Fighting in Socio is fairly easy. We don't emphasize too much on fighting, so it is kept simple.
First of all you should have a weapon equipped. You may also fight without a weapon, but in that case you will not cause much damage. To equip a weapon, just drag it on your Paperdoll. there are two-handed weapons and one-handed weapons. When you equip a one-handed weapon, you can hold a shield in the other hand, which is not possible with a two-handed weapon. Each weapon has a power value that is one of the factors that determine the damage done and you can find it in the Items table in your client's Help Menu.
The next thing you do is click your desired opponent and then click on the Combat Tab. Alternatively you can also hold down the Ctrl key and double click your victim to speed things up.
If you are using the Combat Tab you have some more control over the fight for special purposes. The window looks like this:
As you can see, you can select two target areas in the left section: The torso or the genitals. Selecting torso is the usual way to inflict damage and quickly kill or KO your opponent. When you select the genitals, you choose to inflict pain instead. This will bring up the pain value of your opponent quickly with every hit but won't do much damage. Similarly you can chose the strength of your attack. Hurt only means that you only want to inflict pain, which goes well with the genital target, Full Damage on the other hand means you want to kill your opponent fast. A Hurt Only attack however will stop at 50% health of the victim.
Once you're done with your selection, you click the Attack button and you're done. This turns on attack mode and your character will continue to hit your opponent until he or you are dead/KO and as long as nobody leaves the room or you stop the attack with the respective button. Once you click attack, you can not quickly stop and re-attack since the Attack button is blocked for 5 seconds, so stay in attack mode.
Leaving the room might be prevented while you are in a fight. There is a skill check performed with DEX and stealing skill when you are in a fight with another PC and if you don't pass, you can not escape for a few seconds.
While you are fighting, you must make sure you are within attack range of your weapon. For short range weapons like swords and hammer this usually means standing close to your opponent, long range weapons like wands allow you to stand farther away. While you are in the correct range and you are attacking somebody, your character will automatically deliver blows at your opponent every few seconds.
While you are attacking, what happens is, the server determines the skill that is to be used with the weapon of your choice, mace, sword, long-range or melee and the strength of your weapon. It then determines a raw damage value from this and attempts to apply this damage on your opponent. While doing so, the raw damage value is modified, for example if your opponent has a shield and parry skill, it is lowered, the same is true if your opponent wears armor. the shield and the armor are damaged while absorbing damage points and will eventually break. So will your weapon by the way.
Other modifications may apply, for example a summoned demon in his original form does more damage than when he is in another shape, a socially drunk character with a hammer does more damage with this specific weapon that a non drunk character, a sadist with a whip does more damage than a non sadist with a whip and so on.
Fighting is also used in the physical interaction between sadists and masochists. Whenever a character hits another one in hurt only mode and does some damage ( only 1 point per hit in hurt only mode) there is a good chance that the satisfaction of the sado / maso urges of the two characters goes up, so this is the only way to get your urge satisfaction up.
There is another interesting twist to the BDSM aspect of fighting however. Suppose you know that a certain character has committed a crime. You have the crime file against him but there are lots of suspects. Instead of filling the crime file up the usual way, you may also decide to go for a sneak attack and torture. When you attack this person in hurt only mode, and you have a high sado value, higher than his maso value, then there is a chance with every hit, that he confesses this crime. What that means is that your crimefile receives a photo clue which identifies the criminal without doubt. There is no need for any more clues for that crime file. You can take it straight to the law enforcement and start the trial. This is only possible with a high sado value of the torturer and it would be beneficial to chain up the victim first so that he can't run away.
When highly aroused, you get hit harder and hit for less, so it generally isn't a good idea to get into a fight when your arousal is high.
As described in the death section, it is possible to kill a character permanently. In order to do so, we have introduced a so called "friendship matrix" that stores information about how well one character knows another character. The basic thought is, that most victims know their killer. Since we do not want to endorse killing sprees in Socio we decided that we want to enforce some sort of role play or at least interaction for some time, before the system allows a character to permakill another one.
The friendship matrix works like this: Every time a character interacts with another character, some friendship scores are added to the relation between these characters. Every day at server restart, the value is lowered, so if the characters don't keep interacting, the value will eventually fall to 0 again. The actions that increase the friendship values are:
In order to prevent the possible murder victim from being flooded with 1:1 text messages from potential killers, case 2 gives friendship points to the character being talked to! So this would increase his ability to permakill the talker, not vice versa. In order to earn friendship points yourself, you must make the possible victim talk 1:1 to you.
The same is true for case 6 since stealing from a character doesn't give the thief points that allow him to permakill the victim, but gives the victim friendship points that enable him to kill the thief.
Case 5 means that everybody receives friendship points against the office holder. Being in an office means your character is a public figure and everybody will earn the opportunity to kill your character just by you being a public figure.
The other cases are mutual and they give equal friendship points to both partners in the action.
When you look at a character by double clicking him, you get a line in the description that says something like "degree to which you know this character: x%" which is the measurement whether you have reached the necessary scores or not. Once this reads 100% or greater, you can add this person to your permakill list at the bottom of the dialog. To do this, you just select the character and click the Add Perma Kill button. But think carefully before you do this. You only have 5 slots for permakill. Once the list is full with possible victims, you can't add more and you can't remove characters from the list either. The only two ways to get characters off this list are by either letting the friendship value drop under 100% or by permakilling them!
When a character on this list is attacked by you, you automatically go for permakill, there is no alternative. If you permakill a character, a murder crime will be generated against you. The victim will either disappear and a heir takes over for him, if he has one, or he will go to hell and live on as a demon and might even come back to kill you one day.
When a character is in a fight with an NPC he can leave the room at any time. When a PC wants to leave the room during such a fight, there is a skill check performed with DEX and stealing skill to see if he can escape. When a PC wants to leave the room during such a fight, there is a random check to see if he can escape. If the check fails, the PC has to wait 10 seconds before he can make another attempt to flee the room. this can become quite deadly since 10 seconds can be the difference between life and death in a PvP combat. Try again after 10 seconds until you can leave the room.
(c) 2005, Sociolotronics LLC