My/our contribute ion to Layonara future

[crazedgoblin]

my few ideas for the drow and Tieflings, i play a tiefling cleric and i love playing him, he is of a not so nice alignment and i think its how they should be played, tieflings should be looked on with distaste and even if they gain trust allways watched, i would like to see it that these two "evil races" be limmited to the not so nice alignments CN etc aswell with the monster ones, my Tiefling has allways been met with fear and aprehension as it should be. when they know what i am *evil cackle*

[Filatus]

On the mages,

Af far as specialist mages are concerned. You have to acknowledge the fact that some schools are terrible in a combat orientated environment. The schools of Necromancy and Enchantment are incredible powerful in NWN compared to the other schools. Illusion isn't as good as it used to be. So if you want a powerful mage, you make a necromancer who also focusses in Enchantment and wields the Staff of Elements.

Now Daeron for example started as a generalist wizard, I did this because I wanted him to find his school of magic ingame. Now, it's a pity you can't switch from generalist wizard to specialist. You can be considered one through a CDQ, Tathnolu is as far as I know the only example of that.

I choose for Daeron to become a 'generalist abjurer', meaning he's stuck to being generalist but has taken spell focus and greater spell focus in Abjuration. Now, these two feats give him a +4 DC on two spells, Dismissal and Banishment. So yes, not the most potent build in terms of combat.

But in a GM-controlled environment, the specialisation, or in Daeron's case focus, can actually provide advantages. This really is up to the GM in most cases.

My point being, yes there is a point, you can go for a combat orientated mage. But given the right circumstances, a mage specializing in a certain school has some great bonusses in the right situation.

To force people into a certain school would leave us overflown with necromancers, enchanters and illusionists likely. Choose one of the less popular schools to specialize in and you might be surprised how much potential this can have.


EDIT: On the identical spellbooks; look at the list of available spells compared to true PnP. What makes wizards better in a combat environment is there big choice in spells. Now, if you leave out the useless spells, this advantage over sorcerors is almost non-existant.

[Harlas Ravelkione]

My proposed changes were meant to bring less power builds. Some players start out with a character they have in mind, but then they discover that they want to be able to slay things themselves and forget everything about their initial character and his feats in abjuration and divination - and instead they focus on necromancy and enchantment instead, since that allows you to kill things. By barring schools a mage/sorceror will work with what he has from the beginning and not be able to change along the way to empower his character.

Of course, there will be those who choose only the strongest schools from the beginning, but they will at least have created a background and a personality based on these teachings. They will be more powerful in game when soloing, but on GM run quests you also need the spells these characters do not possess - such as scrying via divination, illusions that allow a mage to trick or confuse an enemy when the player works with the GM, hold a portal via abjuration to allow the party to escape, etc.

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

I am all for limiting the number of spellcasters. Heavily. Admittedly, I might be a bit biased, since I have more experience writing than most, but... There should definately be more stringent requirements for ALL spellcasting classes, most especially Wizards.

Why Wizards? Well... Thier magic is learned. They have no innate power, just a heck of a lot of studying. And getting that study in a low-magic world would be HARD. My character spent most of a year studying out of a book written specifically to teach the basics of Wizardry (doing absolutely nothing else in the day, I should add) to even get the hang of his first Cantrip, Light. And this was in the Great Library, possibly the best study environment in Layonara. It took this brilliant little elf the rest of seventeen years to get a general handle on the other spells he came with at first level, and most of that was groundwork; the actual spells are all more or less variations on a theme. (As a side note, I do not support limiting the number of schools a character can participate in; while specialist Wizards are GREAT fun, what about those nutty ones who want to learn every spell ever written? ... Like mine.)

I'd also support changing the requirements for subrace characters to the same as the CN alignment: 10 levels and 6 months at the minimum. Take out Orcs, maybe limit Half-Orcs a bit... From what I understand, the orcs of Layonara aren't nearly as civilised as the ones from Faerun.

Languages should probably need a good bit more support than is currently required.

[Frelinder]

Harlas Ravelkione - 8/31/2006 7:58 AM

"On the spell casting suggestion I also agree that diversity would be a great thing. Additionally we play in a low magic world and therefore spellcasters should be rarer than they are now"

Well since we are playing in a low magic world we are sort of asking of getting a great number of spellsingers and priests. Sure we could make it harder to get those classes aproved. But I don't think that will have any greater impact on the number / % that will play this classes.

[Harlas Ravelkione]

If you look at the number of priests we have now compared to earlier you will see a clear difference in numbers. This trend is most likely caused by the requirements that need to be met by character applications for said class. I believe that similar requirements to wizards/sorcerors would be beneficial.

And even if what you predict will happen and we see no decline in the number of players in these classes, there will be HUGE difference compared to today where we see mages with all the same spells and spell-feats.

[Frelinder]

True. and perhaps you are right about that Harlas. But i don't think there are to many wizards out there. As Ar7 has stated for a long time there are problems in this classes and the players are more or less "forced" to build their character with a certain spell book and certains feats. I am for that it should be more dificoult to get a spellcaster class aproved, but not because i think there should be less spellcasters out there. In my opinion the spellcasters out there is needed since this is an low magic world.

Example: Kobal is one of the most powerfull fighters out there that are not a spellcaster. I would like to see how far he could get and what he would be able to kill on East without any help from a cleric or an wizard/sorcerer.  The spellcatsters are needed when adventuring and it would be less fun without them. ( Just taking your character as an example here Harlas but it would be exactly the same for every fighter including my Boon)

I say more Buff monkeys for us fighters.. Everey fighter should have one personal Cleric and one wizard.. :-D

[Eight-Bit]

I am just going to repeat my beliefs here, but firstly...

Varka, this is a good post dude. You bring up a lot of issues that are pretty important here. But, in my view of Layonara, it's not the rules that make the server, or how many characters of a certain type there are that give it a soul. It's a community of players, playing together, and playing who they wish to play that makes it true.

The Planes are infinite, there's bound to be loney Celestials and Demons and Devils always like another lowly servent. The Underdark covers most of Layonara, as far as I know, and for the possible number of Drow out there, there's bound to be several good ones. Even if it's rare, the amount we have now is really nothing compared to most servers.

While they are power builds, powergamers are easy to spot, easy to ignore, and are often passed over for more interesting, more developed, and deeper characters.

[SquareKnot]

I won't comment on whether this is "right" or "wrong", but now, around 10% of all actively played characters in Layonara are principally wizards (meaning have more levels in wizard than any other class, tie going to the first class the character picked). Around 6 and a half percent are sorcerers. 15% are clerics and just under 5% druids. So that puts just over a third of the characters in one of the classic "caster" classes.

Oh, and because someone asked, about 6.5% of characters are half-elves. And around 14% are elves.

[Filatus]

SquareKnot - 9/1/2006  11:38 PM

I won't comment on whether this is "right" or "wrong", but now, around 10% of all actively played characters in Layonara are principally wizards (meaning have more levels in wizard than any other class, tie going to the first class the character picked). Around 6 and a half percent are sorcerers. 15% are clerics and just under 5% druids. So that puts just over a third of the characters in one of the classic "caster" classes.

Oh, and because someone asked, about 6.5% of characters are half-elves. And around 14% are elves.

May I ask how you came up with these figures?

[SquareKnot]

May I ask how you came up with these figures?

Certainly. I have a background perl script running on my machine that pulls in the Server Status page once every 5 minutes. It then parses the page and stores the information into a database. The current data set started on June 18th. So any character that has been played for more than 5 minutes since then has been logged. If I look up Filatus, I see that you play two characters. There's Daeron, who is a level 21 Lucindite wizard. I know roughly how many minutes he's been played since June 18th, but I won't post that kind of thing (information specific to a character or player) without permission. And then there's Janus, the 5th level druid, who was on for a few  minutes as well.

I can mine the data for classes, races, average character level (8.6), which deity has the most followers (Lucinda has a slight edge over Toran and Aeridin), which character logs the most time, and so forth. For example, 4 of the 10 most played characters are half-elves, which could make them seem more common than they are. A Drow doesn't show up until number 17 on the most played list.

[Olme]

Aragen in the computer age.

[darkstorme]

I'm going to dispute the "low magic world means fewer wizards/sorcerers" argument that's come up.  With the ready prescence of a continent full of demonic/diabolic beings summoned through gates between the planes, forests populated by undead, and golems maintaining eternal vigils, I'd argue that Layo is a normal-magic world, but wherein ITEMS do not well hold a magic charge.  Magic is fine while fresh, but the ring you enchanted might only work for a hundred years, or never accept a truly epic enchantment - in fact, only a masterpiece of craftsmanship might accept a powerful spell that would last centuries.  This would explain the dearth of truly powerful magic items, while allowing wizards/sorcerers to wield the power they draw from the Weave without an inherent contradiction.

[Filatus]

SquareKnot - 9/2/2006  6:19 AM

May I ask how you came up with these figures?

Certainly. I have a background perl script running on my machine that pulls in the Server Status page once every 5 minutes. It then parses the page and stores the information into a database. The current data set started on June 18th. So any character that has been played for more than 5 minutes since then has been logged. If I look up Filatus, I see that you play two characters. There's Daeron, who is a level 21 Lucindite wizard. I know roughly how many minutes he's been played since June 18th, but I won't post that kind of thing (information specific to a character or player) without permission. And then there's Janus, the 5th level druid, who was on for a few  minutes as well.

I can mine the data for classes, races, average character level (8.6), which deity has the most followers (Lucinda has a slight edge over Toran and Aeridin), which character logs the most time, and so forth. For example, 4 of the 10 most played characters are half-elves, which could make them seem more common than they are. A Drow doesn't show up until number 17 on the most played list.

Heheh, you almost lost me at the word perl, but this seems handy and very interesting.

I would be more interested in a most played race list and then limit it to West server where Hlint is. Like.. total playing time divided by playing time by race, for west server. Not sure if that's possible of course.

[Chongo]

SquareKnot - 9/1/2006  10:19 PM

May I ask how you came up with these figures?

Certainly. I have a background perl script running on my machine that pulls in the Server Status page once every 5 minutes. It then parses the page and stores the information into a database. The current data set started on June 18th. So any character that has been played for more than 5 minutes since then has been logged. If I look up Filatus, I see that you play two characters. There's Daeron, who is a level 21 Lucindite wizard. I know roughly how many minutes he's been played since June 18th, but I won't post that kind of thing (information specific to a character or player) without permission. And then there's Janus, the 5th level druid, who was on for a few  minutes as well.

I can mine the data for classes, races, average character level (8.6), which deity has the most followers (Lucinda has a slight edge over Toran and Aeridin), which character logs the most time, and so forth. For example, 4 of the 10 most played characters are half-elves, which could make them seem more common than they are. A Drow doesn't show up until number 17 on the most played list.

Did you write this yourself?  And is it easily distributed?  I'm curious if anyone on the staff has something like this to help them view the realtime statistics.

[LoganGrimnar]

its been said a million times before, just becouse there are only so few dwarves or elves or whatever, dosent mean there are that few in the world, the players make up like .5% of the population.. er wait.. we have what, 8 million people livving on Layonara.. and lets say... 240 PC heros. That means the heros make up .00003% of the population. Crazy isent it?


edit: Just an example really.. i dont know exactly how many people are left after the war, i think L announced it, but i dont recall.. was it 3 mil? *shrugs* anyways you get the point.