Our latest update comes with an improved focus on role playing, and with it a number of new role playing tools and settings.
As part of character creation, a person can declare their role-play status and opt to enter in a number of new role-play oriented character settings and information, including: short description, detailed description, background story, background archetype, goals, personality, ideals, bonds, flaws, age, homeland region, hometown, faction, and deity.
Background archetypes is a system borrowed from the 5e system, and allows a person to select an archetype that comes bonuses to two skills as well as an ability specific to that background. The backgrounds in-game right now are: acolyte, charlatan, criminal, entertainer, folk hero, gladiator, hermit, noble, outlander, pirate, sage, sailor, soldier, squire, trader and urchin.
We’ve also borrowed, from the 5e system, character personality, ideals, bonds, and flaws. Each of these offers the ability to request some premade ideas, pulled from the 5e SRD, however, the actual text is written freeform.
Along the same lines are character goals. This also offers the option to request random ideas; the table pulled from the book: “The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying” by Jonah and Tristan Fishel. Goals help you build your character concept and allow Storyteller staff to have referenceable ideas to assist with your personal character role play and involving your character’s goals into the overall narrative.
The rpsheet command puts all of this information at hand for you and storyteller staff in one screen, with ‘sub-screens’ for more detailed info like your character’s background story, personality, goals, etc.
As usual, we also have a long list of bug fixes and minor improvements and additions:
-Added downgrade command to downgrade high level items to lower level usage, including reduction of stats in the process.
-Fixed auto prep to cycle through different spellcasting classes when you rest, auto-prepping them all.
-Identifying an item now flags it identified and can henceforth be identified by anyone regardless of Arcana skill.
-Added a saveeverything command on the rare occasion we need to save all zones.
-Began the background system a la 'D&D 5e' system.
-Changed various skill names, combined some skills, and added some new skills.
-Monk weapons now do monk barehand damage if barehand damage dice are higher than the weapon dice.
-Added a temple spec proc that offers healing for gold.
-All warlock blast essences have lower durations, cooldowns on how often they can be applied to a single target, and can be stacked with each other.
-Fixed duration on see the unseen warlock spell.
-Eldritch shape and essence now save over sessions.
-Added relay ability to send messages to people in other locations.
-Added forgeas to allow for attempting to forge messages to others.
-Lore checks are now rolls against a set dc.
-Object lore checks now use the highest of your arcana, religion and nature skills.
-Mob lore checks now use either arcana, religion or nature skill depending on the race type of the mob.
-Added ability for sages to give a bonus to attacks and damage for party members against mobs they've lore'd.
-Fixed a bug with autostore.
-Redid the skill lists to be alphabetical.
-Added backgrounds for: Acolyte, Charlatan, Criminal, Entertainer, Folk Hero, Gladiator, Hermit, Noble, Outlander, Pirate, Sage and Trader.
-Added the ability to get coin and possibly treasure through the entertain, tribute, swindle and extort commands for various backgrounds.
-Added the ability to forage for food and drink in the wild.
-Renamed Survival skill to Nature.
-Added ability to add multiple clan allies or at-war enemies.
-Fixed class and cross-class skills for each class based on the new skills list.
-Added ability for builders to set city, nation and faction for zones.
-Gear given to and equipped by charmie will now save over reboots.
-Added black market and noble-only shop flags/types.
-Added the roomvnum command, allowing players to get the room vnum for the room they're in.
-Changed autoblast command to assistblast, and added the autoblast toggle so that warlocks don't have to use the blast command to commence using their eldritch blast in place of regular attacks.
-Added more prominent display for characters who are flagged non-roleplayers, when seen in room. This is to alert role players in that room that this person is not a role player.
-Added background archetypes. Each archetype gives a bonus to two skills, and a new ability. The archetypes are: Acolyte, Charlatan, Criminal/Spy, Entertainer, Folk Hero, Gladiator, Hermit, Noble, Outlander, Pirate, Sage, Sailor, Soldier, Squire, Trader and Urchin.
-Characters can now choose their character's age from the following list: adolescent, adult, middle-aged, old-aged, venerable. Age is no longer tracked mechanically as a number, but rather as the listed descriptions instead, and does not change except through role-playing. Each age has certain ability score modifiers, except adult, which is +0 at all ability scores.
-Added the postcombatbrief toggle, which will reduce the amount of post-combat text to cut down on text-spam.
-Turn undead, when used on players, will now deal damage instead of causing them to flee or being insta-killed with large level differentials between player and mob.
-Fixed a bug with paladin mercies that would sometimes crash the game.
-Blackguards now get a series of class abilities that improve the save DCs on their cruelty uses. They also now get a mount they can summon with the 'call mount' command.
-Made adjustments to the skill list. Some skills were combined, some new ones added, and some were renamed.
-Adjusted the lore command to perform a d20 roll and also use different lore skills depending on what is being identified (Arcana, Religion or Nature).
-Removed Ascii art on copyover.
-Scythes are now slashing weapons only. Previously they were slashing and piercing.
-Added character age to a character's short description.
-Swapped out Great Int for Great Charisma for Sorcerer epic class feats.
-Added a new game menu for setting optional character details. Among these are: short description, detailed description, background story, background archtype, character goals, character personality, character ideals, character bonds, character flaws, character age, homeland, hometown, faction, and deity.
-New characters will now be prompted to flag themselves as non role players or role players, or defer the decision to later (which can be done in the prefedit menu).
-Reduced exp gained by summoners for damage dealt by their eidolons in combat.
-Fixed Anti-Neutral object flag to no longer exclude NG and NE alignments.
-Added background descriptions to the help system.
-kill command is now just an alias for the hit command.
-Added the 'rpsheet' command which will display information pertinent to role playing for that character. Staff members can view the rpsheets of other players.
-Fixed a bug with the holy aura command that caused crashes sometimes.
-Fixed a bug with 'see the unseen' warlock spell that prevented it from working correctly.
-Players casting healing spells on undead group members will no longer damage them.
-Fixed some bugs with extra descs on some items causing crashes when their owners enter the game.
-Fixed cooldown on the summoner 'merge forms' ability.
-Coded in the mob ability 'corruption'
-Smite Evil/Good/Destruction will all offer bonuses regardless of alignment, with greater bonuses if used against the listed alignment.