Re: the sandbox

The Shield Lands server will go back online this Sunday, the 12th. Some notes:
Scheduling: Previously, we’d been playing at 1pm EST, which was quite early. We’d been playing this early because Jason was playing from internet cafes in Madrid. Since both him and Ryan are going to play from Ryan’s apartment could we bump the time an hour or two to accommodate people in the westerly time zones?
Voice-over-i.p.: I’ve decided to use it. Earlier, I was against it because I’m pretty sure it’ll cut down on role-play. But the whole point of these sessions is to hang-out, so why wouldn’t we use v.o.i.p., especially since it’s going to be a handful of people. It might take a while to work out, but roleplay might be enhanced, say, if we use our speaking voices for third-person references and in-game text voices for first-person speech.
Experience calibration: I’ve decided to set the XP scale to 24 (normal NWN is 10), as well as bump the XP penalty up 5%, from 15% to 20%. Everyone agrees that tread-milling isn’t any fun. The slow gaining of levels, only to incur a penalty and have a few hours of work erased, is frustrating. But considering that my treasure system is pretty generous, and my monsters loot fallen PCs: Characters fortunes will wax and wane much more wildly, which I think will take us beyond the doldrums of tread-milling. Adventuring is only fun if the character is putting something on the line, and not just punching the clock.
That said, first level is really boring as-is. I’m going to tie starting-packages for new characters to their social class. So children of Counts and Barons will start with 0xp and 200 gold, freemen and the children of merchants will start with 500xp and 100 gold, and vagabonds and peasants will start at second level, with a club and a biscuit.
P.S. Jason, I did some research about getting rid of the familiar penalty to experience and it can’t be done without disabling Bioware’s experience system and writing our own from the ground up. We’ll talk about this later.
P.P.S. I’ve been thinking of re-building the summoning tables (maybe not this week, though). I’ve looked into it and it isn’t terribly hard. This little gremlin inspired me. Also, monodrones... MONODRONES!!!

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