Changes

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
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Heero
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Re: Changes

Post by Heero »

That didnt really answer my question.
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Zelknolf
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Re: Changes

Post by Zelknolf »

Heero wrote:Ronan makes great points. How long do yall think ya have continuing on the current trajectory?
The two things we have which have verifiably increased population and increased in-game activity are adding content and advertising, and that statement includes observation of activity and population after the two PC policy. That made people happier, but it didn't make them play more (or if it did, the increase was so minor or so shortlived that I can't distinguish it from the usual noise in our population and activity). If this is a conversation about survival, instead of just what people think would be nice, we should probably go for some evidence-based solution-- and work on content and advertising.

If we're just talking about what people would like, I'd probably say to start with the points that a DM can enforce in their own game, because those bullet points have all been proposed individually and they haven't had enough support to be implemented across the community (and, therefore, the answer to your question is "more than on Ronan's, because those ideas have inadequate support"). Write a list of the spells that are too hard to DM (you'd have to do this if it became a policy anyway; zero extra work compared to the proposal), give it to your players in advance, and don't DM those spells. Put a level cap on your events, and offer to take XP away from people if they don't want to advance past the cap (99% chance that admin won't stop you-- seriously, who's going to complain about voluntary XP reduction?). Have your NPCs prepare grease, dispel magic, and wall of fire. Use multiple-shot traps. Have your NPCs finish off downed PCs. If it's clear to players what they'll meet when they join the campaign, it's unlikely to be a drama-generating thing, and these all sound like things that bring your game closer to what you want without altering others' games away from what they want.
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Re: Changes

Post by Silvary »

I think that allowing multiple PCs help to have better RP because you can create specific PCs for specific campaigns. For exemple with the current restriction if a DM decides to create a campaign on MS around the druids circle I wouldn't fit in with my northman cleric of Tempus who lives in Ironkeep. Thus since I already have a PC on MS I would need to have him killed to create another that would fit in the actual campaign or would join anyway not to stay alone even if it would break the immersive feeling of the druid campaign, I mean why would a northman interact with Ffolk druids? RP non sense! Multiple PCs allow to create diversity, I can't DM but if a player wants to visit Oman's Isle and have some RP with a northman he can but the price is that to allow this I can't have another PC on MS. It shrinks RP opportunities. Don't know if I'm being clear here but to be concise I believe that multiple PCs=multiple player driven plots=livelier server.
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Heero
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Re: Changes

Post by Heero »

All good points, Zelknolf. I guess at this point its just hope for the best.
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Brokenbone
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Re: Changes

Post by Brokenbone »

I have this feeling that "negative, make the game harder" changes are kind of something ALFA doesn't object to in terms of if a DM wants to set a game up a certain way, particularly if there's been some advanced notice / advertising of some sort to any relevant prospective players. However, "positive, more flexible, enhanced awards of gp/xp" are something that may get a DM curbstomped by vocal community members.

Example is with the Vilquari (Ronan) campaign. Things we knew going in or that evolved across time:

(1) Money. Everyone started with 0gp as opposed to 300gp. Slaves in a cage. Now our first adventure was "thrown into goblin dens as a fitness trial", so we got to scavenge clubs and things and one guy died, so it wasn't like we were naked for very long, but it was long enough.

(2) Crafting. We were asked not to expect custom imports with the size of the group. Consumables available in the generator system were fine though (potions, scrolls, wands). If we happened to want CWI or CMAA, that's fine, go ahead and take them... but find a different DM to be your import monkey.

(3) Bleedout. This one had to be figured out some months into the campaign as whack a mole was getting silly. Since the game was either courtesy paused by DMs, or later the haks forced a pause for folks going into negatives with a DM around, well... that time would in part be used for intelligent foes to roll heal vs. DC 15, idea that they're assessing the downed guy is "not dead yet." Usually success will mean there's some narration of *lifts axe for killing blow* and it's up to the party to hope to intercede in time. Present a more pressing threat, blast with spells, pour healing into downed guy, dimension door downed guy away, whatever.

Now, those things as long as the players are fine with it, no problem right?

However, say instead the money thing was "everyone gets 1000gp to start", or bleedout was "rather than dying at -10 I'm going to roll % dice for a divine intervention because I think that's cool", I'd anticipate flipouts.

Over to things like rez, I bet if a player was onboard, ALFAdom might not care if "well this priest has a unique raise dead spell, unfortunately though it drains 50% of XP"... or "wow your guy took disfiguring scars taking a nap in that acid pool, I'm going to drop a -1 diplo token on you", that kind of negative might not incur complaint. However if this rez cost 500gp not 5000gp, then I'm thinking cries of unfairness / favoritism would be likely.

Character substitution, even if for a weaker character, would be entirely off the ALFA table I'm thinking as well. Have a level 8 rogue die, he could easily get a rez funded so he gets a level 7 rogue back... but what he can't do is stay dead and "inherit" say a level 5 fighter NPC who used to have some minor role working with the party. Yes it's a net loss in power/level but I think flip outs would be really likely. "Go and play that new concept to 5th, just do the following list of statics and get a few DM hours, just like everyone else!" Maybe though stepping into the shoes of some thieves guild or dwarf fortress or Thayan lackey NPC makes for more campaign sense though. That's certainly a common PnP thing to do I'd say, integrate someone with the common background / knowledge of the campaign rather than random bar stranger. Oh well.

Again, I do think it nets out to the idea of "negative stuff, do whatever you want... but don't you dare do anything that can't be done for everyone else." Maybe it's the vibe of competition etc. which hangs over from a more open CvC policy of most years gone by, I really don't know.
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Ronan
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Re: Changes

Post by Ronan »

I wasn't actually expecting those ideas to be approved, hah. If I wanted to EfU-ize ALFA badly enough I'd probably fork it.
Brokenbone wrote:(3) Bleedout...
Dealing with the -6 floor has been a pretty massive headache for me, and of all NWN2's and ALFA's technical querks, definitely the single greatest hindrance for me to craft the sort of challenges I want. If the combat is not deadly as most DM's combat isn't (or wasn't back when we had other DMs), then obviously it does not matter. The only active DM I can think of who supported the floor was HEEGZ.

The 50% XP penalty (and all the other ideas) is not meant to make the game "harder", and is really an arbitrary number (50% of your XP is usually about two levels). The point is that death should not be an OOC punishment. Players should not feel like they can no longer enjoyably play with their group(s) because a PC died. We do not want players fishing for a rez for OOC reasons, we want it done for IC reasons, hence why the raise and re-roll penalties are the same. As has been stated many times, most deaths do not result in raises, so allowing a re-roll at 50% of your last PC's XP almost certainly makes the game "easier".

IMO the purpose of XP loss on death should not be a punishment, but a XP sink. That death punishes the player as well as the character should be seen as a bug, not a feature. I realize this is contrary to what we're all used to.

As yes of course DMs can house-rule things. DMs can do whatever the hell they want, but it doesn't mean we want or have time to do those things. If we want more DMs DMing, we either need to make it easier for them to DM or increase the rewards from DMing. Short of offering paychecks, I think making it easier to DM is the most promising thing which can be done. Wealth/pricing, dealing with the floor, mixed-level parties, campaign deterioration as PCs die, and our multi-DM environment are big costs to DMing in ALFA.

BB, we have had an approved campaign where the players actually could not even die (though they would loose a level upon death). So its possible.
oldgrayrogue wrote:I'm on board with all of these suggestions 100%. OP is "Changes" and intent was to brainstorm on how to loosen things up now that we are getting smaller and smaller as a community and to point out that the changes we have made have not destroyed our RP.
I don't see it as loosening up, but instead cutting the fat. ALFA has had a lot of rules which didn't serve its goals as a hardcore RP and permadeath community. We thought they did at the time. The one PC rule probably made sense from an administrative point of view when ALFA was massive, but it certainly did not contribute to RP quality.
Silvary wrote:I think that allowing multiple PCs help to have better RP because you can create specific PCs for specific campaigns.
Yes, this! It keeps your PC from walking 1,000 miles to meet up with a guy in a bar. It lets DMs run more isolated campaigns, which can be a great bonus since the multi-DM environment is so hard to deal with.
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Re: Changes

Post by oldgrayrogue »

Since when is posting ideas in a Brainstorming thread considered whining and bitching? If that is the case we should not have such a forum.

Most of the members that are still active in ALFA have all contributed to this project over the years, each in their own way.

Over the years I have been:

Application Reviewer
ALFA Representative
DM
Player Admin

I have tried my hand at building and scripting. While I can make pretty cool custom armors, I have enough self awareness to conclude that continuing to contribute in that way is simply an exercise in frustration and time sink that I cannot afford. Others posting here have contributed way more than I -- Zelknopf and Ronan for certain.

Ronan: When I say "loosen up" I think I mean the same thing as you. Make it easier for DMs to DM and for players to find game. And yes, ALFA is flush with many outdated and pointless policies, rules and requirements given the size of the present community. I also agree with Silvary, more options as a player means more opportunity for RP.
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Re: Changes

Post by Zelknolf »

Ronan wrote:As yes of course DMs can house-rule things. DMs can do whatever the hell they want, but it doesn't mean we want or have time to do those things. If we want more DMs DMing, we either need to make it easier for them to DM or increase the rewards from DMing. Short of offering paychecks, I think making it easier to DM is the most promising thing which can be done. Wealth/pricing, dealing with the floor, mixed-level parties, campaign deterioration as PCs die, and our multi-DM environment are big costs to DMing in ALFA.
The trick, of course, is that we tried not having rules or standards first, and that had problems-- and we acquired rules because the alternative was harder. ("Oh no, this magic missile was really comprehend languages! I totally wouldn't have used it to win a fight if this scenario hadn't arrived!" and "My guy has a food cart in Arabel! Of course he has two million gold! Sure isn't my problem that your wealthy merchant lord from another server doesn't!" being non-exaggerated cases we had to contend with-- and we continue to have widely-diverse opinions about which RP spells are "annoying" or "hard to DM" with some DMs [shad0wfax comes to mind] saying that everything in the SRD is fair game, and being annoyed that we don't have RP placeholders for every spell. Something of that overhead implied by a multi-DM persistent environment). Dealing with the resultant state is still work, sure-- but clammoring for us to change systems to what you'd find more convenient doesn't necessarily improve the environment for everyone else (and, in the process, you'll have done the same work as just setting up your own campaign).


Granted, that's not much of an answer to the campaign deterioration thing, which is an easily-observed problem that I can't solve in current rules without annoyingly-low level caps on campaigns. We've had "dead means dead; get your new level 1 and quit bitchin" forever, and the only circumstances I can point to where that wasn't the case are ALFA's various splinter projects (which also failed by attrition, afaik, but I'm pretty sure they took longer to die; of course I don't have the numbers so I strictly speaking don't know that-- may well be that most of them failed way quicker, and I just never heard about them because they failed quickly-- may also be that there are dozens of splinters as old as ALFA still trucking along happily and in relative secrecy).

The best response I have there is that it has never had the necessary support, and other admin seem incredibly uninterested in hashing out the implications of any compromise in the "tougher death" / "ACR works just fine" debates, and the only compromise on advanced start that passed was ineffective and blunting of other discussion, so I don't think that your chances of getting those changes are very good, while the chances of getting RP spells out of your specific game are as good as the chances of the DM saying what they are.
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Re: Changes

Post by Ronan »

Zelknolf wrote:The trick, of course, is that we tried not having rules or standards first, and that had problems-- and we acquired rules because the alternative was harder.
I'm not sure it was always harder, but it was sillier. DM A allows all SRD spells, DM B only allows his villains to cast them, DM C pretends they don't exist. I was the guy who added all the RP spells in NWN1 ALFA, to mitigate these situations. We even had something which told DMs the outcome of a Teleport (ew!) casting.

I also allow all SRD spells (I value consistency), although I think a good number of them are very poorly designed. However in all my time in ALFA, only three DMs that I've had experience with have tried to follow the rules for SRD magic: Spider Jones, me and Regas (and Regas often asks me how things work). You can say "well all those other DMs were crap", but then you'd be left without a whole lot of DMs...

The unfortunate reality is that a computer game medium imposes a lot of additional complexity on the act of DMing a game of 3.5 D&D, and ALFA adds greatly to this complexity. One way complexity can be reduced is by removing 3.5 features from the game world, or changing them so they are easier to implement in NWN2. This is obviously quite different from not having any standards at all, which I agree is bad.

Do I expect ALFA to change? No, but hopefully some people here learn from its mistakes, so when the next platform comes along something better can be built.
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Re: Changes

Post by Adanu »

All I'll say here is that without revisiting campaign specific PCs, DMs cannot do long term campaigns without doing mini campaigns to level PCs as I'm trying to do.
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Re: Changes

Post by FoamBats4All »

As the PA seems to control how many PCs people can play, you could run on a related platform. Player Admin self nominations are open.

If you want to see change, best way is to do the changes yourself.
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Re: Changes

Post by boombrakh »

Isn't the time when we didn't have a bunch of rules way back when ALFA was new and we actually had members in the community? I mean, it's not news that stuff gets increasingly chaotic the more people are involved.

Also, reasons.
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Re: Changes

Post by Castano »

Not that I really hate DnD's ruleset - it works great for PnP and if it had been coded into the NWN2 game it would work great to. Right now we have a hybrid beast - 3.5 wherever we can if we can depending on what server you are on.

3.5 rules are implemented in the following ways:

1) ACR changes that effect all servers
2) ACR systems like swimming that require builder implementation at the server level
3) DMs doing SRD out of engine

I would not call DMs who refuse to use SRD spells crappy - I would call them people who do not want to play PnP on a computer. I lean more and more to saying we should in a future incarnation rely entirely upon the computer implemented mechanics of the game world. This would in a best case scenario mean that servers maintain consistency in their tech offerings. I am willing to support a bit of item 2) nonsense - via hand waving, after all not all of BG's water is swimmable just some of it - so one could argue a server is internally inconsistent across its areas also. e.g. thou may only climb rocks I the builder designate as climbable - even though other rocks look to the player as perfectly climbable. ditto for ponds, lakes and rivers.
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Re: Changes

Post by Castano »

BB what you are proposing is that ALFA move to a campaign system where the PW is no longer relevant to advancement/risk.

I had approved Heegz/Ronan hosting such a server before but the idea fizzled. My support for it is still there. Take one of the ALFA NWN2 servers and mirror it, or use one of our NWN1 servers. I'll give you MS NWN1 or NWN2 for it. At present there are few people utilizing our PW content so I think an experiment in a pure campaign system is in order. It would still have the RP aspects of a PW when the DM is offline - but I would propose that the world be entirely nonlethal absent the DM of that PC running a session. How you make it nonlethal is up to you - remove spawns, or make people not die from them.

One of the big failings of ALFA1 and ALFA2 was that your PC gets knocked off by another DM or by static content right before your session. Let's remove that possibility and see how it goes.
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Re: Changes

Post by Dorn »

Seeing we're spit balling
http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/view ... 46#p613746 ((please for GODS sake don't read past the first post!!))

Foam - you're absolutely right. But if we went through the last decade of ALFA posts i think about 23.46% of them would be something along the lines of "we need more DMs" followed by "put up or shut up"...some of those would be from me!!!

I think we can safely say just the put up or shut up line doesn't work. Sadly the logic of it doesn't work when applied to the human condition.

So how can we change the put up or shut up message to something that's going to make people want to pitch in.

All aside however, i kinda think zelk and heero may have it right and some of my thoughts in the link would take more work than the likely benefit. Lets hope for the best.


One other suggestion from WAYYYY out in left field which will no doubt raise some ire. But hey, we're spitballing.

1) Pick a point of inactivity (yet to reach)
2) Approach BGTSCC and share all tech advances we've made
3) Begin ALFA gaming campaigns on BGTSCC with a commitment of players/DMs from to each other that we DO play permadeath and not farm etc. (Hell even organise it on these forums!)
4) Keep one server here just for us:)

This would allow us to:
- have DMed permadeath campaigns with our DMs, but also allow players to have "BGTSCC PCs" for fun when no other ALFAns are around (as there is always ~30folk on) to keep pees engaged
- maintain our 'community' for the next platform as a priority over maintaining our 'PW'...as i fear if we do the latter, ALFA will be 4 people by the time a new DMable/Toolsetable platform emerges

I've been playing there a while (as there's are zero peeps here at GMT+8) and have found some good folk to have a one day a week session with including proper RP and commitments to no exp gains between sessions etc I hang out for these sessions, but can have a good 1 hour bash about with some alts putting aside my 'hardcore RP-ALFA' roots for a while.
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