Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

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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).

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.

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.

Dalvyn wrote:Some topics that I think should be worth discussing.

- What to do about low stats ?

- Holes and bugs.

- Needed areas.

- Where to put the effort (and the players)?

About low stats, I think that making it a lot harder for people to do quests via charisma and wisdom, and making it a lot more expensive for them to purchase things in shops would go a long way to this. I know there are quests that aren't triggered for people below a certain charisma, put a similar restriction on all quests, people with charisma below 8 should have only perhaps half of all quests available, people with charisma down by three or four should only have the most basic necessary quests. No one would ask someone with a 3 or 4 charisma for help, they probably would be extremely uncomfortable just looking at them. Also translate that really low charisma into really high prices at shops. These are medieval times and the economy was all about barter. A 3 charisma should be paying at least double the price other people should. A 3 wisdom the same. People with a really low wisdom and charisma should be paying nearly four times the cost that perhaps other people are, make the negatives stack with one another. Similarly with wisdom, you'd not know the value of the things you're purchasing, make other skills like consider, appraise, discern all based on wisdom. If your wisdom is super-low you're not going to be able to tell whether you could successfully fight a mob or the like. Perhaps also make a lot more mobs auto-attack people with low charisma. You're not going to be able to tell whether people are hidden around you, you could probably barely pay attention to what is going on. Maybe even make things hardcoded for absurdly low wisdom like blatant errors on the VT terminal showing where roads go, walking into the wrong room like when you're drunk/hallucinating, those sorts of little things that will make people go nuts but hey, they have a 20 str and 20 con and 20 dex so let them suffer.

As for holes and bugs, lalowing a builder revision team to operate and take a look at old areas is the best suggestion, as posted by Ellian. Let people take a look at these old areas, identify the problems with them and stop them but also make certain that, as you said, that you're not removing options for people which will make the game too rough. I've been playing a wizard on the surface a little lately and without friends or assistance, it's difficult to make money. I'd say more areas like Melee Magthere in Menzoberranzan would help people with this sort of thing.

Needed areas. The real question I have been wondering is, even if areas are needed, can they even get into the game at this point in time? I don't claim to know what goes on amongst the imms and all, and I of course realize that this game is maintained at their leisure for our benefit, without being paid or getting anything in return. I know that players cause a lot of trouble and it's a lot of hassle, all of these things I understand, and I don't blame people for not coddling to our every need, but then many players here have been playing for a long time, putting a lot of time and effort into our chars, and trying to help out as best we can to put something back into the game.

I really appreciate everything the imms do for us, it's fantastic the job you guys do. But as I understand the building process now, even if people are submitting new areas, unless Sharni is around to continue the process, no new areas can be added to the game. I was what I'd consider a fairly active builder. But when I stopped getting feedback, and when my areas stopped getting reviewed at a certain point, I didn't continue to build, there didn't seem to be much point to just throwing stuff into a backlog that may or may not ever be completed, because building is a lot of work and why would I do work that will never see the light of day? Similarly I've submitted publications and the like which have not been added to the game, and other people I know have done the same thing.

I think that the best answer to this is to spread the work out. Have a team of players that review areas, which is difficult work! Have another team double check it, then get one of the main admins, Dalvyn, Sharni or Tyr, give it a look over finally. The way this could be done would be by establishing clear rules of building. When I started building, I had only been in the Underdark. I didn't know how things were designed on the surface, let alone how the code worked. Make it clear, no skills trained past X level, only so many combat skills per X room area, only so many spells per X room area, only so many trainable things per mob, give examples of appropriate quest rewards for quests of varying difficulty, make it stringent and spelled out and area revision will be a lot simpler because people wont make all of the same mistakes over and over.

Where to put the effort? Connect areas so that you don't have these completely separate worlds within the same game, that will bring RP together and make it a lot easier. The more people that RP, the more interesting things are. The more chances people have to RP with one another, the less admin intervention they need to provide things to do. Skullport and Menzo are one separate area? Bring them together, make them one area, let the players intermingle and then they will make their own RP. Let the evils from ZK and Westgate connect to the people below ground, giving them a brisk trade in surface equipment, while provide perhaps extra coin for people below ground that makes them able to afford things above ground. Tie things together so that people can do things themselves, rather than micromanaging the availability of RP. Make available auction characters to good players who can act as drivers of RP. I don't remember the last time auction characters have been given out, and many many that I know of, are inactive. These characters aren't a feather in someone's cap to use or not use at their desire, they are the major players in this world who should be driving RP, not sitting idle for some player who hasn't logged in in a year, they should be a privilige, not a right or something one player owns irrevocably.

These are my suggestions, feel free to tell me they're all terrible But just remember when I make them I'm trying to be as constructive as possible, and know that I really do enjoy this game a lot, I wouldn't waste so much time here if I didn't. And even if none of them are even considered, I'll still play here and try to make the place better.

My opinion only.

Solaghar wrote: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.

First, the evil and monstrous characters are not prevented from going down there. There are ways to get to Undermountain for them. It's certainly not impossible. And even if they can't think of a way to get there on their own (and such a way exists), they can always set up a time and ask if an imm can prepare a roleplay for them to reach Undermountain through tunnels from other areas.

Second, an opinion that I am pretty sure Sharni and I share is that you should be very high level to expect to survive the trip down from the surface to Menzo, at least through Undermountain. And I don't think we consider to make it easier. Yes, the quest is somehow long (the contrary would not be IC I believe) and there's the additional requirement that you have to be grouped up to go down there. But with a tiny organizational effort, it's not that hard to achieve.

Third, I fail to see what problem if any would be solved by making the way down from the surface to Skull Port or Menzo easier. What it would achieve is certainly take some mystery away from those underdark areas (i.e., make them less "special" and make reaching them less of an achievement). If we remove the "requirements"/obstacles to get down there (i.e., if we open an easy way, remove the need to be grouped up, ...), this becomes just "yet another area" with nothing special.

Solaghar wrote: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.

For the first part: that's assuming that adding new areas will actually be an improvement. Taking it to the extreme, my question would be: is it worth the effort to make it for a handful of players, or would we better spend our resources on areas that will benefit more players? The more areas we have, the more spread out the players will be, and the less likely they are to meet up and roleplay. I'm not completely dismissing the idea (and I know that some of those areas are being worked on or, in some cases, already completed), but I'm saying that there's more to it than simply "the more areas, the better".

As far as I'm concerned, I believe that "random wilderness" is not interesting. We could randomly generate 1000 rooms then use them to connect the surface to Menzo. What would that achieve? That would, at best, be a boring walk through 1000 rooms of underdark passages with only minor difference, no special points of interest, no quest, no interesting mobs that "stand apart", no history ... just a hack-and-slash

That's just my opinion, but I believe that some small random areas are fine for adding some space between two interesting things, but lots of random rooms are just boring, so I don't believe that it would be a solution either.

Solaghar wrote: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.

I can agree with the idea of establishing "well-travelled roads" between major cities, although they would be more dangerous than surface roads in my opinion, but I do not agree with the idea of safer roads between the surface and down below.

Solaghar wrote: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.

Well, as stated here and there in the help files and in the new character creation process, what I called "the Good" in my previous post is aimed at newbies. And Menzo and the Underdark certainly is not.

There's a reason to that, beyond the fact that life is harder down there and that help is harder to come by: If we allow newbies to start down there (and make the areas there suitable for a first experience with the mud), we'll soon have a horde of Drizzt wanna-bes. And the few who would play an "evil drow" would roleplay their character according to the definition of "evil" you find on most PvP servers out there, something akin to a crazy psychotic killer, "I am bad, so I kill everyone I see". And that's definitely not what we want.

Now, to make more precise what I alluded to earlier. One may or may not agree with this, but I believe that we (currently) have a very limit amount of players able to roleplay evil characters "correctly" (this term still needing to be defined precisely). So I am really wondering if it's a good idea to spread that 'evil' resource thin through so many evil areas (surface, Skull Port, Menzo).

Well, as I said earlier in another post, I'd rather see the Underdark closed altogether to player characters as a hometown type area than have it remain the way it is. I think you have only a few options really with the Underdark...

- To expand it until it's viable and keep it almost completely seperate from the surface in the way that it is now. Like you said, this would only serve to spread players thin, to encourage more people to create characters that could never interact with other people and hence reduce the overall amount of RP in the game.

- To connect the Underdark to the surface. Don't expand it much at all, keep it at it's current difficulty level and maintain all of the RP restrictions on the Drow in terms of being evil, no Drizzts, and simply allow more contact between the surface and the Underdark outside of the way via Waterdeep and Undermountain.

- To close down Skullport and Menzoberranzan as hometowns and make them places that people can go to for adventuring purposes, but not places that people live and are expected to RP in full time.

Any single one of these solutions would be preferable to the current state of affairs, at least with the last option people wouldn't be wasting large amounts of kismet on characters that 9 times out of 10 they will quickly abandon, though that's their own problem if they do.

As for people coming to Skullport, I have spent RL weeks in Skullport, just on the off-chance that someone will head down there and do something, often without ever meeting up with anyone. The dangers are very real on the way down and the pay-offs in Skullport aren't worth the effort. Right now the city has nothing more than stock goods, a few quests (most of which are broken) and about 20 inns. I've heard that it's all in line to be expanded, but it's not a viable hometown as it stands now. Once a newbie passes level 10, they're literally without any options when it comes to making money apart from running nails around. There is nothing to kill, nothing to sell, there isn't even a set of basic leather armor for them to buy. How are they expected to make 20 platinum to get up to the surface? I'd love to hear some opinions from people who made their characters in Skullport and hear what they experienced there.

When it comes to playing evil, yes I agree that most people don't do it right. Most people also don't play Rangers right, they don't play Elves right or Dwarves right or Drow right, they don't play their alignments right, they don't play their classes right, they don't play their cultures right even when they're humans. If you're going to limit people based on being evil, you might as well limit everyone, because when it comes to doing these things, very few people do it in a way that could be accurately described as 'right'.

No one ever considers closing down cities like Berdusk and Zazesspur and Shadowdale and Golden Oaks because they take away RP from cities like Waterdeep and Silverymoon. People will go and find the RP where they can if you give them the option. One reason people rarely go to Skullport is that there simply is no RP there. It doesn't matter how big the world is, you'll still find people to hang out with because that's a big part of what this game is about, spending time with friends, RPing, adventuring in a group. But I hear the same argument being used against the Underdark and for evil cities, that expanding them will only reduce the RP in the core zones. I'm just against the status quo down there, I'd like to see more options available for evil people everywhere, above and below the surface, but if I'm against anything it's simply the status quo down there, where people who are newer to the game, who might be interested in these races and the RP are dangled the carrot of having them, and who maybe not knowing everything about the game would create these characters, whether a Human in Skullport or a Drow in Menzo, and only once they're created, once they have invested a lot of interest and effort into the characters do they realize the pitfalls. But I don't make characters randomly or often, and I suppose some people do, so maybe it isn't such a big deal, I just tend to really care about and put effort into RPing and I don't like to see it in vain, I tend to ascribe that philosophy to other people, perhaps in error.

Solaghar wrote:As for people coming to Skullport, I have spent RL weeks in Skullport, just on the off-chance that someone will head down there and do something, often without ever meeting up with anyone. The dangers are very real on the way down and the pay-offs in Skullport aren't worth the effort. Right now the city has nothing more than stock goods, a few quests (most of which are broken) and about 20 inns.

I can understand your frustration at not finding any roleplay there, but I still do not believe that just making the way down there "easier" is any solution (I'll develop that further).

The areas are not more dangerous than others, especially when you take into consideration the requirement to be grouped up. Now, it's not really my or any other builder's fault if players apparently prefer to just mindlessly kill thousands of giants of all kinds in Hartsvale rather than set up a group to go down into Undermountain and use this as an opportunity to combine exploration and roleplay (some still go down there, but their only goal is to complete as quickly as possible as many quests as possible in order to get as many quest rewards as possible). Believe me, after the hours invested in building Undermountain, I'd prefer to see it used more.

As for the pay-offs, I'm not sure what to add. There are (at least I hope) some interesting mobs to meet on the way down there, some out-of-the-ordinary underground areas and creatures to explore, opportunities to learn about the races living down there and the history of some parts of Undermountain, plus there are - once again I hope so - opportunities to train in a varied environment (as opposed to killing thousands of giants) and to roleplay about the various discoveries, plus nice quest rewards, and finally the ability to meet drow if you are down there. I hardly see what other kind of pay-offs could be added.

Solaghar wrote:I've heard that it's all in line to be expanded, but it's not a viable hometown as it stands now. Once a newbie passes level 10, they're literally without any options when it comes to making money apart from running nails around. There is nothing to kill, nothing to sell, there isn't even a set of basic leather armor for them to buy. How are they expected to make 20 platinum to get up to the surface? I'd love to hear some opinions from people who made their characters in Skullport and hear what they experienced there.

I agree that adding more to Skullport can only make the place more interesting to visit. I also agree that it needs low-level areas to become viable for new characters. But my question is: is it worth putting the effort there and inciting people who might make evil characters on the surface to make their characters there instead of concentrating the effort on the surface? We don't have that big of a player base either, so filling up all the parts might not be possible.

Solaghar wrote:When it comes to playing evil, yes I agree that most people don't do it right. Most people also don't play Rangers right, they don't play Elves right or Dwarves right or Drow right, they don't play their alignments right, they don't play their classes right, they don't play their cultures right even when they're humans. If you're going to limit people based on being evil, you might as well limit everyone, because when it comes to doing these things, very few people do it in a way that could be accurately described as 'right'.

I personnally find a character who is an evil psychotic killer much more disruptive than an elf who does not know all there is to know about elven fantasy culture or a ranger who spends most of his time in the cities. Moreover, I can see a discusssion with the first kind of character being a waste of time ("But I'm evil, I like to kill people!") while it might be IC to try and convince a ranger to change his way.

Solaghar wrote:No one ever considers closing down cities like Berdusk and Zazesspur and Shadowdale and Golden Oaks because they take away RP from cities like Waterdeep and Silverymoon. People will go and find the RP where they can if you give them the option. One reason people rarely go to Skullport is that there simply is no RP there.

That's because all those surface cities are connected and characters can easily travel from one to another. And it's IC to be so.

Now, you might answer, "Well, create easy connections between the surface and Menzo, an alternative to Undermountain." And my answer would be: "Then, we might as well just rid of Menzo and the drow."

What's the goal of drow areas in the mud? The initial goal - I believe Sharni will agree with me on that part - is to allow people to roleplay according to drow habits, to roleplay a character plunged in a drow society filled with intrigue and backstabbing hidden behind a mask of treachery. And how can you achieve that? By roleplaying with other drow. So a condition for this to work is to have several drow characters online at the same time, and have them play more or less regularly, so that complex schemes and plots can be set up.

Now, let's assume we have an easy connection between the surface and the drow areas, to the point that, basically, it's (more or less) as easy to reach Menzo as to reach Westgate from Zhentil Keep, and vice versa. I'd bet we will see the following:

1 - Surface players will rush to Menzo to buy those nifty magical adamantine and other drow equipment. Then they will notice that this kind of equipment slowly damages when worn on the surface. The word will be spread that it's a waste of money, that piece of equipment X is better than drow things and that it's not worth going there. At that time, journeys down to Menzo will stop, with perhaps a few exceptions.

2 - Several drow will be created (sorry, I should call them black-skinned evil creatures with nice stat bonuses and sometimes insignae with cool powers). Most of them will not have a clue about drow society ("Hey, red-eyed female drow floating on a disc, wanna heal me? I attacked a spider and it bit me hard!"); they won't be interested by roleplaying a drow in a drow society and most will find it to be hard ("Hey, red-eyed female drow floating on a disc, you attacked me, I only wanted healing! That's a PK, no roleplay, I'll fill in a complaint!"). Others will just rush to the surface and ... spend their time killing poor giants and become just another character, with race "drow", but absolutely no drow behaviour.

That description might be a bit extreme, but I believe that, if we open up easy routes between the surface and the drow areas, we will just have to abandon all hopes of being able to create a drow society where people can roleplay a drow. Some contacts between the surface and the drow might be interesting, but constant contact will just make drow "yet another race choice" and nothing more.

Now, I don't claim there's no problem down there, and a possibility to enhance drow roleplay and make it more interesting might be to add other underdark race options, like duergars, svirfnebli, and so on, that would basically be as limited as the drow in their contacts (they could meet each other in the Underdark, but not reach the surface or meet with surface dwellers easily). But doing so with a small player base is - at least in my opinion - a waste of time and resource; and I don't believe it will help the drow situation in the end.

Solaghar wrote:I'm just against the status quo down there, I'd like to see more options available for evil people everywhere, above and below the surface, but if I'm against anything it's simply the status quo down there, where people who are newer to the game, who might be interested in these races and the RP are dangled the carrot of having them, and who maybe not knowing everything about the game would create these characters, whether a Human in Skullport or a Drow in Menzo, and only once they're created, once they have invested a lot of interest and effort into the characters do they realize the pitfalls. But I don't make characters randomly or often, and I suppose some people do, so maybe it isn't such a big deal, I just tend to really care about and put effort into RPing and I don't like to see it in vain, I tend to ascribe that philosophy to other people, perhaps in error.

As I wrote above, I believe there are problems to be fixed there, yes, so I would also prefer change to the status quo. The question is not whether to change something or not (at least in my opinion), but rather - as stated in my initial post - what or how to change?

Personally I love the idea of roleplaying a Drow in Drow society here, but there's limits to it. There's only so many times you can talk to the same Drow when you have nothing new to talk about, nowhere new to adventure, when you never meet new people and nothing ever changes. Drow can't eliminate their rivals because people just resurrect. Drow Matrons have never as far as I know, actually driven RP by saying for instance, we need to bring down House Tlabbar or we need to ally with House Baenre. House rivalry is meaningless, there is no way you can either positively or negatively affect the status of the houses.

And I would definetely agree, that putting all the effort and resources into making this possible, to do all of this stuff and bringing the players necessary to do it would be a lot of effort, and probably not worth it in terms of the greatest benefit to the most players. So if I had to make a suggestion as to how to fix the problems in Skullport and Menzo, it would be to close down the Underdark to new players. Maybe one day it could be reopened if people figure out a way to successfully incorporate the areas into the game as a whole, but I definetely agree that the idea of maintaining the status isn't feasible, and that having in effect, two separate games here isn't a good use of resources. Let those Drow who wish make an application to move to the surface as part of a surface Drow settlement, let them explain what they've done to be a 'good' Drow and how they can still maintain their excellent Drow RP on the surface. Maybe ask some of the Matrons for their opinions as well as to who can remain a successful Drow up there and then just cut off the race and maybe make Menzo somewhere you can reach by travelling down through Undermountain if a surfacer was so inclined, just for the fun of it.

It's really the simplest and best suggestion I could make that doesn't involve huge useless new passageway areas and a gigantic expansion of the Underdark.

Edit: This thread was split from a thread I started with the intent of gathering suggestions for a meeting's adgenda.

This is all really interesting discussion, but to get the topic back on subject, I think the best way to make an adgenda would be to pose your thoughts and opinions in the form of questions (as Dalvyn did in his first post) so we can say, is this someone everyone is interesting in discussing and coming to a decision on at a meeting. I'm not a moderator on the boards or anything, but I'm just saying that while the posts were all very good, they might be best suited as a separate thread, as I created this thread for people to offer suggestions for an adgenda.

Thanks
Jayson

I myself made a character that has a hometown in Skullport a while back. I was really excited about this character when I made him, I think the rp that he coul dhave would be amazing. The problem I ran into was once he left the temple...he is stuck. I cannot do anything really, there is one errand that I can do to make a few gold peices, but it can only be done a certain number of times and then there is nothing to do again. I would LOVE to see a low level area put in or maybe a couple of different level areas, so one doesnt have to travel to the surface to level the character. I can easily see this guy never wanting to find the surface. So a few areas to go and train and make some cash and perhaps some decent armour *hint hint* lol would be wonderful.

My two cents.

Moved from Drow forum.

Speaking as another long term player of Drow characters i generally agree with the points that Solaghar has made in this and the general forum.

I also take on board the points that Dalvyn has made about the relative prioritys and benefits of doing work on Drow specific coding when Drow are a minor (if vocal ) part of the playerbase.

I would also agree that if the ways to the surface where opened then many people would create drow with the intention of going to the surface, which is not a good reflection of the forgotten realms reality as portrayed by the many books.

However i think that there is a place for a closer linkage between the underdark and the surface to create interesting situations for good RP between two interesting and different cultures. My one contact with a non Drow in skullport made for a very good RP experience (i feel for both of us) and opened up an ongoing RP oppurtunity.

My personal favorite would be a difficult (requiring at least level 30 +) route that would allow drow characters to get to one of the sewers below the surface citys. I think that Westgate is the best candiate because it already has a fairly well developed sewer system which is visited fairly often by surface players. Also it would not be out of place for Drow to be there to trade with one or more of the surface traders, influence agents and generally interfere in the politics of the overground. I think this kind of interaction where the Drow are trying to advance there aims indirectly through other evil characters (playing spider in the web) is a good reflection of how Drow should be acting. Drow actually appearing on the surface should be incredibly rare and only ever in support of a major plot. Drow war partys should be feared and would only attack well defined targets not randomly wander round slaying stuff.

I also think that one way of stopping Drow running around on the surface is to severley limit the availability of 'Daylight adaptation' this should be incredibly rare. This would limit Drow to travelling only at night if at all. A Drow caught during dayligh should be in serious trouble.

So in summary i would favour a small targeted piece of work to allow Drow to interact with other PC's in a limited way by allowing High level Drow to get to the sewers of Westgate. Allowing them to leave Westgate and go any further is another issue, this is where the problems might really develop.

Expanding the underdark itself and fixing the bugs within it is a seperate piece of work that would aid in building up a viable underdark playerbase, this however would require much more work and is i feel a more longterm project. The addition of other underdark races would aid this greatly.

I would be certainly willing to help implement these changes in any way that i could.

Duranamir

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