Frequent Events/Things to Do Ideas

Rancoura

Stemming from the Lusternia Activity Levels thread, the intention here is to create a comprehensive list of daily (or at least more frequent) events or interactive features that we as players would like to see -- things that will encourage us to log in much more often than we do, that will engage us, intrigue us and shoo that boredom some players feel away. This will hopefully provide a pool from which @Estarra & Co. can pick ideas.

Please post anything not included here that you'd like to see and I'll add it to the list! Thanks to everyone who brought these up in other threads. Feedback on wording also welcome.

@Admin, we would like to see more of:

• casual mob-possession (even just for short RP conversations!)
• shorter events (less Basin-dooming, more low-scale), e.g.:
  • petty crimes
  • NPCs having feuds
  • Bob losing the key to his shop
  • low-risk NPC-initiated attacks (Elryn's post for examples)
• more mini quests doable in ~30 minutes - 1 hour (possibly even chained with saved progress)
• Artisanals/Bardics
• Vengeance games
• Great Hunts/Hamster Hunts
• PvP tournaments (Wargames?)
• misc. arena events: slippers, freezetag, battlerun and battlechess
• lotteries
• increased village revolt/wildnodes/aetherflares/domoth frequency
• pre-coded RP events (Vatul's post for details)
• off-Prime events (Stratas' post for details)

Rancoura

N.B. I've purposefully left out the commodity-gathering ideas, partly because of how much discussion is going on in the activity levels thread and partly because they should probably have their own thread.

Xenthos

Artisanals / Bardics.

ElrynGreythane

I'd quite like to see the occasional NPC-initiated attack (on a small, not nation-threatening scale, maybe that becomes more dangerous/difficult depending on how many players join in). For example:
- contracted assassins loose in the city as part of a trade delegation, use influence to uncover them then kill them before they complete their murderous task.
- a haunted algontherine crashes into allied plane, hunt down the slivvens that are now infesting the area before they expire for nice auridion rewards.
- a band of barbarians attempts a raid on the nation outskirts after knocking out the city guards, defeat a few waves of attackers to inspire a few commoners to join the guard ranks for free.
- possessed animals break loose in the city or foreign hunters are caught trapping game in the commune - put them down before they kill their quota of commoners/critters.

I don't know if that's what this thread is for, but I think I'd like that kind of spontaneous cooperative response to a little mini-event. Especially if there are only minor consequences if no-one responds, and it ends quickly.

Rancoura

Added!

Snald

I've literally never played slippers, freezetag, battlerun, or battlechess.

Snald

Also yes, the revolts/flares/wildnodes are pretty rare and there's a decent chance (even for me, being online ALL THE TIME) of missing them. I feel like I've gone a real life month before missing every revolt or flares because they fired at a time when I'm not usually around.

Versalean

Thinking of lotteries, I'm sure I've seen something like a bookkeeping license in other IRE game, which I always thought was pretty neat, and it's something I'd definitely buy in Lusty and might create a bit of community spirit

Rancoura

Versalean said:

Thinking of lotteries, I'm sure I've seen something like a bookkeeping license in other IRE game, which I always thought was pretty neat, and it's something I'd definitely buy in Lusty and might create a bit of community spirit

Can you elaborate on how that would work in Lusternia? 

Kagato

I don't know how I'd feel about 'bookie' setups in Lusternia, since it would require some level of admin oversight/monitoring, otherwise people would inevitably find ways to game the system unless it worked along the lines of how the Wakabidrome currently works (not based off player interaction)

Vatul

I just posted a "things to do post" in Lusternia Activity levels about RP. I don't want to repost here, because it's long.

Maylea

Vatul said:

Off handed idea about RP - it may not be technically correct or feasible, but something as a springboard to jump off of. So don't take these as like a HUGE master plan. So I thought: How do more Rpz. This was obviously when I was on caffeine, so here we go.

Much like the PVP events we have happening, like wildnodes and flares - which could happen more we could have RP events. These events don't need to be run by admin, but could happen possibly every day and line up with the storylines and history of the orgs you're in. These would be open opportunity events that would factor in some scaling system that weighed in RP mechanics via participation. 

Events could also be tailored to happen in orgs that are outside of the yearly questlines and promotions, like tangents or deeper into the details of the events hinting at other things admin may be wanting to develop. These would be "general" in terms of a prompt, but provide for a lot of creativity to happen.

Consider them like watered down quests, but a chance to exercise HELP EMOTES, HELP SAYS, and all of those RP mechanics to teach incoming players about what it means to develop your character. For for example:

Celest: 

An event window where dragon turtles come to nest, some of the babies require nursing before you release them / Old Celest artifacts bubble up from the waters down from Spectre Isle. / Crabstrosities infest the city! Oh no!

Magnagora:

You witness a hanging/ You gamble for contemptible servants / You try to assist the harbourmaster in building more ships for the fleet. / You do experiments with Snaikka and co.

Glomdoring:

You cultivate wyrden spores/ You stalk a deer from outside of Serenwilde to offer to Crow / You nurse thornbeasts back to health and assist in building homunculi.

Hallifax:

You capture homing pigeons for the post / You assist a Master Artist outside of the Epic Quest / You try to sabotage Gaudiguch by doing something with gems and sparklies.

Gaudiguch:

You get drunk with one of those Enlightened Ones and they reveal pieces of wisdom that further develop your character/ You try to uncover secrets from the Illuminati and fail

These are just a random few. But then there would be combinations of events for each org that would get more unique benefits.

So you could feasibly have enemies RPing with one another, where there are some possibilities of PVP and RP mixing together (those would be tricky). World RP windows would get even bigger benefits - That would be outside of participating in World events run by admin. 

Announcing the window for the RP event would be simply doing a world emote or org emote depending on what was needed. Then the window would close depending on what coded in choices they chose to take with the event. There would be options to be creative around a certain point to get benefits, with a chance of scoring big things like buffs, small prizes, even divine trinkets or secrets from the Fates. 

You could get special benefits for quests if you RP'd in this window, maybe temporary artifacts or boosts to have better chances at crafting items depending on the subject of the RP event prompt. @Luce 's idea for the economy sounded interesting, and it could play into that as well - like there are small ways to encourage RP.
I'm not sure how you would be able to measure participation on a weighted scale. I know this doesn't seem like I have everything down pat about this idea. 

Also, to mark how you have been doing in these RP Windows you could add - not honours but some sort of "reputation" marker for what you've done. So, for example. If I RP with Kalnid in a window about SCIENCE!(tm) and we do this maybe three times a week, we get some random buffs but we also get something on our Honours that says:

Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is pristine. 

But when in Scores, with other orgs that you've RP'd with or are enemied to. It would say:

Her reputation as an enemy of Glomdoring is harrowing. (Meaning that Vatul has RP'd a lot in those windows with Glom, establishing some sort of villainy).

RP windows could also be added to tics in family logs, politics logs - if certain villages like certain event windows that appeal to their sensibilities - maybe it gives some orgs more of an edge. 

Certain RP tics, and reputation markers could generate some different benefits. Maybe in aetherspace, culture, and maybe some buffs/malus to PVP. These buffs would only last for a few hours, so timing would have to fall in with the RP Windows. 

- 

Also, maybe we could have a CONFIG RPWHO, which shows not only who is on RPWHO, but who configs it on as a notification like:

"Vatul is interested in Roleplaying!"

Then off: "Vatul is no longer interested in Roleplaying."

There would also be an option to suppress the notifications if it was super annoying. You could have it organized by org.

I reposted it for you, @Vatul! Thank you.

Vatul

Thanks Maylea! Appreciate it.

Rancoura

Added with a link to the details!

Stratas

I'd like to see minievents of some sort that take place on other planes. Not just aetherbubbles, though sure, those sometimes too, but things like the Elemental or Cosmic Planes. There's generally no reason to go there if you're not hunting or raiding or on your way elsewhere. Not sure what that would look like, but probably on the low-scale sort of thing. Maybe have a chaos hamster hunt on Earth, or an Influence event on Nil where periodic dumps of invading hobgoblins have to be convinced to go somewhere else (so it's less about 'do you know how to get to high value areas before anyone else'). Maybe Tejas is just bored and wants to put on a fashion show with player provided clothing. Maybe Hallifaxian researchers want to see what happens if you put a cat in a Sphere - for Science, of course. Putting some short quests on the other planes as well would be good - do a task for the Supernals and get a bottle of sacramental wine or something. Just anything to make those places feel alive and important for a change.

Put in some new NPCs or area ambients that make it seem like the new guilds have any type of in game presence at all. Hell, even just wandering mobs would be so cool. A nameless member of Glomdoring's Swarm could be wandering around in Hifarae. Someone from the Consortium could be in village general stores, occasionally spouting lines about trade agreements. Whatever Seren guild likes flowers the most could have someone wandering in the tar pits trying to plant things. I dunno. Just make it seem like the guilds aren't just tacked on, but are actually a part of the world.

Kistan

Rancoura said:

we would like to see more of.....

• Vengeance games
• misc. arena events: slippers, freezetag

  I have mixed feelings about these - that perhaps they should concentrate on the other stuff - ones that players can't do themselves??

Snald

@Kistan players CAN do themselves, but when's the last time you've seen them done? The divine have done a few vengeance games in the past week or so (one with Darvellan and Ein playing and the other started by Trader Bob) and had decent turnouts.

Esoneyuna

Yendor said:

@Kistan players CAN do themselves, but when's the last time you've seen them done? The divine have done a few vengeance games in the past week or so (one with Darvellan and Ein playing and the other started by Trader Bob) and had decent turnouts.

I think I am the last one to try to start Vengeance games in Gaudiguch, the average turnout was 4. So yeah I don't do them anymore unless people ask. I guess I should gain the ability to give TDFs if I want people to join mortal vengeance games.

Kalaneya

I want to say I love @Vatul's idea regarding RP events, especially world/cross-faction scenes. For people with limited time commitments, I wonder if this will turn into the village/flare problem where people may just miss the event going on. What I also fear is that it is completely admin-dependent on starting/stopping which I don't think is ideal. Forgive me if I've missed something in there, but I'm operating on too few hours of sleep.

so tl:dr: On 3 hrs of sleep, Kalaneya tries to set up Lusternian RP Tinder

My ideal would be something that would:
1) connect people who are interested in RP with one another
2) recognise and reward those who participate in RP together, no matter how big or small the scene is, which would hopefully lead to
3) encouraging more people to reach out and be more comfortable reaching out to people for RP.

The following disclaimer from Vatul's post applies to mine:

it may not be technically correct or feasible, but something as a springboard to jump off of

so I am sleep-deprived and if I sound like a crazy person, forgive me, I'm still down to RP with you.

RPCOMMEND <player>
Any RP that occurs after setting CONFIG RPWHO (see Vatul's post) is eligible for a commendation. This base command is just to let the person you are RPing with know they did a great job! This can also loosely go along with with Vatul's idea outside of 'designated times'. You get a point on your commendations count, which would lead to:

RPCOMMENDS RANKINGS
A list of people who have been commended and how many times. Now someone looking for RP will know who's proven most willing to engage and may feel more comfortable approaching certain people.

But why stop there? RPCOMMEND (player) could also do is assign a scenario identifier to the commendation/RP scene, attached to the person commending and the person being commended. Then we could do many more things:

RPCOMMENDS
All scenarios that are open for editing.

RPCOMMENDS <#> COMMENT
Elaborate on what you liked about the other person's roleplay! Or provide constructive criticism. 'Hey Kalaneya, you have cool ideas, but it would be more fun for me to participate if you didn't gouge out your eyes and feed them to your pet spider in that ritual because that's not what I'm into.' Then the person can take that into account the next time they RP together.

RPCOMMENDS <#> DESCRIBE
Brief description of the event. 

RPCOMMENDS <#> TAG
Allows you to attach keywords to the scene. Examples include: enemy faction, same faction, allied faction, conversation, debate, lecture, ritual, RP-PK, Glomdoring, Celest, Magnagora, Hallifax, Serenwilde, Gaudiguch, world building, character progression
-Can dovetail with Vatul's idea of org-tied events allowing you to get a line on your honours for doing things associated with your org.
This could potentially generate a profile attached to each person on RPCOMMENDS RANKINGS that could potentially be publically available in an IC book ('Distinguished Personalities of Lusternia') or a forum post. 

CONFIG RPWHO TAG SELF
Can allow you to express what you're interested in for this hypothetical RP dating profile. Tags can be a limited set of things so that mudsex isn't one of them. so that the whole thing looks like:

Kalaneya of Glomdoring
-------------------------- 
Interested in: art, ritual, world building, character progression 

Tagged scenes: 
conversation - 88 
Glomdoring - 80 
same faction - 58 
ritual - 20 
allied faction - 5 
debate - 4 
Celest - 2 
enemy faction - 2 <br>

RPCOMMENDS <#> LOG EDIT
Allows you to attach a roleplay log of the scene. This could lead to a host of other things. Ideas I was tossing around (and this is where things get real complicated and possibly not reasonable/too trollable):
-RPCOMMENDS <#> LOG ADD (player): Two (or more) sides to every scene. Maybe it's some juicy cross-faction plotting that shouldn't make it public! Adds the people to review the log before submitting.
-RPCOMMENDS <#> LOG MAKEPUBLIC: Flags everyone tagged to the scene to review before posting publically. Any of them can reject having it posted publically at this stage using RPCOMMENDS # REJECT. Maybe have a 72h review deadline before it automatically goes to the next step. Then it goes to have an admin review for propriety (could be mortal reviewer level work) and post this in an IC book ('Scenes from Lusternian Life') in the World Library, so that anyone can read about the breadth and depth of RP we have. If not an IC book, then may a post to forums or something. Before posting publically, the admin can make sure everyone who needs to be notified is notified, etc. This could increase the value of this commendation and give you more points on the rankings. 

Rewards:
-the 'extremely credible character line' is essentially meaningless to me. Perhaps we could turn this into a line that reflects how into RP the person is, potentially tied to Vatul's idea (from "She is an ordinary citizen of Lusternia." to "She has distinguished herself as one of Lusternia's most unique inhabitants." to "She has proven herself a paragon of Lusternian creativity", yes, these are godawful lines, sorry). Perhaps after accruing enough points, one could customize this line. Or to customize the lines that Vatul had proposed in her post, you know, when "Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is pristine." doesn't adequately express your supremacy and you really want "The demons of Nil prostrate themselves before her, an awe-inspiring reputation that serves as the embodiment of Magnagoran culture."
-uncouple demi entrances/exits and typecast from demigod-hood to 'able to purchase one once you reach a certain number of RP points'
-can be linked to a new set of achievements that give buffs (can also see Vatul's buffs ideas here too)
-was thinking about if this should be in the CULTURE system but I don't really love that because it is gameable and I am more interested in developing a way to connect RPers together.

Drawbacks:
-The major one is that this relies on players not abusing the system or being trolls. Not a reliable ask.
-Essentially an OOC system for something that should arguably be IC.

-eh, idk if there is even a need for this kind of thing, but since everyone seems to collectively be bored, maybe this can facilitate some conversation/RP in-game.

Vatul

Good ideas @Kalaneya, and thanks for that - One concern I have with your idea is that some people don't like to share logs or show off their RP content. The review syntax would be, I think, used a lot to shoot down a lot of logs - preventing lots being posted.

I agree about the drawbacks. The OOCness doesn't really allow for RP behavior and manners to flourish, true. Trolls are trolls and they'd likely abuse most of it to shame others if it weren't for your review syntax.

And yes, for sure - there'd be a weight system for mine. You'd have a see-sawing scale on your scores. If you don't RP often enough that scale will go down depending on how high you are. So if you reach 1, and then don't do anything for three weeks, it'll go back to zero. Customizing them would be cool too! That's also a good idea.

(Here's a bit of the scale I made up. It would be unique to each org, but this is an example).

0: Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is destitute.

1: Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is beneath notice.

2: Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is rising from the muck of the Undercity.

3: Her reputation as a Magnagoran citizen is being preyed upon by the lowest of socialites.

10: The really clever one you said.

And so on. For allied cities/communes you'd have things like:

0: His reputation allied with the Free Forest of Glomdoring is shadowed in doubt.

10: His reputation allied with the Free Forest of Glomdoring is blessed by the wings of Brother Crow.

Enemied cities/communes:

0: His reputation as an enemy of New Celest is but a distant, dying star.

I guess what would be a good way to do this is not do them on HONOURS <name> but maybe do some sort of ranking like with Explorers and then do REPUTATION VATUL, and it would show all the RPing sorts of things that happened. And maybe if they reach the 10 scale, it shows in their honours or is watered down to one that's general for reputation.

Maybe their could be artifacts to hide your REPUTATION, or prevent REPUTATION loss along with your idea of customization.

I also have a few more things to clarify! Since you brought up some good points.

Admin would not be initiating these events. They'd cycle through certain coded hours of everyday. Ideally events would happen all RL day every 2-3 hours if people were interested. Something like that, I'm just throwing out a number. Maybe there'd be like solo, co-op events, two person events, world events, and org vs org events. Think of them as RP dungeons.

They would be doing the work to code these event windows in, sure. But it would just run on automatic for each org/ subset/world participation. I guess it would kind of be like vengeance in the fact that you'd be locked into the window of the 'game' but if you'd afk, you'd get kicked and no rewards. RPing isn't AFKing after all.

Also! This means that anyone could jump in at anytime. Players, admin.  No one would be missing out unless they chose to. Admin could hypothetically even alter the course by inhabiting other NPCS if they wanted to. It would be a base of a scene to jump off of, for those people who have difficulty just magically thinking of a way to RP.

My whole thought process, I think, was coming from the point that admin cannot always be there for events. But some 'general events' with these prompt examples could happen all the time in your org. Imagine one of those novels where it's like 'Choose your own path.'

There would be certain points in it where you'd have to choose which direction you'd go, much like the outline of a short story - but it would still get you those rewards.

So, say, we have you and me. We are RPing that the Taint is superior to the Wyrd through this experiment we do with the creepy lady near the Moors - I think she has a plant baby. We RP make it, with the quest alongside, but one of us decides to go the villain route and initiate three choice pathways - So the quest lady alongside that quest after a certain point asks us:
"What is your choice?"  To both of us. This is usually kind of guided to with admin present, but in that essence a Quest-giver, could also be guiding us to the endpoint of the scene. But this would be the indicator that the window of the RP event is closing, and will result in both of us being rewarded depending on our choices - but we don't know what those rewards are.

After selection of a choice, that would equal the outcome of the notations in our Scores, where it would add weight after the RP has been worked around.

So, I kill the plant baby with my Soulless mumbo jumbo. And you decide you try to initiate PVP because I've essentially proved you wrong, but I escape! Gasp!

Thus begins a dramatic plot line of nemeses. Will Kalaneya and Vatul meet again, will they clash again? Dun DUN duuuun.

To sum up my clarifications: (tldr)

Admin wouldn't have to be there, they could jump in if they are present and comfortable. Likely interior policing would be able to watch the events, or log them to prevent any abuse or issues from players attempting to be unsavoury.

Reputation as being ranked, scaled via activity, and only huge achievements on honours to save space.

Admin could add different RP event window prompts by simply making a mob appear, and have it triggered to do 'time the event window.' Unique prompts could tie to End of Year tangent questlines, wrap-ups.

Players wouldn't miss out, it would be any time a player wants with some sort of cooldown to prevent abuse.

"Choose your own path" - point in the RP line where you decide what to do. Choices would define the weight of the scores, and what's tacked to your honours.

Quest-givers as RP guiders for unique player interactions.

RP Dungeons lock you in to RP once you're -ready to go-

AFKers don't get rewards or buffs, they'd get kicked and admin would be notified.