I play a mud called Medievia a lot and they have a great pk system that could easily be used in Planeshift.
The world is divided in lawful-pk, neutral-pk and chaotic-pk zones ( LPK, NPK and CPK for short).
- in LPK, you can\'t attack or harm other players in any way. In these zones, you are toatally safe from other players.
- in NPK, you can attack other players, but when one of you dies, they don\'t suffer a real death, they are just teleported ,with just a few hp, to the closest LPK area, in a shielded room. Mobs in this areas also give more xp than they would in Lpk, thus people often gather here to xp and pk.
To prevent mass newbie pk, a marking system has been added, so when you pk someone you get \"blood\" on your hands. This means that you can get attacked anywhere by anybody for a certain ammount of time, which depends on the difference in levels between you and your victim. So, if u were a lvl 100 player and you killed a lvl 4 newb, the mark would last for a very long time, maybe even a few hours, but if you killed a lvl 150 player, you would only get marked for a few minutes. This marking system also prevents players from pking at the edge of the NPk zone and then running out to rest and regain hp or mana.
- Finally in the CPK zone you can pk anybody without penalty. They will suffer a real death in this zone and you will also be able to loot the corpse for about 2 minutes until it dissapears. The mobs in CPk give even more xp than in Npk and usually, rare and powerful eq can be found in this areas.
Phew this was a long post