myzmar
Hello everyone,
I am a new player to this PW, made my first character (Beryl Slamfist) a few days ago and decided to give it a try playing him yesterday. Spent a few great hours around here. I have a few remarks that might perhaps be interesting to someone, and a few questions as well. Here it comes.
First, let me say hello and welcome to EfU. We are always glad to hear feedback, and being able to make experiences better for new players to the server is always a priority, so we are very interested in this kind of feedback in general.
1. Kudos to the players around here. It really is amazing not to see anyone running idiotically all around. All the people I have met were kind OOC and well in their roles, both the good and the bad guys (including the one who killed me for accidentaly walking into a trap that did hurt him). I didn't really expect this quality of roleplaying on a non-passworded PW. Chapeau bas.
We are always amazed by the players as well. This is the number one thing that defines the server. We hoped the DM's, the world, and the stories would nurure good RPing, but the players are the key to this server, and what makes it what it is. EfU was kind of an experiment in ways. We started password protected during alpha testing for a couple months, then removed the password for our New Years grand opening. Part of what the DM staff had discussed a lot was how to keep the players roleplaying. We were lucky to have gotten a great set of players during alpha testing, but weren't sure if the quality of roleplay would continue once it was opened up. However, as we hoped, good roleplaying breeds more roleplaying, and it seems people learn fast. I'm continually impressed by many great new players who jump right in and contribute.
2. Kudos to the world builders. I find it a very good idea not to make a huge world, but to insist on details, depth of the story and the thousand small things that make the world alive. The sanctuary town and immediate vicinity are trully beautiful and make me feel like exploring its history.
Having a detailed immersive world was a high priority in the building. We've learned a lot since the start, and some areas have been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of techniques and designs that we learned while working on other parts of the module. I hope you'll find the history and the "mysteries" are as detailed as the areas are.
3. The relatively small size of the world (as I understand it) also greatly increases the RP opportunities, simply because I cross other players all the time. In all, really a great idea.
The module is centered around a few core areas, which allows a lot of player interaction. However the module really has grown quite a bit. At the time of my last inventory we had 243 area in the module.
[br] 11 DM/OOC Areas
[br] 41 Areas making up Sanctuary (may sound like a lot, but this is every shop and building, faction areas, etc).
[br] 15 Areas making up the sewers/Dunwarren (which are like extended Sanctuary)
[br] 64 Areas making up the Underdark
[br] 56 QA Areas used by scripted quests
[br] 56 @ Areas for DM run quests.
How we add areas is really important to us. We are trying not to have "dead areas" that just take up space in the module, so every addition is carefully considered before it is made.
4. While I do enjoy this world is hard to survive in (low magic from what I have noticed/read, sever death penalties, money hard to come by, full PvP mode), it seems to me this encourages min-maxing of characters. From what I have come to realize is I probably won't survive long as a monk with an AC of 15. Most high level players I have met were playing a custom sub-race, and most players told me OOC this was their 3rd, 4th etc character, leaving me with an impression the way to survive around here is to work your way to having a custom sub-race application approved, especially as the ECL system does not in fact add you creature/outsider/humanoid levels but simply makes it a little slower to advance. I was wondering if this was intended and if it was as I think it is.
We do consider this a low magic server, especially by underdark standards. However, I actually consider the death penalties to be pretty slight compared to what I'm used to on other servers. It is very possible to not even lose a level upon death. There are some easy quests to make money on as well.
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I will say that we have tighted up xp on ECL characters recently, because the number of high level ECL characters concerned us as well. However, I actually see it different on the reasons why the players with ECL characters are often high level. ECL characters are generally played by veteran players who have learned how to level, how to make money, and how to limit their deaths. There are plenty of non-ECL characters that have made it to higher levels as well, and I know of some ECL characters who never made it to level 5.
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The server is designed to make leveling to level 5 fairly easy, with it getting harder once you go beyond that. One of the big things we are trying to look at as a DM staff is making sure we are spending more time with those level 2-5 characters when it comes to special events and such.
5. I was wondering what is the role of DM around here, I tried to browse the forums but found no answer. A player told me there is a lot of DM involvment, and indeed a DM did possess a final quest npc in my presence. My questions are quite precise and a little technical, but I would like to know: 1) do DM gives cookies for RP, or do they only "animate" the npc's occasionaly 2) are there any DM-run quests other than the entrance quests for new players 3) if so, are those announced prior hand or one just has to be lucky and 4) are there any DM rewards a player can earn from such quests?
The DM's are involved in all kinds of aspects in the game.
1) We do have the ability to give "RP tokens", however, we have really turned to giving RP experience instead, since RP tokens really tend to change the dynamics of the server, and actually encourage habits we don't want to encourage. We do possess NPC's constantly, either when asked by a player via the DM channel, or just to suprise people and spice things up.
2) We run a lot of quests as well. There are several different ways we go about this.
a- We change scripted quests on the fly, possessing the monsters, spawning new monsters, adding other obsticals, and sometimes even connecting new areas. We will often hop from quest to quest doing this.
b- We run preludes (to introduce new characters). This is usually scheduled, but the last two I ran were actually with no planning, just because there were 3 people in the welcome area at once on both occassions. (On both occasions, 1 of the 3 players gave me a heads up about the players in welcome.)
c- We run "one shot quests". This is usually something we set up as a one time thing, where it's a quest without any real long term plot results. These are almost always unscheduled. A DM jumps in game, and just sets up the quest. How the players are found varies. Sometimes some event hook happens to get the attention of players. Sometimes we make an announcement with an NPC. Sometimes a party will just stumble on a cave or some ruins they haven't seen before.
d- Plot quests are usually planned from the DM's side more in advance. Sometimes players trying to do something on a plot tell a DM "I want to do X" and we set up a quest for it. Other times they are set up more like one shot quests. We have had a couple on the forums with signups, but usually it's just a matter of who is on at the time we run it.
e- Player requests. At times we run plots to help advance player plots, react to player actions, or base quests around character backgrounds. Often-times, the players send DM tells saying "I'm going to go do X" and we see the opportunity for a quest. No all DM tells result in interaction, but if a DM is on and not busy, they are usually responsive to this.
3) This was reall covered in the types of events. Some are announced, some you just have to be lucky. Best ways to make sure you get some is to get involved with stories and plots, and if you are doing something interesting, send a DM tell about it before you go.
4) Most magic items are given out via DM quests. There is some magic available in shops and in scripted quests, however the truly unique stuff comes directly from a DM, we keep a wide variety of stuff in our loot vaults, so that our avatars are always stocked with new and interesting stuff.
6. I noticed all quests may be repeated after a server reset, and remember reading somewhere we should role play it as if we did the quest for the first time. Is that true? It does sound a little... well, odd. My character does not suffer from amnesia :D and it seems to me most quests can be done repeatedly without it being a big hindrance to RP (like delivery quests, perhaps someone is just always hungry for a pie?).
Common sense is the main thing here. Although many quests like pie deliveries make sense to do often, if you killed some villain yesterday, and then go to kill him again today, sometimes it makes a little less sense. The biggest reason for the amnesia rule, is to keep from metagaming quests. "Look out, there is a trap on that door, we hit it yesterday!" "Alright, everybody cast death protection, the next room has the bodak!" Those kinds of things need to be avoided, and full memory of previous quests would just be excuses to do things like that. It also avoids discussions about how you've killed that pig farmer 11 times and he continues coming back. We tried to make the storylines for a lot of quests make it make sense to repeat them, but for many, it's still a stretch.
7. The limited range of character levels for quests seems an issue to me. I had two players apologize to me OOC they could not take me with them because of level limitations in less than one hour. I understand there might be some reasons behind this (probably avoiding some abuse), but the way it is coded seems to limit RP possibilities. If a high level Paladin wishes for some reason to take a recently escaped slave into a dangerous dungeon, he should have the chance, imho. Perhaps instead make a cap for xp the lowbie would get, both from kills and the quest reward? just my 2 cc's.
Level ranges are an issue for a number of reasons. First, it is much easier to balance a quest within a certain range of levels. High level chars could run through all of the low level quests blindfolded, dragging people along to farm xp and gold. This is a very undesirable outcome. Min levels are mostly to keep people from getting instantly killed. This said, you can ask a DM to raise or lower requirements for a quest. When this happens, it makes sure the DM's are aware that it happened, and they have the opportunity to do things like throw something higher level into the quest to challenge the person over the normal cap. I feel the level limits on quests are really necessary to keep things running smoothly.
8. Last but not least, I have read a recent thread concerning re-rolling on level-up to get maximized hitpoints. I have read the rules attentively but did not find anything about this. Could a DM please precise if this is considered an abuse or not? (personally, I totaly support the view that this is something hindering mostly a certain type of characters, warrior-types to be precise. I would enjoy the server to automatically give either the maximum or a certain percentage of HP's at level up)
We'd love to get a technical solution for the HP dilemma. We do consider rerolling to be an abuse, and when I know of someone doing it, they are less likely to get any positive attention from my time (just like anyone abusing other parts of the system). The problem is, every solution I've seen requires a hak, which we are very much opposed to, or the solution just doesn't solve the problem. From a policy standpoint, we are very against rerolling HP, and should we see a satisfactory scripted solution to handle it, we'd happily add it.