(Discussion) General Part VI

[Creamsteak]

The latest thread for general discussion of Living EN World related news, ideas, problems, proposals, games, and such.

If you have a question, this is the place to ask it.

[Sparky]

I have to agree with dpdx here. We're all more than creative enough to put interesting spins on a core rule world with characters and adventures to match. LEW doesn't have a strong guiding vision and it seems that in a very short time the waters have become exceedingly muddied. Or soon will be.

The longer these discussions go on the more I'm leaning away from my moderate stance of 'sure OGL content is fine' towards a 'core books only' stance. The reason being that folks are bogged down in discussions of what can/should/will/won't be included and are spending their time arguing in the forums rather than creating content.

We're suffering from 'feature creep' - you've seen it on wholly indecipherable VCRs and remotes, in muddled user interface and 'deep' gameplay of many games - and let me tell you all, it needs to be nipped in the bud - brutally - not maliciously - brutally, fully and CLEARLY.

Homebrew content is fine. But I am in favor Core book only adventures and characters from now on. Choice is attractive, but it is most certainly not the best thing for a project of this nature.

In my opinion, LEW needs to be easy for anyone to jump into at any time. To create a character or run an adventure (as 'easy' as that can be in any case). And to me that means Core Rules/SRD and homebrew content only.

My $0.02

[Creamsteak]

Minor point, I think that a lot of people don't realize just how little of the stuff that gets proposed has actually been accepted. Technically, we have 2 Prestige classes and a lot of deities. I'm not sure what else has really been approved.

Edit:

And the most debated points seem to be things that don't necessarily work from the core rules (Item Creation, Resurrection, Penalty for death of a character, and most recently ECL races). We don't see too much fighting about proposed content, because most of the stuff either gets overlooked by the judges or is in a state of constant "what can we do to improve it."

[Sparky]

Right. My point is that we're bogged down in discussions about what to include or not include rather than creating content for a clearly defined set of rules.

I think we should 'grandfather' in any non-Core characters, feats, etc. and back off of OGL content.

[Jack Haggerty]

Regarding ECL races...

I'd have to agree with dpdx (though, perhaps not quite so vehemently ). Think that our current racial guideline is fine:

Originally Posted by Your Guide to Enworld

Q: Can I play a (insert name of monster here)?

A: At this point we are only allowing the races listed in the PHB and the varients of these races that do not have a ECL. So, for example, Deep Dwarves are allowed, since they have no ECL, but Drow are not, since they have an ECL.

I don't see any reason why this guideline can't provide enough variety alongside any proposals (like the mountain goblins) we might come up with.

[Creamsteak]

I'm probably being really annoying when I say this, but Macbeth should probably have said LA instead of ECL. We are not allowing races with any sort of Level Adjustment or creatures with monster hit dice. ECL does refer to either, but "characters with an ECL" includes humans with fighter levels (They have an Equivelent Character Level to a X level character).

Now, I want to say that I think that we probably should make an adjustment to that specifically for humanoid LA +1 races and maybe stretch it to include 2 hit dice humanoids (Lizardfolk/Gnolls). I think that since we have introduced Drow as a character race they should be playable. A simple way to deal with this would be to say, "Creating a Drow character, you start with the Hit Dice, BAB, and Saves of the character class you choose to advance into first, but none of the abilities. You do not gain those abilities for the 1st level in the class until you gain a gain one level to equal the level adjustment of the class."



Personally I'm not too concerned with monster races. I'm more concerned with how we are to deal with certain core bits. I think I've explained it 30 times, but "crafting items by the books is extremely difficult because its hard to decide how we measure what a weeks worth of item crafting should equal in character for a single person." Do we measure that time in days, or do we just use a points system (which is what I'm for). Do we use real time to equate to game time, "If your character sits out for a week, you finish one week worth of item crafting." Or maybe a function of real time "for every day you spend crafting in real time, your character accomplishes x days of item crafting in character time."

The other core bit that has me is, "Do we let them 'roll up' a new character when they die?" At one level lower? Also, a side bit of this is "How difficult is it to have raise dead brought to a character?"

[Kahuna Burger]

I don't see why 'diving into' LEW should have to be any easier or harder than the person joining wants it to be. The existance of or acceptance of LA+ races doesn't obligate anyone to use them, any more than the existance of non core base classes does. The whole point of discussion and approval of such things is to make sure that they aren't intrinsicly 'better' options - just more. (Past comments about monty haul or munchkinism aside, balance isn't a factor in this world anyway, as more and less powerful PCs were made a feature the moment older characters leveled and new ones were declared to always start at 1st.)

I perfer to see a forum where people can use the play style they enjoy. The addition of vetted options shouldn't stop anyone from playing core rules. If one person is runing a 1st level asimar bucanaeer, and another is running a 1st level dwarf heavy fighter, why worry, as long as both new players are enjoying their characters? And except for a good faith effort for fairness sake, why worry about power level if they can be accompanied on their first mission by a third level rogue with ten times the equiptment?

I guess what I'm asking is, in terms of ease of use, if the answer to the FAQ queston of "can I play an LA+ race" was either "yes, but they still begin as the equivelent of a first level character to avoid imbalance, see this link" or "LA+ characters can only be made through the retirement of a higher level character" How would that be any harder on the people who want to play an elf or a gnome or whatever than the way it reads now? Enough of the world has been fleshed out that a new DM is going to have to check out the map anyway before declaring the location of a new plot, and if they want to balance the encounter they'll have to read every character sheet to see what the last DMs of a higher level character let them have in power enhancing loot; so is it harder to jump on in if you read that this PC has an inherent bonus to survival as opposed to this one having picked up boots and cloak of elvenkind? Why enshrine one preference when it isn't damaged by allowing another?

Kahuna Burger

[orsal]

Originally Posted by Kahuna Burger

I don't see why 'diving into' LEW should have to be any easier or harder than the person joining wants it to be. The existance of or acceptance of LA+ races doesn't obligate anyone to use them, any more than the existance of non core base classes does.

Well, I'd be much less interested in a game if I walked my first character into the tavern and found it full of critters I'd never heard of but, judging by the way everyone around is treating them, seem to be commonplace in the game world. It would mean I'd expect my character to be familiar with them, and I couldn't roleplay unless I familiarized myself with them too.

I guess I'm all for homebrew if I can reasonably expect it would be used sparingly, but less enthusiastic (not necessarily opposed) if I thought it would become the rule rather than the exception. Unfortunately I don't see a way to control the usage level once we make the decision to allow it.

[dpdx]

So at present, I still count two for, and four against, eloquent "discussion" notwithstanding. If we're only counting Judges (and I hope we're not), the ratio (2:1, against) holds: Jack and I against, CS for.

But since we're attempting to change people's minds, lemme just add:

This wasn't ever advertised as, or supposed to be Monte Haul, Play-Whatever-I-Want Munchkinland. If we're stifling anybody's creativity because they don't get to play an Incorporeal Tiefling Learner with the celestial half-dragon template straight out the box, the regular PbP forum link is at the top of the page. Go start one, and don't let us stand in your way to ultimate roleplay, nor the Back button hit you in your browser on the way out.

Once again, in case anybody failed to understand me clearly enough: nothing's preventing anyone from starting a game where anything goes, everything changes, and the DM has lots of books.

But this is not that Forum.

In a cooperative, persistent world such as this one, in order to make it work, we need guidelines, boundaries and limits that don't change at the latest whim, and in fact, before I even got here, and ever since, you've already set them -- SRD only sounded like a good one at the time, so you went with it. People built, adventured, and DMed under that guideline in good faith that it wouldn't change and now people want to break it.

That's not fair, and it never will be. Repeat after me: people who've been here from the beginning deserve the respect that comes from newbs not overpowering their original PCs on the very first day.

And btw, the reason not much is getting approved is because the things that are being submitted (or for that matter, being asked for) are not what the world needs. LEW doesn't need core classes, ECL+ races, or for that matter, even PrCs. It needs geographical details. It needs a map, and city descriptions. It needs adventures, and for those, it needs plot hooks and NPCs of all kinds.

Good night now.

[Uriel]

My head hurts...

[Sparky]

KB: It's weird for me to be arguing against player choice - I'm usually such an advocate. But I remember trying to start a character here and not having any clue where one would fit in the world, what playing was really like, where to post questions, what the world was about. Shoot, I didn't even know that I could change how far back the threads displayed went. For a long time - after I'd made a character and even contributed some pantheon proposals - I didn't know that.

Being newbie friendly is the key to a vibrant community. Being newbie friendly means that the community doesn't get more and more byzantine and convoluted as new players come and old ones go and - like the government - new folks have the old regime's work to 'deal with'. Keeping things simple is the key to that sort of vibrant continuity. That's not to say that this isn't a forum for creativity - on the contrary - I think homebrew material is brilliant and builds LEW into an interesting place (and I really dig the Wilders proposal - I'm an EQ fan too - I promise to comment soon). I'm all in favor of homebrew content and dealing with the issues unique to PbP gaming (crafting).

HOWEVER, I think the creation of new content needs to be guided and focused by the Judges. Right now we have a mish-mash world which is growing and changing, but eventually, say a year or so from now, there will be a whole new crew of people who want to add their own places, classes, cities. And eventually we'll all be laboring under too much of a good thing. I think we should engineer some meta-solution where entire cultures, countries, cities, races and such can disappear and, perhaps, reappear, or can be visited in different ways, so that we can keep the meaty heart of LEW's content lean and easy to grok.

Also, thinking about creating an adventure as a DM, I'm more than a little intimidated by the prospect of PbP anyway - add to that crazy systems or strange races and classes and pretty quickly, I don't want to run anything, there're just too much to juggle. Now, it's easy to just ignore things I don't want to deal with, but that's not embracing LEW, in my opinion. And when everything is in flux, I don't know what to include or not.

I love tying in to other people's work, the synergy of that sort of creation is very powerful and makes people feel their work is valued and important - and it spurs more creativity. I had great fun working with WizWrm on putting the backgrounds of our gods Shural, KaziKazi and Taurusk together. I was happy to present an opportunity to WW, and WW was gracious enough to embrace it. I think that the background we put together for our two gods is really something else (Where is that story posted WW?). And this gets back to Judge-driven focus.

I support judge-driven global events that evolve LEW and perhaps clear out content not being used (not at the moment - we're still just making things).

I support judge interaction in approving Adventures and seeding them with global plot hooks.

I support DMs interacting to make adventures that seem like they're happening in the same world, rather than loosely tied together one-shots. That would alleviate some of the everyone-jump-in-Uriel's fast-paced game syndrome (which I admit to succumbing to ).

I support player and DM and Judge created content with a focus on making LEW into a fun, vibrant and focused setting rather than grab bag of random unrelated places and events. Maybe that's just me. What a place like this (and any other persisent multiplayer world, massive or otherwise) lacks is the epic feeling of characters whose actions shake the world. With humans at the helm here, there's no reason we can't capture that if we cooperate rather than trying to shoehorn little pieces of our favorite random campaign bits or ideas together here.

To that end - I propose that each proposal needs to have ties into other proposals. It makes judging harder, because if Taurusk is denied, then that sort of breaks Shural and KaziKazi... though really, it doesn't have to. Legend is a beautiful thing.

Enough from me.

Okay, that's a lie, one more point. Boy, you've all really uncorked me. I apologize for rambling and congratulate and thank any who have read - not skimmed you skimmers! - this far.

I think LEWs biggest flaw is a lack of focus. I think that it is not an insurmountable flaw. I think this is an intensely creative community that could make anything at all work. I think that the more simple and streamlined the content is, the easier this will be for everyone, Players, DMs and Judges alike.

Phew.

[WizWrm]

Originally Posted by Sparky

I had great fun working with Gnomeworks on putting the backgrounds of our gods Shural, KaziKazi and Taurusk together. I was happy to present an opportunity to GW, and GW was gracious enough to embrace it. I think that the background we put together for our two gods is really something else (Where is that story posted GW?). And this gets back to Judge-driven focus.

You cut me, Sparky. You cut me deep.

[Creamsteak]

I think LEWs biggest flaw is a lack of focus. I think that it is not an insurmountable flaw. I think this is an intensely creative community that could make anything at all work. I think that the more simple and streamlined the content is, the easier this will be for everyone, Players, DMs and Judges alike.

There are already plans in the works for that, but we are waiting on a few things to come together. I had expected these things to be finished by now, but they havn't happened yet. They are outside issues, but once they fall together theres going to be more of an overarching series of events in the setting. Basically, were going to start curving adventurers towards a common goal, in a big way. I think that will help the focus quite a bit, but we need a couple of things to wrap themselves up.

[dpdx]

Originally Posted by Creamsteak

There are already plans in the works for that, but we are waiting on a few things to come together. I had expected these things to be finished by now, but they havn't happened yet. They are outside issues, but once they fall together theres going to be more of an overarching series of events in the setting. Basically, were going to start curving adventurers towards a common goal, in a big way. I think that will help the focus quite a bit, but we need a couple of things to wrap themselves up.

Oh, really?

When were you going to tell the JUDGES this is what you were going to do, Creamsteak?

You wanna run this thing all by yourself, with no help, just say so. But I think the bomb dropping without any discussion speaks volumes.

[Manzanita]

Let's keep this polite & respectful, dpdx. I Creamsteak has done a lot of work getting this up & running. We can't expect everything yesterday.

On another tack. Do I have any volunteers to write up a little summary of an adventure they've completed? Not like a story hour, but a summary of what the trouble was, how it was settled, and what was left undone. I'd do one myself, but neither of my PCs has completed an adventure yet...

[dpdx]

Believe me, Manzanita, that was polite and respectful (and brief), compared to what I was going to say.

Sure, CS has done a lot of work, but other people have, too, and they deserve to be communicated with. This is a community, and we need to start acting like it.

[Creamsteak]

Originally Posted by Manzanita

Let's keep this polite & respectful, dpdx. I Creamsteak has done a lot of work getting this up & running. We can't expect everything yesterday.

On another tack. Do I have any volunteers to write up a little summary of an adventure they've completed? Not like a story hour, but a summary of what the trouble was, how it was settled, and what was left undone. I'd do one myself, but neither of my PCs has completed an adventure yet...

I'll write up my own, and if you need someone to read through a completed adventure I'll do that too. My PCs have completed one full adventure, but they decided to follow it right into another. I'll do the write up on the Dwarven Golems and Old Ruins in a couple days. Then, I'll close the old thread and start a new one for "Hunt for Sullivan in Allimon" which will likely be short by comparison to the old thread.

[Creamsteak]

Originally Posted by dpdx

So at present, I still count two for, and four against, eloquent "discussion" notwithstanding. If we're only counting Judges (and I hope we're not), the ratio (2:1, against) holds: Jack and I against, CS for.

It hasn't been proposed, I just said that I'd support it if the other judges support it. Basically, if we have a method for allowing a few additional races into our game without bogging things down, I'd accept that method. Maybe you wouldn't support it, but I don't see a problem with a drow player character or a heroic gnoll cleric or any other sort of slightly strange character. Also, I disagree with you that LA races are automatically stronger than normal characters. I've found the opposite in experience, except when you get up into things like liches and vampires and any other sort of extremely monsterous race.

I'll make a prediction that even if ECL races were allowed in whole, they would not suddenly take over the forum and outnumber the humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings. I, personally, could enjoy playing the Gnoll for instance, but I still have a 3:1 ratio of "core" characters to monster/LA races. I wouldn't doubt that it is a fairly normal curve.

Once again, in case anybody failed to understand me clearly enough: nothing's preventing anyone from starting a game where anything goes, everything changes, and the DM has lots of books.

Since the converse is also true (if you want to run a strict core game, you can go create a new game), I don't think that this is really all that important.

In a cooperative, persistent world such as this one, in order to make it work, we need guidelines, boundaries and limits that don't change at the latest whim, and in fact, before I even got here, and ever since, you've already set them -- SRD only sounded like a good one at the time, so you went with it. People built, adventured, and DMed under that guideline in good faith that it wouldn't change and now people want to break it.

First part - We are still setting up static guidelines, boundaries, and limits. That's the point of the proposals at least, to define what is allowed and not allowed.

Second part - I set the game to SRD only in the very first thread under the motive that I did not want to further complicate the game. Even then, I said that I would be willing to have some non-core material (like, lets say, psionics). I even went so far as to say I'd be interested in a world-wide storyarch developed around the introduction of psionics to the setting.

Go back and read the first thread on LEW if you like. You'll find that I said a lot of guidelines were temporary, and that they would likely change to allow other options. I originally made these limits because I wanted to reinforce a structure of guidelines for how a player joins the game and creates a character. Once we had established this base, I said that we would "consider" adding additional material on a case by case basis. That is something we still do.

When were you going to tell the JUDGES this is what you were going to do, Creamsteak?

Two things about this, 1) This stuff isn't entirely about judges. We've just been brainstorming. The goal would be to give each willing DM, when the time comes, certain pieces of information related to what is going on. And, I'd also like to keep it as surprising as possible. 2) It just hasn't been a subject of judgely discussion for a long time. We've been quiet as of late doing the same thing that we brought new judges in for: to organize LEW. Thats why we needed more people around, so we can finish issues like item crafting, organizing the information and catalogueing it, and things like finishing the pantheon and its lack of neutral and evil deities.

[Creamsteak]

Just so everyone knows beforehand, when we have worked out the first "great epic of Living EN World" the goal will be to have this Big Picture of which every character involved is important. I want the world to be decided by the choices and successes of the players. That much is obvious. On a headcount level, I'd like to see at least half of the adventures that run at that time have something to do with the big picture, however, I also think that other characters having completely unrelated goals is just as important. It's all about making the setting suddenly "come to life" in the way I always envisioned it.

[Creamsteak]

Also, something that I havn't discussed before but I've thought on quite a bit:

If our world is a continent, then we could have islands as well. This would actually fit pretty well with the questions about a method for altering the setting. If there are other, much smaller, worlds like our setting floating about in space, it makes it possible for these masses to interact with the continent. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles away, but you could theoretically teleport to them. Other times, they even touch down on the continents surface.

I think this is an interesting mechanic, not completely unlike planes of existence, and I like it. Maybe this is a worthy bit to think about?