OK, I\'m resurrecting this thread I guess.... searched and thought this one was most appropriate to what I\'m proposing. This is going to be fairly long though, so bear with me.
OK, to start with, I don\'t have much experience of online RPG\'s... I\'ve played beta for a couple, which were rather disappointing, mainly because you spent a lot of time simply leveling up etc. It seems like PlaneShift is headed in a different direction to this though, which is good. What I have here are descriptions of how I think a few different systems of gaining status and prestige might work. I have no idea how possible these are in terms of programming, server processing power and so on.... but here goes.
First, several different paths unestablished characters could take to gaining status and prestige.
Adventuerer / Monster Hunter - going out in groups with particular skills to take down a couple of monsters which have been plaging a town, using a combination of their abilities - support mages, offensive mages, warriors and so on working together for a share in the loot, which would be the treasure the monster has hoarded, or the monster itself! Think of the alchemy system from Morrowind, where you can pick the herbs from beside the road, cut off a dead monsters horn or skin it, and so on. With merchants/alchemists which I\'ll mention below, pieces of a variety of monsters would be in demand, and warriors could earn money, increase in status etc just by killing them.
Merchant (Trader) - travelling from town to town, paying a small fee for hire of a horse and cart (or buying one, once you\'ve made some money), and buying up goods which are cheap in one town to another where they are in demand and making a profit. Buying up all available supply of one item, then pushing up the price and selling it all back dear. Such merchants could eventually set up shop in the middle of highways between cities and sell potions and so on to travellers, supply and demand etc.
Merchant (Crafter) - a completely different type of merchant, a character with good item making skills (or potion making for alchemists). These characters would set up stalls, and by offering bounties for ingredients they need (herbs, animal horns, iron, coal etc), buy them fairly inexpensively from warriors, miners etc, and make them into a more valuable potion, which they can then sell and make money.
Mercenary / Thug - not everyone is going to play nice and by-the-law in the game of course, and so there is going to be a demand for characters willing to risk fines and imprisonment to threaten, rob (at swordpoint as opposed to a thief) stores, exact revenge on another mercenary who has recenty irritated someone and so on.
Thief / Spy - if the game has a working economy, somoene who can spy on some of the richer merchants and tell their competitors what they are going to change their prices to undersell them (this is a bit hard to work out, since there is no real way to spy on a PC unless they say something to the NPC which runs their shop while they are offline, so I figure you make players set what their prices are going to be the next day, which the thief can then (with appropriate luck and skill) discover and inform the persons competitior). Also if the game has a political guild system (where guilds control cities, siege each other for control of cities and so on), they should be communicating through in-game forums, which the thieves can intercept part of a post etc, and report back to the rival guild which employs them.
Bounty Hunter - Kind of like a mercenary / thug, only this character works from the games legal system (which lists which characters have broken the law), and allows the bounty hunter to attack them with out being put down as a lawbreaker themself. Perhaps any character with a bounty hunters license would see the names of people who have broken the law recently in a differnt colour, so they don\'t actually have to look at the list at the police station, write it down on paper and frantically check through it each time they see a character.
When creating a character you would have to allocate points among a number of skills which would then determine how they can advance in the world (eg sword and other fighter appropriate skills, mage skills, traders license, alchemy etc, extra money [not really a skill but something merchants could put points into so they do not have to spend time as a fighter earning the cash to make a business venture]). You would only have enough points to fill a couple of skills, so each caracter has a certain place in society, and people will rely on each other - so an alchemist can make potions but he is not a fighter, so he cant kill monsters to get ingredients for his poitions, and will have to pay money to warriors who have collected the said items.
Say you are allocated 6 points to start with and need to put them into these skills (note skill(3) means you have to spend 3 points to get one level in skill). Note though that these AREN\'T all skills.... some are items your character will start with which would otherwise be very expensive, and it would take a long while for you to obtain otherwise.
Fighting Skill/s (3)
Bounty Hunter License (3)
Employment with thieves Guild (3)
Merchant License (4)
Alchemy (4)
Mage (4)
Extra Money (2) (maybe this should be stock coupons or something, so the character can get a starting load of merchandice, and so people can\'t exploit this feature as a way of getting extra money for other characters)
Wagon (1)
Premesis (2)
This is just a rough outline of course.... the actual list would take a fair while to come up with, a lot of balancing and so on.
If its possible... it would be good if the crafting system did NOT follow set recipies, because then anyone who looks them up on a web site would just be able to use them. Instead they should be - to a degree - random for each character that uses them, with some characters having to use more or less of an ingredient than another and so on, to make higher quality items. Therefore crafters who experiment with different quantities and so on will make better quality items, which they can sell for more, and the characters who make the best items would become well known, and sought after to make special items (say a character fulfills a quest and recieves a special ore that can make a better weapon.... they would only take it to the character who makes the very best items.
I\'m going to finish here for the moment.... thats the rough sum of my idea... feel free to comment, suggest changes etc.
