Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

I tried to help someone get started on FK today, and I noticed that there are a few things that could be greatly improved, maybe even with minimum effort. If anyone else has similar suggestions, feel free to tack onto this topic.

1. If you try to look at HELP files, use the ASK channel, QUIT and come back later, or anything else that could end up covering or clearing your screen, you can easily lose track of what stage of character creation you're at and what options are available. If you try to LOOK for the options, you just get...

If you have lost track of where you are, you may type "restart".
This will take you back to the beginning where you select the sex of your character.

It'd be very nice if you didn't have to completely recreate your character just because you got momentarily distracted. Could the LOOK command be made to show you your current character creation options so you can pick up where you left off?

2. The premade character choices are very unclear as they don't tell you what you're getting into when making the selection. In fact, looking at the premade warrior options, this is all the instruction I get...

Please choose one of the following:

(A) Standard warrior aiming to become a ranger (help standard ranger)
(B) Standard warrior aiming to become a barbarian (help standard barbarian)
(C) Standard warrior aiming to become a paladin (help standard paladin)
(D) Standard warrior aiming to become a fighter (help standard fighter)
(E) Customise your warrior
.
Please note that paladins are a special roleplay and not a guild you can join.
See help paladins for more detail.

Now, if one looks at the mentioned helpfiles (such as HELP STANDARD FIGHTER), it somewhat explains what you're getting with each choice. However, it's super easy to overlook this, especially for new players. Perhaps a little warning could be added to character creation as well as the helpfiles to tell the player what all is going to be preselected for them? That being starting alignment, ability scores, weapon, skill, and spell.

3. Time for my most difficult suggestion to actually implement. This should sound familiar for anyone that has played Bethesda's popular roleplaying games (Elder Scrolls and Fallout). How about an option just before being transported to your hometown that allows you to make last minute tweaks to your character? It could allow you to adjust pretty much every aspect of your character right before it becomes set in stone. This could be a real lifesaver for those poor people that chose a premade character and got stuck with the wrong alignment. However, is there any way that this could be seriously abused?

Here's a screenshot from Fallout 3 showing the last minute changes screen.


I'm sure there's other little tweaks that could be made to make character creation less frustrating. Let's hear 'em!

Does the command QLOG show you where you are at in the process?

(B) Standard warrior aiming to become a barbarian (help standard barbarian)

We should probably add, for now, a disclaimer indicating that barbarians are not yet in the game.

Lathander wrote:Does the command QLOG show you where you are at in the process?

Good question! I've got a test character that I logged off of in the middle of creation, so I should be able to test this...

Okay, looks like the qlog does give little phrases to hint at what you're doing, such as...

Standard or customise.

However, this is not for all of the phases. Some of them show nothing at all in the qlog. Even then, it doesn't show you what the current options are. Just imagine looking through a bunch of helpfiles while at the race selection phase, then having to guess from memory which choice represents Gnomes.

And yeah, I guess we should mention that barbarians are still out to lunch.

Or we could add them -cough-