Category: Uncategorized

Be good to yourself

by Tharius

I received word this morning that a golden oldy player of Realms attempted
suicide last week. I feel free to share with you because he went public with
it himself. He’s the funny, sarcastic happy go lucky recreational drug user
that seems to be a staple of many game communities.

His outward nature obviously masks a deep pain that he didn’t feel he could
handle any more. Thankfully someone in his RL was there to catch him
(figuratively).

Life can be hard, bleak. It can always get better. Lots of people have been
there and came back from it.

Please get help if you think you need it.

Tharius

Who watches the Watchdog?

by Tharius

Woof!  Woof woof woof! *pant pant pant pant* You hear someone’s death cry!

These words can only mean Gorog’s Watchdog is out … or in this case a Watchpuppy!  What’s the difference you ask?  The number of avatars required to kill the critter is the main thing and correspondingly the rewards are not as large.  For those who aren’t familiar with the rewards there is a reason the word “goroggles” enters into every conversation about top of the line characters.  The “doggy ear” is a nice devout piece and an ok all around piece with aff fly being maybe the most interesting thing about it.  Somewhere along the lines the “dewclaw” got added, a nicely statted ankle piece and finally making a debut not too long ago was the muzzle, a statted face piece which is decent but gives thieves an interesting dilemma.

Now, no one is saying you can’t get goggles off the puppy but no one has seen a pair off a puppy yet.  There have only been a handful of puppy kills so there’s no way to even really speculate about possibilities … oh and since they could be changed at any time without warning, it’s pointless to bother.

Aleq did a great job of being the cheerleader, with others like Mephie contributing to help get mass established.  For my part Arca and Ravith came and got a hold of me and I almost didn’t bother.  These things can drag on for hours and hours before we get mass and even when we have mass it can be a mess 20 different ways to Sunday.  Still, I figure if you don’t log in and help out you have no reason to bitch when you want other people’s help getting mass.

We made a few kicks at it and wiped a few times.  Mass came and went.  Someone commented that if we didn’t get a few more people that it would take a little imm pity (downing the doggie) to get a kill in.  Around midnight we said “one more try”.

Whether the stars aligned or whether we got some pity or a bit of both we managed to get a dead puppy.  I had joked earlier in the night that it was a nice birthday gift and when I saw that I had a kill blow it sure felt like a gift wrapped present.  Prior to this the closest I’ve been was 2 spirals from the kb.

I almost didn’t log in.  Instead I logged out with a dewclaw.

Goes to show that you have to keep in touch and just keep trying even if you think you have no chance.

Goodbye Zach

by Tharius

Today Kali posted a note that saddened many of us.

(1033) Kali 03/24/15 Zach

Recently we have learned that the Realms of Despair has lost one of its young
bright stars. The family of Zach has contacted the immortal staff, as well as
some of his mortal friends who reached out, to let us know that Zach has
passed away. Zach has been a long and devoted player of the Realms.
He recently joined the immortal ranks and inspired us with his enthusiasm and
vigor for bringing positive changes to the game for his fellow players. We
are sad to have lost a vital player, but more importantly, we are
devastated to have lost a good friend and a good person.

As a tribute, we are promoting Zach to level 56, True Immortal, at which point
we will move him to retired status. As a lasting tribute, the pedagogic
spirit in the Umbrageous Ruins will be renamed to the pedagogic spirit of Zach
so that he may teach and train all those would follow his ways. In this way
his memory will live on.

I don’t have a lot to say.  It is always sad when we lose someone from our community.  Some of us have been through this before, I’ve written about losing Marie years ago.  Some of us keep a distance online, even me not that you’d know.  When people quit playing without a word I know that some of us used to worry a lot about what happened to them and I think because of that a lot of us put up that distance.  “Realms friends”.  When 9-11 happened we lost players, one of them was a long time Guild of Druid person who we all presumed died, she resurfaced a couple years ago, alive but needed to totally walk away from everything in their life for a long time before being curious about Realms still being online.

It’s a hard subject.  I think lots of us struggle with appropriate ways to deal with our feelings in the first place.  I encourage you to reach out to the people around you and let them know you appreciate them.  If they’re off game/on game, doesn’t matter.  In the age of Facebook a lot more of us are staying connected.

To my Realms comrades: to the people I adventure with, the people I share my evenings and stories with – thank you for being there.

Good bye Zach – our community is diminished by your loss.  The PK community has lost a stalwart advocate, a tireless recruiter and a valued teacher.

Tip Toe, Through the Tulips …

by Tharius

Ahhh, spring is in the air … the smell of serious funk … wait what?  Someone parked an ogre east of Darkhaven and he stinks up the joint!  All the tulip scented fabreeze in the Realms won’t cover that up.  We’ll keep dumping boo-kays of flowers on him anyway until he goes away and makes up with his wife :>

This quest brought out my thinking cap a few times … how to obtain the tulips is one problem and which to hand in is another.  Finding them boils down to telescan until you’re sick of it then do mkill farming till you’re sick of that, then traffic for ones you’re missing and repeat.  Ok maybe not quite that bad but … well … ok.

So the pink, red and coral tulips can be found by telescanning.  As Akael noted, tulips also appear in areas that are non-teleportable, but beyond running through the areas a few times a day to check your mainstay is going to be the ones you can find by teleporting.  Gnarish is making out like a bandit, I’ve rotted the teeth out of a few characters eating zombie candies and scanning all over hell’s half acre.  In the process I’ve hit my totems on the right characters multiple times, hit Window to the World noteboard and also hit a new Twenty Questions noteboard – more on that in a minute.

So the twist with the pink, red and coral tulips is that they’re increasingly rare.  So by the time you’ve found enough corals it’s likely you’re overflowing with pink and reds. As much as I appreciate the idea of a sliding difficulty scale, I wonder if just having them closer in rarity wouldn’t have achieved the same… you still have a ton of randomness because of the teleporting aspect.  Oh well.

Next come the violets and silvers which you get from mkill.  The violet mobs are pretty soloable.  The son of a gun of it is that both the violet and silvers are pop items.  So you find the mob and kill it and maybe nothing.  For the violets, well, oh well.  For the silvers which are multi-av mobs … yeesh!  That’s mean!  Think about this, for a full turn in of 35 sets you needed 21 of each tulip on a multi-av mob which might not pop … how many kills do you think you’d need to get a group of 3-5 a full set?

Some of us noticed that 2 of the mobs were much more manageable … Dennis Moore is a good 2 man run and with the right set of characters Zyla can be soloed … when this is the more manageable …

The CM mage crew at Zyla
The CM mage crew at Zyla

 

So how do we leap to 35 sets means 21 of each flower?  Ahh this is where the maths comes in.  A quick visit to Math is Fun gives us the chance to set up a combination of pink, red, violet, coral and silver tulips.  Repetitions are allowed {silver, silver, red} is ok but order is not important {silver, silver, red}, {red, silver, silver} are the same.

Combinations with repetition (n=5, r=3)

List has 35 entries.
{pink,pink,pink} {pink,pink,red} {pink,pink,violet} {pink,pink,coral} {pink,pink,silver} {pink,red,red} {pink,red,violet} {pink,red,coral} {pink,red,silver} {pink,violet,violet} {pink,violet,coral} {pink,violet,silver} {pink,coral,coral} {pink,coral,silver} {pink,silver,silver} {red,red,red} {red,red,violet} {red,red,coral} {red,red,silver} {red,violet,violet} {red,violet,coral} {red,violet,silver} {red,coral,coral} {red,coral,silver} {red,silver,silver} {violet,violet,violet} {violet,violet,coral} {violet,violet,silver} {violet,coral,coral} {violet,coral,silver} {violet,silver,silver} {coral,coral,coral} {coral,coral,silver} {coral,silver,silver} {silver,silver,silver}

If you’ve done it right you got this list. For the die hards who started early and managed to get all 35 sets, my hat is off to you.  I got about 26 sets and I can’t even stand one more Zyla kill right now, even if you told me that in the final hours the pop rate goes to 100%.

A good quest overall, a bit long though.  4 types of flowers would have given 20 combinations, so all in all drop the 3rd telescan type, make red a tiny bit tougher to find and I think maybe it might not have felt so bad by the end.  Still as with many quests I got out and killed Zyla for the first time, never mind the first time by myself.  My scripts for telescanning and for CM mages got a great upgrade but now it’s time for a few days of something else 🙂

Cheers!

Zap! Poof! It’s gone! and other tales from GoO

by Tharius

Over the last while a few things have been going on in the Guild of Origin and during the runs a number of comments have come out that I thought I’d share since I think they’re worthwhile.

First … one of our members needed help replacing a jade strand.  Turns out he had been doing something in Shattered Refuge and a firebat aggressively attacked him and caused him to zap.  The hobgoblin miner thought he’d won the jackpot and started picking up equipment.  Our guildie killed the miner for such affrontery and promptly autosac’d him.  Autoloot doesn’t help you much when your hands are full.  Another reason to have autosac off when adventuring, it’s handy for favoring but it sure can go horribly wrong.

Next, we’ve been talking a bit on guildchat about what can be killed and where people like or don’t like to adventure.  Some people have expressed they won’t adventure in no supplicate areas.  Some think that using double heals is a sloppy way to get a kill on a tough mob.  Some like green potions, some like ambrosia.  Yet others like apples.

I’m going to say that the most challenging and rewarding parts of the game continue to be added with no supplicate flags.  You can argue that you’ll just buy the equipment by running lesser challenges or by amassing gold.  It’s possible.  Or you can get 20 glory and go adventure yourself.  20 glory comes pretty easily and isn’t a great investment in effort… I doubt you could trade 2 hitpoints worth of glory for a Seth set for example, yet that 2 hp can give you a safety margin if you wanted to actually try to adventure for that Seth set.

I generally dislike farming and apples have been farmed to the point that people felt it necessary to put anti farming programs.  Ambrosias won’t work for everyone, worshippers of Kardis don’t abound and farming triple heals takes a very long time.  I would like the idea of finding a recipe that you take to a mob which would allow you to buy them.  I rather imagine the program to be a fake brew … you buy them but then you have to wait for them, maybe even 100 at a time or whatever.  More interesting than straight farming.  Any which way, if you need to use doubles to make something happen, especially while learning, I say go for it, but tend to agree that they shouldn’t be needed to make a run work.

Oh well, that’s the news at this hour! 🙂

Mapping the Realms of Despair

by Tharius

Lots of people set out to do this and many of them choose to make a link between areas so that each one appears in it’s own graphic. There’s good reason to do that, it makes individual areas easier to find and helps to modularize the mapping process. One thing it doesn’t represent well is how the areas fit together on the continent.

I have previously mapped a lot of the Realms using zones but for my currently project on realmsofdespair.info I want something different. Having only taken the time to map New Darkhaven I’ve already come across a number of challenges. I’m sharing them with you because if it’s your first time trying to map the Realms, I think these issues will crop up regardless of which software you choose.

A map of Darkhaven
New Darkhaven

As a bit of background to SMAUG a room is the basic unit of measure of space.  There is no way to specify the size of a room though there is some limited support for expressing the size between rooms.  More on that later.  Rooms are the places the action takes place and exits let us move between rooms.  I will assert here that there is no established coordinate system in Realms that we can tie into to make our life easy, so we have to come up with our own.

I want to point out 4 particular difficulties that will pop up before you’ve finished Darkhaven.  There are more but that’ll give us something to talk about later.

  1. Either the distance between rooms varies or the rooms aren’t the same size.  You can’t rely on just counting off the steps in a direction and evenly spacing your rooms out.  Proof: As soon as you enter the game you can move up 1 room to get to ground level for Darkhaven.  If you move east you’re in a small shop.  Now if you move west, north, east, south and west you might expect to be in that same shop but you are actually in the bank.  This is the simplest example of this but you better get used to it.  Try squeezing the Warehouse into the map without accepting it 🙂
  2. Diagonal directions cause some tricky geometries.  To get things to line up “just so” you will either have to accept that every link is not going to be perfectly straight or you need to be prepared to fuss over moving rooms around until they click perfectly.
  3. There is an implied terrain grade that has nothing to do with up and down exits.  What?  It means that you can walk and without moving up or down anywhere you can be looking up or down at a room you were previously in.  Proof: Exiting Darkhaven’s southern gate you can follow the trail northwest until you eventually reach the Crumbling Bridge.  If you had instead gone northeast and followed the Darkhaven River you would have followed a path that lead to a spot below this bridge.  Simply move up and down yet stay on the same map level.  This is one of the most difficult discrepancies to reconcile … most maps can visually represent it but if we’re going to try to apply good mapping techniques we have to understand what sort of physical reality might cause this situation.  In fact it’s not a problem of a real representation but rather it’s a problem that crops up in computer science all the time.  We’re trying to assign discrete, fixed, defined levels to something that were it real would be a continuous reality.  So once again, wha?  Up and down exits are jumps in elevations, not some unusual change in level.  The terrain itself may have some grade that imperceptibly slopes upwards or downwards in a way that isn’t so drastic that climbing is required.  In this case the river slopes downwards or is even beneath the regular grade and when our characters travel it they gradually travel below the street level of Darkhaven.  Eventually it becomes noticeable enough that you’d have to climb up to the bridge to get back on top.  Thankfully this is a short stretch and it peters out, but it sheds a light on the fact that you can’t assume that because something has the same number of ups and downs, or has no ups and downs at all, that you’re on the same level.  Street level in Darkhaven is a different altitude than the ground level in the Southern Mountain Range … or is it?
  4. Paths will irreconcilably cross one another.  Try as you might to keep your map nice and neat and clean, paths will cross one another.  Proof: The first occurrence we’ve already discussed.  Go directly south of Darkhaven to the bridge.  There is no up and down exit here, so no direct path down to the river, yet the river’s gonna pass right under it.  Okay, maybe we’ve explained this one already.  What about the path from Miden’nir to Moria crossing with the one from Darkhaven to the Southern Mountain Range?

 

Hey, so that’s enough for now, stay tuned for more exploration and additional maps.  You will be able to follow my progress on realmsofdespair.info but first I need to settle a couple of technical questions about how to display them.  I’m pretty happy with the early test setups but it’s not quite right yet haha.

Merry Christmas!

Looking forward, the Realms of the future?

by Tharius

In my last post we talked about an achievement system and saw more comments on that post than any other. Overwhelmingly people thought it would be a positive thing for Realms. It has been proposed to TS and we’ll see how it goes. Without waiting to prove that the idea can work the Guild of Origin will use this technique to finally get our Assassin’s Run Council up and running – a tool to encourage people to adventure and get more skillful at mob kill.

I continue to reflect on what things might improve the Realms. I say might because I do not consider my own opinion to be the only one out there but by having the discussion in this forum I think at least I expand my understanding of what others thing, so please keep the feedback coming.

Once I started thinking about the achievement system I started to question whether or not the character is the right basic unit for a player. For example there’s no simple way to create an achievement that says “Level a character of each class to avatar.” because our basic unit is a single character.

Why might we want to create a higher level grouping than a character? It seems that the idea of character bound items is very popular to encourage people to go out and adventure on their own. I fully support it. It instantly conveys to me that someone has actually done some playing (except for those who pay someone to get the item on their character … but no system’s going to be perfect). The frustration comes when you upgrade the character with a replacement and now want to use that item on the new character — or if you’ve decided to switch the build on your character and won’t be using the character bound item on that guy. You can’t use it on your own characters.

One solution to this is to create an account level login that acts as a master login to all your characters. Character bound items become account bound items and problem solved. Account level achievements now become trivial and happy days.

So … is it even possible with the way SMAUG is designed today? Perhaps. I don’t think it’s a trivial change but I do think it’s possible. The question becomes what behaviours should be allowed regarding accounts? Can we trade characters out of accounts? Believe me that there will be a segment of the community that will say NO … and it is by far the simplest solution. An end to character trading means you level your own toons and no more paying someone to do it for you. If we say yes then we need a mechanism to disassociate a character from an account … again not a big deal. The later is probably the simplest political sell because it does not signal any policy change from today.

As with most things Realms this could be opt in. You get to the login prompt and type a character name that isn’t associated with an account and bang you log in as a single character.

There are lots of details that would need to be worked out especially around how character and/or account bound items would operate but I think that this would be a road forward that allows players a more rewarding experience.

New account oriented features could be discussed … we call our groups of characters armies but what if a new semi-pkill kingdom style of play was introduced? That’s a different idea for a different post and maybe even a bad one but let your imagination run away with you and see if new ideas crop up when you travel this road.

… and now for a word from your Supreme Entity!

by Tharius

Did you know that Thoric was not always alone at the top of the wizlist?

It’s true! A quick visit to the Darkhaven library reveals that some unoriginal dude named Thoricabc was also once atop the wizlist in mid-1995 OK! That’s cheating, but hey, it got you reading didn’t it?

There are only two names on that list who are still on the wizlist today: we find Thoric at the top and if we look waaaay down to Lesser Gods to see our elder Ancient, Blodkai. We do see a number of other names who have left their mark on the game; Dominus – former Assamite and author of Seth’s Fortress, pre-Shattering deities Circe, Grishnakh, Scryn, Cabal, Taboo, Witherin and Adonia, we see Gorog perhaps best remembered for his watchdog among newer players and coders like Haus who contributed so much so long ago. Then there’s Blackrose? That was a long time before Dragon’s Pass, what the heck?

Despite standing astride the wizlist Thoric is a really down to earth guy. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him several times over the years, mostly at reunions and I will say that I’ve always enjoyed speaking with him … well unless you want to talk code … then the “i++” or “++i” debate threatens to ruin all! (Ok ok! No more code, I promise!!) Thoric generously agreed to answer some questions about himself and the early days of the Realms of Despair, so without further ado, I present Thoric, in his own words.

Prior to founding the Realms of Despair, I had experience with BBSing from about 1985, and didn’t discover MUDs until 1991. I primarily played a MUD called Mozart. I started Realms as a pet project while working for ComputerLink Online as a door game for the BBS. Realms came first, later a version of the code was released as SMAUG. Part of the reason for the official code release was due to the code (and areas) being stolen. The name “Realms of Despair” actually originates from the “Forest of Despair”, from the “Salburg” area which I started working on while playing Mozart and was never completed until many years after RoD had been up. Although I don’t play as a mortal at all Salburg has a special place in my heart. I actually never spent time as a mortal on Realms. The aspects that appealed to me were all ones that I had added to the code. This was by part inspired by my desire to make the Merc code base a little more like SillyMUD. One misconception about the early days of Realms is that the mud was originally PKill only. Realms was never PK specific. Originally there were less rules, and later PK specific code was added.

I think that one of the greatest accomplishments that Realms achieved occurred when Realms was still young, back around 1997, the development and evolution of the code was very rapid and significant changes and rewrites would happen nearly overnight. I think it was somewhere around this point that the game really came alive and defined itself from others, laying the foundation the rich maturation that followed.

Back in 1999 we had the opportunity to take Realms in the direction of MMORPGs like WoW, but it felt too risky. I believe there was a huge missed opportunity there. If we could go back and have a “do over”, I think that would be it.

Other than its longevity, the aspect of the Realms of Despair that has surprised me the most is mostly how many people met in the game and got married in real life.

It’s tough to say what might be needed in order for the Realms to survive another 20 years I imagine it would need to evolve into something a little different than it is now, which is perhaps something that should have started long ago. I’m open to ideas regarding the nature of this evolution. I don’t know if fundamental changes would be required but without some changes things will be come stagnant and I don’t see them lasting [another] 20 years without some evolution. I’m sort of envisioning something with mobile support, but interested in what others are suggesting.

Kali the Cleric! Hey, did you hear something? It sounded like a dropped hand grenade!

by Tharius

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Kali is the current Head of the Council of Elders. This _vampire_ vampire has been kind enough to contribute as our guest writer today. If he’s visible then there’s a certain nervousness that spreads across Realms. If he’s not inclined to destroy you today, your deity might be on the chopping block! 🙂 I have had longstanding respect for the quest lines surrounding the Shattering and while acknowledging the many contributors to those quests, my favorite remains the closing and reopening of the Tower of Despair which Kali was so involved with. Where did he get started? He’s been on the wizlist as long as I can recall … well here it is, in his own words!

During my first year in university a friend of mine introduced me to a now forgotten iteration of a sloth mud. I played this mud a lot. More than I wanted to, really. At this point in time access to the internet meant using the public computer lab, which put all of my time-wasting on display for the whole dorm. After a couple of months I finally quit that game cold turkey and swore off muds forever and ever and ever.

Then, during my third year, one of my roommates started talking about this mud he found where you could play as a vampire. I declined to play. No more muds for me! Then another roommate started playing. I still resisted. Then a third roommate joined in and told me about the player killing he was doing as a vampire. Finally, I gave in and decided to test out this mud. But as my act of defiance I decided that I wasn’t going to be trendy and follow everyone into being a vampire. I followed in the footsteps of my slothmud days and chose to play a mighty cleric.

Shockingly, that did not last long. When some of my friends lapped me to avatar on their second or third vampire, I decided that I might have made the wrong choice. I abandoned that level 32 cleric and started my first vampire. As an aside, I came back to that cleric many years later and finally took him to avatar. I still have him. But vampire became my main class, as they were for most players in those days.

I was actively almost exclusively in pkill for my first couple of years on the mud. My belief was: Why go kill a mob for one piece of equipment when I could just kill a player for a full set of equipment? Some players farmed mobs – I just farmed those players instead. I had members, secretly or publicly, in every one of the clans, but my main loyalty was to Inconnu.

At that point in time if you owned a deadly character, you were not permitted to be an Immortal. There was too much concern that cheating would occur. Eventually, that rule was removed and I imm’ed on an unknown alt along with about a dozen other deadlies. A few months later, they reinstituted the ‘no immortals with deadlies’ rule and I chose to demote rather than leave my clan. About ten months later, they decided to remove all of the existing clans and replace them with two clans: Retribution and Forsaken. Once my clan was deleted, I chose to retire from pkill and become an immortal (albeit a deadly one and the Head of the Pkill Conclave). That was in 1996 and I have been an Immortal ever since. In addition to Pkill Conclave, I co-headed the Visionary Consortium and then joined the Council of Elders in 1999.

Trivia note: Both times I was immortalized they moved me directly to 52. I have been many things in the game, but I have never been level 51.

In response to the question about inspiration, I did quite freely involve ideas from Vampire:The Masquerade in my early years on the mud, but the tradition of utilizing that world actually started with Caine/Dominus. I didn’t learn about V:TM until I started playing Realms and I wanted to learn more about the game as it was heavily part of the mythos of deadly clans. As a result, I bought a large number of the books and even played VTM for a few years as well. While the VTM source material was part of my inspiration as an immortal for a number of years, I’ve always drawn from a multiplicity of sources: literature, music, plays, current events, art and anything that happens to catch my fancy. Sometimes an idea can grow from something as simple as a name or an image. I don’t contribute as much creatively now as I did in the past, but growing the seeds of those ideas was always one of my favourite parts of being an immortal.

The chance to implement some of these ideas is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the game, along with the friendships I have made and the sense of responsibility I have towards the stewardship of the game. I hope that my contribution to Realms has overall been a positive one and I’m proud to be part of the Immortal teams, both present and past, that have helped to create this world. I would say that I am proud of the mortal contribution as well. Realms of Despair is a story jointly created by the presence of all involved and it has been a pleasure to be able to tell that story alongside so many wonderful players.

Well, that’s about all the niceness and sappiness I have in me for this decade. I’ll probably kill you all in the morning.

Beg, borrow or steal I’m scraping game.org to bring you words from Blodkai!

by Tharius

Yes … the title here is pretty literal. I discovered this post by Blodkai while doing a scrape of the Wayback Machine archive for game.org. Why do such a thing to begin with? Well, a few sites have gone offline recently and I’ve been really glad I had my own offline copy of them. I went sniffing around game.org mostly looking for old wizlists or other removed organization pages that might be helpful towards building a new Realms site that includes more depth than many I’ve seen.

I present this to you in its original form, unedited as it appeared on game.org. It is 14 years old so I think it qualifies as a Realms historical document in its own right 🙂 I thought it was fascinating and i hope you do too … Blodkai!

August 28, 2000

I collection of various questions that have filtered across to me in one way or another enough times that I may as well put them together in a single Q&A.

“How long have you been on Realms? Did you help found it? How did you come to Realms?”

I’ve been on Realms since near the beginning, but was not a founding immortal. I’ve always been a gaming fanatic, and I had run myself broke playing Major BBS door games like TeleArena and Crosswinds and MajorMUD on a 286 with an amber monitor and a 2400 baud modem, mooching access to the ‘net by sharing shell accounts that other BBS friends let me use.

One day I landed on some giant Major BBS system up in Kansas or someplace that was dedicated to the schools of the Big 12 Conference. I schmoozed (repeatedly) some free credits from the moderators there to play MajorMUD, and one day tried a link they had to Bat MUD. That was a whole new experience for me. I was amazed at all the people, the interaction, the different style of play and the new things available to me.

And all the lag.

When I figured out that it wasn’t the only game in town (literally) I ran around trying out other MUDs. Back then there weren’t nearly so many of these games around, and most “big” muds had 20 or 30 online at a most. I stumbled across Realms one day in its infancy and was amazed yet again at the new world, and the immortals. Ranma was my first immortal contact, and blew my mind by informing me that, yes, I was allowed to keep _all_ that stuff I got off the corpse of a janitor I killed. As I explored and died, Ranma assisted me a few more times (hey, the rules were far more lax back then, and there was virtually no one else around to help) in finding the precious pink ice rings that permitted me to carry loads of heavy stuff.

Not so long after that I lost my telnet access and got distracted by RL matters, and I abandoned the game for a few months. A short while later I, um, stumbled across an unsecured system in the engineering department of a local University that could be accessed via modem and which supported telnet. It was laggy, but it was enough. I jumped around from MUD to MUD again for a while, and finally ended up on Realms again, and the rest is history. A lot can happen and change in a half-decade plus, both online and IRL. Few things are as they were.

“You had some cool bands in your bio a while back. I thought you were old. How old are you?”

Sorry, I don’t give out detailed personal information. I also don’t know where anyone got this idea, though perhaps it’s because of my online age. I hate to shatter anyone’s image of me, but I’m a 20-something. Sorry.

“Your online age is unreal. If you’re not old and haven’t been around for 15 years to account for all that, you must not have a life.”

Blodkai is not only my immortal, but was my primary character that received most of my playing time. When I first imm’d I was indeed online a vast amount of time every day, especially when I began overhauling all of the mobiles, areas, programs and objects in the game. But in addition to that, Blodkai rarely quits out; link-dead immortals simply stay online. I can’t give a specific percentage, but I’d wager that at least half of that time is simply link-dead. I am not online 24 hours a day, or anywhere close, but by the same token I am online (or working offline) for a good amount of time every day.

“I heard you used to pkill and had a cheated Dragonhide Breastplate with 900 hitpoints and 50 damroll added, and then some guy killed you with a cheaply equipped warrior and you balzhured him for it and still hold a grudge against him and you hurt kittens.”

Okay, I admit this is a compilation of statements from the absolute extreme end of the rumor mill, and I people aren’t out there accusing me of this for the most part, but it has bothered me to no end so I’m addressing it here:

Yes, I used to pkill. Quite a bit. I don’t any more for a variety of reasons that I won’t really get in to here, but suffice to say I have too many things to do and not enough time to do them as it is.

No, I did not have a cheated plate, and the plate I did have had something like 300 or 400 hps on it, plus (if I remember correctly) a few dex and luck. No damroll, no affects. The plate represented the lion’s share of all
my old quest points. Prior to the current “glory” system, the quest system (quests and rewards) were much different. One quest point = one hp. I found that too tantalizing to pass up.

I spent a good deal of time accumulating quest points and renames in both public and private quests. (private or small quests were often run in those days, it wasn’t a matter of my immortal friends giving them to me – primarily because I had no immortal friends aside from Darksong, who was in no real position and of no inclination to be doing such things in the first place) I have always been a HP fanatic, and 90% of all of my quest points were spent on hitpoints, most of them going on that plate.

I had placed the plate on one of my pkillers primarily because I wanted to see if I could solo Divine Retribution straight up (i.e. using nothing but the inherent skills of that character’s class, and heal potions) using it and my pkill equipment. I used to spend a great deal of time killing Divine with peacefuls, but it involved using a single vampire or warrior or ranger (usually warrior or ranger) assisted by backpacks full of various offensive scrolls. With the pkiller I wanted to just try to flat-out whip the beast. I was otherwise not in the practice of placing rare items on my avatar pkillers, save for a few.

No, a cheaply equipped warrior did not kill me. A cheaply equipped warrior may have participated in the fight (started it, got the killing blow, who knows, I don’t recall), but I think the other five or so characters — including at least two of the buffest enemies in the game wearing plenty of “special” equipment — deserve as much credit. Heck, I used a cheaply equipped warrior (I had several around the 90 damroll, 1350 hp range) on a similar kill on a clan leader who was more powerful than the character on which I lost my qp’d plate – including helping to tank him, chasing him down and preventing him from fleeing with bashes – but “I” didn’t kill him. There were four or five others characters who helped out on that one as well.

And no, I did not balzhur the character for it. After the behavior or the MUD administrator prior to mine, and because I was deeply involved with pkill from the mortal side, it has always been important to me to separate my immortal activity from my mortal activity as much as possible. It would frankly be idiotic and arrogant for me to have balzhured someone for killing me. To be honest, I don’t even remember everyone involved in the kill today.

I was eventually involved in the balzhur or destruction of the characters of the player who eventually ended up with the plate, but that was some time later under completely different circumstances. Specifically, that player demanded that his army be deleted and he engaged in behavior designed to force us to do just that. I believe at a later date when he asked to return and get a few characters back I restored a few bare pfiles for him, but beyond that I could not tell you today who he is, if he still plays, or if he was involved in the kill or simply acquired the plate by some other means.

Oh, and I love dogs. Not so much cats.

“I heard you created a 25 damroll Oblivion for a pkiller friend a long time ago.”

The number of pkiller “friends” I had I could count on one hand, with people like Stoker and Felix making up the majority of them. Anyone with any knowledge of pkill should know that they aren’t exactly hurting for out of game, rare, or exceptionally powerful equipment. Makes a lot of sense for me to go against everything I’ve always stood for on this subject to give them an obviously modified item, doesn’t it?

I should say that there were many pkillers I was friendly with. Many, many of them, but not to the extent that I’d sit around thinking, “Hey, I’d really like to risk ruining my reputation by giving them something ridiculous and against the rules I helped set down.”

Now, there may indeed have been a time I reimbursed an oblivion to someone, or some strange, unusual circumstance that gave birth to something vaguely similar occuring. Beyond that, I’ll just mark it up to the rumor mill. I feel somewhat thankful that these two things account for most of the really bad rumors I’ve ever heard about myself.

“Are you Allax?”

No.

“Do you know Allax?”

Not that I am aware of, unless he’s someone I do know going by another name. I’m afraid I have never heard of Allax, and never encountered a player who I know to have ever used that name. I wish I knew the story behind this, since it seems to get brought up quite a bit and I’m somehow linked to it.

“Do you play other MUDs?”

No.

“Do you pkill on other MUDs?”

No.

“Do you play mortals on Realms?”

Not nearly as much as I used to, but yes I still play.

“What else do you play?”

Counter-strike (quite a bit), Halflife Team Fortress (rarely these days), and Quake 3 (quite a bit). Beyond that I have a very busy job (as I said in the first section, a lot has changed in the relatively short period of time since I came to Realms), a girlfriend, and a laundry list of hobbies and outside interests.

“Do you work for Idirect, Tucows, Bluegenesis, etc.?”

No.

“Do you live in Canada?”

Politely put, no.

“Are you bald? Why do people call you Baldkai?”

Not even close. My friends used to call me that because one of the few things I was vainly obsessive about was my hair and they knew it would bother me, especially after I cut off my literal mane of hair a few years ago.

“Is that you in your bio on the main Realms page?” [ed: Blodkai’s bio is reposted below]

Yes.

“Your bio says you were a massive multiplayer. It’s very hypocritical to have been a massive multiplayer when you were a mortal, but now that you’re an immortal you try to hurt multiplayers.”

My bio says no such thing, and I’ve amended it with a paragraph that should make that absolutely clear. I’d suggest you read it here. I had a large complement of characters, but I rarely played more than one at a time, and when I did it was perhaps two or three.

“Why are you so against multiplaying?”

I’m not against it in moderation at all, but when it’s overdone to the tune of using 16 or 24 or more characters to fight a single mobile it’s gone off the deep end. It’s massively unbalancing to the game, and it simply isn’t tolerable. Many old MUDs, including several that used to permit unlimited multiplay, have banned it altogether for the exact same reasons we’re trying to limit it. We are attempting to walk the line between allowing it yet maintaining some balance, and banning it outright ourselves.

“Why have you made so many mobiles so hard to kill?”

Note that I alone no longer make all changes to mobiles. We thankfully now have a staff of higher immortals who are truly capable of helping with these things, and in whom I have entrusted the authority to make certain changes. While it was once true that if something changed it was my doing, in recent times that is not necessarily the case.

Mobiles have been upped to try to keep extreme multiplayers from ruining the game by spam-killing them. Many mobiles are designed to deal specifically with multiplayers and not be so harsh with smaller groups. As we begin to clamp down on multiplay and implement code to lessen its effects, mobile power may begin to decline as well.

Another problem is simply our size. On most MUDs it’s rare to be able to put together a group of eight or nine or ten players to go try to defeat something, but on Realms where we have 400 and 500 players on at once during peak periods it’s not at all uncommon. As time goes by, players get more advanced, skills and spells become more powerful, etc., mobiles have to be adjusted to keep up.

In consideration of all the above, look at Seth. The premiere monster in the Realms with the most sought after equipment, yet even the latest generation of Seth equipment existed came to be common. With a character base before the clamp-down of well over 20,000 (larger now, but still) there nevertheless existed _several_ thousands pieces of this equipment. If that doesn’t necessitate a change, nothing does.

Right now things are about as difficult as they have ever been, but I would anticipate that in the future this rise in difficulty across the board will abate. Some mobiles will continue to grow in power, and yes some are next to impossible, but that’s simply part of the game.

“Has anyone from Realms ever met you?”

Exactly two people who have ever played Realms have ever met me. I speak to or have spoken to several immortals (Thoric, Circe, Moonbeam, etc.) on the phone, but only two people have I ever actually met.

There are many more, but I’m out of time for now. If you have a question, email it to me and I’ll try to get you a reply.

Blodkai’s game.org bio:
Blodkai appeared ages ago, only shortly after the inception of the Realms.  For some time he traveled the world, occasionally with friends but largely alone, learning the realities of the Realms, its nuances and even its tricks.  Over time he came to command a sizable complement of characters long before it was common to do so. (and it was rare that more than one was used at a time)

A chance encounter with a strange character in the Tree of Life in the days when the world was much smaller was to be the changing point in the path of Blodkai’s life.  Though he did not recognize this stranger,  the stranger had noted Blodkai’s presence over time and revealed to him what was at the time a little-known and fascinating feat.  This single act was an epiphany for Blodkai, and soon he began expanding upon his new-found understanding.  In time there was no corner or secret of the world unknown to him, and the extent and value of his material accumulations grew to exceptional proportions.

Though his contact with the stranger had been sporadic during this time, the day came when Blodkai chose to accept an offer made to him upon their first encounter.  This was his entry into the world of the deadly, in the lawless, brutal and chaotic time of the original clans:  he accepted the invitation of McBeth, and became Darkblade.

Eventually Blodkai would be a member of a handful of additional clans through the many deadly ages:  an Inconnu, an original Malkavian, a founding deadly Maidenstone and a Nosferatu.  But after the passing of the original clans and Darkblade, the majority of his deadly activity was carried out as an unclanned, fighting for no colors but with loose affiliations.  There came a time when his deadly characters of all levels outnumbered his remaining peaceful characters.

At some point as a mortal he was approached by Circe, a high goddess who oversaw the creation and expansion of the lands of the Realms, and through her favor became an immortal.  Within a few weeks he was a Demi god, and within a matter of months had ascended to Greater God, a time during which he made sweeping changes to the treasures, lands and creatures of the Realm.  This was also an age of repeated upheaval in the immortal community as the very gods fought and conspired against each other, and despite his attempts to avoid entanglement in these affairs he was ultimately drawn in.  Joining with a number of other high immortals including Narn, Haus, Gorog and Damian, and with the aid of Thoric, he helped re-form the Council of Elders – which came to assume complete control of the Realms in its entirety and usher in a new age of growth and stability, eschewing the rampant chaos and infighting of the past.

Today, Blodkai heads the Council of Elders and is the primary administrator of the Realms.  He still dabbles directly in building and coding as time permits, and always maintains a hand in each facet of development.