Reagents
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If for doign a particular thing, needs x,y and z reagents and If Players get these and then send in an application to DM who will supervise your ritual on what they intend to do and **mainly how they acquired them (least odds of success for reagents bought from other players or from quested scripts and high odds for exploring)..**will this not solve the probem ?
You will force people to explore and discourage people from buying them from market
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i have never bought a hedge magic reagent, but have managed to trade favours for a couple of them.And i think that this is the way that the system is supposed to be run.
Search the items yourself so that they are 'pure' and unsullied by the hands of others else the ritual you plan will be tainted.
As an example of this whilst playing as the red moon hunter Karic , i had a plan on going where we were going to taint the meat of the white stag and pass it to the zhents who had a deal with the red hart. The plan being that their ritual would be corrupted as it would be touched by Malar as well as any of their own desires.
As it was we were told by an NPC that this was not a use that Malar would approve, regarding it as poisoning.
Any way back on topic. I would suggest that the items be given a 'tag' that shows how many times they change hands. So the 'quality' of the item can be judged?
This in itself would possibly cause the factions to want a larger level range within their ranks too.
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Remove reagents from quests.
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See what the players hope to accomplish with the ritual. After all, if success and failure is in the hands of the DMs, don't let the ritual proceed as expected if a group splurged 10,000 and bought every one of them.
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Remove the obligatory spellcraft/concenration/lore/whatever roll. This is usually of little use, as people simply find the highest level spellcaster available and hire them to conduct the ritual. It also means than a roll of 20 doesn't guarantee success, as seems to be the case from what I observe. (Might be wrong!)
I understand the allure of hedge magic myself, even if I never cared for it personally; It used to be, as Mr.Moloch stated early this year, that if you happened to be online at the same time as a DM, you got involved. Now, you can work towards what you want irrespective of DM presence.
As hal says, any steps taken to make hedge magic harder to obtain is not going to affect the reagent economy much. You could make it hard to get, for example, clues–>equipment-->reagent, but people will be selling the clues and equipment along with the actual reagent, then.
If reliance on Hedge Magic is to be reduced, I think the best way is just to make the playerbase understand that the success of the ritual has less to do with the fact that you acquired all the reagents, and more so with the amount of fun you generated while looking for them.
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If a group hasn't been exploring and finding them, or getting them by making deals of mutual benefit, etc. simply fail it.
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If someone's planning on completely resolving a DM plot with deus ex machina, fail it.
Once hedge magic really becomes as unstable as it's supposed to be (and while a lot of hedge magic rituals don't go as expected, speaking from a player's limited perspective, most of the rituals I see usually end up positive.) people'll think twice before turning to it, or turn to it only in abject desperation.
Which is, really, what it should be. A last resort. A mad scheme to try something impossible.
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Assuming that a DM is needed to overview the ritual, the result of it will be heavily influenced by how the reagents have been acquired.
So if the majority of the reagents have been purchased or "farmed", give the ritual odd result.Also storing reagents might give some weird result (if not "immediately" needed for a ritual). i.e. metals that are close to the rubicite get corrupted, if you hoard white stag meat you can get infected with a parasite, etc.
Some NPCs could also be willing to purchase the reagents like the White Stag Meat quest… (even if this might lead to more farming).I've never been a big fan of Hedge Magic since - for a while - it seemed to be the panacea for all the diseases.
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Turn it around so the whole idea of Hedge Magic and regents is actually the grand plan of some evil wizard who's main goal is to convince people to do ''rituals'' with ''regents'' for some grim and forbidden reason.
There are no regents, there are no rituals - it's all just a crazy joke / dream.
On a serious note:
I don't really see an issue of selling / bargaining with Regents, but it got really silly when the world and his mother were doing rituals to solve everything as has been mentioned - it almost got to the point where it felt like you HAD to go and find the regents to do ANYTHING, but that was more a problem the playerbase made for itself than anything the DMs did.
Anything that spawns will get farmed (see crafting way back when), the placing of spawns in dangerous places just leads to high level people going and crushing the spawns and taking the regents.
Suggestions would be to have the DM dropped only - but then that removes the idea of not having to have a DM online to get them.
Make more people die if the rituals go wrong / make the rewards greater if they succeed but make them harder to do but..
Anything that involves a high DC to solve (Lore, Spellcraft etc) will naturally favour high level characters, and we all know that high level doesn't necessarily mean ''good / well played / interesting''
Or why not just take them out? Doesn't seem like they have worked as intended, so why not try something else to promote the hallowed ideas that are Adventure and Intrigue?
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A quote from the writings of the Sage of the Sands Alhaz:
"Hedge magic is a potent tool sought after by many in the Realms due to the powerful effects rituals constructed with certain reagents can produce. I's practice is frowned upon by many magi due to its notorious unpredictability, making it not only a costly, but also potentially catastrophic endeavor. Some say that this is in part due to the gods having a direct hand in determining whether the volatile magical procedure results in a success or not. Historically, rituals have had a greater chance of producing desired effects when the participants have gone through numerous trials and tribulations, displaying their strength of arms, sharpness of intellect, or fluidity of guile - in short, proving their worth. Rituals where the participants and the reagents have been purchased in gold have been noted to be either substantially less effective, or downright disastrous, as can be seen in the case of the Thayvian wizard Edwin the Feminine's coin-bought attempt to slay Elminster himself with hedge magic. Not only did the ritual consume the reagents, as well as driving the magi taking part in it insane, but it turned the ambitious wizard into a woman."
In other words, why not discourage the buying and selling of reagents by making it a semi-requirement for players to have acquired them without simply buying them? Reagents can still be "traded", so to speak, perhaps in exchange for appropriate tasks fulfilled, favors, or even at a whim; just not bought in gold. I'm not sure how such would be enforced, but perhaps by players informing a DM before proceeding with the ritual how the reagents were acquired in the first place.
This is in all likelihood a terrible idea.
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2 Quick things:
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Don't get all over Hal for the comment on random exploration and the doldrums therein. I love to randomly explore, but 99 times out of 100, I end up doing it totally alone, because begging and pleading with other players to do something outside of the norm with no real promise of reward does not appeal to the average player.
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The problem I keep seeing with everyone chiming in "if someone buys/trades for the reagent, don't have it work!" or something to that effect:
How do you police this, exactly?
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Another idea I had was requiring players to find certain clues and hints on where to seek the items and unless you've found the clues, you can never actually 'find' the item.
There is the notebook quest that works like this if I understand correctly?
I think this might be a good idea. Having to find a random drop item or clue that points vaguely to the location of said reagent. Also including a trigger that only spawn said item if the person/party with the item on them open the container in which the item is spawned.On a different note tho. I've been out and about quite a lot with all of my characters, and so far I've only found a single white stag in all my time. Sure, I might not know all the places they spawn or any location in particular, but to me it still require quite a bit of exploring to find anything at all. And few are willing to come along for such unless you pay them tons or they participate in your plot. But then I'm not a powergamer or powerplotter, so I might not be in the designated group.
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I am not familiar with the system - but here's nevertheless a thought:
afaik, there are module-based limitations to the number of items that can be in it. In part, this seems to lead to a situation where there exist a certain limited number of reagents that people know will be useful. In a limitless world, there might be many more highly specific reagents or variations of reagents - and the vast majority of them might be completely useless except for a very specific purpose.
But would there, perhaps, be ways around the module-limitations in some (or all?) cases? E.g., I recall that the dye-system used to color clothes etc., used to use many more items - and then was replaced by a script. Let's say, then, one was looking for a very specific kind of mistletoe, vine, etc., harvested on a specific daytime, etc. in a particular place. Could a script handle that and create an item with an auto-modified name or description that includes this kind of complex information about it?
Then, it might be useful to explore and find out that e.g., a particular patch of strange mistletoe grows at place X - but unless one already had a very specific idea or instruction on what was needed, it would be rather useless to try to collect 999 different samples of mistletoe on the chance, that, perhaps, the one that was needed happened to be included.
If this is technically feasible, one might also apply it to other items like pelts or horns, etc.. I might need to have a specific gender, age, sibling rank (e.g., firstborn cub etc.), color-shade, length etc. which might be a (bounded) random number associated with something that isn't actually very rare to find as such.
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i had a thought whilst at work…
how about adding a bit of 'weight of destiny' to the items, such that they are actually an encumberance like the white stag meat can be. That way you will only carry them about if you actually 'need' them.
Possibly you may allow an application for a 'reagent bag of holding 100%' for any player/faction that has written exactly what the items are designed for and submitted before any reagents are collected?
It would increase the load on dms i imagine, and would need to be policed to a degree also... but my best idea.
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Add more reagent spawns.
Make Reagents Perishable.
Add a means to keep a reagent between resets in exceptional circumstances.
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Another idea I had was requiring players to find certain clues and hints on where to seek the items and unless you've found the clues, you can never actually 'find' the item.
this is a good idea. like the notebook quest as lillesmurfen mentioned. That will force people to go out and adventure to find the item. If the spawn point is random in at least a dozen areas, that out to get folks wandering around :D
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The problem isn't having peope go out and finding them, it's that there's nothing keeping people from selling the regeants to other players once they do.
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And why the hell they shouldn't be able to sell it to people??
I really don't understand why not. For a ritual you usually need at least 3 - 4 reagents, and aquiring them takes a load of time. I don't see why Party A shouldn't get the gold, and Party B - the reagent.
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They're saying that Party B, who's getting all the benefit of pushing forward a plot, didn't do anything other than quest themselves silly and get a bunch of gold. Essentially buying progress in a plot through powerquesting.
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Which is why Hedge Magic shouldn't always answer every problem. It should be used to push a plot a little, or as a final device, not just as Ultimate Problem Solver.
Besides - I am all for using not just the reagents in the book. Collect various body parts from unique creatures etc. etc, and roll with a ritual based on that.
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Or… make them undroppable! Meaning the person who finds them has to participate in the said event or ritual/whatever. This would create some interesting conflicts. If this is the case they could be low weight and marked as stolen.
Or have reagents perish automatically after... two RL week for instance. Some people or factions need a good amount of time to gather all the stuff they need for a ritual. It might take weeks before the DM in question is available too. This way at least they won't gather dust in some faction storage somewhere.
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if they are undroppable then there is little room for stealing them off one another, though i dont know how often that would happen without a dm about to facilitate the transfer anyway.
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As long as all the reagents can spawn in places that do not have level requirements.
Some reagents only spawn in quests that are level restricted.
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Perhaps make all the regeants weigh as much as the stag meat? I'm not sure how many people it irritates, but if everything weighs so much, the ammount of time walking everywhere while carrying those regeants on your person is very annoying.