Eww... Long note, Careful!
I am trying to connect auras to the law system (and once you have the "evil" tag, you are quite obviously an evil character because of that tag alone)
In OOC parlance, the good gods appreciate if good characters do good deeds by engaging/encountering anyone with an evil aura. (Or at the very least, be extremely suspicious of these people). Possibly the evil gods appreciate the opposite route, as in the evil characters trying to weaken good characters or fighting them, and so on. In short - this is all very conflict intense.
Now, once someone does an evil deed/action, and does not "compensate" this with good deeds, an evil aura seems to be permanently attached to that character. From this point you are basically an evil character.
From how I understand it there aren't any really "neutral" actions. Or in other words, only good and evil actions can be done, and if you are neutral you usually "balanced" these actions in a way (or perhaps did nothing and fell back to this default?).
So someone being neutral usually shuffles between these two sides slightly, or just sticks to one side eventually and "stops" being really neutral.
Bear with me for now here...
To me this seems as if there aren't any real gray zones possible that way.
You are either good, or bad, but you can hardly stay neutral because the system would try to
shift you into either a good or bad direction constantly (if you do certain deeds, and as a result your karma changes).
A good example would be "neutral" characters right now: who of the examples you can give would be really "neutral"? To me it seems as if they more or less closely fall into the good or evil side when they do specific actions.
Or they really do absolutely
nothing but doing absolutely nothing seems a bit ... boring. Hmm.
I am not really thinking about crusaders/rangers good/evil guilds or characters here actually. Sooner or later, I think it will be somewhat obvious who really is evil or good (or "neutral") anyway.
I am more thinking about
areas here, such as Asador. Or let's say Elvandar. Or ... Arborea. All areas have their ways to deal with evil and good folks (focus on religion here).
Some areas seem to allow more religious freedoms than others, some areas are more restrictive. The aura system, or more accurately all characters who can discover auras, basically reveal the tag attached on a character swiftly, easily and quite transparently.
It's actually pretty funny: evil characters are sometimes EXTREMELY scared of having their auras checked. That can often scare them away faster than a smite miracle or similar stuff ... and when a character runs away from an aura check, well ... I guess the reason is pretty obvious ... if you have to hide something, run away...
A good character can
NEVER be wrong here though - when you see someone with a bad aura, you can be
ABSOLUTELY sure that this person has done something evil. Your god can never be wrong. If your god somehow tells you or reveals to you that this person has an evil aura, you can be sure that this MUST be correct. That's at least how I understand it.
And once you have an evil character before you and are a good and caring character, why should you care about that evil character too much? I mean, as far as his evil wicked ways are concerned. Sure you can try to pull him over to the good side, make him stop being evil, or you just hack him to pieces if it fails, or you simply watch what he does carefully.
There is absolutely no real reason to be lenient with evil characters, no matter whether they are strong or weak. They have such an aura tag attached, and the tag will attract attention (and problems). And they will easily fall into the old pattern anyway, by joining the evil or good side or at least by stopping being evil (or sometimes being good).
It just seems a lot easier to be pushed into some specific direction (good or evil)
here, and I think this heavily reduces which playing styles are possible. You can't really "hide" if you have an evil aura.
But as said ... this is not so much about
auras alone, this is about areas and these areas being in control of deities actually, even if only indirectly.
Asador has shiplines with Arborea (and Bandama or Cumberly, I always mix these up). As a town it seems to be under control of Sathonys, an evil god. I believe Sathonys really would dislike those coming to his zone of interest who have a good aura (perhaps an aura earned by destroying his undeads ... ? ).
Why would the Asadorians accept people who got an aura by slaughtering undeads?
But if auras are so exclusive then it means that characters will only have a few areas to actually visit and do something there. It also isn't really possible to hide your aura as said before. Once you act "suspiciously", sooner or later you will be revealed anyway, unless perhaps you stay away from most other characters (but then you can't sozialize in any way either, and I am sure that sooner or later you WILL want to interact in some way, unless you like to play alone forever, which seems pretty odd to have in a MUD I guess... )
This conflict of good/evil transcends down into the areas, with the auras attached to characters. I just don't think that this way you actually can have characters with evil auras walking into areas dominated or controlled by those with good auras. Not even disguise works seriously because everyone will be so suspicious. There just doesn't seem to be a place to hide "who you are". Sooner or later, your allegiance will just be obvious.
Even in the distant past, it was quite obvious who was good and who was evil ... somehow. Now it just is even more obvious, because you can rather easily find out.
I mean, Sathos always tried to kill someone so one could state that they always were evil.
But with the tag, you will automatically fall into the box of good or evil (or perhaps neutral), and it is absolutely predictable what you have done or can do because of the way it works.
So, about areas ...
I think it is kind of bad to have areas become too exclusive for a single deity (more or less) and automatically exclude other deities. Of course it often makes sense to do so, both for IC and OOC reasons and also because gods are in some way in opposition to each other (more or less... at least the way preaching works right now means that you can convert worshippers of other deities).
I mean... if you are a god, you probably want more followers. And if you exclude the other gods, all the better - more followers to you, I guess.
But a good example for access restriction, IMHO, are the Sathonys insects.
On the one hand the insects kill guards in Arborea. On the other hand, you have shipping routes right into Asador (!) from Arborea, and Asador is often used as an attack platform for Satho priests (the shiplines). Perhaps there are economic reasons for having these shiplines but ... to me this seems a little bit crazy for the Asral side. If someone is attacking me, why would I offer him ship routes for his attacks or ways to
weaken my area? Or put more precisely, if insects kill human guards in Arborea, why the heck would I want to
befriend the priests of this insect god if I worship a deity that is in a way an enemy to Sathonys? That seems like ... crazy. Of course, Asral is a "neutral evil" deity, but I would be totally mad to go and HELP those that weaken my area in any way or allow them to kill potential Asral worshippers (if I am an Asral cleric... at least an old school Asral cleric)
I really think it boils down to the way the gods work. By being extremely exclusive, and partially quite predictable and auras revealing what one did in a broad sense ... it seems as if you can never hide. And areas will remain extremely exclusive, which sometimes leads to other problems (complaining that once you are outlawed you lose access to guilds and so on and so forth)