Ephirith
12-08-2012, 07:30 PM
For a while now I've been pretty disappointed with the state of PC gaming, particularly the available MMO's. World of Warcraft went in a direction I didn't like, and none of the other newcomer games have appealed to me whatsoever. Last night, while I was trying to fall asleep, I started thinking about what would be the perfect MMO for me... which design would I most like to play?
It is a lot like Darkfall meets Eve Online meets Farmville meets Wurm Online meets World of Warcraft but hopefully with a lot more hardcoded things in place to prevent bullshit, and a better use of technology. I want it to have all the traditional MMO functions, dungeon raiding, gear progression, combat, faction-based pvp, individual pvp, along with an extremely robust player-run economy. It is a frontier MMO.
Overview/TL;DR:
-Mostly player-driven economy at every level of production.
-Cities, villages, farms, mines etc developed and run by players
-Players manage NPC employees who perform gathering, industry, combat, etc save and spend money, buy goods from other players and their npcs.
-Player-run government with checks and balances to prevent douchebaggery
-System in place to turn-over/clear out unused or unprotected property
-Player-run companies which gain experience and grant bonuses and abilities to their members.
-Detailed talent trees for combat classes and crafting professions.
-Smart AI factions who are difficult opponents, respond to player behavior, send raiding parties.
-Player freedom. Be an outlaw, merchant, soldier, fur trapper, miner, farmer, tailor, or basically anything you'd find in an economy.
-Watch your region grow and develop, watch it change over time as groups of players struggle for power and control over valuable land and resources.
-Develop your character with experience, talent trees, and equipment.
-As a member of an empire, fight for control over the continent!
-Don't like your government? Start a rebellion.
-No fast travel, except boat-rides to other regional port-capitals. If your state builds wizard spires, extremely skilled spellcasters can use them to teleport to other spires.
-No instances
Long version: So here it is: For the sake of explanation I will refer to the game as Awakening.
In Awakening, the player begins next to a wrecked armada of ships crashed on nearby rocks with wreckage strewn across the beach. The collection of ships was a refugee fleet, sailing from a far away island which suffered some great cataclysm. To your knowledge, this collection of ships is all that remains of the civilization.
You are on a new continent, unknown and untouched by your people. There are 4 or 5 different regions or "areas", which have a fairly distinct climate, topography, and overall 'setting', kind of like provinces in Elder Scrolls. Each of these areas has a shipwreck where the player may choose to start. The game area should be about the same size as Skyrim and Cyrodiil combined.
This leads to the first system I envision:
Player Land Ownership: Each of the 4 or 5 areas has many designated sites for towns, villages, farms, mines, outposts, ports, etc etc. At the beginning of the game, these sites begin undeveloped. Each region has a 'capital', which will begin as a collection of refugee huts and will serve as a gathering/rally point for incoming players, if they choose to associate with other players at all.
Let's say you just started the game and you're wandering around in the expansive wilderness. You're hiking through a misty, hilly redwood forest when you come across a small meadow clearing. The clearing is marked by a node which indicates this as a development site, and gives you some information about the soil, resources, etc. You 'claim' the node, and you have 6 hours to build on the land before your claim expires and your account can't reclaim that node for another 24 hours.
The first form of development you can place on the land is a makeshift hut. The hut requires x units of wood, y units of rough stones, and z time to construct. You don't yet have an axe, so you can't cut down trees, and you don't have a pick, so you can't quarry your own stones. You need to find some tools. There is a creek that runs through the meadow, and you begin to follow it downstream. It winds through the forest and, as it meets other tributaries, it increases in size. Eventually the creek flows out of the hills and into a plain, where it enters a much larger river. You follow the river until it meets the sea, and there you find a large settlement.
This settlement began as a node, just like the meadow you found, however it had several huts already on it, and this site is intended to be a 'hub', or a capital. Many buildings have been built here by other players. You notice a wooden house and as you walk closer there is a sign. You hover over it with your cursor and it reads "Kuriak's Tools". You walk indoors to find a player at a workbench crafting tools.
Crafting: I envision a robust system of crafting with an entire simulated economy. As a player crafts certain items, or gathers certain resources, he will gain skill and, as a result, create items of higher quality and unlock items of greater sophistication, or gather resources more efficiently. Let's say the creation of the most rudimentary axe requires 1 unit of wood, and 1 unit of stone. Kuriak was able to obtain some wood and stone by trading with a roaming band of npcs (more on this later). He used these materials to create a very makeshift axe and pick.
He took that axe and walked into the hills, where he cut down a pine tree. He then used his axe to break the pine tree into 23 units of rough pine wood. Kuriak has no mule, and no cart, so he was only able to carry 4 units of the pine wood back to the town with him, which he placed on an unoccupied piece of land in the town. He did the same thing with a nearby node of rock outcropping. After several trips back and forth, Kuriak had amassed a sizable pile of wood and stone on his piece of land. Having gathered the required resources, he built a very makeshift wooden house. He used a piece of wood to craft a sign, which read "Kuriak's Tools".
He spent a few hours gathering more resources until he had quite a sizable stockpile in his house, and went to work making tools. As he made more, the quality of the tools increased. As Kuriak was cutting trees to get enough wood for his tools, his skill reached a certain level, Kuriak unlocked his first crafting tree:
http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/4269/carpentry.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/844/carpentry.jpg/)
Talent points are earned by gaining 'experience' doing crafting combines in that particular area. In this case making tools would slowly give Kuriak both skill in making the tools, and points to spend in that tree.
Your skill in carpentry has increased to 53.
Back to you as the player. Neither you nor Kuriak has any currency yet. If you want tools from Kuriak, you're going to need to either:
1. Ask Kuriak to help you out and give you some basic tools.
2. Go make some money and try to buy the tools.
3. Go find something to trade for the tools.
4. Ask to work for Kuriak in exchange for goods.
5. Kill/knock out Kuriak and/or steal his tools (this has consequences, more later)
Kuriak tells you he's looking for leather to make some straps for some of his constructions. You recall that as you were walking down the creek out of the hills, you saw some beavers in the creek.
As you are leaving town, you see someone yelling: "East Shore Fur Company now recruiting! Send tells!"
Corportations and Guilds: In Awakening, guilds are groups of people intended to serve a purpose which can be fairly specific, or general. Maybe <Kuriak's Lumber Company> specializes in gathering, refining, and selling quality lumber. Perhaps the guild <Frontier Knights> recruits fighters for dedicated expeditions to raid villages, enter dungeons, and seek treasure (more later).
As a guild gets more members and accomplishes tasks, the guild itself gains experience and unlocks trees similar to the individual ones. As the members in <East Shore Fur Company> kill animals, skin them, and make leather, in addition to their individual experience they also earn experience the guild can use in guild-level talent trees. The guild leader may choose to spend the points in a talent that increases the quality of fur gathered by guild members by 25%, or gives the ability for guild members to track animals at x distance.
You agree to join the company and the leader invites you. There are 9 active members online. It is a fairly new guild but joining has given you the ability to carry 25% more fur.
You hike back into the wilderness headed toward the creek where you saw the beavers. Some time later you come across a pond and beaver dam, different than you saw earlier. You pick up a nearby stick, walk over to some beavers, and with some difficulty you try to bash them over the head as they flee into the water and hide in their dam. You manage to get one before it can escape and it is killed. Using a sharp stone you found earlier, you crudely skin the beaver and produce a very low quality pelt. You also make several units of beaver meat and some bones.
You pick up the pelt and put it in your inventory. The pelt shows up on your character model as a rolled up fur attached to your pack. Players that see you can see that you're carrying a pelt. If you were a miner, and you were carrying ore, players could see you carrying a bag full of ore on your shoulder.
You spend some time bashing beavers until you have gathered three pelts, which are rolled up and carried on your pack. The inside of your pack is filled with meat and bones, and there's no more room for anything. You make your way back to the town. Once you arrive, you say into chat, "WTS 3 beaver pelts and some meat". You get a tell from somebody offering 5 silver coins for your 3 pelts, and some people willing to trade various things.
You meet the guy and agree to give him your 3 pelts for 7 silver coins. With your new coins, you return to Kuriak's shop and offer to buy a decent quality pick and axe for 2 silver coins, and Kuriak agrees.
You take your new pick and axe and head back to your claim in the forested hills. Using your new tools, you cut some trees, and you cut some stones from a rock outcropping. You use the materials to build a crude hut on the property, and the land is now yours.
You spent a good amount of time gathering pelts from the nearby creeks. Every so often you stumble upon some berries or some herbs to gather. You find some seeds for planting tea. You become much better at trapping animals and invest in some talent points which makes you more effective at it. You use some of the money you've made selling pelts to people to buy an iron knife, which makes your skinning more effective. You also buy some farming tools from Kuriak, a plow and shovel.
The land you've settled has satisfactory soil and you suspect it has a good climate for growing tea because you've found tea growing wild nearby. You spend some time developing a field and plant some tea, which rewards you with some experience in farming and eventually unlocks its associated tree.
Your character reaches level 10 and you notice a new window has appeared:
NPC Management: Players in Awakening have the ability to hire npc's to perform work for them. As the player gains more experience, the gain the ability to hire more NPC's. There are also talents in the crafting trees, such as Mining, Carpentry, or Blacksmithing, which increase the effectiveness of your NPC's at those tasks.
You notice the ability to manage 1 npc. In order to manage 2 npc's, you need a great deal more experience than you needed for 1 npc.
You head back to the town and notice it has grown considerably with player structures. You visit one of few buildings that was there from the beginning: Worker's Lodge, where you can recruit NPC's.
You browse through several pages of procedurally generated characters with varying attributes, skills, beliefs, and attitudes. You hire a young male with no real skills. He requires, at the minimum:
1. Housing
2. Access to food and water
3. Pay
Since you only own one building, he will live in your tiny hut with you. You travel back to your claim and open the management window to set up his schedule.
Time: 24 hours of an in-game day lasts for 72 real minutes. During each 72 minute period, each npc must eat, drink, and sleep. 1 in-game hour = 3 real minutes. NPC's require 8 in-game hours of sleep. There is a monthly calendar with 7 days in a week.
Your npc is going to work your farm. You tell him where to get seeds, and where to place the finished crops-- in your case, inside a bin located in your house. You provide him with the necessary tools and instruct him to begin working. He will perform as many hours of work in a day as you require of him, but the amount of work may impact his happiness, which in turn influences the rate at which he gains experience and his productivity/quality of his work.
For this particular npc, you demand 10 hours of work per day (or 30 minutes of the 72 minute long period). Between 10 hours of work, and 8 hours of sleep, your npc has 6 hours (18 minutes) of un-allotted time to do as he pleases. You pay your npc 4 silver pieces every day for 10 hours of work.
Since you have given him 18 minutes of free time, you can choose to enable the npc to visit a nearby town or village. You are fairly close to the region's capital (where you bought tools from Kuriak and hired your npc), so you toggle the option and allow the npc to visit the town in his free time.
The npc will check a registry of businesses being run by players in the town. He will find an inn, being run by a player and his one npc employee, which sells bread for 1 silver piece and beer for 3 silver pieces. The player who owns the inn has instructed his npc to sell beer and bread at that price. The player makes the bread and brews the beer while he's online, and keeps the npc stocked to the best of his ability.
Your npc decides that, since you have allowed him, and since he has enough free time, he will walk to town each day and buy a piece of bread. Your npc wants to save some money, so he won't buy beer as well every day, only on wednesdays and fridays. Being able to eat bread of decent quality and drink beer on some days will increase his happiness and make him a more productive farmer.
To get to the town, the npc will calculate a path to the nearest road or trail. There is an extensive system of trails and paths in the world, but since the world is fairly new, nobody has improved the roads with stone or smoothed them out.
When many players of npc's walk over a piece of ground, they will slowly kill the foilage and create a trail over time. A player can then build an actual trail, "Formalizing" the path. He can use stone to lay down a road and increase movement speed, but it can also just be dirt. Once a trail has been created, npc's can follow it to various destinations reliably and effectively as can players. On formal roads and trails, you can use waypoints to direct your npcs on the path you want them to take to get to town, send them to buy goods for you, and keep track of them.
If a formal road or trail goes for an extended period without being used, it will begin to deteriorate and eventually disappear, and the natural foliage will regrow.
You use your plow to clear a trail to the nearest dirt road, which leads to the capital. You make it into a formal trail, and instruct your npc to use it so that it does not deteriorate.
As your npc accumulates savings, he will use his money to buy items like clothing, furniture, tea, or tobacco from players-- all of which will increase his happiness. As he becomes a more skilled employee, his productivity will increase and you can specialize him further, but he will start to demand higher pay. You can fire him and hire another grunt, at which point he will be available for hire back at the Worker's Lodge for other players, or you can give him a raise.
Between the productiveness of your tea farm, and the time you spend hunting fur as a member of the fur company, you begin to accumulate more goods and savings.
Player Government: On your next trip to town, you notice a series of colored banners with a symbol as you enter the settlement. The settlement is now surrounded by a wooden stockade, and all of the available property has constructions. There is now a 'Government' window which shows a map of all discovered nodes and the region territory with colored shading and a symbol similar to the one you saw on the banners around town. The symbol is a crescent moon and a curved sword.
This government was founded by a large guild who made a 'political' claim to the nearby territory. Upon making the claim, a flag appeared in the town square bearing their symbol. They established the government as a 'Republic', which is a hardcoded functionality. The government will be ruled by a series of official positions: 7 council members elected by land owners, a judge, a sheriff, and a governor. Though the council is elected by land owners, the judge, sheriff, and governor are chosen by the council.
Once the political claim is made, a 6 hour timer begins, during which other groups of players can dispute the claim by forcefully tearing down the flag, or convincing the electorate that the claimant is no good. If the claimant can protect their claim flag for 6 hours, the government is established and no further political claims can be made in that territory until the government is dissolved.
Once the government is established, an election will begin, since it is a republic. In order to run for office, you need a petition signed by 12 land owners. When the sign up period has ended, every landowner in the government's territory will receive a popup in which they vote for the candidate of their choice.
One of the council candidates happens to be the leader of your fur company and your friend, so you vote for him... along with your other guildmates, and he wins a council seat.
When the election is over, the council selects the judge, sheriff, governor, treasurer and whatever other positions available in that form of government. Each position has some sort of power, for example if a citizen lodges a complaint against a council member, or has evidence of a crime, he can remove that councilman from office.
Inactive or corrupt government officials can be removed either by citizen referendum or various other means.
The government has the power to raise taxes and build public projects. It can gain experience just like guilds and corporations can. The government may require landowners to pay x amount of money every in-game week or face the legal confiscation of their property. Taxes will be a hard-coded function in the government window, and players will be able to keep track of what they owe, and what has been collected.
You arrived in the city to find the government already established. The council has voted to name the city Freeport, and the state/government is called Winterfall.
Freeport is now bustling. The government is constructing a large stone keep at one end of town. Large wagons pulled by horses carry large piles of ore and carved stones from countryside mines and quarries. A company has constructed a shipyard in Freeport, and they are making and selling small sailing vessels. You look at a recently constructed harbor area and see several ships with symbols on their sails.
One of the ships has sailed from another region of the world, and it is selling sugar and wine, which will not grow in your region. Another ship is owned by a merchant who arrived in Freeport to buy iron bars and furs, with the intent to sell them in a far away town he knows to need those goods.
NPC Factions and Large-Scale Algorithmic Combat Talking to your guildmates, you learn that each of the other regions has their own government. You also learn that within your own region, there are some areas controlled by highly organized hostile npc factions. Deep in a mountain valley, far past your hill farm, there is an area rich in gold deposits. However, this area is controlled by a band of dwarves called the Thundersong. Deep in the valley they have their own fortress, surrounded by several smaller villages and outposts.
Their economy is supported by a system of farms, mines, and cottage industries. This is a warlike faction, and when they learn of the establishment of the Winterfall government, they send a raiding party consisting of 9 soldiers armed with spears and shields, 3 crossbowmen, a lieutenant armed with a magic sword, 3 wagons full of supplies, and a few quartermasters.
The expedition comes down from the mountain valley, headed for a small player-run village to the south of your farm. As they approach, you tell your npc employee to follow you as you run to Freeport. The raiding party attacks your farm, damaging your house, and looting all the money and supplies you didn't bring with you.
(At this point, if you fail to repair your buildings, they will be destroyed in 48 hours, clearing the land for somebody else)
You arrive in Freeport and start crying about your farm being attacked. Some players, along with the government, decide to organize an expedition of their own. A few minutes player they have established a raid of 33 players. Some wield spears or swords, and some are archers. Some wear platemail, others wear chain or leather armor. Many of them have learned some degree of magic.
The 33 players leave Freeport and march to intercept the Thundersong party, which is moving along a road past your scorched farm. As you approach, the dwarven spearmen form a line protecting their wagons. Behind that line, their archers begin shooting arrows at your raid while the spearmen hold their position.
The main body of your force rushes at the spearmen. Some of your members have emerged from sneaking among the woods on either side of the road, and begin firing arrows at the dwarven party. It appears they will be quickly overrun when twelve dwarven skirmishers emerge from stealth and attack your party by surprise. Since you failed to send a skilled scout ahead of your expedition to investigate before attacking, you did not detect these dwarves.
They are equipped with powerful steel weapons and manage to backstab some of your soldiers. Many people are knocked unconscious and some die, but your expedition manages to kill the majority of the dwarves. When the dwarven lieutenant dies, the few remaining dwarves break their ranks and attempt to run away, but a few in your party are on horseback and quickly cut them down.
Each member of the raid grabs as much of the precious steel armor, weaponry, coins, and rations from the dead dwarves as they can carry. As a group you decide who gets to go home with the dwarven wagons, and who gets the lieutenant's magical sword.
The expedition decides to attack the Thundersong territory in search of land and loot. You recruit a few more members from the nearby village and continue into the mountains. Before too long, the terrain becomes too rough for your wagons and the expedition needs to leave behind anything that can't be carried by pack-animals.
Before too long, you are spotted by three patrolling dwarves on a far-away hillside. Seeing the size and strength of your party, the dwarven npc's dispatch one of their own to the Thundersong stronghold for reinforcements. Again, your party lacks scouts or screens, so you were able to notice none of this. You had nobody to intercept the sentries or provide intelligence about the dwarven positions. You're a disorganized zerg.
When the dwarven sentry arrives at the Thundersong stronghold and tells the other npc's what he saw, the dwarves muster most of the soldiers they have available. 45 dwarven soldiers assemble according to the alogrithm, and march out toward the last reported position with their pack animals and supplies. Ahead of them the dwarves send three scouting parties of three dwarves each, which will march ahead of the main force. If the scouting party encounters your raid, they will send one dwarf back to the main force and provide them with updated intelligence on where you were, and your strength. These npc's can see you from considerably further away than in other mmo's, if you're not concealed, and if they think they can take you on, they will follow you EQ-style until you get help, you die, they get tired/hungry, or they lose you.
At some point the Thundersong force finds yours. They rush your position with the entirety of their army, including a dwarven general wearing the absolute phattest lewt. Your poor zerg is outnumbered and out-equipped, and you don't hold for very long before the dwarves slap your shit. Many turn and run away, leaving behind the slow pack animals.
The idea is that different npc factions will utilize different tactics. Dwarves are organized, intelligent, and well-equipped, but you wouldn't expect a civilization of orcs or goblins to use the same tactics, or have the same quality of equipment. Ideally there would be ways to increase your standing with the Thundersong if you want to trade with them or own property in their territory. You'd need to learn their language, and perhaps prove yourself through military service or some kind of labor/faction building effort.
The next course of action for the Winterfall government may be to construct a fort near the Thundersong territory to counter raiding parties and protect nearby territory. Raids can also use the fort to resupply, organize, respawn, heal, etc.
It is a lot like Darkfall meets Eve Online meets Farmville meets Wurm Online meets World of Warcraft but hopefully with a lot more hardcoded things in place to prevent bullshit, and a better use of technology. I want it to have all the traditional MMO functions, dungeon raiding, gear progression, combat, faction-based pvp, individual pvp, along with an extremely robust player-run economy. It is a frontier MMO.
Overview/TL;DR:
-Mostly player-driven economy at every level of production.
-Cities, villages, farms, mines etc developed and run by players
-Players manage NPC employees who perform gathering, industry, combat, etc save and spend money, buy goods from other players and their npcs.
-Player-run government with checks and balances to prevent douchebaggery
-System in place to turn-over/clear out unused or unprotected property
-Player-run companies which gain experience and grant bonuses and abilities to their members.
-Detailed talent trees for combat classes and crafting professions.
-Smart AI factions who are difficult opponents, respond to player behavior, send raiding parties.
-Player freedom. Be an outlaw, merchant, soldier, fur trapper, miner, farmer, tailor, or basically anything you'd find in an economy.
-Watch your region grow and develop, watch it change over time as groups of players struggle for power and control over valuable land and resources.
-Develop your character with experience, talent trees, and equipment.
-As a member of an empire, fight for control over the continent!
-Don't like your government? Start a rebellion.
-No fast travel, except boat-rides to other regional port-capitals. If your state builds wizard spires, extremely skilled spellcasters can use them to teleport to other spires.
-No instances
Long version: So here it is: For the sake of explanation I will refer to the game as Awakening.
In Awakening, the player begins next to a wrecked armada of ships crashed on nearby rocks with wreckage strewn across the beach. The collection of ships was a refugee fleet, sailing from a far away island which suffered some great cataclysm. To your knowledge, this collection of ships is all that remains of the civilization.
You are on a new continent, unknown and untouched by your people. There are 4 or 5 different regions or "areas", which have a fairly distinct climate, topography, and overall 'setting', kind of like provinces in Elder Scrolls. Each of these areas has a shipwreck where the player may choose to start. The game area should be about the same size as Skyrim and Cyrodiil combined.
This leads to the first system I envision:
Player Land Ownership: Each of the 4 or 5 areas has many designated sites for towns, villages, farms, mines, outposts, ports, etc etc. At the beginning of the game, these sites begin undeveloped. Each region has a 'capital', which will begin as a collection of refugee huts and will serve as a gathering/rally point for incoming players, if they choose to associate with other players at all.
Let's say you just started the game and you're wandering around in the expansive wilderness. You're hiking through a misty, hilly redwood forest when you come across a small meadow clearing. The clearing is marked by a node which indicates this as a development site, and gives you some information about the soil, resources, etc. You 'claim' the node, and you have 6 hours to build on the land before your claim expires and your account can't reclaim that node for another 24 hours.
The first form of development you can place on the land is a makeshift hut. The hut requires x units of wood, y units of rough stones, and z time to construct. You don't yet have an axe, so you can't cut down trees, and you don't have a pick, so you can't quarry your own stones. You need to find some tools. There is a creek that runs through the meadow, and you begin to follow it downstream. It winds through the forest and, as it meets other tributaries, it increases in size. Eventually the creek flows out of the hills and into a plain, where it enters a much larger river. You follow the river until it meets the sea, and there you find a large settlement.
This settlement began as a node, just like the meadow you found, however it had several huts already on it, and this site is intended to be a 'hub', or a capital. Many buildings have been built here by other players. You notice a wooden house and as you walk closer there is a sign. You hover over it with your cursor and it reads "Kuriak's Tools". You walk indoors to find a player at a workbench crafting tools.
Crafting: I envision a robust system of crafting with an entire simulated economy. As a player crafts certain items, or gathers certain resources, he will gain skill and, as a result, create items of higher quality and unlock items of greater sophistication, or gather resources more efficiently. Let's say the creation of the most rudimentary axe requires 1 unit of wood, and 1 unit of stone. Kuriak was able to obtain some wood and stone by trading with a roaming band of npcs (more on this later). He used these materials to create a very makeshift axe and pick.
He took that axe and walked into the hills, where he cut down a pine tree. He then used his axe to break the pine tree into 23 units of rough pine wood. Kuriak has no mule, and no cart, so he was only able to carry 4 units of the pine wood back to the town with him, which he placed on an unoccupied piece of land in the town. He did the same thing with a nearby node of rock outcropping. After several trips back and forth, Kuriak had amassed a sizable pile of wood and stone on his piece of land. Having gathered the required resources, he built a very makeshift wooden house. He used a piece of wood to craft a sign, which read "Kuriak's Tools".
He spent a few hours gathering more resources until he had quite a sizable stockpile in his house, and went to work making tools. As he made more, the quality of the tools increased. As Kuriak was cutting trees to get enough wood for his tools, his skill reached a certain level, Kuriak unlocked his first crafting tree:
http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/4269/carpentry.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/844/carpentry.jpg/)
Talent points are earned by gaining 'experience' doing crafting combines in that particular area. In this case making tools would slowly give Kuriak both skill in making the tools, and points to spend in that tree.
Your skill in carpentry has increased to 53.
Back to you as the player. Neither you nor Kuriak has any currency yet. If you want tools from Kuriak, you're going to need to either:
1. Ask Kuriak to help you out and give you some basic tools.
2. Go make some money and try to buy the tools.
3. Go find something to trade for the tools.
4. Ask to work for Kuriak in exchange for goods.
5. Kill/knock out Kuriak and/or steal his tools (this has consequences, more later)
Kuriak tells you he's looking for leather to make some straps for some of his constructions. You recall that as you were walking down the creek out of the hills, you saw some beavers in the creek.
As you are leaving town, you see someone yelling: "East Shore Fur Company now recruiting! Send tells!"
Corportations and Guilds: In Awakening, guilds are groups of people intended to serve a purpose which can be fairly specific, or general. Maybe <Kuriak's Lumber Company> specializes in gathering, refining, and selling quality lumber. Perhaps the guild <Frontier Knights> recruits fighters for dedicated expeditions to raid villages, enter dungeons, and seek treasure (more later).
As a guild gets more members and accomplishes tasks, the guild itself gains experience and unlocks trees similar to the individual ones. As the members in <East Shore Fur Company> kill animals, skin them, and make leather, in addition to their individual experience they also earn experience the guild can use in guild-level talent trees. The guild leader may choose to spend the points in a talent that increases the quality of fur gathered by guild members by 25%, or gives the ability for guild members to track animals at x distance.
You agree to join the company and the leader invites you. There are 9 active members online. It is a fairly new guild but joining has given you the ability to carry 25% more fur.
You hike back into the wilderness headed toward the creek where you saw the beavers. Some time later you come across a pond and beaver dam, different than you saw earlier. You pick up a nearby stick, walk over to some beavers, and with some difficulty you try to bash them over the head as they flee into the water and hide in their dam. You manage to get one before it can escape and it is killed. Using a sharp stone you found earlier, you crudely skin the beaver and produce a very low quality pelt. You also make several units of beaver meat and some bones.
You pick up the pelt and put it in your inventory. The pelt shows up on your character model as a rolled up fur attached to your pack. Players that see you can see that you're carrying a pelt. If you were a miner, and you were carrying ore, players could see you carrying a bag full of ore on your shoulder.
You spend some time bashing beavers until you have gathered three pelts, which are rolled up and carried on your pack. The inside of your pack is filled with meat and bones, and there's no more room for anything. You make your way back to the town. Once you arrive, you say into chat, "WTS 3 beaver pelts and some meat". You get a tell from somebody offering 5 silver coins for your 3 pelts, and some people willing to trade various things.
You meet the guy and agree to give him your 3 pelts for 7 silver coins. With your new coins, you return to Kuriak's shop and offer to buy a decent quality pick and axe for 2 silver coins, and Kuriak agrees.
You take your new pick and axe and head back to your claim in the forested hills. Using your new tools, you cut some trees, and you cut some stones from a rock outcropping. You use the materials to build a crude hut on the property, and the land is now yours.
You spent a good amount of time gathering pelts from the nearby creeks. Every so often you stumble upon some berries or some herbs to gather. You find some seeds for planting tea. You become much better at trapping animals and invest in some talent points which makes you more effective at it. You use some of the money you've made selling pelts to people to buy an iron knife, which makes your skinning more effective. You also buy some farming tools from Kuriak, a plow and shovel.
The land you've settled has satisfactory soil and you suspect it has a good climate for growing tea because you've found tea growing wild nearby. You spend some time developing a field and plant some tea, which rewards you with some experience in farming and eventually unlocks its associated tree.
Your character reaches level 10 and you notice a new window has appeared:
NPC Management: Players in Awakening have the ability to hire npc's to perform work for them. As the player gains more experience, the gain the ability to hire more NPC's. There are also talents in the crafting trees, such as Mining, Carpentry, or Blacksmithing, which increase the effectiveness of your NPC's at those tasks.
You notice the ability to manage 1 npc. In order to manage 2 npc's, you need a great deal more experience than you needed for 1 npc.
You head back to the town and notice it has grown considerably with player structures. You visit one of few buildings that was there from the beginning: Worker's Lodge, where you can recruit NPC's.
You browse through several pages of procedurally generated characters with varying attributes, skills, beliefs, and attitudes. You hire a young male with no real skills. He requires, at the minimum:
1. Housing
2. Access to food and water
3. Pay
Since you only own one building, he will live in your tiny hut with you. You travel back to your claim and open the management window to set up his schedule.
Time: 24 hours of an in-game day lasts for 72 real minutes. During each 72 minute period, each npc must eat, drink, and sleep. 1 in-game hour = 3 real minutes. NPC's require 8 in-game hours of sleep. There is a monthly calendar with 7 days in a week.
Your npc is going to work your farm. You tell him where to get seeds, and where to place the finished crops-- in your case, inside a bin located in your house. You provide him with the necessary tools and instruct him to begin working. He will perform as many hours of work in a day as you require of him, but the amount of work may impact his happiness, which in turn influences the rate at which he gains experience and his productivity/quality of his work.
For this particular npc, you demand 10 hours of work per day (or 30 minutes of the 72 minute long period). Between 10 hours of work, and 8 hours of sleep, your npc has 6 hours (18 minutes) of un-allotted time to do as he pleases. You pay your npc 4 silver pieces every day for 10 hours of work.
Since you have given him 18 minutes of free time, you can choose to enable the npc to visit a nearby town or village. You are fairly close to the region's capital (where you bought tools from Kuriak and hired your npc), so you toggle the option and allow the npc to visit the town in his free time.
The npc will check a registry of businesses being run by players in the town. He will find an inn, being run by a player and his one npc employee, which sells bread for 1 silver piece and beer for 3 silver pieces. The player who owns the inn has instructed his npc to sell beer and bread at that price. The player makes the bread and brews the beer while he's online, and keeps the npc stocked to the best of his ability.
Your npc decides that, since you have allowed him, and since he has enough free time, he will walk to town each day and buy a piece of bread. Your npc wants to save some money, so he won't buy beer as well every day, only on wednesdays and fridays. Being able to eat bread of decent quality and drink beer on some days will increase his happiness and make him a more productive farmer.
To get to the town, the npc will calculate a path to the nearest road or trail. There is an extensive system of trails and paths in the world, but since the world is fairly new, nobody has improved the roads with stone or smoothed them out.
When many players of npc's walk over a piece of ground, they will slowly kill the foilage and create a trail over time. A player can then build an actual trail, "Formalizing" the path. He can use stone to lay down a road and increase movement speed, but it can also just be dirt. Once a trail has been created, npc's can follow it to various destinations reliably and effectively as can players. On formal roads and trails, you can use waypoints to direct your npcs on the path you want them to take to get to town, send them to buy goods for you, and keep track of them.
If a formal road or trail goes for an extended period without being used, it will begin to deteriorate and eventually disappear, and the natural foliage will regrow.
You use your plow to clear a trail to the nearest dirt road, which leads to the capital. You make it into a formal trail, and instruct your npc to use it so that it does not deteriorate.
As your npc accumulates savings, he will use his money to buy items like clothing, furniture, tea, or tobacco from players-- all of which will increase his happiness. As he becomes a more skilled employee, his productivity will increase and you can specialize him further, but he will start to demand higher pay. You can fire him and hire another grunt, at which point he will be available for hire back at the Worker's Lodge for other players, or you can give him a raise.
Between the productiveness of your tea farm, and the time you spend hunting fur as a member of the fur company, you begin to accumulate more goods and savings.
Player Government: On your next trip to town, you notice a series of colored banners with a symbol as you enter the settlement. The settlement is now surrounded by a wooden stockade, and all of the available property has constructions. There is now a 'Government' window which shows a map of all discovered nodes and the region territory with colored shading and a symbol similar to the one you saw on the banners around town. The symbol is a crescent moon and a curved sword.
This government was founded by a large guild who made a 'political' claim to the nearby territory. Upon making the claim, a flag appeared in the town square bearing their symbol. They established the government as a 'Republic', which is a hardcoded functionality. The government will be ruled by a series of official positions: 7 council members elected by land owners, a judge, a sheriff, and a governor. Though the council is elected by land owners, the judge, sheriff, and governor are chosen by the council.
Once the political claim is made, a 6 hour timer begins, during which other groups of players can dispute the claim by forcefully tearing down the flag, or convincing the electorate that the claimant is no good. If the claimant can protect their claim flag for 6 hours, the government is established and no further political claims can be made in that territory until the government is dissolved.
Once the government is established, an election will begin, since it is a republic. In order to run for office, you need a petition signed by 12 land owners. When the sign up period has ended, every landowner in the government's territory will receive a popup in which they vote for the candidate of their choice.
One of the council candidates happens to be the leader of your fur company and your friend, so you vote for him... along with your other guildmates, and he wins a council seat.
When the election is over, the council selects the judge, sheriff, governor, treasurer and whatever other positions available in that form of government. Each position has some sort of power, for example if a citizen lodges a complaint against a council member, or has evidence of a crime, he can remove that councilman from office.
Inactive or corrupt government officials can be removed either by citizen referendum or various other means.
The government has the power to raise taxes and build public projects. It can gain experience just like guilds and corporations can. The government may require landowners to pay x amount of money every in-game week or face the legal confiscation of their property. Taxes will be a hard-coded function in the government window, and players will be able to keep track of what they owe, and what has been collected.
You arrived in the city to find the government already established. The council has voted to name the city Freeport, and the state/government is called Winterfall.
Freeport is now bustling. The government is constructing a large stone keep at one end of town. Large wagons pulled by horses carry large piles of ore and carved stones from countryside mines and quarries. A company has constructed a shipyard in Freeport, and they are making and selling small sailing vessels. You look at a recently constructed harbor area and see several ships with symbols on their sails.
One of the ships has sailed from another region of the world, and it is selling sugar and wine, which will not grow in your region. Another ship is owned by a merchant who arrived in Freeport to buy iron bars and furs, with the intent to sell them in a far away town he knows to need those goods.
NPC Factions and Large-Scale Algorithmic Combat Talking to your guildmates, you learn that each of the other regions has their own government. You also learn that within your own region, there are some areas controlled by highly organized hostile npc factions. Deep in a mountain valley, far past your hill farm, there is an area rich in gold deposits. However, this area is controlled by a band of dwarves called the Thundersong. Deep in the valley they have their own fortress, surrounded by several smaller villages and outposts.
Their economy is supported by a system of farms, mines, and cottage industries. This is a warlike faction, and when they learn of the establishment of the Winterfall government, they send a raiding party consisting of 9 soldiers armed with spears and shields, 3 crossbowmen, a lieutenant armed with a magic sword, 3 wagons full of supplies, and a few quartermasters.
The expedition comes down from the mountain valley, headed for a small player-run village to the south of your farm. As they approach, you tell your npc employee to follow you as you run to Freeport. The raiding party attacks your farm, damaging your house, and looting all the money and supplies you didn't bring with you.
(At this point, if you fail to repair your buildings, they will be destroyed in 48 hours, clearing the land for somebody else)
You arrive in Freeport and start crying about your farm being attacked. Some players, along with the government, decide to organize an expedition of their own. A few minutes player they have established a raid of 33 players. Some wield spears or swords, and some are archers. Some wear platemail, others wear chain or leather armor. Many of them have learned some degree of magic.
The 33 players leave Freeport and march to intercept the Thundersong party, which is moving along a road past your scorched farm. As you approach, the dwarven spearmen form a line protecting their wagons. Behind that line, their archers begin shooting arrows at your raid while the spearmen hold their position.
The main body of your force rushes at the spearmen. Some of your members have emerged from sneaking among the woods on either side of the road, and begin firing arrows at the dwarven party. It appears they will be quickly overrun when twelve dwarven skirmishers emerge from stealth and attack your party by surprise. Since you failed to send a skilled scout ahead of your expedition to investigate before attacking, you did not detect these dwarves.
They are equipped with powerful steel weapons and manage to backstab some of your soldiers. Many people are knocked unconscious and some die, but your expedition manages to kill the majority of the dwarves. When the dwarven lieutenant dies, the few remaining dwarves break their ranks and attempt to run away, but a few in your party are on horseback and quickly cut them down.
Each member of the raid grabs as much of the precious steel armor, weaponry, coins, and rations from the dead dwarves as they can carry. As a group you decide who gets to go home with the dwarven wagons, and who gets the lieutenant's magical sword.
The expedition decides to attack the Thundersong territory in search of land and loot. You recruit a few more members from the nearby village and continue into the mountains. Before too long, the terrain becomes too rough for your wagons and the expedition needs to leave behind anything that can't be carried by pack-animals.
Before too long, you are spotted by three patrolling dwarves on a far-away hillside. Seeing the size and strength of your party, the dwarven npc's dispatch one of their own to the Thundersong stronghold for reinforcements. Again, your party lacks scouts or screens, so you were able to notice none of this. You had nobody to intercept the sentries or provide intelligence about the dwarven positions. You're a disorganized zerg.
When the dwarven sentry arrives at the Thundersong stronghold and tells the other npc's what he saw, the dwarves muster most of the soldiers they have available. 45 dwarven soldiers assemble according to the alogrithm, and march out toward the last reported position with their pack animals and supplies. Ahead of them the dwarves send three scouting parties of three dwarves each, which will march ahead of the main force. If the scouting party encounters your raid, they will send one dwarf back to the main force and provide them with updated intelligence on where you were, and your strength. These npc's can see you from considerably further away than in other mmo's, if you're not concealed, and if they think they can take you on, they will follow you EQ-style until you get help, you die, they get tired/hungry, or they lose you.
At some point the Thundersong force finds yours. They rush your position with the entirety of their army, including a dwarven general wearing the absolute phattest lewt. Your poor zerg is outnumbered and out-equipped, and you don't hold for very long before the dwarves slap your shit. Many turn and run away, leaving behind the slow pack animals.
The idea is that different npc factions will utilize different tactics. Dwarves are organized, intelligent, and well-equipped, but you wouldn't expect a civilization of orcs or goblins to use the same tactics, or have the same quality of equipment. Ideally there would be ways to increase your standing with the Thundersong if you want to trade with them or own property in their territory. You'd need to learn their language, and perhaps prove yourself through military service or some kind of labor/faction building effort.
The next course of action for the Winterfall government may be to construct a fort near the Thundersong territory to counter raiding parties and protect nearby territory. Raids can also use the fort to resupply, organize, respawn, heal, etc.