How To Die

An article entitled "How To Die" may not seem like the most appropriate subject but by knowing what events may lead to your death you may be better equipped in avoiding death, or least be able to recover better from your untimely demise.

There are 2 main kinds of death in MUD2:

• a silly death
• a permanent death (or "dead dead")

Silly Deaths

Silly deaths are when you suffer a temporary death. You don't lose your persona, but you are kicked out of the game with a loss to your score and stamina. There are many different ways of dying a silly death in The Land. Some of fairly obvious, or there are at least some very strong hints:

Beaten track near cliff. You are at the end of a rough track. There is a dangerous cliff to the west marked "Lovers' Leap". You think that, were you to leap, you'd end up splatted in the sands below, unless you had an open parachute.

Others may be more obscure but there is usually a hint somewhere close by that what you are about to do may result in you dying.

Other players can also cause you to die a silly death by engineering circumstances thereby causing your death, but you will soon learn to avoid these and to take measures to stop this from happening to you.

These are the main groups of silly deaths:

• Being blown up e.g. taking a lit brand to the swamp
• Falling a long way e.g. falling of a cliff
• Drowning
• Being poisoned
• Being excessively drunk

There are many "one off" ways of dying a silly death too, e.g. being squashed

Permanent Deaths

A permanent death is when your persona dies; you get kicked off the game, your score and everything else associated with your persona is wiped. To be killed permanently another creature (or occasionally an object) needs to do the act. There is only one way in which you can kill yourself in the game and that is by a self-FOD. FOD is a spell known as the Finger Of Death. The FOD spell can be performed by anyone who has magic. The chances of the spell working on the target though whether it is another player or a mobile is pretty slim. But if the spell is performed on oneself it will always result in death.

These are the main ways that you can die:

• Touchstone
• Finger Of Death (FOD)
• A player
• A mobile
• Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous comprises of a very small number of other ways, in which you can die, but these are very rare and I'll leave you to discover them for yourself. Needless to say it'll be very apparent that you are in danger of dying.

Why would anyone whether it is a mobile or another player want to kill you? There are many reasons from accidentally typing kill player instead of kiss player (as odd as it sounds it has happened loads of times) to someone just being plain malicious. Here are the more common reasons:

• Because of how much you're worth - type value me
• Because of the items you are carrying - someone may want your items or you may have aggravated a player or mobile in getting any of those items
• You have annoyed another player
• You have annoyed a mobile in some way - that mobile may well try to kill you every time it sees you
• You are on low stamina - this is a particularly high incentive for mobiles to kill you