Expanding on Options:
Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2015 8:16 am
Hrmm, I was sitting here thinking about other places I have played, and what parts of them I liked and did not like, and tried comparing all these to Alangara here as well.
I thought, why not address some of these aspects while I had time to kill?
Well, it's not as if any of these ideas and such need to be implemented into Alangara at all ... most are just enhancements that give a little bit of "wow that's neat" factor into base idea itself.
Keep in mind, I have no idea how to do most of these things myself, as I'm a scripting dummy ... all I have is the player end side of the experience to go on for most of these.
I will not name the severs from which I take examples of, for I do not want those names being tagged by search engines, so the post could be found by the other server admins and possibly start conflicts or disruptions. I am sure, most people have tried one or two , and maybe even had similar experiences.
One sticks out in my mind, mostly because I TRIED my best to enjoy a stint there ... there were issues on this PW I had trouble swallowing though.
Number one being the main DM/Admin/Creator ... while he was amazingly talented at a lot of things, I wish I knew how to do ... , he also had the mind-set of play the way he likes , or you weren't worth his time/effort. His personality was controlling , and often super -paranoid you were going to take his ideas and run off with them I guess.
He also was un-able to try and compromise any detrimental situations that popped up from any aspect, be it social , something in the PW, or dealing with the server itself.
Besides that, I continuously got these weekly emails from his forums, with some sob story of how expensive hosting was, that the money ran out for hosting, and next week/month/day ... the server would be shut down if players didn't donate to keep it going. I think I donated 10 dollars on the first one I got, then I sat back and watched to see if the PW got taken down permanently like the emails suggested.
Well, it never did ... somehow "miraculously" , funds magically got donated to upkeep the high server cost every month. I always felt, ol dude was just scamming money ... in fact he tried to enlist me as a "advertiser" demanding I make post of bioware and other places to attract players that might donate. It felt like it was pay-to-play , or work outside the PW to play , and if you didn't do that ... you got problems and nitpicky issues throwed at you.
Anyways , on the PW side ... it did use some Hard Core Rulesets that were quite advanced from my way of thinking ... , now I never have been a fan of HCR concepts in the first place, because they are static and often annoyances while trying to RP and adventure. Like having to have food to rest, plus a bed roll, or tent, campfire and water. Combine that with timed resting ( you can rest again in X hours ) meant if you screwed up and tried to rest when you couldn't, it screwed up your timing so you had to wait longer, and also used up resources , even though you didn't gain anything from it.
Some of the concepts ,I learned were put in place, so it gave your characters something to do other than grind for XP elsewhere. One way of getting food , was to find and hunt herbivore animals, skin them, get the meat and cook the meat on a campfire. Or you could go to places find or buy the foods. Water needed good water sources to get into your canteens. But, some water sources could be bad ... I discovered a few that were full of pathogens ( gave a disease upon drinking ) , and one well another player actually poisoned some time earlier ... which , while annoying was rather neat in concept at the same time.
Aggravatingly though, you had these hunger/thrist/fatigue bars pop up in your client side chat area, and if you stopped to RP , these bars drained faster than if you were adventuring. You constantly had to spam food, water, and rest when you could, even if you were in mid conversation ...
The realistic weather aspect, also bugged me ... it never seemed the weather was "nice" , it was either super cold ( forcing you to wear cold weather, heavy, and non-AC adding gear ) and damaged you slowly , or it was scorching hot and forced you to remove most items or armors, or your thirst and fatigue level ran out in a minute or two ...
There was also item and gear UPKEEP/Repair too. Everything had those bars , and just wearing/equipping an item started making it wear out. Armors, weapons, and shields especially dropped in wear and tear, in every battle you had, big or small. I lost quite a few good items to this system, before I figured out you could return to town, find a crafting anvil, and make repairs of you had points in craft armor or craft weapon, and some gold.
So, while these were designed to aid RP "systems" , I found them annoying and problematic at best.
BUT the place did have quite a few awesome extras that made me keep going all the same.
The first thing was, the SECRETS ... and I'm not just talking about secret doors and hidden loot here ... I found out, that some doors I found that couldn't be picked or opened , actually needed chat-spoken-passwords to enter. Usually you found clues around these doors to know how they Open. Like the first one I found had a sign beside it. It had said something like, "sOrry, authorized PersonnEl only."
While it read funny, I just thought it was a typo, or maybe the odd capital letters was from a NPC that wasn't too savvy on writing ... but if you stood near the door, and said "Open" in your chat bar, it actually unlocked the door. I looked at the sign again later, and if you took the capital letters, it spelled " OPEN" ... giving a clue as to how to access the area beyond.
There were many such doors, and secret passages that opened by chat like that. One I found in a dungeon, the clue on how to open it was absurdly found in a dungeon completely un-related elsewhere , but I did find it.
Like Alangara here, some areas weren't obvious points on the map ... many were well hidden and crafty placed triggers , you really had to search for them .
Movement - This was probably my second biggest love of the server , not only was walking/running an option ... but you could also jump, climb, and swim ... well, you could fly too if shape shifted into a flying form, or had winged characters to begin with. To me , this opened up a whole slew of new means of exploration. There were areas, you couldn't access unless you climbed to them, or flew up ... and many you had to swim to get to. If you were on a higher elevation ( cliff wall) you could climb down, or jump down to the next level. ( or again fly ). This place was designed for that though, and Alangara uses the elevations to channel specific paths, so I doubt these extra means of movement would be beneficial for it. I loved that aspect of that one PW , but honestly it probably would only work well there.
Like Alangara , spells were changed here and there to reflect the scope of the server itself. In my opinion, most were downgraded , instead of upgraded though. But , as far as casters went , each type ... Druid, Cleric, and Arcane had the potential to learn spells not included in NWN.
Somehow they had this spell book for your type of character , and if you placed the book, with the correct material components in a special research desk ... you could learn and memorize extra spells , a lot of which were from the DnD handbooks ...
If you learned a spell, you could use the book on someone else and teach them a spell, if they were of a level that could cast it.
In order to cast the spell, each spell had it's own unique way of "chanting it" , meaning you had to type in the exact funny looking name for it.
I never found many of these spells, even though my book showed hundreds of open slots for them. A DM did tell me, each slot was for a unique spell for my class ...
The only drawback was , no one knew all the spells , or what to get to gain most of these spells. That was a secret the creator knew , but would not even drop hints on how to achieve those. He told me, I'd just have to be smart enough , to figure them out.
Certain spells were useful there, like "Rope-Trick" , you casted by saying something like -linguasse in the chat box if you had it memorized. It casted like any other spell in NWN, complete with animation. The effect was a magical rope appeared , and allowed you to climb up into a pocket dimension where you could camp/rest/try to wait out the weather/day/night cycle.
I did learn a few of these , just enough to keep my interested in discovering more, and also frustrating as you found items you thought might work, but didn't lol. For playing a caster, it just added a whole new dimension to playing a caster.
The world was huge ... I don't know how many areas, but over a thousand separate areas.
But, it also had big area maps almost every area. Most of them, around the starting city were plain, and held no interest in them at all.
I found some caves , and discovered the caves ran all across the same lands underground, but they did not contain anything of any real interest. A few non-hostile bats, and transitions to caves scattered about the lands.
I played there a month, before I discovered the secret to that , and that was only because a DM dropped a hint on how to find places to adventure in.
Keep in mind, there were no portals I could attain at my low levels ... only high level wizards could teleport around there.
The DM explained to me, that there would be less monsters where civilization was, and far away from patrols. So, one day I headed out due north from the city. 28 huge maps later north, I finally ran into a wandering band of goblins to kill. I got hurt badly, didn't have enough healing so I went all the way back to the city on foot, and picked up some healing pots. I traveled all the way back, to discover the goblins only came out at night time hours, lol.
Trogdolytes came out and close to the city when the moon was "new" ( not shining in the sky at all ) , many animals came out at night , you didn't see in the daytime, and vica versa in the same areas.
Shops in town an off a Business hours, so if it was nighttime in the city, forget about shopping , find an inn, and wait out the slow creeping hours if you needed anything.
I eventually did find other cave systems to explore, and going far and deep in these places, I found entrances to other worlds and lairs ... so that stuff kept me going through the aggravation. But, the PW had almost no players at all. I discovered most got annoyed by not finding any adventure shortly after arriving , plus the HCR stuff, I can't blame them for not coming back.
I explained to the creator , that areas were to big, and adventure was too far away for starting characters. He told me , that players should expect monsters to be very far from civilization , and they needed to tough it out and be smarter about things, instead of trying to make it easy for people to integrate.
That was one thing that was wrong there ...
Eventually you an into the point where you needed other players , and there weren't any because hardly anyone stayed long enough to find the places to go to adventure.
Some aspects that were good though was, Rogues got XP for picking locks and disarming or flagging traps. There were even some places, you could "rob" , like my rogue/assassin lifted a set of plates off a wall of a house in town. A few paintings ... I eventually found a "fence" to buy them, I got gold ( not much but some ) and a bit of XP per item sold for it too.
Most windows , you could listen at, peek through ( set a cutscene of what was on the other side in limited view ) , open, lock, unlock or break, and climb through. These were more areas I missed while playing the caster. If you did it right, you could sneak into a place, rob it blind , avoid the staff/guards/NPCs ( whom could catch you in the act ) ... and sneak out again. Some areas were only accessible by climbing through one set of windows, traveling around the inside of a building, find the right window that took you outside so you could find more windows to get into areas you normally couldn't get to.
Every time you entered an area for the first time, you gained like 20xp for exploration. The DM told me, even if someone played a pacifist character, and never got into combat, they had enough areas someone could gain 7 levels from exploration XP alone. I raised one level by exploring early on, so yeah it was probable.
I thought that a nice touch too.
Traps though were stupid ... I've never liked traps in NWN , because they normally are easy to spot, or are set too high and you run over them for instant epic death. These ones were even dumber than that, save one type. Every trap there had a triggering mechanism located else where. In order to disarm, you had to find the mechanism , but the trap never actually went away even If you disarmed it and got the xp, so you wound up getting blasted regardless of the effort.
The one trap I did however find amusing was the "paint traps" ... occasionally, you'd be sneaking around a dungeon or cave, trying to remain undetected or invisible by the wandering monsters that came in hordes at you if one spotted you. If you hit the paint trap, and failed your reflex save, you got coated in paint ... rendering you visible to the bad guys If you came across them. Finding enough deep water to stand in, and waiting washed it off ... but it not only spazzed out your invisibility spell , or made you where you couldn't sneak or HIPs , ghostly visage, and displacement also got fizzed out as long as you wore the paint ... , it turned you and you gear, a bright color , usually green but I also got painted aqua, and light pink too a few times.
I thought it was cool, because it wasn't a lethal trap in itself, was a reason to have a good rogue along with you for sure , and it's effect was basically one that could land you into trouble, if you didn't take caution and get the stuff washed off as soon as you could.
Like the time I got painted Pink , I was trying to rob a merchant's back room. One of the chest had the paint trap in it. Normally I liked trying to rob a merchant, and then go into the store late rand resell his items back to him/her, lol. One time I did it, forgot to get rid of the pink paint , and the NPC refused to deal with me, because the paint told him I was caught robbing his wares. He called the guards , and I slipped out a window. From there on out, my character could not "shop" at the place, even after a reset.
Shops were a different experience too ... items were placed in containers, and you picked what you wanted and went to the NPC to barter a deal or pay for the items. Some would haggle. Appraise skill helped. Others not so much ... but you could do a few things because of that system. First off, you could try to shop lift items if you wanted to. I never did it in front of the NPCs , they would give a warning if you got to close to a door , and after knowing some won't deal with you If caught stealing ever again ... I decided not to push my luck. But you could do something else just as effective ... rogues got a "hide ability" , like they could literally hide in the bushes, trees, crates, boxes, coffins, ect ... , so remember how I said most shops closed at dark and didn't open until morning? Well, you go in late, hide in a crate or other thing, wait until the shop closed. Then you were locked in. But you could load up on items , either break a window and climb out ( hoping no guard was below to spot you ) , or try and pick the lock or discover another way out.
Occasionally, the shop owner would "hear something" and come investigate his shop floor when it was closed, and it was random so you never knew when or if you'd get caught or be able to hide fast enough, lol.
I thought those aspects great additions, and really made playing a rogue( mine was evil there ) quite entertaining. Some places had golems and magical means of disrupting thieves, lol I found some of those too ...
The areas though, bleh ... most were not detailed. Just big and open , or paths through normal tree lines, and such. There was no in game lore to be found , there wasn't even any direction to take there. You just explored and discovered, or you missed out. In many instances, the "clues" that something was there, was so obnoxiously un-impressive it was easy to over-look. There were secrets hidden inside secrets , that was the creator's handiwork. He never liked anything to be obvious.
I always thought, If one could take all those extra cool features, and roll them into a PW like Alangara , it would truly be a fantastical place to explore and play in, beyond the scope of what it already is. One just would have to remove the annoying stuff, and the crap the other PW owner wanted to force onto players. That was his thing, he wanted to challenge the player, and not the characters they played ... but then gripe at them, because they aren't role-playing to his standards.
I am certain I am forgetting a ton of things, like encumbrance there was annoying. Your gold weighted you down too even. Between that, the food and water , and camping gear ... you suffered in weight and always limited in how much loot you could carry. There were no magic bag sin the PW, so yeah ... another frustration. Changing armor, took many rounds where your character was paralyzed basically until the time was up.
That sucked too I thought. Heavy armors gave good AC, but slowed your character down.
Like I said though, some of those extra features were pretty cool. Just about every class has some extra abilities granted to them, that fit the classes. Like Rangers and Barbarians could track almost anything given the dc of the tracks left behind. Examining a campfire burned gave the approximate hours since it was burned out, what sort of tracks were around it , if any food was cooked, spices used, potions brewed there maybe, and if tents or bed rolls were used. My Barbarian also could sense pathways and strange places in natural areas by wilderness sense.
Rogues , and rogue based classes , I covered a lot of that up above.
Casters got extra spells ( if you could figure out how to gain them ) , some of the most valuable items not even UMD users could use , and enchant/repair enchanted items if they were high enough level for the items. They could scry for other players, NPCs, ect as long as they knew them, and used the clairvoyant/clairaudience spell while using their crystal ball.( A limted time cutscene , that actually showed the player or NPC and what was going on around them. ) The could passively detect magic, that also told them if they were in wild magic zones, or dead magic zones. SpellCraft would tell any caster type, if high enough they got spied on by Scry too.
Even clerics got special holy spells , NWN did not ever cover.
Bards just didn't sing for bonuses or curses in combat too ... you could gain XP for telling a tale ( non DM, dunno how that was done, but the server knew when you told a long tale ) , you could cast minor illusions to enhance performances ( leaned similar to the wizard/sorc spells ) , like dancing lights , and other minor illusions. One I seen had a Mirror Image spell, that in combat gave the monsters fake targets to go after , until they hit them and dispelled each one ... handy wouldn't that be? Bards got xp for writing in game books/stories, and poetry that got added to the library by scripting in real time.
Fighters got extra bonuses to stats here and there, and depending on their armor/weapon configurations, often got boons to ac , or attacks based of their normal training methods.
Paladins could detect evil in 60' radius. They could also Inspire others, ... I seen one rally a group of regular farmers ( NPCS) , to go fight a minor battle against some goblin raiders found on the road.
Druids could do all sorts of nature things, like pass with-out trace ( no tracking them ) , use special paths no one else but a druid or ranger could follow. Shape changed, their animals forms allowed other senses to kick in, like smelling bad water, hearing things others couldn't hear , tracking was easier by smell. Some polymorph and small animal forms, allowed to by pass things like bars on doors, crawling into cracks too small for even a Halfling to enter ( accessing new areas , or other ways into places. )
There was crafting there too , but honestly I never figured any of it out myself. It wasn't CNR crafting , it was some odd custom made craft system, there were no recipes, and you didn't know what objects to find to craft , or how to put them together to make anything. It was another one of the creator's " figure it out" things, and didn't interest me enough to try. It was hard enough, trying to figure out spells and finding adventure there.
Lol, like I said some of it was down right cool, and awesome ... but put in the most annoying set up/PW , and with the owner the way he was , I just had to find something else entirely. It was a big huge world, and there were like 3 players there , and we were only on the same times a few precious days out of a month. That didn't make things any easier to swallow there. And we were all varying level ranges anyways. My Barbarian/rogue/assassin got to level 14 before I decided to give up there, and shortly after I discovered Alangara here.
, but like I said, I doubt much of these aspects could be implemented or repeated here , but I do like throwing ideas out on the tale for inspiration.
So if none ever make it into this server, no worries at all.
I was am simply sharing an experience, and hopefully other swil chime in on aspects they found in other places they liked as well.
Out of these pockets of information, Alangara might get a few additions here and there , that would only farther enhance it's already awesome content.
If not, ... we aren't loosing anything , so it's all good to me!
I thought, why not address some of these aspects while I had time to kill?
Well, it's not as if any of these ideas and such need to be implemented into Alangara at all ... most are just enhancements that give a little bit of "wow that's neat" factor into base idea itself.
Keep in mind, I have no idea how to do most of these things myself, as I'm a scripting dummy ... all I have is the player end side of the experience to go on for most of these.
I will not name the severs from which I take examples of, for I do not want those names being tagged by search engines, so the post could be found by the other server admins and possibly start conflicts or disruptions. I am sure, most people have tried one or two , and maybe even had similar experiences.
One sticks out in my mind, mostly because I TRIED my best to enjoy a stint there ... there were issues on this PW I had trouble swallowing though.
Number one being the main DM/Admin/Creator ... while he was amazingly talented at a lot of things, I wish I knew how to do ... , he also had the mind-set of play the way he likes , or you weren't worth his time/effort. His personality was controlling , and often super -paranoid you were going to take his ideas and run off with them I guess.
He also was un-able to try and compromise any detrimental situations that popped up from any aspect, be it social , something in the PW, or dealing with the server itself.
Besides that, I continuously got these weekly emails from his forums, with some sob story of how expensive hosting was, that the money ran out for hosting, and next week/month/day ... the server would be shut down if players didn't donate to keep it going. I think I donated 10 dollars on the first one I got, then I sat back and watched to see if the PW got taken down permanently like the emails suggested.
Well, it never did ... somehow "miraculously" , funds magically got donated to upkeep the high server cost every month. I always felt, ol dude was just scamming money ... in fact he tried to enlist me as a "advertiser" demanding I make post of bioware and other places to attract players that might donate. It felt like it was pay-to-play , or work outside the PW to play , and if you didn't do that ... you got problems and nitpicky issues throwed at you.
Anyways , on the PW side ... it did use some Hard Core Rulesets that were quite advanced from my way of thinking ... , now I never have been a fan of HCR concepts in the first place, because they are static and often annoyances while trying to RP and adventure. Like having to have food to rest, plus a bed roll, or tent, campfire and water. Combine that with timed resting ( you can rest again in X hours ) meant if you screwed up and tried to rest when you couldn't, it screwed up your timing so you had to wait longer, and also used up resources , even though you didn't gain anything from it.
Some of the concepts ,I learned were put in place, so it gave your characters something to do other than grind for XP elsewhere. One way of getting food , was to find and hunt herbivore animals, skin them, get the meat and cook the meat on a campfire. Or you could go to places find or buy the foods. Water needed good water sources to get into your canteens. But, some water sources could be bad ... I discovered a few that were full of pathogens ( gave a disease upon drinking ) , and one well another player actually poisoned some time earlier ... which , while annoying was rather neat in concept at the same time.
Aggravatingly though, you had these hunger/thrist/fatigue bars pop up in your client side chat area, and if you stopped to RP , these bars drained faster than if you were adventuring. You constantly had to spam food, water, and rest when you could, even if you were in mid conversation ...
The realistic weather aspect, also bugged me ... it never seemed the weather was "nice" , it was either super cold ( forcing you to wear cold weather, heavy, and non-AC adding gear ) and damaged you slowly , or it was scorching hot and forced you to remove most items or armors, or your thirst and fatigue level ran out in a minute or two ...
There was also item and gear UPKEEP/Repair too. Everything had those bars , and just wearing/equipping an item started making it wear out. Armors, weapons, and shields especially dropped in wear and tear, in every battle you had, big or small. I lost quite a few good items to this system, before I figured out you could return to town, find a crafting anvil, and make repairs of you had points in craft armor or craft weapon, and some gold.
So, while these were designed to aid RP "systems" , I found them annoying and problematic at best.
BUT the place did have quite a few awesome extras that made me keep going all the same.
The first thing was, the SECRETS ... and I'm not just talking about secret doors and hidden loot here ... I found out, that some doors I found that couldn't be picked or opened , actually needed chat-spoken-passwords to enter. Usually you found clues around these doors to know how they Open. Like the first one I found had a sign beside it. It had said something like, "sOrry, authorized PersonnEl only."
While it read funny, I just thought it was a typo, or maybe the odd capital letters was from a NPC that wasn't too savvy on writing ... but if you stood near the door, and said "Open" in your chat bar, it actually unlocked the door. I looked at the sign again later, and if you took the capital letters, it spelled " OPEN" ... giving a clue as to how to access the area beyond.
There were many such doors, and secret passages that opened by chat like that. One I found in a dungeon, the clue on how to open it was absurdly found in a dungeon completely un-related elsewhere , but I did find it.
Like Alangara here, some areas weren't obvious points on the map ... many were well hidden and crafty placed triggers , you really had to search for them .
Movement - This was probably my second biggest love of the server , not only was walking/running an option ... but you could also jump, climb, and swim ... well, you could fly too if shape shifted into a flying form, or had winged characters to begin with. To me , this opened up a whole slew of new means of exploration. There were areas, you couldn't access unless you climbed to them, or flew up ... and many you had to swim to get to. If you were on a higher elevation ( cliff wall) you could climb down, or jump down to the next level. ( or again fly ). This place was designed for that though, and Alangara uses the elevations to channel specific paths, so I doubt these extra means of movement would be beneficial for it. I loved that aspect of that one PW , but honestly it probably would only work well there.
Like Alangara , spells were changed here and there to reflect the scope of the server itself. In my opinion, most were downgraded , instead of upgraded though. But , as far as casters went , each type ... Druid, Cleric, and Arcane had the potential to learn spells not included in NWN.
Somehow they had this spell book for your type of character , and if you placed the book, with the correct material components in a special research desk ... you could learn and memorize extra spells , a lot of which were from the DnD handbooks ...
If you learned a spell, you could use the book on someone else and teach them a spell, if they were of a level that could cast it.
In order to cast the spell, each spell had it's own unique way of "chanting it" , meaning you had to type in the exact funny looking name for it.
I never found many of these spells, even though my book showed hundreds of open slots for them. A DM did tell me, each slot was for a unique spell for my class ...
The only drawback was , no one knew all the spells , or what to get to gain most of these spells. That was a secret the creator knew , but would not even drop hints on how to achieve those. He told me, I'd just have to be smart enough , to figure them out.
Certain spells were useful there, like "Rope-Trick" , you casted by saying something like -linguasse in the chat box if you had it memorized. It casted like any other spell in NWN, complete with animation. The effect was a magical rope appeared , and allowed you to climb up into a pocket dimension where you could camp/rest/try to wait out the weather/day/night cycle.
I did learn a few of these , just enough to keep my interested in discovering more, and also frustrating as you found items you thought might work, but didn't lol. For playing a caster, it just added a whole new dimension to playing a caster.
The world was huge ... I don't know how many areas, but over a thousand separate areas.
But, it also had big area maps almost every area. Most of them, around the starting city were plain, and held no interest in them at all.
I found some caves , and discovered the caves ran all across the same lands underground, but they did not contain anything of any real interest. A few non-hostile bats, and transitions to caves scattered about the lands.
I played there a month, before I discovered the secret to that , and that was only because a DM dropped a hint on how to find places to adventure in.
Keep in mind, there were no portals I could attain at my low levels ... only high level wizards could teleport around there.
The DM explained to me, that there would be less monsters where civilization was, and far away from patrols. So, one day I headed out due north from the city. 28 huge maps later north, I finally ran into a wandering band of goblins to kill. I got hurt badly, didn't have enough healing so I went all the way back to the city on foot, and picked up some healing pots. I traveled all the way back, to discover the goblins only came out at night time hours, lol.
Trogdolytes came out and close to the city when the moon was "new" ( not shining in the sky at all ) , many animals came out at night , you didn't see in the daytime, and vica versa in the same areas.
Shops in town an off a Business hours, so if it was nighttime in the city, forget about shopping , find an inn, and wait out the slow creeping hours if you needed anything.
I eventually did find other cave systems to explore, and going far and deep in these places, I found entrances to other worlds and lairs ... so that stuff kept me going through the aggravation. But, the PW had almost no players at all. I discovered most got annoyed by not finding any adventure shortly after arriving , plus the HCR stuff, I can't blame them for not coming back.
I explained to the creator , that areas were to big, and adventure was too far away for starting characters. He told me , that players should expect monsters to be very far from civilization , and they needed to tough it out and be smarter about things, instead of trying to make it easy for people to integrate.
That was one thing that was wrong there ...
Eventually you an into the point where you needed other players , and there weren't any because hardly anyone stayed long enough to find the places to go to adventure.
Some aspects that were good though was, Rogues got XP for picking locks and disarming or flagging traps. There were even some places, you could "rob" , like my rogue/assassin lifted a set of plates off a wall of a house in town. A few paintings ... I eventually found a "fence" to buy them, I got gold ( not much but some ) and a bit of XP per item sold for it too.
Most windows , you could listen at, peek through ( set a cutscene of what was on the other side in limited view ) , open, lock, unlock or break, and climb through. These were more areas I missed while playing the caster. If you did it right, you could sneak into a place, rob it blind , avoid the staff/guards/NPCs ( whom could catch you in the act ) ... and sneak out again. Some areas were only accessible by climbing through one set of windows, traveling around the inside of a building, find the right window that took you outside so you could find more windows to get into areas you normally couldn't get to.
Every time you entered an area for the first time, you gained like 20xp for exploration. The DM told me, even if someone played a pacifist character, and never got into combat, they had enough areas someone could gain 7 levels from exploration XP alone. I raised one level by exploring early on, so yeah it was probable.
I thought that a nice touch too.
Traps though were stupid ... I've never liked traps in NWN , because they normally are easy to spot, or are set too high and you run over them for instant epic death. These ones were even dumber than that, save one type. Every trap there had a triggering mechanism located else where. In order to disarm, you had to find the mechanism , but the trap never actually went away even If you disarmed it and got the xp, so you wound up getting blasted regardless of the effort.
The one trap I did however find amusing was the "paint traps" ... occasionally, you'd be sneaking around a dungeon or cave, trying to remain undetected or invisible by the wandering monsters that came in hordes at you if one spotted you. If you hit the paint trap, and failed your reflex save, you got coated in paint ... rendering you visible to the bad guys If you came across them. Finding enough deep water to stand in, and waiting washed it off ... but it not only spazzed out your invisibility spell , or made you where you couldn't sneak or HIPs , ghostly visage, and displacement also got fizzed out as long as you wore the paint ... , it turned you and you gear, a bright color , usually green but I also got painted aqua, and light pink too a few times.
I thought it was cool, because it wasn't a lethal trap in itself, was a reason to have a good rogue along with you for sure , and it's effect was basically one that could land you into trouble, if you didn't take caution and get the stuff washed off as soon as you could.
Like the time I got painted Pink , I was trying to rob a merchant's back room. One of the chest had the paint trap in it. Normally I liked trying to rob a merchant, and then go into the store late rand resell his items back to him/her, lol. One time I did it, forgot to get rid of the pink paint , and the NPC refused to deal with me, because the paint told him I was caught robbing his wares. He called the guards , and I slipped out a window. From there on out, my character could not "shop" at the place, even after a reset.
Shops were a different experience too ... items were placed in containers, and you picked what you wanted and went to the NPC to barter a deal or pay for the items. Some would haggle. Appraise skill helped. Others not so much ... but you could do a few things because of that system. First off, you could try to shop lift items if you wanted to. I never did it in front of the NPCs , they would give a warning if you got to close to a door , and after knowing some won't deal with you If caught stealing ever again ... I decided not to push my luck. But you could do something else just as effective ... rogues got a "hide ability" , like they could literally hide in the bushes, trees, crates, boxes, coffins, ect ... , so remember how I said most shops closed at dark and didn't open until morning? Well, you go in late, hide in a crate or other thing, wait until the shop closed. Then you were locked in. But you could load up on items , either break a window and climb out ( hoping no guard was below to spot you ) , or try and pick the lock or discover another way out.
Occasionally, the shop owner would "hear something" and come investigate his shop floor when it was closed, and it was random so you never knew when or if you'd get caught or be able to hide fast enough, lol.
I thought those aspects great additions, and really made playing a rogue( mine was evil there ) quite entertaining. Some places had golems and magical means of disrupting thieves, lol I found some of those too ...
The areas though, bleh ... most were not detailed. Just big and open , or paths through normal tree lines, and such. There was no in game lore to be found , there wasn't even any direction to take there. You just explored and discovered, or you missed out. In many instances, the "clues" that something was there, was so obnoxiously un-impressive it was easy to over-look. There were secrets hidden inside secrets , that was the creator's handiwork. He never liked anything to be obvious.
I always thought, If one could take all those extra cool features, and roll them into a PW like Alangara , it would truly be a fantastical place to explore and play in, beyond the scope of what it already is. One just would have to remove the annoying stuff, and the crap the other PW owner wanted to force onto players. That was his thing, he wanted to challenge the player, and not the characters they played ... but then gripe at them, because they aren't role-playing to his standards.
I am certain I am forgetting a ton of things, like encumbrance there was annoying. Your gold weighted you down too even. Between that, the food and water , and camping gear ... you suffered in weight and always limited in how much loot you could carry. There were no magic bag sin the PW, so yeah ... another frustration. Changing armor, took many rounds where your character was paralyzed basically until the time was up.
That sucked too I thought. Heavy armors gave good AC, but slowed your character down.
Like I said though, some of those extra features were pretty cool. Just about every class has some extra abilities granted to them, that fit the classes. Like Rangers and Barbarians could track almost anything given the dc of the tracks left behind. Examining a campfire burned gave the approximate hours since it was burned out, what sort of tracks were around it , if any food was cooked, spices used, potions brewed there maybe, and if tents or bed rolls were used. My Barbarian also could sense pathways and strange places in natural areas by wilderness sense.
Rogues , and rogue based classes , I covered a lot of that up above.
Casters got extra spells ( if you could figure out how to gain them ) , some of the most valuable items not even UMD users could use , and enchant/repair enchanted items if they were high enough level for the items. They could scry for other players, NPCs, ect as long as they knew them, and used the clairvoyant/clairaudience spell while using their crystal ball.( A limted time cutscene , that actually showed the player or NPC and what was going on around them. ) The could passively detect magic, that also told them if they were in wild magic zones, or dead magic zones. SpellCraft would tell any caster type, if high enough they got spied on by Scry too.
Even clerics got special holy spells , NWN did not ever cover.
Bards just didn't sing for bonuses or curses in combat too ... you could gain XP for telling a tale ( non DM, dunno how that was done, but the server knew when you told a long tale ) , you could cast minor illusions to enhance performances ( leaned similar to the wizard/sorc spells ) , like dancing lights , and other minor illusions. One I seen had a Mirror Image spell, that in combat gave the monsters fake targets to go after , until they hit them and dispelled each one ... handy wouldn't that be? Bards got xp for writing in game books/stories, and poetry that got added to the library by scripting in real time.
Fighters got extra bonuses to stats here and there, and depending on their armor/weapon configurations, often got boons to ac , or attacks based of their normal training methods.
Paladins could detect evil in 60' radius. They could also Inspire others, ... I seen one rally a group of regular farmers ( NPCS) , to go fight a minor battle against some goblin raiders found on the road.
Druids could do all sorts of nature things, like pass with-out trace ( no tracking them ) , use special paths no one else but a druid or ranger could follow. Shape changed, their animals forms allowed other senses to kick in, like smelling bad water, hearing things others couldn't hear , tracking was easier by smell. Some polymorph and small animal forms, allowed to by pass things like bars on doors, crawling into cracks too small for even a Halfling to enter ( accessing new areas , or other ways into places. )
There was crafting there too , but honestly I never figured any of it out myself. It wasn't CNR crafting , it was some odd custom made craft system, there were no recipes, and you didn't know what objects to find to craft , or how to put them together to make anything. It was another one of the creator's " figure it out" things, and didn't interest me enough to try. It was hard enough, trying to figure out spells and finding adventure there.
Lol, like I said some of it was down right cool, and awesome ... but put in the most annoying set up/PW , and with the owner the way he was , I just had to find something else entirely. It was a big huge world, and there were like 3 players there , and we were only on the same times a few precious days out of a month. That didn't make things any easier to swallow there. And we were all varying level ranges anyways. My Barbarian/rogue/assassin got to level 14 before I decided to give up there, and shortly after I discovered Alangara here.
, but like I said, I doubt much of these aspects could be implemented or repeated here , but I do like throwing ideas out on the tale for inspiration.
So if none ever make it into this server, no worries at all.
I was am simply sharing an experience, and hopefully other swil chime in on aspects they found in other places they liked as well.
Out of these pockets of information, Alangara might get a few additions here and there , that would only farther enhance it's already awesome content.
If not, ... we aren't loosing anything , so it's all good to me!