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Re: [MUD-Dev] Alignment



On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Richard Ross wrote:
> Should I go ahead with this system and risk having a mud full of evil characters (despite the
> player's best efforts), or is there a solution?  

I'll assume your working in some kind of fantasy setting.

Now many things can be said of alignment, and many would suggest to 
entirely do away with it, or let it up to the player to express it in
actions and roleplay.

Another way is to fix the characters alignment at what the player 
choose upon creation.

If you are at all able to detect if the character is doing deeds 
that is 'outside' her alignment you would count them and give 
apropriate warnings, and if they kept 'straying from the path' 
you give them some serious penalties to their comming actions, 
until they 'have changed alignment' or 'have refound the path'. 

Basing alignment on hack and slash only is very limited, it should 
more be based on choices made in quests. If youre running a 
hack'n'slash mud, the easy way is making it very hard to be good. 
Of course here game balance should award good characters with access 
to unique good resources. (holy avengers, good artefacts, special 
spells .. whatever). If the game has a limited number of resources 
for good and evil, being among the few good then becomes desirable, 
since you will be less sharing the resources.

If you choose basing a dynamic good/evil scale on slayings only, 
remember to make it so slaying goblins only take you so far on your 
road to sainthood.

Also remember that evil begets evil, and slaying evil creatures
is not as good a deed as you'd think. 

Example: Slaying a deamon to eat its heart and gets its dark powers.
 .... not a 'good' deed.

In short managing alignment through the game is in my oppinion difficult.
Some actions may be obvious (like slaying an angel) but most actions may
be hard to judge automatically (like a player leaving some food that 
was poisoned, then found by a child, that dies eating it .. did she 
do it on purpose?). In the pen-and-paper games where this originates from
the call for weather a character is acting outside her aligment is done
by the GM, this could also be a way to do it, relying on active online 
game masters to make the call (requires lots of resources though).

Hans Henrik Stærfeldt   |    bombman#diku,dk    | work:  hhs#cbs,dtu.dk      |
address:                |___  +45 40383492    __|__       +45 45252425     __|
 Dybendalsvej 74 2. th, | Scientific programmer at Center for Biological     |
 2720 Vanløse, Danmark. |  Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark|




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