Re: Rhyme and Reason behing the game... (artefacts and player killings)

[Mark Wedel <master@rahul.net>]

 Actually, nick has many good points.

 Player killing is one example.  If a player is moving quickly and
runs into another player, somethng should happen.  I take the peaceful
flag to make accidental deaths less likely.  However, even that has
some flaws.  How would the character know that some creatuer is
unagressive or friendly?  However, with the peaceful flag, that knowledge
is apparant.

 One suggested change, which I would very likely put in, is have it
so that you will not physically attack other players if they are in the
same group you are in.  This makes sense - they are known to be 
friends by the character (assumedly if they are in the same group.)
Also, since most times a bunch of people are in combat together, they
are probably in the same group, it should prevent a lot of problems.

 The only hard part would be if a player in a group decides to kill
the other players.  One method might be that if you are in a group,
you can not harm another player in that group with melee attack.  However,
still has the problem that they could be killed by spells.  But as
someone said, if they are worried, perhaps they should have some key
bound so that they leave the group very quickly in that case.

Artifacts:
There are 2 situations for the unique artifacts.  Those where they are
just really nice weapons, but not necessarily unique in nature (
firebrand, elven bows, speed boots, etc), and those where it should be
a unique item (mournblade, excaliber, etc.)

 I believe that peters argument against uniqueness is not that one player
will get all the good ones, but the first players to achieve that
level on that server will.  So one player may have mournblade, another
excaliber, another pseed boots, etc.  Leaving only wimpy or in fact
no artifacts for new players.

 Encumberance really does need to be changed around.  However, that
does not prvent them from storing various artifacts in 'bank characters'
or any of the other item storage methods that have been suggested.

 Auras:  First, it would be quite a bit of work to implement.  And would
not necessarily change all good artifacts from being grabbed.  Also,
some artifacts would probably get along quite nicely with each other.
Excaliber & Holy Avenger.  Mournblade, darkblade, and stormbringer.  And
so on.

 Polymorphing:  Putting a limit on how much one spell could do
might be more reasonable than it sucking more charges based on what
you do.  However, if you have a rod, the only thing that this
would do is slow you down some (need to wait longer for the rod
to recharge.)

 Polymorhping items probably came from nethack or one of the similar
type games where you could do this.  There is no basis for this to
actually happen (and AD&D doesn't allow this).  Yet it seems to be a 
popular thing, however it should nto be a something that is done as
standard practice.  Keeping cursed stuff cursed is probably a good idea.
At least that way, you can't use the basis that there is nothing to
loose by polymorhping cursed stuff.  And for the other stuff, with
the changes I proposed, you will very likely end up loosing money
in the deal, but if you really want something, and have money to burn,
may still use the polymorph idea.

 The big problem right now is that it is very risk free - the chance of
loosing items is very small, and the gains coudl be great.

 --Mark