Exploration points = better Explorers?

Exploration points are an intriguing new development, and I'm interested to see how they'll be integrated into game mechanics (in more than just a keep track of your exploration and set your rank on the leaderboard way). It's my hope that one of the associations that will benefit most directly from the introduction of exploration points will be the Explorers.

Explorers have become somewhat less relevant or useful since their two real abilities (estimate location and forage) were genericized, so adding a couple of minor benefits to the association which were tied to the accumulation of exploration points could perhaps serve a few purposes, such as revitalizing the Explorers' Guide, bringing more people into the association, and adding another incentive (along with exploration XP) to people to actually explore the MUD (too many people I know have never even seen Maardryd). Maybe something along the lines of giving an autokeep compass or sextant, a simple spell that replicates the effect of the crystal cubes, an ability or item that adds a boost to the running skill.... Really, there are quite a few interesting possibilities.

Guild review: Justicars of Tyr

The recent Almerian Expansion was particularly hard on one of my newer characters -- my Ollin Tonatiuh/Kensai who I had decked out in hyperium gear. Basically, since I had neglected to log her in within the time frame allowed for prior to the expansion, she ended up being sent into penury, losing all of her equipment. Instead of attempting to re-equip her with more hyperium gear, I decided to take her in a different direction -- since I already have a kensai, and Lenisa was basically just a thematic variation on the guild, I decided to use her to check out a guild with which I have not had much experience in the past -- the Justicars.

Now, typically the mere mention of the word 'Justicar' is enough to elicit comments about how utterly bad the guild is, so I knew that perhaps I would have a bit of an uphill battle as far as character development is concerned. I knew that the Justicars still lock the upper-level powers up behind level requirements, and while Lenisa had a bit of a head start at level 15, she would still be pretty far from using some of the better abilities of the guild. I've gotten Lenisa up to level 16 so far (much of her short time with the guild has been spent in efforts to train up her crafting skills, since those are so vital to good performance in the guild), and so don't have a whole lot to say yet about the two upper-level powers of the guild (meditate and deliver judgment), so a review inclusive of those powers will probably be forthcoming. And despite the cynicism of some players towards the Justicar guild, I've come to learn through my experiences with the Ordo Maleficus (and clerics, which tend to be similarly-maligned as 'broken') that things aren't always as insurmountable as some people might make them out to be.

So let me just kick off the review by saying that the Justicars are a decently-solid melee guild. Of course, this isn't saying a huge amount, since, after all, the Adventurer's Guild is also a decently-solid melee guild these days, and there aren't even any special requirements to join. But the melee ability of the Justicars is a boon, since unlike some other 'underpowered' guilds (such as the Ordo Maleficus), Justicars always have the power of a good old-fashioned ass-whooping to fall back on.

Augmenting the Justicars' melee prowess is what I consider to be their primary guild power: their equipment. Now, I have to make the confession that I have cheated a bit in this arena... The two great rings of smithing which augment Lenisa's ensemble do wonders to increase the quality of equipment she can craft at Tyr's forge. But even so, Justicar equipment is some really good stuff -- and it should be, considering that Justicars are encouraged to spend so many specialty points in crafting skills. There really isn't a whole lot of room to criticize the Justicar equipment... The armor is solid, and can be crafted piecemeal (so that it can be accessorized with odd pieces such as a dactid), the weapons perform special attacks, and even though you might want to carry a back-up (for order-resistant foes), the weapons are generally good enough to not make you look twice at most things you might pick up. The only real criticism I would have about Justicar equipment is that the new map expansions make it somewhat onerous to get -- you have to travel to the Ivory Tower to craft it, and it does not persist between incarnations. On the plus side though, it does stay with your character if she gets killed and resurrects herself, somewhat alleviating the requirement to go naked to retrieve one's corpse from a potentially dangerous environment. Something like an ability to keep Justicar equipment between incarnations would be nice, especially considering the general largeness of the world nowadays.

Another nice benefit of the guild is the guild tower, which has some really great trainers. Of course, the trainers in the Ivory Tower are not exclusive to Justicars -- any Questor of Tyr can use them (a fact I discovered when setting up my old RW/Questor character who I made basically for the entertainment value of having a scry-proof, invisible Lord Questor, as well as being able to grab the One Ring from Ahrikol at any time by using the Lay on Hands ability in order to blast off his pimp-slapping claw (reported that as a bug, and it's no doubt since been closed... :P ), but they're still a really awesome perk for the Justicars.

The other abilities of the guild seem somewhat lackluster... Cleanse allows you to cure disease or poison on anyone except yourself, which seems sort of nice for if you have a lot of followers, or just want to get rid of the plague in an area, but otherwise, not so much. Consecrate area allows you to make an area ordered, which apparently has some sort of effect on things, even though I don't know exactly what. Meditate sounds like it could be useful -- a general buff to abilities that's 'charged up' by spending time meditating... I don't know a whole lot about it yet, since it's still level-locked for me. And finally, deliver judgment -- an area attack that messes stuff up for chaotic people, which can be used every 5 minutes and (at least from what I've seen in the past having been hit by it in Jhan), actually does pretty decent damage. Again, level-locked for me, so I dunno how well it will work when Lenisa uses it against the ravening hordes of chaos. So two pretty useful/awesome abilities to look forward to, with most of the 'ho-hum' things out of the way, I guess.

Since Justicars are one of those guilds which have limited rapid travel options (no guild teleports, unable to join Brotherhood of Wine and Song, probably unable to join Stalkers of the Gate...), I decided that I might like a horse of some sort for Lenisa. The good part of this is that Justicars get 6 spec access in equestrian, riding, and mounted combat -- perhaps a holdover from the days when they could summon griffons and dragons to serve as mounts. Of course, this access seems to be going to waste just a bit with Lenisa, since most of the mounts she can get at the moment seem to share the characteristics of being fairly fragile and not at all that courageous, meaning Lenisa ends up running a lot if she goes into combat mounted. She's got a pegasus from Centaur Isle right now, but is definitely looking for something better, especially since the pegasus she's got is very chaotic, which might become a problem when Lenisa grows up into th deliver judgment ability. Maybe I'll assassinate Tiamat with Porphyria and see if any dragons or drakes hatch from her eggs. Since Lenisa can't just do the knight trick where she just lays hands on her mount and everything is good (although she can totally cure it if it gets the sniffles), other options seem just a bit limited.

Anyhow, there's really not a whole lot more to say at the moment about the Justicars... They're a decent enough guild, even if they've been left in the cold a bit as far as updates/power increases are concerned. Maybe more updates to come, if Lenisa doesn't get deleted in a fit of pique...

Jury Duty...

I had jury duty a couple days ago (which prevented me from logging onto the MUD for awhile, except for on breaks, when I logged on with my phone... and lemme tell ya, reading 8pt type on a 3 inch screen isn't exactly conducive to mudding...) This sort of got me thinking about what a legal system on Lost Souls would look like.

There really isn't much of a legal system on Lost Souls to speak of... The various settlements do have guard forces, which usually do enforce some rudimentary rules (usually 'don't attack people', but sometimes also stuff like 'no orcs'), but it's really only a 'legal system' inasmuch as a deputized posse might be considered one. Indeed, there is no real incentive, once one finds oneself on the wrong side of the law, not to simply hack their way out of a city -- even if one wanted to surrender and face the wheels of justice, there is no 'perform surrender' command, and no system by which the surrendering party might be held to account for her actions. The automatic sentence for any crime, no matter how small or inadvertent (such as accidentally catching a Losthaven guard in an area attack) is death (assuming that the person cannot fight her way out.)

Which brings me back to the top of the post... What would a legal system on Lost Souls look like? Of course, the ideal legal system would be player-driven -- those interested in becoming guards, judges, or lawmakers in a particular settlement would be able to (assuming they satisfied certain prerequisites), and would be free to make and enforce the laws within their town as best they could, with a certain amount of system support to provide some needed abilities for law enforcers... But of course, a player-driven legal system would require a much larger player base to really be feasible for even one settlement or kingdom within Lost Souls, much less a majority of them. It would certainly bring a lot more of a roleplaying element to the MUD, though...

Somewhat more possible (at least with current MUD demographics) might be to make justice a minigame of some sort (perhaps similar to what the Pantarchic Church has with confession.) Someone who committed a crime could surrender to guards and undergo a minigame to determine the outcome of his or her case... a good result coupled with a minor crime (such as accidentally hitting someone in town with an area attack) might allow the character to get off with a simple fine, while a worse result might entail a period of exile (basically, a period of days during which the guards in the town were auto-aggro to you). In order to encourage compliance, fugitives from the law (those who choose to fight their way out) might encounter persistent (lasting across reboots) auto-aggro from the guards in the town/kingdom/culture (basically however wide the devs would want to make each jurisdiction... guards in Camelot, for instance, would likely be on the lookout for a fugitive from Devonshire)... Perhaps extremely poor behavior (such as amassing a 600k bounty in Losthaven ;P ) might become grounds under which a character could find herself being excluded from a greater range of settlements and cultures (as her reputation for violence and lawlessness grew).

Anyhow, just something I was mulling over the other day while serving my civic duty (I didn't make it on any juries...)

More Witches...

Apparently, now that the 'main map' has gone into 3D mode, Babbi Yaga's Shack can climb trees. I wonder how much climbing skill it has.

So more thoughts on witches... This time, I will talk about blood foci. If any of the five people who are likely to read this don't know, witches need blood in order to make most of their spells work. It's a nifty sort of limitation on the otherwise Awesome Power that the witch possesses, and really, if you're not killing things and draining corpses of blood in a sort of Satanic ritual, what kind of witch are you? (I wait now for some wiccan/modern witch to stumble upon this blog, misconstrue things, and start up a shitstorm of comments...) Anyhow, past a certain point, blood is a pretty easy component with which to come up, and one of the first things you learn as a witch is to just drain pretty much every corpse you make or come across into the old blood pouch. And once you're skilled enough to start manufacturing shrunken heads, you're basically golden forever for most of your spells.

One of the big factors that comes into play with blood foci is the rarity of your blood types... It takes increasingly-exotic blood to pop out more powerful spells, and for a couple of spells, you basically must have one type of blood or another, like faerie blood to cast the crudelis curse.


One issue I do have with blood is that the rarity of blood types don't always follow how difficult they are to get, considering that elicat blood is considered 'exotic', and the things basically infest the Temple of Discordia... or that you can make eight 'exotic' shrunken heads (more if you have a brute or battlerager nearby) out of a single hydra... And of course, there's unicorn blood, which is supposedly a 'very rare' type (more common than 'exotic', in other words), despite the fact that no unicorn has been spotted on the MUD since the last time someone mistakenly tried to kill the Red Bull, leaving only a single source (that I know of) from which to get the stuff. Plus, unicorn blood is a necessary component for one of the Ordo's most powerful spells. A little more than 'very rare', I would say...

In general though, I do like the blood component. It makes the witches a bit different a guild than the other mage-type guilds out there, and gives them a bit of flair.

One thing that would be very nice (if not completely necessary) would be a way to determine what types (and maybe how much) of blood you had on-hand in your foci, since the only real way to do this now is to cast a spell and see whether or not it goes off and what kind of blood it ends up using (as far as I can tell, anyhow).

A magical reality...

A few years ago, I made the attempt to create a game world (for the GURPS system) that would include the existence of magic in a logical and consistent manner. I eventually gave up after inflicting one too many headaches upon myself. One of the biggest issues I have had in the past with standard fantasy worlds is that many (if not most) of them make magic an accessible force and then imagine a world that's more or less identical to medieval Europe... only with wizards.

Huh?

Now to be sure, the mere existence of magic doesn't necessarily mandate an entirely different lifestyle for the common man. After all, nuclear weapons exist, but for the vast majority of people, the mere existence of nuclear weapons means little to their daily lifestyles (thank goodness). Likewise, real magic users could be as vanishingly rare as the people who control nuclear weapons, with about as much effect upon the lives of the common folk. Of course, this analogy starts to break down when one envisions a world in which there are enough magi for them to organize themselves into fraternal orders, in which priests are invested with more than just inscrutable spiritual powers, and in which magical items are common enough that not every single one is the legendary heirloom of some royal family.

Of course, I do realize that, as much as anything, the setting of a fantasy world is a thing of convenience for its creators and participants. The idea that a fantasy setting needs to be realistic can get in the way of having fun with it as often as not. Fantasy worlds are by definition unreal places, and agonizing over whether or not these places are entirely logically-consistent does not necessarily ultimately enhance one's experience of the world. Even so, it's still pretty interesting to wonder how a culture in which magic actually existed would actually evolve, rather than simply taking a random Earth culture (preferably something medieval European) and grafting on ancient orders of wizards and other magical goodies.

Take, for example, the idea that there are materials that can be either manufactured or mined that are drastically stronger and/or lighter than iron. Of course, we live in a world like that now -- we've got mass-produced steel, aluminum, and all variety of other materials -- and those materials have revolutionized the world. Likewise, the evolution of agriculture and its mechanization has allowed modern cities to grow (imagine what could be done if humanity could literally command rain to fall somewhere)... Simply put, make magic common and allow it to accomplish things that could not otherwise be done in a medieval culture, and it follows that the culture would stop resembling a medieval one rather abruptly. Once things like teleportation and a cure disease spell are factored in, the world that emerges starts to make modernity look quite like the Dark Ages.

Anyhow, I don't mean to ramble too long, since this post really does have little to do with Lost Souls in particular, and is more of a commentary on the fantasy genre as a whole. It's just an interesting thing to ponder.

Spiderwood

I had my first chance to check out Spiderwood (the new 'dungeon' area) today. Fun place. I took my witch through it for a bit first, but didn't fight a whole lot past the first few levels, since she couldn't use her spear very much (needing to keep a torch in-hand due to all the webbing). Eventually, I turned her invisible, and ran her through to the end of the dungeon. After that, I ran Porphyria through a bit (her celestial claw makes her pretty much immune to webbing), since I wanted to try fighting some of the monsters at the end of the dungeon. She had an easy enough time with the rhax, but couldn't put much more than a dent in the gigantic spiders there... May have to come through with a group sometime. I tried to have Porphyria kill the critter at the end (I won't spoil the surprise for anyone by telling what it is...) whereupon she had her ass squarely handed to her. Porphyria lasted about 4-6 rounds before I had to take her out of combat, since she had had both wings disabled and had been taken down to 100 chest (out of a maximum of about 650)... Ouch. I might try it again with a proper group together, but I wouldn't be too optimistic about the group's chances.

Crystal Cubes

Well, now that it's been long enough to really get a feel for the New World, I have to say that I'm quite smitten with it. The world seems a lot more like a place with actual geography now, and not just a plane upon which a bunch of 'areas' are scrunched up together. There's a bit more of an ecosystem now, and I can't wait to see how it will be fleshed out.

One of the cool little amenities to come as a result of the new map is crystal cubes, which allow you to 'see' a bit of the map in your character's vicinity. I have to say that they're certainly a welcome addition, since the fact that there's an actual topography now means that it's a lot more difficult to really plan a course from point A to point B, especially since room descriptions don't always say what's further than a square or two away (understandably, since including everything in your character's line of sight to the horizon would probably take a page of description). I know the cubes help me enormously, since I've never been very good at envisioning topography in my head.

The Explorers' Guide

The Almerian Expansion has hit, and I've been glad to see that most people have taken it in stride for the most part. I do have to admit on my part to no small amount of surprise at the sheer size of the expansion, since I had figured post-expansion Almeria would still be a 40x40 map, just with an extra axis involved... But wow. My first impression is that there's just a whole bunch of space now -- it's nothing I've really seen before on a MUD, and I have to say that I'm impressed.

All of the new content that's been showing up lately (Avalon, Gardagh, the rest of Almeria) has made me think a bit of the Explorers' Guide, believe it or not. Nowadays, we've got the Wiki, which is an invaluable resource for just about anyone who wants to find their way around the game, but somehow, I always enjoyed reading the articles in the Explorers' Guide, since so many of them were written in-character, and showed a lot of good humor and narrative voice. For awhile, I had a character (a POEE) with whom I intended to be an Explorer and dedicate some time to writing in the Guide. I did get some articles done and entered into the Guide before running out of inspiration, but I regret not doing more with her. Maybe I'll come back to the idea sometime soon, since there's just so much more to explore now, and while there's a whole lot to say for having everything at your fingertips in the form of wiki pages and other channels of OOC knowledge, it can still sometimes be nice to forget all of that stuff, and try to find help from something that your character might turn to in a time of need.

Witches, part 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

So with all of the supposed weaknesses of the witch guild (see previous post), I started my character with the goal of mitigating those weaknesses somewhat. This is an approach I have tried in the past by making two of my previous witches as fomori, which offset the inherent squishiness of a mage class with supernal durability access, natural armor, natural weaponry... Of course, fomori also don't have much charisma to start (a key attribute for witches), as well as a bunch of strength in a guild with essentially no specialty access in strength. I think the highest I ever got a fomori witch was somewhere around level 20.

I started off this time with the decision to make a new witch who was a little bit more of a finesse fighter, so I decided to go with a zenun. Zenunim, amongst other things, get flight spec access (for better dodging), bonus specs in stamina and recuperation, and access to regeneration. They also get ungodly levels of charisma, good dexterity, and good mental stats, so they seem a bit closer to ideal witch. Plus, they're demonic, which is a good bonus. I joined spearmaidens for the combat skill access (although I had considered wandslingers, as well), so at the very least, I would have a decent melee combatant with an aura that hastes me, finishes off morted opponents, and offered a bit of protection. Plus, I would have a character that was able to turn invisible and use some damage-dealing spells.

Using this build, I found myself advancing relatively well, although I really didn't take off until after I discovered just how much the guild's curses can make the difference in a fight. Now, I'm used to playing guilds whose primary powers focus on popping in and unleashing a world of hurt in the form of lightning bolts from eyeballs (ELF, RW, OZM, RM) or else unending amounts of slashity-stabbity (Kensai, Knights, Brutes, Rangers) -- after all, most of the guilds on the mud are built on the model of allowing one to perpetrate extreme amounts of damage upon an unsuspecting world in the quickest time possible. This is generally a good model, and I have no real problem with it. But it's also a model that the witches don't squarely fit into, since witches, more than anything else, seem to be debuffers. Witches get a lot of traction not by being able to out-damage the competition, but by being able to make their opponents just as squishy as a witch. It's really a different way of doing things from the way most guilds operate (although lots of guilds get debuffs, there are really none that seem to work them as well as witches do). Hex an NPC, and suddenly they're dodging less often, attacking less often, hitting less often... In short, they're turned into as poor combatants as the typical witch.

Now, while the debuffer role would seemingly be most effective in a group, where their powers would allow the other members of the group to inflict Satanic amounts of rape upon the unwashed masses, the very act of grouping with a witch appears to violate the basic ethos of the guild. After all, witches are supposed to maintain secrecy about their membership in the guild (to the point where they're listed as 'adventurer' in their whois profile, despite the fact that it really doesn't fool anyone, and makes everyone assume that any adventurer over the mid-teens in level is secretly a witch). So, grouping sort of kills the whole secrecy thing. After all, who's dumb enough not to suspect that the lady in the corner -- you know, the demonic-looking one surrounded by a shroud composed of the stolen souls of her victims -- who keeps whispering to herself for some reason, is in actuality a witch? And to a certain extent, the secrecy is completely justifiable -- after all, they're hunted by the church of Yehovah, which has a really nice cathedral and masses of homicidal knights, while all Samael's followers get is a grotty old shack in the middle of the woods. So, for the most part, I tried to build a witch who could go it alone, which means getting some combat ability apart from what the guild offered -- a 'pure' witch would be pretty cool in a mixed group, but unfortunately, that just doesn't seem to fit the whole idea behind them.

Anyhow, that's about where I am with my witch now... Sort of pondering whether or not I want to take her to hero level or beyond. What I really hope for is to get a few other people together to play witches, so I can get some groups going now and then.

Witches.

One of the things I like to do from time to time in the game is to attempt to play characters in guilds and associations that don't get played very often -- Porphyria originated as an attempt to make a viable character that remained an adventurer her whole career (an idea I revisited later on with a tuatha character I got to about level 32 and then deleted), I've gotten two brutes to hero-level... Obviously, I also enjoy playing the more popular guilds as well, but I have found that just about any guild can be playable (and enjoyable), no matter how much some people might talk about a certain guild 'being broken', 'sucking' or 'needing an update'.

So my latest real project character: A zenun Maleficus. My first impressions of the Ordo Maleficus guild were not at all kind. It is, amongst all else, a Den guild, which means it has help files that aren't quite as forthcoming as those for other guilds, it has hard level requirements for the use of a couple of the higher-level powers, some of the powers have rather serious cooldown requirements (if a ringwielder can pop off hundreds of area attacks an hour, why does my only real area attack have an hours-long cooldown?), and it hasn't had much dev-love for quite some time. I've run a few characters through the gauntlet of this guild, not really getting anywhere, and even got frustrated and deleted a level 30-something tuatha with a psychic healer talent who I brought over from the Elflords.

With this character, I've finally been able to find a play style that works for a witch... For the most part in the past, I was bummed that the witches, on their own, did not seem to offer a whole lot of bang for the buck -- Most of the damage-dealing powers cost a lot of SP, blood foci are hard to maintain, and witches are inherently pretty squishy (they get little decent combat specialty access).

(Will continue in next post)

My LS blog...

Well, as Gavadel suggested, I have decided to give maintaining a Lost Souls blog a try. My personal prediction is that I will get to five or six postings and probably forget all about this, but we'll see how that goes.

News about my characters... Porphyria got kicked out of Spearmaidens, so I popped her into the Chosen of Vashanka (mostly for the combat spec access, since ELF don't get that much, and the stat boosts from the storm amulet aren't all that impressive...), and am thinking of putting her in the Weapons of Vengeance, as well.

I'm also still looking for a few people to get together with me to get a regular group of witches together... There was some interest expressed, but that petered out pretty quickly. For my part, I'm starting to really enjoy my Maleficus. They're certainly different from anything else I've played on the MUD before. Anyhow, if you're interested in making a witch and doing some sort of adventuring party/regular grouping thing, let me know on the MUD, and I'll do what I can in order to help you get started.