If you want to allow people to do bad things, you need to decide whether or not you want it to have potentially strong consequences. Is being evil a standard thing players can do (as in many games), or is it the exception that should be punished (as IRL, more or less)? If the latter, a law/reputation system should definitely be high on your list. You might also want to consider giving people options for advancement other than combat. But even if you do have combat, you should probably tag mobs with their general alignment, and have rather strong consequences for going after "good" mobs. Many games encourage or at least allow you to kill fairly innocent creatures or even people without much consequence. IMO this is "wrong" from a realism perspective, and probably quite wrong for you from a Christian perspective.

I think the most important part though is focus. If you try to go for too much at first, you will likely end up with less. First, decide on a clear vision for your game. Are you trying to send a message? Are you trying to nudge players' beliefs? Are you trying to just provide a friendly environment without too many overtones? Once you have this very high-level vision set, you can start worrying about the theme and setting, after which you can worry about things to do in that setting (and potentially revise the setting accordingly). Then, once you have a list of things to do, you can work on them separately and maybe have several releases, each one adding activities to the last.

I took a page from the Fallout series and everytime you successfully use a skill, you gain experience points for it, so long as you haven't maxed the skill to 10%. Different types of skills give different bonuses as well. So even within the course of combat, a player is gaining experience points. We have had some players gain 20 levels without killing or engaging in combat a single creature. This was all done through skill training.

In addition to that, we also plan on having a series of quests that interlink and go throughout the entire game that acts as a playable storyline, and reaching certain milestones or achievements will bonus high amounts of experience points, so there are certainly a lot of things you can do for player advancement that doesn't involve killing.

For the theme you are considering, I think it would be a wise thing to consider.

Something else just came to mind… I don't know if you are considering classes or not, but some sort of character archetype of a Pacifist would be neat, who would actually be penalized for combat, and have other prominent ways to level.

One thing we're considering for our "White Wizard" class is an optional skill that would lessen the amount of exp they get for killing things and greatly increase their exp they get for using their curative magic.

I love the idea of gaining exp for skills, and non-combat leveling. My concern is just mindless botting. (which is a concern for any mud)

I was thinking of a classless, level-less system. I like the idea of getting exp for completing complex quests. the thing I think of is when you complete one of these quests, can you grind it again to gain more exp? To prevent this I would need to track so many quests. hmmmm … which probably isn't a difficult thing if I am running a mud with SQL instead of pfiles.

Looks like I am going to have to pick a new source to work with. Any recommendations on something that comes with mysql and progs integrated? Are there level-less classless source out there? I prefer to work with C

Actually, the smaugfuss codebase would be pretty easy convert to a leveless system. Just take out the level advancing and keep them at level 1. Smaug raises skills as you use them, not by level. And there is a snippet for quests that adds them to a pfile directory and keeps track of what all quests a player has done.

I've never fully understood how a 'level-less' mud would work. I've never played one and I can't see how you could raise your character if you aren't raising the level. Do you end up with some older advanced player having 1000 hp whereas a new person would have like 100? Wouldn't that still be the same as reaching level 100 with 1000 hp and the new level 1 guy would have like 100? The 'more advanced' person would kill the new player pretty easily in both instances. *shrug* just never understood it.

The main property of a level-less MUD is that levels do not determine your competence so much as your skills do. In classic (A)D&D rules, your level determines all sorts of things, like saving throws, ability to hit (THAC0), hit points, and so forth. A system without levels would determine something like THAC0 by looking at how proficient you are with blades.

Morrowind and Oblivion are good examples of (pseudo-)level-less systems: the level is just an indicator of how many skills you have advanced, and serves only to advance your hit points. Every 10 "major skill" advances, you get to increase your attributes according to which skills you trained, and your hit points go up by some factor determined by your endurance (constitution). But a level 1 character with 50% in blade will hit much more strongly with a sword than a level 30 character with 10% in blade. In fact, level is almost no indication of who will win in a fight, other than the fact that the level 30 character has had at least 290 more skill advances than the level 1 character. (But not necessarily in combat skills.)

What I like about Morrowind and Oblivion is that the "level" is a good indicator of general progress, but it is just that: only an indicator.

The SmaugFUSS codebase still uses mostly C, but compiles as C++, so technically we're C++. Kinda. If you want a level-less system, FEAR 2.x (available here) is already class-less and level-less, and could very easily be adapted to suit your needs. It has progs, but I'm not sure on the SQL part. I'm not 100% sure of any publicly available base that has SQL support naturally. Well, No, AFKMud 2.0+ has it, but you had said you wanted C code, and AFKMud is most assuredly C++.

[Edit:] Because I can't spell publicly apparently…