Idea: Druids

[Yolan]

Also, the concept of druids killing trees to form a wall around trees seems bizzare. Druids using brick and metal in large quantities even worse.

Exactly. Surrounding a tree with a wall would be highly suspicious. If somebody had a grudge against you, they could kill you while you are offline/anywhere, simply by bashing down the wall and chopping down the tree. They don't need a scent, or anything.

Hence, the huge bonus of heart-tree semi-immortality would really only be beneficial for those players who are willing to take the risk of hiding their innocuous looking heart-tree inside a big forest, hence making it very unlikely that anybody would know that it is important. At the same time, this makes the player have a vested interest in keeping the forest relatively unmolested. In turn, this is good for the health of the world, which needs abundant wood/hunting areas to function, not ravaged, clear-cut desolation.

[Jackard]

What if their was a skill druids could use to make a tree stronger, harder to chop down? It could require a certain number of dreams/________ to enchant one in this way.

Instead of building a wall, they could (slowly) grow a natural one.

[Onionfighter]

Instead of building a wall, they could (slowly) grow a natural one.

That would be cool, but the current way trees grow prevents their use as real barriers.

[Jackard]

Other spells might be to enchant undergrowth into entangle or thorn traps.

[Jfloyd]

The druid should be able to right click on the tree, and have a menu pop up with options such as:
Imbue- Makes the tree stronger at a loss of LP, and Dreams.

Protect- Makes a trap of varying strength protect the tree from destruction. Adding LP, and dreams would increase the strength of it.

Release- Releases the heart from the tree, and returns it to its normal state.

Also, a new way to get dreams.
Beds- When built, r-clicking would open a menu with the command "Sleep".
Choosing this would log you out, heal s-hp slightly, and generate dreams.
The dreams would only be made if the time of day is night.
A dream catcher would also have to be in the room for dreams to be stored.

[Erik_the_Blue]

Imbue- Makes the tree stronger at a loss of LP, and Dreams.

Why not MHP or CON instead of LP? The druid would effectively be breathing their own vitality into the tree after all, and it'd mean the druid wouldn't have to choose between 'imbue' and 'protect' as far as LP is concerned (the tree could be made even stronger at a greater cost to the character).

[Jackard]

LP/HHP I could see, but costing MHP/CON would be unbalancing at higher levels. It'd give younger druids an advantage over older ones.

I was thinking more of giving trees the strength of a palisade. The real cost wouldn't be the dreams, LP or whatever - it would be the time it takes to grow each tree.

[Erik_the_Blue]

HHP probably isn't good since someone could easily recover that (assuming LP costs would be large). I'm not sure how younger druids would have an advantage though, since they'd have less MHP/CON to spend. Would you care to explain? If you're thinking in terms of health and how long one could stand in battle, I'm not sure it matters much since druids are quasi-immortal anyhow.

[Jackard]

Because FEP costs more with higher stats....................

MHP and CON are much harder to come by than trees or palisades, they would be an unreasonable price and discourage players from actually using the skill

[Erik_the_Blue]

Ah, yes. Non-linear growth does throw a wrench in the proverbial cogs. The costs would need to be reduced proportionately as a character gains stats, which would probably end up confusing many people. Scratch that idea. Though it occurs to me the devs mentioned the LP system will likely be replaced someday, so that might not be ideal, either. A couple other ideas:
1. Tie it into the ageing system, though this would obviously be limited.
2. Require the character to supply the tree with a specific item. To ensure only the character can affect their tree, the items would need to be 'bind on acquire', and no character should be allowed to place these items into another character's tree.