Shattered Kingdoms

In my opinion, there's no way to force people to do this without severely neutering the game and resulting in a worse experience. Sure, there are some minor changes that could encourage interaction, but they wouldn't require it, and generally wouldn't be helpful (Forcing all advancements to come from PCs wouldn't prevent people who just power-level together, but it would really frustrate lowbies who can't find anyone to advance them). In my example of leveling someone to GM in 14 hours, we did a very minimal amount of RP, but there -was- RP. We were playing characters that had little to no affiliation with anyone else, and the characters were not breaking alignment to work together. In fact, the character I was using would typically find random people and help them level. My character was also a priest, and I took time to resurrect people when they needed it throughout our leveling spree, especially if no other priests were available.

Our main priority was testing the waters and pushing our limits, and that was fun for us. We also did the best that we could to ensure that we didn't hurt the game for anyone else, and we were in-character the entire time. This was not a case of "We have to be GM to RP" it was a case of "Hey, let's have some fun with SK in an unorthodox way." Afterwards we just logged onto our normal characters and played the game normally. I know that I have never felt like I had to GM a character in order to start RPing.


tl;dr: Forcing people to RP in order to advance in levels is a bad idea. In the same way that you don't want people to feel like they have to hit some arbitrary level mark for their character to be considered worthy of RPing, you should not force people to hit some arbitrary "RP-amount" in order for their character to be considered worthy of advancing in level. That's just going to leave a sour taste in people's mouths.

You don't need to do anything, in my opinion. A power leveled character usually doesn't stick around very long in my experience. When you implemented racial vulnerabilities way back when, I leveled a sorcerer to GM in Ch'zzrym (using color spray) in approximately 10 hours.

That character lasted maybe a week before I got bored with him, since he had no friends as a consequence of doing nothing but leveling.

Just sayin'.

Very true. One does not preclude the other.

That may be true for you and maybe lots of people, but is certainly not true of everyone. And even so, throw-away GMs are not a thing to be desired in the game because character continuity is important. A system that both incentivizes and requires RP would help reduce this phenomenon.

If a system is put in place, I hope it leaves experience gain from combat relatively or completely unchanged. I'd hate for this to just increase grind time in an attempt to spawn more rp along the way. But something plateu'ey and rp'ey could be pretty cool I guess.

That sounds terrific in theory, but I hope it doesn't end up like the change that added an experience cost to recall. There is already a system in place to require RP - peer pressure from fellow players and curses from admins.

I had an idea this morning after first writing today that could help be both incentive and requirement for RP and I don't believe I've ever heard something quite like this suggested before. It would leverage the existing greet system. Greet is already about 95% RP as a system, since there are very few game mechanics tied to it and the couple that were in the past have either been eliminated or weakened. But while supportive, it's never been put to use as an incentive even though it lends itself to counting interactions.

In a nutshell: Every status you would have to mutually greet and exchange conversation with a minimum number of not-previously greeted player characters. Conversations would be measured in exchanges. An exchange is at least one message that is responded to by at least one message.

Targets would start out low. To get to novice for example, you'd just need to find one other person to greet and have an exchange with them (say hello and have them respond with a hello of their own). Each status would have at least the same or a higher requirement than the last. Initiate may be one more person (for a total of two) and then Apprentice two new people (for a total of four). In addition, the required number of exchanges per encounter would also increase. For example, if the requirement is three exchanges, you'd have to trade at least six total lines (1/1, 1/1, 1/1) of alternating conversation (although it would be just as valid to have longer conversations like 3/1, 1/2, 8/1).

To keep this as being not only requirement but incentive, greeting and exchanges would also be rewarded with experience points, even beyond the minimum requirements, but with some sort of diminishing returns.

I'm well aware that some people like to travel to lucrative but hard-to-get-to areas and train there for two or three status changes without coming out. I can already see their tears reacting to a proposal like this. My first thought is to say 'tough luck' and make them come back and talk to people. But depending on feedback, perhaps you could stockpile exchanges the way that you stockpile experience and then trade them in at the trainer. If so, I think that should still be limited. Perhaps each status that you achieve will halve the number of exchanges of the stockpiled encounters, so that you must have more meaningful, in-depth conversations if you want them to be useful for later advancement.

Twinks will want to make this into the following:


But by forcing you to keep talking to new people, this would be either eliminated or easily detected. I would hope if you are going to have to talk to someone you don't know anyway, it might as well be interesting or potentially lead to something useful in the future.

Anyway, that's my idea. Interested in hearing feedback that is not just moaning and gnashing of teeth.

That's not a system and furthermore it doesn't work. There is more peer pressure to GM before RPing on SK than vice-versa.

It's ultimately your decision, but the system you are proposing reminds of when an experience cost was added to recall. Good in theory, bad in practice. I think this system will suffer the same outcome.

The evolution of how to add incentives for RP has taken some strange twists and turns over the course of two threads. I still think the reward for RP (and playing SK or any game for that matter) should be fun.

Why are we addressing a problem that doesn't exist? Is anyone actually bothered by the fact that people can get to a high level without going through the motions of meeting a bunch of random people? What about people who roll on an underpopulated side or don't have the ability to play during peak hours? A system like this will only make those players quit playing entirely.

This conversation only started because of some people who weren't trying to game the system and make some PK gods to take over the mud, but just because a handful of players like testing the limits to see how quickly one can GM if the process is done perfectly. Does anyone at all feel like they have to GM in order to RP? You don't. People level because they like their characters to be useful in PvP and PvE. There's no reason to spend coding time on adding in a feature that tries to mechanically force RP when it should be a reward in and of itself.