Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

I'd also like to throw an idea out there that might actually encourage rp directly.

You know how you get rp experience every few lines of dialogue you rp? What if the debuffs slowly got removed, or the timer reduces, every few lines of rp?

I think that would encourage players to run to the nearest town and interact with people at least for a bit. And who knows, maybe they'll get caught up in the rp even after the debuff/timer has been cleared? It offers a direct solution to get to the player's goal faster (getting out there to fight more monsters) while appeasing the overall goal of encouraging more rp.

On another server I used to play , they had an "exhaustion" like mechanic , where while rested you'd get more exp and less as it went down towards exhaustion , it depleted as you killed monsters but recovered very slowly while offline or quickly while RP-ing . It would also be set to 0 (max exhaustion) after a death (or greatly reduced , don't remember the details) .
Not suggesting it be implemented here , but I liked it and find the new death system a step towards it .

Titania_1 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 1:29 pm I'd also like to throw an idea out there that might actually encourage rp directly.

You know how you get rp experience every few lines of dialogue you rp? What if the debuffs slowly got removed, or the timer reduces, every few lines of rp?

I think that would encourage players to run to the nearest town and interact with people at least for a bit. And who knows, maybe they'll get caught up in the rp even after the debuff/timer has been cleared? It offers a direct solution to get to the player's goal faster (getting out there to fight more monsters) while appeasing the overall goal of encouraging more rp.

I like this idea better than a straight timer that allows for random afk'ed characters.

gedweyignasia wrote: ↑Thu Jun 15, 2023 3:18 pm

Winterborne wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 11:14 am I don't understand how them wanting to play multiple characters is a problem. If they have the option and that's what they prefer it doesn't hurt anyone else to let them.

I firmly believe that alts are a good thing and we should support people who want to play them. There's no question about that.

I agree but I believe the penalty as it is now does the opposite. Instead of being able to log onto an alt knowing that you can play a bit and then switch back later to play again without the penalties, it instead encourages you to spawn and wait. This is great if you have people to RP with at the time but I know that if I am soloing it's generally because I'm playing at a time where I can't find anyone else to hang out with. So what it does instead is make me go somewhere out of the way, put up an AFK tag and wait out the timer, or if I don't have time for that at the moment, log out, log in when I am able to next and AFK in the nexus until it runs out.

If I only have an hour every few days to play and I have to pick between not playing at all/doing something else and logging in to sit around and wait for a timer to count down, then I have very little incentive or reason to log in at all. That half hour penalty would quickly cause me to not play at all, rather than sit and idle just to make it go away.

In an ideal world this wouldn't be a thing because we'd have enough players that I would know I could log in and RP with someone and the timer would expire without me even needing to think about it, but that's just not the reality of my recent play schedule and as a result on days that I'd log in and do something it would make me not do that unless I could guarantee I'd have something to do other than wait on the timer.

Fishing.

Steve wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 12:54 pmFishing.

Fishing, plant gathering, appearance changing, item customising, RPing, exploring, going to a lower level zone... I feel like waiting 30 minutes is only truly a deal-breaker for those that just seek to go lootrunning. Death is meant to have a penalty, I feel like many lvl 30s are just used to not having one.

Add an upper cap on the time of the active debuff, whether the user is logged in or not.

Add a timer block for sitting in the Nexus, waiting it out AFK.

I don't feel like the system does anything to encourage more RP or improve the new character experience. You spawn in a giant ghost town, find no other players, find a CR1 area, die, -2 to all stats for 10 minutes. Sure you can RP with the empty seats around a fire, but I'd just log out.

But if it means fewer encounters with other characters evolve into aggressively yelling "Graypeaks" until teleportation ensues, then maybe it can be a positive!

Edit: To be fair it's probably a largely better system for any character in the epic range. I was always put off by levelling in the epic levels, so I never did outside of RP xp and events, I don't think I've had a character above level 25 at any point on this server. It just feels like a solution to a problem that only affects epic characters, which might say more about the other systems in the game.

Even before epics, the XP loss could often feel more punishing than a few minutes of "let's not fight stuff" - at times, people would log out in frustration, having ended the session with less XP than they had at the start. Maybe not for the first few levels, especially with the 10-minute minimum, but the minimum's going away, at least.

Who won the contest? I'm betting Ghost!

Kaden Asen wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 2:33 pm Who won the contest? I'm betting Ghost!

That feels like a non-sequitur?

DM Winter wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 1:00 pm

Steve wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 12:54 pmFishing.

Fishing, plant gathering, appearance changing, item customising, RPing, exploring, going to a lower level zone... I feel like waiting 30 minutes is only truly a deal-breaker for those that just seek to go lootrunning. Death is meant to have a penalty, I feel like many lvl 30s are just used to not having one.

I don't enjoy fishing, I don't have any characters it makes IC sense to go plant gathering, appearance changing I do as needed but it never takes 30 minutes, ditto for item customization. RPing only works if you have people to RP with. Lower level zone can work but generally for my characters, I am slow to move up in a zone and as such I'd get nothing really from going to a lower level zone since I probably already exhausted it in terms of XP before moving on. Little need to explore when you've already seen everything on all your characters. Waiting 30 minutes but requiring you to be logged in for that 30 minutes is a penalty for the player, not for the character.