Guild Rewards system

[Lucid]

Well my initial idea is that you can access new skills when you complete (max out all) primaries in your guild. But perhaps that is too easy?

Perhaps even new guilds that are associated with your main guild. So a subguild. But then you could also cross over to begin learning the 'learned commands' thing. Various guild quests could be made that have to be solo'd (no item passing/ no healing/ no help hitting things down, etc) without quitting (switching chars/ quitting to avoid death during the test(s.))

I've not put too much thought into this, but I will suggest one path for testing:

• A thief could could through an indoor area trying to stay off to the side in the dim rooms until the right time, then progress onward doing a series of skills, even ones previously unused elsewhere in the game (such as lockpick. Perhaps even gaining this ability at the end.) The goal would be to utilize the dex stat, so race and gear selection for the test would greater aid you in any new abilities in the guild quest reward system.
• -- And for a thief to learn the abilities of another guild, say Stormlords, then they will be using Int stat and doing much harder tasks with greater chance of fail. This type of test would require more than just maxing guild primaries. Such as training magic to a certain level, having a min level of int (12?), and training outdoors and things. Perhaps even require the player to read a lot of things and do a test. But something like that would have to be randomized outcomes.

And so forth, I'm not adding things for every other guild right now.

There could be other things than new skill abilities, such as a reward of a weightless guild item, or pretitle, etc.

Ideas? Most practical and easiest to implement would be best for now. (We don't want to have to rely on Fantom to do it all after all. laf)

[Fantom]

Relying on fantom to code it could cause you to have to wait a while

Sort of side topic: we probably shouldn't show you all the skills until you are able to advance them. Initially you should have only co, ma, st, fa, and some of the top level ot and cr skills.
Once you raise co to a high enough level to be able to train co.me then we could show the next level inside co.
In this fashion you at least don't know all the skills that are possible and your training will have the effect of opening up new areas.

I like the idea of allowing people to learn commands from other guilds, I see nothing that makes most commands unable to be learnt by a non-guild-member, as long as they can find someone to teach them. There is a serious balance issue however and we'd need to make sure that we didn't just finish up with everyone being identical.

What if you chose 1 command from each guild that you were willing to let the other guilds have... don't be greedy, lets start with something simple. No corpse commands.

On your other suggestion I think we need to branch out into things that are perhaps beyond commands, things that are a permanent addition to your character. Critical hits, things like that, which just happen some percentage of the time, based on your training.

Wrt lockpick - that is all coded but never released because we didn't have a use for it. should we release it?

[Lucid]

Re: lockpick If we can in-turn use it to lock doors that cannot be locked normally, that would be awesome and a real dickish thief thing to do. ha haw. But I can already think of locked doors that I cannot open now that would make it worthwhile. A set of lockpick tools should be required to perform it.

Re: balance How do we decide which sole command we want to have other guilds be able to learn? I should think that theft would be best for others to learn from thief guild, or lockpick. heh Lightningshield from stormlords. And quickheal from Druids. But a Storm might rather have summonbeast from a Druid. Then there's Warrior. Disarm seems like their best command to learn, but whether it can be mastered by lower size/str races is another story. It is hard for even a warrior themself to become good at it. I've tried on ptest before. But I think people would prefer to use a command that would let them AA block.

Balance to take into account: (left out warriors for now)

Thieves having lshield isn't helping balance, but it is the thing every thief is jealous of that storms have. summoncloud is also high up on the list. Giving thieves lightning would be unbalanced. I don't know what lshield uses, but since having low skills in it can hurt you pretty bad, or having it wear off, sort of makes it something hard you have to work on to be able to be good at it.
Thieves having a healing command was always frowned upon, but it is down right necessary in this game. Quickheal requires ri.healing, staff, and pr.healing.self and carrying a staff to be able to do, so it is more weight and 3 skills to learn. To be able to go around blackjacking and healing would be pretty cool.

Stormlords/druids having steal seems unrealistic unless it is highly based off of race size and dex and perhaps even keeping +light armours off of them, because it affects thieves. But since theft also using hiding, and maybe sneaking, it is something that requires a bunch of skills they'd have to learn (from thieves) to be any good at it. The game only became unbalanced when we all started training each other ot.st and block way up. Steal is the best thief command right now. Especially in pk.

Druids would probably also want lshield/steal. Steal of that jerkin for the +2 wis is great stuff. Or steal a demon staff for themselves is also useful.


I still think the test/quest reward system is a good idea.

And re: perminent addition skills, (that I think of as automatically-in-effect skills,) those would be awesome.

• Critical hits : Do a big special that can do upwards of 200hp damage. WC / Melee / Unarmed based
• Riposting : avoiding a hit, and countering it. WC / Melee / Unarmed based
• Dodging : avoiding any single attack against you. DEX / dodge based
• Speed : Multi-hits. DEX / Melee
• Drain : Absorb hp/gp from a target. INT / WIS / Luck based

Just a few things there for now.

[Aura]

I think druids would want the blackjack command since it aa's blunt (as rare as it may happen) and that skill is one of their main issues in regards to training.
As a storm I think I might want the backstab command actually, rather than steal. Thom is decently easy to kill, same with huge dog and I don't often use jerkin nor am I in serious need of coins. But then again it is just another attack command like lightning or icestorm. Thieves need more (and cooler) commands... hah.

Maybe instead of picking a single command that is possible for everyone to learn, each player has the ability to choose which command from each guild s/he would want to learn. There could be a quest for each different command, maybe they all originate from the same place so once you have completed the quest and gained the skill in one guild, the mud would recognize that you couldn't do any other of guild-specific quests.

[Fantom]

Re lockpick: Yes - you can use it to lock any lockable door.

Re: learning commands: I meant a single command from each guild to start with, with the longer term goal of making almost all commands globally available. It wasn't per player, it was just a starting place for which ones could be taught.

Some should never be allowed (IMO):
- summon beast.
- lshield
- summon cloud

If we add the idea (totally off topic again ) of ranks of learning even within a command, then we could have commands which could be only taught above a certain level to members of the right guild.

(taking this last idea up in a separate topic)

[Salius]

What should and should not be taught to outsiders of a guild?

We all joined guilds based on our preferences and there should be some sort of crosstraining.

The problem with giving everybody everything is that we all lose our uniqueness, thus the homogeneity kills guild concept... we could have started out like this, but we didn't for a reason.

The question is thus: "How to best support class crosses without destroying everything?"

Support skills should probably transfer: those odditities that extend a class rather than define it. This would be things like barkskin, flash, stab, hail[maybe], forage, study, etc. (the rule being utility not bread and butter of a class).

We could add to these some general new combat commands:
Block = chance to diminish damage for x rounds
Evade = chance to evade damage for x rounds
Parry = chance to boost ac through weapon for x rounds
Berserk = chance to boost offensive skills at cost of ac for x rounds
limitedcharm = chance to charm a mob into fighting for you for a very limited time

(none of these proposed commands should aa anything faster than storm ma.sp.at or have a cost below 25 co.po)

=================

Druids are healers. Storms are damage casters (how rain became so godly I don't know). Thieves are stealthy creatures of darkness (they steal and backstab).

[Salius]

How about we move the learned command system in a new direction: temporary commands per boot or per timer. As much as everyone would love to have the damage casting of a Stormie, healing and pets of a Druid, and insane aa and attack abilities of a Thief; why don't we put these type of things into a pick a command for a day (arbitrary time here) as a new auction prize?

Just handing out the commands is much too easy, why not make people pay rent to use (ticket style)?

[Dracula]

would an adventure be able to learn commands from other players with out joining guild?

[Salius]

If we actually went in the direction of free commands for all, guild would be meaningless. We might as well all be adventurers or warriors.

I like the idea of adventurers getting all the commands though. That sure would teach people who chose a path and stuck with it. Dilettantes should rule the world.

[Fire]

I'd rather have dissect as a stormlord than any other command.