A Land Far Away

This may be one of those things that has already been settled behind the scenes without me knowing about it. If so, then sorry.


One of things that struck me as odd in ALFA is the wide disparity between servers of the availability of magic items through merchants. Some servers have none, others make items readily available. Some large, highly magical places had no access w/o DM intervention, while some rural servers have large amounts.

I would like to see an ALFA in NWN2 that had some standard adopted based on city size, wealth, canon degree of "magicalness", etc to determine what is available through merchants in different cities and on different servers.

Thoughts?

AFAIK magic shops in the realms are rare.
These places do exists, and should be created if canon dictates this IMO.
Personally, I'd never add a magical shop that's not notted by canon, as I dislike the feeling of easy magical access to low level PCs. Magic needs to remain mysterious.

That's my opinion anyway.

Aye, i don't know where they presently stand, or what is geared up for ALFA2, but i do have thoughts on this (as i have on just about everything, eh?). First, i need to discuss the crafting system.

NWN2 has a crafting system built-in, which is great. As is, it's not acceptable, but that's because the items, and the components, are not properly adjusted. We can stick with the crafting engine as is, which will make all of this much easier. My recommendation is to change it so classes (possibly even races) cannot use various components, and 'items made' cannot be sold to npcs/stores. The first part, about component restrictions, will ensure you cannot create items that benefit your class. Thus, you can only make items that benefit others. This, along with the 'zero' sale price of items made, will ensure items are sold, for profit, to other player characters.

If the crafting system items are properly adjusted, then we setup a utility that increases inter-character participation. But to make this work better, these same items should either not be available in stores, or should be available from NPCs at a ridiculously high price, and that selling items to NPCs is at a ridiculously low profit.

If we want to encourage inter-character activity, we need to build within the system a means for players to be encouraged to interact with other players. This particular approach also sets a stop-gap, in that characters have a limit of how much they can purchase, and the limit in player characters ingame also keeps finances in check. By imposing such factors, we can easily disband the whole 'wealth standards,' because wealth will be full dependent upon the community as a whole.

Distribution of wealth will occur with smart businessmen finding items that the community purchases more often, and setting those prices competitively while still making a profit. By ensuring the components are class-restricted, items made can only benefit other classes. Because of this, characters will trade with other characters, either for gold or for items they made or own.

There are already pretty clear guidelines in I think the FRCS on what level of magic should be available in what size of settlement. I believe we used something based on this in NWN1, although often in an after-the-horse-has-bolted type way. I'd be keen to implement something from the off in NWN2 - as a member of the standards team, for instance, I'd be very happy to review merchant inventories before servers go live, and I'm pretty sure the other guys and gals would too...

Please direct crafting philosophies to the thread on, well, crafting philosophy:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... hp?t=31776

White Warlock wrote:By imposing such factors, we can easily disband the whole 'wealth standards,' because wealth will be full dependent upon the community as a whole.

Only if you ignore wealth coming from outside of the community, one of the prime reasons for adventuring. Adventuring wealth should be many times higher than "crafter" wealth, though magical crafters should get close.

Not that it really matters, since I don't expect anyone to make or adopt a crafting system for NWN2. At least, no one has expressed any serious interest in it thus far, and we've been asking for people. Adventuring content comes first anyways, IMO.

Cassiel wrote:as a member of the standards team, for instance, I'd be very happy to review merchant inventories before servers go live, and I'm pretty sure the other guys and gals would too...

Not a bad idea. Maybe something that needs to be done when something switches from beta to live?

I am aware of that thread Ronan, but what i was discussing was relevant to this thread. Also, you missed a paragraph, in which i stated:

"But to make this work better, these same items should either not be available in stores, or should be available from NPCs at a ridiculously high price, and that selling items to NPCs is at a ridiculously low profit."

What i'm saying with that particular line is, items obtained via adventuring should not provide significant wealth. One should not be capable of selling uber items for uber prices to uber-rich 'small-shop' NPCs. NPCs should offer to purchase said items at a ridiculously low payoff, which would discourage characters from selling to stores, and instead be inclined to sell to other characters.

Btw, this is very much the way it is, in real life, with many collectibles, in which you pretty much screw yourself if you sell to a store. So, the part you didn't glean from my post, Ronan, is that i'm saying whatever buy/sale concept posed in ALFA, it should full-consider the Crafting system. Implementation of the Crafting system is essential if all of this is to work, and since it takes so little to utilize the existing crafting system provided by NWN2, it would be a waste not to go this route.

As i see it, they are mutually dependent.

White Warlock wrote:What i'm saying with that particular line is, items obtained via adventuring should not provide significant wealth.

The idea behind the wealth guidelines isn't so much controlling currency as it is the amount of "power" a PC gets from his gear. The actual value you can sell something for is a LOT less than how its counted as "wealth". So I see what your saying, though we'd need seperate guidelines for what is acceptable levels of "power".

White Warlock wrote:...since it takes so little to utilize the existing crafting system provided by NWN2, it would be a waste not to go this route.

Maybe I'm not seeing a good way to utilize it, but I don't think thats the case. If it is, your welcome to do so and help out.

Ronan wrote: The idea behind the wealth guidelines isn't so much controlling currency as it is the amount of "power" a PC gets from his gear. The actual value you can sell something for is a LOT less than how its counted as "wealth". So I see what your saying, though we'd need seperate guidelines for what is acceptable levels of "power".

Aye, thanks for reminding me. Old age creeping in. Touching upon some things we discussed in chat, wealth standards exist primarily as stop-gaps for DMs not trained in ALFA's ways... and that proper education of DMs will go a long way to removing the necessity of having Wealth Standards.

White Warlock wrote:...since it takes so little to utilize the existing crafting system provided by NWN2, it would be a waste not to go this route.

Maybe I'm not seeing a good way to utilize it, but I don't think thats the case. If it is, your welcome to do so and help out.

Repeating some of what we discussed in chat, the approach i'm recommending is not perceiving the crafting system as something that could destabilize the game, as i am perceiving it as something that could BE the stabilizer. If it is in place, it could provide an ingame sink, with some components purchaseable in stores. Great magic items could be obtained that need fixing before they work, and again... costly components need to be purchased in order to fix said items. I suppose i could get more into this discussion in the other thread. I think i covered it enough here.

Thanks for reading.

I suppose some linking to a crafting system is possible, but that's not necessarily the thrust of my original thought. (Although feel free to continue on discussing ...no worries to me )

What I really wanted get at was limiting inter-server variability for what can or can't be purchased, where one set of builders decide that Waterdeep will have no magic items available except through DMs while the builders of Luskan decide to place +2 swords in "Jim's Weapons-R-Us". (examples just randomly chosen).

All nwn2 servers should be expecting to present detailed lists of all magic items available for sale in their merchants as part of the live review process. That was the plan anyway. A review of the mod should be little more than sampling for correspondence with supplied documentation. And yes, magic items should be much harder to come by from *static* merchants, even in canon magic stores - more DM contact required. Regardless, there will be much more scrutiny given to what merchants have for sale in nwn2.

fluffmonster wrote:All nwn2 servers should be expecting to present detailed lists of all magic items available for sale in their merchants as part of the live review process. And yes, magic items should be much harder to come by from *static* merchants, even in canon magic stores - more DM contact required. Regardless, there will be much more scrutiny given to what merchants have for sale in nwn2.

Allright ..that sounds pretty for preventing the +2 keen longsword in some random township.

The next thought off mine is looking at the higher end and keeping a balance relative to canon ....

For instance, if the builders of Waterdeep chose to make no magic available, would they be also scrutinized? Or only if they didn't harm the balance "in the other direction"?

I'm not sure we can force [Waterdeep] to have up to +3, but nothing above. While I'm heavily for consistancy, there are points that the HDM should be able to control his server (and thus set the point/method at which a DM is needed to go beyond his static merchants).

What I'd dearly like to see is randomized merchants. This can easily provide *access* to +3 gear, without allowing a priest of Kossoth to know exactly where every flaming weapon in ALFA is. He will either need to search for it (or hire others to do so), or he will need to have it commissioned.

The system I have up is limited to randomizing (delete X%) a particular store's inventory, rather than populating it from a much larger list. If we can figure out a reliable way to create/copy items into a store, that would be vaslty better.

For some things, perhaps manually populating the merchant's inventory would be better, like the mod has no magic in the merchant inventory but after resent a DM can restock. DM intervention is required, but can be when the DM has time to do it, and would account for any IC reasons behind merchant stock or lack thereof much better than the machine could. If at any particular time a DM doesn't feel like doing it, that's fine too. There should't be oodles of items requiring this level of attention under the best of circumstances.

Fionn wrote:
What I'd dearly like to see is randomized merchants.

The system I have up is limited to randomizing (delete X%) a particular store's inventory, rather than populating it from a much larger list. If we can figure out a reliable way to create/copy items into a store, that would be vaslty better.

Hmmm...interesting.

Could you weight such a system to give a particular merchant (or a
merchant in a more cosmopolitan or inherently magical city) a higher liklihood of having more and more powerful magical items?




Kind of like the way the NBA lottery is set...everyone gets a chance, but certain teams are more likely to get the best players (thanks god the CAVS got LeBron )