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The Master Plan includes a Role called "PeaceMaker". This would be something like an advanced Healer, Good-aligned, with the ability to use magical or psionic powers to stop violence in progress. There'd be a "Calm" command or etc.
I like this idea but I can imagine potential for abuse which I thought y'all might have ideas about.
For instance, manipulative players could include a PeaceMaker in a group of Evil types running around causing mayhem. If an Evil Warrior, say, were about to be killed by an advanced NPC, the PeaceMaker could then intervene to stop the fight. Effectively the Good-aligned PeaceMaker would be acting as an Evil team member. That wouldn't really be good role-play and it would be outside the spirit of the Role. But, could be done.
The brute-force way to enforce Role constraints would be to deny PeaceMakers the ability to stop fights which an Evil character is losing. That would be similar to the way Healer was disallowed from using Heal or Energize to assist Evil characters. But it's an ugly solution and the constraints it imposes are too narrow.
What do you think? Do you have ideas how this Role might be implemented in a way which preserves the intention of the Role without opening it to abuse?
--Mark
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We're ready to think about creating a small number of "marshalls" or "game wardens" or whatever we'd like to call them: experienced players who are empowered via special commands to assist other players, resolve disputes, discipline players when necessary, fix minor glitches, and generally help out.
We're thinking about making this a proper TC Role, with participants rewarded experience and dinars for their connect time, as well as (possibly) their helpful actions.
So, we'd like to solicit input from all those interested, re what some of these special characters' special powers might be, and how they might be rewarded.
These are some suggestions that occur to me for Warden Commands. What do you think of them, and what others can you suggest?
-- Disciplinary commands: muzzle; shackle; jail; pardon.
-- Movement commands: goto (another player).
-- Administrative commands: set character titles and descriptions; whereis (a player).
What other special powers should Wardens have? How can abuse be prevented?
Re Warden rewards, we were thinking that Wardens would accumulate experience and dinars simply by being connected. Some reasonable quantity of exp and $ per minute, say. (Like, one, LOL.) So simply by being a human resource available to assist newbies and players with problems, Wardens would be growing their characters.
It would be more interesting to reward them for actions, but it's difficult to think of cheat-proof safeguards that wouldn't free the unscrupulous to unfair gain. For instance we could spiff them for use of the muzzle or goto commands, but it's easy to imagine people using goto too often. Stuff like that. What are your thoughts on these ideas?
Many thanks for contributing your suggestions, they're greatly appreciated!
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Our prodigal dev server is back online, after many adventures passing through many hands. (You can tell who writes most of the game world, can't you?)
I'm getting everything tested and reconfigured now. Soon as I'm able to build a new player applet I'll send out a newsletter announcing all the recent enhancements.
--Mark
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The dev server is so busted that it can't be fixed. Bummer. We'll get a new machine and be back in the coding business asap.
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The computer which SmartMonsters uses to do our development work on is toasted. That's a geeky technical term meaning not working. 
Until this is fixed I won't be able to contribute new code. Later today I'm gonna put up a release that has a lot of accumulated small bug fixes that are tested and ready to go; but there won't be new code work for a while.
Not sure how long this'll take to get fixed. Quite a bother just getting the machine into the shop. Guessing two or three weeks.
While dev is offline we'll see if we can get Poobah working on some new content.
Thanks for hanging in there!
--Mark
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Somebody cut the fiber to the Olympic Peninsula yesterday afternoon, cutting off long distance voice communication and, achem, SmartMonsters. Sorry if you were unable to reach TC.
--Mark
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Just want to thank Kristofer and Juha, by the way, for creating the interesting problem we've been discussing in these threads! 
I think Kristofer in particular has been an extremely able provocatuer. With his role play he's pushed people's buttons in the most dramatic way we've seen so far. From the perspective of interesting RP that alone is a kind of success. Now the issue is how to find balance which allows people to RP offensive behaviors without causing others to hate being involved.
--M
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Hello all! Welcome to the Players' BBS.
This forum was created at player suggestion to be a place where everyone can discuss, out-of-character, issues related to game play.
We especially encourage you to use this space to discuss role-playing, and other topics which are awkward in-character.
Thanks! Have at it!
--Mark
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I copied the Player Pages narratives into the biography field of the fora profile.
I believe all went well, but I note that JF's bio is now empty. Did I overwrite your comments about D.C., museums, etc.? Or had you previously removed them? (All went perfectly in dev - did not overwrite existing bios.)
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I'm kinda spooked by the fact that the member list is open to the world, that is, the Internet. What implications for player privacy? What about spam bots?
Decided to hide the Member List link from casual browsers. You have to be logged in for the link to appear.
Ditto the Moderation Log. Not sure what value there is in that anyway.
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Created sub categories for posts re the fora. Hopefully self-evident.
When the fora are out of "alpha", that is, ready for integration into the rest of the site, I'll move this category to the bottom of the list.
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I kinda like the way it's working now. The posts which were made IC display with the TC character name on the left, instead of the usual user first/last name, karma, etc. But the standard PM and Profile buttons remain, so that when you click on them you're taken to the user's information. So the IC posts aren't anonymous, but the user's identity isn't stuck up yr nose. I'm trying to test the daylights out of importing because I want to do it just once, correctly. Super close to ready, maybe tomorrow.
When I do the import I'll back up the database immediately before, so that if we decide we hate something it'll be possible to roll back to the state just before the import.
Re future IC posts. We can create a protocol for that, where, say, you put [IC CharacterName] in the subject and/or the first line of yr post. But there's no real way to force people to be honest about actually owning a character or not.
I suppose we could automatically append each user's real list of TC characters to their messages...
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Made searchable by first or last name. Flagged "done".
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Duh. Fixed.
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Done.
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