Beilian Trask's page

I wonder if there will be a way to play a bounty hunter type and still remain neutral or good? The blog says killing the target, but I wonder if maybe you could do something else, like arrest the target or something? Or does killing a target outside of a city (or outside the 'law' zone) not count against you?

I really like the idea of being a bounty hunter who chases 'criminals' down, not because of the money (added bonus) but because those players need brought to justice. JUSTICE!

And another thing, even if not accepting bounties, wouldn't a Paladin striking down evil eventually lead to their downfall? I have never really thought of the Paladin as a "we are going to work things out." I think of them more as "I WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN IN THE NAME OF MY GOD YOU UNHOLY HEATHEN!"

...that might be my own personal view of them, though... XD

These are excellent points. According to the new blog, it doesn't sound like there is a situation where killing isn't evil (only more or less so given the specific circumstances). But as it stands, it seems like both Paladins and Bounty Hunters will be punished for killing even seriously evil characters with a (small) shift towards evil. I'm not sure I understand what GW is going for here, especially since it seems like their anti-griefing mechanics are getting in the way of at least one pretty core principle of Pathfinder.

Is there a way to gain good for killing a PC? Like killing a really evil character or one with an accumulation of Heinous tags? Or is the only way to gain good through killing in PvE?

And why is there always reputation loss attached to it? It seems as though reputation is specifically measuring level of fame (as opposed to infamy) and not simply notoriety (without valence). Is this the intention?

Greetings to you, leaders and members of The Empyrean Order,

I come bearing a simple introduction. I am Beilian Trask, newly appointed Emissary of Pax Aeternum. It is my duty to aid Ambassador Ezikial Krow in any and all diplomatic relations between our two communities in the days to come.

I look forward to a bright future in the River Kingdoms for us all,
Emissary Trask

@Beilian Trask - If you pledge at the Buddy level, that will create two accounts. You will be able to assign those accounts as you wish. Those accounts can invite/accept a Friend link and they'll get the Shieldmate Mark.

RyanD

Fantastic; question solved. Thanks for your patience, Ryan.

@All - Buddy and Guild rewards include multiple accounts (2x and 6x). You'll be able to allocate those accounts after the Kickstarter ends (and you'll have all the time you need, there's no rush). Accounts will link together with an offer/acceptance mechanism to grant the Shieldmate Mark.

That's great, thanks Ryan. So, if I'm understanding correctly, someone with a Buddy pledge will get two accounts (one for him and one for a friend) and they can Shieldmate them together to get Marks for all characters on each?

Or do you need 2 distinct Buddy level pledges to make this work (so that there will be 4 PfO in-game accounts with Marks of Awesome)?

CFG gets 6 of everything except add ons and the guild starter pack.

Im not sure what a mark of awesome is though. Add-ons are per account so if you want every one in the CFG to say have the title you need to add 60 to your pledge.

The Shieldmate/Mark of Awesome upgrade is not an add-on. It is something that will be available to everyone once the KS ends. According to the Kickstarter, you connect two KS pledges together (so my $500 CFG pledge and my friend's $100 Pioneer pledge) and you become 'Shieldmates', each of you gets the Mark of Awesome.

It says 'Characters on your KS accounts get the Mark of Awesome'. I'm guessing this applies to all characters from all game accounts stemming from those KS accounts. So characters from all 6 game accounts generated by one CFG pledge + whatever game accounts are generated by the Shieldmated KS account will get the Mark of Awesome.

But I wanted confirmation from GW that I am interpreting this correctly because it is definitely not something to miss out on.

Will CFGs get 6 links to share since there are six accounts? Or does the Mark of Awesome effect trickle down to all game accounts generated by the KS pledge (all 6 accounts for a CFG) once that $500 pledge has selected a Shieldmate? Or (heaven forbid) will only the person who pledged $500 get to have a Mark of Awesome and the other 5 are left to their own devices?

I ask because we are organizing ~4 CFGs, pretty much our entire team of players, and would hate to see a missed opportunity to get Marks of Awesome for everyone who has been so incredibly supportive of this Kickstarter since the early days.

Welcome Valthalion :)

As a new member to Pax myself, I have to say that the feeling of a cohesive community runs very strong in Pax. It seems groups are often trying to sell themselves as being 'like a family' in many different contexts (I'm sure we've all heard a boss at work do this at some time or another). But with Pax it really is accurate. Everyone is so incredibly kind and welcoming. Truly a tremendous collection of awesome people :)

Looking forward to getting to know you over the next couple weeks.

If I am understanding correctly: someone going from Guild to Pioneer today, even if they pledged on day 1, would lose their spot in month one of early enrollment?

Edit: I figured out my confusion, 'lower tier' is anything lower than Buddy because Pioneer is already past the 2000 first month entry while Buddy and Guild are not.

I wonder if we will be able to transfer the 'twin' status to other alts if we decide to start over.

Haha, there was at least one unexpected death ;)

But seriously, thanks for letting me hang out. I think getting involved in online PnP with everyone at Pax is the only way I will maintain my sanity until PfO is released.

Thankee, it was an incredible amount of fun. I really enjoyed meeting everyone and helping shape the future of Pax Aeternum. I can genuinely say I am even more excited now for the game having met such wonderful people to play with :)

If the players aren't worried about a TPK, the tension isn't high enough ;)

Likely, Azouth is right. Let's hope it is something more akin to activating a new toolbar that we get to set.

Amazing. So glad I put my application in. Everybody in Pax has been so great and welcoming, and this post just makes me love it even more.

I strongly, strongly suggest that any interested parties go here: http://www.paxgaming.com/index.php?topic=922.0

It's a pretty straightforward process, answer some initial questions and then get to know the members on the forum while they ask you some more questions :)

Agreed. Sounds like they are trying to hit the gambit. Weapons, armor, cosmetics (expect more hats), consumables, and this last one seems maybe like structure decor?

Karnov wrote:

I like the idea in principle, but I have a question. How long would the graves stick around for? It would be really silly if it ended up like UO and players couldn't walk 3 feet in the wilderness without tripping over a grave.

It is the same reservation I have about individual/non-instanced player housing.

Depends on the number of people I suppose, it'd have to be tested, maybe a few days or a week or so?

Mind you, they don't have to be marked graves.

Daniel.

They don't need to be marked. They could also be visible only to the resurrected player the grave belongs to.

I also didn't have in mind that they would last very long given the rate of resurrection. Maybe an hour? Maybe you only have the most recent (or the first) grave-site as a permanent (or semi-permanent)?

I suppose all the specifics will depends on the graves purpose. If it's just to protect loot and items, then the owner shouldn't have more than some small amount of time to recover. If it's also for dark rituals, then 24 hours would give the necromancer enough time to actually find a grave without forcing one to appear himself. And so on.

Apologies if this was addressed but:

I recall hearing that to keep crafting a big part of the game, item durability and deterioration would be very important. Are these special items going to have limited durability? Will only some of them (the functional ones vs. the cosmetic ones)? Will there be an option to repair the ones that broke?

promotes "50 Shades" style RP

I know the reference, but I don't understand it. What does that mean?

As an additional note, the devs seem to like the idea of players defending territory for a set period of time (a couple of different proposed scenarios have described this type of action). They brought up death as an example of when they thought this would come up: when your friend dies, you don't loot his body because it will destroy some of his items as stated:

However, if another player finds your husk before you do, they'll be able to loot it. They won't recover everything that you had in your inventory—just a random selection—but the rest of your inventory will be destroyed and removed from the game. If you die surrounded by allies, they can't just pick up all of your equipment for you, as doing so would cause some of it to be removed from the game, but your allies could attempt to defend your husk until you return to it, so that you lose nothing but travel time.

This didn't seem too well received by people in the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves thread, so maybe burials will provide an alternate mechanic that could be manipulated to establish a similar effect but will resonate better with the players.

In my experience, food and drink (besides ale) go largely ignored at the table. Players will readily assume they have rations in their packs at all times if you let them. However, in special scenarios, it can be really interesting to include food/drink and hunger/thirst as a mechanic, such as long travel. Maybe they ran out of rations and haven't seen a town in weeks so they need to spend time hunting/scavenging to maintain a good clip. It forces the characters to alter their play style just for a little bit, mixing it up can be fun.

But generally, I don't think food or drink need to have large role in PfO. They should certainly be made available if possible for RP purposes, but maybe only under certain circumstances (travel) should they be required.

I think ale should definitely have a function in the game, even if it is cosmetic like having a player character say *hic* sporadically or change the walking animation after too many. Maybe it gives a penalty to hit as well for a non-cosmetic effect. It just feels like ale has too prominent a place in fantasy based tabletop culture not to do anything.

I see. Good point :), sorry about the confusion. I have a bit of an axe to grind apparently.

People don't usually come back to life either, so it's not really a problem, Goddess of Fate can tell them :P

I've heard similar arguments for other mechanics (the bounty system) and I guess that's fine.

The purpose here is to make something that feels more organic and genuine, rather than just be hand-wavy and say 'it's magic and we say so'. There's no need to diminish magic in the PfO world by consistently reducing it to a mechanic explanation with minimal substance. A creative solution can be easy and much more powerful for the gaming experience.

It seems wrong that allies have so little they can do to help someone who has died versus enemies.

I assume that will change with healing potions and resurrection spells and the like. I hope. But I would definitely like to see this implemented either way.

Beilian Trask wrote:

I question the idea of a text notification, but maybe you could re-skin it as having left a message on the cairn stones or whatever grave marker you used (since we think they might be coming back to get their stuff). I fear for nasty messages that might be left, since this is the internet after all, but maybe it would be a nice way to encourage someone.

I think what he meant was an automated message saying "This guy has buried your body," and it keeps a record of that in an event history you can go back and look at.

Yeah, I followed. From an RP perspective, I don't know how a player would automatically 'know' who buried their husk, so I tried to think of an alternative that doesn't require 'magic' as an explanation and in turn wouldn't make magic feel mundane.

@Beilian settlements will take time and resources to build and will need to be carefully defended. It would be very wasteful and expensive to treat proper settlements as temporary.

It will make plenty sense for bandits to have hideouts, but hideouts will lack many of the facilities of settlements.

I see, I was thinking of settlements as something more like a camp. I wonder if there might be some way to provide these facilities to 'hideouts' or whatever they are termed. I'm lacking in knowledge about the kinds of facilities you are referring to, so I can't think of possible suggestions.

I would like to see it come with a text notification and note on your death log of if you were buried and by whom.

This lets players know who's got their backs and can turn a death into a positive experience that results in new friends.

Andius, your comment on the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves blog thread is what inspired this idea (and I wrote about it briefly there). I originally thought burying the dead would keep their items safe from looting as an alternative to 'sending' them to the player.

I liked that it would encourage a greater camaraderie among players (Good aligned in this case likely), a feeling like we aren't alone and maybe we can watch out for each other.

I question the idea of a text notification, but maybe you could re-skin it as having left a message on the cairn stones or whatever grave marker you used (since we think they might be coming back to get their stuff). I fear for nasty messages that might be left, since this is the internet after all, but maybe it would be a nice way to encourage someone.

Bandit towns? Are you serious?

Players who get all the many disadvantages listed are going to further disadvantage themselves by advertising where they are with a big red "kick me" flag for every crazed crusader within a hundred miles?

No, that's not gonna happen.

The settlements don't have to be permanent. Why can't it be like minded evil-doers setting up camp in spot, taking what they want for a while, and moving on before the armies of Good come to say hello? I'll retract including evil kingdoms here because that would be a completely different kind of feat to accomplish.

It's obvious they are stacking the deck against bandits, but just like for good aligned players it means you need to work together to achieve something greater. The objectives are different and you don't have the luxury of game mechanics allowing you to trust your allies, but it's not impossible.

Death is a big part of religion. Adding features to aid in the practice of religion would certainly help the religions of Galarion to be much more developed and important part of the game. Formal funerals might be nice too. A formal funeral might actually result in the person coming back with no penalties or even a buff.

For the truly evil, if there is a mechanic that leaves you unconscious rather than dead, give a mechanic for human sacrifice. The character perform an action that takes a long time. Results in the unconscious victim dying, the person performing the sacrifice gets a buff and a huge boost toward evil. And the victim might suffer additional penalties. You would probably need to have a required evil alignment to do it and possibly certain Cleric skills would be required too.

It certainly could turn into something more elaborate. Maybe burials are a class specific mechanic (limited to divine classes).

With sacrifice, I imagine that might belong to a separate mechanic, maybe something more ritual like that requires the coordinated efforts of a couple players to carry out.

I would love to see burials as a mechanic in this game. It would provide a really interesting choice for players when they encounter the corpses/husks of other players.

The way I envision in-game burials, broadly, it would take some amount of time, maybe a full minute or two of uninterrupted concentration to enact the process, and it would provide a benefit to the deceased WITHOUT providing a direct benefit to the adventurer performing the burial.

So why waste your time burying someone else if it isn't going to help you? It is a choice to perform an altruistic act (please don't argue the definition of altruism here, replace it with 'pro-social' if the previous term offends you). Good aligned players might feel inclined to bury the body to aid the deceased in their next life (which happens to be starting immediately one hex away). Evil aligned might feel just as inclined to loot.

Perhaps the benefits conferred on the deceased through burial are:
-Reputation bump
-Reduced death penalties (whatever those end up being)
-Hiding the corpse from other players and preventing looting (or making looting more difficult by incurring an additional reputation downshift for grave robbing).

Or maybe the corpse is surrounded by monsters and you just can't spend the time clearing the path and defending the body (or have your friends defend while you bury), but passing by nags at your conscience so.

Could be a very neat effect on the player behind the character as well.

At this point, I see no feasible way to play a bandit. Crappy towns, crappy gear, crappy respawn, endless bounties, unable to trade with anyone, risk of getting wiped out by Good Companies...

Can anyone tell me how there could reasonably be enough bandits to even justify guards in this game? I think we need to tone down the automatic clobbering of bandits to an insane degree, and make the players work to keep the bandits down. Because by removing bandits we remove the content for the rest of us.

Location? A coveted prize requires Good aligned players to travel through a well known 'lawless' region that has no problems trading with CE. There may not be as many regions as Good aligned settlements/towns, but they might be very well placed, either by the game or by a league of bandit players.

Could be a lot of these kinds of areas. Could even be merit badges that indirectly force interactions in these regions.

"Where's the crown?" "On the other side of the Bandit Woods." "Crap...."

Thank you for posting the meeting recording. It was a great summary of major game mechanics and Pax Aeternum's intentions for PfO. I recommend a listen for people who don't have the time to synthesize information across the thread(s) on those topics.

@Beilian Trask - it's magic.....

Sure.

I poorly misrepresented my point. I didn't mean 'let's bring realism into a world of magic and monsters'. Though that's how it came out.

I meant, 'here is a suggestion for an alternative system that might be a cool way of bringing something that approximates real world phenomenology into Golarion for a more immersive experience'.

Edit: real world = tabletop phenomenology. my bad, its late.

I should clarify my example above by stating explicitly that the farmer has only enough for one girl and he is resolute about saving his own daughters life. Of course. Otherwise the thought experiment was moot.

Lower the scale a bit:

If a LG Paladin is trying to collect medicine to save a little girl's life and the only salve he can get to the girl in time belongs to a farmer who's own daughter is dying of the same illness, is he going to murder the farmer for it? Or is he going to try to find another solution?

This is extreme, but it seems you are only tweaking the scale when you talk about kingdoms going to war over resources.

Thanks for sharing this, Dakcenturi.

Has anyone considered not allowing a bounty to be placed on a killer for a first infraction? Maybe it takes two or three murders to allow bounties to start collecting?

I wrote in another thread briefly about a 'revenge' system that might take the place of the bounty system for these initial infractions.

- A contract can not be accepted by a hunter if the hunter is a member of the killers charter.

- A contract can not be accepted by a hunter that is allied with the killers charter.

What about 'cannot be collected' instead? That way if someone wanted to go turncoat on a friend they could accept the contract, carry out the attack successfully, but wouldn't get the rewards at all until they dropped from the charter/alliance. The devs haven't spoken about collecting rewards for bounties yet (piece of ear, anyone?).

I don't understand how they intend this bounty system to play out in character. No governing body (certainly no upstanding body) would allow a bounty to be placed based upon the hearsay of one individual. If you are murdered in the wilderness and no one else was around, even if you resurrect to tell the tale, it's the word of one man (or woman) who could easily be lying for personal reasons.

I am of the mind that certain conditions surrounding murders in the game (outside of lawful jurisdiction, no other eye witnesses, something of that sort) should activate a separate system; some kind of REVENGE system that would allow you, and whatever posse you drum up, to attack the individual without consequence (or mitigated consequence in the alignment/reputation/criminal flag domains). Maybe it would require the vengeful attack to occur in a similarly lawless region as the initial affront, maybe not. But once you have exacted revenge (or failed), the system deactivates and you are left to enjoy (or wallow in) the result.

Quote:

Bounties can only be issued when a character unlawfully kills another. Killing an opponent as a part of a declared war, or in an area that does not have laws against murder, will not trigger the bounty system.

So it's not murder just because its in the wilderness? I thought that's where most murders would happen...

Or is just a subset of murder that doesn't trigger the bounty system because there is not law in that region to accept the bounty? Doesn't quite make sense.

I also wonder if people marked by a bounty automatically show up on everyone's screen as 'Kill me'. Would it make more sense to have a bounty wall in the local town barracks that people would need to actively peruse (i.e. "learn the faces and crimes of the bounties") in order to be able to attack them. In-character, if I kill a person and they just happen to have a bounty on them, my intent was still unlawful murder, but I got lucky and won't have the law come after me. But shouldn't I at least fall away from Good and towards Evil alignment a little?

Uhg. You just made me realize a catch in my system of automatically sending their stuff back to them. That would interfere with meaningful trade. As would any kind of mail system.

I like the rest of your idea though. You could make it so when you recover someone's gear they get a message with your name on it. And you could have a loot recovery system kind of like a mail system that is localized (So you can only pick it up from the same location where it was dropped off.)

What if your friends (or even just helpful adventurers) could bury your body? Maybe it would take a full minute or two, something that requires a small sacrifice of uninterrupted time, but prevents anyone besides your own self from looting your corpse-husk.

It doesn't help return your items if you died in a spot swamped with monsters of a higher level than you, but maybe there should be punishment for biting off more than you can chew. Maybe that should be the real incentive for your friends or kind strangers to protect your husk/grave-site: give you a fighting chance of recovering all your gear.

Quote:

When a player is killed by another player, the killer (and his group if he is in one) has looting rights to that player's husk; if anyone else loots it, they get the Thief tag and become a more desirable PvP target.

I just read this, Blaeringr. Seems to indicate you might have been right and friends looting for you will get tagged. The permanent item loss still stands though.

So within the limits that have been painted of that scenario, a group who is attacked in PvP and witnesses the tragic death of a trusted friend will be labelled and branded as thieves if they take the thoughtful action of recovering his stuff for him.

Curious.

The blog didn't say it explicitly, but it seemed like the consequence for your teammates looting your corpse wasn't that they would be branded thieves, but it did explicitly say instead that there would be some amount of permanent item loss: anyone looting your corpse gets a random assortment of items from it (equipment and threaded items exempt), the rest are destroyed unless you pick it up yourself. Hence the game of King of the Hill your friends are playing while you hustle back; they just don't want to destroy some of your items.

It is mentioned here in the To Live or Die blog from earlier:

However, until you return to your husk, you are in danger of losing the rest of your inventory. If you get to your husk before anyone else, you'll be able to get all your stuff back. However, if another player finds your husk before you do, they'll be able to loot it. They won't recover everything that you had in your inventory—just a random selection—but the rest of your inventory will be destroyed and removed from the game. If you die surrounded by allies, they can't just pick up all of your equipment for you, as doing so would cause some of it to be removed from the game, but your allies could attempt to defend your husk until you return to it, so that you lose nothing but travel time.

Sounds like there are three potential consequences to the action sequence of killing and looting a corpse: reputation loss, criminal flagging, and item loss.

Reputation loss comes from the killing act under certain circumstances. This is getting into the 'unlawful' or 'murder' aspect of killing when you aren't just following a bounty. Does rep loss come from looting a corpse you have no claim to as well?

Criminal flagging can come from looting a corpse you don't have 'rights' to; meaning you didn't kill the target yourself and don't get to enjoy the spoils of victory. If you were the killer, you don't get a flag for looting, but I imagine if it was an 'unlawful' murder you've got other flags to worry about.

Permanent item loss as a result of looting hasn't been brought up by anyone on this thread yet and it seems to be the main cause for needing your friends protect your husk since the only person who can loot your corpse without causing some amount of permanent item loss is you.

I'm not sure how I feel about this random selection looting system. Let your friends grab your stuff, or else make there be item loss when you pick it up yourself as well; I'm not sure I understand the function of the double standard except to put your friends out and hear them sigh over teamspeak even louder when someone goes down. I'm exaggerating, but the consequences for not reaching your body in time seem a little too arbitrary and inorganic.

Rafkin wrote:

From what little I know about making these games the biggest barrier to introducing new races is armor skins. Since gnomes and halflings have very similiar body sizes I would think introducing them both could be doable.

I hope so, because I know some of our members are really looking forward to the halflings, as well as others who love gnomes!

That would be great. More broadly, variety in character creation is something highly valued for MMOs (and a long-standing tradition in tabletop games limited only by imagination and creativity). Seeing too many doppelgangers running around because players are limited to a select few cookie cutter creation choices can take a bit of the punch away from an immersive gaming experience.

Have they written about the character creation process in any detail aside from race/class choices? The tech demo had only models for the iconic Pathfinder heros, which didn't lend any idea of the customizability they will implement.

Thanks, Dak. Strongly considering an application to Pax; I've done my homework but there's something I would want to PM you about before I make a commitment. I'm at work, so I couldn't send a message until later.

As for the meet and greet, sounds like it will be a lot of fun from what I've glimpsed. Unfortunately, I'm PST and will be working well past 6pm my time. Daydreaming about sneaking away with a laptop and hiding in a utility closet to attend though.

Hello all,

Just stumbled onto PfO recently through a Kobold Press newsletter and have spent the time lurking and catching up on the forums.

Big fan of what Pax Aeternum is trying to accomplish here, so I figured I would introduce myself to everyone.

With that, hello :)