I'm mostly just posting this as a reminder to myself and to see what other people think of the idea. Also keeping in mind that it probably won't ever be implemented because of the current schedule of the staff who would have to work on it.
Anyways this is a neat idea I thought of that would add a bit of excitement to Realms of Hell. Basically a world broadcast would happen say every 2 days saying A Bounty has been placed on (Character). It would choose from characters that have logged on in the past week or so, and who is above level 10. The character that has the bounty placed on them has their next death by a player treated as a duel death. So simply knocked unconcious and invulnerable or whatever for a small amount of time. The players who hunt this person would obtain an exp/gold amount calculated based on the bounty's level and their contribution to killing them etc. Possibly a random leveled weapon drop or something too.
Of course the exp/gold amount would probably be equivalent to a perm equal to the bounty's level etc. If the bounty isn't killed before 2 days then they no longer will have a bounty placed on them as a new bounty will be chosen. I don't believe people should get anything for surviving being a bounty because you could just not log on that character. There would obviously have to be measures in place to put a cap on exp/gold given to the player doing the killing based on their level. So say a level 6 logs and kills an afk level 40 bounty they wouldnt get full exp, but cap out at something decent for their level.
Of course this opens up the option to people to let certain players kill them for the gold/exp but in reality it would work out to getting a decent perm kill once every two days. Not really worth the effort put into abusing it.
I think this would sort of bring back pk's but without the downside to it, or making enemies etc. It would be a fun diversion for people to gang up to try and take on a high level player etc. Of course if I became the bounty on Kharn I would be more than happy to defend myself as long as I could. It would probably have to be made so that if you are killed by the bounty you're also knocked unconscious like a duel and sent back to the origin. The bounty would not gain exp/gold for this otherwise that would be abused.
Anyways, that's about it, feel free to tell me if you like the idea lol. Just curing some boredom while I raise my poison saves.
Oh one more thing, you could probably give characters an option to disable bounty so their character can't get selected for bounty if they didnt want to be involved. Maybe at level 10 give characters the option Would you like to take part in the bounty bowl? (See Help BOUNTY). y/n? etc
And the setting could be toggled on/off at any time after level 10.

Also just an aside, we should probably code this in so Usagi and I can finally get to business.

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=pastebin&s=view&pid=58966

Arcen wrote:

Also just an aside, we should probably code this in so Usagi and I can finally get to business. http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=pastebin&s=view&pid=58966

HAHAHA. Of course you'd find this ... I think that's the first time I've laughed so hard while reading through code. Patch it in ASAP.

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Anyway, I like this bounty idea. We had something similar on Isen, except bounties were placed on you if you pkilled others (I think it was 1 level == 100 gold) or players could put bounties on other players (it was all anonymous, so you couldn't tell who was placing the bounty on you). I ran around with rather large bounty for a while and was perfectly fine, so accumulation isn't actually as big of an issue as you'd expect unless: 1. your MUD is populated with assholes, 2. you're a publicly hated figure.

I do think we could use that same idea of raising the bounty if the hunted individual manage to knock out those who tried to attack.

I suspect that coding this would be a lot of extra work though, and an added layer of complexity since we're trying to pull it apart from normal pkills. You'd have to add a flag for bounty-only combat or something. But what if we want to actually do a normal pkill on someone with a bounty? Just some stuff to think about if we wanted to code this the way you've described it, I guess.