Subject: Re: hope ya got some time to read. :)
From: Kim Kunnas (beregar@majik3d.org)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 11:10:55 EEST
On 27 Mar 2000, Rob Reed wrote: > I promised my rampant thoughts on things, so here they be. :) and I promised some rampant flam...err, answers, so here they be. Character Creation - How to build a better freak in 2000000000 easy steps! Attributes - Things need em... how else ya gonna know whether or not to take on that dragon? So here's what I cooked up for your amusement. Each primary attribute has 2 secondary attributes to go with it. At character creation I was thinking 300 points to distribute to the primary, and that number could be divided by the player into the secondary attributes. // As far as I know the stat system is already decided, besides, I don't see any reason to get this complicated since most of those stats can be combined to one. When we create skills it would be kind of difficult to determine n+10 stats which might affect to that skills and since Majik is going to have HUGE amount of skills (Majik has always been more skill based than stat based), it would be very time consuming and inefective way to do things. // Also, there is danger that people will concentrate on more "stat hunting". As you may know, we don't have experience points or anything like that (well, at least not visible to players) which would allow players to raise stats. Stats raise with skills, if you spend your time swinging sword or hammering iron, it is very likely that you grow more strong and enduring during the process. If we had too many stats, this all would get complicated and the result would be anyway same: by swinging sword, some or all of your physical stats will raise. // Did I already mention that stats WILL affect the look of your character model. For more info, read: https://majik3d-legacy.org/dynamic_objects.txt Health - Creatures life force (Body +Load/3) // This is obvious, but remember that they show only how much bleeding creature can withstand. Limbs, body etc have their own durability or certain amount of hitpoints which determine how much punishment they can withstand before they are severed (sp?). Also, if you lose your head you will most likley die instantly. :) Mana - Creatures magical Force (Mind +Agility/3) // I will comment mana later in spellcasting Faith - Creatures Divine Force (Mind +Stamina/3) // What is this? As far I understand, faith (in majik) is something you do to show god your, well, faith. In exchange to that you will get something or nothing at all. Ie, priests may get spells and ordinary people just divine favor or simple healing prayer etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abilites (Or skills or trades or whatever you want to call em) - All things must do something, and PC's are no exception... they want to build castles, ride horses, and in general do things that weren't planned for... sooo, the following is a list of abilities... some are trade skills (Armorer, Stonemason), some are martial related (all weapons, dodge), some are learned (Symbol Magic, Navigation), and some are just wierd (eavesdropping, loyalty). Most of these I won't bother describing, it should be obvious, but some aren't, so they will be explained, also, the formula listed after them is based off of the attributes listed above and are the starting ability/skill rating only at character creation. This is by no means a complete list, just what I came up with off the top of my head. // I'm not that familiar with our skill system but as far as I know, it is structured like a tree. They are dependant on eachother so for example when you use a short sword, it also affects your ability to use other 1-handed swords, two-handed swords and also all other melee weapons to certain degree. Skills can be learned by using them (practice) or by someone teaching them to you (theory). If someone is teaching you, you will get theoretical knowledge in skill and thus your practical use of it will advance quicker, if you try to learn skills without theory, well it will be slow but possible. In certain point you reach level in your skill where theory just don't help anymore, you "master" the skill and after that progress in it will be very, very, slow. Ie. When your skill is 80% (of course players don't see their skill levels in numbers), it takes a long, long time before you can get 1% more. // I'm not sure of difficulty levels but there should be some of them. So for example if master blacksmith which has 95% skill would work with material he knows and uses daily to make weapons which he has been doing all his life, he should have 100% chance of success, but if he works with material unknown to him and makes item that he has only description or model, he should have severe penalty to his chance of success. // Also, there are some skills which are just stupid to implement. Where do you need "loyalty" skill. It's more like a npc attribute which determines how loyal he is to pc or other npc. Players can themselves decide whether they are loyal to someone or not. Also, I'm not sure if we should have skills for divine magic, since most of those are "prayers" which allow even a lowly peasant to receive healing from a god. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Power Levels - Taking the above information, you could use the following structure (again, numbers are purely arbitrary) for use in skill lvl of ability and attirbutes... also could be used for multipliers of difficulty (which I did) and any number of other things.... // I'm not quite sure what you mean with this but if these are skill levels (to replace numbers). Well, we already have a list, don't we? Umm, btw, who HAS the list? XP/Attributes/Abilities/Improving them No one likes to see negative numbers in relation to thier character Everyone likes to see thier character advance No need for levels (waste of time really) or # caps (except what might screw up the code) // I already explained how skill and attribute system works. Mortals advance in stats and skills by USING skills. I have no idea how gods advance, I guess it depends of the amount of DP they have or then they don't advance at all. :) // As to beginning... well, different races have different starting skills, it's up to their creators give them what they want. Different persons will also later have different backgrounds, or that's what we agreed upon, I believe. There are also some ways to limit amount of people in races, but I don't remember anymore what they are, does anyone remember? :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PK vs. NON-PK You want an ultima online? Roving packs of PC just abusing any newbies? Give the players a choice betteen PvP mode..... Have altars where ppl can change thier status from PK to Non-PK, or align themselves with Evil/Negative Dieties for PK and Good/Positive Dieties for Non-PK... my 2 cents on that topic. // No, Majik is a world run by players. We have different ways to prevent pkilling here. Permanent death is one thing, another thing is that weapons and armors actually cost quite much. Also, there are guards in most cities which will handle those who kill others. Depending on region punishment might be death penalty to killer or just two (rl) weeks in jail. Of course this is up to area designers or players who run the city. // Also, why to pkill people if you can be chopped to pieces yourself? Sure soldier can kill a peasant with knive quite easily but the peasant might get lucky. The fact that it takes quite a while to have high enough skills not to get yourself chopped to pieces and it requires roleplaying usually tends to shoo off those with only intentions to pkill. First things which players do are certainly not running around and killing monsters or other players. If one wants to have challenge against monsters, well, he or she can join to city guards or military which means rpg, for some reason military tends to be often organized and thus you are not that free to run around, what do you think would happen if you were a soldier and went killing someone innocent? Would you really risk your rpg career (and waste a few months playing) just because they want pkill someone? // Well, of course you can try a career of robber but there's always a risk of guards (be they players or npc's) catching you and, well, have a nice day in hell. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UI - User Interface time. :) As everything else, the placement of damn near anything is arbitrary, but I think other than 2 things the base idea I have works pretty well for everything. // I can't check those pics from school (Well, actually I can, it's just too time consuming) so I will write reply to this subject later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chat System Styles of Chatting; (See also the UICSSB.jpg) General Chat - Everyone in immediate vicinity can 'hear' you. Personal Chat - Click on a PC/NPC and 'whisper' to them Party - To talk only to your current adventuring Party Liege - Talk to the one you are sworn to directly Diety - Send a prayer up Vassals - Talk to all vassals below you. Worshippers - Talk to all worshippers below you Languge (type) - Speak in a specifiac language known to you (Drop down box for known languages?) // I won't comment this much. Only thing is that you always speak languages which you know and that you can speak only to those people who can hear you, at least without spells. So NO mud tells, you can't talk to people who are in different side of world. This one thing we decided, to have some base for inns and taverns, rumors and to avoid spreading of information. // IMHO we shouldn't show our complete map to players, otherwise it is just too easy to place information on netsite and show "in there is this and that" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Divine Magic/Divine Points (DP's) ALL PC/NPC's have the abiilties Belief and Divinity Ratings (see abilities section above). These points are passed from the lowest(Worhsipper) to the highest(Namhas) .. Worshipper to another mortal, to an ancient, to a demi-god etc.... Divine points are earned with this formula (Well at least the formula I used. ;p) XP earned x Belief Rating divided by a Percent rating. Divine Percent rating - Mortal 1% - Ancient 3% - Demi-God 5% - Lesser God 10% - Greater God 15% - Elder God 20% // Well, I see nothing wrong in that percentage system but no experience. Also, almost all players worship something so we shouldn't give too much dp to people. Another thing is that I don't see any benefit from mortals getting DP. They can't use them to anything anyway, unless they know how to control prime particles in same level as gods do. Remeber that divine magic is same magic as symbolic magic. Only different is that in divine magic mortals don't need to control those prime particles themselves, gods forge spells which their followers can use and which drain GODS divine points. So if a god wants help his/her worshippers, he or she must be sure to have enough DP. // What comes to faith raitings, they are dependant on person's sacrifices and prayers. So if they sacrifice a lot, god may give his/her worshippers spells or bonuses to skills or something like that. Spells also require praying, it's not that simple to just "take what I need" most spells are one or two use only. Priests are almost in every case only people who can cast spells continuously. When you pray for aid your faith goes down when you pray to praise god or sacrifice to him/her, it goes up. It is up to each god determine how they use their own DP. So if a god doesn't receive enough worship, he/she won't even answer to pleading players of his or her high priest. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Symbol Magic - Here I expect the most Flames. :) Symbol magic is broken down into Control, Power, Core symbols Control Symbols are the Schools/Spheres of magic - I divided them into the following Schools; Creature, Item, Life, Combat, Transport Power Symbols consist of; Charge & Power levels - Power Level Symbols; Base, Minor, Major, Greater, True. Charge Symbols; Positive/Negative Core Symbols consist of Verbal, Somatic, Component Required Symbols for Casting - Control, Charge, any 1 Core. // Symbol list is already created, I believe. Each symbol has three manifestations, so for example fire symbol manifests in somatic, verbal and component ways. I'm not sure if we decided whether there will be different kinds of fire symbols, for example rune symbol of fire (which would be component manifestation) might not match with verbal fire symbol or component symbol (fire) brazier may not fit together with a component symbol (arrow) branch because another is metal and another organic etc. This would allow us to create many symbol groups which don't necessarily fit together and thus players who later may be druids may find ways to combine these organic symbols and players who later will be elemental mages other symbols. Some symbol groups may not have manifestations for all symbols, for example law symbol group may not have chaos symbols. It is wise to remember that only gods can control prime particle (groups) without using of symbolic manifestations which mortals need. // I would rather determine the cost of spells by amount of symbols they need and by the spell itself. As I mentioned earlier, there should be some flags in symbols. So for example arrow would make bolt shaped projectile if no other flag is overriding (sp?) it. Light symbol could create always light (so creation-light-bolt would create light bolt, what's the use? I don't know :). We also need some useless and even dangerous to caster combinations. Since it is very rare to get symbols and it takes a LOT ( I can tell) time for each player to find what symbol they actually have and combination to them, there shouldn't be much punishment in mana costs or other such things. Do we actually need mana cost at all? Well, maybe, it wouldn't be nice if someone casted 10x in a row earthquake into your city. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Allegiance System Joe elf thinks that Bob troll is pretty spiffy and wants to have him as his liege, bob agrees. Joe goes to his allegiance (control button) icon and choses Liege/Diety Tab. His Liege is currently blank (unsworn) and he clicks on Bob to highlight him, then on the "swear allegiance" button. Now his Liege showsas Bob Troll. and Bob Trolls Vassal/Worshipper list shows Joe Elf as a vassal.Exact same thing for Choosing a Diety, except have a drop down list or pop up window of the Known dieties with desc. // That all is up to players. You don't have list of lieges irl either. They often carry family colors or colors of their kings etc to show that they are followers of someone. Certainly there won't be any kind of "who" list in Majik. As to your deity, well, your own worship shows who you are worshipping, if you worship more than one deity...well, if they are rivals and find out, say goodbye. :) // Rule number 1 in Majik. Never oppose your gods for they are your superiors (+ they can mutilate you beyond all recognition :P). // As to helping, they are your vassals, not slaves. You can command them to do things but they have own will to decide whether they do something or not. If you have an npc vassal, well, you probably can command it with certain ways (like pick up this, fight that blahblah) and NO exp. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equipment Weapons - all weapons have a weight, Speed factor (used with Recovery) Damage base, Quality rating, Difficulty (skill required), and Cost (In stamina) i.e. Long Sword Weight:7# Spd:40 Dmg: 2-8 Quality: 40 Difficulty:8 Cost:5 //All weapons have weight, speed factory, amount of space they take in your backpack. Weight, cost, speed factor etc depend on their shape, material, place, availability, creator etc etc. I don't even remember all things and they are not essential right now. However, you should remember that in Majik you can easily kill someone with sword if he doesn't have armor or parry/dodge your hit. // There are allkinds of details which have been thought through...I think :) I could write more but my fingers start getting numb, besides, I have skipped enough classes today. :P - Beregar Dar'Eldath
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