How will crafting be implemented?

When you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true! That's how!

Isochronous is building a simplified system based on the SOZ style.

Recipe's are inventory items. You get the recipe, plus the two material components, plus requisite skill and you make it. We are controlling crafting by making it time dependent (you can only craft X items per days).

As it should be. More days for larger/more complex items I hope? I still say Full Plate should take a month or better.

Hey, got a couple questions. Some are centered around classes, and others on game play. If these topics haven't been discussed yet by the staff, I totally understand. This is a combination of questions from about three people:

1) Are Warlocks (or something similar) going to be incorporated?

2) I love the idea for the death system. Only problem I can forsee are low level characters dieing entirely TOO eaisly (espically the non melee oriented characters). Will different classes start at different levels to help ease this over? I fully support the idea of permadeath. It should be easy to die, but also easy to live/progress, so long as you're smart.

3) For the most part, in the official campaign, if you take multiple level 8 characters and compare them to one another, they are all roughly on the same level when it comes to combat. Granted, each might take it's own unique way to defeat an enemy, but they all can do it about equally. In low magic servers, Rogues, Bards and to a degree Wizards all suffer greatly without magical equipment to help them (Rogues and Bards in particular.) On the contrary, any type of buff fighter is nearly unstoppable. I saw in an earlier posts that clerics (priests) could only wear light armor, and were only spontaneous casters. Is this an attempt to level things out?

4) Please include Warlocks 0=). They'd be so much fun to play in this setting.

CROWD: A witch! A witch!
[bonk]
A witch! A witch!
MONKS: [chanting] Pie Iesu domine...
CROWD: A witch! A witch! A witch! A witch! We've found a witch! A witch!
A witch! A witch! A witch! We've got a witch! A witch! A witch! Burn
her! Burn her! Burn her! We've found a witch! We've found a witch! A
witch! A witch! A witch!
VILLAGER #1: We have found a witch. May we burn her?
CROWD: Burn her! Burn! Burn her! Burn her!
BEDEVERE: How do you know she is a witch?
VILLAGER #2: She looks like one.
CROWD: Right! Yeah! Yeah!
BEDEVERE: Bring her forward.
WITCH: I'm not a witch. I'm not a witch.
BEDEVERE: Uh, but you are dressed as one.
WITCH: They dressed me up like this.
CROWD: Augh, we didn't! We didn't...
WITCH: And this isn't my nose. It's a false one.
BEDEVERE: Well?
VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.
BEDEVERE: The nose?
VILLAGER #1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
VILLAGER #2: Yeah!
CROWD: We burn her! Right! Yeaaah! Yeaah!
BEDEVERE: Did you dress her up like this?
VILLAGER #1: No!
VILLAGER #2 and 3: No. No.
VILLAGER #2: No.
VILLAGER #1: No.
VILLAGERS #2 and #3: No.
VILLAGER #1: Yes.
VILLAGER #2: Yes.
VILLAGER #1: Yes. Yeah, a bit.
VILLAGER #3: A bit.
VILLAGERS #1 and #2: A bit.
VILLAGER #3: A bit.
VILLAGER #1: She has got a wart.
RANDOM: [cough]
BEDEVERE: What makes you think she is a witch?
VILLAGER #3: Well, she turned me into a newt.
BEDEVERE: A newt?
VILLAGER #3: I got better.
VILLAGER #2: Burn her anyway!
VILLAGER #1: Burn!
CROWD: Burn her! Burn! Burn her!...
BEDEVERE: Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! There are ways of telling whether
she is a witch.
VILLAGER #1: Are there?
VILLAGER #2: Ah?
VILLAGER #1: What are they?
CROWD: Tell us! Tell us!...
BEDEVERE: Tell me, what do you do with witches?
VILLAGER #2: Burn!
VILLAGER #1: Burn!
CROWD: Burn! Burn them up! Burn!...
BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from witches?
VILLAGER #1: More witches!
VILLAGER #3: Shh!
VILLAGER #2: Wood!
BEDEVERE: So, why do witches burn?
[pause]
VILLAGER #3: B--... 'cause they're made of... wood?
BEDEVERE: Good! Heh heh.
CROWD: Oh yeah. Oh.
BEDEVERE: So, how do we tell whether she is made of wood?
VILLAGER #1: Build a bridge out of her.
BEDEVERE: Ah, but can you not also make bridges out of stone?
VILLAGER #1: Oh, yeah.
RANDOM: Oh, yeah. True. Uhh...
BEDEVERE: Does wood sink in water?
VILLAGER #1: No. No.
VILLAGER #2: No, it floats! It floats!
VILLAGER #1: Throw her into the pond!
CROWD: The pond! Throw her into the pond!
BEDEVERE: What also floats in water?
VILLAGER #1: Bread!
VILLAGER #2: Apples!
VILLAGER #3: Uh, very small rocks!
VILLAGER #1: Cider!
VILLAGER #2: Uh, gra-- gravy!
VILLAGER #1: Cherries!
VILLAGER #2: Mud!
VILLAGER #3: Churches! Churches!
VILLAGER #2: Lead! Lead!
ARTHUR: A duck!
CROWD: Oooh.
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So, logically...
VILLAGER #1: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE: And therefore?
VILLAGER #2: A witch!
VILLAGER #1: A witch!
CROWD: A witch! A witch!...
VILLAGER #4: Here is a duck. Use this duck.
[quack quack quack]
BEDEVERE: We shall use my largest scales.
CROWD: Ohh! Ohh! Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn her! Burn her!
Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Ahh! Ahh...
BEDEVERE: Right. Remove the supports!
[whop]
[clunk]
[creak]
CROWD: A witch! A witch! A witch!
WITCH: It's a fair cop.
VILLAGER #3: Burn her!
CROWD: Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn! Burn!...


I had to post this... dont hurt me...

And *ahem* Hellfire Warlock? Pretty please?

They should die easily at low levels. Especially non-melee oriented characters. Wizards are powerful. Getting to their height of power should be hard. I've lost two casters in Charun, but if you play it safe I'd imagine with a bit of luck you can survive.


Wizards? Weak? Sure...
Bards and Rogues are terrible anyhow.
The nice thing about rogues are the skill points. Having to take 10 turns to kill 5 goblins face to face? Not so very nice.

Ha, yeah, should change my stance on wizards.

And agreed on the point of bards and rogues. I guess what I'm trying to say is that because they are so weak, espically in a low magic server, there should be some incentive to play them.

RP? I plan on a weak bard/ranger build myself!

Yeah, rogues are completely crap for everything besides RP if you ask me. They're one of the best classes if you want to be an awesome adventurer hero guy, but the moment you're in a face to face fight, you're better off running.

On a different note, just saw the new blog on http://legacypw.blogspot.com/

Great work guys! Is the timeline still 2-3 months? Heh, that works for me.. I won't be able to play until the end of April >.<

Regardless- looks awesome, and I can't wait.

Rogues are very versatile, with the skill points they get, they can adapt to different situations and excel, depending on how you built them. They're probably one of the best classes for sucking up to DMs!

On the other hand for straight up fights and especially for soloing they pretty much suck. They only really excel in traditional Dungeon Crawl/random explorations if there's opportunities for lockpicking, or traps that are dangerous enough to require disarming. Rare that a PW uses those things beyond a token gesture, understandably perhaps, once you start catering for a specific class, you have to put things for every single class.

What I like about rogues though is the diverse roleplay opportunities they offer. Rogues can be straight-up brigands or cutpurses, to businesmen, spies, diplomats, or all of those rolled in to one sneaky bundle of doublecrossing goodness.

Generally speaking,

It is my view that TFR heavily favored spellcasting classes and tank fighters - Particularly wizards and clerics (the level 8 cutoff wasn't as kind to spontaneous casters).

Generally speaking, I think Legacy will favor rogues, rangers, and probably mostly barbarians than other similar D&D worlds. My reasons:

(1) You only get three respawns: The hardest part of being a spellcaster is getting past levels 1-4. At level 5, spellcasters start being able to hold their own. And they take over in dominance upon level 7. By only having three respawns, it will be much harder (and thus far fewer people will do it) to make it to level 5 or 7 as a spellcaster.

(2) No base class starts with heavy armor proficiency in Legacy. In the dark ages of britain, plate mail was the stuff of myth. Scale male was a thing built by romans and other old world advanced civilizations. Most men relied on a solid piece of hide armor, or leather, or at the most some type of hauberk (breastplate). The armors in game iwll reflect this. Rangers/Rogues/Barbarians are normally hurt by their lack of heavy armor, now the playing field is leveled.

Add these two together, and the result should be less spellcaster/AC tank dominance - that is unless you manage to fight and quest your way into being ordained a knight. Knights are the unquestioned tanks of battle in Legacy. One must be level 7, have a high legacy score (we're working out the final number), must have completed their squireship for a knight/lord (read several quests to prove loyalty/worth), and have sworn fealty to that Lord to become a Knight. Knights get heavy armor proficiency, shield proficiency, combat expertise, and improved combat expertise. In short, these guys can take a beating. They aren't invincible, and rightly fear magic users, but ya - the idea is to make knighthood something special and rare. It will not be a favoritism thing (ala special races).

We are also considering the idea of a 'Lord' prestige class to provide a 'social' prestige class that is different from teh knight route. Again, the details are subject to change, but the idea would be to allow certain persons of sufficient wealth and social favor and legacy score to be given a title and land. These "lord' characters could then have persons swear fealty to them. By swearing fealty, the actions of the vassal reflect on the legacy score of the lord. .....This all sounds complicated, but we'll only do it if it works and is fun. Just an idea we're playing with right now.

Anyway, work continues. We just got our first OL Map done thanks to Pmilk. So it's time to start connecting content. Check out the screens at legacypw.blogspot.com

I dig it. Looks nice, guys.

i see the overland maps on the website that you have up, and was wondering how those work? are they like the ones from storm of Zehir?

Sounds pretty cool, good luck guys.

Well we originally built them thinking we'd do SOZ style stuff, but it turns out turning SOZ OL Maps (Which were designed solely for single player) into a multiplayer map is a lot more complicated than just building a custom script from scratch. The reason is SOZ scripts are all keyed to a single player iwht a single party. Those scripts simply don't play nice in a pw setting where you have multiple parties and multiple players all entering and exiting the OL map via different exits/entrances and all on different parts of the map making different skill checks against different enemies and...oh no i've gone cross-eyed.

So the OL Map is an area in the toolset just like any other (albeit with shrunken placeables [many of the shrunken placeables come standard as "ol map' placeables). Our main buddy Jitur is chained to the desk in a basement hard at work on making custrom scripts. At present the OL Map functions as a travel system. We are also working on doing roaming encounters ala SOZ (e.g., you see a saxon warband running aroundon the map and can attack or evade).

Anyway, thanks for the positive reinforcement guys, you'd never believe how vital kind words of encouragement are to a group of guys building something in a several-year-old game in their spare time for no pay.

Then I'll say that I'm really looking forward to checking this server out.
If you deliver what you guys are promising, I can see this turning out into probably the best PW I've ever played on.

Keep on working guys.

Hope my earlier history post didn't come off as lecturing, because it really just meant I was invested and interested enough to actually give my 2c. Go team, Woo!! etc.

Also, I have a question or two.

Will we still be seeing alignments? What about restrictions based on alignments? - what I'm thinking of here is something like there being a LG restriction on Knights or something, because that would be kind of upsetting. I'm not fond of alignments in general, morality shouldn't be simplified in fiction.

RE: Lord prestige class, will there be similar opportunities for advancement that perhaps lie outside of rulership or the mainstream? For instance Warlord for a more Barbarian/tribal based idea of the same thing, or HighPriest/Archdruid etc? I like the Lord idea, but it sounds like a very exclusive perk that would only apply to a certain type of character, it might be nice if there were other parallel goals or titles to strive for.

No alignments.

Also we're still working out prestige classes and such, what you stated is probably where we want to go with it but we'll see.

Good stuff, thanks for the swift reply.

Alignments - terrible. They should die a horrible death. I have yet to look into whether or not these can be 'removed' from the game, but I can tell you that because I am custom builidng all the classes for this, there will be no alignment restrictions for any class. So if they do remain, they'll only affect spells. I may try to figure out a way to hardset everyone into a true neutral and hide that alignmetn so that it is virtually written out of the game. I'll have to look at this when the time comes.

Lord Prestige class - ya, the details still need to be figured out and playtested (if we do this class expect there to be some growing pains as we learn what works and what doesn't, there's no real way to test how fun this will be except to let it loose on the player base after launch). As for a druid or other form of spellcaster prestige class - we have ideas for these (court mage/high druid/bishop [or some other hierarchical priest class] being a few examples of ideas).

Best news yet.

It may involve some creative reworking of character sheet displays, but what about repurposing the alignment axes to chart other qualities? Instead of having poles, it's just 0 to 100 on some other factor. Piety, for example. 0 being no spiritual connection to anything, and 100 being the truly faithful Cardinal who is upset by the corrupt Pope? Or Honor, where 0 is just your average person who bends the terms of a promise on occasion, and 100 would be Sir Bedivere, whose sense of honor is so strong that he discards Excalibur without even being tempted by it.

The essential point is that there is no "negative" side to it, i.e. you don't undo your slaughtering of an entire village by helping enough random strangers with menial tasks to offset the evil points.

That said, it's just an idea to salvage a display mechanic. It'd be just as simple to track all sorts of qualities (piety, honor, fame, righteousness, etc. . .) some other way if there was a game mechanic or role playing mechanic purpose to the exercise.

We have legacy points fully coded and implemented with DM wands to add/subtract to boot, and starting legacy point values based on your starting "legacy" (takes the place of subraces).

Legacy score is sort of a reputation/prestige/fame value system all rolled into one. It's not a binary good/evil (good actions don't equal + legacy, and bad actions don't equal - legacy). Instead, it is more how notable your pc is/how honorable. For example - if you accept a duel challenge from a higher level character or a character with a higher legacy score, you get a plus to legacy. You decline a duel from a lesser player, you lose. You charge in against overwhelming odds and survive? Plus legacy. You run away to live another day, lose legacy (depending on the circumstances of course).

This system, Legacy, is so central that 1 - we've named the server after it, and 2 - DM's will never give out XP...ever. DM's deal solely in legacy plus/minuses. The world is being constructed so that static quests and killing will naturally take you up to level 8 provided you survive. Our xp system is also going to reward group killing of monsters (there's many views on grinding, but essentially group grinding is encouraged as it fosters a bigger player base and spawns player created rp). Furthermore, our death system (i.e. the fact you can actually die) further encourages group tactics/strategy/mob killing.

Want to play a social character? Great, now that actually makes sense. On some servers, 'social' characters get rewarded XP same as those who go and killl/fight. It makes no sense that one would become more powerful fighting/etc. merely by sitting around and socializing. This is where the legacy system comes in. It's entirely possible (even likley) for a level 3 in our system to have a far higher legacy score than a level 6. These legacy points translate into in game rights (e.g., right to trial by combat comes from being one of the peerage, right to trial by peers (hence the name 'peerage'), etc), influence, as well as post death rewards.

If you perma-die in our pw (run out of deaths), your ending legacy score for that pc translates into a starting level bonus for your next PC. This is designed to get you right back in the game, and to make death a natural part of the world without being too much of a penalty. It is merely a part of what keeps the pw vibrant.

Anyway, I digress.

Im gunna make a suggestion IF my first question is true, if it's false then ignore my suggestion:

Question: Are the Norse gunna be in the setting? Followers of Thor were one of the/if not the last group of pagans to convert to Christianity so i would assume they'll be in the setting. (I think Saxons may have followed the Norse gods but not sure)

Suggestion: If the Norse ARE in the setting, then wouldn't dwarves be a reasonable race to still have in the setting (though MUCH rarer)? Also if they were to be in the setting and if the main area is a christian area then also they would most likely be "AHH A DWARF KILL IT!!!!!" rather than "Oh a dwarf! lets get him to help us mine!" Also there would be ZERO-ZIP-NADA-NONE dwarven Christians or followers of any other gods than Norse gods seeing as if they didn't believe in he Norse gods they wouldn't believe in themselves existing.

(also ignore the suggestion if you already considered it)

Oh and i have to say, at first i thought this idea for a server sounded really lame, but as i keep getting more info and hearing how much you've already got planned it's starting to sound really quite fun, the medieval time period has always been a huge interest to me and actually inspired my major so... yeah... sounds like a blast, though I am gunna miss playing my halfling barbarian/frenzied berserkers...

*stares into space and goes back to the glory days of Vugdish and Kevdurk*

I really like this idea, after all, it would suck to have a character that you had for say, 6 months, die, and have to start again from the beginning. its kind of like a D&D session where you character dies and you want to keep playing, instead of having to make another level 1 character while everyone else is up at 8-9, the DM lets you make a 6-7 character, so that you can help out still and not just be a liability to the team.

Eh...
How much of a level bonus are we talking about? A couple of levels? Or a buncha levels? Are we going to see most level 10's that die, given they get to that point, reviving up with a char at level 8, or something more moderate like 3-4?

Besides that, anyone making any character concepts yet? I'm at a lost. Considering some sort of Catholicy knight-type guy dedicated to purging all evil creatures.

This doesn't make much sense to me. Should a skilled and famous knight feel obliged to duel every dirty peasant that waves a pitchfork at him?

Some people are just beneath his notice.

Permadeath at the hands of NPCs is just an excessively punitive and time-consuming respawn button. New face, new name, but it's the same world, just minus all the IC relationships. If you've already played the "video game" part (killing AI controlled monsters, looting chests, rinse, repeat) then it just becomes another grind that takes time away from the social aspects. Starting people off with a healthy boost cuts out the need to repeat the extraneous stuff and lets them get back into the real game (the roleplaying).

Isn't that part of the point of e8? To make the RP more important than the mechanical power differences?

If the most important quality is Legacy, and that comes only from RP, then XP and levels themselves become something of a quaint artifact leftover from an entirely different system (3.5 d20).