New Skill - Analyze Death

[Synthesis]

The overarching problem with this is that it isn't going to work unless you add code to track -every- source of damage that a PC took prior to their death.

If you instituted a simple "register the killing blow and add a code flag matching it," it could be very easily circumvented by the mercy system.

E.g., you could backstab someone into the negative HP range, then pull out a hatchet for the killing blow, and the simple-register system is going to read "This dude was killed by an axe-wound to the neck."

[Orin]

"This dude was killed by an axe-wound to the neck."

I actually laughed and caught my coworkers attention at this.  Best analyze echo ever.

[Fujikoma]

I like the idea. Maybe have backstab or ranged weapons register regardless of whether they did the killing blow. Not sure it would be a good idea to have it set up so that you had to skin the corpse to find out, although being able to cut up a body and transport it piece by piece somewhere it is unlikely to be found would be pretty neat.

[James de Monet]

The axe thing would be OOC abuse, IMHO, and it would still tell you that this guy didn't die of poison, starvation, or overdose, which would give different connotations about his death and your reaction.

[Narf]

The axe thing would be OOC abuse, IMHO, and it would still tell you that this guy didn't die of poison, starvation, or overdose, which would give different connotations about his death and your reaction.

I'd tend to agree that you could just put a rule under the help file that says 'switching weapons after most of the damage has been done for purposes of messing with analyze death is not allowed' rather than trying to code it in.

[Cutthroat]

But Synthesis's example can just happen on its own without attempting to force it. For example: Guy gets filled with arrows, runs into a gortok. Autopsy skill tells us "This guy died of a gortok claw to the face" despite all the arrows sticking out of him. Or a less contrived example, if a person was attacked by multiple people with different weapons, that should ideally be pretty obvious to discern. Figuring out the exact wound that killed someone is difficult when there are dozens of wounds of different kinds in the game.

If an idea like this is implemented, the system needs to record every wound. Which would be good if it is possible.

[James de Monet]

True, but I would much rather have a system that detailed only the killing blow than no system at all.

(And such a system would probably be significantly easier to code than tracking all damage done to any living thing ever)

[Orin]

You could get around this by adding flags for the following: last hit weapon type, percent majority damage, percent minority damage, did player die from poison, arrow count.

Suddenly it's the dude who was stabbed to death, but has a broken, bludgeoned arm, a small amount of lacerations, and three arrows sticking out of his back.

To be quite honest I think that would be the most I would expect out of a MUD's code given the limitations, and would take some time to code properly.

[Jherlen]

Agreed that we'd need to record more than just the killing blow. Consider this possibly unlikely but plausible scenario:

Amos meets Talia at the bar in Tuluk. Talia buys Amos a couple drinks and gives him the sexy eyes. Amos leaves the bar with Talia and they go to her apartment. Suddenly it turms out Talia is actually a soul sucking abomination!!! Talia blasts Amos in the face with a giant fireball. Amos, on the edge of death, lunges at Talia, who kills him with a breadknife. Talia then uses her magick powers to escape. A little later, the ever hard-working soldiers of the Legion find Amos' remains in Talia's apartment. "How did this man die?", Corporal Malik asks. His partner, who examines the corpse, says, "Looks like he was stabbed to death."*

Killing blow could be misleading, and in cases where the cause of death is relevant to a plot, I'd rather trust in staff to provide the info over just a "what was the killing blow" sort of implementation. That said, if we had code to track all sources of damage and give a bigger picture, that would be REALLY cool.

* I tried, I really tried, to think of a CSI: Miami joke here, but it evaded me.

[Quirk]

You could get around this by adding flags for the following: last hit weapon type, percent majority damage, percent minority damage, did player die from poison, arrow count.

Yeah, this would be a serious undertaking. I can claim to be pretty well qualified to speak on this as I was the coder who presided over rolling out and tweaking Traithe's wound code on Harshlands just after he left to found SoI.

Percent majority damage sounds much easier to track than it is. Consider a case where someone takes 50 damage from source A, 30 damage from source B, heals 20 points of damage, takes 40 damage from source C and dies. What's the autopsy going to look like? Depends how the healing was split - is it even, is it oldest first? What if the healing is an ongoing thing? You rapidly approach a point where it makes no sense not to implement it as a wounds code, because you're doing nearly all of the work for it, and because a wounds code leads to a lot more RP than autopsy code. A wounds code would be a big thing to retrofit though, because many very different things can do damage on Arm and all of them need catered for with a damage type.

But once you add new things to track for each player savefile (you don't want the damage information to disappear when they log out after all), and a mechanism to transfer these to the corpse object... well, certainly, it's all doable, but if we consider a sensible and useful suggestion like this:
http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,46418.0.html
well, we're talking about two orders of magnitude more work, in my estimation.

So - what if we just look at the last wound taken? We're still doing quite a lot of work. There are many things that could inflict that last wound, and all of them need touched by this code. And we're still open to Amos and Malik talking until Amos is actually starving, then Malik beating Amos down to negative HP and leaving him for dead, and the starvation doing the last few points of damage.

It's a nice idea, but the payoff looks far too slight for the effort if we compare it to many other suggestions.

[Brytta Léofa]

Let hitpoint loss be caused by attaching an Affect to the character whenever he's effectively hit or otherwise damaged, and healing happen by decaying these affects over time.

Code Select Expand

Amos.damage[] =
 [0] a nasty black eye (-2 hp)
 [1] a sucking chest wound (-85 hp)
 [2] some big, nasty wounds and scratches (-32 hp)
 [3] deeply charred and blackened skin all over his body (-258 hp)
(The muscular, tall man is quite dead.)

I don't doubt it'd be a demon to implement.

[evilcabbage]

1 and 2 are like 117 hp on their own, I doubt most people could survive that kind of damage.

And yes, it would be a bit of a demon to implement, if I have even half an idea of how difficult it was to code SoI's damage system. That's something that would GREATLY affect the game, possibly in a negative way, given what we know about most peoples lifestyle in this MUD.

[Brytta Léofa]

That's something that would GREATLY affect the game, possibly in a negative way, given what we know about most peoples lifestyle in this MUD.

It doesn't have to be done in a way that changes gameplay: make all the damages the same values as today, and have HP regeneration just apply to wound affects across the board; the only difference is that you can identify what all the wounds are.

(And you could have better auto-ldescs: "looks very ill," say, for poison, or "is battered and bruised" for sparring encounters.)

But a huge investment, sigh.

[Desertman]

I remember being in Luir's once and I'm in the Kuraci Fist, and we find some poor sap's body.

I recall seeing someone holding different kinds of daggers up to their wounds trying to "figure out how they died" and seeing what blades "fit the wound".

Someone sends:
"What is this CSI?"

Laughs were had.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

There is an extremely easy way to do this. Its hodgepodge, but it would work. Aside from some very minor code.

Write up wound objects that decay at various rates. Give these objects to PCs as they are wounded. These would be checked by weapon type and amount of damage. Instead of saying he carries these, say he bears these.

They would be flagged as noremove and 0 weight.

They would be on a corpse as well until they decayed, at which point you can just say the body is too decomposed to know what killed him.

[Fujikoma]

There is an extremely easy way to do this. Its hodgepodge, but it would work. Aside from some very minor code.

Write up wound objects that decay at various rates. Give these objects to PCs as they are wounded. These would be checked by weapon type and amount of damage. Instead of saying he carries these, say he bears these.

They would be flagged as noremove and 0 weight.

They would be on a corpse as well until they decayed, at which point you can just say the body is too decomposed to know what killed him.

Would have to make them no-remove, however.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

[James de Monet]

That would be really cool, especially if you could target emotes at your own

Code Select Expand

>em fingers ~massive.black.contusion, wincing

Wouldn't it show up in your inventory, though? And mess with the number of things you could carry?

[i love toilets]

Make corpses last longer, and you have my vote.

[Desertman]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

Venomz is here having another great idea.

I would like to take your idea and apply the same sort of concept to food so that it could decay over time given the proper tag. Cooking food/drying food/salting food/preserving food in some way with the "cook" skill would reduce the rate at which it decayed. This would also make all of that salt everyone is digging in the south IC'ly useful and valuable. It would also make hunters in Houses a lot more valuable. It would also makes the cooking skill, cooks, and food in general more valuable.

It would also just be more realistic than everyone having apartments with fifty pieces of raw meat that are five IC years old that are still edible.

A meaty steak.
A fresh meaty steak.
A stale meaty steak.
A aged meaty steak.
A decaying meaty steak.
A rotting meaty steak.
Nothing.

Once something reached the "stale" stage you could still eat it without risking food poisoning, but you could no longer cook it/cure it/dry it to preserve it further.

Eating anything older than "stale" would result in a chance to be poisoned.

(Probably needs its own thread.)

[evilcabbage]

1. In corpse becomes on corpse. This is doable with a simple check for the object type, and, if corpses have no code flag but container, then create a new object type for corpses so the code can check appropriately.

On the corpse of the tall, muscular man:
a sandcloth shirt
a pair of grey pants
a pair of worn boots
a nasty head gash
a horiffic many-toothed bite mark on the chest

2.Expanding on what you see when they are alive ...

This man is tall, and muscular. He has green eyes and red hair.
The tall, muscular man is in poor condition.
<on torso>               a sandcloth shirt
<on legs>                a pair of grey pants
<on feet>                a pair of worn boots
He bears:
A nasty head gash
a horrific many-toothed bite mark on the chest
He is carrying:
a large bag

Venomz is here having another great idea.

I would like to take your idea and apply the same sort of concept to food so that it could decay over time given the proper tag. Cooking food/drying food/salting food/preserving food in some way with the "cook" skill would reduce the rate at which it decayed. This would also make all of that salt everyone is digging in the south IC'ly useful and valuable. It would also make hunters in Houses a lot more valuable. It would also makes the cooking skill, cooks, and food in general more valuable.

It would also just be more realistic than everyone having apartments with fifty pieces of raw meat that are five IC years old that are still edible.

A meaty steak.
A fresh meaty steak.
A stale meaty steak.
A aged meaty steak.
A decaying meaty steak.
A rotting meaty steak.
Nothing.

Once something reached the "stale" stage you could still eat it without risking food poisoning, but you could no longer cook it/cure it/dry it to preserve it further.

Eating anything older than "stale" would result in a chance to be poisoned.

(Probably needs its own thread.)

Make your own thread for this so I can voice my support and stop being a Dr. No.