Forlarren's page

I have always felt the kill it if it pings evil is a GM problem. They way we always played it is detect evil is asking your deity's opinion. Pinging evil is your god directly telling you that, yes the person you are detecting is better off dead. If your don't want that well as the GM now is the time to speak up (as the paladins God) or forever hold your peace.

I wanted to talk about the subtleties of managing an world spanning online community. I got compared to a pedophile at a BBQ, and generally treated like an idiot.

At the other end of the spectrum, baalbamoth brought up the same thing, though in a far more antagonistic way for sure, but the response from the CEO of Goblinworks was to threaten him with bodily harm and an insult, breaking one of his very own rules I might add. Followed by others encouraged by this behavior, pontificating on additional tortures that he "deserved".

Insult and derision has been encouraged against anyone not in complete agreement on this subject.

I can't possibly fathom how you intend to manage an MMO when your forum already has a toxic environment.

This isn't a company I can trust to be reasonable, to see more than one side of a debate, or even hold themselves to the same standard they hold others. I said I was only going to lurk, but I feel I have more than enough information to make an informed decision, and I will not be playing this game, nor will I advise others to. In fact unless things change I will be doing the opposite. As much as you look down on me personally that isn't a good thing for a niche game, in a bloated genre, that's expecting players to be the content.

People want songs not notes. Evil Lincoln hit the nail on the head. Every VTT program I have seen is trying to sell access to components, but to me this is like trying to sell pianos by the key in a world where keys are easily reproduced with a couple mouse clicks.

Instead Paizo should focus on being the iTunes of VTTs. They could even enforce a copyleft style license where any unique resources introduced by a 3rd part would be required to be added to the general pool, including both art and rules subsystems (also Game Space should be scriptable).

The other thing that Paizo could sell would be hosting. A free account would have just enough memory to host a single campaign, while for X$ a month you get X megs of extra storage space. This would be an abstraction of what you are really buying (bandwidth) because having a single database serving all instances means that the art resources are not actually getting copied.

I would buy into such a system, and before long Paizo would have such an insurmountable level of content Game Space could become the de facto VTT.

Another way to encourage community addition of resources is giving each artist a small cut of Paizos portion of the profit when someone buys an adventure. This way everyone gets paid but only Paizo deals with the details.

Anyway that's how I would do it.

Some loot ideas:

Each creature should have a plethora of lootable items depending on it's type. Lets take the common boar for example. Tusks, hide, meat, and bones would be a good start. To keep people from just loot>all make each item take some small amount of time if done in the field. Also each lootable item has some % chance of being destroyed in the fight that killed the creature. A fireballed boar reduced to ashes is useless, even the ashes have been scattered in the blast. Was it taken down by a slashing weapon? Well there goes any chance of pulling a good hide out of it. Poison? Now the meat is bad,and so on. To receive the maximum utility from a boar it should be hunted with piercing weapons, and processed at a butchers shop. But if all you need are a couple of pigs feet for a spell component or something it wouldn't be too cumbersome.

Carts and horses. There is no reason that mobs have to be field striped. Why not just pile up those boar on a cart where the local butcher can do a better job (bonuses for access to masterwork shop tools for example), and do it faster (batch jobs require the correct facilities), at some cost (gold or a % of the loot). In a system like this merchants needing supplies could hire adventures to do the killing while they pile up the cart.

Back in civilization you get a bonus to butchering when in a butchers shop or well equipped kitchen, if it's going to take a considerable amount of time to transport or processes a wand of purify food and drink could prevent spoilage. Also being in town makes it easier to separate and store the bits and pieces, skins could more or less just be stacked on a shelf but you are going to need jars for eyeballs, a barrel for the livers and salted or dried meats, etc. This would require a robust container system, something I would love to see.

You are not going to just throw a bunch of unprocessed pig parts in a backpack and towing around all the necessary containers is a pain (especially if there is a breakage mechanic). But it's sill useful to field strip a pig if you find yourself out in the middle of nowhere and need rations or maybe just a specific part or two.

Also carrion should attract carrion eaters.

The same system could also be used for logging, fishing, mining, etc. Raw goods should come into town (mostly) raw, where they are processed and put on the market. Wile collecting raw goods gives opportunities for players to interact as guards, collectors, caravan handler, highway men, etc.

Addendum: some processing could be done in field camps. A lone ranger could make a decent living as a trapper/hunter bringing in a stack of skins he treated and tanned in a field camp. A logging camp could cut the logs into rough planks for ease of transport if they are not floating the logs. A mining camp could do some basic smelting, and so on. Anything more advanced would require returning to civilization.

I would love to see no auction house in a game again. Finding merchant houses in early SWG was cool too. If you bought an item from the market it often had a manufactures tag, and if you found their house you could often get a good discount as well as order custom gear.

I would like to expand on the "transportation" element of the player generated economy. This is where you will make it or break it. SWG broke it not because it was nonsensical, because with careful consideration and exploration the difference between good and perfect equipment was vast. On more than one occasion our team of a dozen or so carefully equipped characters would decimate our enemies facing between two and five to one odds and we wiped the floor with our enemies taking base after base. While tactics played a large role, it was careful planing at every stage of the production processes that made the biggest difference.

Where it broke was encumbrance. There wasn't any. Not in any meaningful way at least. You didn't need a binary load lifter to lift loads. That excluded the droid manufactures for a huge part of the game. A player could instead just carry huge loads on his person, jump on a speeder and that was that.

If instead lets say you needed to bring load lifters to move your resources from the factory, to the cargo carrier, then off again, not only does that include more professions (cargo carrier builders, droid builders/operators), but also slows the process down enough to put guards to work, guarding the collection processes, the transportation processes (the more massive the hauler the slower it should go vs speeder but less efficient methods), and it also spreads the wealth around so the crafters don't end up with all the money. Also by increasing interdependency you create tighter communities, as well as emergent content (ala eve's PVP).

On a slightly related note, give every player a purpose no matter the level. Easy to obtain ores should be required for every item. If it's made of steel then iron ore mined by an army of lowbies should provide it to the higher level characters, instead of just increasing yields for the higher level character. In place of having higher yields more levels in mining mean you can mine more difficult and valuable ores. Low level smiths could provide smelted iron ingots to higher level smiths that then add ingredients to create specialized ingots and/or equipment (iron ingots into steel ingots, steel ingots into specialized or higher quality steel ingots). Give people a reason in engage in master apprentice relationships, get the levels mixing together, and the race to level 20 will be far less important/necessary.

I hope that made some sense, I got a fever today so I might have been a bit rambly.

I'm seeing a lot of confusion over point buy vs random, game theory and design decisions in general. So in the interests of understanding instead of offering my opinion (a very strong opinion at that), I offer research material.

First of all I would suggest reading the RPG Design Patterns. Specifically the Point Spend Attributes and Random Attribute sections. Many of the entries were compiled from knowledge gleaned from an indy RPG forum called "the forge".

Bringing us to "the forge". If you are into theory, there is no other place like it. The archive is a treasure trove of very carefully reasoned and thoroughly argued RPG design tropes. I suggest starting with the glossary, then reading the archive. The RPG Theory forum is mostly about how each rule impacts the game as a whole and why you would choose each and every rule while the GNS Model Discussion forum separates play styles and allows a designer to better compile individual rules to match a specific flavor or flow of the game.

I hope this helps reduce some of the more antagonistic banter by providing a common framework to hinge our discussions on in the future.

Powergaming

A potentially dysfunctional technique of Hard Core Gamist play, characterized by maximizing character impact on the game-world or player impact on the dialogue of play by whatever means available

I'm having a difficult time finding the essay on Gamist play but it's in there if anyone is interested, I was going to go on but life calls me away from the internet.

Happy gaming everyone.