At 10:06 AM 9/1/96 +0000, Rev. Mark Grant wrote:

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Jon Leonard wrote: Protection Agencies Escrow Agencies Private Law Courts (probably controlled by players rather than the computer) Reputation Agencies

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What am I missing? Should there be direct support for Jim Bell's assasination markets? It'd provide a means of demonstrating its ineffectiveness as a means of social control.

I think it should be incorporated, but I think that people can set them up easily themselves. Perhaps we should have an NPC-run 'Assasins Inc' which would run the lottery, and then players could do the actual 'wet work'.

But yes, I'd really like to see how this would work in the game. As I said I'm thinking of this more as a semi-scientific experiment than a pure game. We have some idea of how this stuff should work in theory, but little of how it works in practice.

I do think though that we'd have to enforce some kind of rule against 'disposable characters', otherwise people could simply create a new character every time they were killed trying to assasinate someone. There would need to be some disadvantage to just going in guns-blazing and being killed ten times in a row.

Wouldn't it be more realistic if instead of representing individual characters, you created composites which had a "weight" based on how many of them exist in the country/world? For example, the character "buggy-whip maker" in 1900 would be weighted in the thousands, while his number would be drastically reduced a few decades later. This would avoid the "going in with guns blazing" scenario, or at least it would put it into perspective: the number of assassins would drop by "1" (or some proportion) if that happened, although correspondingly the number of targets would also drop. With this system, a character would never die, but his number would simply drop to an insignificant quantity. ("Government-thugs" comes to mind...) And that's not the only reason the number of characters would drop: If it suddenly became "unhealthy" to accept a public paycheck, and thus the risk wasn't matched by the rewards, presumably people would shift professions. Again, this would all be part of the simulation. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com