Shattered Kingdoms

Currently, you have the creation hall asking your alignment before asking your profession or even race. Could you please change the order to race, then profession, then alignment. Right now a new person to the mud might pick something like say aberrant and completely miss that griffons and elves are options.

Under the current system if someone picked any alignment other than aberrant or principled, they would miss that some races can be paladins or hellions.

It's also annoying as hell to try to see what the new race/class combos are and have to create 3 new characters for each race just to make sure they didn't add paladin or hellion to something.

In the VERY least, could you add what professions are available to each race under their appropriate race helpfiles?

The creation hall is counter intuitive currently.

The helpfiles need some serious reworking. Each race helpfile should list available classes at the bottom, and each class helpfile should list available races. Alignments should also be listed clearly for any race/class that is restricted to only certain ones.

I don't remember people complaining about the fact that certain alignments were restricted when you chose a certain race or class. Remember that this is an RP required MUD, so this is just as important an aspect to your character as race or class.

You say it's counter-intuitive because you have years of behavior training telling you that. All respect to you Cannibal, but you should go read the other thread I posted regarding the Hall of Creation. It wasn't an accident that it's been changed that way and it's not going back.

We might add disallowed-alignments to certain help files.

I disagree that alignment first is a bad thing.

If you're rolling an abherrant character, you don't want to play an elf or griffon anyways. If you learn, once you start playing, that elves and griffons are playable races, and want to play one, then you'll reroll using a more appropriate alignment for the race in question. But alignment first does exactly what it's intended to do: you have to know what kind of character yours will be before you select anything else for it, and thus are restricted in race and profession by that choice.

I agree that it's not ideal, but you could argue the other side and say that if you picked a paladin, you might never realise that there was any alignment other than principled.

A simple "help class" fixes up any confusion. I assume the hall of creation still insists you read the odd helpfile.

I read the other thread Dulrik and responded, but I'll repeat the main points here and elaborate.

As I said in the other thread, I understand your reasoning behind the current change. You want to stress RP and that is laudable. I approve of this type of thinking and I'm glad to see you stressing it. This particular change, however, does so at the sacrifice of allowing new players to know what all their options are in the creation hall race and class wise and I guarentee you that newbies are far more interested in what races and classes and combinations thereof you have available than what alignments you can be.

To complain that alignment was restricted after race class would be laughable and that's why no one complained D. I mean, diabolic paladin? Evil elves? The reason no one complained is because this was a logical progression and intuitive to character creation. You picked your sex and then you saw every possible option available to you race wise. You then saw every possible option available to you profession wise. It was then logical that your profession limits your alignment such as necromancers can only be diabolic. Every single D&D game out there has you pick your alignment after your race and class for this very same reason. (Yes, I know SK is not D&D, but I'm just pointing out that this is an established player friendly system for a reason.)

The current system makes you pick your alignment which automatically knocks out options no matter what alignment you choose. Choosing any light aura alignment first eliminates delves, hellions, necromancers automatically. Grey eliminates griffons, elves, delves, hellions, paladins, necromancers. So on and so forth. A new player to the mud might wish to know all of their options up front and may be disappointed after picking miscreant that they can't be a necromancer.

If you're adamant about the order, then you need to have your minions edit the helpfiles for all the races, professions, and alignments. I would be perfectly fine with the current creation hall order if only, when I was a soul, I could type help profession, look at the list and then type help hellion and then under what you already have written for hellion, have it say something like "abberant alignment only. Available races centaur, delf, dwarf, human, helf, and minotaur (shameless cry for minotaur hellions). All the professions should be done this way. All the races files should have all the available professions to that race with griffons and elves stating that they must be either principled or scrupulous and the delf file stating that they must be diabolic, aberrant, or miscreant.
Then each profession needs to have either "all alignments available or only diabolic, only aberrant, only principled."

Just adding those things to the helpfiles, which really should have been there this whole time, would silence any complaints anyone could possibly have about your new creation hall order.

See, I don't think you're wrong at all. I just think that you need to put the finishing touches on a few helpfiles to clear up all confusion.

Could be solved by having an "enter principled" "Are you sure? This will remove the following class choices for your character: hellion, necromancer. Enter principled Y/N".

I agree about the need for clarity on which races, alignments, and classes are appropriate to each. Race help files need to mention which classes and alignments can be selected or are restricted (and even point to them in See also:). Classes need to mention which races are capable of taking this path and if there is a restriction. I think all in all its mostly been done, but I think there could be a more systematic approach. Or simply a new helpfile which references them.

Instead of going through and editing multiple help files, why not just create an entirely new help file? Say..Help creation or so.

What this could do is give a break down of every single allignment with a simple statement. ie

"Diabolic - (Dark) Crazed murderers of the realms. - Insert race and class choices here." etc. That way it eliminates the read to wade through the help files if people aren't sure what they want right off.

Just an idea.

Edit: It would be kind of like the Help gods file in which it gives a break down of the gods, which gods are Hellion, paladin only, etc. And then if they want further information on an allignment, they can type help diabolic etc. And things of that nature.

That would be a nice helpfile to add in addition to editing multiple files.

To be honest, most of the file editing would be nothing but copy paste work.