Shattered Kingdoms

Imagine you are in the Taproom of the Heart and Rose. There are ten other characters in the room. Your enemy, Vicasharie, is there and it rustles your jimmies something awful. So you decide to show her a thing or two:

#ALIAS {bslap} {pemote merciless pimp slaps owns %1.}

Since you have her greeted, you enter bslap Vicasharie. Your client sends "pemote merciless pimp slap owns Vicasharie." to the MUD and that is the output everyone in the room sees.

However, this makes no sense for anyone that does not have Vicasharie greeted. You could do a workaround by always using adjectives for your wildcard, but this has its own drawbacks.

The pemote system could use a quality of life adjustment by simply allowing wildcards to be interpreted by the MUD.

EDIT - It also makes no sense from the POV of Vicasharie. The pemote should use the pronoun "you" from her POV, but if the pronoun "you" is input as the wildcard for the alias - the ENTIRE room thinks you just pimp slapped them.

This is EXACTLY what I was trying to get across... though I don't like being bslapped, LOL

bslap Finney

Since we're on the subject of emotes...

Note that the following is not meant as a criticism of SK. Well, not as negative criticism, anyways.

ArmageddonMUD has a wonderfully complex and in-depth emote system. You can attach emotes to almost anything, including leaving or entering a room. It can reference people in all kinds of ways, and even outputs differently depending on who is reading (the emoter, the emotee, and anyone else in the room all receive different echoes.)

Given that it is also based on DikuMUD, why is the SK emote system so, by comparison, bare? And would it be possible to 'upgrade' it (not really suggesting it needs to be, especially as I don't have the wherewithal to do anything about it, and Dulrik doubtless has more important stuff to deal with).

Armageddon and Toril MUD both use the pemote system I described. It's really feature rich. I don't like either MUD, but I like their emote system.

Saying we are all Diku MUDs is true but beside the point. This game branched from diku four code bases and almost 25 years ago. In the same amount of time, we've gone from 2400 baud modems to broadband almost anywhere on your smartphone. By comparison, all mud development has been pretty stunted.

Some new code for emotes does get done here once in a blue moon, but emotes are already so free form compared to the strict requirements of functional combat, that it rarely gets priority. I do like the idea of improving the system to closer to Armageddon style.

The only priority for me in the emote/pemote system is the ability to target emotes by adj/name so that people that haven't been greeted knows sees the adj and those that don't see the name.

Like:

What you and everyone that has greeted Brandy sees:

Everyone else that doesn't know Brandy sees:

If you start an emote that doesn't have a valid target, it will assume that you are not targeting the emote. Not sure if asterisk is the best substitute since we use it ICly to give away commands, but you get it.

I will say one thing for permadeath. It sure makes the whole 'RP before PK' thing come into play.

Going to come at this from another angle - RP as requirement rather than incentive.


It's been an idea in the past and every time I seriously consider it. Some form of RP being required as part of attaining each status. Few things about the game annoy me as much as the attitude that you shouldn't even attempt to RP until you hit GM. (After all, if you did, there is no way you could RP as a badass from your very first appearance!)

Having a RP requirement to advance in status would bust that attitude right in the balls and prove once and for all that RP is not a second class citizen to tactics on SK. And might even teach some characters the importance of early humility. (Not holding my breath on that.)

The big question to me is the way to implement it that would not just be twinked.

Eliminate advancement trainers and require being advanced by actually Characters in the game.

You could do an XP modifier based on hours. You know, something like XP = BaseXP x (hours/(n x level)) where n is some positive real number greater than 1 that you can set. Everyone on the powergaming side of SK would hate that though. Or you could require RP and/or hours benchmarks for advancement beyond a certain level. I brought up the wildly unpopular idea in a previous thread of being able to make it to champion via standard leveling practices, but only being able to advance beyond champion via quests and RP rewards (or some new system you devise). Another method might be to put a cap on skills of (superg) until you amass RP rewards or IC years of life, at which point your cap goes up. Maybe 5 rewards or 10 years IC would be sufficient to get your skill caps up to (mastered). There is already at least one thing in place that uses a variant of this mechanic (specialization).

But if you're going to make RP a requirement, I don't think you need to do that instead of making it an incentive. It can be both! You could still have RP awards hand out things on top of XP. Something that makes them more attractive to GMs. A mentor point award is the only thing I came up with that I would like and that I think almost anyone would like, but I'm sure there are other ideas out there waiting to be posted.

Of course, tying advancement to RP awards could have a lot of problematic consequences, and it sort of requires extra micromanagement from the staff to hand out rewards and also monitor rewards from players even more closely. An hours based system might be better, but then again, it could just make people furious and want to sit around idling while they tab out to pr0n.

What, specifically, is your goal with such a policy?