The "One PC Limit"

[Riev]

It unfortunately only takes being burned once or twice before your guard goes up.

I've had wonderful opportunities where both of us disengaged mid fight, even though I knew I was winning, and a near-friendship developed. But for every one of those, I have three or four "magicker in the wild just makes you move to a room with a bunch of aggressive beasts and traps you".

[nauta]

It unfortunately only takes being burned once or twice before your guard goes up.

I've had wonderful opportunities where both of us disengaged mid fight, even though I knew I was winning, and a near-friendship developed. But for every one of those, I have three or four "magicker in the wild just makes you move to a room with a bunch of aggressive beasts and traps you".

Really?  I mean, I've played  heavily outdoors characters now for over a year, who traveled far and wide, encountered a lot of magickers and strangers, been attacked, etc.  I rarely avoid the chance to ride up on someone and greet them, and I've only had one or two encounters (newbies in each case) that made me go: meh.  It's anecdotes, but these sorts of anecdotes just don't add up to my experience inside the game.

Perhaps things were different back in the day, but all this talk of hack-and-slash play really makes me scratch my head.

[Synthesis]

It unfortunately only takes being burned once or twice before your guard goes up.

I've had wonderful opportunities where both of us disengaged mid fight, even though I knew I was winning, and a near-friendship developed. But for every one of those, I have three or four "magicker in the wild just makes you move to a room with a bunch of aggressive beasts and traps you".

Eh, don't blame players for that.  Old-skool Whirans were basically designed from the ground up to be nuisance magickers, whether it was intentional or not.  Almost all 'gickers were glass cannons, in fact, so the only real option you had was to go balls-to-the-wall in an aggro scenario.  The reverse also held true, though:  I lost a pretty cool d-elf 'gicker PC once to an insta-charge code gangbang when I had magick active that was like, "hey, you can literally move faster than the eye can see."  Didn't even get a chance to emote that "hey guys, I'm moving faster than you could possibly imagine, so there's literally no way your stupid inix is going to catch me and run me over," but you know...the code is shitty like that.

This thread isn't even about that, though.

My concern isn't people interacting badly in a PK situation.  My concern is people using throwaway PCs to join clans, mine info, then log back in with their long-term badass PC to act on that info.

Obviously hardly anyone is going to be that BLATANT about it, though.  The hard cases come when you have intel that will save your long-term PC's life.  Will you be willing to allow your long-term PC to die, or will you fudge it and try to use OOC info to escape?

If your day-job is 50-day Byn Sarge and your side-gig is d-elf, and you've learned that the Red Kah Var Runners are setting up a sekrit hella magick ambush on the next RPT, are you going to go in blind like it's just a routine 'forage rock' mission, or are you going to take extra precautions or just cancel the RPT altogether?

[Miradus]

Most of the time when I bump into someone in the wild, it's a hello how ya doing, we're both so bored we want to have a chat, we do, then we either go our separate ways or we become friends.

OCCASIONALLY I run into someone whose emotes and speech patterns lead me to conclude that the CHARACTER is a dick who may end up throat-stabbing me if I don't get on my way, which probably means a decent PLAYER is at the helm.

Separation of character and player is in order.

[Inks]

This isn't about quality rp. We have lots of that, wilderness or otherwise. It's about acting on information discovered by your alt pc or avenging your alt pc or his friends on your badass pc. It is bad.

So yeah...If you don't enjoy your pc at all just store and start anew you won't be judged.I don't want to be rping with a bunch of disposable alts. I want to be rping with PCs.

[Reiloth]

This isn't about quality rp. We have lots of that, wilderness or otherwise. It's about acting on information discovered by your alt pc or avenging your alt pc or his friends on your badass pc. It is bad.

So yeah...If you don't enjoy your pc at all just store and start anew you won't be judged.I don't want to be rping with a bunch of disposable alts. I want to be rping with PCs.

How do you determine if someone is playing an 'alt' or a 'pc'?

How are you certain people are acting on information they've gotten surreptitiously?

If you assume the worst about people, you will find conclusions that assert your claims. As this isn't currently possible, i'm not sure how you can assume that people will abuse it and egregiously so. I suppose it's the opposite extreme to my naive assertion that people are more or less responsible, and those that aren't are pretty quickly fingered by Staff for their illicit behavior.

Why are PCs 'Less Disposable'? Isn't that part of the problem, insofar as this 'Massive Conflict' thread and so on? Treating PCs like they are this valuable commodity, when really they should just be another thread in the story tapestry that is Zalanthas?

[Miradus]

Are the secondary alts going to have an * by their sdesc so we'll recognize them?

[a french mans shirt]

Do you think being able to app an alt at a 3 karma level would be alright? Or 6? It would have to be mundane and maybe other restrictions like not being allowed to join a clan. Frankly, most of the people I see in Allanak are clanned humans or clanned secret breeds, and people who haven't been here years or haven't been reading the gdb probably don't know that clanned jobs are the rarest and cushiest things a commoner can hope for.

I'm thinking 6 because at 3 you've basically just proven that you're capable of apping a half-giant without going into the Gaj main room in your starter clothes and emoting throwing people all over the place (I'm looking at you, whoever you were.)

I'm actually on the fence about this idea still.

[Feco]

I don't think alts are a good idea, period.  Karma requirements don't change that.

[LauraMars]

You guys know this will never happen, right?

[Malken]

What if we could decide between one full character or two half characters with half the stats, half the skills, half the sdesc limit and half the starting money of a full character.

[Delirium]

You guys know this will never happen, right?

thankfully

[boog]

Agreed. Multicharacter MUDs are, quite frankly, shit.

-Person who played multicharacter MUDs for over 10 years.

(And, in fact, I think Delirium played one of the ones I played years and years and years ago. I know Socko did! It's how I met him and how I was brought here!)

[Synthesis]

The world isn't large enough for alts to have enough plot separation to avoid conflicts of interest.

If the playerbase were in the hundreds at peak time and there were geographic regions that were so isolated that even Whirans and Sorcs would have trouble traveling between them (along with barriers to psionic communication), it might be doable, with a geographic-separation stipulation for alts.

As it stands, with Allanak basically the only game in town...there is no way this would be a good idea.  The restriction on OOC info usage would essentially be based on the honor system, and would be completely unenforceable except in a post hoc manner that undoubtedly would infuriate everyone involved in the process.

[Akaramu]

(And, in fact, I think Delirium played one of the ones I played years and years and years ago. I know Socko did! It's how I met him and how I was brought here!)

Was it Achaea? 

Everyone abused their meta knowledge on there. It was bad. But then again, the game didn't have really big, story-defining secrets. Or permadeath. The worst thing you could do was to steal books from clan libraries and spread rumors about god X's behind-the-scenes religion being much more evil than its carefully maintained neutral facade. I tried to get back into it a few years ago but... after playing Armageddon for so long, H&S muds just aren't fun anymore. There's really no point to exp or leveling up.

[boog]

It wasn't Achaea, and Synthesis is right. But even with hundreds of players (which we have, they just log on at different times of day), there'd be way too much conflict of interest.

I'd speak the name of the game, but I don't want anyone here to even bother checking it out. It's an incestuous pit of veteran players who play multiple, maxed out characters and have no staff direction. And the RP isn't enforced. And it's just... bad.

[Delirium]

It wasn't Achaea, and Synthesis is right. But even with hundreds of players (which we have, they just log on at different times of day), there'd be way too much conflict of interest.

I'd speak the name of the game, but I don't want anyone here to even bother checking it out. It's an incestuous pit of veteran players who play multiple, maxed out characters and have no staff direction. And the RP isn't enforced. And it's just... bad.

and they're all insanely bitter and jaded and mean and more or less awful. When I think it gets bad here I should think of that place and feel so very relieved.

[Akaramu]

You guys are making me curious now. 

PM? I won't actually play it, promise!

[Molten Heart]

.

[Akaramu]

I see hundreds of guests browsing the forum during the evenings. Imagine if all of them played the game.

[LauraMars]

What if we could decide between one full character or two half characters with half the stats, half the skills, half the sdesc limit and half the starting money of a full character.

lol

[IntuitiveApathy]

I see hundreds of guests browsing the forum during the evenings. Imagine if all of them played the game.

I believe they're all spambots.

I agree with the sentiment that at most we should have temporary roles only (though I'd love to see more of those!).  Syn pretty much summed up my thoughts on the matter - policing OOC information sharing even with just people limited to a single character is difficult and problematic enough as it is.

[Malken]

I see hundreds of guests browsing the forum during the evenings. Imagine if all of them played the game.

Just your usual web crawler/spambots, yeah (a web crawler is not a spambot, it's used by search engines like Google and Yahoo to index web pages and they can send hundreds of them a day depending on how many pages total the website has)

[Reiloth]

I dunno.

Staff play the game, sometimes multiple PCs, and they have pretty much omnipotent knowledge of the entire game world and what is going on.

Are they playing an 'Alt'? Or are they playing a 'PC'? Does it break the game that Staff members have PCs in the game?

Are Staff more trustworthy than players? What about ex-Staff? What about players with 8 Karma?

Just some questions for the jaded and insecure.

[boog]

I think that the multiple character thing is an exception as opposed to a rule for most staff. Are you gonna ask for Stata as to which people on staff play? Who play one character? Who play more than one? Would it make the player base happy to know these things?

I feel like that doesn't have a whole bunch to do with this discussion. Staff are staff because they're trusted to be staff. Players are players and are only allowed one character. Players don't have the same trust placed in them, simply by being players. I'm sure there are checks and balances in place.