The Shield Lands is slightly more than two years old. In the first year of its existence, it went through four months of building and two-and-a-half months of play. In this last year, it saw three months of building and nine months of play. It has been a mammoth time investment for me, and has greedily devoured most of the time I would otherwise spend on more serious creative pursuits, or socializing, or reading, or personal growth in any other way. Honestly, I’ve been seriously waffling about going cold turkey off of virtual worlds. Instead, I’ve decided to take the board into the next stage of its development. Here are the things I plan on doing:1. Bioware plans on releasing a huge body of excellent content in the next update of the game. I have a fairly good idea of will be included, it will be mostly stuff from their premium modules. This provides an excellent opportunity to rebuild our resource hakpak from scratch. I wouldn’t say that I’m going to try to minimize our use of custom content, but the hakpak will most likely shrink; Proving less of a barrier for new people to play with us.
2. I’ll repaint all of the areas on the board, because of expanded tileset options, and to accommodate a new play style.
3. In the current version of the Shield Lands, civilized NPCs are static and robotic. The goal of the next overhaul will be to have PCs be able to treat certain populations as either peacefully or hostilely. The home base town as a fixture of the board will go away, as will the axial town-and-dungeon structure of the areas.
4. The economy of the board will change from currency to barter. PCs will be able to attempt to barter with anyone friendly to them with a “Barter Bag” utility item. Yeomen and merchants will cease to function as you have known them. (Brace yourself.) The warehouse will go away. Loot will cease to be about how many tens-of-thousands of ducats you can hoard, and will revolve more around swapping gems, jewelry and art objects. I will also try to spam your inventories less, so I will install the proper code to make food and material components stackable. I also plan on reorganizing and expanding the treasure types.
5. I’ve decided to treat magic items differently from vanilla 3rd edition D&D. Plus one swords and stat buff items will still be the majority of magic items found in the world. Such items will be more simply named. “Magic sword” or “magic necklace” is preferable to “longsword +1" and “amulet of natural armor bonus”. More powerful items I want to design and script myself, these will...
A. Always have some drawback to use. For instance, making you more vulnerable to certain kinds of damage, or having some kind of uncontrollable collateral or unpredictable effect.
B. Powerful magic items will never be “always on”, they will have to be activated and will function for a random amount of time.
C. There will be a small percentage chance per use that the item will become mundane.
6. The treatment of high-level characters in the typical online RPG: that of expanded range, bigger monsters, and truck-loads of loot, is problematic for a game of our scale. Even if I could produce the amount of game content necessary to smoothly maintain such an escalation, the mutchkin-like behavior such a structure encourages is anti-social, predictable, and a drag for new players. It is an unfortunate pattern and I hope to design my way out of it.
1st edition AD&D has a convention tied to high-level campaigns that was fairly important to that game, though left out of the subsequent editions, and computer RPGs entirely. The convention was that around 9th to 11th level, depending on the class, a PC would attain a level that was called “name level”. For instance, a Fighter of 9th level or above was called a “Lord”, and a Magic-User of 11th level or above was called a “Wizard”. The idea was that at name level the character became a fully recognized hero of the game world and would begin to amass followers and territory, as well as greater responsibility.
The obvious incorporation of such an idea would be to shift the focus at name level to a strategy-style game. The amount of work to write a functional strategy game is prohibitive, and there would be no guarantee that it would mesh well with the smaller-scale game, or that it would even be any fun, until we play-tested it. I’ve been wondering if I should include such a strategy element in our game since I started the project. Fortunately, I’ve recently had a much better idea:
A. At a certain level, player characters will stop receiving experience points for killing monsters. They will select a population to champion, and will then gain and lose experience based on the growth and decline of that population. They will be given to option to donate major treasures to enrich the population, supplementing its growth. This is obliquely a gold-for-experience system, another out-of-use 1st edition convention.
B. In addition to population growth and treasure, high level characters will be able to gain experience for leveling up henchmen of their championed population. PCs with a negative Charisma bonus will be denied followers, those with a high Charisma will be able to take on multiple followers. It’s probably important that the followers survive their training for the experience benefits to “stick”.
C. High level characters who are killed will be considered “stopped” for the remainder of the server session. They will not revive like lower level characters, will drop a couple items, and will not be allowed to re-enter the board. Our standard death penalty will still apply, though since these high level characters are not being revived they are not susceptible to the dreaded chain-death/trail-of-tears.
D. I’m considering lowering the death penalty even further, as this new system provides another element to our soft level-cap. The following chart shows the percentage chance of level loss over three different progressions. The changes in color show the loss of multiple levels. We started early this year using the x12 progression, and are current using the x10 progression.
7. I'm not going to schedule sessions while I am making the new build. It may take a several weeks to a few months to get everything in order. I am willing to hold a "goodbye to the old build" session in the next couple weeks, if there is interest. Feedback, cheers, derision, or debate, would be most helpful for furthering this project's development.
