Goblin Squad Member
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One of my favorite mmo characters of all time is my Legendary tamer in UO. Being able to tame high lvl monsters and have them fight for you is just pure fun.
I'm not all that familiar with Pathfinders lore and if there's room for such a mechanic in PFO, I come from a mostly mmo background and haven't played PnP games since 85.
Being able to tame rare mounts for players and sell theme in town was one of my favorite pass times in UO, and taming my first Frost Dragon was an epic experience I will never forget.
So would this idea be something we might see in PO?
Is anyone else interested in seeing taming in PO?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Awesome good to hear taming has a possibility in PO!
Just snatch up a few of the UO design team leads and have them create a really kickass taming system lol. I'm sure some of there design team members are ready to move onto a great 3d sandbox project and PO would be a perfect Platform for them to really create something epic and next-gen.
I love your direction with PO and think your spot on with the timing of a great next-gen sandbox.
Good luck and god speed!!
Rangers and Druids both have animal companions in the tabletop game, so that's something I think we'd look to have eventually in the online game too. Mechanically I have no idea how it gets implemented, or what you could have as a companion.
What about Necromancers?
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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...that's something I think we'd look to have eventually in the online game too.
Awesome good to hear taming has a possibility in PO!
I think the intent was to be completely noncommittal. Personally, I'd like to see an 'animal companion' mechanic, a 'trained animal' mechanic, and as suggested above, an 'undead minion' mechanic. I have no idea how to make wild creatures, in general, tamable without making the characters which can tame those creatures too powerful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have no idea how to make wild creatures, in general, tamable without making the characters which can tame those creatures too powerful.
If it takes the same amount of time/effort to train the skill to let you tame a creature that does X dps as it does to train the skill that increases your own dps by X, I think that would pretty much balance it.
Personally, I would very much like the possibility of having a troupe of trained monkeys that steal things for me :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have no idea how to make wild creatures, in general, tamable without making the characters which can tame those creatures too powerful.If it takes the same amount of time/effort to train the skill to let you tame a creature that does X dps as it does to train the skill that increases your own dps by X, I think that would pretty much balance it.
Personally, I would very much like the possibility of having a troupe of trained monkeys that steal things for me :)
Partly but not completely, that one is the greatest challenges in keeping a 20/20 comperable to a 20, as there is very little that can justify why or how an animal leaves you while you are full wizard, monk, etc... it is very difficult to attach an animal too an item or anything of that nature.
I'm not saying this is imposible, just difficult to implement.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Daniel
UO does taming combat very well and is fairly balanced in PvP. Your tamed pet has fairly low hp and can be killed very easily, so ylu have to switch from casting spells on the target and healing the pet at the same time. There is a vetrenary healing skill you need to use during combat, this prevents you from spamming your dps skills on your target and keeps your pet alive long enough to finish the kill.
Rangers and Druids both have animal companions in the tabletop game, so that's something I think we'd look to have eventually in the online game too. Mechanically I have no idea how it gets implemented, or what you could have as a companion.
I've had some experience with Neverwinter Nights I & II, and one thing I can say from experience is that there needs to be some animal companion diversity or things will get dull. In the initial launch the dev team may be tempted to keep the options limited, but this can become a bore. Even if there aren't many choices, the choices that do exist should be original. Instead of simply relying on the standard Bear/Boar/Cat/Wolf model, there should be at least a few unusual choices like Dire Bats, Spiders, Axe Beaks, Crocodiles, Snakes, etc.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@ Daniel
UO does taming combat very well and is fairly balanced in PvP. Your tamed pet has fairly low hp and can be killed very easily, so ylu have to switch from casting spells on the target and healing the pet at the same time. There is a vetrenary healing skill you need to use during combat, this prevents you from spamming your dps skills on your target and keeps your pet alive long enough to finish the kill.
So, taming a bear is either impossible, or doesn't result in having a tame bear.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...that's something I think we'd look to have eventually in the online game too.Awesome good to hear taming has a possibility in PO!I think the intent was to be completely noncommittal. Personally, I'd like to see an 'animal companion' mechanic, a 'trained animal' mechanic, and as suggested above, an 'undead minion' mechanic. I have no idea how to make wild creatures, in general, tamable without making the characters which can tame those creatures too powerful.
I agree totally on how I read the intent. This said, I do hope everyone can get an animal companion if they spend the time to learn the skill. But, I hope animal companions are NPCs and behave as such...trained skills are fine, but without spending the time to actually train your pet, it should be an animal with animal behaviors.
Likewise, I hope everyone can get cohorts through Leadership.
Likewise, I hope everyone can craft constructs with the right meta feats/skills/badges.
Likewise, I hope everyone can summon "stuff" (generic thing from other planes, ways, or forms of existance) with the right meta feats/skills/badges.
Likewise, I hope everyone has access to make undead (not summon, because undead are constructed and animated...not summoned like in WoW) with the right meta feats/skills/badges.
Anyways, I think I made my point...but finally, I hope none of these things are easy or fast in the learning of or capture and training of.
@KitNyx: I am inclined to agree, except that each of those companion skills would be mutually exclusive. IE: anyone could choose to gain the animal companion skill, but once you do, all the others would be unavailable to that character forever.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@KitNyx: I am inclined to agree, except that each of those companion skills would be mutually exclusive. IE: anyone could choose to gain the animal companion skill, but once you do, all the others would be unavailable to that character forever.
I am all for that as long as it is a soft cap enforced by the amount of time it takes to make a path reasonably worth pursuing. Saying the mutual exclusion should be hard enforced is akin (I see no real difference) to saying becoming proficient at the sword and ax should be mutually exclusive.
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Actually not at all, you cant use a sworsd and axe at the same time without a dual wielding feat and not even then the weapons are two handed. In this case simply give a leadership score to characters and they can only have so many hd of followers of any type limited by their leadership score.
So if I have a score of X and that allows me 6hd, then I can have 3hd of a bear companion, 2hd of a hiriling, and 1hd of zombie, assuming i have the skills and gold to obtain the above.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... except that each of those companion skills would be mutually exclusive.
For the love of God, please, no!
The entire point of an open-ended progression system is to give players the ability to do what they want rather than pigeon-holing them into little niches where it's easy to make them fit into a pre-defined view.
If I choose to spend 3 years learning the skills to be able to raise a skeleton and tame a bear and summon a water elemental, then by God, let me do those things. There are plenty of ways to ensure that it doesn't become overly unbalanced without putting a hard and fast - and oh so arbitrary - restriction in place. Off the top of my head, I would say that Concentration is a very simple way to balance it. Traditional summoning spells almost always center around the terrible things that befall the mages who lose concentration and thus lose control over the summoned being.
Arbitrary restrictions are the last, worst option we should ever consider.
Stacking weapon skills adds versatility. Stacking pets would directly add power. Without some kind of limiting factor, ultimately the character with the most pets would dominate the game.
Even if Concentration was implemented, sooner or later a character would reach a point where they were simply too powerful, unless there was another "arbitrary" cap on the maximum number of pets one could command at a time. And even then, having a large number of pets would require them all to be relatively weak. How much would you enjoy having 5 pets if they consistenly all get wiped out with one pass of someone's AoE attack? It's the basic Necromancer dilemma--which is better, a bunch of mook skeletons or one big bad undead? One big bad, always.
You could implement a cooldown on pets, which would give this master summoner unparalleled burst damage ability, and extreme vulnerability when he is unable to summon his monster swarm. But that kind of defeats the purpose of a pet class--to have a persistent pet. And burst damage is king in PvP, so despite the weakness, he would still be overpowered.
Believe it or not, I was actually going for a sandboxy approach. Limiting companions by archetype would be by far the easiest way to balance them.
A different way to limit it might be to allow only one companion at a time. This might be the best compromise, giving you the versatility of pets you want and also reigning in the power problem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Hudax, I hear you, and I understand the goal you're trying to achieve, and it's a reasonable goal. But there are certain possible solutions that I am extremely opposed to. Arbitrary restrictions on which pets you can summon, or how many, etc. I think are totally unnecessary, and I hope they don't resort to something like that.
One thing that I've spent a lot of time trying to get across that doesn't seem to impress people much is that there will almost never be balanced PvP combat. There will be cases where a small group of people trying to mind their own business get rolled over by 20-30 people who are just passing through and see some easy pickings. With that mechanic at play, I don't get overly concerned about trying to make sure that each possible choice of skills on a single character balances out.
There are also going to be players who are so successful at playing the market that they can literally afford to hire an army of players to do their bidding. Does the game need to do something to stop that player from being too powerful?
But back to the topic at hand. Consider the Necromancer building up a small (or large) army of undead. There are a number of ways that this could be constrained without resorting to the arbitrary and admittedly easy "one pet at a time" rule. For example, it would likely be far easier to animate a skeleton and have it wander around a very confined area, basically operating as a guard. The power to actually put your undead army on the march should be the kind of thing that takes years to achieve, and even once it's marching, it's still going to be an army of dumb undead, that would get chewed up by flanking cavalry.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But many of these are not "summoned". Contrary to WoW, all things do not sit in your inventory until you call them (in the PF universe). Undead and golems both take time to "craft" and animate...and once done, remain so, the source of the animation is different though. Once created, they remain until destroyed.
I could see temporarily summoning planar allies or whatever.
And henchmen and animal companions, they should always be spawned and they should have heavy costs of food and resources (and take time and energy to first acquire and to replace if necessary).
What I would agree to is that the power of your allies should be proportional to the level of your respective skill. A powerful necromancer can build much more powerful undead. A powerful ranger would gain the respect of much more powerful animals. A golem artificer would be able to build much more powerful golems. And on and on...
So, a ranger who has put all their time into working with a single animal would have a companion 3x as powerful as each of the creatures a person who split their time between necromancy, leadership, and animal handling could bring to the table. I want to clarify though that by 3x as powerful I mean 3x as trained and refined...not necessarily 3x the hp or damage. It should be like 3 level 3 players taking on a level 9-10. However this is intended to balance in game, is how I think it should balance.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There are a number of ways that this could be constrained without resorting to the arbitrary and admittedly easy "one pet at a time" rule. For example, it would likely be far easier to animate a skeleton and have it wander around a very confined area, basically operating as a guard. The power to actually put your undead army on the march should be the kind of thing that takes years to achieve, and even once it's marching, it's still going to be an army of dumb undead, that would get chewed up by flanking cavalry.
Yeah, we had a previous discussion on how to limit this and the agreement seemed to be material costs and upkeep would be sufficient. Consider that these undead you have animated each require 2 servings of humanoid brain a day...and will seek it out from any source before allowing themselves to re-die (their "primal instincts" take over). Any size group of undead ends up requiring a lot of food from a difficult source. And, without this food, they will turn on you...and stay out of your control.
Animals and people are the same. They have needs and if they are kept caged without it, they will either turn on the cager or flee.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... material costs and upkeep...
Infinitely superior to arbitrary caps, even if the end result is exactly the same.
It reminds me of the Rest XP Bonus in WoW (and every game since). Blizzard originally introduced it as, effectively, an Unrested XP Penalty. But the players rose up in revolt and demanded they change it. So they reversed the terminology, left the mechanic exactly the same, and everyone was satisfied and said "Yeah, that's a great thing." People are weird.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Upkeep costs are the opposite of arbitrary caps. With an arbitrary cap and no upkeep cost, there is no cost to keeping x creatures; with upkeep costs but no cap, keeping x creatures is almost prohibitively expensive.
I would like to see polynomial increases in upkeep costs, so that keeping 3 skeletons costs only slightly more than 1, but keeping even 1 has a significant cost, and keeping a swarm would be cost-prohibitive in addition to taking time to learn how to do it; excessive numbers should cost too much, but moderate numbers should have a lower unit cost than tiny numbers, or it makes too much sense for everyone to dabble a bit and get one. In any case, a kodiak should be as hard and expensive to train and keep as a vampire of roughly equal power.
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I say make the leadership feat a skill and need to spend time improving it to be able to command more and greater minions. Minions can be animal companions, familiers, hirelings, skeletons, etc
However this skill does not allow one to actually get minions(except for hireling and followers)you must still learn to summon a familier or to raise skeletons, this skill merely allows you to more greatly utilize the summoning abilities.
For example, if you have leadership rank 8, then you can have 8 "lvls" worth of minions( 4 and 4, 3 and 5, eight 1s, etc) and 20 followers(non combat npcs which can craft for you and improve the area your home is in, like the invisible npcs mentioned in the blog: not all of these followers would be visible just some)
in this way you have to spend skill time on getting them so not everyone will bother as low lvl minions take to much attn to leave alone on the battlefield as they are weaker and need more direction then higher lvl minions. this allows anyone to try their hand at it but only those who train the skill will become effective summoners. they can be like the mastermind class from city of heros or the summoner class from pf(which i dont know much about) they can stand back and direct and support the minions or they can get higher lvl minions and train them so as to fight with the minions(the former being more effective but..)
if they can do this right, omg it would be awesome and I would totally be first to max this skill(hmm what kind of summoning should I do? taming? summon monster? summon natures ally? hirelings? necromancy? oh the possibilties XD )
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DLH, I think Leadership is a great skill for humanoid type followers, but I don't think undead minions respond to the same thing. I can see room for several different skills, tailored to the type of follower.
Mostly, though, I want it to be possible, though exceedingly difficult, to raise an undead army, because I want someone to try. Talk about player-created content :)
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Hope there will be different functions for followers/summons/undead/animal companions.
Intelligent humanoids should be the most flexible. Commoners can farm/mine/trade, experts to craft/build, warriors to guard/patrol, etc. The player may even be able to make profit through their activities.
Crafting golems are expensive, so maybe relatively low at maintaining cost. Animals / undead also constantly require food, but are easier to be recruited/created.
Player pets should augment, not take the place of, player skill. That is normally how such pets work in most MMOs, unless they are right out of balance like AoC is.
Anything else would require more balancing to the non pet classes. And please, do NOT require pets in all classes to create balance. If I have to have some stupid animal following me around everywhere because some munchkin just has to have undead minions, I'll scream.
I want to remind people in this thread that the MMO won't be sticking to PnP rules. Semantic arguments over "summoning" and "summoning" are not relevant to the conversation. If there is any distinction in the game, it will be superficial, ie: needing bone chips to "raise" your undead pet.
I am not a fan of using upkeep as a balancing method at all. Say I can tame a dragon for the cost of 1k gold an hour. Now I can destroy your settlement because I'm rich. Or if taming things is capped at a certain power level, say I can conscript an army of 100 orcs for the same cost to the same effect. How is that remotely balanced? Currency, and therefore upkeep, will be a non-issue to at least one person in the game, and I don't feel like handing that person a win button. I strongly urge GW to completely reject any thought of this method and actually balance people's pets--on the order of concept balance. Make them equal or make them unavailable.
If a kingdom of necromancers can raise an undead army capable of destroying another kingdom, I'm ok with that. But if an individual necromancer can raise an undead army, it should be something another individual can deal with using fireball or cleave. Either that or limit one pet per person. Having a good reason to make an arbitrary limit is better than no limit for the sake of immersion.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There does NOT need to be a superficial element to getting a pet. It is entirely possible to say "You need to cast this spell, with this rare and expensive component on a corpse to get a skeleton."
Then the rarity of that component can be compared to the rarity of the resources needed for other things which provide benefits.
There is no need to assume that the economy will not have scarcity.
Since they'll be sticking to the books, and necromancers are not among beginning classes, it's moot. But it's way munchkin and very 3.5 or 4.0 to want to have an army of undead. Thankfully, PFO won't be that.
But if they DO allow necromancers, keep them from being able to cast positive spells. Good and evil do NOT mix. No healing spells for YOU.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Gotta go a little off topic to start, but I feel your 'class', or the long term development, should be about 10-20% of your character. I would like the remaining portion of the character to be handled like SWG, where we can interchange abilities. These abilities would be all your weapon skills, crafting, schools of magic, pretty much everything outside of class specific things. Some of these ability trees would include companions, the balance lies in not being able to pick have a skill tree that increases your characters output. Characters that take combat and non-combat abilities will not be able to stand up against full combat players, unless there is a serious difference in gear. This is assuming the players are around the same ability level(of the person, not the character).
The last thing you should do in a sandbox is to put in a system that you bottleneck. If you have to limit it too much, it's not worth putting it in the game.
... except that each of those companion skills would be mutually exclusive.For the love of God, please, no!
The entire point of an open-ended progression system is to give players the ability to do what they want rather than pigeon-holing them into little niches where it's easy to make them fit into a pre-defined view.
If I choose to spend 3 years learning the skills to be able to raise a skeleton and tame a bear and summon a water elemental, then by God, let me do those things. There are plenty of ways to ensure that it doesn't become overly unbalanced without putting a hard and fast - and oh so arbitrary - restriction in place. Off the top of my head, I would say that Concentration is a very simple way to balance it. Traditional summoning spells almost always center around the terrible things that befall the mages who lose concentration and thus lose control over the summoned being.
Arbitrary restrictions are the last, worst option we should ever consider.
I agree completely.
It would be a huge mistake to implement restrictions we see in current themeparks/most MMOs without strongly considering their origin, intent and if a more viable solution can't be found.
According to the tone of the blogs we're in good hands. However as this is actually a tabletop game being imported to an online space in a way, I would very much hope they don't just choose some modern MMOs to mimic (along with their weaknesses because 'that's the way it's been' [which doesn't seem to be the case luckily]) and instead follow the time-line back along the evolution of online games and possibly pick an earlier point at which to jump off while considering how to approach various problems.
A lot of systems seem to exist because 'That's the way it's done', rather than because they're good or even great ideas. The reasons for some existing and common restrictions could very well be due to time restraints, technology limitations or other issues that might possibly be dealt with in a better way.
So many recent MMOs feel like simple iterations of other recent MMOs, arbitrarily complete with their weaknesses and shortcomings, rather than an attempt to bring a fantasy based role playing game world to the online space.
It's about time someone went back along the path of what we have and why we have it, and re-investigated options and possibilities available to make that happen with a strong grasp of PC gaming/MMO history and an open, creative mind.
I realize this is a bit of a tangent and that I'm grasping onto a small portion of your point, but it's a notion that I'm pretty passionate about and feel is very important in a broader sense as well.
A large part of what made rpgs so enticing for me was the near limitless ways you could approach situations and the world. Transporting that experience to an online PC setting obviously imposes some innate restrictions that can't be helped. However, it seems to me many mechanics and limitations we take for granted could now be scrapped or approached differently.
To me it feels most everyone's been so busy falling all over themselves trying to evolve World of Warcraft in their version of the game that they forgot to look at the entire experience with fresh but experienced eyes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I want to remind people in this thread that the MMO won't be sticking to PnP rules. Semantic arguments over "summoning" and "summoning" are not relevant to the conversation. If there is any distinction in the game, it will be superficial, ie: needing bone chips to "raise" your undead pet.
And nor must they use the way it has been done in other games as a rule. And I have not seen anyone here suggest they use PnP d20 rules or mechanics. What I see are people asking them to stick to the Golarion campaign world as they have suggested they will. In GOlarion, when someone creates an undead, it remains undead until destroyed. Also, in Golarion, the creation of undead requires a corpse to be present and in a certain condition to raise (although this is not only a Golarion thing...it just makes sense). If you change this, then you are changing to campaign setting. At least this is how I feel about it. I am not asking them to use d20 mechanics at all. I am sure they will use whatever magic mechanics they develop, and I am happy with this.
To illustrate my point with another example, this argument could just as well be about swords...some may feel there should be magic in the game world that allows characters to "summon" swords, versus sheath them. This allows them to not include the encumbrance of the sword when not in use. I would argue that this would fundamentally change the "feel" of the world...to something more like Aion, and much less like Pathfinder/Golarion. I am not asking them to use the PnP mechanics by asking them not to deviate "in the effects" so much from logic or what we would expect in the PnP game.
I am not a fan of using upkeep as a balancing method at all. Say I can tame a dragon for the cost of 1k gold an hour. Now I can destroy your settlement because I'm rich. Or if taming things is capped at a certain power level, say I can conscript an army of 100 orcs for the same cost to the same effect. How is that remotely balanced? Currency, and therefore upkeep, will be a non-issue to at least one person in the game, and I don't feel like handing that person a win button. I strongly urge GW to completely reject any thought of this method and actually balance people's pets--on the order of concept balance. Make them equal or make them unavailable.
To me you just illustrated why it is a good idea and why it is logical. Having a pet dragon is like having this army of 100 orcs at your constant call. The continued cost should be comparable. From your description it sounds balanced to me...anyone is welcome to go pay a merc guild to kill someone's dragon, they should cost about the same to keep on retainer. And it is logical that persistent pets have to eat, there should be a cost involved with feeding them.
I am all for the ability to go hunt and gather to food yourself. I think the cost should be an actual requirements and if you choose to buy it, so be it. The greater the power of the pet, the more the work you have to unkeep (or cost if you want to pay others to do the work).
If a kingdom of necromancers can raise an undead army capable of destroying another kingdom, I'm ok with that. But if an individual necromancer can raise an undead army, it should be something another individual can deal with using fireball or cleave. Either that or limit one pet per person. Having a good reason to make an arbitrary limit is better than no limit for the sake of immersion.
So if a player spends a year building an army...and has a guild of players that gather food to feed this army while in preparation. You think the year of work should be defeatable with a few fireballs?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I expect Hudax would agree that if it takes 100 players to create the Undead Army (whether that's 100 Necromancers, or 1 Necromancer and 99 people doing whatever is necessary to upkeep the army), then it's okay if it takes 100 players to defeat that army. I think this is generally correct.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I expect Hudax would agree that if it takes 100 players to create the Undead Army (whether that's 100 Necromancers, or 1 Necromancer and 99 people doing whatever is necessary to upkeep the army), then it's okay if it takes 100 players to defeat that army. I think this is generally correct.
Then we would agree.
There does NOT need to be a superficial element to getting a pet.
I meant the difference between taming an animal and raising an undead pet would be mechanically superficial. That the differences would be essentially for flavor. I didn't mean to imply a negligible cost.
I expect Hudax would agree that if it takes 100 players to create the Undead Army (whether that's 100 Necromancers, or 1 Necromancer and 99 people doing whatever is necessary to upkeep the army), then it's okay if it takes 100 players to defeat that army. I think this is generally correct.
If that is possible in the game, then I agree. Something as powerful as an undead army, or an orc army, or a dragon pet, ought to require resources far more vast than one person could ever hope to achieve alone. However, now we're getting away from character building and into world building. A dragon pet is simply too powerful for one person to control. If a settlement or kingdom invests in such a thing, what happens when they need it and that player is offline? It should be part of the kingdom, not part of the character.
Unless defending a kingdom is going to be relatively easy compared to attacking one, such a large investment would be crucial to the kingdom's defense and would need to be persistent regardless of who is online. Having it be under one person's control and being subject to the whim of that person to log in would be like saying "Well, our Company leader is offline, so we can't do anything even though there are 100 of us online right now. He's that much of a lynch pin to our operation."
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Constructs, especially colossal constructs, should have a combination of a very large price tag and a specific weakness due to material type; iron golems are stopped and eventually destroyed by rust effects, wood constructions become animated firewood, and other thematically appropriate effects. The balance side would have their upkeep be lowered somewhat, but their construction cost per unit effectiveness would be much higher: A 1,000,000 GP golem that needs only 100 GP a month in maintenance might be a match for a mercenary company that costs 10,000 GP every month that it is in use, or an undead army that costs 100,000 GP to raise and 1,000 GP every month to feed and maintain.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I actually still think there's room for a single character to swoop in riding a powerful dragon if it took a significant number of players a significant amount of time to unlock it, and then would only last a limited amount of time.
You mean a dragon raiding a settlement along with its PC minion, right?