High Level Quests and Doing It Hard Core
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It's going to take even longer to wait for a suitable PC cleric to Raise you than it would take for a Resurrection. If you have the luxury of being able to wait it out anyway, it would be pretty much a waste of NOT going for resurrection over raise dead, as for 'a few lyons more' you'll save hours of lost playtime.
Mangled corpse –> Raise dead is not an option anyway.
P.
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Why not have a PC cleric raise you? Its hella a lot cheaper than having an NPC doing it and I died -alot- back in the day and wasn't even that high level. Just make your guy is buddies with a few priests in town and that should go along way. It doesn't solve the problem of losing your loot but I don't recall having anything valuable enough that much of the time that was worth respawning for and spending the next two weeks releveling.
That one is not that easy, there are very few PCs with 9 cleric levels, they usually have only one lvl 5 spell per day, and not always logged in when you need to be raised. Plus, there is an alignment restriction (one step removed from the PC's god if memory serves).
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That is true…right alignment, in the area when you die, logged on when you die, on your side when you die, has materials to perform such at that time, hopefully does it for free/low cost if you don't have any or enough gold, high enough level to actually cast raise dead/ressurection...If you can get all of those though, you're in! =D
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Our playerbase is simply not as good at questing and mechanics as it was three years ago. I have difficulty getting groups together for mid range and low level quests that are percieved as difficult, too.
As an example, take the Mirror Quest Moloch was running last year. He was spawning an exact duplicicate of a players character and pwning them dead in an arena environment. This demonstrated that players simply do not know how to play their characters to the best of their abilities any more.
This means that what looks to be a reasonable level of difficulty in the DMs eyes (who remember how to play the game) is actually a death trap of the highest order to someone who doesn't have much of a clue.
Perhaps bring back a faction similar to the adventures guild where players can be trained in survival tactics?
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There seemed to be several characters in the Mage Guild that offered practical advice, theory, and duels. Even three that have attempted to help people get the buff spells that wizards needed in some sort of grand overtaking. People just didn't take up on it, wasn't available enough, or it was completely sniped down by PCs. Other than that I'd say there was a ton of missed opportunity here and there that could have resulted in better gains, but a lot due to player choices eventually leading into having jack squat.
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if i knew where the quest givers were to these quests id spam them….except kantheas
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@HarryMcScary:
stuff
We have diminishing XP rewards on CoA because we don't want epic level characters.
This is so, and I do not question the purpose behind this. The server has done well by restricting the upper levels with this technique. However, the diminishing rewards at higher levels does mean that people think more than once about risking loosing those levels that have taken some time to aquire on scripted quests where they see no gain in plot rewards.
The scripters could put all sorts of scripts in to work round this. One idea might be to have the deminishing rewards applied and record the maximum XP ever achieved by a character on the character token. Then, should the character die and loose XP, he is allowed to regain that XP position without the deminishing rewards. Once he's at the top of his game again, the diminishing rewards script kicks in. Maybe too complex, but it would maintain the lower Level range of the server and would also allow people to regain their maximun achieved level more quickly.
Having said that, any debate regarding the pain of death has always come down to the statement, "Death should be feared."
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People risk death on plot quests because they see a valuable reward - either DM Loot or progressing the plot they are chasing.
People are much less likely to risk death on scripted quests for XP gain or gold, because these rewards often do not further the character's story, they are seen as just a means to get gold and XP.
I often hear people comment, when asked about a scripted quest. "Oh, I've got a DM plot quest this weekend, I'm not going to risk things on a scripted quest."
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I like the variation and potentially powerful rewards that can be had from scripted quests now (as opposed to how static some quests like Mad Fey used to feel). It makes them more than an xp/gold slog.
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Personally, I love these higher level quests. They are more challenging and often much longer. You also feel a real sense of achievement when you complete one with a full, still breathing, party. The length of the scripted quests means that the hack and slash approach is often discarded for a much more relaxed, slower, RP-oriented approach, that enables discussion on tactics, abilities and often unrelated plot ideas.
Hurrah for these scripted quests. And Damienxo, have your character make friends with Jason or Marin. I'll show you IC where many of these quests can be found.
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@Cunning:
Our playerbase is simply not as good at questing and mechanics as it was three years ago. I have difficulty getting groups together for mid range and low level quests that are percieved as difficult, too.
… players simply do not know how to play their characters to the best of their abilities any more.
A thousand times this. Mechanical ability on CoA has declined tremendously. I think the playerbase has shifted more towards "roleplaying" than "adventuring", not realizing these aren't mutually exclusive. Look, I know I sound like a dick, but it's true. If you go to quest with a random group on CoA, at least half of them can't play as well as it used to be the case. PvP is one-sided- the player who knows potions exist and can be used in battle wins.
You can't change that, unless you somehow give incentives to get good at mechanics again. Instead of making all these quests easier and easier, maybe they should be made harder and harder and give out plenty of consumables. This will teach people to use them, as well as make them play better out of sheer survival.
Also, I really think we need to get away from the "we aren't adventurers" mindset. If you have as much as 1 Rogue level or 1 level in ANY class, you're an adventurer, period, no matter how much you want to pretend to be a beggar or helpless scholar. Flaws are good, yes, but you need to balance them with strengths to make a memorable character! Making gimped characters or avoiding quests all the time, especially the dangerous ones, does not make you king of roleplay and master of plot.
Sorry. =/
Edit:
I have noticed that on High level quests is hard to balance out expenses vs end profit. The characters who do the fighting on the quest, use so many potions/wands, yet also die when they don't because they are trying to make a profit from the quest too by saving.
This is simply wrong, the reason people don't make profit on high level quests when they don't is because of bad coordination and unsuitable spell selection. I have spent many hours debating the benefits of Improved Invisibility as a wizard when I could, but a few months later, many are back to cushy Stoneskin again, a vastly inferior spell in almost all circumstances.
And the expenses are quite low- if you have just one character with a high Heal skill and share your healing kits, costs go down. If you give your healing wands to the wizards and other support characters, your healing costs go down. And so on. It's all a matter of experience, organisation and teamwork. Also, it's vastly preferable to lose money than to lose a level, if time is your prime concern. Also: if someone used more supplies than everyone else, they should ask for more pay. Equal pay is only warranted if everyone did in fact help equally.
But this is the problem: to get to this point, you have to struggle through hard quests and die a lot. But if doing them isn't encouraged (be it through the rewards they give or through the playerbase), then you can never get to a point where you can actually make a profit because too much depends on grooming characters to survive on them, which can take a long time.
The only way to get good at harder quests is to do a lot of harder quests. It's like practicing anything. You can either practice what you already know - and feel better about yourself, but learn very little - or you can try to practice what is really difficult for you, make mistakes, but have the chance to learn a lot in return.
Edit 2:
The new potion system also discourages questing. Now it's even harder to stock up. Now, I know we're supposed to buy potions from a vendor, but that just sort of feels wrong. Brewing should be made fun if it was a chore earlier, not be marginalized completely.
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tl;dr: Consumables should play a bigger part in CoA. Can we have them drop on quests in much larger amounts? Items with spell-charges, healing wands usable by everyone, that sort of thing. You know what I mean, Oro.
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On a side note, Pilgrims is a freakin' death trap.
I mean, c'mon. Packed with Secondary Damage: Death poisons and respawning + dispel + Death Gaze + paralysis baddies? Waaay too rough, without even counting the other three nasty evokations you generally take to the face doing it.
Side notes aren't helpful for balancing quests. When this quest got tested, everyone told me it was fine. Saying "its a death trap" isn't remotely helpful. Post some suggestions on how to make it more balanced.
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So easier access to raise dead scrolls and higher gold rewards.
I keep hearing that you make more gold on the low level quests than the high levels. That's not in the least way right.
From what Zyla said, it takes about six days to regain a lost level at the high levels if you do ever quest every day. That sounds about right honestly. Its probably faster too, as I know people actually don't do all the high level quests–just the ones that don't scare them.
So here is what I think DMs can do:
1). Make getting raises easier via scrolls and maybe 'pre-paid' PvM raise abilities.
2). Increase gold rewards and loot rewards on high level quests in a variety of ways. (But by how much?)Here's what players can do.
1). Stop stop fearing quests and try them!
2). Report what is too dangerous about some quests so DMs can fix them.
3). Remember, we want adventurers. It takes a DM over a week of work to make a functioning quest, so we DO want them being done.Am I missing anything?
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What Moloch said…
This sounds very good.
Having said that, with the Raise Dead scrolls, I think the alignment issue also needs to be considered. There would still be a reluctance to risk a thousand or two on a raise dead scroll if there is a reasonable chance of failure.
I think one of the things that a lot of higher level players want is access to quantities of consumables, that they can use for intrigue and adventure. Many, but by no means all, have already got significant items of DM loot. I suggest Wands with 10-15 charges and stacks of potions would be highly desirable. Perhaps this can be done with specific points of interest like alters that might charge a blank wand with a random spell appropriate to the deity and "Pools of escence" that allow you to fill up a random number of empty bottles with random elixirs. Odd bushes that hold a few berries of rare power that can be spawned in a quest area. To be honest, it would be rather fun to fill your bottle at such a pool, wondering what you might find, hoping for something unusual. Is it a potion of Stoneskin or an elixir of Light Healing. Perhaps on rare occasions, you might get the odd potion of Tenser's Transformation or other such rare circle 7, 8 or 9 spells that we just don't see on this server due to the inherent level limits. Perhaps each pool allows each player to fill three bottles and a quest area might have one, or two or even three of these on a long quest.
If all these things are inside quest areas and are refreshed at the start of a quest, they cannot be easily farmed without gathering a party and negociating the dangers involved. There would be none of the mad rush having cast invisibility to known resource locations in out of the way places after a reset.
The advantage of offering consumables rather than gold is that you turn gathering of resources into an adventure rather than a method of spending gold and grinding out potions in a laboratory. With a random component, you also encourage people to return to quests, to get that potion of Uberness.
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understanding that we dont want epic levels running about,
maybe relaxing the siphon a bit, to get back to those levels that are required to do the high levels quests or explore the more deadly areas a bit easier
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A few tips (should be valid unless the quests got remade in the past month-two) to possibly make the quests more appealing, balanced and fun.
Kanthea: spawns got a significant boost a few months ago, the quest can be deadly at higher levels (a party of 9-10s), I suggest some tuning down. Loot and xp levels seemed to be okay. Either reduce the chance of getting dispelled or make fewer alpha males spawn.
Frost giants: this seems to be the most often done quest among the high-end ones so there should not be an issue.
Missing pilgrims: unless it got fixed, the huge problem here are the backspawns. The bridge is also challenging and could be altered a bit. I have got the feeling that general magic level has become too low to allow reasonably properly equipped characters to pass the last room without cripplingly massive use of consumables.
Notebook: The tome could spawn more often, I would also suggest its possession to generate appropriate spawns around the owner so that it does not get found and taken only to be forgotten.
Scrambled eggs: the special ability of the monsters makes it very dangerous and/or costly to play low-AC characters - archers or wizards. I would suggest fewer of the spawns to have this ability.
Slums' tower: the rate of re-spoiler of spawns could be reduced to make it more fun and less of stress.
Withering heights: seems okay, maybe increase the difficulty of spawns as well as reward but allow camping in-between, should make it more fun.
Bresk castle: the quest seemed a bit tedious to me, both in terms of environment and reward, maybe some extra area would be nice. The mist thing also seemed buggy and the most common spawns there were not giving any xp.
Gypsy healer: more loot with lesser restoration abilities to be found there would make the quest less class-dependent, otherwise I recall it was fine and fun - could perhaps use more spawns.
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Hrm… How about a dynamical script that sorts the inventory of all players for the Gold value, determining on the beginning of the quest how much they have, and in the end you run that again. If the amount of value in cash+items is less, you make a proportion of how much extra you should add to the reward?
2 Players enter with 10k in items, gold, potions, etc. They leave with 8k.
The reward was supposed to be 550 GP for being a high level quest. so the loot would have around 50~80% (1k to 1.6k extra) of the value lost + random items/consumables.
This way, you still have a profit and don't oversize the reward, I take.
Cheers.
in a bubble over the player's head "Okay, so I drop a few thousand coins now, then I turn the quest in…"
I can't support your suggestion, sorry. ;)
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I keep hearing that you make more gold on the low level quests than the high levels. That's not in the least way right.
I don't any longer, but I used to go on nothing but low and mid-level quests, and I can confirm this. This seems to be due to the price of potions wands and other stuff that are consumed on higher-level quests.
Now, in D&D3.5 PnP, the DMG quite explicitly states that if you do spend huge amounts of gold in consumables, then the campaign is doing something wrong. The CRs for PnP are calculated with a "typical" party in mind, which means both a reasonable balance of classes and a reasonable level of permanent magic items appropriate to the party's level, that actually save a lot of consumables. By permanent, I mean either bonuses or per-day uses.
The DMG even had a sort of formula or table to express the expected wealth of the PC in terms of perm. magic items vs. actual level. If the PCs were below par, then the CRs of the monsters had to be reduced, causing the level curve to flatten after a while: PCs simply don't gain enough treasure anymore to support the extra cost caused by their relative weakness.I have no clue whether this applies to NWN as well, and in what proportions, but I'm suspecting the losses some PCs experience on high level quests is due to this phenomenon: a dearth of appropriately powerful permanent magic items cause a higher need for consumables just to survive.
Combine this with the lower XP yield at higher levels, and the only interest that remains for those quests is the thrill of it, which actually fades after you've done it a few times with a given group.My last point here comes from personal experience: Gurm does have three quite powerful permanent magic items and this fact combined with wandmaking does mean he actually makes a small profit on quests (less if Fleabag comes along, companions go through consumables like you wouldn't believe).
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yes but due to our low magic we dont have a preponderance of use per day or perm items
actually we really dont have " magic items" unless in a faction, we simply have enhanced items and most of those are for certain foes only
true magic items are good versus any foe
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I don't understand why people are saying that the magic level is "too low" or "reduced". The average character has a load more magic and gold than a year, two years, or three years ago.
You also can't really compare the real-time funky mechanics of NWN to the turn-based, flexible mechanics of PnP. An encounter that you finish in 5 minutes in NWN could take an hour or two in PnP.