[MUD-Dev] Integrating PK

[Adam Wiggins]

[Marian:]
> Many players will be mildly upset when they're attacked 'for no reason'
> by another player.  In fact, the standard excuse for PK on many muds is
> that it allows players to take revenge for being attacked by others.

This doesn't make much sense, since if you can't attack other players in
the first place, why would this be a problem?

On the other hand, I know what you are referring to.  This is general
called 'player justice'.  The main problem with muds that are hardcoded
to not allow PK is that they forget all the devious little methods that
players can find to basically fuck around with the others online.  The
Law of Jerks says that no matter what you do, you will have to deal with
jerks at some point or another, so saying "I just won't let that kind
of person into my game" is pretty moot if you plan to allow more than 10
people online at a time.

Common examples of things you can do to other players on otherwise 'no-PK'
muds:
- Stealing money and/or objects.
- Charming creatures and ordering them to attack players.
- Charming creatures which are agressive to a given player's race and
then walking into the room with them.
- Charming creatures and ordering them to steal from players.
- Pulling the pin on a flash grenade, dropping it on the ground, and leaving
the room with other players.
- Pawning off a given item as a magical artifact when actually it is a
worthless piece of junk.
- Tricking someone into walking off a cliff or into the lair of a dangerous
monster.
- Someone is good at blindfighting and in fact relies on it in order to
take out very strong NPCs.  Another player then happily wanders in with
a lit torch saying, 'Can I watch you fight?!?' resulting in the nearly
instant death of the blindfighter, since the mobile starts fighting about
twice as well as soon as there is light in the room.  (This is a truelife
example, and there was no malice on the part of the torch-bearer, only
ignorance.)

And so forth.  I've seen all this and more in my time on no-PK muds.
Some of it I consider perfectly valid - it's just very frustrating to then
be restricted as to the recourse you can take.

For example, I *love* the scenario of a slimy little conman pawning a
valuable-looking ring off on the big bad ogre barbarian.  When the ogre
finds out, she's gonna be PISSED, and would naturally give the conman a
sound thrashing (well, assuming she could catch him)...except, wait, the
game won't allow it!  I've mentioned this one time and time again and no
anti-PK person seems willing or able to answer it.

My favorite, though, is when the coders try to second-guess the players.
For example, they decide that players dropping grenades on other players
is becoming a problem.  So, they make it so that grenades dropped by
players don't harm other players.  Then you get *highly* amusing things like
a mob dropping a grenade, a player picking it up and then dropping it, and
saying, 'Okay guys, we're safe now, cause I touched it.'

Thus the 'revenge' thing to which you refer is actually players being
able to handle their own disputes by whatever means they see fit.
Unfortunately this doesn't always work real well in systems with massively
out-of-whack 'power' levels, poorly created justice systems, or other
such glitches.  I've seen both PK and non-PK work well and poorly.  PK
works poorly when there are problems with powerlevels.  Non-PK works poorly
when there are holes in the system which allow players to 'hurt' each other
by indirect methods.  Personally, I dislike limits on what I can do, and
plus, I like both the roles of predator and prey quite a bit.  However, I'm
not always in the mood for this, and a relaxing no-PK mud is a nice break
from time to time, as long as it is indeed bulletproof.