Shattered Kingdoms

First, the fact that there are instant kill spells make me want to object. It's already rough when I'm patting my cat and I look up to see that I've been petrified but at least I know I'm to blame there, instead of someone snuck into a room and now I'm dead. Most games that I have played before do have post cast lag instead of pre cast lag but they also don't have the same consequences (no instadeath). That leads nicely into my second point that pre cast lag was something that I really liked about this game, as a new player coming in. It felt far more realistic that my character was chanting the words to a spell, or gathering power before the spell went off, instead of staring in awe at the effects.

A decent amount of work actually went into creating casting times specifically for SK. It was not a standard feature of MUDs then and I am not sure how many other games bothered.

Just as an aside, I used a charm+recall tictac on my sorcerer a few times. I considered using charm person to be incredibly risky. It has a two round cast time, and there are quite a few races that gain bonuses to saving throws via racial resistances. Also, any bit of willpower on gear can cause it to be resisted. This was with 14 art trains as well.

Despite what you might think, it's not a surefire tactic. I think your dislike with it may be skewed that most people, myself included, do not post their failures.

I know of only one other mud that has it (three before two went under and were offshoots of disgruntled players of the first mud), and has for as long as I have been playing here, which is nearing a 20 year mark in the next year or two. The way they filled in the gap is to make spell-casting interrupt-able. This was in the form of a counter spell, trip or bash.

In any of these cases, there was a chance that the spell would simply falter and stop casting. In such a case, there was another chance of a random effect happening due to the chaotic nature of unfocused energy being released, be it a weird, momentary effect to the caster (nose suddenly turns red and bulbous before reverting to normal), summoning a random piece of food, instant death to the caster (killed a LOT of boss-type NPCs solo doing this) and things in between.

I am not advocating this, but I would not be adverse to this happening, either. A bit of randomness in disrupts would be interesting.