Urman TEO's page

And C stands for Criminal, too, and I think we've been told that stealing loot from someone else's kill is a globally Criminal act (So both group A and B can attack without Rep losses, regardless of whose corpses you're looting). Not saying the idea isn't sound, but you might want to start the group at Chaotic.

Is Occupation separate from Annexation? I'd think that an attacker could take and hold a city (Occupation), but it wouldn't 'legally' change hands (Annexation) in the eyes of the NPCs, guard NPC types, etc. until the conclusion of the war and the final peace settlement.

Guard NPC types would defend the town for the Occupier, but at the point that the settlement is legally Annexed, there could be alignment changes, loss of population as the NPCs of the wrong alignment head elsewhere, the new aligned NPCs raze structures they dislike, etc.

I think plenty of people will play characters that are evil, or bounce between evil and neutral. I expect many will belong to -N settlements, but the end of EE there could be several -E settlements.

edit: No settlement will be restricted from waging war against another settlement; LG could war against LG. Territory and power are conflict drivers that ignore alignment.

I assume the achievements aren't renamed collection quests that require some large number of items. If the achievement for Skinning 3 requires killing a large animal like a boar for its hide and other materials, I think it's reasonable for each character to have to kill/loot a separate creature. ('How did you learn to skin a boar so quickly?' 'Me and three other guys watched a fifth guy do it.') Many achievements will likely still go much faster with a party.

I'm hoping that most achievements are based on an individual action, not a party action. Even then, there are big advantages to people working in a party. Some junior character with an achievement like 'kill one humanoid' can be protected from additional mobs at a minimum. Party members might also be able to heal the character, attack the target with debuffs, etc. PFO is intended to be a group game; the system shouldn't discourage players from grouping to get through content.

It depends on how tightly GW wants to work character Reputation and associations.

They could, for example, have some Reputation mechanic that kicks in when a low Rep character does a face-to-face trade with a high Rep character. So when Louie Low-Rep can't enter a town to sell his goods, he logs on his second character, Susie Stalwart to act as his fence. But when she trades face-to-face with Louie, she takes some Rep hit for "associating with persons of low repute." (It only needs to affect the higher Rep individual; Louie doesn't gain Rep in the trade.) Eventually, Susie can't enter town either.

If (a big If) they want to control Rep like that, they might make dropping items to the ground impossible.

Audocet, would your vision of modding characters just apply to our personal character? If we could mod our enemies, to make them appear in bright neon colors for easy spotting - that seems less than optimum.

What I am wondering is, how the "achievement" recognition system will work? If I party with players below me, and go after their wanted achievements, will that hamper their gain? Will my actions, while grouped with them, count toward their gain? Assume that I already have these "achievements" and just want to help.

Is it right or wrong to "power level" new players this way?

Since it's a level-less system, I'm not sure how the game would detect that you or I are partying with players "below" us. I guess the main gist of your question is whether achievements are gained by individual actions or by party actions.

If achievements are gained by party actions, then power-leveling.. er, assisting newer players has to be seen as working as designed.

There was a dev post that explained that when they were laying out the map, they had used those campfire markers to ensure every settlement hex had no monster hexes, etc., directly adjacent. They removed most of the campfire markers, but posted the more detailed map with some that hadn't been removed. The campfires icons can be ignored.