Dev diary: Ritual, Skills, Wyrd

[Gauteamus]

[Ignore Jackard]
Not a bad suggestion/loose idea, I would not mind a multidimensional wyrd system - why stop at dark/light, evil/good, chaotic/lawful though?
Even MtG has a five fold way IIRC (see my Hue/Value brainstorm in the Extended Quality thread).
[/ignore]

One in ten of jackards posts are among the most worthwhile on this forum, I just cannot fathom why he makes all the inbetween noise.

[springyb]

I think this will make Haven and Hearth go way down hill because some of us dont want to do all of this stupied stuff to gain Wrd I just wanna play. If this "upgrade" is actually coming I think many will quite including me.......

If this 'wyrd' system replaces or changes the LP system too drastically, I have to agree.

What draws me to this game is that you're able to sit down and just -play- it, as little or as often as you want. All you really -need- to worry about doing when you play is making sure your guy's fed. The LP system right now is amazing in that your character gets better just by playing naturally and doing whatever you feel like doing. Someone posted that this won't fix the "I can make clogs and get better at farming problem". Why is this a problem? If you want to get better at farming by constantly farming, then constantly farm and spend the LP on farming. Let the players advance their characters by doing what they enjoy doing instead of forcing them to grind.

And that's what the ideas posted so far say, "grind". Once per day, every night, 8 times a day. Things like that create a mindset where the player can feel like if he does anything less then the limit, then he's falling behind. This will make players go out of their way to hit the '8 per day cap', probably forsaking things they'd enjoy doing. If not implemented carefully, these 'per day' things can easily become known as "things I need to do" or "stuff to get out of the way" before actually playing.

And lastly, I am not trying to say it's "bad" idea at all. I think it's a very unique and creative system. (Much like LP, FEP, and the "quality" systems, amazing) My only gripe with it is having it replace the LP system. I think adding in 'wyrd' alongside the current system would be awesome. If you want to go through the rituals in order to zoom around the world chopping the hell out of trees? Awesome. Having to go through them just to advance your character? Not so much.

[ImpalerWrG]

One in ten of jackards posts are among the most worthwhile on this forum, I just cannot fathom why he makes all the inbetween noise.

I knew their had to be a reason people put up with such a jackass

Not a bad suggestion/loose idea, I would not mind a multidimensional wyrd system - why stop at dark/light, evil/good, chaotic/lawful though?
Even MtG has a five fold way IIRC (see my Hue/Value brainstorm in the Extended Quality thread).

I don't think going all out with MTG style colors is appropriate because it really starts to turn into 'schools' of magic, ware jorb clearly wants this to be non-magical-magic. Thus a binary dark/light split, its consistent with wyrd and rituals "pertaining to the soul", it's quite believable to have a dark/light side to ones soul, it quite another to say one has a fire/water/earth/wind etc etc.. side to the soul.

What draws me to this game is that you're able to sit down and just -play- it, as little or as often as you want. All you really -need- to worry about doing when you play is making sure your guy's fed. The LP system right now is amazing in that your character gets better just by playing naturally and doing whatever you feel like doing. Someone posted that this won't fix the "I can make clogs and get better at farming problem". Why is this a problem? If you want to get better at farming by constantly farming, then constantly farm and spend the LP on farming. Let the players advance their characters by doing what they enjoy doing instead of forcing them to grind.

I tend to agree, being able to do what you need to for 'living' purposes (getting food, shelter, exploring) and allocate points as needed is not a flaw in the system. I agree wyrd should be a separate system independent from LP, though the ability to spend wyrd to gain LP would not be unreasonable, but again it should not be all that efficient either, wyrd grinding should not replace actually doing stuff as the best method for advancement. I'm hopeful from the rituals described so far that wyrd grinding will simply not be possible given the very restrictive nature of most rituals (time of day, locations, pre-conditions, daily-max) their simply are not things you can grind away at endlessly. At best you can do them as a routine or when an opportunity presents itself. Even if a player were to try to maximizing their wyrd acquisition it would still consist of a dozen different rituals which would entail travel, various ingredients and the like, it would not be too terribly boring.

Now of course adding wyrd as a new system means we would be hitting overload and something else should probably be removed, I personally find the 'incremental skills' to be a terrible concept mainly because of the confusion they introduce with respect to their effect on the non-incremental skills (some even share the same name!), either combine them (creating a tree of incremental skills much like Diablo 2) or abandon incrementing all together and use a chain of "Advanced X" skills to extend the skill tree and allow specialization.

P.S. Interesting stuff on the Hue/Value brainstorm thread

[Jackard]

Might this "Wyrd/Mana" stuff perhaps be a bit like the force and have 'dark side' and a 'light side', Wikipedia says Wyrd is an old english/norse word for fate so I think this fits with the theme your going with. Essentially a player would have two pools of wyrd points and each wyrd producing ritual would produce either one the other or both types (perhaps one or the other based on something in the world, for example 'knock on door' produced dark wryd if no one is home and light if someone is home), obviously human sacrifice is going to produce a lot dark wyrd. Rituals that use wryd could have costs of one or both types or even 'generic' wyrd like the casting cost of a card in MagictheGathering, naturally the aggressive & destructive spells (like making your neighbors cows dry up and not give milk) require dark wyrd and the productive & healing stuff the light. This allows a modest degree of specialization while keeping a things under the umbrella of a easy to understand binary system, it also fits well with the more 'karmic' feel I think your going for and avoids the more D&D arcane wizard feel.

this post was only barely related to the rest of the thread to begin with, just speculation based on the name

then you sort of assume you are correct (of course?) and proceed to head even further left field by bringing up the force, flashy spells, magic the gathering and that the devs are going for some sort of karma??

where are you getting all of this from

[JustasJ]

The way of collecting wyrd points is ok for me, what they are used for are isn't though. Shaking hands to learn hunting just doesn't look good for me. Most of the other stuff suggested could also be done without an addition to learning points. Burying or burning the corpses should be available with ancestor worship learned. Doing this could reward the burier with lp and the buried with the stuff the buriers had provided him with for his new life. Praying to shrines, worshipping deities or blessing the times of day could also be implemented as well as smoking hemp or eating magic mushrooms for an lp gain.

[Voidfest]

Hehe. Snorri and I have already been playing a lot like this! We built a cromlech of runestones on which we inscribed our gods' names (Ymir through to Nuss) and when we make a kill or go fishing we leave a sacrifice to the gods in the center of the cromlech. This is in additon to sacrificing to the ancestors.

This is going to be fun!

Ha I saw this!
Was on my badly spawned alt, I decided to go exploring with him. (left via wrong ladder instead of stairs)
It looked rather cool if not a little excessive use of limited resources.
I ended up leaving my boat with gathered various samples and food and taking an empty one!
I may of borrowed one or two samples from you, but they are in that boat
Your place was one of the best organised and looking ones I found before I retired that alt.

[Jackard]

id like to see Marching made similar to Timber Song, so it prevents drowning and stamina loss from movement

[ThirdEmperor]

Here's my unwanted two coppers, I like the idea of wyrd in general, but some of this seems unbelievably grindy and people will exploit them ridiculously. Please implement ways to get wyrd without alt exploitation. Here are a few of my ideas.

Offering of Food: Three times per day (once each during morning, noon and night), you can toss food into your hearth fire, this gives wyrd based on the food's q.

Giving of a Gift: Once a day you can give a present to a kin, giving you wyrd based on given item quality (you lose wyrd if you take the item back).

Ponder the Wild: While exploring forests, caves and swamps you'll ocassionally find a spot of "wild magic" which you can ponder to gain wyrd, once somebody finds it the "wild magic" moves somewhere else. Wyrd gained is based on how far from civilization you are.

Greeting a Friend: This should only work the first time you meet a person, and give wyrd based in how long it was since you ladt used it. Otherwise people will just give each other a handshake every day and it'll just be free wyrd once a day.

Knock on a Door/Welcome a Guest: Implement this and I'll just build myself a extra hand. And welcome a guest will just end up as "you knock on my door so I can get wyrd and I'll do the same, repeat".

[Elirian]

Er is this serious?

I really wouldn't enjoy the disconnected feeling from learning murder by singing hymns in the morning and greeting friends into my home. If you want to encourage RP, making talking to your friends part of the stat grind is probably not the best way to do so. I think we might have missed something essential in player motivations here.

More essentially for powerplayer types, being unable to solve multiple problems simultaneously would be an issue. Right now, if I craft an axe, I get an axe, and my character improves. Knocking on doors provides nothing that I want, and will simply be seen as a non optional grind for a large percentage of players. An especially boring one, when you compare it to the grinds in many other games.

In fact, while the proposed system looks fairly iffy to me as is, the knocking on doors part in particular looks outright awful. 8 knocks a day, with gains maximized by having them 3 hours apart looks designed to reward someone who bots to be on 24 hours a day. That's an issue for an action that is so easily automated in complete safety, as almost all the actions on this list are. Combined with the lack of any sense of progress or excitement gained from many of the actions (hello yes I can still see you mr knocking on doors), you're looking at a system that people would prefer to bot than play, will be able to bot easily, and will be rewarded for botting... at which point people are going to start comparing h&h to progress quest.

In fact, I'd like to say just a little bit more on this. The LP system in place does such a good job of rewarding people for actions they want to complete anyway that I am really surprised that you consider it a weakness of the game that needs changing. About the only things I would have thought needed any changing would be greater rewards for harvesting higher quality base materials, making those hours spent searching for them worthwhile for both improved production and character improvement, along with either simplifying or providing greater rewards for the tanning process. Off the top of my head those are the only two activities that don't fit the mould of providing good rewards for time spent doing things that the player already wants to do, which is one of the most outstanding features of the game to me.

[sabinati]

the LP system is easily macroed