Housing Discussion
I was going to post this as a response to @Eoghan in @Druu 's thread about stuff we'd like to see and realized that it was probably derailing the thread a bit, so I felt it best to snip it and make it a new thread instead -
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Now that I got the post in I Hate out of my system, this is the thread I was actually linked that I wanted to comment on, since I ain't going to lie, tricking out Anette's house is like 85% ish of what I do on Imperian or the end goal towards which I do things.
My shortlist:
Village, Docks, Pond, Valley, Path, River, Road, Forest, Temple, Church, Farmland
Maybe Sewer for those of us with too many House Tokens and not enough sense but I'm unsure if this plays into the Survival skill ability in any way.
Here is how I would design it, personally. I'd piggyback it on the design of the NPC reactions system, with a few ideas lifted from elsewhere.
1] Players can unlock the ability to have guards for their house. They can unlock one guard slot per [token, credit purchase, or whatever]. This guard slot would use a generic guard NPC description like house mobs.
2] For description customizations, I would probably use a system like deathsight messages: you create a description for the guard, it gets approved, you can save it and use it on future guard slots. Saving descriptions is probably a good idea as it would make the burden on @Elokia and others manning the customization approval queue easier.
2a] Caveat to customization: While I would like attack messages to be something you could customize, I understand there are technical limitations that would probably make this more trouble than it's worth to attempt this. Though if I'm wrong, by all means, add those as customizable fields.
I would structure the customization as thus:
appearance
dropped
examined
leave
enter
dead
gender < it would be nice to be able to have descriptions work for either gender but there are probably technical limitations regarding this
For "enemy spotted" bits we could just use the reactions system. Perhaps we could have a default reaction builtin that people can unlock to change, or perhaps they can just buy reaction tokens/slots and add it themselves.
3] For a fee, existing guard slots can be "unlocked" to move them to a new room or change their description to a saved, approved description. Making them otherwise locked to a room would prevent players from abusing them and herding them into a clot, if coupled with an upper limit on "guards per room".
4] When you set up a guard slot, you set the description to use, out of the saved ones or the generic description, and the room the guard is in. If you do find a way to make gender-agnostic descriptions, you would also set the gender.
5] The guard would then appear in the room and guard that spot. They would function the same as city sentries.
5a] They probably shouldn't be able to man siege.
6] Guards that are slain would have a nominal gold fee to enlist a new guard. This would give real costs to a player using a house as a fortification or safe haven. I'm not going to suggest specific amounts as that would depend upon the strength of the guards but it should be enough that endgame players "feel a burn". It shouldn't be so much that you can grief people financially by sniping guards, however.
7] I would probably allow reaction slots to be placed on them so people could, for example, have a guard TELL them if an enemy enters the room. This would be the means for people to add extra functionality like that to guards if they so wish.
8] If we have the bank account addon as above, we could also charge an upkeep for guards that draws on the house bank account.
8a] If you don't have enough gold for all the guards, they would leave and you would have to pay the reinstatement costs as if they were slain, and also the upkeep due for that month that was missed. This would probably be best done as an overarching "due fee" rather than doing it individually per guard as I imagine tracking it individually per guard would introduce an onerous amount of necessary tracking to the monthly turnovers. Just make it so that you can't revive guards or hire new ones until past due fees are paid, I'd say.
As to attacks and NPC strength, that is best left to the musings of people more familiar with the balance of guards than I am, but in general I'd say you want to avoid casual attacks and guard sniping, but not targetted attacks on a player.
How I envision commands:
HOUSE GUARD [id] - general information about the guard of that ID (maybe: room, hire date, next payment due, guard type, maybe the dropped desc)
HOUSE GUARD ADD - pay credits/gold/tokens/red M&Ms to add a slot to the guard roster
(Thought: you could perhaps have the generic descriptions just be descriptions under the same system, just ones available to everyone.)
HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION [id] SUBMIT - Submit a description you've put together for approval by the administration.
HOUSE GUARD [id] UNLOCK - allow a player to move or change the description or type of a guard for 24h (like reactions). The guard has to be locked again to work as a guard. To prevent panic moves and other abusive plays, we could have a minimum unlock time of say a few minutes.
HOUSE GUARD [id] ASSIGN TO [room shortname or vnum] - allow an unlocked guard to be moved to another room
...
Feel free to use all, any, or none, of the above, I'm just thinking aloud here.
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Some other ideas of my own:
Fluff NPCs
I've asked @Elokia about this and it's something I like to be able to do in the future is have "fluff" NPCs outside of the three kind of hard roles we already have with servants. One example pertinent for my own house would be a forge worker for instance, since one of the rooms is a forge. I'm not expecting something that has any added functions or sells anything, just things to add to the "flavour" of various parts of the house. It's these kinds of vanity purchases that are many MMOs primary endgame money sink, virtual currency and real money alike. I know I'd spend money on it.
I would approach this like I would the free item tokens personally (and maybe for a price point considered comparable?) - a tabula rasa that won't have progs or a functional use (except attaching all kinds of nifty Reactions to!) but you could use to have flavour NPCs of your choice. A formalized system to submit them via the customization system or some variant thereof might make @Elokia happier though!
Moving addons (idea 61621)
Right now, the only way to 'move' an addon is to REMOVE it from one room and then re-purchase it on the other. This disincentivises people like myself from expanding houses because if I want to, for instance, move my stable out of the garden Anette has now into a separate room, I'm not only looking at the minimum 750k gold to add on a separate stable room, but also the expense of re-puchasing the addon as well. This is not a nominal expense. I'm not asking it be free, but if it was doable at some sort of premium that's less than repurchasing the addon that would be nice.
Map fixing stuff
As Jeremy well knows, the mapping stuff when you're trying to construct houses the maps can be a bit derpy, since he had to help sort mine once. Having some way to rectify mapping problems in our own house would probably be a good idea since then we wouldn't have to bother you guys if the automap derps, but I'm not sure if this has been enough of a problem to warrant this.
Cook Improvements
Allow us to specify specific recipes a cook uses from the given pantry shelf so we don't need separate pantries for separate cooks.
Ability to suppress servant reactions
The cook and butler and maid servant types all have built in fluff reactions. These are neat to have as generic things, but it would be nice for those of us that have added our own reactions to be able to suppress the existing ones.
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Now that I got the post in I Hate out of my system, this is the thread I was actually linked that I wanted to comment on, since I ain't going to lie, tricking out Anette's house is like 85% ish of what I do on Imperian or the end goal towards which I do things.
There are several terrain types similar to the ones already existing in the system that are worth considering.Eoghan said:These have been historically deliberately restricted because we don't want groves etc to be placed in houses. Now that groves aren't as combat relevant as they once were, we may reapproach this.
My shortlist:
Village, Docks, Pond, Valley, Path, River, Road, Forest, Temple, Church, Farmland
Maybe Sewer for those of us with too many House Tokens and not enough sense but I'm unsure if this plays into the Survival skill ability in any way.
Perhaps this could be added to Butlers to give them a functional use? As is, I believe they are just fluff NPCs with a few stock reactions.Eoghan said:
Not against this as an addon, other than that it devalues key sigils overall. Will add it to the list of things to consider.Sumie said:Allow for doors to close automatically like having a key sigil without needing a key sigil.
I don't see a problem with having a bank in a house as long as the price point is such that it doesn't mean everyone and their dog has one. Perhaps they could have an upkeep cost associated with them - this is what Aetolia does for libraries (or at least did, when I played it, that may have changed).Eoghan said:
1) A bank is something we've discussed in the past, but haven't added. A few issues with it that make us go back and forth on the idea.
I think this would be a very good idea if we had a house bank as well, because then you could charge similarly to town guards and have them charge an upkeep on the player just as city guards do.Eoghan said:
Allowing house guards of any kind is a huge balancing concern and would need to be part of a much larger discussion. We've talked about a few different ideas for house guards, but haven't really come up with anything we're happy with.
Here is how I would design it, personally. I'd piggyback it on the design of the NPC reactions system, with a few ideas lifted from elsewhere.
1] Players can unlock the ability to have guards for their house. They can unlock one guard slot per [token, credit purchase, or whatever]. This guard slot would use a generic guard NPC description like house mobs.
2] For description customizations, I would probably use a system like deathsight messages: you create a description for the guard, it gets approved, you can save it and use it on future guard slots. Saving descriptions is probably a good idea as it would make the burden on @Elokia and others manning the customization approval queue easier.
2a] Caveat to customization: While I would like attack messages to be something you could customize, I understand there are technical limitations that would probably make this more trouble than it's worth to attempt this. Though if I'm wrong, by all means, add those as customizable fields.
I would structure the customization as thus:
appearance
dropped
examined
leave
enter
dead
gender < it would be nice to be able to have descriptions work for either gender but there are probably technical limitations regarding this
For "enemy spotted" bits we could just use the reactions system. Perhaps we could have a default reaction builtin that people can unlock to change, or perhaps they can just buy reaction tokens/slots and add it themselves.
3] For a fee, existing guard slots can be "unlocked" to move them to a new room or change their description to a saved, approved description. Making them otherwise locked to a room would prevent players from abusing them and herding them into a clot, if coupled with an upper limit on "guards per room".
4] When you set up a guard slot, you set the description to use, out of the saved ones or the generic description, and the room the guard is in. If you do find a way to make gender-agnostic descriptions, you would also set the gender.
5] The guard would then appear in the room and guard that spot. They would function the same as city sentries.
5a] They probably shouldn't be able to man siege.
6] Guards that are slain would have a nominal gold fee to enlist a new guard. This would give real costs to a player using a house as a fortification or safe haven. I'm not going to suggest specific amounts as that would depend upon the strength of the guards but it should be enough that endgame players "feel a burn". It shouldn't be so much that you can grief people financially by sniping guards, however.
7] I would probably allow reaction slots to be placed on them so people could, for example, have a guard TELL them if an enemy enters the room. This would be the means for people to add extra functionality like that to guards if they so wish.
8] If we have the bank account addon as above, we could also charge an upkeep for guards that draws on the house bank account.
8a] If you don't have enough gold for all the guards, they would leave and you would have to pay the reinstatement costs as if they were slain, and also the upkeep due for that month that was missed. This would probably be best done as an overarching "due fee" rather than doing it individually per guard as I imagine tracking it individually per guard would introduce an onerous amount of necessary tracking to the monthly turnovers. Just make it so that you can't revive guards or hire new ones until past due fees are paid, I'd say.
As to attacks and NPC strength, that is best left to the musings of people more familiar with the balance of guards than I am, but in general I'd say you want to avoid casual attacks and guard sniping, but not targetted attacks on a player.
How I envision commands:
HOUSE GUARD [id] - general information about the guard of that ID (maybe: room, hire date, next payment due, guard type, maybe the dropped desc)
HOUSE GUARD LIST - list all the guards in the house presently, maybe order them by type
GUARD#52
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a generic guard - in The Hall of Heroes (v1234)
archer guard using description "a generic guard"
Hired 13 Halitus, 166AM
Wages of 1234 gold next due 13 Halitus, 167AM
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GUARD ROSTER FOR ANETTE_HOUSE_1
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standard guards
house_guard#121 - anette_house_1 (v123)
archers
house_guard#122 - anette_house_1 (v123)
telepaths
house_guard#123 - anette_house_1 (v123)
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Total upkeep: 1234 gold
You are using 3/3 available guard roster slots.
HOUSE GUARD ADD - pay credits/gold/tokens/red M&Ms to add a slot to the guard roster
HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION NEW - create a new guard description, probably with the standard customization fee or similar
> house guard add
You are attempting to add a slot to the house guard roster for 10 red M&Ms. User HOUSE GUARD ROSTER ADD CONFIRM to confirm.
> house guard confirm
You have added one guard slot to your house guard roster, with id #124
HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION [id] - put alone will display the current description
> house guard description new
You are adding a new guard description for 50 credits. Type HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION NEW CONFIRM to confirm.
> house guard description new confirm
You have added a new guard description with the ID #2
(Thought: you could perhaps have the generic descriptions just be descriptions under the same system, just ones available to everyone.)
HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION LIST - list all the available descriptions and statuses
Description #2
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status: system
appearance: a generic guard
dropped: A generic guard patrols here.
examined: This generic guard isn't anything special to look at.
enter: A generic guard enters from the $(dir$)
exit: A generic guard leaves to the $(dir$)
dead: A generic guard lies here dead.
type: standard
gender: female
----------------------------------------------
HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION [id] SET [dropped/appearance/etc] - set attributes of the created guard description
Available house guard descriptions
----------------------------------------------
id appearance status
1 a generic archer system
2 a generic guard system
3 another generic guard system
56 Anette's special guard unapproved
57 Anette's special archer pending
58 Anette's special telepath approved
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HOUSE GUARD DESCRIPTION [id] SUBMIT - Submit a description you've put together for approval by the administration.
HOUSE GUARD [id] UNLOCK - allow a player to move or change the description or type of a guard for 24h (like reactions). The guard has to be locked again to work as a guard. To prevent panic moves and other abusive plays, we could have a minimum unlock time of say a few minutes.
HOUSE GUARD [id] ASSIGN TO [room shortname or vnum] - allow an unlocked guard to be moved to another room
HOUSE GUARD [id] DESCRIBE AS [description ID] - change the description of an unlocked guard.
> house guard 123 move to anette_house_2
You have assigned a generic guard (a telepath) to Anette's Second Room (v1234).
HOUSE GUARD [id] HIRE - hire a guard that is in the roster and locked. This places them in the room. Necessary if they're new or got slain.
> house guard 123 describe as 3
A generic guard is now Another generic guard.
HOUSE GUARD [id] FIRE - fire a guard that is active in the world. Useful if you're going to be away for a while or don't want to pay upkeep or whatever. This would remove them from the room, but they'd still be on the roster. It would not unlock or remove that roster slot.
> house guard 123 hire
You have hired a generic guard (a telepath) for 1234 gold and they are now standing guard in Anette's Second Room (v1234).
...
Feel free to use all, any, or none, of the above, I'm just thinking aloud here.
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Some other ideas of my own:
Fluff NPCs
I've asked @Elokia about this and it's something I like to be able to do in the future is have "fluff" NPCs outside of the three kind of hard roles we already have with servants. One example pertinent for my own house would be a forge worker for instance, since one of the rooms is a forge. I'm not expecting something that has any added functions or sells anything, just things to add to the "flavour" of various parts of the house. It's these kinds of vanity purchases that are many MMOs primary endgame money sink, virtual currency and real money alike. I know I'd spend money on it.
I would approach this like I would the free item tokens personally (and maybe for a price point considered comparable?) - a tabula rasa that won't have progs or a functional use (except attaching all kinds of nifty Reactions to!) but you could use to have flavour NPCs of your choice. A formalized system to submit them via the customization system or some variant thereof might make @Elokia happier though!
Moving addons (idea 61621)
Right now, the only way to 'move' an addon is to REMOVE it from one room and then re-purchase it on the other. This disincentivises people like myself from expanding houses because if I want to, for instance, move my stable out of the garden Anette has now into a separate room, I'm not only looking at the minimum 750k gold to add on a separate stable room, but also the expense of re-puchasing the addon as well. This is not a nominal expense. I'm not asking it be free, but if it was doable at some sort of premium that's less than repurchasing the addon that would be nice.
Map fixing stuff
As Jeremy well knows, the mapping stuff when you're trying to construct houses the maps can be a bit derpy, since he had to help sort mine once. Having some way to rectify mapping problems in our own house would probably be a good idea since then we wouldn't have to bother you guys if the automap derps, but I'm not sure if this has been enough of a problem to warrant this.
Cook Improvements
Allow us to specify specific recipes a cook uses from the given pantry shelf so we don't need separate pantries for separate cooks.
Ability to suppress servant reactions
The cook and butler and maid servant types all have built in fluff reactions. These are neat to have as generic things, but it would be nice for those of us that have added our own reactions to be able to suppress the existing ones.
3
Comments
City houses could use a little love with the attractiveness of a token house's permanence, area choice, and expansion possibilities compared to the possibility of investing millions into a home only to have it collar you to a city or to have it yoinked by a chancellor.
House Add-ons
Cardtable yes please thank you.
Horseshoe Toss.
Darts.
Stage - Adds a little copy of the Nolmine Theater stage (backdrops, illusions) with the homeowner able to set directors and actors.
House Mobiles
Vanity pets and familiars really should be able to be set to a house, possibly by virtue of an add-on if you really must charge for it. I would care more about them if I could use them to decorate.
Librarian - Allows you to sell book copies in a few different book patterns. Being able to sell blanks of those books would be handy, too.
Kennel/Stablemaster - Allows you to train a pet without having it out. Possibly could just have it autotrain (Kennelmaster train pet skill -> trains at a longer cooldown).
Director - Runs recorded plays and allows renting the stage.
House Management
Allow the owner to set others as capable of making edits.
*fans self* Also allow the owner to set approved list for depositing vanity pets and familiars.
Thoughts on the other suggestions:
Cardtable would supercede an existing artifact so it seems unlikely, though it would be something I'd buy if they did put it in.
Horseshoe toss and darts would be nice. I'd never use them but I'd probably still buy them because I am silly like that.
Stage/director would probably necessitate prog editing by us players unless the plays were pre-recorded and from a list or something, which I don't see the administration wanting to do for a variety of reasons, but I'd definitely go for it if they added it.
Vanity pets can already be set to a house room with the "a silver leash" artifact available for 25 credits. ARTIFACT 105 SHOW. Something similar for familiars would be neat.
Kennel/Stablemaster autotrain would allow people to essentially complete a task unattended, I'm not sure that's the best idea. A mobile that simply allows you to train the pets in that stable would be a good idea though, I think!
Librarians selling book copies is a good idea. Also, we can't presently attach custom REACTIONS to librarians (not sure if bug or design), if they could be added to the list of NPCs we can that would be great. Especially since many people who don't know better try to GIVE books to librarians when they want to donate them to the library, so I could script a reaction to return a book in such a way. Probably overly ambitious to have custom book designs but it should be trivial to make them have a basic design each of book, tome, journal, and scroll that you can buy with ASK LIBRARIAN WARES.
Being able to delegate at least key creation/lockworking would be a big plus.
The backdrops are pre-set. You could, if you purchased that, request special backdrops. The prog is already in game. They just need to make it attachable to new rooms.
The director and rotating shows would require input. The actual show part isn't challenging to create and the prog for running the show is already in the game. Require players submit their shows, purchase comes with one show, you can buy additional for tokens/credits and players supply the actual show. All they'd need to provide other than the text would be timing. All text would be room-wide displayed text.
Makes sense for flavor, too. A wilderness household would want to acquire protection, whereas a house in a city/towne has the protection of walls and standing guard.
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edit: Just to clarify, I am not against this at all (I would love it!) I just think for practical reasons there might be too much coding required to make this work. If I'm wrong then by all means, I'd love it if they added it.
This is currently restricted to the following addons: newsroom, postoffice, stable, kennel, privacy, travelblock, storeroom, pantry
You must be standing in the room from which you wish to transfer an addon, then use the syntax HOUSE TRANSFER ADDON TO
We have evaluated the list of environments available within houses, and have decided we don't want to expand them just yet. We're considering adding additional "natural" environments, with the caveat that they we wouldn't allow groves to be placed within houses. We haven't made a final decision there yet.
We aren't going to allow shared house management. Houses are personal items, and modifications to them will remain personal. We don't want to encourage the ability to give portions of houses to other players, and are opposed to players selling sub-houses with shared addons.
We also aren't going to allow many of the requested environments for the same reasons. Houses should be just that - houses. We don't want to mechanically support the creation of organizations within houses. A house should represent a house, be that a cottage or a mansion. It should not represent a village.
With the hills and forest bit I was envisioning an estate that would have it's own walled grounds, which one imagines would be rather reasonable, though perhaps some other environment name might be preferable for that.
The village one just seemed an alternative for "urban" which is on the list now. Many valid places to place token houses (well places I'd think are valid) are villages. I'm not at all married to that particular one, though, just explaining why I suggested it.
Token houses are out of the reach of some players, housing plots are limited, most players share a house (because that's what you do) with spouses/family.
Edit: Honestly, the group aspect is the purpose of having a house. That's just such a silly reason. I'd buy that you don't want to add player managers because you want to drive the sale of token houses. I'd buy that you don't want to do it because it's complicated (read: not a high priority). But that? Makes zero sense.
Perhaps "personal item" was a bad choice of words. What we're trying to avoid is a situation where someone creates a large plot and rents or sells subsections of it to other players. This creates a situation where fraud and abuse are very easy, especially with retirement, and that's what we're trying to avoid here. We are absolutely aware that families share houses, and think that's fine. But a house should not be an extra guildhall or a clanhall, for example, and definitely should not be a town or village.
If someone wants to get uppity about it, then it's as simple as pointing to the current owner and leaving it at that.
IF they cared at all about the effort/money spent in a house, they'd make all houses credit purchases and permanent. I've lost like 6 houses in this game over the years because of politics and/or Life Happening (tm). That's not a good reason, imo.
If they are concerned about subletting, then they should eliminate the ability to share keys, because that's all that's necessary to sublet a house. Almost all of us who have owned a house have done it at least once.
The credit costs for vanity pet setting are atrocious. 25c per pet is ~440k per each one. The cage that lets people grab and play with pets are a bit closer to reasonable (100c (<2m gold) for all your pets), but you can't decorate that way.
Cardtable has the same pricing issue, evidenced by how few there are (@Cardi
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Regards to management: If I wanted to sublet, I'd do it whether it was 'mechanically supported' or not. I just don't want to have to login to make an edit to a room that the Misses could make. If it comes down to Anette's described situation, that seems pretty obvious to me: Subletters have to deal with the authority of the owner and should have no claim on the home.
Either way, it's a minor issue that would be convenient, but it's not necessary.
Edit: Holy crappola the posting speed
It is, as I said, an investment. 25cr per means every month I can get 4 on Iron Elite. That's a fairly insignificant cost.
Whether the 25c is insignificant or overpriced is subjective without better data, I suppose. It's hard for me to see it as anything but gouging when you glance over at, say, Aetolia's free ability to drop in vanities.
Skegdald for instance has at its entrance "You see exits leading north (closed door), southwest, and A path of trampled snow leads northeast."
The vain person in me would love the front door of my house to look all properly imposing or impressive or whatever.
PS yes I did typo the capitalization there.
*checks* Yeaaah.
I'd remembered paying through the nose for my vampire's house (and I ain't meaning undead houses!). Didn't think it would have changed.
I wouldn't say the costs of the two markets are comparable at all as a result.
Though perhaps that's a thing ya'll should look into. Some of my favorite spaces in Aetolia are player-created villages/public spaces. The pub in Delos that was a major source of cross-faction RP, for example. At least two players that I know of made huge player-created villages that had a ton of lore built into them and created a lot of interesting RP for players.
Imperian has and continues to be weirdly restrictive for player-generated RP and I think the game suffers for it.
That said, housing.
On the subject of custom entrance/exit messages, I'd DEFINITELY pay money to have the ability to create custom 'keyed' entrances. Like a speakeasy password or emote-access. Kabaal and I are building a sort of semi-private bar in Caanae for RP purposes and it'd be swank if we could give out a passcode for entrance (rather than just leaving the hidden access point unlocked).
And hell when I ran a towne on my old character, I kept one of the 'houses' in the ownership of the towne, and divided into rooms that towne citizens could rent out at a reduced price, so that those that couldn't afford a whole house could still have a place to live. There's not much incentive to have a house in a towne - the security is poor and the size is restrictive - but that at least put one of them to use. I always had great difficulty keeping the houses filled and paying rent. Emote "locks" would probably be doable since there's instance where this exists. The wardancer guildhall having pulling on the tapestries or the old Taekyon monetary having taekyonbow at the statue. This would open a lot of doors for very cool flavour things in housing.
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edit If you think Antioch is big, check out Khandava. Most of the cities/councils are fairly equal in size I think, but actually, I think Antiochs one of the smaller ones if you counted the room numbers. I might be wrong.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
100 the City of Kinsarmar (349 rooms)
43 the Celidon Council (350 rooms)
16 the City of Antioch (370 rooms)
151 the City of Stavenn (350 rooms)
85 the Ithaquan Council (283 rooms)
Aetolia for exits with doors has it like "east, west, north (pine door)" < could describe doors/exits in parentheticals like that too.
Though the above-quoted code from my OP is actually in game already in use for some areas anyways so its probably easier.
That being said, i'm totally up for it, cause waiting for the house owner to get around to decorating your room is probably a pain in the neck, even if you write the room yourself. If you wanna make any sudden changes, you'd have to get a hold of that same owner every time... That being said: sudden changes to the room are prohibitive, and i'm okay with that because it probably keeps something on the back end from going haywire.
I know its already been said 'no', im just throwing my opinion in to the grinder.
Editing room exits could get weird, but i'd like to be able to have both a (for example) trap door type up/down exit in my room desc and have a matching up/down exit saying the same. Right now i'm making do with a metalworking design stair that echoes the room description - also stairs, what a strange thing to have a pattern for... the request for that one must've been someone who is an avid stairs fan. ...a stair-master maybe?