of your typical story-line villain. If they had reasons or motive that you could identify with, understand, or even agree with, then they wouldn't be a "bad guy".

If, however, they extend their "griefing" to OOC abuse like spamming, flooding, (intolerable) verbal abuse, breaking rules, etc., then that's a whole different story, but I don't think that has anything to do with what we were talking about.

You see, the thing is that too many players really just want to make other people's lives miserable, and they use as an excuse "oh I'm just a role-playing villain". But that's bogus: when you get somebody who actively hunts down a player again and again and again, doing everything possible to make that player's life miserable, that is no longer acceptable. Note that I'm very careful to use a word like "player": that means that if a player switches characters, the "villain" will switch their efforts to that character (if they find out it's the same player). That clearly has nothing to do with role-playing anymore.

In fact, it's interesting that you mention OOC abuse, since that is what I've been talking about since the beginning: abuse related to a player and not a character. Spamming etc. are an example of that, but basically things that maliciously target other players (not their characters) are also (by nature) out of character.

My point, in any case, was that if you include game mechanics that allow such a person to make somebody's life even more miserable, perhaps completely ruining their experience of the game, then that game mechanic is very dangerous and should be thought over very carefully. If the worst you can do to me is kill me, and I respawn without losing anything, then fine, it's a little annoying but it's not the end of the world. But if the worst that can happen is that all my work utterly disappears, then that's just a little more than a little annoying: that's fundamentally broken.

(Again, in the case of permanent death, this can be fixed by changing the focus from a single character, but that's another story.)

Well, the line between character and player ceases to matter as much (if at all) if you allow your players to play multiple characters. It's rather absurd to think of a story where the "good guy" is tired of being harassed by the "bad guy", so he takes a break and logs onto another "good guy". Role-playing is one thing, but using OOC methods to affect IC situations is a fundamental oxymoron. People in traditional stories can't get rid of their problems (read: bad guys) simply by switching personas, so why should it be possible in an interactive story (read: MUD)? Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't allow people to play multiple characters; simply that if you do, you can't very well criticize people for allowing their relationships/emotions to carry over to those alternate characters.



As long as the harassment remains in-game/in-character, then it can't be lumped in with actual OOC abuse like spamming and the like. When playing the game, player and character are supposed to be one entity, and while it's rather naive to think that this can be enforced, it certainly can't be held against someone for hating the person behind a character, since in all actuality, it's the person that they interact with; not the character.

It's just as absurd as the concept of a player being done for the night and the character suddenly vanishing from the world… In other words, in the context of a game, it's really not absurd at all.


Ah, but that is the fundamental difference. If somebody is harassing a character and claims it's all about role-playing, then if they move that harassment to other characters of the same player, even very different ones, you have established that it's no longer about role-playing but about person-to-person interaction. Hence the "role-playing" excuse is shown to be bogus (in this case).


What is the difference between OOC abuse like spamming and OOC abuse like hunting down a player no matter what character they play? It is obviously not an in-character thing to do: characters have no notion of other characters being related by virtue of having some player behind both. (That's nonsensical, actually.)


But are they really? Isn't the whole point of role-playing to separate the person playing the role and the role being played? When you watch a movie, it's not as if the actors are supposed to be the same entity as their characters. Role-playing games, in the strict sense, are the same: the player is a puppet-master for their character, especially in role-playing games.

If I play a villain, I would certainly hope that people do not assume I am actually a villain…

In games that aren't so much about role-playing (even if they're still termed RPGs), then yes, the player and the character are basically the same thing: a player that switches characters will still interact with everybody in the same way. In fact, typically such players will have several characters all in the same guild/clan/whatever; the characters will be almost like different skins/styles for the same kind of game. But as soon as you do this, then abuse can no longer claim to be about role-playing villains: the less you separate players and characters, the more abuse is directed against players and not their characters – this is a tautological statement (true by definition, really).


Then why mention it at all, if it's unrealistic to think you can enforce it?


Precisely. But the people who heap abuse aren't the ones hating other people. It is the victims of the abuse who will grow to hate the person heaping abuse. And this is precisely why you can only stretch so far the notion that abuse is directed against characters, because as you say, you are interacting with people, not characters.

I've never heard of a game in which role-play was so enforced that people could detest one character of a player yet get along fine with another. I think that's only possible with (a) very, very mature people who understand very well what the nature of the game is, or (b) people who are already OOC friends and who agree to play arch-enemies because it's fun to do so. (This is comparable to friends playing death-match games against each other…)

I think there's a very large difference between those two concepts… one being fundamentally necessary and the other not :P



Most relationships between players are not about role-playing (even on an RP MUD). Your interactions are player-to-player, not character-to-character, so it only makes sense to identify these relationships with the person behind the character, and not the characters themselves.



If you allow OOC concepts like multiple characters per player, then you have to allow OOC concepts that come as consequences of them, like carrying over relationships.



Actually, that's what discerns the good actors from the bad ones - whether or not you believe they are the role they're playing. That said, though, I'm not talking about people who are trying to play the role of being a "bad guy", I'm talking about actual "bad guys".



I think you're under the mistaken impression that I'm talking about people who use role-playing as an excuse for harassment. People who legitimately like to harass other players and make people miserable are villains. They aren't role-playing. As long as they limit their actions to acceptable parameters within the game, such as PKing, stealing, looting, etc. and don't begin breaking rules or crossing lines into actual abuse, then I consider this OK. I'm not saying that I enjoy being harassed, but that I understand that a game is more interesting with people in it who enjoy harassing. If everyone held hands and sat around a camp-fire singing kumbayah, I think the player-base would dissipate very quickly.



So then what's the difference between griefer A harassing player B no matter what character he/she is on, and player B hating griefer A no matter what character he/she is on? I see none, but you're only defending one of them.

I completely agree with this. Basically everything you have said above I would align with.

I have played many games over the last 12 years and by far the ones that draw me back are the ones with these kinds of players. If everyone is to afraid to PK people over and over, or hunt down X, what fun is that? When someone targets me over and over in a pure PK game, I don't cry or whine. People always say sorry but your on the bottom right now, and I say yep its a PK mud, thats what Im here for.

I think some people just do not understand the concept, or agree with it, which is fine. I don't like the types of games those people make, nor do they usually like the types that I make or play. I can understand how it might upset people to be treated like that, but I find it far from abuse, even unilateral player character targeting. Oh well, learn to play better.

-Syn, ;)

If you don't mind my asking, why is the character suddenly vanishing from the world because the player was done for the night fundamentally necessary (unless I'm misunderstanding and you're saying that what's fundamentally necessary is that a character, tired of being harassed, will log off to switch characters…) because it seems to me that there are alternative methods of handling the fact that a player has decided to log off rather than having their character suddenly vanish from the world, despite the fact that it's the way we're all used to it being handled.

I was referring to the concept of "logging off" in general. It's a fundamental necessity in the sense that if you don't want hundreds (or thousands) of linkless characters floating around your game eating up memory, there needs to be a way to remove them from the game.

The concept of "character switching", or even just having more than one character to begin with, is not a necessity in any sense of the word.

Well, ok, so it seems clear at this point that people are who role-playing as an excuse are not actually role-playing anything: they're just being plain mean and unpleasant, for lack of better words.


I don't think it's a question of "allowing", it's a question that it's going to happen whether you allow it or not. The point was that in these cases, the fact that it traverses OOC boundaries is proof that it has nothing at all to do with IC role-playing and everything to do with OOC unpleasantness.


No, you judge them based on whether or not they're plausible, whether or not they make it look like the role could be a real person. Anybody who thinks the actor is the role they're playing is fundamentally confused about what it means to be an actor. To choose an extreme but exemplary point, an actor could play Hitler extremely well without being at all anything like Hitler…


Well, it's what you'd said earlier, which is why I was talking about that. You were talking about "in-story", "in-game", "story-line" villains.


One wonders what it means to "legitimately" like to make other's people's lives miserable… perhaps you meant "truly", but if you really meant "legitimately" I'll have to ask some questions… :tongue:


What you said is, basically, definitionally true and isn't what I was talking about. I've been using the word "abuse" from the beginning. It seems tautological that when you start breaking rules it is no longer ok.


I think you're taking it a little too far, and a little unfairly so. I was specifically referring to the case where activity becomes abuse: we already agree that is not tolerable. It would seem that we might draw the line at different places regarding what is abuse, but we still agree on the general principle.


I disagree that memory is a "fundamental" issue any more than leaving lots of NPCs lying around all the time is an issue. The character can get removed when it gets killed, just like NPCs, and when the player logs on, the character respawns. There is no "necessity" in removing characters. Character switching seems just as "necessary" to me, in the sense that neither one is necessary. :smile: