One of the things I most like about Planeshift is its emphasis on roleplay.

However, there are several ways in which I feel that this is taken too far, ie beyond the bounds of pragmatism and coMMOn sense.

Planeshift is now a much more mature game than it was previously. There are many more quests and the ingame mechanics are a lot more fleshed out. To me, this means that one would expect more people to try the game out and want to play it for a longer period of time.

But, you have to realise that both roleplay and MMO are social passtimes which are fun because they involve interaction with other people.

Spoilers do tend to undermine the enjoyment for some people but, in my opinion, suppressing the natural human inclination to share and to help is much more damaging to potential enjoyment of the game.

When I was at uni, I ran a real pen and paper roleplaying group for several years. Naturally, as the game master, I did not undermine the amount of time and effort I had put in to creating fun and interesting quests for my players by telling them the answers.

At the same time, though, the fun of the game, whether I was player or gamemaster, was the enjoyment of the players discussing among themselves the problems my quests posed.

As I said, roleplaying is a social passtime.


In PS, there is far far too much emphasis on not helping other people to solve quests. Yes, I agree, we should not merely hand out answers. In that respect, we are all gamemasters for each other.

At the same time, if you prevent people discussing amongst themselves, you are also inhibiting their inclination to form and participate in the social group and community that is inherently part of any roleplay and any MMO.

An MMO without player community is, by definition, a failure.

Likewise, an MMO where you can simply ask for and get the answer, OOC, is also a failure.

Planeshift has consistently stood head and shoulders above other MMORPG, as a roleplay game, by insisting that we remain in character.

At the same time, the insistence that we not help each other has also caused it to be a consistent failure as an MMO, by suppressing our natural inclination to help each other, thus forming friendships and a social community.

So, I would suggest, that Planeshift would be both a much stronger MMO and a much better environment for RP if the restriction on helping other people was relaxed a little.

IE ...

no direct answers allowed, but reasonable hints allowed
questions must be asked in character and answers given in character, but otherwise we should be allowed to interrelate to each other in a normal, friendly human way

The question "ok how do I complete quest X at the point where .." is clearly out of character and would be destructive to the RP environment that Planeshift tries to create.

But I honestly dont see anything wrong with "This carpet salesman, Y, in Ojaveda wants me to get Z. Can anyone suggest where I might get that?"


Also, what exactly is the problem with asking directions or where to find someone? Think about it! You dont wander, lost, around a city for 3 hours looking for some address! You pull over and ask someone how to get there!

Yep its probably the drivers (which are probably Catalyst 6.9) which I have found to be least likely to muck up with OGL and ATI.

About to rollback/update till I get something that works

Lying quiet on the black leather, heavy jacket over me in an attempt to hold in the sleep that I wanted back, I stared up at the clouds through the glass door. Hasn\'t everyone done this sometime, stretched out on their back in some nowhere time watching the pattern of god\'s mind for lack of something better to do?

So I lie there, keeping distant company with you perhaps, as you watch what image these words paint for your mind\'s eye. Sometimes I drift, aware of but paying no attention to the world around me, gazing at the cloud shapes as, lacking the opposition of noisy thought, they become fantastic creatures upon imagination\'s canvas.

I stare through a gap into the landscape beyond, seeing first low hills then farmers working their land. As the steamy frame shifts into regular square formation, the scene become a courtyard which I look down upon from height.

At the farther edge a small house with neat pointed roof emerges all cleanly carved in tidy designs, scrolls of gilded wood in organically prominent from the well aligned boards of the ochre orange walls.

A small blue creature, all squat lizard power, exits the building and moves to stand at the nearest corner of the court as another, taller and more slender, clambers over a fence from the small field beside the home. The latter, it seems admires the smaller creatures shield and spear, making some comment, it would appear, on the ornately graven or fashion ornamentation on its face.

Another creature appears, this one indistinct of form, but a definite lightning blue, seeming midway between the heights and weight of the others. Finally, nearest, a last lizard seems to coalesce from the cloudscape, winged as the others were not, tall and slim as a stick with dragonfly wings in pastel shades of lavender and powder blue, its head held high in noble carriage.

The fascination of the scene takes hold, my belief, like iron filings to a magnet, realigning so that the world I am looking at becomes reality. I feel endearment and a sense of friendship for these strange creatures taking for within me. Somehow, with a physical vitality that is entirely of the imagination, I leap unhindered through the window and down into the court yard to stand, all clothed in mortal black before these friends for whom I have suddenly felt such intense affection.

After a fashion that would feel foolish, were it not for the entirely genuine honesty of feeling that has taken hold of me, I reach out and shake the claw of the squat lizard creature, introducing myself as though worldly tongue would suffice in this alien world. His clasp is clean and dry to the touch and very smooth like a limb of polished wood.

Each of the others I greet likewise, feeling somewhat like a publican greeting new and important guests at the door of an establishment much more humble than their status. Seeming to understand my arrival in their place as though it were an uncommon, but known occurrence, the four lizard-folk introduce themselves in turn.

The squat, powerful looking fellow is Glaur. As he speaks his name, I realise that, back in my living room, his name would have connotation of anger and turbulence. Here though the meaning of his name after the language of his own folk is plain. He is a creature of great and potent vitality, named as much for strength of spirit as for strength of arm.

The second, taller creature is Glomhna which I would have taken to mean sullen, but which is clearly the description of a graceful and intelligent female with a calm spirit. She bears a staff at the end of which a pallid blue crystal glows and she clearly has abilities that I would describe as magical.

The third creature of indistinct form and vivid hue, is called Shadhoe. At home, I suspect, I would have confused his name and personality with the word shadow and guessed it to describe a somewhat morbid and saturnine personality. The meaning conveyed though is of an extremely bright ad lively person who is naturally reserved and honoured for that.

The last creature is Eargh, Iurq and Aerch, the pronunciation of his name being difficult since it sounds the simultaneous speaking of all three variants. I would have taken his name to mean the pain of slow torture, a somewhat grating sound to hear and to speak but the sense of swiftness of motion, thought and pride was unequivocal so that I interpreted his name to mean grace of spirit instead. While this one clearly was not the warrior, mage or priest like personality of the others, he was equally clearly a being of both intense feeling and great authority, the fact that hue of his mottling is so subtly soft, only serving to accentuate how  paradoxical the expression of that sort of personality was in human terms. His name would be Eargh to me the GH of that being a slurred G that was the closest my human throat could approximate the lizard\'s pronunciation.

My former world seems distant, remote and unreal the vividness of the lizard folk a dynamic vitality like the dance of lightning in the clouds, my own, stark contrast in the black of the night sky, more distinct than ever seemed the case in the world of mortal affairs.



Strangely precipitant for my own nature, I ask the lizards what they are, why they are here, what they are doing in this place.

Glaur explains that this is his home. Built by his own hands he is a crafter and a smith his occupation being the fashioning of useful objects for those of his folk who live over the rise in the next valley. He was once a warrior of some skill.

Glomhna is a mellifluous delight, her tongue and speech so fluidly sibilant that I nearly miss her description of her profession as a healer and member of the local community\'s council. She is very beautiful in an entirely non human way and I sense that her easy acceptance of her skills makes them seem less than they are to those she describes them to.

Shadhoe it seems is an architect, here to help Glaur complete some project he has been working on for Eargh. his conveys the sense of a vast understatement and I sense that Shadhoe has great respect for Glaur in his ability to accomplish whatever this task is.

Eargh states that he is lord of the local community, being also of some repute in the other provinces of this world. Glaur\'s project is near completion and he blatantly happy and excited that the work has gone so rapidly and smoothly.



At this point  Glomhna intercedes. She explains that her calling leaves her with a good understanding of he circumstances ha have brought me to this place and explains that her understanding leaves her to believe that I must decide whether to make this place my own or to allow my awareness of it to lapse and return to my own world.

t appears that visitors from my world are infrequent, but not unknown, and that the protocol is clear. I will have one night of my time to decide whether to stay here or to return permanently to the world that I came from. If I stay I may still have some contact with the world I am used to, but that cannot be guaranteed and I may be stranded here forever. If I do I will have few opportunities to associate with my own kind and will have to make whatever life for myself that I can. On the other hand, I am different from the lizard folk and people such as myself often have skills and abilities that become highly sought after amongst them.



From myself, and for your benefit, I should mention that the strange stiltedness of my description reflects the strange state of awareness that I entered when I entered this world and that this has been gradually changing to a state of simultaneously heightened and jaded awareness brought about by the vividness of the world which I have stumbled upon.

My name is Aeflithan, which means Evening Song in my own tongue and I am not very fanciful or prone to strange imaginings. According to the lizards my name in their tongue would be Elbe and means the Powerful Time, connoting birth, death and magical transformations. In the rest of this journal I shall refer to myself by the name they have given me and attempt to write somewhat less stiltedly. For your ease, and the clarity of my own mind, I shall write as though looking from the outside.



The lizard folk Glaur, Glomhna, Shadhoe and Eargh invited Elbe to sleep with them in Glaur\'s house that night, making clear that the decision upon whether to remain or leave must be made by morning. In the meantime Elbe could do as Elbe liked, as long as Elbe did no damage Lish, the name they called themselves by, or Lish property.

Thinking matters over in a corner of the court as he watched the Lish busy themselves about helping Glaur in his work, Elbe began to become aware of that inner quietitude and clarity of mind that he eventually came to associate with the Land of the Lish.

He wondered how defined the stipulations of the Lish had been. Would he have no chance to ever return to his home, if he decided to stay for a while? Would he never have the opportunity to return to this place if he decided not to stay? There were no real answers sitting here in the soft white dust of the courtyard. He would just have to make some sort of decision and see what happened. In the meantime he struggled, unaccustomed to siting cross-legged, to his feet against the resistance of his stiff knees and went to talk to the Lish.



He clambered over the fence around the home\'s filed with a little more difficulty than Glomhna had and walked stiff legged over to ask her what she was working at. In the centre of the field there was a large beast, as he thought, that she seemed to be tending.

For lack of a better opening line he asked,

\"What does it eat?\"

\"Oh, this is not alive! This is Glaur\'s work. I am merely adjusting some of the more simple of its mechanisms so that it will function properly.\"

Her tone was delicately querent, as though mildly, but not particularly inviting further conversation.

This post was inspired by a chat I just heard on the IRC channel, so it is not intended to be definitive or the be all and end all, only hopefully the start of a thread about generally useful guidelines to people who want to RP (RP=RolePlay) well.

Definition of Roleplay

To roleplay means to talk and act while you are playing the game as if you actually came from the game world, lived in it and had the behaviour and mannerisms that someone coming from your character\'s part of the game world, with its race and its profession would do.


Before You Start

Most of us will have more than one character. Trying to learn all about all the background info for each one of them is probably going to be quite difficult to do and remember well.

Pick one of your favourite characters and decide that that is the one you are going to roleplay most. Have a look at the descriptions of their race and profession and pick the one that you think you would be most comfortable acting as.


to be continued ... (editing atm)

This post has been prompted partially by the post on the economics of mining and partially by observation of the fact that ingame economics are not very well balanced.

Accepted that this part of the game is still under development, now that the game is so highly playable in so many ways, ingame economics is now a much more prominent issue for everyone playing it for the sheer enjoyment of it. Anyone not doing that?

Rat Race

Okay, rat hides and eyes are not really that valuable, but for new characters they are a compulsory pursuit. They provide cash for training and weapons and, my personal feeling is that the balance of time vs cash return is just about perfect for new characters learning to fight and saving up for those two essentials.

But there are just not enough rats out there. And, tbh, the easiest rat is a pretty stiff opponent for a noob character, given that they might lose most, or all, of their hp in one fight.

My suggestion there is that the difficulty of a rat should be low enough that one rat should not be strong enough to take more than half the HP from a character with average health.

Gobbling Progression Points

By the time you can actually kill these, they are fairly easy, but because they generally mob you (which is fun!) they are not the meat for the outright noob.

On the other hand, they are so easy to kill that you can make large amounts of PP in a very short period of time. This is not really very well balanced and the same problem persists when you get to harder monsters later.

PP is far too easy to get in large amounts and cash is in far too short supply so that the balance of PP vs the cost of training is very wrong.

I would suggest that one way to offset the huge amount of PP that can be gained would be to require as many PP per KP as the next skill level of the character.

IE training once when your Sword skill is at level 2 should cost you 3 PP. Thus, it would cost my Klyros 12 (=4x(2+1)) PP in total to fill the yellow bar at level 2 and 16 (=4x(3+1)) PP at level 3.

Getting that many PP is relatively easy, but making enough cash to pay for the training is nightmarish and we really need the Gobbles to be dropping something that we can sell.

eg I started writing a quest based on Gobbles dropping hides that would sell for roughly the same amount as a rat hide, but where you can carry 20 gobble hides at a time, thus a full load would reward you with 140 tria and pay for 3 training sessions.

That, I feel, would give us a fair way of earning cash in reasonable amounts and balanced in well with how far a character will have developed at that point.

Jayose

I know we are not meant to mention ingame quest info, but the quest for this guy gives far too much cash.

Given that he works in a library with a magical looking book in the corner, I think a much more balanced reward from Jayose would be a Glyph that the player could choose to complement whatever Way their character happened to be most interested in.

eg \"Thank you, $playername In return for collecting those herbs for me, I will reward you with a valuable Glyph from my collection. Please select one of ... as what you would like as a token of my appreciation.\"

Gold Ore

Mining is a painstaking passtime and not very rewarding in cash terms. I estimate an hour to collect 10 gold ore with Mining 2.

In the light of the fact that it is gold and how long it takes to get, I would suggest that the Gold Ore quest for the guy in the magic shop should not involve a quest assignment but should be purely a transaction intended to help him stock up on a valuable compoinent and should require 10 gold ore, be repeatable and reward the character with around 200 trias.

Thus a PC could take an hour to get some cash to pay for training in something.

Blacksmith

Given that the playter has to wander about to get the item required for this quest, and that it is clearly something that he wants a lot, I would suggest that the reward for completing this should be at least 50 trias.

Other Monsters

Even the Rogues do not have any cash. Given that, by the time you get to the arena, the lower rank mobs are relatively easy to kill, though still harder than Gobbles etc, these monsters should really drop upward of 10 tria each.

I think they are worth about 400 exp (?) so perhaps a rough estimate of how much cash a mob might drop would be approximately 1 tria per 40 exp? Which is not to say that I think all monsters should have cash, but only that that might be a reasonable approximation of how much they could drop.

Wrt other less blatantly intelligent / humanoid monsters, it would be nice to see them dropping things that could be given to the right NPC\'s in exchange for other items or which could be used in crafting things like armour.

Conclusion

Basically, the balance of earnable PP vs earnable cash is extremely lopsided and simply does not work.

In the long term, the game is going to need some well thought out, carefully devised guidelines on how PC\'s can earn cash and how much they can get at a time.

A big problem, as always in MMORPG\'s, is to ensure that mobs do not become camp targets for people short of cash, so there have to be different enough mobs that give cash and enough ways of making cash that people do not end up fighting over the spoils.

Is there any chance that we could have more complete MySQL tables in the CVS release.

I know you dont want people to be able to read things like full quest definitions, which seems fair enough, but it would be a LOT easier for me to design quests if the tables were complete wrt to all non-secret data.

From what I can see, that means that all tables except characters , npc_triggers  and quests can be exported without restrictions in the state that they would be when a new live server is installed.

As far as the tables that can only be partially exported are concerned, I would guess that, if they are set up with the simplest quests at the start of the table (eg the magic shop gold ore quest - which is trivial to complete) and the more important quests later, then the tables could be partially exported to only include the info relevant to those quests and people like myself who want to design new quests would have relevant examples that they could look at ingame, instead of an example quest involving the rescue of Princess Leia from the Death Star (!?).

In that way, people running their own server and designing quests using it would have all the NPC\'s that are already in place, without any quest information beyond the basic quests.

Having the NPC\'s installed in the CVS tables would mean that new quests would not inadvertently place two NPC\'s in the same place and that, assuming the quest dewsigner knew what the quests were from playing the game, that they could place augmentary characters without problems.



NB for the purposes of quest design, an ingame command something like /teleport_to char would be very useful for testing quests.

Would also be very useful for GM\'s I suspect as would /teleport_to querent so that GM\'s go teleport directly to someone they were talking to on the help channel.

Okay, so now that I have the server up and running, how do I get the tables etc up to date.

As I said, I tried just copying the ./art and ./data folders from the game distribution, but that crashed the server next time I tried to start it.

Having read the server console\'s help and noticed the command to import various types of XML file to the db, I am wondering if I have to step through the game folder importing XML files as it is possible to do so in order to bring the db tables up to par with the data contained in the directories.

NB possibly just the result of a hung DLL or something but I noticed that, when I tried this that copying the original art files in the cvs back over the ones copied from the game distribution, the server still would not start up again. Are other files, like the cfg\'s being altered to reflect some aspects of what is in the ./art folder?

Getting back to my question, do I need to import some of the XML files to the database? And, if so, can anyone suggest what files and in what order I would want to do that?

NB2 Another thing I noticed was that using the server as built straight from CVS, it is not possible to create all races and that, when I finally found a race that I could create - the second type of human, that once I got ingame I was actually being shown as one of the dwarves.

The error I was getting on the character creation screen was that I had not selected a race