Geas

Not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you Zehren. IMO good and evil are subjective IC and relative to the perspective of each character in geas.
We objectively define the gods ooc and create coded manerism and actions to lead players to act a certain way with their characters, but its up to the player to justify the actions of their character IC. Or else the character is insane and not so fun.

This sort of thing happens all the time. One group has more active players and the power shifts that way. Then people on the other side get more members and the power shifts again.

The NPCs moving around thing is just a byproduct of this. Unless it's done intentionally.

I think we may be missing my original point and what Rudolpho was trying to reiterate.

Using holy word is fine, using holy word for the fear effects is fine. No one is disputing this.

What I am disputing, is that moving NPC's without the intention of killing them (ie just getting them out of the way) isn't nice.

To give you some perspective, I could theoretically tie up every ogre and giant... knowing full well that they are commonly used in sacrifices and put them in the Crusader castle... and no they won't respawn at their normal spot.

Does this sound annoying? If yes, then perhaps sticking to killing the mobs is best.

Do unto others as you would like done unto yourself =D

TL;DR I am not against using holy word to split up mobs to make them easier to kill, that is smart. What I am against is using methods to split up NPC's or move them to different locations so they will not return to their original place.

Yep, I remember a similar situation where the fence would commonly be captured so he couldn't be used for selling stolen goods.

Sabotaging other players by abusing a loophole in the game's code structure is obviously rude if not explicitly stated as against the rules. Just use your head.

I like the suggestion Drayn had about just implementing some simple code to have a check and a timer that would 'teleport' an NPC back to where they belong (or destroy and respawn...isn't that basically what a Transporter does?).

Now, this is a little tiny bit off topic, and I run the risk of sounding really really programming-dumb...but would it really be super difficult to write some pathfinding algorithm that would let the NPCs walk home themselves? Even if they were being held captive in some room with guards, at least they'd try to leave and then get killed, or do some killing.

I suppose I recognize that this may be (more than) somewhat time consuming and difficult, I'm just wondering _how_ time consuming and difficult. Especially since in MUDs, the paths are well defined and discrete chunks.