Yet another question concerning MOBs.
In the area that I am building I have a MOB called gnome slaves My question - I don't want these MOBs to be killed, as they are suppose to be rescued by the players, is there some way to assign an alignment to them so that if a 'good' player kills them the player recieves an alignment modifier? And if an evil player kills them that would be ok since evil players do that sort of thing.
Second question - is there som way to have the slaves follow the PC's out of the caves as they are being 'rescued'?
A well written mprog can completely prevent whichever groups of chars you want from even touching the prisoners. Mprogs would also be the easiest way to have the prisoners follow their would-be rescuers. As for an alignment penalty for killing them, I'd advise against it unless you are actively enforcing a heavy roleplay environment because the majority of players dont give a rats ass what their alignment should or shouldnt be killing - if its worth experience, it gets killed.
could an mprog be written that would have the Slaves follow the players to another room and when they reach the new room the players recieve experience points for rescuing them? That might be more of an encouragment than just kiling them?
It would be far far far easier to give material rewards (ie items or gold) than it would exp though if you gave the players a token worth a set amount of xp when given to an imm it could work reasonably well. I hesitate to recommend the use of direct exp rewards from mobs via mprogs because they are so easily abused even when written by very skilled mprog writers. Not to mention the potential for deliberate abuse by greedy builders, but thats another matter entirely.
Actually giving items would be prefered to exp. The idea I'm working on is to have the PC's rescue the slaves so that they would gain a clue to a different area of the realm. Example: The Slaves follow the characters back to the castle and the gnome king rewards them by telling them the location of a hidden treasure in another ancient ruin. The King would say,
"Thank you $N for saving my people. In return for your service to me I will now tell you the location of the Lost Keep of Yada Yada. Go to the docks of Been There, and take a ship to the Isle of Done That. Travel North until you reach the Tree of Goodies, then DIG down and you will find the old entrance to the Keep".
Naturally if they don't bring back any of the slaves the King wouldn't say anything to them about the keep. The goal of the game is to stress the role playing aspect of the game by forcing interaction with the NPC's to gain information and bring the illusion of a living World to the game. I've already told most of the players that form time to time there will be changes to known rooms/buildings of the game - such as old shops going out of business and or even being destroyed only to be replaced with new room/buildings. In that sense it will (I hope) add atmosphere to the game of being in a 'living' world. So role playing is a vital part of the game.
I know fully well that not all players are into roleplaying. Many are just hack-n-slashers, and thats ok to as they will be much for them to do, but the sucessful characters, meaning the one who get the kewl toys, will be the ones who follow the story line and interact with the game more than just going here and there to kill critters.
I actually have several well developed story lines that I want to implement in the game, but don't have the tech knowledge of the game itself to do many of the things I want. Ala - why I post what may seem to be stupid or silly noob questions here.
Long ago in a BBS far far away I used to run a couple of MUDs; Major Mud and Swords of Chaos. Both of which run only in conjunction with another piece of software called WorldGroup BBS by Glacticomm. Great games and would be my first choice to rn again, but they are no longer free and I don't have the desire to spend the large sums of cash to purchase them. Major Mud and its expansion paks can run over $2000 for an unlimited # of users license. So I'm pretty familiar with MUDing in general, but the specifics of SMAUG building are still very new to me. But I digress.
So using itmes or even information in place of experience would be preferable to rewards of exp. but I'm still shaky on how to write the mprog to so such a thing. In a word HELP!
:-)
Thanks as always
~G~