Shattered Kingdoms

This is for those of you who believe leveling should require more RP.


I am proposing a system where, to level up beyond a certain point, (say, level 30) you require a PC mentor. That is to say, you have to seek someone out, do some RP with him, then with some command, the 'mentor' enables you to level further, and gain access to your latter skills.

Later on, at lv 41 and 46, you require to do some quest given to you by some imm. That is to say, an RP-oriented quest that requires a good while to finish, before being able to return to your leveling.

Not a perfect system, but maybe something in this direction would help avoid characters that appear out of nowhere, are lv 50 and act like they rule the world. They actually do, if you think about it, and that's why something needs to be changed. Maybe. I dunno. *burp*

These threads are getting really tiresome at this point. What started out as a way to provide incentives to encourage RP has devolved into complex and convoluted systems to bottleneck and limit leveling.

The greet/conversation system that Dulrik proposed is flawed, but might be workable depending on its implementation. It is MUSH-like, which I don't particularly care for but it won't kill anyone to spend a bit more time interacting and being social.

Encouraging RP is great and I am all for it. However, this is NOT a MUSH. This is a MUD and I expect a LOT of hack-and-slash to go along with the social and RP stuff.

TLDR: SK is a MUD, not a MUSH.

What he said.

I don't disagree with you on the MuD vs MUSH part, I'm just looking at this from a game designer perspective.

In any MMORPG game, you don't want your players to hit max level in a matter of a few hours, because that takes away from the value of having a max level character.
In the example of the most popular MMO out there, max level is actually really easy to attain, but the concept of 'leveling' then moves unto gear and, accumulating the 'top' gear takes quite a while.
However, in SK your equipment is not part of your character. It comes and goes. This means that a 6000 hours character is essentially no different than a 40 horus old character (minus RP and age ticks)
This makes it easier to say 'screw this' and change characters once things don't go your way, and it also makes it harder for reliable communities (known in mmo's as guilds, clans etc) to form, as players just shift every 5-10 weeks after something does not go their way.

If you look at slightly older MMO's, the more succesful ones used smart tricks to 'delay' leveling and, the less successful ones just upped the required EXP to level. Some used to penalize death with exp loss that would literally take you hours just to recover. That just drove people away.

In taking the example of a popular 2d sprite animation MMORPG, you are not really likely to abandon your transcended lv 99 character to start a new one, because that would mean you have to do all the quests again, spend your time grinding certain NPCs for certain 0.5% drops and so forth. However, the leveling part can be done in more or less 2 days.

TL:DR: Its not about MUD or MUSH. It's about a character's value. Every GM can be 'replaced' in a few hours, if you strip down eq and rp. That's why its so easy to ragequit.

yeah, wrong

There's a science backing this, that all your favorite modern games follow, and there's a reason for it. You can dismiss it as wrong if you feel it doesn't work for you, but that doesn't change the fact that it works, when done right.

These threads started with the premise that there needed to be more incentives to encourage RP. Then it evolved to a hybrid argument about stats and veteran players having too much of an advantage due to accumulated game knowledge.

Then it evolved again: this time the problem with SK was that leveling is too easy and tactics ran rough shod over RP. Now we have version 3.0 (or maybe 4.0) that is using some sort of hybrid rage quitting and character value theory.

What does any of this have to do with encouraging RP? These threads have reached the point of uselessness.

The thought that spawned this particular thread was 'how to combine RP and leveling' in a way that is not arbitrary or system based (like # of people greeted), and also interactive between players, and maybe even angels/imms.

It's not useful or useless. It's brainstorming. A conversation starter, if you like. But if you prefer that I shut up, I can do that too