Shattered Kingdoms

This is basically stolen from a thread I made in gameplay. Please, for the sake of the players who are desperately trying to get ahead and slowly being beaten about the head and neck, follow this guide.

1. No bards or sorcs. These classes are killers between charming, sleeping, and songs that ruin your equipment. Please don't select these classes for NPCs unless you actually want them to be tough. I recommend you select this class for NPCs you don't want killed very often, like the "boss" NPC of the area. Examples might be queen Serena, town judges, etc. Necromancers are pretty devastating as well because of their maledictions.

2. Few barbs. Barbs are the toughest NPCs aside from bards and sorcs to fight, and can really give you pause. Barbs are enough to make a leveling area difficult or hard, and certainly enough to keep you on your toes. If you want to make barbs, go ahead, but make them sparingly as a kind of "Surprise! Things aren't so easy" kind of NPC.

3. Don't make priests assist. In fact, make as few assisting NPCs as possible. Multiple priests mean multiple harms mean multiple deaths. Multiple any class will do a lot to ruin an area for leveling. Again, I suggest making the only NPCs that assist being ones who you intend to help the "boss" NPC of the area out when they're attacked. Otherwise, forgo them, and give the players a little slack. We don't all get automatically advanced to level 53.

4. Lots and lots of lone priests/swashbucklers with only one sword/mercs with low damage weapons/scouts/rogues. These guys, when not assisting each other, make the best targets for leveling. Again though, please don't make them assist.

5. Law. Law is a tricky issue. I know you want law so that there's some kind of "ooh, gotta be careful!" element. Forget it. It's not "Ooh, gotta be careful", it's "Hey everyone, there's law here let's patrol" - or if you're like me, "Let's watch people make a kill, then report them, and then we get the area all to ourselves". I cannot count the number of times I've done that in a certain Zhensh village.

6. Layout. Make it simple, keep it simple. If you must have a secret area so that nobody but your mortals and their buddies know about it go for it, but make it small and unimportant. Squares and corridors are best.

That's all I can think of for now.

Wonderful thread.

I'd like to add: if it is going to be an area intended for a certain aura to level, make the NPCs opposite aura. There's no reason not to give people the opposite aura bonus while leveling.

Hrmm, do dark aura's recieve an opposite aura bonus? I was under the impression that they didn't, that only light aura's did, since they were restricted in what they could level on. This was designed to give them a bit of a boost since the amount of leveling areas they have are considerably less than those available to dark auras, since they have no problems leveling on any aura.

I could be under the wrong impression, or perhaps this was altered, can anyone clarify for sure?

I'm fairly sure that lighties get bonuses from leveling on darkies, darkies get bonuses from leveling on lighties, and greys are just shafted because they are cheap and don't take damage from SoF or Holy Word.

lighties/darkies get bonus xp for killing opposite aura and negative xp for killing same aura. Graybies, get no bonuses or negatives.

I know lighties recieve a bonus most certainly. Greybies don't for obvious reasons. I'm don't believe darkies do though, for the same reason as greys really. Darkies can level on any aura, dark/light/grey.

Darkies get opposite aura leveling bonuses.

Hrmm, yeah, I read the helpfile on EXP and it seems to point towards dark/light both getting an alignment bonus.

I could have sworn I saw an immortal post some time ago however that said darkies didn't get an exp bonus for leveling on lighties.

Perhaps I'm just remembering incorrectly, wouldn't be the first time.

While we don't have access to the code, SK is built on DIKU base, and MUDs on the same 'base' are similar one way or another. Each alignment has a score value between 1000 being principled to -1000 being diabolic. Dulrik or previous coders may have re-evaluated that of course. Unprincipled and so on land around 200. These values are 'hidden' in SK as with many other numeric values. Then by comparing those values against NPCs', whether if bonuses exist is determined. (Correct please if this is wrong, Dulrik!)

Lighties get a bonus against darkies.

Darkies get a bonus against lighties.

Greybies aren't cool enough for a bonus.

Lighties do not lose XP (my translation of "negative XP") for levelling on other lighties (unless an Imm finds out and curses them for it, I suppose), and darkies don't lose it either. The ways you can lose XP are actually quite limited. Try checking the helpfiles if you want to tally them up.