Goblin Squad Member
|
Should they be possible?
I for one would like to see them in the game. On the longer scale of things it should be feasible.
Templates I am interested in would be the result of hard work.
Lich
Graveknight
Other Intelligent undead
The ability to for this to be present in the game would give it something no themepark mmo could ever offer. If instead of spending 2 and 1/2 years a necromancer, they decide they don't want a capstone as a wizard but would like to transcend into lichdom, could spark a whole new level of player interaction/gameplay
Ps. Apologies on typos these past few post were made from my phone
Others that could the result of hard work are the acquired versions of Half-Fiendish and Half-Celestial.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Capstone isn't really relevant anymore. It's turned into a dedication bonus. Krow and I talk a bit about it in Gobbocast Episode 12, if you wanna check that out. The developers haven't released much about it, aside from the change.
All that said, I could more then see another 6 months spent working towards and being granted lichdom. However, it should not be so easy we see more than a hundred or so liches in game. I'm not saying give it a hard number cap, but it should be very very difficult. Otherwise you get an army of liches with armies of undead and that would kind of kill it for me. They should not be common place nor be something that is handed out with only a moderate amount of work.
My two copper.
-Areks
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'm not really familiar with the term "Template", but if I follow correctly, then it's transition into a new being?
I think it should be possible.
It should be proportionally very low to the player population
Information on how to do this should be almost non-existent
It should be merely hinted at that it's possible and that means not ever mentioned if it's in or not.
The method one player finds to achieve this should be different from the next player.
So, in a word you want to keep it as a "secret".
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
The two templates I would find interesting are:
These templates are obviously in d20 rules, and ridiculously overpowered. The general ideas could be fun though.
One important thing to note with lycanthropes is loss of character control should be avoided. Penalties for not quenching your thirst for blood could be viable though. I really enjoyed lycanthropy in Skyrim where I was incentivized to kill everything in my path, and most people would shoot at me when they saw me, but I could still choose only to kill things I would normally kill as a human.
As a sidenote, no templates should allow people to bypass the reputation mechanic.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Instead of leaping straight in as Uber-lich/werewolf/whatever, maybe such templates would require growth to be powerful. If they essentially started you off at the same power level as your current character but enabled a very different, but statistically similar, development path, I would see no problem in them.
After all, it would then simply be moving to a different race/class.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I still think you want this sort of thing to be "Mythical" to players. The draw of Jedi in SWG was it's mythical status >> actual existence. According to Raph Koster as soon as it became known players changed how they played and grinded like hell. Just have a few very rare players who transform and it becomes an in-game legend. I'm not sure what the transformed player does with themselves afterwards... probably just add to the richness of the game world's possibilities.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'm not sure what the transformed player does with themselves afterwards...
While I don't have anything against this idea per se, this is what I wonder about. What is a lich going to actually do in game? I can't think of anything more immersion breaking than walking into the local tavern and seeing a lich having a quick pint at the bar with the local werewolf...
The lich is an awesome (in the true sense of the word) creature. Its reach is long, its plans nefarious, its patience inexhaustible. It has plans within plans, yet those plans can have steps that take decades or even centuries. It doesn't matter, the lich can wait (usually within its tomb).
The werewolf, on the other hand, is a creature of action. But a large amount of the literature dealing with lycanthropy stresses the inability of the werewolf to control its changes, especially at the beginning when it is first infected. There is often a sense of amnesia and a period in which the werewolf is unaware that the problem, the lycanthrope, is actually him. For me, this is a fundamental part of the "lore" surrounding lycanthropy.
Both of these creatures have amazing potential to play a part in enriching the experience that is PfO. But do they really sound fun to play as your PC in an MMO? A lich that goes out harvesting, crafting and PvPing like any other player is not a lich - it's a player with a template that has a mechanical benefit. Who, on the other hand, would want to tie their character to a tomb? A werewolf could cause all sorts of interesting story lines, but would someone really want to "give up control" (an impossibility in reality anyway) for the period of the change? Easier to RP than the lich, but still more about the mechanical benefit than the flavour.
Perhaps this is a way to "retire" characters, perhaps it could be made to work. But once the "secret path" to lichdom is discovered, it will be on the net with a walkthrough in the next 10 minutes. It sounds like SWG and Jedi to me. And I'm not sure that's a good idea.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Construct! Death to All Fleshlings!!!
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you fleshlings do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Fleshlings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The werewolf, on the other hand, is a creature of action. But a large amount of the literature dealing with lycanthropy stresses the inability of the werewolf to control its changes, especially at the beginning when it is first infected. There is often a sense of amnesia and a period in which the werewolf is unaware that the problem, the lycanthrope, is actually him. For me, this is a fundamental part of the "lore" surrounding lycanthropy.
Apparently lycans don't have to be raving monsters in Golarion. I ran across a god of good aligned werewolves.
For me what would really make a lycanthrope an enjoyable character to play is something that really promotes the idea of "you should go crazy and kill everyone" but doesn't force me to do so. I really appreciated in Skyrim that my werewolf form was powered by feasting upon flesh, especially human flesh, and everyone who saw me would try to kill me, but ultimately I still controlled my character.
A really, really, awesome lycanthropy system for me would work something like this:
- Freshly turned Lycans would be forced into hybrid form every full moon.
- Lycans could train the ability to control their changes, eventually being able to assume hybrid or animal form when desired, and having the option to suppress automatic turning.
- Most NPCs including guards attack lycan on sight when in hybrid form. Players can also kill then without reputation loss.
-Lycans have a bloodlust meter while in hybrid form. It constantly decharges but charges whenever you consume the flesh of an enemy (player or NPC). Raising it gives bonuses to movement speed, attack speed, strength, total health, and health regeneration. Lycans with a high bloodlust are very powerful, but are extremely weak (even compared to their non-lycan form) at a low bloodlust.
-Lycans get a specific bonus based off their animal. There Werewolf bonus is "You gain X% of the bloodlust gains of other werewolves in your pack"
-All lycan are weakest vs. silver and mithril weapons.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
When it comes to templates... I do have one problem right off the bat if we are talking "super hard to aquire, but very powerful and permanent".
They will not be uncommon 5 years into the game. I don't care if it takes 4 years to get. A permanant boost in a game where almost everything can be lost, IS HUGE.
Look at eve, titans take a stupidly large amount of work, there's tons of them in game... AND they are regularly destroyed. If CCP made a ship like the titan that was flat out exempt from loss, you could expect 15x as many people working towards them, basically they'd be everywhere.
(for those who are unfamiliar with eve, basically the titan takes thousands of man-hours worth of effort to build, something like 6 months of real time
Unless templates carried with them a pro's con list that made them evenly balanced against another character, they would be both overused. Raising the work to get them, would just leave new players at a point of "well I'll never reach that stregnth".
With items that can be lost, new players get the "it will take me years to get to that level, but hey there's also the chance that someone else will knock that guy down from his pedestal of power", by destroying that powerful item, bringing him down to my level.
Basically I hold this view on everything that is gamechangingly powerful, should have potential to change hands or disapear. Otherwise it is just a barrier to new players telling them they aren't going to be competitive or meaningful for a long time.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think the key is weaknesses and not making them THAT powerful. For instance with a litch, all the spells that really, really, really, hurt undead should be useable against you and most NPCs including guards in towns not friendly to necromancy should be like "Holy ******* it's a litch! DIE FIEND!!!"
Or with lycans, they are only really powerful if they get their bloodlust snowballing. Otherwise they are a weaker than normal character that everyone is going to attack, and they always have a weakness to silver weapons. And they have to do that snowball every time they turn.
I think any of this is likely to not be around until 3+ years after OE, but it's fun to talk about.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think with the nerf to Undead in Pathfinder Tabletop compared to D&D 3.5, this wouldn't be such an issue in an online game. Phylactery? Oh you mean respawns? I wanted this more as flavor and an achievement to be set upon by only the staunchest of necromantic(sp?) nerds.
The advantage of being a Lich in the tabletop was the immortality with the phylactery, if someone argues that, then I ask what was it for? There are many undead templates with much better stats, DR, and supernatural abilities than the lich, and from my experience are much easier to attain.
As for what I would like to see as an in-game adjustments? I would like to see a visual change that would provide many flavor options when it came to necromancy. That is all.
Some Flavor Options I would like to see:
-The ability to have Undead NpC guards/citizens within your "Necropolis" settlement. (possibly the ability to establish a Necropolis?)
-Obviously a permanent "Heretic/Heinous" flag
-Additional visual customization for Undead minions
-The ability to Undead "Slaves" in a settlement owned/operated by a lich
Any Hard/Soft Abilities with in-game "benefits?" (These are merely my thoughts at the moment and I could live without them, even if they are already part of the intentional setup)
-The ability to apply leadership modifiers to undead minions?
-Possibility for a higher limit of Undead controlled?
-Possibly a new skill tree focusing on your Undead abilities/resistances
As for what I meant by templates. I think they should be treated as extremely hard to get "Class Trees" if they were to have permanent in-game Benefits other than cosmetic/flavor utilities. If they were to have in-game benefits, making them require a large amount of skill investment, time, and effort to achieve will deter most of the average "seeking advantage" players, because the advantages will be few and far between.
Cons:
-Undead will generally not be received well, except in cities that allow necromancy, and even then, probably only "Necropolises"
-Your Phylactery is really only an RP variant of the "respawn" ability of every other player
-Spells that effect/affect(Sp?) undead would do the same to you
Option B for implementation would be:
-Consider it a prestige class
-Balance it with other available prestige classes
I did intentionally leave out the immune to Mind-affecting effects, but choose too because the strong counter is an equal amount of spells/abilities designed to destroy/hinder undead.
I apologize for any spelling/grammar errors, I made this post while on my phone at work.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Doesn't sound balanced at all. Why then would the god of undead not favor her champions? If you add the fact that pharasma is her mortal enemy it makes much more sense. The balancing factor is requiring an investment of time, experience, and gold to achieve abilities just like everything else in pfo. There is no instant gratification. There is only hard work...
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
A werewolf could cause all sorts of interesting story lines, but would someone really want to "give up control" (an impossibility in reality anyway) for the period of the change? Easier to RP than the lich, but still more about the mechanical benefit than the flavour.
Not impossible, just boring: "I've been watching PFO like a screensaver for the last 20 minutes as the monster AI controlled my werewolf."
It's true that every secret in an MMO eventually ends up with a walkthrough guide. One of the most unusual things about Star Wars Galaxies was how long it took for that walkthrough to appear. The MMO market and the wiki community were younger then, too. These days, I think secrets tend to leak even faster.
Giving each player a unique path to a rare template could be accomplished at least two ways: Hand coding a path for that player, and the next one, and the other one, and the ones after that, or programming a generic path with several random elements. SWG choose the second option. People figured out where the random element was (which career to max out next), and 'rolled the dice' until they hit the right combinations.
Taking the first option - hand coding unique and meaningful paths for each player who wants a template, is a project for a GM and a player. It works in tabletop gaming because you have one GM and a handful of players. When you have on the order of 10-100 GMs and 10,000-100,000 players... let's just call it unlikely to happen in a commercial setting. Sure, the GW folks are dedicated to their game, but that's asking a lot from them.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
What you're looking at is max max max type of "one of a kind" addition years from now. Eg A Liche could be a super premium content thing one day with other conditions eg max and it's own hex and undead minions and the player would be a dungeon master able to harvest the goods of dead adenturers as well as their corpses to the ranks of their undead minions.
But the quality of a "secret" is the knowledge that it might be possible and no one has yet found it. Incidentally it's the appeal of the story in "ready player one" that there is something of high value to be found that none have found in a virtual setting. Maybe a lottery is a very basic version of that too. I know the devs are interested in the possibility of wider even arc in the game so who knows long-long term planning (Chinese style) could be called for?!
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Well the Lich transformation is supposed to require a powerful and expensive ritual to perform. If the Ritual transformation required a collection of seriously rare items dropped from the most dangerous dungeons and then further refined to a high degree, the transformation could be easily regulated. GW could simply control the drop rate of the components to control the Lich population. You could also use gameplay factors to control lich behavior. If one of their ability trees was the ability to develop their own dungeon lair and populate it with monsters, you could use them to produce interesting player generated content.
Lycanthropes are significantly harder to control the population of, but as has already been pointed out gameplay factors can actually be used to balance their population.
Vampires will see a high degree of demand, but you could probably control populations with gameplay factors as well. Damage from or massive debuff caused by Sunlight would probably do the trick to keep vampire populations under control. Throw in their other weaknesses and actually seriously apply them and only people that really want the vampire experience and not just "lol vamps iz cool" will actually being playing them.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
The werewolf, on the other hand, is a creature of action. But a large amount of the literature dealing with lycanthropy stresses the inability of the werewolf to control its changes, especially at the beginning when it is first infected. There is often a sense of amnesia and a period in which the werewolf is unaware that the problem, the lycanthrope, is actually him. For me, this is a fundamental part of the "lore" surrounding lycanthropy.Apparently lycans don't have to be raving monsters in Golarion. I ran across a god of good aligned werewolves.
For me what would really make a lycanthrope an enjoyable character to play is something that really promotes the idea of "you should go crazy and kill everyone" but doesn't force me to do so. I really appreciated in Skyrim that my werewolf form was powered by feasting upon flesh, especially human flesh, and everyone who saw me would try to kill me, but ultimately I still controlled my character.
A really, really, awesome lycanthropy system for me would work something like this:
- Freshly turned Lycans would be forced into hybrid form every full moon.
- Lycans could train the ability to control their changes, eventually being able to assume hybrid or animal form when desired, and having the option to suppress automatic turning.
- Most NPCs including guards attack lycan on sight when in hybrid form. Players can also kill then without reputation loss.
-Lycans have a bloodlust meter while in hybrid form. It constantly decharges but charges whenever you consume the flesh of an enemy (player or NPC). Raising it gives bonuses to movement speed, attack speed, strength, total health, and health regeneration. Lycans with a high bloodlust are very powerful, but are extremely weak (even compared to their non-lycan form) at a low bloodlust.
-Lycans get a specific bonus based off their animal. There Werewolf bonus is "You gain X% of the bloodlust gains of other werewolves in your pack"
-All...
This idea reminded me of the 3.5 supplement book which had rules for playing undead. One of the rules which I liked treated an undead's special abilities (such as energy drain, strength drain) as both an addiction and as a replacement for food. For instance a vampire needed blood to survive and was addicted to draining the life out of living creatures. Something similar would be awesome for suitable monster templates. Also templates would work best if they didn't give fantastical mechanical benefits, unless there is some sort of trade off. Another option would be for characters to earn/acquire a template and then have to learn how to use their abilities. Thus its a trade-off of XP and time, plus still having to decide what passive and use activate abilities to slot.