In response to your last suggestion Dalvyn, I think one thing that could help that out a lot would be to connect the evil areas far more than they are at the present. Making the Underdark more easily traversible for it's inhabitants, making it so that you don't need to be level 50 and have completed the entire Undermountain quest (which many many people have not done and which the evil characters, the monstrous races, the very people who would *want* to get down to Skullport can almost never do simply because it's located in the middle of Waterdeep and they can't enter the city) to get down there, connect these areas to places under Zhentil Keep and Westgate via the sewer systems or the catacombs beneath the cities, etc... and you can tie together all of these evil-themed places and open up a lot of opportunities for evil players. In regular tabletop D&D, players go into the Underdark from level 6+ in a lot of modules, which if we figure our own level 50 being analagous to level 20, would be equal to a level 15 character here. Make a lot more of the Underdark that is like (what I've heard) the first level of Undermountain is like, and you'll see more players going there.Dalvyn wrote:- What to do about low stats ?
The new system allows someone to select a very low Charisma and/or a very low Wisdom with few negative consequences. Currently, they will only miss on several quests (and maybe get worse prices in shops); but I believe the consequences should be way bigger (compare it with penalties for low Strength about how many things you can carry and melee damage, or penalties for low Dexterity about how many things you can have in your inventory and AC, or penalties for low Constitution and hit points and move points, or penalties on the learning rate from low Intelligence).
- Holes and bugs.
Something I hate to see is: experienced players using their knowledge of "holes" in the system or "bugs" in areas to gain unfair advantages instead of reporting it. An example: an experienced player making a lowbie wizard and asking a high level fighter to raze again and again the basement of the House of Wonder to find weapons and shields that can then be sold. It makes no sense that a school would ask you for a 2 platinum fee then later allow you to steal items for 20+ platinum from the dummies set up for training. It might be a good idea to set up an easy channel (mail address or something else) to report such "holes", and a relatively quick process to fix them.
- Needed areas.
In some sense the counterpart to the previous point (which basically aimed at removing holes that only experienced players would know and (ab)use): what kind of areas do we need? I would guess something for level 5-15 characters to make coin. Are there other niches that need to be filled?
- Where to put the effort (and the players)?
We currently have roughly 3 or 4 parts in FK. Waterdeep-Silverymoon-Golden Oak-Shadowdale, the "Good"; Zhentil Keep - Westgate, the "Evil"; Skull Port; and Menzo. As far as I know, the Good have nearly all the areas (including shops, trainers, quests, ...) they need. This might not be the case for the other three parts. Now, should we spread the (currently very limited) building efforts between all those parts, or should we concentrate on some parts and perhaps give up on others (for now), either for lack of building resources, or for lack of players, or for both? Plus a similar question from an imm resource point of view (create roleplays for all four parts or concentrate on some of them only).
There's also the city of Ched Nasad which has a lot of opportunities for evil players, especially Drow and Half-Drow, the Orc Camp which is a major center for the monstrous races and should possibly grow to give all of them more opportunities, and there are more areas on the drawing board as well, it's just a matter of getting them in the game in some cases. It would be extremely simple to come up with a few thousand rooms of a sort of "Underdark Wilderness" which could connect a lot of these disparate places in much the same way that the wilderness of the surface with only a few different room descs and a few different monsters to throw some danger in there connects the surface. I know I, and probably many others, would be more than willing to work on getting a few thousand rooms in if it would make it easier for us all to play our characters.
I'm not suggesting the Underdark be a cakewalk, but it should be relatively simple to let people know that there are dangerous areas of it and simpler areas, the paths between cities which are plied by merchants should be relatively safe. So like a surfacer lowbie, I might walk far around on plains and roads for the safety of my trip rather than take the short cut across the mountains and fight giants, we could arrange for something similar below ground, taking well-defined "merchant paths" that stretch far and wide rather than running through the real Underdark wilderness. Allow for players of evil characters both above and below the surface to have access to one another, to join together in RP and the like and you'll see a big flowering of evil RP.
The Underdark is a big part of the Forgotten Realms, and it's easily the most popular of the climate/culture areas in that setting. One need only look at the number of modules and supplementary books out about the Underdark and it's races and cities to see that this is the case. One never needs to wonder why more people visit surface cities than Skullport; as a Drow to get to Skullport, there was almost literally no way I could have made it there without someone (not a normal PC as there were none active when I was looking to get there) explaining the way to me, especially as someone who had never had a surface character and was unfamiliar with Undermountain. On the surface, most of the major cities are shown with roads on a map that's available on the website to which anyone has access, the reason for the disparity is obvious. A good newbie born up there has free reign of the surface along the roads to every city up there without fighting anything worse than a bandit, to all of the skills, quests and equipment there. Every evil city in contrast often needs to be an entire world to itself, even though that is definetely not the building philosophy of the game, no area can be a one stop shop, even a very large area.
I could probably say a lot more but I'll end it there and see what some other people think about it, it's certainly ripe for discussion and I'd like to hear what some of the evil people from the surface think about more interaction between evil cities above and below ground.