Brigandry/Escort Tasks

[Serity]

The topic of PC brigandry and PvP/CvC came up the other day in chat and there was a lot of contention; a lot of people would not want to be forced to interact with PC brigands, and there's no current mechanics that would allow a PC brigand to actually stop a player traveling, short of hoping to ambush them, but that doesn't really work with 0-traveltime horses, either. The topic generally keeps coming up here and there over time though, about when CvC starts up and the concept of thievery characters ('stealing small objects' isn't really a mechanic that has any use against NPCs, after all).

To scratch that itch - because there are people who would probably like to play brigand playstyles - I came up with the idea of brigandry tasks. I didn't play CLOK, so any similarities in this proposal would be coincidental. The Guild of Thieves seems perhaps an obvious place to put these, but there might be other places too if the Guild is supposed to be more subtle and less violent - perhaps simply at any tavern overhearing rumors of people traveling could be used as a task spot for this if it should be available to non-Guildites. I'll note that likelier than not, this sort of thing would mostly for intentional antagonist characters, unless people were really good at disguising themselves, having an assortment of gear to swap out - no doubt some people would meta and go "oh, that tall redhead/very short shadow blob/tall ivory-skinned person was CLEARLY so-and-so because they're the only [example] around".

The basic concept is that there would be NPC travelers - merchants, scholars, etc - who want to go from, say, Shadgard to Emberlight or the Library, or from Mistral to Morhollow or so on and so forth. When this happens, a brigandry task is set up to ambush them, perhaps at a certain ambush point such as the pass near Qamar, the Canyon, the West Basin, the stretch of road beyond Sorveggen, etc. The travelers are spawned and travel regardless of if anyone accepts the task. The prospective brigand has to both accept the task ("we got word that so-and-so is traveling to wherever and loaded down with goods") and be in the appropriate location to actually fulfill the task. The traveling NPC would wait at a safe place, ideally in the gatehouse of whatever town they're departing from, or just inside the entryway of Qamar, for example. The task view would indicate "departing in 12 minutes and 5 seconds" or whatnot, and they wait there until either time has expired or someone has accepted the task.

The NPC is invulnerable to players who have not accepted the task, to prevent randoms from ganking or farming them or otherwise ruining the task ("they're going about their business, why would you bother them?"), though they might still be vulnerable to random encounters (and players passing by could help out, though they wouldn't get paid for a task). Attacking the NPC outside of the designated location would either be impossible ("it's too risky to jump them here", "they seem too on edge") or fail the task (granting them immunity to CC and they flee) to prevent people just waiting outside their departure location and taking them out instead of playing out the ambush points. The player should be forced to be wearing a disguise to attack.

The NPC, rather than being slain, would be knocked unconscious (robbery, after all, not murder) as a compromise given the fact that we don't have non-lethal combat mechanics. Less-lethal weapons could be used, but attack locations are highly prone to RNG - though the traveler could just have a very low energy pool and an extremely high health threshold (500+?) to offset this. The traveler may or may not have NPC guards with them, guard-ing them, that would have to be dealt with. Once the NPC is within a suitable ambush area (presumably some large stretch of road) they should slow down in order to give PCs time to react or catch up if the traveler walked past ("their pace slows to a more relaxed one as they let their guard down").

Once the hapless mark is knocked out, a few options work for completing the task: if it's a Guild task, you could grab a generic loot item ("bundle of goods"/"occult documents"/"cache of jewelry boxes") and report back to where you got the task, turn it in and you get a cut of the pay (after all, the people who gave the intel should get paid too, plus of course the Guild takes their fee). Another option is Guild members show up to handle the 'cleanup' - dragging the bodies off the road, hiding traces of a fight, and so on - and they bring your pay. If something like taverns being used as the task location is done, perhaps the cache can simply be sold at the market, or a fence at one of the bandit locations might accept them.


On the other side of this, the system could fairly easily be bent into escort tasks (either in addition to, or instead of, brigandry tasks) with some tweaks. Players could sign up to escort the travelers (in a similar manner to signing up to rob them) and the traveler waits in aforementioned safe place, and they depart once either time has expired or a sufficient number of PCs have shown up to guard them and joined their group. The players would defend them against random encounters (at a much higher rate, perhaps increased further when traveling through areas that brigand PCs can ambush from), or even brigand PCs if any happened to take the opposite task - though if brigands and escorts could both target the same traveler, likely it should run down the timer before departing instead of setting off if anyone accepted it. These tasks would be available from appropriate locations - gatehouses where the traveler is waiting for NPC guards, or taverns where they might overhear seeking assistance, and the escorters would get paid once the NPC successfully reaches their destination.



Anyways - just a general collection of ideas I had floating around, hopefully the concept gives some sort of inspiration.