Shattered Kingdoms

You forgot removing scouts signature ability from the game completely (not that it hasnt already happened).

My question is what is the goal of this idea? What need does it fill. If you think something like this is going to limit your busy body work in collecting tribunal coffer cash this is going to be way more work. If you want PvE go out and PvE. If you want PvP go out and PvP. If you want Imm driven PvP use the pray command. If you want to see why its a bad idea to have a system like this look at CRS.

What is the purpose:
To give tribunal members another field to fight on while giving an advantage to pk within the city, should all territories be captured.
Crs is different than this because it's such a high risk/reward action. With the non-jloot scenario proposed for trib warfare, there is little risk in making these territory runs. Nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Tribunals at war need a different way to conduct war rather than inn ganks.
But this would also make inn ganks easier, should your team be able to take all enemy territories.

Here's some addendums to the short version I referenced before.

Regarding gates/rifts: I don't think it's necessary to remove gates/rifts from cities altogether, but to -definitely- make it impossible to gate to any location where you can walk to the inn without running through a set of yelling guard NPCs. If you're an outlaw or in a warring tribunal, it should not be possible to get to the inn of your enemy without some form of advance notification. I'm also a fan of removing all NPC gate targets from cities in addition. That way, you could still create gates and rifts into or out of a city, but you'd first have to gain access to the city itself and/or have a willing gate target. This preserves the ability to set up rift networks and maintains the convenience of gating out with only a minor inconvenience of gating in. The last time I floated this idea, other power players suggested that it also would be reasonable to have cities be made no-gate/no-rift except for one designated "portal" room that would be heavily guarded, perhaps even more guarded than the city gates. That was also a neat sounding alternative.

Regarding preventing recall: I think it would be an awful idea to make cities no-recall. Removing recall works against the defenders and the attackers, though it does so in a heavily skewed favor benefitting the defenders and only continues to discourage attacking without having an overwhelming advantage. Also, as you pointed out, it would greatly overpower cabal room affecting spells and classes that can go ethereal.

Regarding bounty NPCs: It's very important to point out that my suggested change doesn't help the state of tribunal PK -at all- unless bounty NPCs are removed as one of the fundamental pieces of it. Bounty NPCs are a scaling system that spawns more NPCs based on your outlaw list, and killing the bounty NPCs increases your outlaw list. This is overly aggressive in its punishing of attackers, making it so that getting outlawed and/or banished all but completely removes your ability to mount a meaningful attack into a city without using overwhelming numbers. Bounty NPCs are also the primary reason why your aforementioned disguise cabal ability already -is- OP concerning tribunal warfare: The ability to hunt and kill your enemies while avoiding the penalty of bounty NPCs is extremely powerful, as Trag's necro that has free reign in Exile with a hoard of undead can tell you.


In tandem, these three changes would completely reshape the look and feel of attacking and defending a city, which is currently configured all wrong. Right now, the place everyone is supposed to congregate, the inn, is the least secure place in a city, to the point where even an outlawed or banished member can often reach the inn without any forewarning to tribunal members, let alone citizens. Instead, the benefits of city defense for a defending tribunal member lies almost wholeheartedly in bounty NPCs, which is a scaling system that spawns useless NPCs endlessly, making it impossible to lock down a kill once you get outlawed which only gets worse over time, yet also providing absolutely no real benefit to someone who is truly outnumbered unless they're focused in ranged combat. The current system punishes attackers who get outlawed too aggressively, requiring them to farm bounty NPCs to have any chance of fighting on even ground, requires bounty NPC farming and coin farming on either side of a conflict which is ultimately boring, which ultimately encourages scanning for cheap kills with large groups because an even fight in tribunal ground is virtually impossible once you get outlawed.

If you put in the three changes of removing free gates to inns, standardizing and strengthening gate guards, and removing bounty NPCs, then inns would actually feel safe when outlaws were about, making your enemies recall would mean something to a defending tribunal member, and attacking invaders would actually be rewarded for breaking the perimeter of a city instead of just racking up endless bounty NPCs kills that ultimately result in running the risk of IRL month-long jail sentences. I personally think that would -encourage- people to stay in cities, not discourage it, because right now the inn is literally the easiest and first place anyone checks for cheap kills, and it can often be checked undetected.


The game was better when players actually possessed the ability to "take over" a city by killing all the guard NPCs until the next repop. Now the only way to "take over" a city is to drain the bounty NPC coffers, which is mind-numbing on both sides of the equation. Simpler is better. The answer isn't to add more complicated systems that auto-spawn NPCs or encourage offline farming, whether it be farming coin for coffers, farming bounty NPCs to deplete coffers, or farming territories or cabal guardians while players are offline. The best approach is to simplify the system so that you're not punished in a scaling way for attacking a city's guards and you're not able to scan for cheap kills by gating 2 rooms from the inn. Both of these are currently true and it's one of the primary reasons that tribunal PK has grown so stale and why cities are still fundamentally flawed in their defense.

Lets look at this constructively. Why do tribunals need another field to fight on. They have their city their foes city and Teron a lawless city to fight in. I do not buy the needing a new field to fight in they just need to make use of what they already have. What you need is a better way to engage people while both sides are "ready" and more importantly willing for the fight to take place. The issue here is attacking a city means they have the advantage and finding someone in Teron is hard if they dont want to be there. So you need to promote desire to engage because they will solve both the ready and willing problem.
CRS is not high risk. If your attacking a CRS when there are members of the other cabal online that arnt dead your just doing it wrong. That basically makes this CRS of the tribunal world.
If tribunals need a different way to conduct war rather than Inn ganks. Get out of the Inn and yell challenges at people, you can change this by your own actions. You dont need code to make that happen. If your saying tribunal need a PvE way of fighting each other I can not disagree more. It was bad for cabals when it was CRS was introduced and it will be the same way for tribunals until people just ignore the system mostly much like they do with cabals.
Your final point the one thing you want to be limited would be easier to do for the side that already had the advantage? How is this good game design games that have the winner gets an edge are looking for a conclusion not a steady state of conflict.

A limited code change requirement to increase the willingness of people to enter into PvP. Add a scripted NPC near each judge. When a group of a tribunal heads to that NPC they get the option to start a quest if there are members of other tribunals online. The NPC then opens a gate/rift from them to their foes stones. They NPC then sends two messages <insert tribunal A> are invading <insert tribunal B> hold the city for a day and you will be rewarded. A counter starts 30 min. If the attackers are in the Inn room when the time ends they win, if not they lose. Winners get a scripted vendor that has several different options that you can only perform once per victory.The rewards could include a one use scry item, potion of true sight, standard "good" PvP potion scroll wand or staff (single charge so no recharging), a blank overpowered scroll/vial or scripted item for religion spell. If required engaging more interest this could contribute towards mentor stat attribute at the end of the month.
If capital cities gets boring you could add coding to attack each city with a similar challenge, Everclear Seawatch etc. Then if you really wanted territory give and take you would have something to work from. However territory changing hands seems like a really bad idea from how the game is designed currently because there is an end state to gaining territory and once its reached its either lame or game breaking.

This solution encourages players to join and engage in tribunal warfare by giving them a PvP path to get something that takes PvE. It encourages people to engage in PvP in your foes cities because thats how you get the reward. It doesnt force someone to PvP but they know their foes are going to get an edge if they dont if scrying is included they know that a gang might be in store for chickening out anyway. It is relatively simple to implement a builder probably has enough scripting power to do at least 75% of the work if not 100% once the exact terms are set out and approved by an Imm discussion. Most importantly it doesnt take a "huge build effort" and has tuning dials built into it. If the rewards are too good they can get nerf if they arnt good enough they can get buffed. If attacking or defending is harder they can get better rewards. If tribunal guards are making it impossible with out draining an account a small amount of code should be required to even the playing field with buff or nerfs to bounty NPCs based on numbers of attackers defenders. If the one room inn is too hard for attackers (who need to sit there) give them a few rooms to be in so they can move around while occupying. Its "simple" solution that encourages with out forcing people to engage, non tribunal members can help but are not rewarded directly (they could always demand one of the items from people they helped).

You don't like bounty hunters? Cap territories to keep them from spawning. Solved.
The side with the greater numbers will have the advantage? The rich get richer? You can obtain territories while enemies are offline. Oh no! Offline farming is bad? Let's talk about draining coffers. Territories has greater RP on the large scale of a war. A measurable way to see who is winning at any given time. Give your team an upper hand when nobody is around to pk. You can also take territories when your enemy is online.
People won't defend because it's a guarentee'd death? Anti-jloot room. Pvp still happens. You get to boast how the enemy couldn't stop you and now the territory is yours.

Greater RP. More pvp. Incentive to capture. Pve that affects the pvp status of war.

This is absolutely pve. With a greater chance of getting the pvp fights. And it affects the ability to get ganks in the city.

I'd also like to see 'staying inside cities' incentivized further. Or at least be a greater requirement, to increase pvp/pk.
Half of your required logged hours must come from residing within a city. I dunno the exact number. But something to straight up 'force' people to reside within a city throughout the month. Perhaps this is best posted in "what do you want to see" thread. But oh well.

Perhaps 3 out of 5 territories are jloot free. The other two you have to obtain with full pk standards. Abuse potential: only ninja caps.

Maybe a couple of the jloot territories are only open durring happy hour.

Just some additional thoughts to keep things interesting.

My interest in this type of idea goes back over years of watching factions march into an area, steam-roll its defenders, obliterate the NPC guard population, and humiliate the defending faction's leaders and troops, yet have no ability to 'actually' capture any of this territory that they're occupying, no ability to station their own guards in the territory they've occupied. There used to be a lot of those complaints when we had a larger playerbase and more regularly had various factions invading each others' territory.

When CRS was rolled out, I think I was in-between tenures on staff, and I was one of the players who vocally opposed it. My opinion is that tribunals and kingdoms are more appropriate for that type of "capture the flag" gaming.

And of course, my gaming history revolves as heavily around turn-based strategy games like RISK, Axis & Allies, Civilization as it does around D&D-style RPG, so this type of idea interests me. It is a big part of why I was interested to run the Grahme Civil War RPK experiment. I'm still interested to run another event that touches on these same kinds of ideas, in a DM-style role like I attempted w/Grahme, hopefully building upon lessons learned last time, and heeding warnings/ideas that percolate here.

...if time ever allows, that is. Hopefully sometime this year when I'm not sleeping in the woods.

I know there was more to this post, but I want to emphasize the reason why I don't think this would be a good direction right now: There used to be rampant PK involving big groups of people rolling through cities murdering everyone. Now there aren't. Adding an extremely complicated system that would have maybe been nice to have 3-4 years ago is a bad idea now when things simply aren't ripe for that sort of play, especially when there are more pressing class-breaking bugs that haven't been addressed.

A valid argument. I agree that class fixes and bug fixes should take priority over a large scale project like this. Because those fixes would affect this type of system.

You state that large scale pvp use to occur. My point is that we do not have the Playerbase to facilitate the old style of pvp. We need a reason for this smaller scale pvp to occur. Something to motivate tribunals to engage one another.
If we can come up with a better way for tribunals to engage eachother, other than territories, im all for that. But we need a way to spark the interaction.
I evolved the idea to affect bounty hunters because coffer draining and and farming coin for coffers has been brought up negatively as an issue.
I brought up no loot zones because people are afraid of losing loot.
I like the idea that only some of the territories are no-loot zones.