Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Architecture of the Obsidians, Part 5: Desolis Underground!
• Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 20 Postmortem
• Novia – Circa 1977
• Let’s talk about… USE BASED SYSTEMS! Part 1

Architecture of the Obsidians, Part 5: Desolis Underground!

[Continuation of A Dev+ Forum Post by Scottie Jones]

Alright folks! Here’s the last and largest update for this particular area I’m creating. There’s lots more decorating left to do, but I don’t want to spoil everything with teasers. Soon I’ll be moving on to other items and areas!

Near the center of the town of Desolis is a prison composed of the fortress walls of what had long ago been the seat of power for the once mighty Obsidian Empire. These walls surround the Epitaph, a towering plateau containing an entrance to the underground zone I’ve been building. Those who live in the town of Desolis place their criminals beyond these walls (instead of behind bars), where they wander the contained rocky ruins and small oasis surrounding the plateau, unable to escape. Some of the toughest of them choose to enter the Epitaph to claim the cooler inner chambers as their own, though they rarely dare to delve deeper, for fear of the hideous monstrosities that dwell far below.

You’ve seen a version of this following image, but since it’s been finished, I figured I’d start us off at the beginning, with a view as you walk down the entrance hallway toward the Cave of Night. Here you can have a closer look at the sentinel dragon statues favored by the Obsidians, which mirror the even larger version that overlook the outside entrance.

Inside the Upper Prison you will encounter the toughest of the criminals who have been thrown beyond the dark and ancient walls of the Desolis prison compound. Beyond the passages containing the old cells, which now have been claimed by those that wander these upper ruins, you’ll encounter their self-proclaimed leader, who lives in what was one the Upper Garrison Commander’s quarters,…now decked out with the nicest things the convicts could scavenge.

You’ve all seen the entrance to the Obsidian Keep, so I’ll bypass that and move into the keep proper, where all the rooms have been built out and now await final decoration. Soon I’ll be making a pass to turn these rooms into abandoned wrecks now infested with monsters for several centuries (unless they’ve been successfully locked and sealed away)… I think an abandoned underground library would be a perfect place for a web-choked den of giant cave spiders,…don’t you?

From here we move on to the Lower Prisons, on our way to the terrible Reshapers’ Labs.

We know we’re about to reach the laboratories themselves because, despite over 200 years having gone by, the disgusting chamber of the Charnel Pit still reeks of the thousands of bodies once dumped into it, each one a failed experiment. No doubt it is still in use to this day, since the mad remnants of many of those experiments still wander the dark halls seeking vile sustenance.

By now there’s no turning back! Just beyond the foul pit is the great central chamber of the Laboratories of the Reshapers. Three other hexagonal passages lead from this room to unknown areas, but first you’ll need to deal with whatever horrors our world-builders choose to infest this place with!

Connected to this main hall are numerous sub-chambers devoted to the Obsidians’ dark alchemical arts of twisted transformation. Subtle yet hideous vignettes can be glimpsed beyond shadowy archways and reinforced gates; piles of bones surrounding a fleshless, huge troll-like cadaver,…chambers with arcane work-tables,…the skeleton of a dragon, long dead and forgotten.

And lastly, I’ll take you beyond the Chamber of Souls (which you’ve already seen)…to the deepest destination in the Desolis Underground. Here the Obsidian sorcerer lords once stood, to catch a glimpse into their future, at the heart of the power that drew them to this place long ago. This is the cave of the Pool of Destiny, a stone bowl set above a shaft of air and fire to catch the powerful energies of the obsidian shards, carried by mineral-rich waters as they fell, drop by drop, from above. Legend has it that the waters of this pool once gave visions to those powerful enough to use it. What secrets might it still hold?

Well,…that’s it for this thread, my friends… I truly hope you enjoyed it. Look for more threads like this one in the future as I create new areas to share!

Scottie ^_^

Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 20 Postmortem

The team had a rather memorable Hangout of the Avatar this week! Richard, Starr, and Chris chatted about Release 20 and looked ahead to Release 21. FireLotus fielded some great questions and live feedback from the chat-room.

As an interesting variation on the usual postmortem Hangout, Starr, Chris, Richard, and FireLotus agreed to take a shot for every full level tier upgrade that was pledged during the Hangout. Well, um, the community rose to the occasion and generated over $5,000 worth of pledge upgrades during that 90 minute hangout. And the Hangout team had a rather merry time for the rest of the afternoon!

Check out the video if you missed the live show:

Novia – Circa 1977

Now for a historical tidbit from Lord British:

Before beginning any computer role playing games, I hosted a weekend D&D group in our home in Houston Texas. This map, used during those D&D sessions, goes back to about 1977. The lands of New Britannia in Shroud of the Avatar are loosely based on this pre-personal computers Lands of Lord British!

Let’s talk about… USE BASED SYSTEMS! Part 1

[A Dev+ Forum Post by Chris Spears]

For those who haven’t been around for a while, for the first 6 or 7 releases I would write up a massive wall of text style post each release where I just broke down one or two topics in detail. A few clever people identified that the departure of the “Chris’ wall O’ text” posts coincided with the arrival of my daughter. Sadly they were dead on target with that guess and I really just had to stop because I wasn’t able to work 60-70 hours a week and something had to give. This has made Smack very sad…

Well, for R20 I’m making time to write up a few big posts because I’ve got some exciting stuff to talk about! Possibly the biggest change since we started the project. Drum roll please….

Let’s talk about the impending switch to a use base system!

So I’m going to break this brain dump into 2 parts. This first part represents how it appears to the players. I’ll let dev plus people give feedback on it and then assuming feedback is generally positive, I’ll post the second half next week where I explain the specifics of how the system accomplishes its goals.

So outside of a handful of not so constructive people, I think most people acknowledge that we listen to players and change things when needed, almost to a fault. (PVP people, I swear you’ll get one of these style posts soon! I’m looking at you Tek/Abydos/Isiah) So this was an idea I started fishing around the office about 6 or 8 months ago. Our office policy for when to take PTO is “There is never a good time to take PTO so any time is a good time!” I think we’ve finally realized the same is true of major project design changes… “There is never a good time to make a major design change so (if it really needs to happen) any time is a good time!” Well, now is not a good time to make this change so that must mean it is a good time!

Based on a number of reasons we finally decided this needed to happen. The largest reason for it was definitely player feedback. We were also struggling with how to make crafting compelling and immersive in the long run and too many times the answer started with “Well, if we were using a use based system…” Also, while we all still feel we’re not a game that requires extensive grinding, switching to to a use based system will make it even less grindy for players.

The reason we hadn’t switched yet was because no one had a design that we felt was both implementable without massive rework of systems, which was fun, and that solved some of the more serious flaws in the use based systems of UO and SWG. After several more months of thinking and planning, I believe we have something that meets all of those criteria!

So there were a number of problems we were trying to solve with the system but the biggest problem can pretty much be summed up as: “Stack of Pennies”! For those not understanding, in UO/SWG, since everything was purely use based, the most efficient way to advance your skills was to take a stack of pennies (or a wrench if you’re Burningtoad!), put it on the A key and then go to bed for the night. Today that stack of pennies would be replaced with a keyboard macro or robot program. While it is fun to hear the stories about people who became Jedis in SWG by dancing for a day and then tumbling and using medic on themselves for a day completely through macros, this is not the game we really want to make!

So let’s get to talking about how it will appear to the player:

Skill trees will generally look the same as they do now. The only real visible changes is there will be a small toggle icon for train/do not train, a small bar going across the bottom of each skill icon, and the number above each skill go from 0-100 instead of 0-5. There will also be a few new skills at the tops of some of the trees that are effectively tier 0 skills that represent things like polearm base attack skill, bow base attack skill, etc. Mousing over skills will show when the next glyph is unlocked for those using random decks. The effectiveness of the skill will now be tied to the 0-100 number though and not the number of glyphs unlocked.

Skills will start at zero and training takes them to a 1. That unlocks the skill and allows the player to use the skill. For active skills, when a player uses the skill successfully, the small bar on the skill will go up slightly assuming they did something useful. If they failed or missed, it will still go up some smaller amount. For passive skills, they will simply progress slowly while the player is actively playing. Skills will default to “Train” but can be toggled to not train which will allow other skills to progress slightly more quickly.

Repeatedly using a skill in a pointless manner (attacking a training dummy, casting fireballs at cows) will actually improve the skill some but will have rapidly diminishing returns until you go do real stuff. Adventuring, PVP-ing, crafting, will all show much faster advancement in skills.

All skills go from 0 to 100. Skills that gain glyphs generally gain an extra glyph at 1,10,20,40, and 80. Skills that have more levels than 5, gain at evenly distributed increments. For example, for the Strength passive, you gain a point of strength for every 2 skill point increases in the strength skill because 100/50 = 2.

Passives will advance pretty slow but you will be able to go to a trainer and pay for a lesson with most skills. The lesson will give you a buff that helps you increase skills faster for some amount of time though that will come at a cost to the speed at which other skills advance.

All skills will VERY slowly decay over time. Current target is that if you set a skill to not train, it would take about 40 days to lose a full point. That decay will only be applied at death or when gaining another skill point. There will also be a cap to how much decay can be accrued so players who don’t die or gain any skills for a month, aren’t suddenly going to get a bunch skill decreases on their next death. Also worth noting that death does not accelerate that decay process, it only applies it.

There are no hard caps on how many total skill points a player can have. Due to the slow decay there is a sort of a soft cap where at some point, no matter how frantically a player tries to advance everything, they will not be able to keep everything at max. Also, the higher the skill is, the tougher it will be to maintain BUT the same 40 days to lose a point still applies!

Player hit points and focus pools both slowly increase over time and are based on their stat passives. Just as with the existing system, players can expect this to not be a huge curve though.

A handful of real crafting skills will be coming online this release as well and they too will use this system. Also, the salvage system will make it for R21. This will let a player break down finished items into its base components. This conversion is a lossy process but how lossy will depend somewhat on player’s skill in salvaging.

Also, keep in mind that players will be able to salvage many of the items that they find on creatures. So now those useless rusty swords suddenly become not so useless as they can be taken by a blacksmith and turned into iron scrap which can then be crafted into an ingot. All the while earning the player skill up options with the use based system!

Also, for those worried about there being a wipe to drop this in, don’t fret. We will be wiping skills BUT the way the system has been engineered means that players who are highly experienced now will advance FAST in the new system. So don’t feel like you shouldn’t adventure in R20. Go adventure, PVP, and craft like the wind!

That is it in a nutshell! Next week I’ll post the second half of this brain dump which will include details of some of the mechanics that are going on behind the scenes. See you next week!

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears