Shattered Kingdoms

I like them, but they are probably full out trade skills that should be open to anyone.


I like it.


Not sure I like this one, but it is really thinking outside the box. I would like inns to retain their unique benefits.


Another interesting one, but not sure how well it would work in practice. Between people not finding your vendor and/or trying to kill and loot the vendor, I'm not sure it would be a very satisfying experience.

Allowing you to choose all your abilities instead of having classes is more than plausible. Build your own skill-set instead of having classes was the default for this style of MUD back in the late 90's. And there are (or at least were) no shortage of MUDs that have that sort of system. We actually ripped out that customization code in order to do something different. I have played those games and eventually the community comes to a consensus on what is the optimal build and then everyone plays the same character.

Opportunities for ability customization in SK are based on (by order of importance) class, cabal, race and religion. This is a fundamental tenet of SK. In the future, I do foresee trade skills as being a new category for differentiating your character.

Ironically, these trends come and go. SK chose to be hard-classed in a time when it was rare. These days it is more the standard expectation. But that doesn't make it less of a good idea than it was at the beginning. Every class should be bringing things to the table that cannot be optimally covered by other classes.

Loyalty Tokens as originally defined are intended to be a way to entice people to come back to the game even after they've exhausted all the character possibilities there is to offer. That's why the only original rewards were new race/class combos. It was specifically stated that LT's would never give a reward that would definitively give you more power or ability than a starting player. They were just different (and usually sub-optimal) possibilities.

Then we started down the slippery slope of providing a few more options that could be used after character creation. The XP boosts were actually part of the original vision to make it easier for vets to come back even though they've done it all before. But the unspecialize and rez options started to segue into territory that was not part of the original mission statement. Yet importantly, neither of them affect the power level of your character and they are still only options available to returning players.

Unfortunately, there has always been a desire for people to spend loyalty tokens using the character that earned them. The more options that we give for LT that are not tied to character creation, the stronger this desire will become.

Even some of the staff is on that bandwagon, including fellow thread-contributor Yed. So I won't say it's completely out of the question that we will see future ways to redeem LT or even that you may be able to redeem them with the character that earned them. But I haven't committed to that yet. At best, I'm on the fence now. But I still feel very strongly that none of these rewards should increase the power level of your character beyond what a starting player can achieve.

What if at each age tick all LTs earned became unlocked for use?

Still don't like the idea of actual power improvements tied to LTs because opportunity to earn them is very subjective and I don't think it makes sense to add further benefits to leadership hoarding.

Hence the instrument idea enhancing bard songs.

I'm game. Should probably have it's own thread.

It already does have it's own thread that I started a few days ago.

Well, the title was instruments as a weapon. But sure. I will move some of these other ideas over to that thread and change the title.

Give bards shield block and/or meditation and they'd be competitive.

Shield block would not make them competitive. Not even close.

Meditation would be nice for a hard though. There's no other class that is so mana dependent which doesn't have meditation. It feels like an oversight that bards don't have meditation, like back when barbarians didn't have dodge and we had to argue to get the skill for them.