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• Current system
  • Overview
  • Problems
• Goals
  • Guilds
  • Player
  • Problems
• Design
  • Code
  • Ideas
    • Example
• Troubles
  • Clashes
  • Dependancies
• Tasks

Current system

Guilds currently have a set of commands which they own and bestow upon their members.

Overview

• A player joins a guild and is automatically assigned a set of commands, they magically learn these just by pledging themselves to a guild.

Problems

1. Difficulty to code new guilds.
2. The code behind the different types of commands eveolved over time and is now different for each type of command.
3. Damage-based guild commands dont give exp.
4. Lack of integration with the rest of the game, resulting in the long command code.
5. People learn all commands upon joinnig a guild rather than getting them taught to them as they learn the necessary skills.

Goals

Guilds

1. Guilds and commands get separated
   • A guild command being seperate to the guild and thus available to all players whom can gather the required amount of skills and find somebody to teach them.
2. Guilds become a place where there are NPCs who are willing to teach commands to members, if the members have a sufficient bonus in the necessary skills
3. Gpose AA'ing a players guild points done away - replace chance to AA points via any regular command.

Player

1. Players themselves given ability to teach commands to other players.
   • Control of scope of guild commands can be done through the "teach" command. I'd anticipated that it would become possible to "teach to ". To be able to learn a command there are bonus requirements in the skills used by the command. To be able to teach a command there are (much higher) bonus requirements in the same skills. Some commands can also be completely unteachable - which effectively restricts them to players who can access the NPCs who can teach these commands.

Problems

1. Many dependant features.
2. Guilds become irrelevant if player X can learn all of guild Y's commands.
   • Players must gain all requisite skills to be elligable to teach another player, this isn't to say that all commands will be learnable by any player. NPC's may teach to only a single guild, commands may be "teach blocked" so that players cannot teach others.
3. Gp: display - This will show the GP for joined guild? a variety of sub guild's points may be learned, and maybe should be taken into account on the overall GP.
4. Class specific skills
   • Other classes could learn related class skills with greater affinity than those outside the guild. Perhaps certain classes would aa (auto-advance) certain skills at a faster rate. For instance: Thief and Assassin are both members of the "Rogue" guild. Thieves would aa easier stealing than stabbing, whereas it's the opposite with Assassins.
     • I think as a member of a guild you have greater access to teaching in a skill but your ability to learn through usage probably wouldn't vary greatly.

Design

Code

1. Instead of guilds just being guilds, it should relate back to all forms of daily activity. CraftingSystem details some of my ideas for integrating all concepts of mud life to the general guild idea. What I mean is, as stated, a player starts off with the rudimentary commands. Then all through out the mud, there are npcs willing to teach new ones in exchange for money, quests, etc. As long as the player has the prerequired skills. I like this concept now because a player can make a truly unique character and take on a new role in the mud, eg become a black smith, wood worker, alchemist. The commands learnt don't all have to relate back to the concept of killing other things or combat. So somone who desires can log in, find a forester, do a quest to gain his trust, become an apprentice and learn the art of chopping wood. I would imagine it would take quite a while to learn a skill, and to make it usable. As I mentioned in PyrosGuildSuggestion a concept of efficiency can be utilized, where when a skill is learnt it starts at 0% and only increases with use, then decays without use.
2. The issue of balance is key, that is why I came up with the spectrum concept. That when a player starts, they initially choose 1 of 5 paths, magic, faith, combat, crafting, stealth. Each path as sub guilds in relation to it, or has commands which ultilize the skills under that tree. So when a player goes to learn a skill, if it is too distant from their original path it requires say 15% more skill to learn it, because they would have less practice and knowledge in that tree. For example, player x is focussed on combat, but finds an npc who wishes to teach him minorheal. Since it is a rudementary command, doesn't require much skill, maybe 25 faith.healing. But since his focuss is on combat, it would cost him 100 faith.healing to learn, as it is on the other side of the specturm in his case. So a player who is skilled enough to learn lightning, a higher end command, would require an immense amount to learn another higher end command of major heal. Then this all ties back to efficiency, as commands from the original path would be easier to use than commands from another path. So overall a player would not be restricted in what they can learn, but it becomes very hard when they don't focuss more on one way of life.
3. The vanishing of guild commands and replacement with commands which you learn and these commands may come to you via your guild or other routes. All combat related commands would work into the combat system regardless.

Ideas

1. Commands being learnt over time, via studying from books and (possibly many) lessons from the teachers of that command.
2. Restrictions upon amount/availability/frequency of learning commands.
   • I'm not particularly interested in placing restrictions on the number of commands you can know.
3. Advancing through different npcs could require donations, and guild quests.
4. No indication of available commands.
   • You dont get a command until you have the skills to support it, which in turn implies that you don't know all the commands when you join a guild and thus have to experiment and focus your training to get them.

Example

Bob the thief wants to learn some magic type skills, he would only have a selection of first tier magic commands, or those skills that someone adept in magic would get when they first started out. So if a storm starts out with flash, icestorm, and whatever, Bob could (once he reached an appropriate level, learn one of these commands. Bob will never be able to learn the higher tier magic skills like lightning shield or summoncloud.

Troubles

Clashes

1. Why cross guilds from what the members are supposed to be 'masters' of into learning another guild's trade?
   • I believe that there is a large demand amongst players to be able to build a unique character
   • Just because you are a thief who majors in sneaking and stealing, does this mean you should never be able to learn to disarm or fix a weapon or mix a potion? People already presume that weapon fixing and potion mixing are not guild bound and don't have a problem about them being so, so why the problem when I imply that non-thieves might want to learn to steal?
   • If you as a real life person concentrate on a particular set of skills you get good at it, but that does not stop you spending some time on other skills and obtaining a basic ability in those as well.
   • Possible ideas for balancing this, and stopping everyone coming out identical with every command in the game:
     1. PyrosGuildSuggestion - This is rather large but points of it are pertinent - we could make commands from the oposite side of the wheel harder to learn.
        • Or even impossible to learn. Subguilds would move in between major guilds (example thief being in between fighter and rouge. Making it impossible to learn extreme fighter commands aswell as extreme rouge commands. But in turn have their own extreme command that neither a fighter/rouge only player can reach). Planning/scetching needed.
          
          
     2. Increasing the base level skills requirement for subsequent commands, thus making each subsequent command harder to learn.
     3. A combination of both the above.
        
        
   • You should also take this topic into consideration, CharacterAdvancement, even if it was possible to cross-guild, you could not become powerful in each one, cause they use so diverse skills that you would not be able to train them all to a high level. This depends on the type of guild, an assassin and a thief guild would be quite close to eachother skillwise, while a warrior would not be close at all to a magician.
2. Balance.
   • The question of whether or not we let people learn types of magic commands if they are not of the mages guild or not is a different question. There is nothing to say that we shouldn't - beyond perhaps balance. We could add further balance by restricting the extent of spells that a non-mage can learn (by making those spells only available by mage guild NPCs).
3. Reality
   • I think that if we have clerics with a pray command then that should not be teachable - gods only grant the wishes of their true and dedicated followers.
     • I think that if we design the guild wheel in such a manner that pray will be moved slightly up in the priest guild only players that invest time and effort in that guild will learn the pray command.. And in that way make the gods happy. In an extreme scenario we can improve the pray command and move it up to a "master" position in the wheel and so only really dedicated followers is given the command. I don't see this is as a problem if the wheel is well designed and that there is major restrictions on how far a player can "walk" along the weel (A player should never learn all commands for an example). Making this "walk" movement propotional like the skill system it will be possible in theory to learn all commands and join all guilds. But it would require a level of like ten billion (which is pretty much impossible anyway).

Dependancies

1. Combat system
   • Many combat related commands, and certainly future ones, could use a more dynamic base combat system.

Tasks

• Regurarly check the thread and remove double statements and do general cleanups.
• Convert guild commands to new 'learnt' commands.

• • 
• Scetch out some kind of guild wheel with possible support for future guilds, their commands. If there is one, illustrate and post here. In the wheel, list commands which belongs to each guild. Certain level of commands (example: 1 guild level makes you reach commands one step away, lvl 2 two steps away etc. Each guild have their own "master" commands and extreme commands. Those commands can only be reached if the player invests in this guild only. A hardcore thief gets fewer range of commands, but much stronger theif related commands.)