A Land Far Away

This is NOT for ALFA, this is for my own project, someday in the very very distant future.

For clarification I have entertained the idea of re-creating my old PnP game world for a long time, I have played in the toolset and gotten a pretty good start at it. I am not intending to rob ALFA of players, DMs or intellectual property...I would not be working on this seriously until I accomplish building a server for ALFA to host. My world would be drastically different that FR so I wouldn't be able to use anything I made for ALFA...other than the experiance and learning.

with that disclaimer in mind...

I was thinking in my game world I would want advancement to be a bit faster, but I don't want 35 level 20's running around soooo

I thought of speeding up the "game clock" to lets say 50 years of time in a single real life year. This would make Humans age to 75 years old 2 years after creating the character.

I wouldn't want it to cycle day and night every 10 minutes so I would have to undoubtedly do some scripting to make this happen.

I would then award the short life span races a large exp bonus (an anti-ECL if you will), to reflect their ability to advance quickly. This would allow them to get to 20th quickly but they wouldn't have much time till they would have to retire/die...unless they tried for Lichdom.

If a player made an elf they would do so knowing that they would "never" get old, and therefore could take their time in the world, their PCs would persistently last longer than their short lived counterparts.

I thought it would give a cool ... IC perspective on the whole thing, elves never seem to be as IC as they should considering their life span compared to humans. When you know you will out live generations of men you act a little different.

Anyway ... please don't flame/spam I am not trying to change ALFA or anything, I just wanted to talk about the pro's / con's with people that play D&D/NWN.

thanks.

There's a pro on the points you've already mentioned

But there're some distinct cons:
2 years is all one gets for a human character? Hell, at 50:1, that's going to be -6 str/dex/con after year 1. Sure, it's enough time to flesh out the character, but that's brutal man.

What you could do is script the ability score bonuses/penalties in and then make various (risky) quests to acquire things like potions of youth, or introduce fortify seed epic magic. The immediate problem I see with this is the mentality this will foster with players. The notion of impending character doom that either can't be resisted, or becomes harder to resist the more imminent it gets, seems like it'd discourage play for everyone but elves. (and who wants a server full of elves? I DM on one. They drive me nuts!)



tbh, I'd reccomend just playing or just DMing for a while. I for one think there's a lot to say for ALFA NWN1 of late, and I think your energy/creativity put on a (much) smaller scale would make for some happy players. Don't make a cool world, make a handful of cool areas, then play in them. Bring others over, show them your handful of cool areas, play with them in them. It will be fun, and you won't get flamed.

I will/am. I just got a replacement video card the other day, I am patching to 1.69 right now...

I will be back to DMing once a week or so, and now I can get back in the toolset.

this is a "one day" I'll do that. Its hard to shake the idea of re-creating a world I played in paper into a multi-player game.

Yes I agree I HATE elves as well...and I could see the paniced lives of the PCs...

hmmm ... I do like the fountain of youth stuff, maybe some people would like to play "fast" being human and then RPing the retirement, maybe some especially the first few to reach the abilitie negatives would seek magical gear to compensate for their weakend state... and then ultimately die of natural causes ... something else that could be scripted.

I think I would enjoy trying to play something like that out, Having tons of low level elves would be annoying...

It would take forever for them to actually reach a decent level... and that would seem unrealistic as well, I suppose I could make their starting age "younger" to account for the low level ...