Why Avoiding RP Makes You a Wanker!

Another devblog and another week on the Sea of Storms. In keeping with the original intent of these devblogs to be something informative and relevant, I will be addressing some annoying role-playing tendencies. The chief amongst annoying role-playing tendencies is when someone avoids role-playing with others. It’s really simple, when you log onto the Sea of Storms you should, hopefully, be logging on to role-play.

Now, I realize that some people play the Sea of Storms and enjoy some solo play. I enjoy quite a bit of solo play myself, as do channelers, shady types, and older players with thousands of hours logged. So a good rule of thumb is, if you remember your last role-play in detail and had fun, then you’re doing fine. Normally this equates to something like one role-play a week, which is a fair number with an active schedule in your daily life.

Logging on to the Sea of Storms with the intent to role-play is important, since it’s the basis of the game. However, logging on with the intent to role-play then turning down role-play with certain characters is what turns you from a misguided player into a wanker.

The crux of this problem is set firmly on the players shoulder. When someone asks to role-play it’s not your character saying no, your character addresses a role-play situation after you’ve started to role-play. Players avoiding certain characters is OOC/IC information, but it’s one that we let slide. Still when a mercenary, whitecloak, male channeler, Aes Sedai asks you to roleplay. You should never turn them down because doing so would threaten your character in some way.

All you’re really doing is deciding that you know ICly that character is this or that. So based off that IC information you’re deciding as a player to avoid role-playing. It’s probably the last bit of OOC/IC abuse that is allowed on the Sea of Storms on any large scale level. Personally, I’ve always found it to be something of a self imposed handicap. Stories are born out of division and conflict, on many levels ranging from physical, emotional, and philosophical. By choosing to remove this conflict and division and waiting for event immortals to generate these situations you’re depriving yourself of superb role-play.

I’ll give an example in hopes it helps make my point. As Jeshin the mute, I role-played with Alisa Sedai every chance I could. She knew I was a male channeler and had told me that when my madness progressed that she’d either find a way to help me or gentle me. I knew OOCly that eventually I’d go insane as my taint went up and Alisa would do her thing. This didn’t stop me one bit, characters aren’t meant to live forever. They’re meant to exist as experiences and stories. If their story ends that’s just their story ending. To finish the Jeshin and Alisa example, she eventually kidnapped me to the White Tower when Samiel declared dragon. I managed to escape and join Samiel. The point is that it was a great set of role-plays and gave my character an amazing experience of nearly being gentled and escaping.

My Story from the Old Days

***Disclaimer: This is mostly story with a little commentary.***

Yesterday there was supposed to be a devblog but clearly there was not! Instead we will be talking about the old days and when I say old days I mean like eight years back. So, long long ago in the before time there was Jeshin and he was new. He was a mute and a channeler, perhaps not the most unique first character but I was new.

I originally joined the Sea of Storms in my freshman year of high school, probably back in 2000 or 2001 and to be completely honest I also joined the Sea of Storms because of a forum role-playing board called… Actually I can’t even remember anymore. It was a Wheel of Time themed board and one of the staff members there said the concordance would be a good place to use as reference. When I saw it was part of a MUD website, I thought awesome and started to play.

I logged in and created a character by the name Jeshin. He was a mute, a channeler, a vagabond, and a perfect example of a newbie. My first months with Jeshin were probably some of the stuff that is commented on now. He was one of the only channelers to ever escape Nico, he channeled in the Hall of Servants, and was a general troublemaker.  The most outlandish of those is channeling in the Hall of Servants.

My first experiences on the MUD was meeting Nico, Alyn, Samiel, and Inzu. The last of which was probably a meeting that caused the Sea of Storms years of trouble. Me and Inzu hit it off fairly quickly. We both enjoyed role-playing and the Wheel of Time setting. When he first created he was a gleeman who ended up doing a few shows at the Feast of Lights. At the time Jeshin was a bartender at the Feast, he didn’t really need to speak and he occasional played cello in the place of real entertainment.

Shortly after Inzu was approved for his gaidin sset and became a member of the White Tower. Still we had already had a strong friendship both in game and out of game. Surprisingly, Inzu joined the MUD to learn English. He was always a fairly good role-player though.

So you have a gaidin and a male channeling bartender as the best of buds, you can imagine some shenanigans happened. Such as Inzu and Alisa being directly responsible for me being able to get into the White Tower ICly and channel in the Hall of Servants and leave something like 25 finger flames on the ground.

That experience, which was role-played is probably one of the fondest memories I have. Even though it’s terrible, absurd, and completely something I’d be shocked to see today as an Immortal. It was awesome back then. Truly an experience and not a goal I had set.

I had really intend to include more story here. The more I write this, the more I find that in the last eight years the amount of stuff I could reminiscence about is staggering. So I’m going to tell you the point and if you’d like to read more stories on the Devblog, post a comment on here asking for it.

The point of my story is, I was new once and made some of the mistakes the new players of today make. I met my best friend on this MUD and have continued to game with him even now. I will definitely go in depth into the shenanigans me and the infamous Inzu got into if I do one of these again.

To quote something Inzu once said, “Once you forget it’s a game, you’ve won the Sea of Storms.” If more players tried to immerse themselves rather then game the system. Start treating it more like an experience then anything else. That’s when the Sea of Storms will become more fun then you can imagine.

- Jeshin

I’m the Dude Playing the Dude Disguised as Another Dude

A hilarious line from the movie ‘Tropic Thunder’, where Robert Downey Jr. is playing an actor, playing a black soldier from the Vietnam war. It’s also an oddly relevant line to most of us as roleplayers. I’ve seen a lot of players come to the Sea of Storms over the years, who have started characters only to meander aimlessly further and further from any semblance of character concept.

The idea of a character concept can be a little tricky for the average gamer, since in almost all cases we never need one for the other games we play. A character concept is who, what, why our character exists. Each of these helps to provide a better foundation for roleplaying our character and having direction. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, people who have characters seemingly driven by metagaming goals such as level 2 channeling, level 7 forms, and ultimate power. In most cases these characters are poorly roleplayed because they have no concept, they’re just vehicles for the player to reach those goals. The biggest pitfall with thinking this way, is that the Sea of Storms is centered on roleplay. So to enjoy the game and fulfill your goals a player needs to roleplay well and enjoy it!

The first step to creating character concept is to take what you want to achieve as a player and put it into terms your character can understand. I think a good example is someone who wants to be in a lot of events, get forms, skills, and not be restricted to one city. These are pretty common desires from a player prospective, and the good news is there are a lot of different character concepts that can attain these things. So to achieve these desires lets take a hunter for the horn, who has lived on the docks of Illian until he was in his early twenties. This gives us nationality, appearance, age, and a possible motivation to rise up out of the hard life of a dock rat. That is who our character is, a young man who worked the docks in Illian. 

Now what is our character? Well, having heard stories of glory and respect for the hunters of the past, he quickly drops his life as a dock hand when the hunt for the horn is called again. This gives us his view on his life. He finds the act of hunting for the horn a way to rise up out of his current life and gain fame and adventure. The character we have so far may have been thought of before, but just because it has been used before doesn’t mean the concept isn’t viable. You don’t need to break the mold every time and have a unique and one of a kind idea, in fact you’ll probably come up with more bad ideas that way.

With our who and what in place we now need the why. It should be pretty simple with the who and what thought, we can surmise he had a boring life and wanted the piece of the glamour sung of in the stories. Maybe he had friends who joined the hunt and it goaded him into joining. Perhaps he borrowed money to buy gear and a horse to go hunting for the horn and now he has people from Illian looking for him to repay his debt. These are all ideas that give your character the why for his decisions and actions, such as learning forms to defend himself.

The above is a quick and dirty way to figure out a character concept that gives you as a player what you want in your character for roleplay. Another benefit of having a character concept is that Immortals love it. It’s so much easier to design events for people who have an established character concept that an event Imm can look at and understand. Character events also impress older players and make them more likely to give you those forms and skills you want because you’ve thought about roleplay not just code.

Everyone Hates Channelers!

Ok, so not everyone hates channelers. Everyone does however, get tired of new players making channelers all the time. It’s not so much the fact that making a channeling character is bad. It’s really that so many people make them, and to be honest, they don’t exactly roleplay them very well.

The reality of creating a channeler, is that it is really one of the hardest roles to play on the MUD. In the Wheel of Time setting, channelers are a very touchy subject ICly for people. For example, in the first book pretty much everyone in Rand’s village had a very strong and culturally driven view on Aes Sedai and channeling in general. Thus, our characters on the Sea of Storms would also have opinions formed by the fact channeling caused the end of the greatest age of the world. This means that not only do the players not like channelers per se, but that the NPCs of the world are also not overly fond of them either… Everyone hates channelers!

So, what’s all this nonsense about people not roleplaying channelers very well? Pretty simple really, there are a lot of common roleplay mistakes that lead to players approaching the character in a different way then is really logical. The first issue arises from the simple fact that in most cases the character wouldn’t want to be a channeler, but the player does. This gives rise to the cases of male channelers that are excited to be destined for insanity and death, as well as female channelers that don’t want to go to the tower, because channeling is just to cool for school.  While these character types are completely possible, albeit rare, the truth is almost every newbie who makes a channeler falls into these two categories.

The second issue that comes up is the absurdly knowledgeable characters. The kind of knowledge that a character in the setting wouldn’t really have, but a player would. So we have the difference between player knowledge and character knowledge. This causes things like channeler level 0 people talking about angreals, knowing that a tingle means a female is channeling, and chatting to each other about what flows they’re skilled in as if they were trained in the tower. This particular issue is annoying to me personally, mostly because it borders on a policy violation for OOC information. I don’t really enjoy busting people, especially newbies, for not understanding the role of a channeler very well. It’s not really their fault after all, the channeler is a harder character to understand and roleplay.

The third issue isn’t really the players fault, well sort of, but not really. This issue comes up with numbers. At certain points during the month, depending on the newbie count and some other factors, we can expect the nonchanneler to channeler ratio to be like 1:2 or even 1:3. So with 10 people online, we can expect at least 6 of them to be channelers.

Despite these roleplay difficulties channelers provide a lot of benefits. They are good for players who like a little bit more solo play. They also have quite a bit of good roleplay potential. The channeling system on the Sea of Storms is pretty deep once you start delving into it. A channeler can easily spend a couple months reaching the second level of power, then several more months making themselves a force to be reckoned with. Some of our best roleplayers have been channelers. The concept allows for very in depth roleplaying, along with some interesting interpersonal relationships with the nonchanneler population.

Some of you may be asking yourselves, when is a good time to make a channeling character on the Sea of storms? The answer is any time, as long as you understand the pitfalls of the character. If you’re not in the White Tower, then your female channeler won’t be to well liked by the NPCs of the world. If you’re a male channeler, then everyone and their mum will want you dead. A player should have an open mind about how they play their channeler and be willing to re-evaluate the approach they’re taking if someone offers advice. If a player can understand and accept these simple truths about playing a channeler, then they are well on their way to playing a great one.

On a side note, I’ve finally decided to write a how to guide to roleplaying a channeler on the wiki. I hope that this will help newbies and regulars alike enjoy their characters more. I also hope that this will prevent older players from seeing a bunch of misplayed channelers and deciding to off them!

Events for Players by Players!

It’s a pleasant Monday morning with little to no chance of the Foregate getting any easier to finish. After mapping it for the last steps of the review, the staff discovered that someone managed to botch the layout. Clearly it wasn’t me! Regardless of which event immortal may or may not have caused the issue in layout, it is in the process of being fixed and will only add a few more days onto the release schedule at most. However that isn’t what this article is about, this article is about events. Not just any events, mind you, but events for players by players!

I am, of course, speaking of player events, those often mentioned and rarely seen set of circumstances where a player can run an event just like a staff member. As the only active event immortal on the Sea of Storms, I’ve often wondered what players want out of the game. At first glance I can surmise they want roleplay and story. With a second pass, I can determine that excitement and growth of power is important. On a final overview I can see that, despite the previous two observations, maybe I don’t have an inkling of what the average Sea of Storms player wants out of their gaming experience.

So the event immortal has come to the conclusion that he doesn’t actually know what the players want. Being in charge of creating an fun experience for players through story based roleplay, makes that a bit of a problem. Yeah, it was pretty jarring for me as well. I kind of sat around for a couple weeks looking at options. I could try to change how I ran events to make them less scripted and more reactive to players. When I tried that with my co-event immortal Orson a group of players ended up staring at a door for 4 hours in a roleplay. Clearly a disaster had evolved with the approach of reacting to players instead of providing plot and guidance. To be honest, I only really tried this before realizing maybe the best people to run the events are the players. The only problem with this approach is that players can’t be trusted with forsaken, shadowspawn, rulers of countries, captains of the guard, children of the light, assassins in the great game, etc. etc.

From this impasse with allowing players to run their own events arouse the current player event design. A group of players can join a roleplay and have universal control over non-restricted NPCs; barkeeps, serving girls, citizens, travelers, scholars, even Ogier on occasion. I thought maybe I’d discovered the key to providing the players with what they want. Giddy with excitement, I brought the Idea to Luthien and he quickly agreed. In almost eight months of being in place it has been used less then eight times!

I hope that the above explains why I created the player event system, if it doesn’t then here’s a simple version. I trust players to know what they want. I thought players would like to tell their own stories. I know the players on the Sea of Storms can be a creative and fun group.

With all this being said, I will be using this devblog entry to announce a new tool in the player event line. Hopefully this will help entice players to use it and grow comfortable with running their own events. Starting on 09.14.09, I will be providing player event kits. These kits will include NPCs with descriptions, motivations, and roleplay notes. In addition, they will include holodeck room descriptions and in some cases premade items.

It is my hope that with these easy to use player events, players will start to use the system. There’s a lot of really cool stuff that could be done on the Sea of Storms if the player event system was more widely used. In fact I’ve designed some storylines completely around the player event system. Which causes a bit of a problem considering it has been used only rarely. I can’t release these storylines until players have actively shown they can responsibly control NPCs and story first.

- Jeshin

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The Thought Behind the ‘Algorithm’ Update

Recently a patch known as the aLGORITHM has been released on the Sea of Storms. The first thing someone might notice about this patch is the awful use of caps lock. That’s mostly due to my in ability to properly type which got it dubbed the aLGORITHM by Luthien. So with the most obvious question out of the way, the next question must be. What exactly did we change?

Well dreaming was moved back to its rightful place as a major talent. The scholar talent has been properly supported now with the ability to teach various languages such as old tongue or Ogier. Finally we modified our drunk code to affect posts. I know awesome right?

Wait… we also brought back gifted and strong channelers. In fact the very nickname to the patch was given in reference to the new formula that dictates flow strengths for channelers. I suppose that is the most important update, well that or the ability to finally post URLs containing & in them without double typing &. Nah, channeling is totally cooler so lets cover that.

Channeling has long been debated by mortals in its balance. Mostly you would have non channelers such as blademasters or soldiers denouncing weaves like wrap, airblind, and any of the more powerful weaves that essentially allowed channelers to pummel others in one on one combat. These complaints have always been responded to by channelers saying that all a non channeler had to do was bring support or simply not go toe to toe with a channeler. Which if you think about it seems a little like common sense. Still with the claim that channeling was to powerful, we still got requests to unlock the strong and gifted channeling talents.

I asked our new assistant coder Kimadi to give me a statement about the update for the players. Here it is: “The problem with the re-implementation of strong and gifted channeling strengths did not lie into making them possible – that was a few simple lines of code. The true difficulty lied in several aspects, the main aspect being our wish for a ‘realistic’ environment, which is something that is hard to describe by requirements yet easy for a human to recognize. We did not want people to distribute their flow points to gain very specific code-wise benefits while other matters would be neglected beyond any comparable realism. But on the other hand, restricting players was too much is another matter of concern – both for the purpose of playing, and the fact that even in the world of the Wheel of Time, there are those odd few people who defy the norm as we know it. In the end, both realism and oddities have become fully possible in the new system” – Kimadi

That pretty much captured the intent of the update in my opinion. However, I still haven’t really told you what we changed in channeling, so I’ll get to that now. In the olden days way way back in the before time there were gifted and strong channelers. These old players could allocate their flow strengths however they pleased the only system in place to moderate the maximum  strength in each element was a rather wimpy little +1 extra pt required to raise a strength for every spot above 25. Today’s gifted and strong channelers must have a fair bit of balance to their builds. Just like in the books most channelers are proficient in more then just two flows and none really had an inability to do anything in one flow let alone two.

Without revealing the numbers involved in the formula I can say that if you have 26 or higher in your main flow then you can expect to have at least 9’s in your lowest. In the past it was 1’s so from the get go we’ve already balanced things significantly. In this patch we also fixed some of the flow skill requirements on fire weaves. The older numbers were higher then their earth and air counterparts and during testing we realized that these ‘slightly’ higher flow skill requirements equated to significant changes in male channeler builds. This was mostly due to their low flow skill modifier in comparison with their female channeling counterparts. This has allowed channelers to have variety in their weave selection. No longer will people be using the same three weaves in every situation.

Not a lot code was changed in all honestly. The real change has been the in the framework we’ve placed. With the new algorithm in place and new levels of channeling open we can begin to introduce new weaves. A project we are already working on. In addition new channeling talents and possibly a new way to use weaves in combination with other weaves will be implemented. Really this update marks the beginning of what will hopefully be a long line of successful updates to our code engine to support realism and roleplay for our players!

- Jeshin

Building the Foregate

Recently on the Sea of Storms the staff has been reviewing an area called the Foregate. This new addition to the game has been a trying experience for me personally in two ways. The most painful of which was a hard drive failure leading to the loss of a portion of the area as well as the near complete loss of almost 4 months of work on another area. The less painful of which has been my personal laziness to complete it. This area has actually taken me longer to complete then I have been a staff member on the game, just to put it into prospective.

However, in early august I finally got over my aversion to finishing the area and began in earnest. Upon what was most likely my 242nd attempt to complete the area in the last six years, I realized why it is I always ended up not doing so. The place is a bloody mess! It’s no secret the Foregate has been passed amongst several builders before arriving on my doorstep. One can not imagine the amount of different issues with the area upon final review.

Normally a single builder for a MUD has a certain style. They also have certain weaknesses. I’m a little iffy on my grammar as you may notice during the course of this blog. So when I build an area, I can expect to have to edit room descriptions from time to time. Well that’s just my personal weakness when it comes to area building. This area has been through several people before me, so now imagine four different problem areas for the whole area.

I’ll admit the review process of this area has been a lot more work then I’d hoped. I was originally only required to do 25 rooms or so of the area to complete it. Yes, It took me almost five years to do 25 rooms. Of course even after completing those rooms in early August, myself and Luthien have been reviewing the area ever since.

The review process is pretty straight forward. A sign that we don’t like to let an area sit to long in a complete state without implementing it on the live server. First we go through all the rooms of the area, and by we I mean Luthien. He reads the room descriptions and makes sure they’re grammatically correct and coherent. If they’re not he might put a note up with the rooms VNUM (virtual number) or simply do some immediate triage on it himself.

The next stage is dealing with MOBs (Mobile Objects) or more commonly known as NPCs by the average roleplayer. I just want to tell you that the Sea of Storms has a custom race listing and MOBs are completely customizable. That being said the MOBs in the Foregate were all Aiel and had 2’s for all their stats. Most if not all had no equipment. Still the greatest sin of all was that one of the previous builders had made these mobs active. So you can imagine me at 3:00 am in the morning chasing down errant NPCs to make edits to them or zap them with a sentinel command to make them stand still long enough to fix them. I can tell you it was not a fun experience to have to hunt mobiles that seemed sentient and intent on avoid me despite my impress array of commands on the builder port.

Eventually I ended up stealing the NPCs directly from their area into a special room with no exits. I don’t have to mention how creepy this can be for someone running on coffee in the early morning hours but I will say I started to question my ability to be a good stalker…

Despite all of this, and I do mean IN SPITE of all of this, Luthien and I have managed to bring the area to near completion. I just need to kidnap some more innocent MOBs back to my dark lair for editing and the area will be ready to go live! (Forces Vandread to backup the server just in case!)

- Jeshin
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The Return of Text Based Gaming

About 30 years ago games like Zork and Enchanter existed. These were text based single player games much like the first Monkey Islands. From those games spawned something called Multi-User dimensions  or MUDs. These were the precursors to MMO’s of today and are probably still just as much fun if not more then the average WoW instance.

One of the biggest draw backs to text based gaming is a lack of immediate satisfaction. More often then not a players first experience is had on a telnet connection which tends to be crap. However, recently bc-dev.net guys have designed something called Fmud or Flash MUD. A easy lightweight webclient that allows people to connect to muds with ease. With this new, clean, and simple client out there for free it is possible to start trying to bring players back to text based gaming!

That being said, I’d like to invite anyone who enjoys a great story and some character development to come try out The Sea of Storms. We are a Wheel of Time themed MUD with a lot of friendly players and staff waiting to introduce you to the fun of text based gaming

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