<!-- MHonArc v2.4.4 --> <!--X-Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Another Approach (was: Integrating PK) --> <!--X-From-R13: pynjerapNphc.uc.pbz --> <!--X-Date: from fabius.globecomm.net [207.51.48.6] by in4.ibm.net id 867872871.32766-1 Wed Jul 2 19:47:51 1997 CUT --> <!--X-Message-Id: 199707021945.MAA14841#xsvr3,cup.hp.com --> <!--X-Content-Type: text/plain --> <!--X-Reference: Pine.BSF.3.96.970628094325.7190B-100000#ice,cold.org --> <!--X-Head-End--> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>MUD-Dev message, Re: [MUD-Dev] Another Approach (was: Integrating PK)</title> <!-- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" --> <link rev="made" href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com"> </head> <body background="/backgrounds/paperback.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000" vlink="#006000"> <font size="+4" color="#804040"> <strong><em>MUD-Dev<br>mailing list archive</em></strong> </font> <br> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] <br clear=all><hr> <!--X-Body-Begin--> <!--X-User-Header--> <!--X-User-Header-End--> <!--X-TopPNI--> Date: [ <a href="msg00046.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00048.html">Next</a> ] Thread: [ <a href="msg00053.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00045.html">Next</a> ] Index: [ <A HREF="author.html#00047">Author</A> | <A HREF="#00047">Date</A> | <A HREF="thread.html#00047">Thread</A> ] <!--X-TopPNI-End--> <!--X-MsgBody--> <!--X-Subject-Header-Begin--> <H1>Re: [MUD-Dev] Another Approach (was: Integrating PK)</H1> <HR> <!--X-Subject-Header-End--> <!--X-Head-of-Message--> <UL> <LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#null,net">mud-dev#null,net</A></LI> <LI><em>Subject</em>: Re: [MUD-Dev] Another Approach (was: Integrating PK)</LI> <LI><em>From</em>: <A HREF="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</A></LI> <LI><em>Date</em>: Wed, 02 Jul 97 12:14:17 -0700</LI> <LI><em>Reply-to</em>: <A HREF="mailto:claw#null,net">claw#null,net</A></LI> </UL> <!--X-Head-of-Message-End--> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-Begin--> <HR> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-End--> <!--X-Body-of-Message--> <PRE> In <Pine.BSF.3.96.970628094325.7190B-100000#ice,cold.org>, on 06/28/97 at 12:41 PM, Brandon Gillespie <brandon#roguetrader,com> said: <<Description of magically assisted investigation of "crimes" resulting in penalties applied to players>> >The appropriatness for this solution is rather world based--its great >for my world, which is future/sci-fi/fantasy based (so both >technology and magic can be brought into an investigation--magic >helps make trials much shorter, or at least immediately incriminates >the majority of stupid criminals). I see an obvious problem: Bubba has a grenade. He pulls the pin, puts in on a rollerskate, and pushes the rollerskate so that it rols down the slop to be beside Boffo when the grenade explodes (killing Boffo). Bubba in investigating a mysterious cavern with Boffo. Bubba pulls on a strange-looking rock, which results in a large boulder falling on Boffo, killing him instantly. Bubba later persuades Bernie to accompany him to the caverns to "show him something". Bubba then pulls the rock again, deliberately killing Bernie. Bubba sets up a deadfall, say a large boulder perched on a cliff and set to fall on anyone who passes below. Bubba then leaves and goes to town. In town Bubba tells Boffo that he say a great treasure at the end of the gorge below the cliff. Boffo goes down the gorge, and is crushed to death. The attempt here is to indicate the difference between intent and result, and indirection of intent. In the first case Bubba did intentionally kill Boffo. However the actual scene of the death was significantly removed from Bubba in time, space, and actions. In the second case Bubba also killed Boffo, but there was no intent to kill, it is merely a side-effect of an "innocent" action. In the third case is apparently identical until you realise that Bubba knew what would ahppen before hand. If you want to use the fact that Bubba was present in both cases to track this, have Bruce lure Bernie to the cavern and pull the rock etc, having heard about it from Bubba. The fourth case is jsut a variation on #1, ecetion that we've stretched the degree of removal. Want to make it worse? Have Bernie observe the deadfall, and then go into town and tell Boffo to go down the gorge... FWLIW I don't attempt to handle these sorts of indirection at all. Then again my entire model is non-traditional: You are a player. You are outside of the game and can meddle with it. You can control characters. In the context of the game world characters can be considered synonymous with "spirits" or "souls" (I dislike both words equally as being overloaded with unwanted connotations). A character (soul) is capable of animating one or more bodies. Outside of the multiplicity angle this is fairly synonymous with most religions which posit the existance of a soul which is the temporary inhabitant of a body and which is responsible for its actions (ie the "soul" is the "I" in the sense of identity). Without a controlling character for a body, the body dies (tho typically it will be taken over by a game-supplied character (ie turned into a mobile)). Bodies themselves are pawns. They have no internal animating force,and can be considered synonymous with nervous-twitching slabs of meat, much in the sense that many of undoubtedly consider the slabs of beef hanging at the back of our local butchers. Bodies are expressly built to be picked up and discarded as easily as we might put on or take off a pair of jeans IRL. Characters are dependant on their bodies. Diverting also from the standard religious model, should a character lose all his bodies, the character will die, permanently, and will be erased from the game. Loosing a body comes in a few forms: 1) The body dies. 2) Someone else takes over the body and compleatly ousts your possession and any claims you have to it. This last is particularly interesting as most body possessions will be of the form where the attacker takes control of the body, but does not compleatly oust the prior owner(s) (the body may have been similarly stolen before) from the body. As such what happens is that the new chap has control of the body, but the old owner(s) are along for the ride and can see and hear everything the new owner does -- they just can't input commands to their old body. What this also means is that should the latest owner "give up" the body, the previous owners who still have claims get to fight for it (usually the most recent will win by default). Note: Having such a partial claim to a body gives a character significant advantage in trying to reclaim it. The more recent the claim, the greater the advantage. Note: a player with such a partial claim to a body can drop his claim, at which point he has no claim to the body at all. Note: Compleatly ousting prior owners from a body is a laborious and expensive proposition. It is much easier in general to just wrest control and leave the hangers on at that. It does make it more likely that they might grab the body back, but it sure saves a lot of effort and debilitating work. Note: A character will not die if it loses all its bodies but has remaining an interest in a body it does not control. A character only dies and is deleted when it loses all contact with the game world -- ie all bodies are dead and no claims exist. When another body kills your last body, you become attached to the killing body as partial owner. This would be in the exact same way as if that body had previously been stolen from you. It is then up to you to either battle for ownership of your new host body, or to try and jump ship to some other passing body (eg a mobile or other player). Note: The definition of what is the "killing body" in this context is deliberately vague (consider the deadfall above). Its actually defined as a hash of the following: First choice is the last body to causitively affect the object that killed you, second choice us underlieing default to the next body (or last if recent enough) to directly affect your body in any way, and the last and third choice is anything nearby that could substitute for a body. All of these BTW are limited by range and time. If nothing should satisfy within the limits, then sorry, you are dead dead. Thus a even a winning (killing) Pk'er is at risk of losing his body. He may not lose it immediately, but later on when he's weakened from a later fight (the riding character just biding his time). This could lead to the amusing circumstance of Vlad the PK'er coming back to the Inn for a rest, only to find that all characters bound to him as partial owners immediately steal the bodies of all the mobiles and players in the Inn, and then turn about and attack him. Note: To prevent this detailing an effective immortality, a character which exists solely as a partial rider on a body owned by someone else will decay fairly rapidly with time. As such, should Vlad the PK'er take a bit too long getting to the Inn, his partial owner characters will be so weak as to not even able to body-steal a flea. Similarly, while Vlad is dawdling his way back to the Inn, ewakening characters will likely fight for who gets any passing semi-weak mobile/player body. To a certain extent this model cheapens death, and makes PK'ing free. A player wnating to go on a PK-spree could just go out, steal a body, wandering about killing everything that moved, and drop the body when he'd had enough. I don't directly discourage this. I'm not sure I should. I like the concept of having the world protentially be that chaotic and unreasonable. I do indirectly discourage this by having a built-in system of karma, a stat tied directly to the character and secondarily relfected on the account (see below). Essentially such sprees reflect badly on a player's karma, rendering future actions more difficult (such as ability to steal a body from a character with a better karma state (cf purity of mind), and the player's probability field when in the presence of characters with better karma states (cf prior discussion of probability fields for details or ask and I'll summarise)) This separation into bodies and characters also complicates several of the old MUD models for stats. I've handled this by deriving the stats into three classes: 1) Physical -- these apply to the body, and only to the body. 2) Character -- these apply to the character and only to the character. 2) Account -- well, you guess. The physical stats are all the simple things like strength, weight, endurance, size, etc. The character stats are all the touchy-feelie stats like magic ability, will power, etc. The account stats are a dubious set, but mainly consist of a couple simple stat weights which are touched periodically depending on how well the player has been playing. Essentially they attempt to slant the probabilities so that a player who is being successful will continue to be successful, but a player who is losing (a character death, several body deaths/losses, etc) will fail more often. In line with this general separation of affairs, a character can look out thru the eyes of his bodies as per normal, but can also view the "spirit world" (I dislike this name too), which enables him to "see" other characters, but not to see the connections of those characters to their bodies (its a non-euclidian space which does /not/ map to the game world space). A character may communicate directly to other characters in the "spirit world", and even position his own character in that space (proximity to a target character benefits a take-over/body-steal attempt). The spirit world communications are analagous to channels in normal MUDs. A character may have one of its bodies "speak" (SAY command etc) to another body, and thus attempt to communicate to another character (if it can figure out what characters own what bodies (remember WHO only reports active accounts, not characters). Placement in spirit space also helps group action -- for instance a number of characters may conspire to mutually attack (not their bodies) another character. As such the proximity fo the groups characters to each other strengthens their attacks, while the distance to the enemy weakens it. This is actually the *only* way to take out some of the big targets in the game (other targets have incredibly powerful characters, but wimpy bodies). Note: Underlieing this of course is the general problem of relating a character to its body -- a damned difficult if not impossible feat. Advancement in the game is not the simple old progressionm of levels, or the hoary old class/multi-class chestnut. The goal is to advance your characters. You do this by increasing your character's skill sets (whcih instantly spread to all their bodies), by gaining magical ability, by gaining mana abilities, by gaining strength and will power, etc. None of these are reported by simple adsolute scales. Instead its a sliding scale based on that character's awareness of abilities in that stat and his placement in that field The long term goal of a character is to resurrect himself as a god. Player characters are defined as once mutually responsible for the initial creation of the universe, but are now much descended from their former stature and power and concomittantly bereft of much of their memory. It is the task of the player to return his characters to their former glory. My current debate is over whether I should even postulate the existance of Sim-Peeps, virtual or realised. My tendancy is to arrange the world so that players are the only actual intelligences in the game, and that this is a known feature of the world (cf a multi-player Myst). Then mobiles become the shadows of deranged and descended intelligences (cf Heinleinian Puppet Masters, David-brin-esque raised chimps/dogs, demons nailed to this weary mortal coil). The basic definition of a god in this context is one of immortality (no requirements on bodies), and unlimited access and creative abilities in the physical. magical, and spirit worlds in the game. Godhood is a definite, quantifiable state. Approaching godhood however just means that you gain more and more god-like abilities -- but you can still be knocked back down. Gods are unassaultable except by other gods, and do not rely on other characters in any way. I actually have no idea what sort of characterisation of the world I want -- futuristic, fantasy, etc, other than to know without doubt that I don't want anything tied to a particular author, novel, or standard genre (WoD, Pern, Vampire, Tolkein, StarTrek, DrWho, Tron, etc). If I had any idea of how to do it, I'd probably do something along the line of Myer's Silverlock (an absolute !__*MUST*__! read for any of you here, massively, highly, unendingly recommended (Amazon might be able to get you a copy (No, you can't have mine))) as a fantastic romp thru all of literature, mythology, and the more dimly lit recesses of our common imaginations. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw#null,net (Contractor) Internet: coder#ibm,net ---------------(*) Internet: clawrenc#cup,hp.com ...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith... </PRE> <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00046.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] RP=MUSH/PG=MUD</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00048.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Level abstractions - Realism vs Game Issues</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00053.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Neighborhood watch</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00045.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="index.html#00047"><STRONG>Date</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thread.html#00047"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> <ul><li>Thread context: <BLOCKQUOTE><UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00057" HREF="msg00057.html">Re: (fwd) Re: Popularity of text-based MUDS</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Thu 03 Jul 1997, 07:29 GMT <UL> <li><Possible follow-up(s)><br> <LI><strong><A NAME="00069" HREF="msg00069.html">Re: (fwd) Re: Popularity of text-based MUDS</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Fri 04 Jul 1997, 01:03 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00055" HREF="msg00055.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Level abstractions</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Thu 03 Jul 1997, 07:20 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00053" HREF="msg00053.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Neighborhood watch</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Thu 03 Jul 1997, 05:55 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00047" HREF="msg00047.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Another Approach (was: Integrating PK)</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Thu 03 Jul 1997, 02:47 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00045" HREF="msg00045.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Thu 03 Jul 1997, 01:10 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00355" HREF="msg00355.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)</A></strong>, Martin Keegan <a href="mailto:martin#cam,sri.com">martin#cam,sri.com</a>, Mon 04 Aug 1997, 01:36 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00497" HREF="msg00497.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)</A></strong>, clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Tue 12 Aug 1997, 21:22 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00514" HREF="msg00514.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)</A></strong>, Matt Chatterley <a href="mailto:root#mpc,dyn.ml.org">root#mpc,dyn.ml.org</a>, Wed 13 Aug 1997, 06:25 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL></BLOCKQUOTE> </ul> <hr> <center> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] </center> <hr> </body> </html>