Shattered Kingdoms

Okay, so Dulrik's idea about greet and experience and other discussions about role play incentives got me brainstorming last night at work. Another 12 hour shift so plenty of time to think it out and get excited about being able to post it after work. Sorry for the long post in advance.

I don't like the idea much of limiting leveling with role play requirements, but I do like the idea of rewarding people for interacting with one another. I'm sure there's room for abuse, but what in the game isn't possible to be abused in some way. I'm sure there's a way that the system could be tracked for such.

Basically I'm juxtaposing the idea of says and greets into a system that does encourage people to interact, without limitations on advancement. So you start as a newbie with a RP EXP MOD of 0. It will stay at 0 until you write an adjective and a description. There's some details I'm not quite positive about, but they can be adjusted as needed. At my last check you could only greet so many people based on how high of an intelligence score your character has. This restriction may have been removed, could be increased, could be removed, or otherwise. (By the way you do not become susceptible to a certain cabal skill by greeting another person, its the other way around, when they greet you. This was changed years ago.)

So you're encouraged to interact and greet people in this new system of course. Lets list the methods that the game has to interact with one another that are solely RP related:

• say, sayto, yell (would include esay and esayto if those are ideas added)
• emote, pemote, social, action (would include temote if it was eventually added)
• tell, reply, gtell
• invest, blemish, atone, favor
• tribunal or cabal channel,
• induct, uninduct, tarnish, absolve, immigrate, deport, immigrate, pardon, parole, unparole, banish, unbanish, diplomacy state
• reward

That's the entire spectrum as far as I see it. Might be missing something, but these are what come to mind as far as I can see. So, your RP EXP MOD starts at 0, but once you greet anyone (and have an adjective and description), you gain an RP EXP MOD of .05. As you greet more people, you gain in that status .05 each one. The RP EXP MOD score always rounds up to the nearest integer. After you reach 21 greeted PCs, then your score is 1.05, but rounds up to 2. I am not sure the exact limit of greets for a maximum intelligence right now, but I'm sure that could give you a base RP EXP MOD of 2 or 3 or even 4.

Each of the following achievements increases the RP EXP MOD score by 1:

• joining a religion
• joining a faction
• attaining Paragon
• leading a religion
• leading a faction
• each age tick

So if you greeted 95 people (+5), were a member and HF of a religion (+2), member and leader of your faction (+2), PAR (+1), and had aged three times (+3), you'd have an RP EXP MOD score of 13. Of course, leaving or losing leadership of your religion or faction, losing PAR, would reduce your score by 1.

Each command will have a certain experience value( EXP VAL). I will say that the minimum you experience you get for any of the actual roleplay commands is 1. Each category of commands has a certain amount of experience points you gain by using said commands or being targeted by said commands, or both. Your RP EXP MOD score would multiply the following amounts:

[1] say, sayto, yell (would include esay and esayto if those are ideas added)
[1] emote, pemote, social, action (would include temote if ithis idea is added)
[3] tell, reply, gtell
[25] invest, blemish, atone, favor
[2] tribunal or cabal channel,
[25] induct, uninduct, tarnish, absolve, immigrate, deport, immigrate, pardon, parole, unparole, banish, unbanish, diplomacy state
[5] reward

So, with this system, you will gain experience for using these commands. Each category would of course have certain requirements for them to work. Basically, in any situation where a message appears on the screen of another PC, you or they or both of you will gain the value of the experience value times the role play experience modifier.

Basically the formula is:

RP EXP MOD * EXP VAL

In the case of the three time aged, HF leader, faction leader, PAR, you'd get:

• 13 * 1 = 13 for a say or emote
• 13 * 3 = 39 for a tell
• 13 * 25 = 325 for an invest
• 13 * 2 = 26 for cabal channel
• 13 * 25 = 325 for faction commands
• 13 * 5 = 65 * reward value for receiving a reward

Experience won't mean as much to a character this far developed, because they'll likely already be GM. However, like rewards, this EXP can be accumulated even at the GM level. Not very many characters at all will have all of these attributes, likely the average character will have an RP EXP MOD score of 5ish give or take one.

Rewards given for the one issuing the command:

• say, sayto, yell (would include esay and esayto if those are ideas added)
• emote, pemote, social, action (would include temote if it was eventually added)
• tell, reply, gtell
• tribunal or cabal channel

Rewards given for both the one issuing the command and the target:

• invest, blemish, atone, favor
• induct, uninduct, tarnish, absolve, immigrate, deport, immigrate, pardon, parole, unparole, banish, unbanish,

Rewards given for the target(s) of the command:

• diplomacy state
• reward

Why do we want to give experience to someone who has been blemished, tarnished, or other unfavorable situations? Because these are role play mechanisms, while they are not good to have happen to your character, they do open up the opportunity to play out the atonement, et cetera, to allow another little bit of role play and another small chunk of experience for completing said task. Leadership and PAR are responsibilities and the little bonus this would award is one way of making the effort more worthwhile. Longevity is always a good thing to have in characters in the game. Granting an experience bonus to those who have been in a faction diplomacy status change is incentive to keep those statuses from stagnating.

None of the bonus from this would be gained if you are alone or nobody gets the message you send across. Talking to a stunned or sleeping victim would negate the bonus. Communicating on faction channel when you are the only person online doesn't net you anything. Gtells in lone 1 PC group would not grant any bonus.

The numbers are just for explaining the system. I'm sure that they could be applied higher or lower than I have described. Yes, the idea is from far left field, but I tried to analyze what commands actually do involve some kind of RP purpose and reward people for using them. It increases people's willingness to interact.

I welcome feedback and suggestions for improving this system. I don't know if this idea would require re-tuning the experience requirements for levels, but I don't think it should. This is a system, whereby people could (eventually) level for only role playing their character. Plevelers won't care because its quicker to plevel. Role play fans will be happy they get to earn experience for doing role play. Leaders and Paragons get a benefit to experience, making the effort more worthwhile, especially earlier on. I see this chances for abuse, but I also see this giving a more living feeling to the game, allowing role play to have a mechanical value, without strict requirements or limits.

Sounds pretty cool to me. Some stuff doesn't make sense, like getting modifier for being older. You'd expect anyone to be GM by that time, hopefully.
Instead, you might want to change that from character age, to hours played. Say, you get a modifier for every 50, or 100 hours played. Or something.

Yeah, I can totally see something like this working, especially if the rewards are significant enough that you might get a level after, say, 5-6 hours of RPing. You don't wanna make it so insignificant that you don't really realize you're getting anything, but I guess at the same time you don't want to make it faster to level with this than to RP.

Beats leveling by spamming spells in an inn.


PS: I realize this might not be so much on the topic, but what about RP incentives for people that are already GM? I suppose this is a subject for a different thread later.

At GM, perhaps it can just loop over and be added to loyalty points, whenever they are fully implemented, so GMs get some sort of continued reward for effort. Course, the paragon system in a way is rewarding for this. Longer aged characters have more an opportunity if they role play to be rewarded.

I reiterate from the previous thread, XP is probably the least desirable form of rp incentive that could be conceived. It already exists in the game in the form of paragon rewards, and imm enlights for rps. Has it been an effective incentive to increase the quality of rp in the game? I would say that the very fact that we are having discussions of this sort proves that it hasn't.

This system is solid, overall, but change the exp gain to some form of spendable currency for tangible rewards. That will encourage what you're looking to accomplish far, far more than XP rewards.

Which is why I mentioned the use of loyalty points (whenever they do something). Something to spend. Has there been any discussion about what they could be spent on?

It accomplishes what it sets out to do quite nicely - on paper at least. It offers an RP alternative to hack-and-slash grind, while not directly affecting the hack-and-slash grind. People are less likely to feel they are "wasting time" RPing before GM, and as it isn't tied to the ordinary leveling system it isn't apt for abuse in powerleveling scenarios.

As someone who usually handles the last five levels by gating, enchanting and haphazardly questing over the course of a week or two, I love it.

I can't believe I am saying this, but I fully agree with OA here.

To help limit abuse, from a pair of people just sitting in the inn and chatting their way to gm or something like that, either caps you can get from any specific action (currency[whatever that may be] is capped per week/month for each category).

[edit]If one of these items that can be purchased is temporary insight (xp buff for x period of time), it will still help the RPer's to get to GM as Konge mentioned.

Tangible awards such as what?

I like the XP idea because it is fast to implement. It won't take a lot of new code as it adds something that already exists in the game, experience.

When you guys talk of tangible rewards, i get the vibe you are talking about something that doesn't exist yet, which means it will take the coders a considerably larger amount of time. Just to keep in mind.

Already detailed a short list of options in the other thread. Not going to repeat it here for your benefit.