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So I have been following the game for a while now, and it's time for me to out of the closet. I am evil. I will be playing an assassin entirely for my own purposes. Now I do have some questions. Some may have been answered and I missed them, some may not have. My main concern is the anonymity of my assassin. While I want to be known for how many assassinations I have done, I don't want all my victims to know it was me whom did the dead.
question #1 - When will the combats actually know who it is they are fighting/dying to ?
question #2 - What is the completion key to the contract ? Does the actual contract holder have to commit the killing blow or be apart of the killing ?
Question #3 - Will the contracts be doable through a third party ?
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One solution is to perform your assasinations under a pseudonym and a distinctive disguise, like an animal mask or something, that way your pseudonym gets a reputation as a badass and people come looking for them with contacts, but no one knows it's you. You could even pretend to be your pseudonym's agent.
Goblin Squad Member
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1. yes, it has been described that the player is the first witness to their death, your penalties will grow higher the more people witness the crime.
The contract system is something that is going to be delved more into later down the road, the first goal is probably to get a game that people can log into and move around in. As it stands now, one person posts the contract, and another accepts it. Middlemen will probably be possible.
There is magic in the world, so don't expect perfect anonymity. Killing another player magically tags you if the kill was not justified.
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Goblin Squad Member
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1. yes, it has been described that the player is the first witness to their death, your penalties will grow higher the more people witness the crime.
The contract system is something that is going to be delved more into later down the road, the first goal is probably to get a game that people can log into and move around in. As it stands now, one person posts the contract, and another accepts it. Middlemen will probably be possible.
There is magic in the world, so don't expect perfect anonymity. Killing another player magically tags you if the kill was not justified.
I understood that to be about murder in general. I got the impression that assassination is a separate beast. It would be pretty dumb if someone trained to be an assassin for a year...and then their killing a target was no different than Joe the Brigand doing it.
I don't mind the game mechanic consequences, but if the person dies in one hit, and their character didn't see mine, he shouldn't get a name. Even though I do get the alignment shift and a criminal tag. I am a criminal and evil. I killed 10 people for a fact. But not one has seen that it was me. So the game knows I am evil, but how does every one else unless they know me ?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've actively engaged in theoretical discussions about how assassination might be implemented in an MMO such that it is meaningful, and still fun for everyone.
Other than permadeath already being a socially accepted reality of the game, I've never heard a suggestion that wasn't pointless or just made life suck for the victim.
So I'll remain skeptical until I see a solid idea.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't mind the game mechanic consequences, but if the person dies in one hit, and their character didn't see mine, he shouldn't get a name. Even though I do get the alignment shift and a criminal tag. I am a criminal and evil. I killed 10 people for a fact. But not one has seen that it was me. So the game knows I am evil, but how does every one else unless they know me ?
Death isn't permanent and I strongly doubt you will ever be able to one shot someone so they would get to turn, see your name in big glowy letters floating above yer head and tell everyone after they were res'd at the local graveyard "that low down so and so Miscreant killed me!"
as a solution to the assassination contract, have it an inventory item. When some one dies by a person with a contract in their invitory, it offers a token. Taking this token causes an alignment shift. The contract and token can then be given to a third party. Handing the token to the contract creator completes the contract and causes and alignment shift, unless you received a shift for the killing already.
Just remove the reputation hit? Chances are, being an assassin, you're not that worried about the alignment shift, and probably prepared to take the criminal hit. Not taking a reputation hit would fit (trained skill to reduce penalties? rep and/or alignment) with the idea of the kill from the shadows theme as far as game mechanics are concerned. Granted, players would still know, but you'd not have reputation issues preventing you from getting into areas. Considering how they're doing the disconnect of "attacker" flag in wilderness, and "criminal" flag in civilization, it'd reduce the negatives while attacking in wilderness. Perhaps not completely negate them, but make assassination worthwhile while giving up training time that could have been spent on other pursuits.
EDIT: Let me make clear, reduce =/= negate penalties. 5% per skill tier trained? 1%, 10%? Max of 5 levels? Assasination 1-5? Not enough numbers yet to set a threshhold, but it could be a skill offbranch of another line that requires non-combat ability skills, but possibly utility skills?
What is even the point of assassination if they are just going to come right back?
Assassination loses a lot of its power and mystique if it loses the power to permanently take critical individuals out of the picture.
Just make respawn points a ways from the kill point. They lose some of their inventory, coin on person etc. Or other consequence if the killer has a contract in inventory
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just make respawn points a ways from the kill point. They lose some of their inventory, coin on person etc. Or other consequence if the killer has a contract in inventoryWhat is even the point of assassination if they are just going to come right back?
Assassination loses a lot of its power and mystique if it loses the power to permanently take critical individuals out of the picture.
The last death implementation I read was that you had a minute to get res'd, after which you spawned at your predetermined bind point (dont assassinate someone at there bind point methinks!) with weapons and armor on ready to go. At that time anyone can loot your corpse and get a few items from your backpack and the rest are destroyed.
Keep in mind, you get to train ONE character at a time per account. I think you can have more then 1 character, but you can only have one of them training at a time. Allowing you to permanantly kill that one character would make the game DOA. Honestly even makeing assassination anything other then insanely impossible could make this game DOA.
People DO NOT like dieing with no possible chance of winning / escaping or defending themselves and losing customer's so you can have your 15 seconds of fun is a bad design decision.
I don't want all my victims to know it was me whom did the dead.
I wouldn't want anybody to know I was "doing" the dead, either. Gross.
BTW: isn't there an Alice Cooper song that deals with necrophilia?
If I'm going to have assassinations in a game I want an assassin to be able to sneak into the castle of a player nations king, kill the king, and it actually mean something.
I was looking at mechanics to allow assassins to do their jobs rather than taking a downward spiral in reputation, thus being allowed few places and dealing with NPC guards at every turn or going straight to hostile in any player run settlement they enter. That would make the characters less useful as assassins if they could go nowhere they need to.
Perhaps if you're assassinated (someone places an assassination contract on you and it is fulfilled) then you take a reputation hit to your own settlement? Again, no clue on what the numbers would be, but that'd be a definite downside to a king losing reputation with his own kingdom.
@Hark
I do see your side of it and yes, there should be some penalty to make it worthwhile to assassinate them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Or the King can't access any of his leadership abilities used to manage his kingdom for X real days. A regent must be appointed in his place.
Since we are talking about political intrigue here, give the regent to power to declare himself king.
But this all sounds really abuse able.
@ Hark
The first I could see, so long as it was 1 day or so many hours, but doubtful. The lowering reputation of those assassinated could be abused depending on the numbers, the effects of reputation in your own settlement/kingdom/alliances, and what you can affect depending on your standing in said places. Those are things I haven't seen announced or planned out yet, so not much to go on.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I'm going to have assassinations in a game I want an assassin to be able to sneak into the castle of a player nations king, kill the king, and it actually mean something.
risk vs. reward.
if the reward for you is to cripple / kill an entire kingdom by assassinating its leader the risk better be so insanely high that you have a 1 in a million chance to actually suceed UNLESS said kingdom is incredbly lax & stupid and leave the back door open with printed directions to the kings chamber through the "secret" tunnel with the keys to his bedchamber hanging there on a string.
PS: I can arrange that for you if the fee's right...
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Goblin Squad Member
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In the real world you can do things like find out who you are working with. The real world doesn't have alts, so in the real world you can't make an alt specifically to rise to power in an enemy organization and at an opportune moment take control rob them blind and dismantle as much of their infrastructure as possible.
In the real world with a little, or a lot, of diligence and investigative skills you can find out who such people really are before they do any damage. You can't do that kind of investigation and vetting in a world with alts.
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Goblin Squad Member
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risk vs. reward.
if the reward for you is to cripple / kill an entire kingdom by assassinating its leader the risk better be so insanely high that you have a 1 in a million chance to actually suceed UNLESS said kingdom is incredbly lax & stupid and leave the back door open with printed directions to the kings chamber through the "secret" tunnel with the keys to his bedchamber hanging there on a string.
PS: I can arrange that for you if the fee's right...
I think you missed the point. There is no reason that isn't completely abusable for such a mission to have any reasonable return on investment in a world with respawns and Resurrections.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pehaps a longterm negative buff once you've been assassinated. Could also include a severe movement penalty to futher limit what you can do after you've been assassinated. Or if your assassinated you can't log in for a certian number of days, which would be another nasty consequence.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pehaps a longterm negative buff once you've been assassinated. Could also include a severe movement penalty to futher limit what you can do after you've been assassinated. Or if your assassinated you can't log in for a certian number of days, which would be another nasty consequence.
Negative buffs/death effect are all awesome ideas EXCEPT for locking people out of the gamein some way (forced logoff.jail etc). This is just no fun for people and is also too big an attraction for potential griefers. Whack someone and force them off game of a few days! Woot!
There are dozens of other ideas that are far more preferable to this route. Monetary costs to ressurection. A 10% HP decrease for a day. Stopping training for a day due to 'confusion'. Random screen effects every so often for a day (blurred screen for 5 seconds etc). Characters movement is impaired for a day...the list goes on.
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@Hark
It's easier to find out about people on the internet then in RL, however my statement was more about the difficulty of simulating abuse without it being abuse.
It's difficult to have a game where being abused by someone is fun or at least not bad and still have it enjoyable for the people who are being abusive.
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You can always have an ability that denies the ability to be raised by fellow players and must rez at the temple or whatever.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pehaps a longterm negative buff once you've been assassinated. Could also include a severe movement penalty to futher limit what you can do after you've been assassinated. Or if your assassinated you can't log in for a certian number of days, which would be another nasty consequence.
So you want to give another player the ability to make the game unplayable for you for 2-3 days at a time?
Mind you if you can't log in no training (which you paid for), no in game chat or communication, no character advancement...
You do realize the company actually has to make a profit here, which is kind of hard to do when everyone but a few griefers quit the game...
Assassination should be a mechanism to allow people to go after people who have had bonuties placed on there heads in places that can not normally be entered for pvp. It should be a counter to someone hiding out in a "safe" zone to avoid the propor penelty for there actions and behavior.
It should NOT be another method to grief other players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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IMO, the point of assassination (besides making the target dead) are:
-you can kill someone far too strong/protected to assault openly
-you can get away with it
see Lee's comments in the thread about NPC guards. I think "legit assassins" should have a reasonable chance to perform their kill without being noticed by guards and criminal flagged there and then . This would allow you to hide from random bandits in 'safe zones' but not from assassins
The target can obviously add any known assassins to the 'black list' making them KOS, but there will be stealth/disguise/bribery mechanisms to counter that.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pehaps a longterm negative buff once you've been assassinated. Could also include a severe movement penalty to futher limit what you can do after you've been assassinated. Or if your assassinated you can't log in for a certian number of days, which would be another nasty consequence.So you want to give another player the ability to make the game unplayable for you for 2-3 days at a time?
Mind you if you can't log in no training (which you paid for), no in game chat or communication, no character advancement...
You do realize the company actually has to make a profit here, which is kind of hard to do when everyone but a few griefers quit the game...
Assassination should be a mechanism to allow people to go after people who have had bonuties placed on there heads in places that can not normally be entered for pvp. It should be a counter to someone hiding out in a "safe" zone to avoid the propor penelty for there actions and behavior.
It should NOT be another method to grief other players.
It was only one of my suggestions.
There's a Pathfinder webstory on this idea.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In EVE there has been a planned assassination of a corporate (guild) leader at the very moment in which this leader ferried a large part of the guild riches from one savespot to another.
This resulted in the guild going broke, currency worth thousands of real world dollar being lost.
THIS was an assassination to be remembered.
From your questions I think that you will rather be a bounty hunter than an assassins because contracts as written would usually go out on miscreants.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just a quick point:
Bounties contracts are separate from assassination contracts.
We know bounty hunting will not be unlawful at least while the target is still tagged as a criminal. Setting a bounty will not be an unlawful and maybe not an evil action.
For assassinations, I think it could be set such that the person starting the contract takes the full alignment hit and the actual assassin gets some sort of lesser hit to facilitate a set of players becoming professional assassins.
I also think it would be cool if assassins had to carry a copy of the contract in their inventory while performing the assassination, so if they fail, the defenders had a chance of recovering the note and seeing who took the hit out. Then again, this (and the alignment penalty) could easily be sidestepped by creating an alt to put out these contracts, so I don't know how they could do it.
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The best idea so far I think is that assassinations reduce the target's rep. That is not too incredibly annoying for a player like a movespeed or other debuff that essentially makes the player log out until it's over.
A rep decrease would be something that other players normally couldn't affect (valuable) and it would be something to keep the target in the game (to work on getting rep back to previous level).
It is also somewhat 'realistic' in that if you assassinate a character enough times to decrease their 'rep level' such that they cannot hold office in the settlement, the second-in-command needs to step in to take over for awhile. The leader is 'dead' until he/she can grind the rep back.
We really don't know too much about the rep system, so this is based on some pretty big 'ifs'. We can assume that a settlement leader will probably be extremely invested in the settlement, and so has high rep. I think we would like viable assassination of leaders and not just officers.
To achieve this you could:
1. Set a rep cap and make assassinations destroy a specific number of rep points.
2. Not have a rep cap, but make assassinations destroy a specific percentage of rep points.
I prefer #2, since then leaders could continue gaining rep that insulates them from the effects of assassination, but every extra point of rep they gain is marginally less effective than the last for this purpose.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For those saying that making an assassination will cause an alignment shift, or that fulfilling an assassination will also do so, keep in mind that your are assuming the person doing so isn't already evil.
Also, if your character is not evil and you have a problem with the alignment shift, there will be people willing to work around that. You want someone killed? Make an arrangement with a professional without making an actual contract. If Goblinworks makes a contract a prerequisite for an assassination to be performed - don't worry, that's what middlemen are for. You make on out of game code arrangement with the middleman, he takes the alignment hit for making the in game code contract with the assassin. Your enemy gets shanked and you keep your spotless reputation...as long as you pay.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Of course, and you can do this through multiple layers if you want to protect yourself from rumors. Get your middle man to hire a middle man so that it doesn't look like you were involved.
Naw, that's what Tony's website is for. Visiting one of our locations in game will work, but won't be necessary to make these kinds of arrangements. If payment for contracts requires characters to meet in game, then it's very easy to regularly re-create simple dummy characters (who don't train up) with new names for this to avoid scandals.
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I am curious about assassins that only take contracts out on evil people, I made a character in star wars like this, she would assassinate evil people, crime lords, gang bosses, etc.
I don't think such an assassin should be counted as evil since, clearly, she fights evil. Might be neutral, depending on definition of good and evil, but certainly not evil.
Think Zorro, he fought for the people but was an outlaw, or robin hood, both could be considered CG or NG, because they helped the community. An assassin or bounty hunter might need that lawful rating though, since it indicates they would actually follow through, but then again DnD lawful had nothing to do with following the laws of land either, but I'm not sure how PF handles that.
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As I said that depends on your definition of evil.
Consider possible definitions of evil,
An action taken for selfish reasons regardless of effect on others,
An action taken that others see as disagreeable, regardless of circumstances,
One of the following actions, killing (for any reason), theft, (pretend the list goes on)
An action that destroys or degrades more life, then is saved, created, or improved.
Or how about definitions of good,
An action taken for the good of others,
An action taken for the good of the community,
One of the following actions, charity, honesty, (again pretend the list continues)
An action that saves, creates, or improves more life then is destroyed or degraded.
There are many more we could try adding to the list but let's clarify Pathfinders rule about it, (Summurized)
Good, altruism, respect, dignity. Makes sacrifices for others.
Evil, hurting, oppressing, killing. Some do so for convenience others for sport or duty.
So every paladin that kills a deer to feed people or kills a murderer is commiting evil despite doing so for the greater good. Obviously PF alignment is missing something.
Therefore by PF standards, most PCs are evil. They kill things and people, and the book makes no distinction for the reasons behind killing (such as defense of self or another) and I would be evil as well, but I think most players would be unhappy with result, therefore PFO will most likely need to redefine Good and Evil.
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I have my own definition I like a lot better,
Good is anything that promotes or creates life,
Evil is anything that degrades or destroys life,
Most things are both good and evil and thus someone who is evil, is evil because they consistantly do more evil then good, and vice versa.
Thus killing a deer for food is both good (it feeds many people) and evil (the deer is now dead) but you obviously can't have pure good or pure evil, you need both for the circle of life to continue.
As for my definition, my assassin would be neutral to good because she kills those that degrade the lives of others, thus promoting the lives of the general populace. Though it would be difficult to incorporate this into the game so perhaps a suggestion for the game mechanics.
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Those who attack outside sanctioned combat, steal, harass, grief, or otherwise act to the impediment of other people are evil.
Those who act generously, help others do non-evil things, show mercy, or otherwise act to benefit others are good.
Those who remain committed and complete tasks, are lawful.
Those who break commitments and leave tasks unfinished are chaotic.
Lawful shouldn't include following the laws of the land, because my personal code may conflict with the law and therefore if I follow the code I am commited to, I should count as lawful rather then chaotic even it breaks the law.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Good and Evil in Pathfinder don't summarize to your summary. Alignment is literally determined by divine beings, so Good means exactly what the Good deities say it does. Note that sneaking into an assassin's room at night and stabbing them in the aorta several times isn't Assassination.
It's the extra ritual that goes into the assassination that's Evil, and the details on what effects that ritual has are yet to be published.