So here is the latest little floater I saw in my coffee. The rings it left around the rim inspired me to share. Brought on somewhat by a recent post from Celerity, and slightly augmented by the latest anime my son started me watching, I believe this might be something for considering in the future.
Let me begin by saying, I know many people will shout neutrals need a q-class, evils have plenty already. Until protection from neutral is addressed that discussion is on hold, so please save those arguments for another thread. With all do respect to those of you who want a neutral q-class or race, I simply could not waste time dreaming up a river that flows into a dam.
Deathnote, one of the most intricately written shows I have ever sat down to watch, reminded me that Aabahran lacks devils. I believe we even lost the reference to them with the most recent change to necromancers, King of Devils. Some of you may be thinking, we have demons, what is the difference. Demons by there very nature are chaotic, devils are their evil counter species and always use rules to trap their unsuspecting victims. Devils are always lawful.
So I began to think what makes a devil, or more to the point, how should a character seeking to become a devil set out upon their path. What classes are represented by devils? What races would we allow to become devils? What sort of quest line would lead to hell? All the while this anime plays out before me, ever inspiring, seeming to answer my question of the day. Until this morning, when it came to me, this does not need to be a class or race at all.
So the suggestion I present to you is this;
Lets design and create series of RP rewards that stair step characters into new and exciting quest creatures. Please do not limit your imagination to devils, just because it will be my focus here. Angels, Dragons, or even Lycanthropes could be achieved with this very same simple pattern. So I will proceed using Devils as my goal.
RP rewards are paramount to building your dream devil. Devils do not sit idly by and watch the world move, they are always active trying to inspire someone to do the wrong thing. Therefor if the devil seeks to progress through the ranks of Hell, he must constantly seek RP points. The progression is as follows.
Character discovers the Devil's Dealer in the Bazarre.
Initially the character will pay 25 RP and one life to become an imp. A minor devil that is affected by detect invisibility permanently, and gains 5% resistance to physical damage.
Later the character returns to the Devil's Dealer, who will offer to increase his power if he will share a little of more of his life soul. For 50 RP and another life, the character will become either a Barbazu if male or a Brachina if female. A Barbazu is a bearded devil, not only will the bearded devil occasionally cause his enemies to bleed by beard brushing them, they also gain a small bonus to any skill or spell that begins with B. Bearded devils strength is increased slightly over that of the imp. The Brachina is a Pleasure Devil not unlike a succubus. Her small wings grant her the ability to cast fly, but do not grant autoflight. Brachina are far more intelligent than any imp and gain a small bonus to any skills that begin with C.
Later the character can return to the Devils Dealer and purchase further upgrades for greater and greater RP costs and the sacrifice of more of his lives. I will not waste time trying to decide exactly what those upgrades should be, because the truth is, there are far more informed people to make those calls. That said, I wanted to present the Idea, for its format to be considered as to how we as players can petition for the Q-Stuff we want to see, without necessarily having staff need to code everything involved with a class or race.
Oh you've got a lot of knowledge on devil lore (at least in dnd sense). I enjoyed reading your suggestion, but I don't see how what you are describing is a q-race... Those things are just pk edges.
Just slightly off topic on the submit of neutrals, watcher specifically. Are you able to join Stalker and focus on just undeads, demons, vampires and avatars without buying into the whole destroy the cities agenda?
slightly augmented by the latest anime my son started me watching, I believe this might be something for considering in the future.
Deathnote
I thought your suggestion was going to be some type of shinigami type creature and it got me excited. I've been watching a bit of anime lately trying to jumpstart the old writers block with some creative mediums and there is literally a goldmine of ideas.
I always thought some type of geomancer would be a good neutral qclass, imagine the alchemists from full metal alchemist and earthbenders from the last airbender.
@f0xx, yes they are PK edges. But technically so are q-abilities.
Imagine when the Bearded Devil (Barbazu) buys the Barbed Devil (Hamatula) upgrade for 100 RP, then rolls toward the Bone Devil (Osyluth) for 150 RP, finally stretching for the Baatezu (hells master race) for 200 RP. Well and LIVES of course.
We have a lot of neat Edges already, I am just suggesting that we create sets RP reward tracks players may be able to ride into something new.
So her we have a completed devil. The character will have paid 600 RP to be an actual full fledge devil, with whatever bonuses or vulnerabilities that might entail. The player did not have to kill anyone, they did not have to complete some secret quest that they do not have prior knowledge of, they just had to RP with a vengeance.
And again, this could be done for any number of suggested q-things, to add an in game avenue to the end result some players may be seeking.
Not really. We have a couple that are somewhat good, some others that are quality of life improvements, and the rest are basically RP sinks that once you find out what they do, you will immediately regret buying them.
2 hours ago, Fool_Hardy said:
@f0xx, yes they are PK edges. But technically so are q-abilities.
No, not at all! When you get a q-thing, you get a package. Generally speaking, the packages are well balanced with some pros and cons, most of the time.
What you are suggesting here, if I understood it correctly (and there's a high chance that I didn't), is "options" which you build upon an already existing combo. There are no downsides to this. Just like edges, you only get positives. And when you stack enough specific "options" on top of each other, you can get something really scary in the end. While it sounds good on paper, it will create some great disturbances in the PK aspect of the game.
What you are describing basically, is a crusader weapon as a q-race.
Well, you can add some negatives at each stage. In the case of a devil, it could be some stacking -regen, a timed, repeating drain effect, vuln to holy, light, summon, charm, etc., perma-curse/hex/faerie fire, immune to poison (but not blackjack/strangle), difficult requirement for food/drink, receding protection from sanctuary (or opposing more effective protection from evil for foes), vuln to good or watcher-themed stuff, pulsing pain, certain key mobs aggress you and on and on.
These penalties can scale slightly faster with the bonuses you take.
I agree that serious bonuses with serious costs wouldn't be a good idea (I'm looking at you, avatars).
Personally, instead of mutating your entire race at every stage, I'd progress with physical/metaphysical traits. First step might be a pact, then your eyes, blood, heart, and soul. These steps determine the strength of gains/losses:
For example, pact might give you access to purchase indirect benefits (e.g. teleport spell, perma giant strength) at the cost of small -regen (say -5%).
Once you accept a couple of those, you can agree to go deeper into the pact and may purchase perma detect invis/good/infravision, small max hp/mana/move increase (say con*2hp, (int+wis/2)2 mana, dex2 moves), or other things of that scale. You pay for these with perma hex, vuln to charm, or that scale of thing.
And so forth, increasing with every step (typically the second step addresses the losses of the previous step in some way...-hp regen countered by + max hp...this ensures you will specialize and gradually adopt the intended final playstyle.
When you give a quality of life benefit (e.g. innate protect_good), you should take something quality of life away (25% chance for sanc to fail on use). Do not let players select the penalties, only the purchasable gains.
It is important to put the gains after the losses because the net gain per step must always be negative. The final losses will thus never be 'corrected', showcasing the final vuln of the qrace. Since these are purchasable and selectable, the race must be overall weaker to gain specialized advantage. Otherwise, the qrace will become too powerful due to min-maxing.
You can combine blanket and selectable gains (and corresponding scalable penalties) to give a qrace both a measure of consistency, but also some unique identity and player-driven development. Blanket + selectables is also a nice place to start with for balancing since you have a base to work from.
I'd go about this by creating:
A pool of interesting positive mutations (write out exactly what each one does, including numbers, even if just an estimate)
A pool of interesting negative mutations (write out exactly what each one does, including numbers, even if just an estimate)
A total cost of RP points to achieve everything possible
Then:
Divide the positive trait pool into tiers, grouping them by general strength/usefulness. Those tiers are now the stages of your progression.
Consider how you want the powers to scale. Linearly, gaining about the same strength in each tier, or scaled up or down.
Instead of adding strong, independent traits, try to break them down (e.g. instead of super flamebreath, give a flamebreath that becomes easier to use or does more things or affects more targets as you scale it up).
Ideally, the later traits should enhance the lower traits or give them more use cases. Try to keep the base skills in the early tiers.
Consider the following categories and determine where you want you want to specialize:
offense/defense (melee, magical)
attrition/healing
buffing/debuffing
retreating/initiating
searching/evading
As you increase capability in one of the categories, decrease it in another (e.g. if you add some offense/defense/attrition, you can decrease three others (or one/two more severely).
You can also decrease and increase within the same category (do more damage with spears, less with daggers or whatever).
Distribute the negative traits into the progression tiers.
Don't worry about balance at this point.
If you have corresponding positive and negative traits, try to distribute the negative side into the tier below the positive side. This creates an advancing (positive) sense of development for the player.
Select a set of positive and negative traits in each tier to become your blanket traits. These are the traits that every member of your race will automatically gain when they first reach that tier.
Don't worry about trying to balance the blanket traits with the other traits.
Balance the blanket traits at each individual tier.
Balanced in this case means the negative blanket traits outweigh the positive blanket traits somewhat in the same tier.
Don't try to balance non-blanket traits or traits of different tiers.
Determine how many purchasable positive traits you want in each tier.
This could include them all or just a subsection of the available choices at that tier.
Determine mutually exclusive traits, if any.
Determine how negative traits will scale.
Does a particular negative trait scale with the number of positives purchased? If so, how?
Does the the character gain an additional negative trait with every positive purchase? If so, in what order?
Determine every possible combination in each tier of purchasable traits. Depending on the complexity, you may only have a few or many possibilities.
Add the next tier's blanket traits to those possible combinations. Ignore the first tier's blanket set.
Balance the purchasable + next tier blanket sets.
Try to ensure the balance on the negative trait pool side.
The positives are the attractiveness of the qrace and you chose them for a reason. Lessening them diminishes the attractiveness and prestige of your qrace
Weak positive traits tends the entire build towards mediocrity.
You already balanced your blanket trait sets, so don't disturb them if you can.
Consider different race or class combinations when combined with your sets. If a certain trait is useless to a group, make sure they make up for it in other traits. Do not allow worthless or purely negative options for any possible race/class.
Remember to balance sets of traits. Don't get caught up in looking at traits individually.
If you are expecting huge balance swings based on certain classes or races, exclude them.
Alternatively, you can trend or level off the traits to towards a certain point (e.g. if high strength is important, you can trend it at +1 or level it by str becomes 23, regardless of base race).
You can do the same with class skills (if your bonus to fire spells is worthless to warriors and overpowered for invokers, consider something more general like +5% fire damage across the board instead or specific to a skill you gave earlier).
You can make skills/spells ignore or replace others. Your fire spell might not gain any bonus from mana charge. It might not stack with spell shields or it could disable the use of firing arrows or whatever condition.
You can use those specific conditions to balance outlying race/class balance issues without affecting the whole trait or tier.
Balance the initial blanket set you ignored earlier to the whole.
If you balanced the tiers well in step 1, the blanket sets in step 4, and the selectables in step 10, you are pretty much balanced already, but make sure the initial set won't throw things off too much.
Divide the RP point cost total by the number of tiers (scaling as you have scaled them, linear or not) and assign the cost to each tier.
Half of the cost at each tier goes to purchasing the tier, the rest is divided equally among the total number of already balanced purchasables.
Viola! You have a well-balanced, well-reasoned, completely technically fleshed out, advanced grade, modular technicolor qrace that is far more advanced than anything else currently offered by the game.
Even if you can't do it all by yourself, you can do a lot of the work by coming up with pools of cool lore-based positive and negative traits. That is the bulk of the creative work. The community can do the rest over time.
I'm fairly sure that Viri didn't want the whole devil/angel thing for reasons. Which is why before, they weren't an approachable option.
It's been a while since he's been here, however.
As the original suggestion sits, it's mostly edges gained, no real drawbacks as Foxx states. But if this were to be a thing, doesn't mean it can't be. And I think the heart of the suggestion, it isn't all positives. Though I like the idea of a "deal with the devil" tie in @Fool_Hardy, be it intended or not.
For races, with how I'm illustrating this, humans would work best. They're 20's across the board and work well with a "template race" as all it is, is another layer to the race. Though you can take any base race and modify stats to fit, a bit how qraces work now. How it's done is largely irrelevant.
Modified stats below assume base of 20. And more plucked out of the air than anything to illustrate rather than suggest.
What makes a race? Well, you've basically got stats, vulns, resistances, immunities, size, skills and skill bonuses. If any. So if you want a template race, it's best to cover those as well. Everything else is gravy, be it ogre regen or faerie immunity to faerie fire/fog.
Abishai
Minimum Level 10
10 RP
-2/+1/+1/+3/-3
Size M
Resist: none
Vuln: weapon
Bonuses
auto detect invis
Barbazu
Minimum Level 20
Must be Abishai or higher
20 RP
+1/-1/-1/+1/+1
Size M
Resist: weapon
Vuln: magic
Bonuses
random bleed damage
Erinyes
Minimum Level 30
Must be Barbazu or higher
30 RP
+3/-1/-1/+3/+2
Size M
Resist: fire
Vuln: air, holy
Bonuses
extra attack, chains (a la slith tail)
autofly
Amnizu
Minimum Level 40
Must be Erinyes or higher
40 RP
-2/+4/+4/-2/-3
Size S
Resist: mental
Vuln: holy
Bonuses
sleep/insomnia
Pit Fiend
Minimum Level 50
Must be Amnizu
50 RP
+5/+3/+3/+4/+5
Size L
Resist: weapon, mental
Vuln: holy
Bonuses
call devil (shadow/beast call/etc)
So you have minimum requirements, pluses and minuses and whatever you want to throw in with them, like Avatar-like abilities. Whatever. RP costs are cumulative. Pit Fiends will cost 150 total RPs. In fact, the levels themselves can be Avatar-like as devils often have a hierarchy. If you don't meet X requirements in X time, you lose a level. Pit fiends to Amnizu to Erinyes and so on. You'll need to spend more RP to regain your promotion. And instead of losing/gaining abilities as you climb, you can stack them as you go.
You might be able to take different paths. Granted, I know succubi/incubi are demons, but what if there was a split at barbazu? One branch takes you up the erinyes to amnizu, the other to brachina to succubi. They could merge again, or have a completely different end form. And you can restrict to various classes. Erinyes are melee while succubi are casters/communers?
Just an idea or a possible direction to go. And of course, balance comes first.
... and it would figure that Celerity posts seconds before I do. :D
I have always been somewhat concerned with the parameters placed upon religion in Aabahran.
Religion remains a focal point, and even plays into strategy when creating certain characters. But the scope of it is finite currently.
Church, being the exception to the Rule, it could also prove to be the salvation for characters who seek to serve unknown/unreferenced gods.
I have often chosen church, not to serve YHWH the One True God, but to serve the "one true god" my character believes in. Heck, one served Tiamat.
Reading Celerity and Magick's thoughts. I see a potential avenue to create quasi-crusader RP treks for any and all races/alignments/religions.
If you think on Crusaders for a moment, we think of them as the good guys, but the people of the middle east did not, they favored their own swordsmen.
Both sides had ritual and prayer, religion and sacrifice, faith and repentance. Always wondered why no one ever played the Ishmael card and went Islam hunting the infidels with a sader.
A couple of other thoughts just to get you talking.
Why are crusaders limited to Storm, Human, Half-elf, and Elf? Would a Dwarven, Halfling, or Avian Crusader been over powered?
Why do we limit the classes of a crusader to Paladin, Warrior, and Berserker? Anyone can repent. Why not let a Dark Knight apply for good, then Crusader?
What would Aabahran be like if Crusaders were often set against other religious Fanatics with their own unique set of q-skills purchased through RP? Clanggedin Silverbeards Dwarf meets YHWH's Storm Giant?
That should give you something to talk about. :pleasantry:
If you think on Crusaders for a moment, we think of them as the good guys, but the people of the middle east did not, they favored their own swordsmen.
Both sides had ritual and prayer, religion and sacrifice, faith and repentance. Always wondered why no one ever played the Ishmael card and went Islam hunting the infidels with a sader.
I've always disliked crusaders as the embodiment of 'good'. It brings some real life religion/political issues and ascribes them a very clear moral value WITHOUT a lot of gain.
Clerics are handled better because while 'cleric' is usually used with one or two faiths in real life, it is morally ambiguous in the game - clerics represent both sides of the spectrum (good, evil) and are a catch-all for all faiths. We don't need a 'priest', 'minister', 'monk', 'imam' or whatever.
I wish we could do the same for crusaders. Paladins don't bother me quite as much, but crusader is a very loaded word. However, I don't really care enough to make an issue, I would just prefer a name such as zealot or something instead of crusader.
I also don't want to see it taken to an extreme and be made a case for making the game politically correct. That wouldn't be in any more interest of the game than the current situation -- probably way worse, actually.
Morality is NOT ambiguous in FL and I'm not saying it should be made less explicit (i.g. relative). I like that there is an absolute good and evil in the game and it is both universal and objective. This is good for a game system. I was talking above about naming conventions, not the handling of the alignment system.
4 hours ago, Fool_Hardy said:
Why are crusaders limited to Storm, Human, Half-elf, and Elf? Would a Dwarven, Halfling, or Avian Crusader been over powered?
Why are undead limited to human? In the undead case, the original stats are replaced completely by a new race, so balance concerns don't even exist. It comes as a tradition for humans to be the base race for qraces. You could argue about it being a part of the lore or something, but no, there isn't a good reason in the case of human --> undead/demon.
The case of a class change, but keeping the old race, does raise the balance question. However, since storm elf and human are allowed, it would be hard to make a case that any race would thus be unsuitable for balance reasons. There is always a question about dwarves and magic resistance, but I think a dwarven, avian, or halfling crusader wouldn't be better than those same races as any other melee class. There is a reason nobody really fears the dwarf warrior/zerk as much as the giant/ogre ones.
The other thought would be to consider if they are unsuitable in the other direction. Are they took weak to be allowed? Again, with the examples of elf, storm and human already allowed, I don't see the other races being significantly weaker than the currently available choices.
A wise designer would take a look at the race distribution for crusaders now (and I presume it is still heavily weighted towards a certain race) and think about how to make the class more appealing to the already available races. Same with ogres and melees and in the past, illithid necros. This should be done before opening up other races, because without it, opening up new races would be largely irrelevant.
If you have top tier choices for class/race combinations, you've effectively eliminated the non-top tier choices. You can have 12,000 races available to a certain class, but if only 2 are viable, you really only have 2 choices. There are a lot of false choices available in FL. Not just in race/class selection, but also skill selection, quest rewards (as recently brought up with the Isle of Souls), cabal considerations and so forth.
4 hours ago, Fool_Hardy said:
Why do we limit the classes of a crusader to Paladin, Warrior, and Berserker? Anyone can repent. Why not let a Dark Knight apply for good, then Crusader?
The purpose of limiting classes as prerequisites in pathing is that the original skillset such form the basis of the specialized 'path' skillset. A warrior should grow into a crusader, ideally maintaining some of the warrior background. This is more complex than a class or race swap since you have to retain something from the base class.
This already occurs in a minor way with crusaders. Berserkers who become crusaders keep roar. What should a DK keep to represent their journey? Mostly likely, under current administration, they'd lose a lot to make the transition and would be relegated to PK invalidity. I consider this a fault since it is discourages transitioning your character, especially when the balancing wasn't really needed, but the staff sees it as an easy way to enforce aligns and discourage advantageous combinations.
Simply put, the staff fears backlash from the players complaining about fire giant dks more than they do about your personal character development.
There isn't a good balance or lore reason why a DK shouldn't outcast to good and eventually make it to crusader while keeping the same balance as a paladin that made the same transition. It is more of a personal decision made by the staff on how they want character progression to occur in their game.
4 hours ago, Fool_Hardy said:
What would Aabahran be like if Crusaders were often set against other religious Fanatics with their own unique set of q-skills purchased through RP? Clanggedin Silverbeards Dwarf meets YHWH's Storm Giant?
This require a lot of base changes to the game:
Good v Good OR crusaders are no longer good (both difficult to rebalance)
Viable PK-grade skill purchase system (a somewhat tough design project)
A shift from align-based PK to religion-based PK
Development of the religion system in game to make this relevant (similar to how the ways aligns are represented, you'd have to work out some system to incorporate all the faiths as different aligns and balance them)
It then begs the question..why religion? Why not race? How about guild? What about town? Political entity? Character dynasty? At which point do you draw the battle lines? You'll notice that in FL, most of the hard lines are drawn at the align level. The game's core story is about Nexus vs Knight and has been since the beginning. Even though the other cabals focus on non-align (ethos for Tribunal (many issues because of this), class for savant/warmaster, ethos/race/class for watcher (thus that cabal is a complete design failure), wealth for merchant/syndicate (another failure due to no real wealth system in game), and lore for herald (another fail, because lore development has been very weak in FL). So you have some successful cabal implementations and some failures.
Turns out that good vs evil (and to a lesser extent lawful vs chaotic) is a nice, easily understood and played tension.
If want to mix it up and make nation, religion, or something else more important, you start seeing the lack of depth in those systems. Since we don't really have playable concept of religion or nation-state in the game, it would be a bad idea to balance around them. You can already see it when you have contradictory goals:
Consider Avatars. How do they play in cabals? Avatar goals first (align), cabal goals second.
This is inverted sometimes in Tribunal --> Ethos over align. Goods can attack goods. This has been a huge source of problems for the game because the game is designed around align first, not ethos. This is a design failure that has never been rectified.
Warmaster/Savant tend to play out nicely EXCEPT when you have..shocker...align conflicts. This is because the cabal requirements contradict the main tension point designed into the game.
Seriously though, there are a lot of good points that @Celerity brings up, and I've always thought of Crusaders as more of a neutral path than purely good simply because they can embody the RP even more so than a Good alignment. Sure they're killing people, and doing it too often can earn an OUTCAST flag, but in the embodiment of the class itself and the RP behind it is that they're generally very helpful in ways that a Good alignment is restricted from doing. How's that the case? They're supposed to be friendly and offer others aide according to their help file (at least at one point in time anyways), but they can't lend a hand to evil characters because of their only being allowed to be Good. Often times I have come across the exact same RP from just about every Crusader since they came out if I was an Evil, "Grow up. We'll be waiting for you." Some people consider that good RP, I consider it a joke since even an Avatar wouldn't throw out empty threats to everyone that's evil and out of their PK range. For a game that promotes RP and doesn't allow OOC notions, I feel an Avatar knowing someone is evil is far more acceptable than a Crusader since an Avatar has the very embodiment of their God of Purity to guide their hands. Unless a Crusader can detect evil though, they have no real reason to assume someone was if they've never met them before.
As to why they're limited to those classes I believe it's because they're the ones who reflect the most possibility of being pure to their cause. They're all melee based for the most part, and blademasters would be slightly weird to see go that route. Mages have a better qclass they can apply for though, and very few of their skills would even cross over to a Crusader compared to the others you can choose currently. It doesn't mean that the others are classes that are lesser than the three you can convert over, just that it may require a bit more changes to be put in.
When dealing with ethos/alignment over Cabal, often times these are extremely minor anymore. It used to be if you'd been in a trade pact or a NA pact with a Cabal that allows Evils in, Avatars and Crusaders would go after them. Those trades now almost never change since Elders and Leaders are the only ones who can influence them and some Cabals will go months without members in those positions from what I've seen. When you get a strong PK machine in those spots people just log off when they see them log in. You can also choose to not fight those people when it comes to Good vs Good when your Cabal is at war, and nothing is preventing them to meet and discuss terms of peace outside of when there's no Elder/Leader. Avatars in Elder positions have always been stated to be too strong and shouldn't be allowed because of the RP behind them. I've always seen Avatar as a means to also not be violent towards an Evil character because devotion and loyalty to their God of Purity can also be seen as trying to convert those who are evil by way of words (invoking more in depth RP that can both help develop the Avatar in question as well as the enemy without being that cookie cutter must kill all sort of crap). The problem with that though is I'm the only person who seems to think that way, especially in cases where you're out of their PK range.
Ultimately I'd love to see some races freed up more and I'd always enjoy a few new classes/races, but with diminished players and no new players coming in it may not be a good idea to work on things that aren't necessarily broken and work on the things that we already know are. Coming together in a neutral state of mind from everyone without people trying to enforce their own thoughts on how a character should be played and offering solutions to the problems rather than pointing them out. It's far better to come up with possible solutions than feed into a negative mind set, and although we are the masters of our own feelings, we react on the tension at times if we feel threatened in some way . Solutions = Good. Bitching = worthless.