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[Vactor]

by disallowing teleportation in order to artifically add gametime played is a tactic that has seen its day come and go.  This is generally used as a trick to cover for lack of content.  If you need to run for 32 hours to get to the next town in order to advance your character, it no longer becomes an interesting choice, just a laborious chore.

I would think a better way to play with a wilderness style world is to have it played out in the trade of resources.  a broad spectrum of quality and a shifting resource spawn system would give players interesting reasons to prepare an excursion to a far away place.  Having an offline journey home would be i think a fair compromise, where it dosen't trivialize distance, but allows a player to be able to go on an expedition, get to their destination, and be able to login tomorrow at their home town when a friend that is there wants to do something together.  (i.e. if you're offline for 4 hours your character will be at your hometown next time you log in)

[Shoku]

While a multiple hour trip to get to another city is a bad mechanic being able to teleport anything you can carry does just blend all the regions together so the only flavor left is the type of architecture and if the buildings are static that probably goes too. It's not just that he wants travel as part of the game but that he wants but what amounts to different countries that have a degree of separation.

[Andir]

That's a good way to explain it.  Each area is it's own game world.  You DON'T HAVE to go to another region if you don't want, but you should be able to if you reach a high enough level to survive the trip.

[HatfieldCW]

Having an offline journey home would be i think a fair compromise,

I like this idea.  I'd be all about having a magic portal that takes you back to town, but you've got to hoof it into the wilds to get to the good stuff.

EvE had a couple of good systems for managing this, I thought.  The most rudimentary one is that having your escape pod destroyed would respawn you at a base of your choosing, so you'd never be trapped behind enemy lines or hours from civilization with no way out.  Another one is the "Jump Clone" system, allowing you to move your avatar, but none of your gear, so you've got to have a wholly seperate base at the destination with all the equipment either shipped in or obtained from the local market.  Very handy for military responses, assuming you have the infrastructure in place.  The third mechanism was jump gates, where you could build a teleporter to move people and ships around, but the cost to operate them made them a special-case utility, and you've got to run fuel back and forth to keep them fed.

The world is huge, and a patrol or expedition could take several hours.  I would routinely get too tired/drunk/interrupted to continue, and volunteer for a suicide scouting run, hoping to discover an enemy force and be whacked in order to pack it in for the night.  Other times, when bad guys are in short supply, you just eject from your ship, let a buddy who lost his hop into it, and then have him shoot you with your own guns.  Fun times.

[Shoku]

That's a good way to explain it.  Each area is it's own game world.  You DON'T HAVE to go to another region if you don't want, but you should be able to if you reach a high enough level to survive the trip.

Well no, I'm suggesting that if you chose the wrong starting area that you not need to remake your character to go right to another one without any kind of having to endure a trip of an effort or time but that you not be able to take anything that can be converted into money (and depending on the currency system maybe even not money,) that way so that there was a reason for taking long trips, but not if you just wanted to play in the same area as someone else.
*with the regional skills system the use of your skills converts into region specific money so you shouldn't be able to take those with you either.

I want all of the regions available at every "level" but having the benefits from multiple areas would only be available to the people who were strong enough to hoof it to the next town and thought it was worth the time to do so. With a large enough world the people obsessed with minmax might decide that they shouldn't bother with getting interconnection between every single region because tempering the lava stones from the sea of fire in the south west portion of the continent wasn't any better than grinding the phoenix eggshells from the middle north region.

Whether you want that particular aspect of gaming or not cold be controlled by how you handled the region connection. If it's just a single web it will be most convenient for them to just run the length of the continent and then extend side branches off of it but if getting it so that the skill from Hyperia over to Thule only gets you another connection on the Hyperia web and although it's connected to Yocast you'd still have to make a Yocast trip over to Thule to get those skills there-
*breath*
-then they'd go for just making the particular trips that were useful for them.
If the skills are very dependent on the materials from those regions it wouldn't be useful to have lava stone tempering on the other side of the world anyway because nobody in their right mind would ship them that far when everyone just used some material a two region trip away for the same general purpose.

Having an offline journey home would be i think a fair compromise,

I like this idea.  I'd be all about having a magic portal that takes you back to town, but you've got to hoof it into the wilds to get to the good stuff.

EvE had a couple of good systems for managing this, I thought.  The most rudimentary one is that having your escape pod destroyed would respawn you at a base of your choosing, so you'd never be trapped behind enemy lines or hours from civilization with no way out.  Another one is the "Jump Clone" system, allowing you to move your avatar, but none of your gear, so you've got to have a wholly seperate base at the destination with all the equipment either shipped in or obtained from the local market.  Very handy for military responses, assuming you have the infrastructure in place.  The third mechanism was jump gates, where you could build a teleporter to move people and ships around, but the cost to operate them made them a special-case utility, and you've got to run fuel back and forth to keep them fed.

The world is huge, and a patrol or expedition could take several hours.  I would routinely get too tired/drunk/interrupted to continue, and volunteer for a suicide scouting run, hoping to discover an enemy force and be whacked in order to pack it in for the night.  Other times, when bad guys are in short supply, you just eject from your ship, let a buddy who lost his hop into it, and then have him shoot you with your own guns.  Fun times.

Well, now my idea isn't very unique at all. Preserves flavor a bit more.

I hadn't really put much thought into how multiple participants would work in to the caravan-to-other-region stuff so you might end up with the rich players having poorer ones haul a lot of their stuff over to the regions where they wanted to use it- I'd pretty much been picturing venture capitalists but some robber baron having his goods delayed because he hired someone unreliable makes for some interesting world mechanics as well. It's even enhance the regional diversity having certain routes that were really difficult to get goods through and having to do things like hire someone to try and go find out where the goods from a caravan had been lost (either some percentage per time the runner's group was wiped out or the entire shipment if they gave up on it.)

This sort of thing could even cue players as to the locations of the kinds of major enemy infestations that warrant a group of heroes gearing up for a mass slaughter of outlaws who are at least troublesome but at higher ranges involved in things like preparing a march of war over to the capitol or unleashing/reviving some horrendous evil from ages past.

-things like "kill me so I can get back to town" work really heavily against the immersion aspect Andir has been stressing so hard.

[Shoku]

Dang, I was hoping this thread would go on forever.

[Lear]

Same here. I'm actually kind of surprised alot of things a friends an I brainstormed about came up in here.

[Shoku]

Same here. I'm actually kind of surprised alot of things a friends an I brainstormed about came up in here.

I've got a decent enough memory that I could probably pick everything out if you gave a list~

[Lear]

It was mostly the scarcity of supplies and the scale of the world that we discussed. Also, diminishing returns in terms in quality of job done (eg you craft a sword over and over, eventually quality suffers) and in terms of exp gained.

We were also discussing ways to make death a harsher penalty, but no so harsh as to greatly discourage people who put a lot of time into their characters.

I was thinking something along the lines of a judgment by a deity the player follows. The player would answer for their deeds in their past life or perhaps have to solve a puzzle or challenge before returning to the world of the living.

[Shoku]

It was mostly the scarcity of supplies and the scale of the world that we discussed. Also, diminishing returns in terms in quality of job done (eg you craft a sword over and over, eventually quality suffers) and in terms of exp gained.

We were also discussing ways to make death a harsher penalty, but no so harsh as to greatly discourage people who put a lot of time into their characters.

I was thinking something along the lines of a judgment by a deity the player follows. The player would answer for their deeds in their past life or perhaps have to solve a puzzle or challenge before returning to the world of the living.

What counts as supplies?

[Andir]

I know games aren't real life, but how is making the same sword over and over with diminishing returns at all intuitive?  People master trades to make better items, not worse items.  If you made 1000 swords in your life, the last one you make is not going to be worse than the first.

You just need to have limited resources in a game world.  If they go the route suggested, that will be very easy to do.  Each tile that's mined out only produces so many of a specific material.  After that's used up, you'll have to melt down old items to make new.  Ironically, it will lead to a majority of the players using wooden/leather weapons (bats, batons, clubs, whips, arrows, bows, etc.) considering they are a fairly abundant renewable source.  Metals and other mined materials wouldn't come into the game world until the miners: A.) find the resource and B.) Refine it and sell it.

[Shoku]

I know games aren't real life, but how is making the same sword over and over with diminishing returns at all intuitive?  People master trades to make better items, not worse items.  If you made 1000 swords in your life, the last one you make is not going to be worse than the first.

You just need to have limited resources in a game world.  If they go the route suggested, that will be very easy to do.  Each tile that's mined out only produces so many of a specific material.  After that's used up, you'll have to melt down old items to make new.  Ironically, it will lead to a majority of the players using wooden/leather weapons (bats, batons, clubs, whips, arrows, bows, etc.) considering they are a fairly abundant renewable source.  Metals and other mined materials wouldn't come into the game world until the miners: A.) find the resource and B.) Refine it and sell it.

If you have just a few players who buy the materials for what they want crafted and tip the crafter how is anyone ever going to get metal to practice with?

[Virtz]

I know games aren't real life, but how is making the same sword over and over with diminishing returns at all intuitive?  People master trades to make better items, not worse items.  If you made 1000 swords in your life, the last one you make is not going to be worse than the first.

You just need to have limited resources in a game world.  If they go the route suggested, that will be very easy to do.  Each tile that's mined out only produces so many of a specific material.  After that's used up, you'll have to melt down old items to make new.  Ironically, it will lead to a majority of the players using wooden/leather weapons (bats, batons, clubs, whips, arrows, bows, etc.) considering they are a fairly abundant renewable source.  Metals and other mined materials wouldn't come into the game world until the miners: A.) find the resource and B.) Refine it and sell it.

If you have just a few players who buy the materials for what they want crafted and tip the crafter how is anyone ever going to get metal to practice with?

Use cheaper metals. Recycle your practice crafts.

[HatfieldCW]

Grinding's never been the best way to level, it's just a time sink.

Ever play Kengo II for the PS2?  It had a really awesome training system.  It was a samurai duelling tournament fighter type game, and your guy had stats like "agility" and "strength" and "spirit", plus you could learn moves and string them into combos and all that.  Quite neat.

Anyway, to get better at fighting, you didn't just fight all the time.  To build agility, you'd run through a bamboo grove, using footwork to get into position to quickly slash through the stalks.  For endurance, you'd stand under a waterfall.  Each of these activities would boost your stats, but only in potential, so your speed attribute would be 325/438, where 325 was your actual stat, and 428 was what you'd "trained" it to through the minigames.  When you actually fought practice bouts with other stuedents in your school, your actual stats caught up somewhat with your potential stats, depending on how you fought, so if you ran around a lot, you'd get a bigger boost to your agility and speed, whereas if you stood and used blocks, you'd build toughness and strength.  Once you hit the ceiling, you'd never get better just from sparring, you'd have to go work out to raise your capabilities.

So instead of having to collect 8000 pieces of copper and make bushels and bushels of mugs, you could sit in your room with five different mugs from different makers and study them, then go to the library and read a book on mugs, then go to another guy's shop and watch him make some mugs, then drink some beer out of a mug, and then the actual workshop time you put in would be buffed by all the groundwork you laid earlier, learning about how mugs work and how they're made.  Thus, a guy who's a mug expert and has made 50 mugs would make better mugs than a guy who rolled out of bed one morning, ordered a tractor trailer of metal and starting cranking out junk.

[Sowelu]

I like that mechanic a lot.