Voicechat Notes: Saturday 7th May 2022

[tulpa]

Q (Lexx416): Is there a reason that small corpses can't be picked up with the GET command, but also can't be dragged?
A: Not really, that was an oversight. He probably would end up adding in 'smells of rotting flesh as you're running around'. The original reason was that, at first, there was some weirdness with corpses, some confusion about whether they're items or special types of characters, whether corpses should shouldn't be in an inventory etc.. All obsolete stuff. It could probably change in the future.

Q (Gorth): Can you outline the plans behind and the reasonings for, what the policies for characters in different factions will be? Will we just be barred from having two characters in seperate factions?
A: You won't be able to have two active characters of the two different factions. If for whatever reason one of your characters switches, then you'd have to essentially shelve your other characters or maybe switch them over too. Shelving is viable; we don't want people doing stuff like spying with their alt in the other faction.

Q (Serity): What if you have two characters at once, though? Like... how do you transfer them BOTH because you can't log in on both at the same time.
A: It would be on a case-by-case basis. There will probably be an allowance, maybe once, where we can do multiple characters at once (as long as it's not something ridiculous.) It's good to have established RP beforehand, for at least one character, that sets you up for moving to Mistral Lake/affiliating with a particular faction. If you have your character that you've been playing before the faction split happened, they might just move other characters over as well. It's something Rias has to discuss with his team more, and flesh out a little more. He doesn't want to see things that are against the spirit of the faction split, so they will just discuss with players individually and hash it out.

Q (Carrioncaw): Why do handcarts expend energy twice when moving around in the overworld, even on a road, but only once when moving around in non-overworld areas?
A: You're probably seeing the energy required for you moving (moving through rooms in the wilderness has an energy cost, as opposed to rooms within non-wilderness areas), followed by the energy cost for pulling the handcart.

Q (Maina): Some characters keep journals. Do GMs have access to read these? Do they have interest in reading these? Is there a way we can help enable GMs reading these if they want to read these that doesn't require coding a whole new journal command for poor Rias?
A: There are some kind of 'hacky' ways to look at the text in pretty much any item, but there's no easy way for them to quickly look at, say, Fred's journal. It's always nice to look into a character, though. GMs could look at items from literally anywhere, they don't have to be in the room with the item. A GM could do a search for journals, it'll tell them which room they're in, and they could read it.

C: Rias might try and find a way for players to indicate to a GM that they have carried out a particular task they have been set in order to move plots along. It might just need to be something that GMs try to keep in mind, making communications easier by giving players a specific set of instructions, and then a specific way to say it's been done.

Q (Tulpa): Are the Arcana glyph names derived from a particular language, or associated with a particular culture? (E.g. cosir, I love that one!)
A: No they're not. They're all made up. Rias does have one language that he'll use to occasionally get inspiration. If a result looks cool he might shift that around a bit.

Q (Maina): I know they aren't a guild, but are Mummers still a thing in the setting? What are they like, if so?
A: The Mummers are still a thing. They're still led by Mayhew, who was one of Rias's favourite NPCs from CLOK. They're just wandering around doing their thing. They don't still have a monopoly around ESP stuff, that's more associated with the Twilight Eye. They might still be associated with ESP, however, but he would have to think about that a bit. There are always going to be the rumours that some of them are really weird, and/or seem to have really weird powers. "Is there something else going on here, or is it really just this troupe of performers?" They have this air of mystery going on. Rias wants to bring their camp back.

Q (Marcuson): After Mistral Lake is released, will new players get an option to join the town at account creation, or will they have to earn their way into the town?
A: There'll just be a character creation option. You won't be able to do it if you have an active character of the other faction. You would just have to go to your account screen and shelve your Shadgard characters and then go to character creation and say you want to be Mistral.

Q (Marcuson): For players with older accounts who are considering joining Mistral Lake, will they have to retire their older shelved characters? What might the transition look like for them?
A: Once you shelve your Dominion characters you could unshelve your Shadgard ones. There could be metaphysicky stuff later, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Q (Marcuson): How will account locking work?
A: You can still have characters that belong to different factions, you just can't have characters from different factions active at the same time.

Q (Maina): What, specifically, determines whether a disguise counts as a new identity for other people to remember? When I asked on #question, it was said that as much as a different colored cloak should do it, but I tried two different masks and they had the same identity. Are there plans for future expansion of the disguise command, perhaps making it skill-based?
A: It's based on your short description. A different coloured cloak isn't going to change the fact you're a tall lanky man with blond hair, etc. If there's a disguise item that masks your hair colour, then you're going to show differently; you're not going to be recognisable to people who saw your character with their regular hair. There may be an item that disguises builds, it is something that he'd like to dig into deeper. On the other hand he doesn't want it to end up like: "I can do horrible things and now I'll put on a hat and escape/nullify the justice systems and all kinds of other consequences". He would love to hear ideas but do keep that kind of thing in mind. This is why the guards check your face when you walk in; putting on a disguise would just be kind of goofy.

Q: Are all "names" actually keyed to the player? Will you have to ever have to worry about two 'blue-haired hooded short men' getting mixed up?
A: if disguised then your character would assume that's the same person. If you made two characters on the same account that appeared the same... eh, GMs might step in and say that's pretty meta, we can't really be doing that.

Q: Could it be a roll?
A: That might end up being a lot of rolls. You could just say that you could only make the roll for a person once, x amount of times. Would be a lot of work to implement maybe.

Q: The help file for Steal indicates that it benefits from Stealth. Since you can steal while unhidden, what benefits do Stealth provide? I can't work out a specific roll bonus.
A: That is just obsolete information, he thinks, assume no Stealth bonus. It's probably from the old way it was before artifice was a thing. It does benefit you but not the actual roll; it's more like setting up, circumstantial stuff.

Q: Does room noise affect ability to hide/move in stealth?
A: It doesn't, but it probably should! (Thunder, rain, that kind of thing).

Q (Navi): Currently, it is possible to use the paranoia affects that stricken hostile NPCs when you make noise from hiding to disrupt their movement patterns. If you whistle while hidden, any hostile NPC will begin searching, and its movement becomes slower. I wanted to know if this would be considered an exploit or just utilizing established mechanics strategically.
A: What Rias is thinking of doing is, if the person that caused the noise leaves, they're not paranoid anymore. That avoids having a way of essentially locking a creature in place.

Q: How about if they see the person leave?
A: We really need a chase mechanic.

Q: Also, the roundtime from noise-induced-searching affects their defense rolls (e.g. dodge). Is this still fine and will be left as-is?
A: He thinks it's okay.

Q: Will it be possible to erase another's arcane circle at some point in CvC?
A: At the moment it's the way it is because it would suck if you were drawing a circle and others were just like nope, erasing it. He might have to come up with some mechanical way of doing it, there is no lore reason for it being the way it is.

Q: Are people with fancy eye colours born with e.g. normal blue eyes, and then it transitions into these kind of gem colors, like sapphire etc.?
A: No, those are part of the physiology of mostly the Nuum, there are a couple of others. They're born with the fancy gem eyes.

Q: Is there a current ruling on the exploitiness of making noise to harm opponents (whether movement AI or rolls) then? Like, should we stop doing it immediately or is it okay until mechanic changes?
A: He'll probably just go in there and fix it real quick. He will talk with gm team to try and figure out a better way of dealing with it.

[Lexx416]

Is there a reason that small corpses can't be picked up with the GET command, but also can't be dragged?

[Gorth]

Can you outline the plans behind and the reasonings for, what the policies for characters in different factions will be? Will we just be barred from having two characters in seperate factions?

[carrioncaw]

I likely won't be able to attend, but some thoughts, observations, and questions are below:

Tending/Bandaging:
One should be able to pick a location to tend or bandage. It's frustrating and immersion breaking to have to do the head, back, chest, abdomen, and right arm just to get to the left arm or legs regardless of how severely wounded the previous body parts were.

Aiming in combat:
There should be at least some chance to hit an aimed spot without an ability, and then the combat precision ability should further increase this. There should be bonuses to staggered, lying, or otherwise hindered targets.

Cleave:
This operates as a double attack rather than a cleave, incurring two sets of energy expenditure and roundtime with a single action. I've also seen it use 'thrust' attacks, as well. Maybe rename or re-work it to be one attack that, perhaps, costs 1.25-1.5x a base attack's energy/RT.

Followup punch:
I've triggered a followup punch on a creature that was killed with the base attack. Somehow, I've even missed with this as the corpse managed to dodge.

Handcarts:
Why do they expend energy twice when moving around in the overworld, even on a road, but only once when moving around in non-overworld areas?

To go with Lexx416's question on corpses:
Really, you should be able to pick up any corpse you have the strength/encumbrance to pick up. Depending on how badly injured upon death, it might be bloody and gross, but it's not unreasonable to be able to want to move your hunts to a single location for processing all together. I think someone mentioned the issue was storing corpses in vaults, which makes sense to not want to happen so we could have vaults deny corpses as something that can be stashed.

[tulpa]

Thanks for your feedback and comments about the game, carrioncaw, it's good to see some new names posting and getting involved with the VC especially.

I do want to say (for everyone's benefit) that observations/comments, as well as specific suggestions to Rias for tweaks are best put in a BBS post, rather than made as submissions for voicechat. We prefer questions, rather than comments, the more open-ended the better. This is because they're more likely to bring about further discussion and follow-up questions, and they also strike a different tone. I hope that's understandable.

Teri and I are thinking about putting together a few suggestions and pointers for formulating VC questions, it's likely we'll have something ready soon. Meanwhile, sorry for the lack of clarity.

edit: Anyway, sorry! The handcart question I don't believe has been asked before, so that's a fair example.

[nobody]

Also wanted to chime in as two of these have been brought up before and I recall the commentary.

Tending/Bandaging:
One should be able to pick a location to tend or bandage. It's frustrating and immersion breaking to have to do the head, back, chest, abdomen, and right arm just to get to the left arm or legs regardless of how severely wounded the previous body parts were.

This one is a known bug.

Aiming in combat:
There should be at least some chance to hit an aimed spot without an ability, and then the combat precision ability should further increase this. There should be bonuses to staggered, lying, or otherwise hindered targets.

This is already how it works, you have somce chance of success any time you aim, and the higher your skill the better your chance of succeeding. At very low skill, the chance is small and can seem no different than random. The abilities help at all skill levels, but are not required for the mechanic.

[carrioncaw]

I do want to say (for everyone's benefit) that observations/comments, as well as specific suggestions to Rias for tweaks are best put in a BBS post, rather than made as submissions for voicechat. We prefer questions, rather than comments, the more open-ended the better. This is because they're more likely to bring about further discussion and follow-up questions, and they also strike a different tone. I hope that's understandable.

Ah! Good to know and it's definitely understandable. Thanks for the clarification; I'll try to keep this in mind for any future posts.

[carrioncaw]

Also wanted to chime in as two of these have been brought up before and I recall the commentary.

Good to know on both accounts. Thanks!

[Maina]

Some characters keep journals. Do GMs have access to read these? Do they have interest in reading these? Is there a way we can help enable GMs reading these if they want to read these that doesn't require coding a whole new journal command for poor Rias?

[tulpa]

Are the Arcana glyph names derived from a particular language, or associated with a particular culture? (E.g. cosir, I love that one!)