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[Ozarck]

last time the mad max, or limited resource game idea came up, a small minority of us were hyped, and the rest of us went "meh, no thanks."

I vote "meh, no thanks" to a game in which all we have is what is available now in real life, only less of it, and we have to fight other scavengers over every scrap. the net result of such a system will always be a loss. And the things you build will inevitably break before long, or slowly wear away while you spend your time trying to maintain shit. I don't like games where I watch everything slowly wind down to failure.

And instituting a crafting system so we can ... what? Make clothes, boots, maybe a baricade, windows for our bunkers, ... maybe a shovel? You'd need a whole setup to even begin to work on things like armor and weapons, or communications devices or what have you. what would cahracters start with? A basic toolbelt with a hammer, wrench set, and screwdriver set?

[Harry Baldman]

I vote "meh, no thanks" to a game in which all we have is what is available now in real life, only less of it, and we have to fight other scavengers over every scrap. the net result of such a system will always be a loss. And the things you build will inevitably break before long, or slowly wear away while you spend your time trying to maintain shit. I don't like games where I watch everything slowly wind down to failure.

The maintenance issue can be pretty easily addressed if you don't put equipment degradation into the game to begin with, since what it adds to the game is strictly enforcing the gameplay loop of crafting (that is, giving you a reason to keep crafting and avoiding a situation where you've crafted all that you need and thus effectively beaten the game), and play-by-post games are slow enough that the inconvenience of it far outstrips any possible use. You also don't put equipment degradation into the game because it's really goddamn annoying, especially if it's as mindblowingly artificial as in your average crafting/survival game.

[piecewise]

Above all, it makes sure that the system is intuitive.... Genius' system is easy to comprehend

I dunno...the more I read the system the more it seems weird. The basic idea is fine but the actual mechanics (What I can find buried here under lists of slang, specific rules for time machines and an orphan mutation chart) get stranger and more convoluted.  Its doing that D&D thing where there's a rule or roll chart for every instance, and I really kinda dislike that. For example, under the special rules and systems there's this thing called "Havoc", which I think is a perfect storm of my misgivings.

First it takes an idea, specifically that super science in the hands of normal people tends to cause problems, and turns it into a purely numerical thing. Rather then have fun with it and create some sort of interesting story or event based on what might reasonably happen, instead you just slap a Scientific analysis (-3) onto it.  And it specifically says "Even if a mortal just pushes the object with their hand" it can be effected by havoc.  So you have a system where a normal person bumping into your suit of power armor could cause it to explode or go haywire. Which is really weird.

Second, it continues this weird trend where it treats mad scientists as super humans channeling "Inspiration" and "Mania" like they're physical powers. Basically, these guys are just wizards with "Mana" replaced by "Mania". Which, considering this seems to be based on "Mage: The Awakening" isn't very surprising.  But I've never really liked the conflation of mad science and magic, despite the similarities. To me mad science and magic have different feels; and one of the biggest differences is that a mad scientist is just a guy who made a thing. He's a smart guy, yeah, but he's not some sort of chosen one who is wielding the power cosmic against mere mortals (The fact that the game calls non-scientists that is pretty telling). 


But all that is more the expanded rules, not the core concept. And I do think you're right that people don't want to go around gathering up a bunch of scrap plastic and garbage in a one post a day system. The difficulty comes in the form of creating a system that balances your ability to create mad science things with a system that isn't totally broken. G:tT took the easy route and just gave them "Mad science Mana" to limit their actions and their creations. But mana, or whatever you call it, doesn't really mesh with mad science to me and seems like an artificial limiting system, where the real limiting system should be access to materials. Doc Brown and his plutonium, for instance.

That, or the Metal Slug system might work. Basically in the metal slug system you can do whatever you want but as you make more powerful and complex things, the chances of horrific backfires increases exponentially.

Hmm...

[Harry Baldman]

First it takes an idea, specifically that super science in the hands of normal people tends to cause problems, and turns it into a purely numerical thing. Rather then have fun with it and create some sort of interesting story or event based on what might reasonably happen, instead you just slap a Scientific analysis (-3) onto it.  And it specifically says "Even if a mortal just pushes the object with their hand" it can be effected by havoc.  So you have a system where a normal person bumping into your suit of power armor could cause it to explode or go haywire. Which is really weird.

In that specific instance the Scientific analysis is a modifier to the havoc check, which means somebody's poking it in a very big way. And Havoc is what's intended as the countermeasure to trying to make your batshit science usable by the masses - sort of a justification for why mad scientists never really get anywhere with their work, and why it mostly only works for them. What makes the difference between a mad scientist and a regular scientist, pretty much. You can safely remove it in a game where ensuring a certain status quo isn't at all important.

Second, it continues this weird trend where it treats mad scientists as super humans channeling "Inspiration" and "Mania" like they're physical powers. Basically, these guys are just wizards with "Mana" replaced by "Mania". Which, considering this seems to be based on "Mage: The Awakening" isn't very surprising.  But I've never really liked the conflation of mad science and magic, despite the similarities. To me mad science and magic have different feels; and one of the biggest differences is that a mad scientist is just a guy who made a thing. He's a smart guy, yeah, but he's not some sort of chosen one who is wielding the power cosmic against mere mortals (The fact that the game calls non-scientists that is pretty telling). 

Oh, that's just nWoD. To have unusual abilities you need to have your metanormal advantage, which is your weirdo level, and a resource that you use to power it. The author actually only included Mania as a thing because all the other metanormal templates had it. And the hilarious thing in Genius is that you're not the chosen one at all - you can make people mad by showing them your science very easily. Why you don't do that is because resources are hard to come by and a person who actually manages to build and use mad science is extremely dangerous. Most often you just rob them of their individuality and personal desires by turning them into beholden, which are basically just Igor.

And it's not so much a case of it being magic as it being modeled like magic, and modeled quite decently at that - with Mania being your intellectual reserves required to operate it (recharged by such things as doing research, going mad, destroying contradictory findings about your research and explaining your plans to people you've captured), and Inspiration being your expertise in using mad science as a whole. The importance is less in the thematics of it as it is in the mechanics fitting the practice and tropes of mad science, and it serves the purpose well enough. And of course since this is World of Darkness, it kind of needs to act as a vehicle for tragedy, which is why in Genius you're a scientist who can't actually do science because you're completely insane, and your inventions, while brilliant, are hostile to most forms of conventional reasoning.

But really this is less about defending Genius' merits on its own and more about its alternative approach to crafting, which is at least worth considering in opposition to just taking Minecraft's system and putting it into a format where I suspect it just plain won't work.

But all that is more the expanded rules, not the core concept. And I do think you're right that people don't want to go around gathering up a bunch of scrap plastic and garbage in a one post a day system. The difficulty comes in the form of creating a system that balances your ability to create mad science things with a system that isn't totally broken. G:tT took the easy route and just gave them "Mad science Mana" to limit their actions and their creations. But mana, or whatever you call it, doesn't really mesh with mad science to me and seems like an artificial limiting system, where the real limiting system should be access to materials. Doc Brown and his plutonium, for instance.

Well, I already mentioned that - replace Axioms with parts. You could have parts in the category Energy, for instance, where Energy-1 is charcoal, Energy-2 is gasoline, Energy-3 is a battery, Energy-4 is a microfusion cell and Energy-5 is some kind of blue thing that you don't know what it is. You can combine this with, say, Gun-1, which is a sling, Gun-2, which is a metal pipe, Gun-3 which is a rifled barrel, Gun-4 which is a set of electromagnetic coils or Gun-5 which is some kind of weird green winding tube. Put two of those together, possibly add something else (the trivial garbage and smaller parts you need are abstracted for efficiency's sake) and then you can get an energy weapon, whether that's a flamethrower, a plasma cannon or a thing that causes black holes to appear every time you're near. Some of these components are easier to find than others.

You can then slot research into it, where you gain the ability to turn lower-grade parts into higher-grade ones - for instance, turning gasoline or charcoal to energy cells by creating a power generator, and use the resulting components to build nicer stuff for limited applications.

[Egan_BW]

I like the original idea. OPness can be solved by not giving a shit about OPness, and the boring mundanity of making things without magic can be solved by having a separate magic system.
That is, make mmww but with some crafting stuff in the background.

[Ozarck]

I vote "meh, no thanks" to a game in which all we have is what is available now in real life, only less of it, and we have to fight other scavengers over every scrap. the net result of such a system will always be a loss. And the things you build will inevitably break before long, or slowly wear away while you spend your time trying to maintain shit. I don't like games where I watch everything slowly wind down to failure.

The maintenance issue can be pretty easily addressed if you don't put equipment degradation into the game to begin with, since what it adds to the game is strictly enforcing the gameplay loop of crafting (that is, giving you a reason to keep crafting and avoiding a situation where you've crafted all that you need and thus effectively beaten the game), and play-by-post games are slow enough that the inconvenience of it far outstrips any possible use. You also don't put equipment degradation into the game because it's really goddamn annoying, especially if it's as mindblowingly artificial as in your average crafting/survival game.

Well, that severely limits the game world, to have a mad max style post apocalystic world of decay and continuously reducing resources, in which none of your stuff falls apart, and you need to have combat to gain resources, but only for crafting so you can have more combat. it stretches my imagination to understand how it could be interesting beyond "Mad Max is cool! Fuck Yeah! Fury Road! Spray paint in the mouth! And also tinker!"

[Harry Baldman]

Well, that severely limits the game world, to have a mad max style post apocalystic world of decay and continuously reducing resources, in which none of your stuff falls apart, and you need to have combat to gain resources, but only for crafting so you can have more combat. it stretches my imagination to understand how it could be interesting beyond "Mad Max is cool! Fuck Yeah! Fury Road! Spray paint in the mouth! And also tinker!"

But that's not an issue you solve with your stuff falling apart. Decay can be introduced through stuff like faults in your inventions - things don't work as they should because you're using limited resources in limited time frames. Basic things needing to be rebuilt all the time is neither a realistic simulation nor particularly interesting, let alone appropriate, since the gameplay loop it reinforces doesn't translate to PbP. In PbP you don't want to have to write the same thing twice, because that's not interesting. Combat, on the other hand, stands to have far more variety, and feel much less pointless because of its higher levels of both risk and reward. Couple that with exploration (motivated by searching for interesting objects) and actual story objectives and you might be in business.

And really, criticizing combat -> components -> crafting -> combat as a gameplay loop is somewhat unsound, because it's actually just noting that the game has a gameplay loop, which isn't actually a meaningful criticism. You might as well criticize ER for being mission -> reward -> purchases -> mission.

[Ozarck]

Well, I was not exactly criticizing the mission loop. I was disussing limitations. Stripping content from a game leaves simple bones behind, and while bones are useful, they are useful primarily when attached to other things.

my issues, as I have stated, are these:

1) I'm not a fan of the mad Max setting as a large multiplayergame setting. It makes for a particular type of narrative which seems to work somewhat fine for a single protagonist, but not so much for a group of disparate individuals, who each seem to be in competition with each other as well as with the environment and npcs.

2) a game of diminishing returns is a game of attrition and loss. I dislike that.

3) post apocalyptic is fine. scarcity is fine. crafting is fine, pve and pvp are fine but the five as primary game mechanics are in conflict, and seem like they would lead to more tedium than interesting activity.

4) I've said it already: the crafting system as stated rewards the tinker style nitpickers, who are a rather small part of the overall player base. This will be confounded by the wall of text responses, the myriad questions, and the pages long discussions and arguments over  a wide variety of topics. The less finiky players will find themselves completely overwhelmed by the elites in no time.

5) I briefly mentioned above: as I understand the game so far, each player is essentially on their own. trust and team building, as the game is described now, will be problematic, and that means the game can easily devolve into that thing you feared - a sort of pvp and pve arena in which the strong survive, and the rest are meat for the grinder.

6) seems like that would mean that power apartheid would rapidly become an even greater problem here than in ER, where the powerful were, at least generally, players who sought to increase the fun for others (though they may have failed at times)

7) as for not introducing decay via things falling apart - Thunderdome's Master Blaster character kinda revolved around the idea - the ones who can maintain the machinery control the civilization. It feels like an arbitrary break from the setting, and seems to me to require a certain suspension of disbelief. Now, I know that every fantasy game requires that, but every setting should have an internal logic, and this seems to defy the internal logic of the setting.

you say combat has potential for variety? I haven't seen enough about the combat in this game to say. Risk/reward? I question the reward aspect, as eerything is supposed to be currently existing, and good stuff is rare. And even upon gaining the reward, each reward carries a secondary risk - the brighter the shiny, the more people want it, and the more likely you are to lose it, and everything else you've put together to get it. Unless you are already at the top of the scrap heap.

thinking on it, I will expand my core of types that I think could succeed or find interest in the game to these: Power, parasite, tinker. I agree that the aspect of exploration could be a positive, but I think it would eed to be handled well - it's not an automatic generator of interesting things.

[Radio Controlled]

Is it just me, or is that nWoD crafting system basically distilled 'special snowflake syndrome'? Nothing wrong with that per se, mind, but I don't think it'd be ideal for a Mad Max-type setting. Lots of things can be customized to the owner's taste in such settings, but in the end it's still all fairly similar/mundane tech (that doesn't inexplicably combust when a normie takes it for a spin).

3. Stupid maybe, but the alternative seems massively boring and also really strange. So you pick up "Generic Electronics" X3 and combine that with "Generic structural" x 2 and get a tv?  That seems like it's begging for abuse because whats to stop someone from saying "I have 300 generic electronics. I build a death star." It also kind of ruins any attempt to have areas you scavenge this from be unique.

Perhaps you could say that the resources they find belong to a broad category, but then when actually crafting they have to specifically name a particular example from the category to use? eg. the 1 unit of the 'fastener' category could be a bit of glue or a bunch of screws or a roll of ducktape, you just specify which and how you'd need it when actually making something. More rare items can be represented by 'costing' multiples of a category (eg some small AA batteries is 1 'energy', while a single car engine requires 10 energy.

[piecewise]

First it takes an idea, specifically that super science in the hands of normal people tends to cause problems, and turns it into a purely numerical thing. Rather then have fun with it and create some sort of interesting story or event based on what might reasonably happen, instead you just slap a Scientific analysis (-3) onto it.  And it specifically says "Even if a mortal just pushes the object with their hand" it can be effected by havoc.  So you have a system where a normal person bumping into your suit of power armor could cause it to explode or go haywire. Which is really weird.

In that specific instance the Scientific analysis is a modifier to the havoc check, which means somebody's poking it in a very big way. And Havoc is what's intended as the countermeasure to trying to make your batshit science usable by the masses - sort of a justification for why mad scientists never really get anywhere with their work, and why it mostly only works for them. What makes the difference between a mad scientist and a regular scientist, pretty much. You can safely remove it in a game where ensuring a certain status quo isn't at all important.

Second, it continues this weird trend where it treats mad scientists as super humans channeling "Inspiration" and "Mania" like they're physical powers. Basically, these guys are just wizards with "Mana" replaced by "Mania". Which, considering this seems to be based on "Mage: The Awakening" isn't very surprising.  But I've never really liked the conflation of mad science and magic, despite the similarities. To me mad science and magic have different feels; and one of the biggest differences is that a mad scientist is just a guy who made a thing. He's a smart guy, yeah, but he's not some sort of chosen one who is wielding the power cosmic against mere mortals (The fact that the game calls non-scientists that is pretty telling). 

Oh, that's just nWoD. To have unusual abilities you need to have your metanormal advantage, which is your weirdo level, and a resource that you use to power it. The author actually only included Mania as a thing because all the other metanormal templates had it. And the hilarious thing in Genius is that you're not the chosen one at all - you can make people mad by showing them your science very easily. Why you don't do that is because resources are hard to come by and a person who actually manages to build and use mad science is extremely dangerous. Most often you just rob them of their individuality and personal desires by turning them into beholden, which are basically just Igor.

And it's not so much a case of it being magic as it being modeled like magic, and modeled quite decently at that - with Mania being your intellectual reserves required to operate it (recharged by such things as doing research, going mad, destroying contradictory findings about your research and explaining your plans to people you've captured), and Inspiration being your expertise in using mad science as a whole. The importance is less in the thematics of it as it is in the mechanics fitting the practice and tropes of mad science, and it serves the purpose well enough. And of course since this is World of Darkness, it kind of needs to act as a vehicle for tragedy, which is why in Genius you're a scientist who can't actually do science because you're completely insane, and your inventions, while brilliant, are hostile to most forms of conventional reasoning.

But really this is less about defending Genius' merits on its own and more about its alternative approach to crafting, which is at least worth considering in opposition to just taking Minecraft's system and putting it into a format where I suspect it just plain won't work.

But all that is more the expanded rules, not the core concept. And I do think you're right that people don't want to go around gathering up a bunch of scrap plastic and garbage in a one post a day system. The difficulty comes in the form of creating a system that balances your ability to create mad science things with a system that isn't totally broken. G:tT took the easy route and just gave them "Mad science Mana" to limit their actions and their creations. But mana, or whatever you call it, doesn't really mesh with mad science to me and seems like an artificial limiting system, where the real limiting system should be access to materials. Doc Brown and his plutonium, for instance.

Well, I already mentioned that - replace Axioms with parts. You could have parts in the category Energy, for instance, where Energy-1 is charcoal, Energy-2 is gasoline, Energy-3 is a battery, Energy-4 is a microfusion cell and Energy-5 is some kind of blue thing that you don't know what it is. You can combine this with, say, Gun-1, which is a sling, Gun-2, which is a metal pipe, Gun-3 which is a rifled barrel, Gun-4 which is a set of electromagnetic coils or Gun-5 which is some kind of weird green winding tube. Put two of those together, possibly add something else (the trivial garbage and smaller parts you need are abstracted for efficiency's sake) and then you can get an energy weapon, whether that's a flamethrower, a plasma cannon or a thing that causes black holes to appear every time you're near. Some of these components are easier to find than others.

You can then slot research into it, where you gain the ability to turn lower-grade parts into higher-grade ones - for instance, turning gasoline or charcoal to energy cells by creating a power generator, and use the resulting components to build nicer stuff for limited applications.

*Warning, my interpretation if things is based on skimming this text*

I connected mania as being mana because the sample wonders all use it as a power source of sorts. Like the weather machine that used more mania to do bigger or wider effects. And thats kind of the thing I mean with it being used as mana; because I think it should more reasonably be a question of like a power source or something not brain juice. It's particularly weird with things like death rays that should really only need a trigger pull draining mania.



Replacing axioms with parts could work; Rather than knowledge of explodey things, what you build is based on access to explodey things. Though that may lead to an awful lot of axioms, depending on how vague and general these parts are.

[piecewise]

5) I briefly mentioned above: as I understand the game so far, each player is essentially on their own. trust and team building, as the game is described now, will be problematic, and that means the game can easily devolve into that thing you feared - a sort of pvp and pve arena in which the strong survive, and the rest are meat for the grinder.

Perplexicon was every man for himself and they formed groups quite quickly.

Really, I've given up on this idea as is, but I'm just saying. Just because everyone is for themselves doesn't mean it will always be a murder orgy.

[Egan_BW]

Aw, I liked the idea. Perplexicon, but with scrap.

[piecewise]

Aw, I liked the idea. Perplexicon, but with scrap.

There was that one test I ran a while back which was Perplexicon but with each word replaced by a piece of machinery. The idea being you'd piece together machines and then see what they did.

[Egan_BW]

I remember that. Was fairly entertaining, if mostly because of the sterilization buttons on the walls.

[syvarris]

I vote "meh, no thanks" to a game in which all we have is what is available now in real life, only less of it, and we have to fight other scavengers over every scrap. the net result of such a system will always be a loss. And the things you build will inevitably break before long, or slowly wear away while you spend your time trying to maintain shit. I don't like games where I watch everything slowly wind down to failure.

Silly Ozy, this isn't a democracy.  Our opinions are at best suggestions for PW, and if he's struck with inspiration for something nobody has interest in, that's what he'll develop.

That, or the Metal Slug system might work. Basically in the metal slug system you can do whatever you want but as you make more powerful and complex things, the chances of horrific backfires increases exponentially.

I actually looked at the Metal Slug thing, because it's short, and it's pretty broken.

Spoiler: Why am I wasting my time complaining about some stupid /tg/ system? (click to show/hide)

Firstly, it says this:

See, when you roll a 1 you don't get to add that dice to the total. If it's the final dice in the weapon chain, you're safe. But if there's another dice after that, you have to roll the next dice and whatever comes after it against yourself. Don't roll a 1 on your initial roll.

What's this mean?  Do you target yourself after rolling a one?  Does that mean shooting at a guy who's really bad at dodging makes you more likely to shoot yourself in the face?  Also, does it improve the game?  To me, it sounds like you should purely pump all 5000 chargen points into your character, because pumping them into your gun makes it more likely you'll just shoot yourself in the face--and then die because you spent points on more damage rather than more defence.  Also, 249 dodge makes you essentially immune to damage from any gun which isn't specifically meant to kill people with 249 dodge--and such a gun is virtually guaranteed to hurt its user more than the target, too.

Big Blast (B): This weapon is for collateral damage. For every non-1 you roll in this stage, the radius of effect increases by a quarter meter (or yard, whatever). You cannot turn this property off, before you ask. If the weapon is also exploding, the explosive push radius decreases by one meter for every meter from the center.

Eh?  This is for payload, so this category is rolled after dodging mitigates damage.  Therefore, shooting a gun with this trait at a high-dodge character will result in the explosion having no radius, while shooting it at a target that can't dodge can result in an absurdly massive radius.  Also, if the radius is determined by damage, what happens to other people caught in the radius?  Do they suffer undodgable damage?  That would mean shooting an explosive weapon at the ground completely bypasses dodge, rendering that game mechanic utterly superfluous.  Do the other people get to try and dodge the explosion if they're within the radius?  Meaning everything is rerolled for them, creating more chances for the user to roll a one?  That means shooting an ordinary rocket launcher into a crowd means it's likely to explode in your hands with the force of a small nuke.

    Free weapon: single-shot high-impact sniper laser. 100HL/*/20E (616 points)
    Primary weapon: rapid-fire acid grenade launcher. 100/4/*/1FA (1200 points)
    Secondary weapon: Jericho missile launcher. 20/20/4/*/1BE (1400 points)

Example Weapons!  Which don't actually pay attention to the rules!  The latter two are guaranteed to explode in their user's hands, while the first is only very likely to do so.  Unless, of course, only the targeting stage fucks up on a one, which isn't stated elsewhere and creates a balance issue.  Even then, 100d4 or (20d20)d4 are almost guaranteed to fuckup before you even get to roll damage, and the former at least could be 4d100 at no penalty.  Anyway, if you're ignoring fuckups, you should make a gun that's a bunch of 2 sided aiming stages, but deals 682EABF as its only damage stage.  Always fires last, but vaporizes whatever it's pointed at, and costs exactly 700 so you're free to spend everything on defensive abilities.

They also screwed up the free weapon's cost.  It should be 56*12=672 points.


...I had other issues with the system, but I've already spent way too long on this.

I like the original idea. OPness can be solved by not giving a shit about OPness, and the boring mundanity of making things without magic can be solved by having a separate magic system.
That is, make mmww but with some crafting stuff in the background.

*Complete Agreement*

2) a game of diminishing returns is a game of attrition and loss. I dislike that.

You run a game of diminishing returns!  In OL, to go from -1 to +1 costs two levelups.  To go from +1 to +2 has the same cost.  +2 to +3 costs three.  That is the definition of diminishing returns; you get diminished benefit for the same investment after you've already invested.

3) post apocalyptic is fine. scarcity is fine. crafting is fine, pve and pvp are fine but the five as primary game mechanics are in conflict, and seem like they would lead to more tedium than interesting activity.

Post apoc, with scarcity, crafting, pve, and pvp.  I.E. every post apoc game that involves both crafting and pvp.  There's a lot of those, and it seems like a pretty popular genre to me.

3. Stupid maybe, but the alternative seems massively boring and also really strange. So you pick up "Generic Electronics" X3 and combine that with "Generic structural" x 2 and get a tv?  That seems like it's begging for abuse because whats to stop someone from saying "I have 300 generic electronics. I build a death star." It also kind of ruins any attempt to have areas you scavenge this from be unique.

Perhaps you could say that the resources they find belong to a broad category, but then when actually crafting they have to specifically name a particular example from the category to use? eg. the 1 unit of the 'fastener' category could be a bit of glue or a bunch of screws or a roll of ducktape, you just specify which and how you'd need it when actually making something. More rare items can be represented by 'costing' multiples of a category (eg some small AA batteries is 1 'energy', while a single car engine requires 10 energy.

This doesn't fix the problem.  What's to stop someone from listing off the exact 300 items that count as "generic electronics" and can be combined into a death star?  Yes, it makes large assemblies more tedious to make, but it doesn't actually make them any less unbalancing.

Also, if rare items "cost" multiples of a category, does that mean I can trade twenty steel bars for one adamantine bar?

Perplexicon was every man for himself and they formed groups quite quickly.

There was actually rather little player murder in Perplexicon, yeah.  Some, but mostly just lone wolf idiots who attacked stronger people.  IIRC, I was only killed by someone else once, and that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't kept my membership in the two big teams secret.