Karma.

[Chris]

Karma in an RPG, discuss.

[vitinho444]

What you mean by Karma? Like if you do something bad, it will happen to you?

[Chris]

Exactly, and how you could bring it to a multiplayer experience. Also, it would be cool that it's a feature, but no one knows about it as it's not mentioned in the game guide or documentation or whatever. Like a feature only some people believe in and can use to their benefits.

[vitinho444]

Well it would be cool to punish player killers outside the pvp, but many games dont have that feature. Aside from that i dont see where it can be applied.

[Jackolantern]

Lineage 2 had a simple Karma system earlier on, but I have heard it has been simplified and "nice-ified" after seeing WoW's dominance, so I doubt it is still there. Basically, the game was open PvP and you would drop a non-rare item on death and lose a bit of xp if you were PK'ed. But, the Karma would cause the killer's name to show in purple, which meant he was open PK for anyone and would drop multiple items, including rares. If you killed a murdered (a purple-named player), your name would not turn purple since you were seen as doing "a good deed" by killing the murderer. Also, murderers were not welcome in cities or all NPCs would gank them. The only way to wear off the murderer label was to hide out in the forests and kill monsters to make it "cool off". The more people you killed while your name was already purple, the harder it would be to cool it down, until sometimes it could takes many hours, and would last even between log-in sessions.

In the end, this created bands of robber murderers who would support each other in theft, high-level avengers who would kill murderers for lower-level players and give them the dropped items (sometimes for a price, but usually for free) and then bands of high-level players who constantly sought after murderers on their own to "bring them to justice". It was a neat system, and an example of how a single, simple mechanic would allow the community to form groups and interact between groups all how they saw fit. I think it was a great model, and better than more modern MMOs who force players into one of a couple or more camps, and then expect them to fight each other simply because they can and the game makes them feel like they have to. In my opinion, that is one of the reasons why world PvP died in WoW and most other modern MMOs, and yet was one of the driving forces in Lineage 2.

[Callan S.]

I remember a story from wurm online where the person telling the tale had found a cart out in the forest, with all the signs of having been abandoned. But it had the brand of settlement of some kind. So he takes it, then he runs into these two other players and I think both of them were from that settlement. And one just starts egging on the other one to kill the player with the cart, telling the other one he's a thief - of course, the one egging on wont take the karma hit. He was essentially ganking once removed.

I think the question of why people conflict would be the heart of it. Perhaps something like a resource node and those who have the largest (living) group on it lock out anyone else from harvesting (ie, we can't all harvest it in peace).