Last night I was rummaging around in my collection of dusty RPG books for my tabletop game when I came across my old Call of Cthulhu books. It got me thinking about the "Sanity" ruleset present in the game, and recently appearing in the game "Darkest Dungeon" on PC. The premise is that when you are exposed to unnatural things your grip on reality begins to erode until you are eventually driven insane. If you do not get treatment that is. Darkest Dungeon has a similar function where you remove these fatigue effects by doing such things as praying, visiting tavern, or frequenting a brothel.
So how is this relevant to Pantheon? What if after a long day of grinding, or a perilous raid you became "Fatigued". This effect could be removed by going into town and spending a short amount of time in one of the social buildings in the town. Say a tavern, temple, or something of that nature. You could even place randomly spawning rare quest givers or rare merchants in these places. The reasoning behind the idea is to create "Social Hubs" for players. You could place small "hubs" in hamlets near dungeons...the Idea being people would organically go there to log off / log on and look for groups.
Just an idea on how to meld Sandbox with Themepark...a reoccurring discussion around here.
-Baulkin
The only "fatigued" system I remember was in World of Warcraft. As you were logged off the game you would accumulate a bonus xp period. The next time you logged on and started gaining xp it would be at 150% (or something around there) for a time then it would eventually return to normal. So the "fatigue" would be gaining the normal amount of xp from mobs/quests.
I really like your idea Baulkin. But what could the potential penalty or effect be from fatigue? The xp modifier in world of warcraft was to give people that couldn't play as much a way to stay closer in level to the people that could play a lot. I dont think an xp modifier would be the way to go for pantheon though. One effect could be that consumables only do 80% of their potential or something similar that doesnt necessarily penalize the player for playing but gives a reason to go have a beer at the local watering hole to wind down.
Baulkin said:Last night I was rummaging around in my collection of dusty RPG books for my tabletop game when I came across my old Call of Cthulhu books. It got me thinking about the "Sanity" ruleset present in the game, and recently appearing in the game "Darkest Dungeon" on PC. The premise is that when you are exposed to unnatural things your grip on reality begins to erode until you are eventually driven insane. If you do not get treatment that is. Darkest Dungeon has a similar function where you remove these fatigue effects by doing such things as praying, visiting tavern, or frequenting a brothel.
So how is this relevant to Pantheon? What if after a long day of grinding, or a perilous raid you became "Fatigued". This effect could be removed by going into town and spending a short amount of time in one of the social buildings in the town. Say a tavern, temple, or something of that nature. You could even place randomly spawning rare quest givers or rare merchants in these places. The reasoning behind the idea is to create "Social Hubs" for players. You could place small "hubs" in hamlets near dungeons...the Idea being people would organically go there to log off / log on and look for groups.
Just an idea on how to meld Sandbox with Themepark...a reoccurring discussion around here.
-Baulkin
Sounds a lot like the wounds system in SWG. You would incur wounds the more you were in combat, and especially if you were knocked unconscious. The wounds would black out your health and mental powers (mana-eske) bars until you were operating at a fraction of your full potential. This made you easier to kill (lower health) as well as lowering your ability to use skills (lower mana). In order to cure the wounds you had to either go back to town and find a master dancer/singer/musician in a tavern and watch them perform until your wounds were gone (fastest approach), or you needed to be able to create a campfire and people in your group could perform (if they had the skill) and it would slowly cure your wounds (slowest approach). This was the most social aspect of SWG and was responsible for a ton a great memories for me and my crew.
It’s an interesting thought to think of adding something like this to Pantheon. Since this game is being built around the social aspect of gaming, this type of system would fit into that concept well. I would definitely welcome something of this vein to Pantheon.
Don't get me wrong I kinda like the idea of the system. I however believe people would AFK in these locations most of the time and then it would become really a laggy area kinda like the court house in Archeage. If the system required you to order a drink, food, or ask a pretty lady for a dance you could remain in the tavern but if you didn't do anything of the sort then tavern owner would kick you out.
Anasyn said:Don't get me wrong I kinda like the idea of the system. I however believe people would AFK in these locations most of the time and then it would become really a laggy area kinda like the court house in Archeage. If the system required you to order a drink, food, or ask a pretty lady for a dance you could remain in the tavern but if you didn't do anything of the sort then tavern owner would kick you out.
Dwarf Bouncer to enforce the no loitering policy? *chuckle*
Baulkin said:Anasyn said:Don't get me wrong I kinda like the idea of the system. I however believe people would AFK in these locations most of the time and then it would become really a laggy area kinda like the court house in Archeage. If the system required you to order a drink, food, or ask a pretty lady for a dance you could remain in the tavern but if you didn't do anything of the sort then tavern owner would kick you out.
Dwarf Bouncer to enforce the no loitering policy? *chuckle*
I like it!
Scrago said:The xp modifier in world of warcraft was to give people that couldn't play as much a way to stay closer in level to the people that could play a lot. I dont think an xp modifier would be the way to go for pantheon though. One effect could be that consumables only do 80% of their potential or something similar that doesnt necessarily penalize the player for playing but gives a reason to go have a beer at the local watering hole to wind down.
Yeah, things like xp modifiers don't seem a good fit for Pantheon. Consumables being less effective is good. Perhaps at more severe levels of fatigue it would affect things like spell success or causing you to be less effective in battle.
I think it would be fun if stubbornly pushing yourself to the absolute limit leaves you collapsed in a heap muttering non sequiturs until you can pull yourself together enough to go buy a drink or three. :)
I'm intrigued by the idea of a fatigue system, but something I don't want to see is a game creating mechanics to discouraging me from playing!
Sometimes I would spend 24 hours in a weekend playing Everquest. I doubt I would have played that much if I was required to do certain activities (To remove my fatigue debuff) in order to keep playing.
I think something along the lines of food/water works just fine for the fatigue mechanic while promoting the interdependence of tradeskills. If weight matters to the player (and hopefully it will), then low level food/water is heavy and not all that filling/thirst quenching, so you need to get better with the cooking/brewing/etc to have better food and drinks that benefit you longer with less encumbrance. Also, don't just increase the consumption rate while in combat, but use things like carried weight, running vs walking, and environmental factors for modifying the hunger/thirst thing as well.
And if hungry or thirsty is not dealt with, the penalty gets more severe as time goes by. Maybe right when you get the hungy/thirsty notice, offense/defense drop by 5%, and then an hour later, by another 10% etc etc until you simply collapse. Not dead, but unable to move on your own, and needing to be dragged/ported by someone else. And even for conjuration classes, I'd limit the ability to one or two classes max, and then have diminishing returns on conjured food, like how the hobbits in Return of the King get sick of eating the elven bread, even if it is magic and all. They just get weary of it, thus it loses effectiveness.
There's so much potential behind hunger/thirst mechanics that is just untapped in MMO and single player games. It's one of the best parts of Minecraft survival...you better solve your food/drink problem quick, or life is hard and death is easy. Minutia like that should matter.
I remember when SWG first announced the introduction of Battle Fatigue. I was adamantly opposed to the idea, since I felt such a system would punish those who wanted to engage in long sessions of combat.
However, after launch and experiencing the battle fatigue system first hand. I began to change my mind on the matter, The social benefits (for example: Meeting new players, or potential guild-mates “casually” while taking time to sip some rum), in such a system far out weights the minor down time healing mental wounds/stress. Some of my favorite times in MMO’s have been the down times, just chilling between battles, which incidentally became more often due to having meet so many other players while getting a twi'lek lap dance.
So yes, a “Battle Fatigue” system would be a positive thing in my mind.
Baulkin said:Last night I was rummaging around in my collection of dusty RPG books for my tabletop game when I came across my old Call of Cthulhu books. It got me thinking about the "Sanity" ruleset present in the game, and recently appearing in the game "Darkest Dungeon" on PC. The premise is that when you are exposed to unnatural things your grip on reality begins to erode until you are eventually driven insane. If you do not get treatment that is. Darkest Dungeon has a similar function where you remove these fatigue effects by doing such things as praying, visiting tavern, or frequenting a brothel.
So how is this relevant to Pantheon? What if after a long day of grinding, or a perilous raid you became "Fatigued". This effect could be removed by going into town and spending a short amount of time in one of the social buildings in the town. Say a tavern, temple, or something of that nature. You could even place randomly spawning rare quest givers or rare merchants in these places. The reasoning behind the idea is to create "Social Hubs" for players. You could place small "hubs" in hamlets near dungeons...the Idea being people would organically go there to log off / log on and look for groups.
Just an idea on how to meld Sandbox with Themepark...a reoccurring discussion around here.
-Baulkin
My favorite sanity system is probably the one in a game called project zomboid. If you were fighting too long, or sick/underslept/hungry/thirsty, or you got surprised by zombies around corners too much, or your temperature was all wrong, or you got bored..you got stressed. This strongly affected your character's general...effectiveness, based on how stressed you were. Time spent without the problem fixxed the stress. What I liked about this system was that many different causes had their own set of problems, stress was just a universal side effect, wherever it made logical sense.
My issue with any system like this though is taking it from paper into an mmo game:
How harshly can we punish the poopsockers before they move on.? How could you find a perfect balance between what stresses a mage and what stresses a rogue (different playstyles; one would inevitably expose himself to more "across the board" stress)? With a death penalty in place, complete with stressful corpseruns, do we really want to punish players even further for taking a while in their dungeons? Should players who want to play one way be forced to vary their gameplay to efficiently keep their characters happily moving forward? Are we going to have people hiding how stressed they are from their guild masters so that they can go on the raid theyve been waiting for?