Frequently Asked Questions

Written by Segal

Friday, 12 January 2007

Q: What is a Quest Progression server? Shroud World is designed around the concept of doing quests, or other tasks such as exploration, to progress your character. You will also get a small amount of experience from killing creatures but the primary focus and most efficient way to advance is by completing quests. In addition, quests impact almost every aspects of your character; Prestige classes are obtained through quests, merchants become available through quests, guild membership becomes available through quests, etc… By designing our world around this system of advancement, we have gained a number of advantages. From a design standpoint, it gives the builder more control of the advancement pace of the players. However, far more importantly, it gives the player a purpose for doing things. When a player logs on, he can check his quest journal and have a number of different things he can go accomplish. There is no longer any real benefit to going to an area and killing the same creatures for hours on end. Yes, you can advance in that manner but it is far less efficient than participating in the quests and the storyline. The advancement system also makes many different strategies viable. If you can sneak in or use magic to avoid combat and complete your goal, you are going to receive approximately the same amount of reward as if you fought your way to the same goal. Our design intent is the challenge the playing skills of the player, not the character build. Q: How does the death system work? When designing the death system, we wanted something that would achieve two goals; it would provide a real incentive to the player to stay alive and it would not be overly frustrating or disheartening. We wanted to remove the punitive part of the system but still make the player very reluctant to enter situations where they would die. You begin the game with a certain number of Death Tokens (also called Death Essence). Each time you die, a token is removed from your total. Should you exhaust your supply of tokens, you begin to lose some of your equipment. Not just any equipment, but one of the items you were wearing at time of death. Obviously, this is a pretty serious penalty so the player likely never wants to get into that situation. You can obtain more Death Tokens via quests with the Temple, you can also gain more through large monetary donations to the church, and very rarely you might be awarded one as a quest reward or a loot item. Thus the player will have to expend time, resources, and energy to maintain their Death Token supply. If you die frequently, you may spend a lot effort maintaining this aspect of your character. Q: What are quest tokens? Quest tokens are given randomly as a reward for completing quests. You have a base 10% chance to acquire a Quest Token with each quest you complete. Once you obtain level 15, you can spend the Quest Tokens on acquiring special abilities, feats, and skills. These extraordinary abilities allow you to continue to progress your character even after you have reached the maximum experience level. Q: What are the rules for PVP? The storyline of Shroud World is one of good (the players) versus pretty much everyone else. Character advancement is based on questing and many quests will require that you work with other players to complete them. It is this cooperative spirit we try to foster; we believe that PVP is counter to that aim. Shroud World is not a PVP server and we do not support PVP in any way. We will protect the rights of players to play on the server and be free of any sort of harassment. Q: How do Fame and Faction work? You can gain Fame (or lose it) when you complete quests and do other tasks for specific organizations. There are many different groups that are impacted by fame points. Your level of fame with an organization (that organization might be a village, a guild, or race of creatures) determines what quests area available, what merchants will sell to you, and generally how you are treated. Faction directly relates to a NPC being Hostile or Friendly. If you have a faction score below 110 with a group, they are very likely to attack you. By doing various quests or by killing the enemies of a faction, you can become friendly with factions that would normally attack you on sight. The reverse is also true, if you kill friendly NPCs, over time they will become hostile to you. Many factions have an opposing faction, making it difficult to be friends with both factions. Gaining faction with a group can be a slow process; however, losing faction with a group can happen very quickly. Take steps to understand the factions of your enemies and you may be able to make them your friends. Not e: NWN2 handle factions very strangely (this will hopefully be fixed at some point). NPC treat players are as a single entity which can cause erratic behavior. A single NPC at any one time will either hate or like all players, and this is a global state. If an NPC in one area is currently in a hostile state versus a perceived player, then all NPCs on that faction will also be hostile to player. If you encounter an NPC that should be friendly to you but is not, retreat out of their perception range and wait a bit for the perception to clear. Q: What are the Code of Conduct rules? We keep it very simple; we have two very basic rules. Rule #1 is the golden rule, “treat others as you want to be treated.” Rule #2 is even simpler, “be good or be gone”. The expectation is that players will be cooperative, fair, and friendly. This is a mature server, not mature in the “X-rated” sense but in the sense that players act like adults and deal with others in a grown up manner. We would rather have ten mature, respectful players than a thousand immature players; quality over quantity. We want the same type of people we would call friends in the real world to be our friends in our fantasy world. One additional rule applies; conduct that would be inappropriate in the work place is also inappropriate in Shroud World. Racial or sexual harassment, excessive swearing, etc, are prohibited and will lead to a permanent ban. This is my 5th year of operating a persistent world and I can count on one hand the number of people that I have banned, so I am not really expecting any problems but I do want to set the correct expectations. Q: How do I gain Experience? As this is a server driven by completing quests, the primary means to obtain experience is through doing quests. Experience is gained via the methods outlined below, however, this is not an all-inclusive list. • Quest Experience – The bulk of all experience gained will come from doing quests. You can realistically expect that upwards of 75% of all your experience will come directly from completing quests. • Exploration Experience – You gain a one-time experience bonus for exploring new areas or finding certain special areas. The bonus increases with the difficulty level of the area you are exploring. • Major NPC Bonus – You gain a one-time experience bonus for defeating certain creatures. Most areas will have a creature or two that give this one-time bonus. The value of the bonus increases based on the difficulty of defeating the creature. • Milestone Bonus – You will receive a large one-time bonus for reaching certain milestones. For example, you will receive a experience bonus when you complete your 100th quest (also at 200, 300, 400, and 500 quests). Other milestone bonuses will be added as we move further into development. • Combat Bonus – You receive a small experience amount for killing creatures that are challenging to you. Creatures that are trivial to you may grant no experience at all. In most cases, it is far more efficient to complete quests than it is to kill creatures. Q: What rules apply to character builds? The answer to this question may get a bit lengthy, not because we have any strict rules, but because of the very nature of the server. It is very unlikely that that “uber” character build you saw on some message board will be possible in Shroud world for a number of reasons. It is part of the challenge given to the player to find those class, skill, and feat combinations that work well in the world. Prestige Classes - Noted below are some of the important differences between prestige classes and the base classes. • Selecting a Prestige Class requires that you complete a number of eligibility quests. Like most quests, these eligibility quests require that you meet certain fame and faction requirements. Some prestige classes may have multiple paths for eligibility while others might have a single path. Due to the numerous obstacles that have to be overcome to obtain a prestige class, acquiring more than one might be very difficult. Prestige classes really are prestigious. • Every character has innate natural regeneration ability. The amount you regenerate is dependent on your level and differs based on class. Fighter classes gain one point of regeneration for every 4 levels, Mages classes gain one point of regeneration every 6 levels, and all other classes gain one point of regeneration every 5 levels. Prestige classes do not factor in this calculation; thus a 20th level fighter would have a regeneration of 5 while a 10th level fighter/ 10th level Dwarven Defender would have a regeneration of 3. • Class can impact what quests are available to you; eventually we plan to have between 50 and 100 special quests for each class. There are no immediate plans to write develop quest series for prestige classes mostly due to the amount of development time it would take for a fractional part of the player base. Since level advancement is directly tied to doing quests; the more base classes you have, the more selection you have in quests. • Guild membership is based only on base classes; there will be at least one guild available for each base class. Joining a guild gives the player access to a large number of new quests. If you have plans to join a specific guild, make sure you have at least one base class that qualifies for membership. • Many special items have powers that calculate certain properties based on your levels and classes. In all cases, only base classes apply to these items and PRCs are not considered. As an example, Mages have access to a starting item that casts a direct damage spell every few rounds. The damage this staff does is directly scaled with the number of wizard or sorcerer levels you have, any spellcasting prestige class levels would not increase the damage potential. General Notes – due to the design of the server, there are some important differences that can impact how a player wants to develop his character. Below is a list of important notes (not all-inclusive) that will help. • Because of the quest progression design, players will spend a lot of time interacting with NPCs. This makes those diplomatic skills very useful and not having at least some of them can and will reduce the number of quests you have an opportunity to take. • We consider level 15+ to be the “End Game”. Level progression after level 15 slows dramatically by design. New challenges and areas will be available only to level 15+ characters. You should be carefully about designing a character that is focused at becoming “optimum” at level 20. You will be levels 15-19 for a pretty significant amount of time. • We are going to add “specializations” to some classes such as a Necromancer, Elementalist, or Enchanter. These specializations will have talents that impact specific areas; such as Necromancers summoning more potent undead or Elementalists doing more damage with fireballs. These specialization opportunities can impact your plans for character development. • We will be adding some new feats that are not a standard part of the ruleset. Feats such as “Spell Critical Knowledge” offer the potential to drastically change how a class is played. Q: Is Shroud World a role-playing server? I find this to be a really hard question to answer. Ask 50 people to define role-playing and you will get 50 different answers. When I began playing D&D back in the 70s, the term “role-playing” could not even be found in the rulebook. We want to create an environment where role-playing is encouraged but not required. Role-playing just differs so differently from one player to another that we do not want to be placed in the position of the role-playing police. If someone were to ask me about the basic nature of the world, I would say it is role-play lite, heavy on story, heavy on adventuring and exploring, and heavy on character development. There are some general guidelines that should be followed. Using /Shout to ask questions is fine, especially for those new players. Try to refrain from having one-on-one conversation in shout; if a conversation can be taken to /tells then it probably should. If some players in a party are involved in role-playing, it would be great if the other party members can join in and be involved. However, we are not going to create rules that are punitive for people that don’t choose to role-play. For the most part, we believe that the issue of role-play is and should be driven by the player community. Segal SoulSaver

 

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