Shattered Kingdoms

Recent events of the whole "get" command made me realize that there's a lot of things I do that make me ask myself the question "Is this cheating?"

To that end, I created this thread to outline the things I normally do that might be considered cheating, or that might be legitimately within the bounds of acceptable gameplay, with the hope that the rules manager (Currently Thuban) or Dulrik might chime in with whether or not it -is- abuse, so that I and all other players can know whether we should aim to avoid doing these things in the future.

Some of these things range from simple things that probably everyone has done accidentally, to things that I wouldn't be surprised that very few people know about. Some might obviously be abuse, some might not. I think that the benefits of posting the "tricks" we as players have learned over the years will hopefully accomplish two things: One, to clear the air on things that are suspect, and two, to be a source of useful mechanics to provide to new players that might not otherwise know about them. Given that one of the most commonly present faults of SK is the gap between vet and newbie, hopefully this will bridge that ever so slightly.

I encourage all other players to post their "neat tricks" they may have found over the years too, and Thuban/Dulrik, if you have the time I'd be curious to see what you think of these.


1. Whenever I'm trying to explore an area to see if it has any hidden exits or hidden objects/containers in the room, I will usually type "get all" in addition to looking at all the keywords in the description. Most of the time, if there's a container in the room I'll get an "It won't come off the ground" message, and that lets me know that unless there's a named exit or other immovable object in the room I haven't noticed, that I should look closer. This is particularly useful in my eyes because a lot of rooms in the game will have copy pasted descriptions from other rooms, yet only one or two of them will actually have a secret container in them. There are still many places in which this will not reveal something "secret" in the room, like a keyword or other script, but it is an additional help to save time trying to play "spot the secret word" that so many exploration trips often turn into.

2. If I'm looking for something in a room that I've located but I am completely stumped as to what the keyword of the stupid thing is, (named exits included) I'll sometimes put all my items in a container and then write an alias to help me "look" at all possible two-letter combinations: Since SK's engine autocompletes words as long as you provide the first two letters, this is one way to find hidden descriptions in a room, although it requires a lot of spam. I typically only reserve this for when I really feel like I'm missing something in a room and have just gotten frustrated trying to figure out what stupid word the builder used (or in some cases where it legitimately seems like the builder forgot something *cough cough* Crossroads Haven)

3. If your mount is on a different speed setting than you, it will not match your speed on movement. This means that you can set a mount to speed walk (by walking next to it for at least one room) then mount it and switch to speed run. It (Or the other player, in the case of a griffon/centaur) will be lagged and lose PE as if they were using "walk" speed, yet you will lose PE and be able to move faster on account of being on speed run. Since being on a rider drastically reduces PE loss, this makes travelling on speed run possible without having to have your horse rest constantly. This is more than likely bug abuse, I admit, but it's also one that I'd all but guarantee many of us have done accidentally.

4. If a weapon is cursed, that means that it's not only impossible to unequip without a "remove curse" spell, but it's also impossible for you to be disarmed while wielding it. As a result, it's best to avoid having "remove curse" cast on you with cursed weapons in some circumstances, because you're disarm immune! In that case, if you need to remove a weapon for enchanting or any other reason, it's actually best to have a friend stun you and take the weapon off of you before enchanting it and then handing it back for you to wield it again, still cursed.

What about you guys? Anyone else up for playing "Abuse or Good Use?"

What is or isn't a bug is ultimately Dulrik's call. He's the coder for the game, after all, and I hope he'll participate in this thread. The only one of those that strikes me as an obvious bug is the mount issue, but I agree that when it gets used it's probably by accident. On a related note, if you encounter anything with bad keywords, please typo log it. That's not very hard to fix, but with the thousands of rooms, objects, and NPCs out there, it's hard to catch all the ones with errors in them.

How can you enforce punishments for bug abuse if you aren't able to determine whether something is a bug? How can any player be expected to?

He asks Dulrik.

What are we supposed to do then?

Stand around in-game and not use any command which could potentially be some kind of "bug?"

Dig around in these forums like dwarves?

Sounds boring!

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic here. Am I missing some context to a joke?

It wasn't supposed to be sarcastic, but I hope that you're willing to acknowledge that there are some things which are obviously bugs, and some things which are obviously not bugs, and some things which are a grey area to most players: This third option is honestly a pretty small window.

In cases of suspicion where you find yourself benefiting from something that seems to run counter to standard logic, you have a few good options available to you: Either avoid the action in question, use the pray/bug command, or as of tonight, you could even toss up a post in this thread and see what other players thought.

There are places in game that a mount cant go because of what ever (example, scripted place in Bakemono Caves), so sometimes I would just make my mount flee until it went into that direction. I have never thought it punishable, but felt it might be suspect.

Disguise and polymorph to confuse targeting is a bug but using a <retracted secret cabal skill> is not. To my best knowledge. Although I am sure that on the cabal where the skill is found their is clarification if it is OK or not.

I have been told that stopping skirmishing and ambushing as a scout while in mid combat is acceptable.

Ive assumed giving someone a number of things/weight to reduce their dodging/stop them from getting vials out of a bag is acceptable due to ranged combat code and arrows.

A dodgy move which I accidentally used while leveling my most recent was using your own corpse to avoid level thieves. Corpses are containers that will go to the other side of resets crashes and logging out being time based on their decay. I died right before a reset, left my corpse and got a rez the other side. Had all my high end enchanted gear with no risk of level thieves. Was more accidental but thought it was abuseable.



If you have done something that might seem questionable my best advice is pray about it. As long as I have asked the question I will normally assume it is OK in PvE until I get told otherwise. In PK where I tend to use follow things the other way around. If I think something is an overly clever use of mechanics and I would call BS on someone if they used it on me I will normally wait for an answer before I use it. I was given miss information from an Imm regarding a questionable situation using disguise to confuse targeting with someone in an enemy group. I was able to use it as a defense when I was corrected by a different Imm. My logic comes from table top gaming. If I break a rule that hurts another player it tends to get viewed worse than if I break a rule that breaks the game.

Seeing as how a couple of questionable actions have been said here, I'd like to get dulrik's input on the OP.
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