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What about introducing another random factor, so that a particular recipe only creates the item it's supposed to create a certain % of the time? Rather than adjusting cooldown or item power to find the perfect game balance, I imagine it'd be a lot easier to just adjust this randomizing figure.

I don't think a lot of good will come from trying to stifle the conversation.

EfU is not a democracy, and nor should it be. But I don't think it's entirely fair to put everything onto the DMs shoulders and just shrug away attempts by players to analyze the situation. I understand that it's critical for the DMs and players to maintain a certain degree of separation, but the fact remains that this thread cracked open a lot of things that people (obviously) wanted to talk about. So let them. If the DMs wanted us to pipe down, they would have asked us to or locked the thread.

In the meanwhile, I like to think that some really cool new ideas might come out of this to make the game easier on DM nerves and more fun for everyone. Every once in awhile you need to have a meta-conversation, you know? It's good for your stress levels.

Honestly-

Lots of people complaining about the immersion issues of villainy in this thread seem to indicate that it is some sort of innate common sense to not murder each other on the brink of extinction.

Judging from human history alone, this is the opposite of the case. Desperation begets violence, because people no longer feel they have the time or luxury of trying to persuade others to follow their point of view.

Not to derail the thread, but this is a topic of great interest to me.

Our history books are filled with violence because it's the exception to the norm, and thus worthy note, rather than something endemic to our race. I agree that desperation does tend to further it, but I don't think you're taking into account all the countless people that have just quietly starved to death in history's many famines. While PCs are certainly not peasants, the point remains.

Especially in our setting, where even the gods are dying, I think you're going to find a larger number of people abandoning their own dogmas and egos in favor of the adaptations necessary for their survival. I would expect to see the vast majority of non-CE characters operating in a more cooperative sense by necessity. After all, if there's one thing about humans, is that they're capable of very rapid change in behavior on both an individual and a social level.

Our setting is extremely similar to the setting of the "real world" in  the Matrix movies. And just like in Zion, while everyone didn't  necessarily all get along and agree with each other, when faced with a sentinel for every man, woman and child, they did what they had to do.

Most exceptions, I think, are going to stem from the multiracial nature of Sanctuary. Humans are renowned for adaptability, dwarves and elves, not so much.

Nice to see some people pointing out the influence the setting itself has.  Being post-apocalyptic, EfU absolutely has an us versus the world  feeling to it. With the possibility that the Dread could come knocking  any time, it just makes sense that all the main institutions of  Sanctuary would remain on at least a cooperative, professional  relationship. Maybe even civil. Even the denizens of Lower wouldn't be  blind to their danger. Throw in a stable two party elective government  split liberal/conservative, and yeah, I can see Sanctuary-based faction  conflict being difficult to stir up and impossible to keep going beyond a  very low simmer. Personally I don't mind it, it's an interesting  atmosphere. I can see how it might get stale to someone who's played  more though.

Regarding the original points, I'd like to address  quest grinding, as I've done it a lot. If you randomly picked one of the  mighty upper Sanctuary daily-running quest crushing freight trains of  the past six months, odds are fairly decent one of my PCs was a regular.  Confessions of an EfU grind-a-holic if you will.

The reason I  did it was twofold. First, for the longest time I just didn't know what  else to do. Just like reality, it can be a very cliquish place, and it's  not the easiest thing to break into. Scripted quests on the other hand  are very accessible, and doing them en masse is a really fast way for my  PC to make friends.

Second, it was always the most rewarding  thing I could spend my time doing, both IC and OOC. My character was  intentionally practicing his skills, making money, and if he was a hero  type, helping people at every available opportunity. It's just what he  would do. There is that OOC aspect, though, difficult to escape. If you  want to have a strong character, a character that can personally  influence the course of EfU events /on the battlefield/, it seems to me  that you have to quest relentlessly. You need to be high level, but more  importantly, you need good gear. And the only way to get good gear is  to make enough money to buy it, or to quest enough to get it the good  stuff when it drops.

I don't do it so much anymore, as I no  longer really desire a battlefield hero type character. But I suppose  there's a third reason. When you get that really perfect group together,  the innate, constantly threatening, brimming-with-danger atmosphere  that EfU has makes it so unbelievably satisfying to just steamroll half  of it. And you'll draw the attention of a dm more often than usual,  which makes the fun quotient skyrocket. (for me at least, some quest  grinders understandably dislike spice) And if you all had so much fun  with it on whatever night, may as well do it again every night you can,  until the party eventually falls apart.

I think the best way to  combat the grinding mentality is to reward other activities more  heavily. And not just plot centric ones or events of great import, as  that stuff is hard to break into. Modest rewards for small acts of RP  like drinking in the tavern as you reminisce with your buddies,  explaining things to a bewildered orange cloak or heckling an elf in the  square with your dwarf would help soften the drive to constantly quest  for gain by giving the impression that xp can come from anything and at  any time, so long as it's played well.

I'm also under the  impression that PC storage is prohibitively expensive. I think more  accessible storage for PC merchants would help them have more fun and do  a little better, leading to increased flow of gold and usable gear and  thus indirectly reducing the need to quest. Especially if the gold  couldn't be stored and had to be carried. Once a few PC merchants are  thoroughly established, profitable and having fun with their characters,  it'd be cool to see a greater economic side emerge to the game, with  merchants acting as middlemen between adventurers bringing alchemical  ingredients and PC alchemists turning them into products. Now your  alchemist's super secret recipe that almost killed him five times to  discover becomes a real goldmine that doesn't require financial acumen  and entrepreneurial spirit to take advantage of.

Regarding people now say "Let's do ". e.g. "Let's do Shagga", in character ...

I  think it's the job of the playerbase to police this one. I've sent  tells reminding people of server rules before, and I've been sent tells  reminding me of others. A lot of times it's a newbie who actually  doesn't know them yet. This is a particularly important rule for  maintaining immersion though, and I think it falls on all of us to  gently encourage people to rein in this kind of behavior.

That was a lot longer than I thought it would be...

I'd like to explore a tangent to this conversation.

I have to  admit, I experience this problem a lot. When I first came to efu, I  didn't really get the concept of the server, and I made myself a "fleet"  of characters so I could play anything I wanted to at the drop of a  hat--it'd already be built, have gear and all that silly stuff. At any  given time I'd run out of quests to do with all my chars, so I'd just  make a new one. Looking back, I can only imagine how frustrating I must  have been to the dm crew. :p

But why I felt the need to do that  does illuminate a problem that's particularly faced by new, and especially younger  players to the server, and that's that without joining a faction, it's  damn hard to crack into. Dms and players have limited time to spend, and  if somebody is just playing a relatively ordinary character that  doesn't stand out in any way and running around in an orange cloak, very  few people are really willing to spend a lot of time with them. And  understandably so, it's a pain in the butt to hold the hand of somebody  who frankly just isn't very interesting. And the mechanics make it impractical for high and low lvl PCs to work together in most cases.

But I think we suffer  for our lack of "greeter" style PCs, especially because our playerbase  is so small. At any given time nowadays, the new guy is the only new guy around.  And it's just frustrating, especially given how the innate deadliness of  the world requires that mid-high lvl PCs always just tell low level  PC's "just go find your own thing to do, our stuff is way too deadly for  you", which is of course absolutely true.

To bring this rambling  post full circle, if you want somebody to stick with a concept,  especially a novice roleplayer, don't put it all on their shoulders.  Help them out a little bit, especially when they're new. Don't wait  until their character is interesting to interact with it, help them make  it interesting. Force them to make it interesting by asking them questions! It'd be especially fantastic if dms in  particular, but really everybody, would take a greater interest in level  2-3 characters that they have no prior knowledge of. Try to grab them,  sweep them up, involve them in your plots. Don't wait for people to push  themselves into the story (because that's really what it feels like when you have no help), YANK them into YOUR story!

Or else, unless they're fairly extroverted, they're going to get bored. And the easiest solution to boredom on efu is to make another efu character.

Okay I'm done.

Okay, I'm not done. Just by way of example, I have only ever once witnessed anybody trying to recruit new Spellguard Auxiliary in the square. Y'all post in the forums, sure, but how often does somebody come IG down to the square and try to rustle up some new Auxiliary? Has anybody ever tried to recruit new Auxiliary from within Starag's Rest, which would be the most logical place to do so?

Now I'm done.

Well done bro.

Thonas was my favorite half orc PC so far. His Shaggahelm incidents were particularly hilarious. :)

Great idea. My only gripe is that this greater iteration of the alarm spell would be of a higher circle, since it's a good bit more powerful than the paper and pencil level 1 version. Greater Alarm maybe?

There's another way to handle it--just don't fight your hardest and then  botch the pursuit. If the poor thing is obviously overmatched, just avoid  stunning effects or anything that would prevent them from fleeing, and  then when they do flee, botch the pursuit a little bit by chasing  manually with the keyboard and not doing that great of a job with it.

If  they never fall, I don't have to worry about breaking character to let  them live. I get to go back to the shield, talk about the fight and how I  "almost had them", they get to live to mug people another day. Everyone  wins, it works great.

Anybody going to do the 2-4 lowbie quest in question isn't a server newbie and should have a good OOC knowledge of how the server works. It took me a month to find that quest, and I think even then someone had to tell me about it. That aside, there's what seems to be an intentional culture cultivated on this server of "Don't go out there, man, it's bad." which kinda helps tie people together and force more interaction. Personally I think it's great that such mammoth threats can strike you down anywhere.

I understand it's uber-harsh and certainly very unfair, but hey man, that's efu, ain't it? The high difficulty is one of my favorite things about this place. Without that constant chance of immediate and gruesome death, I wouldn't be nervous every time I left the shield alone, and that just wouldn't be as fun.

Awwww ...

I really liked Gylin. She was such a balancing vibe against the huge slew of crazies and weirdos that arise so frequently on the server. It was always a real warm-fuzzy pleasure to me when she walked up to me IG and asked how everything was going, quite apart from when even my character's other friends would ask. She just had such a quiet warmth, I'll really miss that. I'm looking forward to seeing how my PC handles it IG, he was pretty fond of her too.

Thanks for playing her, it was a real pleasure.

Hi everybody.

Just wanted to offer my apologies for not being around recently. I was in a car accident a bit ago, and while I was not seriously injured, it came at a time when I already had a lot of real life adjustments going on. The final result is that I haven't been able to log in in quite a time. I haven't forgotten everyone though, and I'll try to be on when I can, hopefully later tonight I'm thinking.

Til then, I guess I hope everyone is having a grand ole time, and I'll see you all around. Cheers!

Currently playing: Mereppi Evinether, humble servant of the Masked Leaf and Orbryn Ironstar, Bloodmaiden of the Lady of the Fray

Sry if I helped derail the thread, it was not intended.

Where are the forum rules posted? Could they be moved to Information For New Players and stickied? This is the second time I've doofed up, I tend to say way more than I should I've found. I'm beginning to figure out, though, that the general idea is don't discuss in-game events in any way in OOC forums except in the most vague of terms. Does that about sum it up?

-nvm, Just found the Suggestion Guidelines thread.

Obviously rushing up and waving your arms around and chanting hoping to save the hostage would be pretty silly, I was thinking more along the lines of sneaking up invis or such and applying it with an item. It seems to me a fantastic counter to the old knife-at-the-throat. Can't cut through stoneskin with a knife.

Just out of curiosity, is it permissible to stoneskin a hostage in the hopes the death blow cannot penetrate the damage resistance?

--bit about last night removed, sry--

I agree with Panama. I think it should be kept strictly IC, especially when these big group melees come up. If it results in half the server dying in one day, so be it. I mean it's Dungeons and Dragons, it's not like death is permanent anyway. You can usually be raised if you've got a few friends around town.

Now one thing does strike me as pretty blatantly unfair--resting. For me, it felt like enough time had passed and that particular encounter was long over, making it reasonable to start a campfire and prepare fresh spells. I had, after all, ran halfway across the map and talked to a bunch of people. The second encounter felt like a completely separate incident to me.

To you guys, role playing with your hostages, it probably felt like there was no opportunity to rest, like it was all one long, large, drawn-out single encounter. An argument could be made that you could have (and perhaps should have) rested in shifts while others watched the hostages, but I can see how that might go against the "don't prepare fresh spells in the middle of pvp events" guideline. Not sure what I think about that one ...

rip Ivan. He forced Mereppi to rethink his priorities in their entirety.