Goblin Squad Member
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It is about 99% certain that there will not be non-pvp servers. It is improbable that there will be multiple servers, and the general ideas of the game, pretty much all require PVP to exist for the game to have any meaning or much depth.
The activity should be considered for prohibition on servers marked NON-PvP, if such should exist.
Time will tell, I was just listing it as an, "If you're gonna have non-pvp servers, you should consider prohibiting this idea there along with bashing heads."
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Goblin Squad Member
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If thieves can, with a successful break in, steal loot, then they should lose loot with an unsuccessful breakin.
Perhaps a mechanic could be introduced that would place a dead thieves ENTIRE inventory into the secure area of a house.
A settlement should have the ability to label a character "outlaw", if that character does not follow a settlement's rules. That is, outside the law and no longer protected by the settlement rules and guards.
For thievery or any other crimes against a settlement's laws: settlement leaders could have the option to seize all property the criminal has stored inside that settlement's control, provided they can locate it. Real property like a house or shop could be easily be confiscated as a punishment or to cover fines or weregild.
Thieves were historically punished with amputation, branding, or death, even for petty crimes. I'd think if a world that has people respawning on death, settlements would seek creative ways to punish lawbreakers with property confiscations, imprisonment and long, lingering deaths like impalement and exposure.
[You log back in. You're still hanging in an iron cage suspended from the city wall. You'd pick the lock on the cage, but it was riveted shut, not locked. Guess they've dealt with rogues before. Gods, but you're thirsty.]
Bottom line: if you play a thief, don't get caught. Steal from strangers and in strange towns. Be prepared to move a lot.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Why not just allow thieves to break in and get 1 random item or 1 Item stack from your personal vault, then a X minutes cooldown timer kicks in, so no thief can get to your vault for the next 5 minutes while the last thief needs to wait 10 mins?
Of of course, how well you disarmed the traps etc. can play a role here, like say, you disarmed them all perfectly then you get 2 random items or more from his vault, and the cooldown timer is reduced. If you set of the traps you get nothing and the timer is increased ?
Letting the thief character run mini-quests, I think, is the way to go. Something like:
First step of burglary is "case the joint". Let's say a house has 20 storage slots. An average thief spends some amount of time (in game hours-days) and if successful, is told what 3-5 slots have in them (randomly determined). This is general reconnaissance, chatting with servants, vendors, etc. The burglar can do this any number of time to get a better view of what is in the house. Each time he does it, there's a chance of being suspicious. Case the joint also gives the thief information on the best time to hit the house, based on owners, neighbors, guards, etc, etc.
In the "hit the house" step, thief has to get in (either rough or subtle), and the chance of being detected goes way up if he didn't do a good job in "case the joint". Once in, the thief has his pick of the known items and maybe a couple extras. Interior defenses might have to be dealt with, which requires more time inside...
In "the getaway" step, the game checks for detection, based on the number of items taken (time spent in the job), the number of suspicious "case the joint" failures, and such. Successive thefts in an area in a short amount of time (by *any* thief) are more likely to be noticed by alert guards and neighbors. Stolen items are likely hot (especially if expensive/uncommon) and either can be used or fenced.
So the average successful thief doesn't do a half-dozen break-and-enters in a night. He might manage one or two a week, with the need to reconnoiter, plan, execute, and lay low. It can be good money, but other trades can be less risky.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is why sandbox is so fun. The security of your stuff should be determined by factors:
1. The type and qaulity of container it is in. ie, a chest in the woods, a house in town etc. This should be determined by you characters resources and abilities.
2. If it is in a residence, what type of security does that settlement have. Is it a village, a town, or a city. Does it belong to a kingdom.
The quality of these item should determine how hard it is to steal it. And these should be opposed to the thiefs abilities. If its in a chest in your house in a village, not too hard. In your mansion in the city in a kingdom, real tough. In a bank in that same city, impossible, but probable at a cost
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Goblin Squad Member
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A player should never go log off, go to bed, wake up, and find all their stuff gone and their house burnt down. The only way to accomplish this is through purchasable NPC protection, or making player structures require permission to enter(SWG).And this is what happens in City of Heroes/Villians, Everquest, etc. Heck, there's even cartoons of players who have had this happen to them. They log off, have a three-day weekend or a particularly tough week on the job, and when they log in again somebody else is living in their house/fortress and all their stuff has been sold on the black market. A bunch of teenagers from South Korea or Seattle has cleaned them out in a matter of hours because the player just happened to have a Real Life situation called sleep, a job, a date, etc. All because the player happened to have an exclusive item because they joined the game in the first month or paid Paypal bucks for it from a professional gamer. Or had a nice location for the 200-400 person gaming team.
Balderdash.
This is a problem going on right now with City of Heroes/Villians, who charge "rent" for fortresses, even if you're the only person in it, and it's in an extradimensional space nobody else can access.
There has to be a balance. I think that balance should fall heavily on the side of the defenders but when Bob the Barely Active builds a little shed in what happens to be the premium spot for the massive fortress a 50 man clan wants to build, they should be able to knock it down and build there. Otherwise you get a stagnant world filled with the inactive stuctures of players who left the game long ago. And new players coming to the world and saying "This place is dead... and there is nowhere to build!"
I personally think that structures should have a massive amount of hitpoints. They should be able to be destroyed slowly by things like sledge hammers, axes, and rams. Or quickly by highly expensive siege equipment with highly expensive ammo such as catapults with magically enchanted explosive ammo. So like a regular player house could be destroyed in 2 days with hand tools by a group of 10 players going at it 24/7. Or in one hour by a single catapult, but it would cost about twice as much to destroy a house as it would to build it.
Going inactive would leave the house in disrepair. So it would fall into ruin and lose 10% of its total health each week after 2 months inactivity. This would work like 90% health the first week. 81% health the 2nd week. 72.9% the 3rd. (And on and on subtracting 10% of the total REMAINING health.) If they become active again they gain 10% of total health back per week.
Forts, watchtowers, and castles should take a VERY long time to and be ENORMOUSLY expensive to take over. Say a large clan spends a year building their dream kingdom complete with walls, towers, a fort, and NPC guards. This should take an entire week of 10 catapults going 24/7 to bring down, provided no repairs are made. It shouldn't be like a Darkfall siege where you lose your town in an hour. It should take a persistent offensive campaign.
As far as thieves sneaking in and stealing things from houses. This should be EXTREMELY limited if allowed. I personally think that thieves should mainly be used in dungeons and against NPC houses. What the heck is the point of a house with storage if a level 20 rouge with high lockpick and trap-finding/disarming skills can just break in and take everything on a moments notice? It is not a viable mechanic.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm fine with losing stuff when I'm online. If I'm offline and get cleaned out? Sorry, that's insane. If that is how you want to play, when a rogue kills you, find him and give him your entire home's inventory. Let the rest of us play a game. Because in real life, towns need a decent group of people payed 70k a year to protect it from thieves, and I don't want to have to pay someone to do that online.
With respect to attacking settlements there needs to be a lead time of a week where a challenge is issued and the crap needs to go down on a weekend. Realistic? No, but everyone has lives, and this would make the wild areas and being a part of the settlements in them more accessible to everyone.
No 3AM stuff, no destroying buildings for days of real-time or anything crazy like that. Crap is going down Saturday, a rival settlement is attacking, be on to defend, the attack will probably be off and on all day unless someone's spirit breaks.
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As far as home burglaries go, it should be possible during the above mentioned windows of opportunity where the settlement is vulnerable to assault. Normally it shouldn't be possible. Yeah, it'd be fun for me playing a rogue, until someone stole all my crap when life necessitated I be offline for 5 days straight.
Being able to burgle caravans, pick pockets, and potentially rob businesses is more than enough thievery to go around without invading people's inner sanctums. If you are willing to go into an active war-zone to rob a house that's a good risk/reward ratio. Disarming traps and picking locks you've got so down pat you could do it half-asleep is no risk all reward.
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Goblin Squad Member
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With respect to attacking settlements there needs to be a lead time of a week where a challenge is issued and the crap needs to go down on a weekend. Realistic? No, but everyone has lives, and this would make the wild areas and being a part of the settlements in them more accessible to everyone.
No 3AM stuff, no destroying buildings for days of real-time or anything crazy like that. Crap is going down Saturday, a rival settlement is attacking, be on to defend, the attack will probably be off and on all day unless someone's spirit breaks.
I respectfully disagree. From all indications it is going to take months or years to build up major cities. They shouldn't topple in a couple hours. It should require a massive investment of both time and resources. Real sieges could last months, and you have to pay for those soldiers to sit there outside that city, and eat, and be sheltered, and stay warm, beyond the ammo for your siege weapons.
People are not going to want to invest huge amounts of time into building entire communities if they know it can be lost, and they might not even be there if they are having a party, church function, or have to work on weekends.
I would rather see epic warfare where frontlines change slowly over time and people become extremely invested in their territory than Darkfall style where clans are constantly taking new cities all over the map and ownership of a holding is as constant as the direction the wind blows.
Smaller settlements on the other hand would fall pretty quickly, but it would still require twice the cost of building them unless they are utterly neglected. The sheer cost alone will help protect most settlements that are actively being used. The other deterance could be forming communities and alliances. If you are a part of a small village your neighbors might notice. "Hey they are coming to knock down Bob's house!!!" even if Bob is offline. If you have alliances they can then alert nearby towns or the fort in the nearby hex which will then come to your aid.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Capturing something unattended should be at least as time-consuming and labor-intensive as building it on an uncontested site.
Destroying something should at least as labor-intensive than capturing it. (perhaps by requiring the building to be captured first)
Once a building is captured, any inventory belongs to the new owners. Consumables stockpiled there for the defense might be the majority of the contents, but I can see a reason for other valuables to be present as well.
Oh, and factional warfare should have a nontrivial cost. Spawn rushing should not be a viable tactic.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Capturing something unattended should be at least as time-consuming and labor-intensive as building it on an uncontested site.
I think this is the heart of the "right" solution, understanding that the labor resources will directly affect the time required.
And what will happen is that you'll get those who min-max whatever is needed, and do nothing else but break into player houses...I hate any "can'ts". If something should be prohibitively difficult...make it so, but don't make it can't. If you can rob houses, you should be able to rob businesses and banks.
Just make it based on a niche skill that contributes little else.
I think what KitNyx (Forencith) was getting at is that it's better if the game uses strong incentives to control behavior, rather than using arbitrary restrictions. And I don't think he intended the "niche skill" requirement to be the only disincentive.
One simple solution is to have a chance that the thief will be discovered, allowing the victim to engage the Bounty System, or perhaps even engage a Legitimate Breadmaking Business. I'm sure there are other ways to properly align the risk/reward ratio as well.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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It doesn't matter. Whatever is brought up is going to boil down to the end to an AI mechanic. A.I. mechancs can and will be gamed as I've described.
There are ways to make it a PvP system. What I don't see is a way to enforce a fair risk/reward system for stealing, given that the thief will only have to risk what he can afford to lose, but the victim will have to store the things he CAN'T afford to lose.
Pickpocketing carried items, on the other hand, would have the thief risk everything he carried, plus his reputation, death and potentially a bounty, while the victim would risk only their carried items, which are already subject to loss by mugging.
You guys can say stuff like things should take days to tear down, but how fun is that in reality?
Anyone who ever beat on a keep door for 2 hours in DAoC can tell you it's excessively boring. It's really bad gameplay. There is a line between simulation and game you must find if you want something fun.
Spending all day doing something even more repetitive than killing the same mob spawn in an asian f2p grinder totally doesn't sound awesome. It's not even very realistic either. Things take less time to destroy than they do to build. It's why the mongol horde could raze a village in 1 day while it may have taken years for it to grow up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It doesn't matter. Whatever is brought up is going to boil down to the end to an AI mechanic. A.I. mechancs can and will be gamed as I've described.
That's awfully fatalistic. Are you just talking about thieving in player-controlled structures? I was imagining a system where the chance to be discovered could be slightly mollified by the thief's skill, but was primarily a function of the environment in which the thieving was taking place. Large, well-run (healthy) Settlements would have very high chances of discovery. It would probably make sense to allow the thief to spend extra resources to increase his chance to avoid detection - something that would make it entirely impractical to consistently steal lower-value items.
Really, it's just a question of properly aligning incentives with desired behavior. If it costs the thief more than he's likely to gain in order to avoid detection, then he's not going to risk it. However, if a mid-level Settlement ends up in possession of a very high-end item, then that should actually create an strong incentive for thieves to try and take it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You guys can say stuff like things should take days to tear down, but how fun is that in reality?
Actually, what I've always favored is something that takes sporadic time over a period of several days. I'm thinking something along the lines of 2-hour events that occur at set times over three consecutive days. If the attackers outperform the defenders enough, that might be reduced to a single 2-hour event.
The point is not to mimic reality, but to give a realistic chance at defense. The mongol horde never showed up to raze a village while everyone who would normally defend it was asleep in New Zealand or watching a movie in Texas.
The point is not to mimic reality, but to give a realistic chance at defense. The mongol horde never showed up to raze a village while everyone who would normally defend it was asleep in New Zealand or watching a movie in Texas.
Exactly, which is why I said something unpopular, which is that there should be a forewarning so that everyone can be on to defend. In reality if you attacked a city all of it's inhabitants are there. Games don't mimic reality because at any given time probably most of a guild or settlement are offline unless they are ultra-hardcore-powergamers. Having scheduled events with lead times may seem strange, but they make the fight when it finally does occur much more realistic.
Schedules also make it so that people who don't play an unhealthy amount per day or belong to a guild with 1000 people can participate in this type of content.
The flaw of setting them at a certain time on for example, weekdays, is that 2pm here is not 2pm in England or Austrailia.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally the idea that I like the most for settlement conflict. Calling the attackers Company A and the defenders company D.
We know that attacks are going to require seige engines to take down settlement walls etc... Seige engines could in theory be purely NPC controlled. A settlement could have a building or a skill that grants general hints as to what is going on in other settlements. Company A hires a catipult team in either their own settlement, or an NPC settlement nearby, the catipults take 24-48 hours to create, and durring so company D may get warning that the catipults are being constructed. After the construction time is over, the catipults begin heading out, and must be defended by company A as they travel to settlement D.
This eliminates the blindsided 3am attack (though permits a 24-48 hour warning of a 3am attack), grants company D time to re-arange his schedule, contact allies, hire mercinaries, or whatever he needs to do to have a fair defense, while not forcing war into a 7pm-10pm PST schedule.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Perhaps when a building is constructed and declared finished it should come with standard NPC security type guards as part of the package. The number of these security guards could go up with the size/complexity of the structure or the number of them in the settlement.
As far as abandoned accounts goes, the NPC guards could leave after not being "paid" for a certain period of time leaving the structure open for looting, destruction, etc., and finally decay to nothing if untouched.
My own preference on the matter of secure storage of items is a site specific banking/warehouse facility in the permanent NPC strongholds. I would even go for them being linked to each other in some way so people can access their items from whichever one they are visiting at the time although I could live without that.
I really don't find any fun in being robbed by, or robbing, another player or their homes and I don't think I am alone in this. Since I play for fun, a game mechanic in which my home can be robbed or destroyed at someone else's whim isn't going to be an incentive for me to play. You can draw a comparison between settling the old west or medieval times but that wasn't generally fun for anyone being raped, beaten, maimed, robbed and burnt out of their homes. It also tended to not happen every day or two. It doesn't matter to me if the outlaws have bounties put on their heads or not. My stuff will be gone. Real life is hard enough, imo. I want a more pleasant game life, me.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You guys can say stuff like things should take days to tear down, but how fun is that in reality?
Anyone who ever beat on a keep door for 2 hours in DAoC can tell you it's excessively boring. It's really bad gameplay. There is a line between simulation and game you must find if you want something fun.
Spending all day doing something even more repetitive than killing the same mob spawn in an asian f2p grinder totally doesn't sound awesome. It's not even very realistic either. Things take less time to destroy than they do to build. It's why the mongol horde could raze a village in 1 day while it may have taken years for it to grow up.
You have to have a large alliance that can rotate people through. Likewise the defenders will likely have a large alliance that will try to mount some sort of defense for the majority of the time stones are being flung.
The scenario that I am describing of needing 10 catapults going at it for a week straight is a scenario of a large clan that has been working on their city for years, surrounding it with thick walls, re-enforcing those thick walls, enchanting those thick walls, having clerics bless those thick walls, building massive highly upgraded guard towers at the corners of those thick walls. Upgrading the hell out of the fort behind those thick walls. Re-enforcing the fort behind the thick walls. Enchanting the fort behind the the walls. You get the picture...
People need to be rewarded for the time they put into making their cities. Obviously a small fort with palisade walls won't take NEARLY as long to take down as the city I just described. It would probably fall in only a few hours, though it would still be enormously expensive in comparison to the cost of the fort if it was an actively used fort.
If you want shallow, quick city building, you have shallow, quick sieges. If you want time consuming invested city building (What we have been told we are going to get.) you want time consuming invested sieges.
What you absolutely DO NOT want is people who are terrified to build an inn along the roadside because Greifer Clan X, is going to come with their 50 well armed soldiers and take it that weekend just because they can, and all it costs them is an hour of their time. Or clans who refuse to build settlements because a bunch of them are RL friends and they don't want to lose it to a quick easy siege when they all go fishing for the weekend.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the solution here is in hiring NPCS to do things like wage war and protect locations. Warhammer showed us that players playing as the soldier is very boring and repetitive, and results in a "who has more people online" game. Power should reside in your wealth.
PC's should be the officers, and NPC's should be the soldiers. War should be a few weeks of directing your soldiers to certain objectives until you reach the final stage where you are fighting for a 'town hall' type building to gain control of the location, or burn it to the ground.
This isn't to say a group of PC bandits couldn't group up and raid an inn or small town looting it and burning it to the ground. But after a certain point of development war should become very costly and risky.
There should be godly guards protecting heavily fortified structures, and it should take godly hired npc's to come take them down.
If a charter puts enough coin into defenses, they should all be able to leave the game for a month, come back, and have nothing lost. This of course would be a huge sum of coin.
I feel the solution here is to make large scale war more of an RTS game. And at all times the cost of taking over territory should be much higher than planting your flag in unclaimed territory. The only instances where attacking a settlement should be wise would be when you already have 9/10 hexes in a chunk, and you want the last one to shorten your territory perimeter so it is easier to patrol.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I feel the solution here is to make large scale war more of an RTS game.
This sounds excellent to me.
I really like the idea of the Settlement's state (health, commoner happiness, etc.) and wealth being the largest determining factor in how well defended it is. There should definitely be room for PCs to influence the outcome, but that shouldn't be the sole determinant.
I'm not sure about "weeks" of objective-taking, but the general idea is very sound.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One thing that a city could do is have a set "vulnerability time". We can flavor that as when the guards have a shift change or what have you, but for the sake of this post I'll use "VT". The government of a settlement chooses when the city is vulnerable to attack, and lets its citizens know. This information should be public knowledge. During that time, call it a 2 hour window once or twice a week (although this is just spitballing, we can discuss numbers later), the city can be attacked for long term damage or destruction. A city should be able to make marginal repairs before the next period of vulnerability, but a good attack should be able to reduce the city substantially.
The importance of player chosen VT's is that the players take responsibility for the defense of their city. They won't have to worry about 3 AM raids. They'll just have to worry about posting a decent defense one or twice a week in the area around their town.
In regards to the more "RTS" style of defense, I like it, but it would be hard to program on GW's part. However, if a VT were only caused by enemy attacks on the various troops and outposts around a city, would that be a good combination?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not a huge fan of Vulnerability Time, it works in a game like Global Agenda, where there is no real 'world'. but not in a free form open world game.
The best way to prevent 3am raiding, is to not make it worthwhile, mostly by making the time requirement longer.
The tricky part in this system, is finding a way to not force players to play the game at any time. Players should be able to log in for however many hours they want, how often they want, and have ample time to protect their goods, or help their charter.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Players should be able to log in for however many hours they want, how often they want, and have ample time to protect their goods, or help their charter.
That's an interesting statement of principle. I tend to agree with it, but I'm not sure I would take it all the way to saying that it shouldn't even be necessary for players to log in and defend their Settlement at all.
I've been thinking all along of sieges lasting multiple days with windows of vulnerability where there would be epic battles. Perhaps instead there should be a constant, relatively low-level struggle for control. Players on either side could log in at any time during the siege and give a minor boost to their side.
I guess I would worry that it would feel like you weren't accomplishing anything during the times you logged in. If it's going to take days or more for your siege engines to take down a Settlement, and you log in to try to help, will you even notice the Settlement's health bar moving more than it was without your help?
Hrm...
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Goblin Squad Member
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I actually think the Attacker should be able to set the time, as long as the Defenders have an opportunity to react.
Which means that raiders will set the attack at 4:00 AM, when most of the world needs to be sleeping for the next day of school or work. Put the power in the hands of those who build, not those who destroy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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PC's should be the officers, and NPC's should be the soldiers. War should be a few weeks of directing your soldiers to certain objectives until you reach the final stage where you are fighting for a 'town hall' type building to gain control of the location, or burn it to the ground.
This isn't to say a group of PC bandits couldn't group up and raid an inn or small town looting it and burning it to the ground. But after a certain point of development war should become very costly and risky.
There should be godly guards protecting heavily fortified structures, and it should take godly hired npc's to come take them down.
If a charter puts enough coin into defenses, they should all be able to leave the game for a month, come back, and have nothing lost. This of course would be a huge sum of coin.
I feel the solution here is to make large scale war more of an RTS game. And at all times the cost of taking over territory should be much higher than planting your flag in unclaimed territory. The only instances where attacking a settlement should be wise would be when you already have 9/10 hexes in a chunk, and you want the last one to shorten your territory perimeter so it is easier to patrol.
This.... is an interesting and agreeable solution. Rather than having 10 players sit there and man those catapults shooting at the stationary wall for that whole week, you could have NPCs sitting there doing it, while the players who hop on and want to take part in the siege are just involved in fighting or manning something more interesting like a ballista that is trying to pick people off the walls.
You could make it so that guards require housing in barracks, forts, watchtowers, etc. and also require wages etc. Then you can assign them to guard things, make patrols, or lay siege to enemy structures.
Meanwhile you have things like farms, shops, etc. that generate revenue via taxes. The important part though, would be that in order to fund a very large army many of these farms, mines, and other revenue generating sources would be outside the protection of your settlements walls. This means they are much more susceptible to attack, and clan that makes a lot of enemies, and doesn't have enough patrols will start finding their farms burned, and mines raided. They could improve the security of these outlying revenue gatherers by posting some of their guards in watch towers that can light signal fires if they require assistance.
Also if a lot of players come and use your towns shops and inns, or even settle down and make farms and towns within a hex you control, it will generate additional tax revenue.
So there would be a lot of strategy involved. Laying siege to an enemy city requires guards that are usually protecting your towns and revenue. A clan might be able to force you to back down from a siege by hiring bandits to attack your revenue which is now less well guarded. One of their allies may even lay a counter siege to one of your towns. This might be offset by storing up extra money in your coffers which you can use to conscript a militia while laying siege...
...........................................................DO WANT!!!!!!!!!!!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I actually think the Attacker should be able to set the time, as long as the Defenders have an opportunity to react.Which means that raiders will set the attack at 4:00 AM, when most of the world needs to be sleeping for the next day of school or work. Put the power in the hands of those who build, not those who destroy.
At which point then guilds would do the exact same in defense. While I do agree that defense should have advantages over offense, IE defensive structures, possibly NPC assistance etc... I honestly can't agree that chosing the time of attack should be added as an additional bonus. When we are talking about large enough scale kingdoms, I really don't quite see time as as big of an issue. Towns and kingdoms aren't going to be owned by small groups, and guilds that are serious about holding onto their keeps, are going to be smart enough to recruit accross timezones. Even the ones that have minimal protection in that, should make alliences with other guilds/alliences to cover eachothers weaker times. If you give them 24-48 hours notice, they will have that option.
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Goblin Squad Member
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At which point then guilds would do the exact same in defense. While I do agree that defense should have advantages over offense, IE defensive structures, possibly NPC assistance etc... I honestly can't agree that chosing the time of attack should be added as an additional bonus. When we are talking about large enough scale kingdoms, I really don't quite see time as as big of an issue. Towns and kingdoms aren't going to be owned by small groups, and guilds that are serious about holding onto their keeps, are going to be smart enough to recruit accross timezones. Even the ones that have minimal protection in that, should make alliences with other guilds/alliences to cover eachothers weaker times. If you give them 24-48 hours notice, they will have that option.I actually think the Attacker should be able to set the time, as long as the Defenders have an opportunity to react.Which means that raiders will set the attack at 4:00 AM, when most of the world needs to be sleeping for the next day of school or work. Put the power in the hands of those who build, not those who destroy.
The idea has merit, to be sure. I'm just a bit uncertain that you'll have as many people available at all times as you think.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Settlements sites are going to low in supply and will more than likely be a safe zone. Safe zones have NPC mashalls. An attack on a builing that deals enough damage to be considered seige type, should trigger a settlements war state, and NPC marshalls should respond. It would be simple to use these marshalls to make it take 30+ attackers and slow down raids. Settlements should have a HP stat where at certain threshholds, building are destroyed, player owned being the last on the list. The attacker should be able to chose what building to destroy, just make player owned not a selection until the near the end, total destruction. You can also make the settlement able to be taken over say at 50% of this HP stat, if a certain goal is achieved, say town hall capture and mayor killed.
As for being able to rob player buildings, I think yes. My ealier post pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. Just make the penalty for being caught, extreme enough that poeple don't want to do it.
I'm fine with losing stuff when I'm online. If I'm offline and get cleaned out? Sorry, that's insane. If that is how you want to play, when a rogue kills you, find him and give him your entire home's inventory. Let the rest of us play a game. Because in real life, towns need a decent group of people payed 70k a year to protect it from thieves, and I don't want to have to pay someone to do that online.
I agree this would suck. So make certain things, unable to be stolen this way.
Goblinworks Founder
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I was thinking about this some and what could be done, granted they allow it or script it in.
With like said already guards that patrol, maybe you can set them to patrol certain areas and how they react to danger (i.e. do they call for help, fight the intruder themselves, get water to put out the fire)
Watcher Towers with archers in it, granted they won't see around certain covers but that's where patrolling guards take over.
Magic so many spells that can be used to protect a house. A business in it's own right, could be part of crafting. Looking at the spells, so many can be used for defense just to mess with them, hurt, or alert others.
Spells for example
Alarm
Ventriloquism - If trap is sprung it sends a message to guards, you, or guildmates. (If it was really done to extra step... sends a text message to you or guild with the alert)
Scrying - having crystals around the area to see what's going on for yourself. (Put them in items to spy, send an image to your phone so you can have a low-res view of the area or tile map of what it can see.)
Unseen Servant with a scrying crystal (that has perma invisibility) walking around spying on everything while you are away)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Spells for example
Alarm
Ventriloquism - If trap is sprung it sends a message to guards, you, or guildmates. (If it was really done to extra step... sends a text message to you or guild with the alert)
Scrying - having crystals around the area to see what's going on for yourself. (Put them in items to spy, send an image to your phone so you can have a low-res view of the area or tile map of what it can see.)
Unseen Servant with a scrying crystal (that has perma invisibility) walking around spying on everything while you are away)
I like all the abilities except scrying. Things that alert your friends or your allies, or you while you are elsewhere in the world that your structures are under attack are all good things.
When you start receiving text messages that your house is under attack while at work, on a date, or just hanging out with your friends... Your personal life is going to suffer. For the sake of the spouses, employers, and friends of the people who play this game... this feature might be better left out.
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Goblinworks Founder
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Spells for example
Alarm
Ventriloquism - If trap is sprung it sends a message to guards, you, or guildmates. (If it was really done to extra step... sends a text message to you or guild with the alert)
Scrying - having crystals around the area to see what's going on for yourself. (Put them in items to spy, send an image to your phone so you can have a low-res view of the area or tile map of what it can see.)
Unseen Servant with a scrying crystal (that has perma invisibility) walking around spying on everything while you are away)I like all the abilities except scrying. Things that alert your friends or your allies, or you while you are elsewhere in the world that your structures are under attack are all good things.
When you start receiving text messages that your house is under attack while at work, on a date, or just hanging out with your friends... Your personal life is going to suffer. For the sake of the spouses, employers, and friends of the people who play this game... this feature might be better left out.
Yeah I did think of that after I left it would be bad to do it like that. The spell can be just left out altogether or just used for the other things.
I was thinking of create musical instrument trap and having it chase the thief around making noises... that is if they triggered it. :) I was looking over the spells, there are so many things you can do with them it's almost mind boggling with what I was coming up with. If it comes into the game, oh the fun you can have.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You set up a camp in the frontiers to mine some stuff. As your NPC goons go about their buisness you log off...
Banditry:
Several PCs attack your camp in the hopes of some plunder in the form of raw materials. Your NPCs fight back (PvE) but also the attack is visible at the minimap, drawing in bounty hunters/allies. So it turns to PvP fast.
Thievery:
Several thieves enter you camp. They dodge the guards with their stealth and disable/avoid the traps. take you stuff and be gone.
If one of the two must be in, I would prefer Banditry over Thievery as Thievery is usually PvE where the loot is my stuff...
And no, I can't believe that you can rob banks in high sec or castles in the frontiers with thievery, that would be incredibly cheesy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The D20 system advances classes until they have epic power: paladins channel incredible divine power that protects them and their friends, barbarians are able to cheat death and deal incredible damage to the mightiest of creatures, arcane casters can bend the very fabric of reality, etc. And of course, rogues can knife through the most powerful defenses and steal from even the lords of the planes.
But in embedded in that system of escalating power is a bias in favor of social behavior. For there to be things like magic shops, trades and professions, to be able to hire sages, for there to be ships, roads and tolls--all things in the SRD--the bias must be against anti-social behavior.
D20 play allows for interactions against NPCs, but the core assumption is that your party will use their awesome parties against monsters, not against every person and structure in your neighborhood.
That's why the developers have outlined a system where anti-social behavior like, you know, cutting down other players in the streets like dogs, is unrewarded. From the developers blog:
The closer you come to an NPC settlement, the faster the NPCs can respond to hostile actions taken against you. The NPCs establish a zone of hexes around each NPC settlement creating an area of relative safety (compared to the uncontrolled wilderness). In the hexes containing and immediately adjacent to the NPC settlement, magical effects make it impossible for one character to attack another unless the characters are in war—warfare being a future blog topic of some length!
Outside this immediate zone of total safety, the NPCs of the settlement will respond with a system we are calling "marshals." NPC marshals will respond to acts of aggression near their settlement by traveling to the location of the infraction and killing the aggressor. Because the marshals are dispatched from specific locations, their time to reach the site of the conflict will depend on how far away the fight is from the marshals' barracks. However, the marshals will be relentless—if the transgressors somehow manage to kill the initial team, more will follow. NPC marshals will have not only strength in numbers but access to magical abilities the players don't have, like perfect tracking abilities and the ability to render a target immobile.
This blog post specifically addresses killing/combat anti-social behavior, but I don't see how using rogue-abilities anti-socially is any different. If a fighter/barbarian, or other combat-oriented class can't just cut down people in town, why would rogues alone have their high-level abilities be biased to succeed in settlements?
This game, to make any sense or be any fun, has to have embedded in it a bias against anti-social behavior. That's what "settlements" means.
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Goblinworks Founder
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Because there will be people who will try to get around systems like this. Either you're bored and using an Alt or just are that type of person. People will want to break into houses or kill/steal from people who fighting monsters or look like they're afk in/out town.
It says take some time to get to the aggressors (depending on distance from marshals' barracks) so depending on skills, the attackers/thief can do enough damage still to get in and out before marshals attack; even kill the initial marshals, go back to what they were doing and then get out before the next ones arrive.
Not everyone will be this dirty, but you have to expect the people that will attempt it; you need some kind of protection. Draw the guards away and have another person or group do the dirty deed (unless more will spawn).
Think Ultima Online in attacks on people in town or out and how thieves tried different ways to get into houses. Darkfall the clever use of spells to get past gates and getting to a hard to reach spot, just to rain down spells or arrows on people.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The problem, apart from the fact that thievery is basically PvE where the loot is my stuff, is that everything that can happen will happen.
So my stuff will be stolen if this feature is in and I can do nothing against it because I am very likely not online when this happens.
So no, thievery should not be in but banditry should be.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not so sure Thievery shouldn't be in.
I touched on this elsewhere, but the basic idea is that you make Thievery costly enough (in bribes to City guards, counter-magic to bypass traps, etc.) that it's only cost-effective when you're stealing a specific item of extreme worth, and even then it would be extremely risky.
It could also be implemented in the abstract, where the Thief doesn't get access to the actual housing inventory, but instead gets a random set of mundane objects (silver utensils, specialized tools, mundane jewelry) which can be fenced for coin.
The latter would support general thievery to reduce the effectiveness of Processing and Crafting work stations.
TL;DR - stealing specific items should be extremely expensive and risky; general thievery could provide coins and simply reduce Settlement common folk effectiveness.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This blog post specifically addresses killing/combat anti-social behavior, but I don't see how using rogue-abilities anti-socially is any different. If a fighter/barbarian, or other combat-oriented class can't just cut down people in town, why would rogues alone have their high-level abilities be biased to succeed in settlements?
This game, to make any sense or be any fun, has to have embedded in it a bias against anti-social behavior. That's what "settlements" means.
This. A thousand times, this.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thievery should be in the game only if 100% secure storage exists somewhere, and can be created by players. The only case where thievery is possible is when players get lazy.
I half agree, but I have to question the "can be created by players" part. The NPC towns absolutely should have 100% secure storage. Player towns/structures I would say it could be grey area, to some extent storage can exist but it also should be lost or destroyed on loss of the town. Which at the very least in the case of hideouts it sounds like destroyed on capture is the plan there.
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Goblinworks Founder
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Then what's the point of a master thief? Right here is if you were a druid/rogue styled character. I'm probably wrong in some of the usage but it's what I came up with just now he he.
Some of the spells will likely fail but then most of the npc's are not always with regular classes (usually the generic ones) or high saves. So I would make sure the ones I cast on people outside like the scrying I have some way of blending in that they can't automatically detect me.
Cast Detect magic in an area up to 60ft away to see if you can catch a guard or worker to see if they have spells that get them by magical traps.
Cast Scrying on the banker or guard; then watch their movement to get an idea of the area and who else is working or guarding the area. This is to see if they avoid certain spots or do certain movements at particular spots.
Slip past the guards and into the vault using Wild Shape into a mouse/spider (level dependent) or other small sized creature. Not everyone is going to be watching the floor except for small sized humanoids like halflines
Search the area for traps, Disarm Traps, cast detect magic and dispel magic then, pick the lock to the safe, if you can't get it that way then you cast Rusting Grasp to rust the locks and open it that way. - This depends on where the vault is located if guards are right next to it, if not you can just wait till they open it and get inside with wild shape (time dependent).
Stuff as much as you can into several bags of holding.
Happen to get caught from some unforeseen circumstance.
Obscuring mist - Gives you a chance to wild shape with it's concealment so they can't see what you are.
Snare - Have rope or something strong enough that you can cast this on to set a booby trap for someone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah I'm a huge fan of Rogues.
My favourite franchise was 'Thief'
I play thief/rogue types in all the MMOs.
Let me just say that even with all that, the PVP house thievery is just plain and simple a Horribad idea.
If they want thieves to be able to go play "Thief:The MMO" in the Pathfinder game then I'll be the first subscriber to that, however it should be a PVE based effort.
PVP House burglary just doesn't, and cannot, work.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It basically comes down to balancing the loss of the target, against the gain of the perpitrator. You can't have the target loss so much that it's discouraging to play. You also have to make it worth while for some one to want to actually thieve, but not so rewarding and easy that its all they do. I believe the mechanic need to be in the game, but balance is a must. Cost to the target / Reward for the thief vs Difficulty, all this needs to be considered. My earlier post stated that a camp with a chest, easy target, expect your stuff to be stolen. Mansion in a city, should be extremely hard. Safe deposit box in the bank, no way for stuff to be stolen. But it should take the players some effort to make thier stuff safe. But it shouldnt be detrimental to have some stuff looted.
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Goblinworks Founder
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Yeah it should be balanced to an extent but you can't take out the whole part to what some thieves are. Sure they won't steal from friends, they do the robin hood thing and choose a certain type to take from, and there are the ones who don't steal at all just use their skills to find treasures or solve crimes.
I think it's the fun factor in trying to get into a high security place to steal the family jewels. If they would allow us to bust into a kingdom and steal from the npc king or mayor. Now that would be a fun activity for rogues.
Yeah I wouldn't want to log in and find my safe with all my precious items ransacked either. I just don't want that feeling of pure safety, so if anything that's not in the safe box is up for grabs in my house... just not the painting of me, people will burn if that's gone!!!
Druids play the best with rogue classes... thought of a safe that's in the center of a building and turning into a burrowing animal to get underneath the spot where the safe is and getting at that way to steal from.