Twitch Chat 9/8/2017
Here's the video. Comments below are my own, since I missed the stream.
Engineer
NOWNOWNOWNOWplx
Roleplay council
There are very distinct roleplay-related mechanics that could be discussed, implemented or improved on. Crafting quests and experience, the possibility of more interactive PvE systems (a la influencing), and social experience just off the top of my head. That's what I think of when I hear 'roleplay council', but there's also room for something like a Lore Council to discuss at least the direction the major orgs want roleplay to go in, if not outright plan events or systems.
Townes
I'm on board with a rep system, especially if it replaces the figurine quest somehow.
Shaman
Give us old shaman messages back for demonic
Khandava would love to roleplay this, and I imagine you probably have those stored somewhere?Affinity
-Toadstool for being in an area is enough to make it important alone. The skill failures are
. Those two alone are the main draw to leylines. If you want to add deeper impacts further down in affinity, sure.Bards
Oh god the argument for not making letters/books generally available hurt my head so hard. Pure headdesk. Let them keep the skills. Yay, they get free trade skill stuff, sounds like a benefit. I don't agree with the argument for why it can't be neutral (voice RP is *not* magickal), but I don't care about that as much. And the real reason you can't let bards play one instrument for style instead of juggling a bunch of bs automagically is it'd devalue the Harp
'Psionic is AM' ==
Not against more differences in Assassigade.
Makeup/Perfume
I know at least 7 people who would buy this instantly. And my perfume is nowhere near as annoying as my headsnakes.
Fireworks
Just go steal Aet's code >.> I miss seeing Areka's square tats in the sky.
SCIENCE
There's also a fairy with clockwork rituals ticking away in her head
3
Comments
I love the Bards. I have been a bard on probably half a dozen characters I love the bards so much. I see zero reasons to not make the crafting skills in artistry neutral. You don't even have to strip it from the bards. Give them enhanced shinies on the crafting ability. Some of this they already have. See: travel paintings. Add a 'seal' for letters or enhance the number of items a letter can carry when crafted by a bard. Voila, bard sadness resolved. Failing that, give them a few more mechanical trinkets. Bards have always had a vaguely mechanical aspect in their artistic crafting.
Thespia and Artistry's 'magick' could easily be explained in a non-magick way. It's never been well explained per lore and there's no reason it couldn't be discovered to be related to the Voice's connection to divine language - the music taps into Rashirmiric energy or is simply just THAT good as to be inspiring/healing/whatever. Thespia could just be trickery.
tl;dr - Please make papercrafting a general skillset. Consider neutral bard because your logic is not sound.
On Science
Gee, why would we want to distinguish ourselves from the 4 other fantasy IRE games. That would just be so awful. -biggest eye roll ever-
On Affinity
Token houses are by and large not in councils/cities. Affinity being harder on punishment would essentially screw all of us token house owners pretty roughly. Please don't.
On Shaman
Oh, wow. The rambling whatever-that-was about why shaman was unrolled without any lore whatsoever? Just say, "We screwed up, we are willing to look at ways to fix it." That's the professional answer. Meanwhile, HEY THIS IS THE EXACT THING AN RP COUNCIL WOULD BE STELLAR FOR.
I'd rather have new and unique demonic messages rather than copy pasting from the old skool demonic stuff. We've gotten new, weird demonic RP/lore now to play with.
On Townes
Yea, cool. I just have to say that I laughed -hard- when you said you don't want to strip them down because 'balance' of circles.
......................................k
On the RP Council
Man. Right now I'm struggling to understand why you guys keep failing -so hard- to grok the RP community in your own game. How in the world do you genuinely think that 'players have different RP styles' and 'there are organizational levels to RP' is a justifiable excuse to can this idea? Combat is inherently more complex and generally generates far more heated opinions than RP does. We have a -serious- issue with our culture, lore, and RP hooks right now. Even people who don't participate much in the RP end of the game can see it. Ya'll -need- an RP council. And if you don't know what we would do with one, let me give you an idea or three. Rotate through a focus area every 1-3 months depending on the complexity of the issue.
-Review lore
-Brainstorm ways to enhance RP/lore tie-in with orgs
-Focus on QoL improvements that would make RP easier/more dynamic/more enjoyable
It is clear to me that IRE suffers from the wall they create by making admin give up their characters. The separation between what's happening in the game world and what you guys focus on and understand is very present in the way you discuss things. You -need- this or something similar to it to bridge that gap or the game is going to continue to struggle in this area.
On the intersection of Crafting and RP
So, these are not the same realm of MUD playing. A lot of RPers are also crafters but not all crafters are RPers and not all RPers are crafters. This is the area within the RP sphere that gets (any) love at all. And that, minimal. I'm counting issues with the tediousness of shopkeeping and harvesting in with the crafting realm. From the perspective of an RPer - it feels like our RP issues are being ignored in favor of giving minimal attention to crafting because -that- is where we spend money.
RP drives the game forward, it helps create dynamic conflict that has a point, it makes the game more alive and immersive even for the people who mostly don't have an interest in RP. The folks that love to RP? Those are the same folks who are frequently hunting down new players and helping introduce them to the game (something ya'll desperately need since your newbie intro currently blows).
tl;dr - RPers help keep people around and devoted to the game, which drives your profit level, so please give us more than lip service.
Edit: Give us custom perfumes/colognes.
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
As for simply making those into a tradeskill without giving bard something in return, that won't happen - Whilst some people might be fine with it, it'd suck having class-defining utility duplicated in a tradeskill without it being replaced in the class skill. This runs into a big problem: Bard is powerful and already has plenty of utility. Working out what to add in place of the half-dozen or more skills they'd be losing would be difficult, especially if instruments changed at the same time.
That said, I'd love to see a shift in how instruments work so that a tri-trans bard could use any instrument for anything, with more instrument choices added and the harp allowed to be customised. This would require rolling the Mark and Harp artifacts into one, though. Not sure how that would work.
Affinity and token houses - Let us buy an addon that blocks the effects of affinity in the house, or just make leyline affinity not a thing inside token houses.
Demonic only having one guild - Not sure what could be done there. I was always against excessive guild mergers, because it took away the uniqueness of the guilds. I guess that's how we got the Wraithweald, anyway.
Further differentiating assassin/renegade - Yes plz. Also yes plz to different messages for neutral professions. Hunter is neutral and has 3 entirely different pet/shapeshifting sets, Shaman is... just shaman, in all forms.
I don't care if the rationale behind excluding bard from being neutral is 'we want that class to remain thematic of magick' but that was not the reason given. It was 'their class is too tied to magick' which is nonsense. The lore doesn't really support that.
As for guilds, it feels like the long term goal is guild deletion. If that's not the case, I'd love to know it so demonic can get behind a new guild charter so we can have at least a LITTLE variety.
Maybe some of it is missing context without the chat?
From a perspective RP stance, it would be a good candidate for a neutral class (which I generally don't care about) precisely because 1/3rd of its skillset is based on divine language and it has pretty weaksauce lore tie-ins to magick for the other two (it's never explained, really, it's just *waves hands* maaaagick). AND because what circle can't use an artistic/creative oriented RP hook?
Edit - I don't have a strong opinion on whether or not bard is neutral or not. I DO think we need papercraft to be pulled from Artistry. It's like 3 skills which are rarely used by actual bards. I don't think that's going to significantly impact bards if they don't get it unique to them anymore and I DO think you can just leave the skills in bard and let bards retain some additional goodies associated with those three skills (paintings get fancy travel, letters get a bard-boost of some kind).
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
Alternative fix: Engineers need to be able to store their schematics and etc in short form or bound form. Give them the ability to make journals and letters somewhere so a Neutral class has it, and Bards also get it as a bonus yay! Don't care too much, lore/flavor won't take that hard a dive for it.
On the topic of Bard and neutrality, etc: I don't think journals and letters when I think Imperian Bard. I think of how Imperian's Bard differs itself from the other two existing IRE Bards in how they approach the fantasy archetype as a whole. I think of Words of Power and the secrets they hold. I regretfully also think of a 'premier' class - which in some form might be the real reason they are reluctant to consider making Bard Neutral. To elaborate: Bard is a class that compels a few distinct categories of players to gravitate toward that circle instead of others. In my opinion, it should go neutral. In the past, people have held up this premier status as a defense to me. I think that in the case of Bard, that logic is questionable. Last time, all three circles gave up a class like that last time by virtue of no Neutral classes existing. I would be confident to say that giving up Shaman and Berserker were a 'premier' class giveaways just like Hunter kinda was too. Every class is a premier class. That's part of what makes up circles.
Bard is only locked in to Magick 'because', from a design perspective. We displayed our willingness to live test mixing peanut butter (Shaman) and chocolate (everything not demonic.) Lore is ultimately flexible and can backtrack.. it isn't like we haven't before. Voice can lean back on 'Words of Power' and 'Language of Creation' handwaving. They could easily give Thespia and Artistry the same rough treatment they gave Shamanism - their power comes from latent power channeled through expressive rituals of singing, dancing, and creating art. Because of that, we really only have to look at the design perspective. In that case.. personally, I don't really like that 'because', but I also rarely see a point in complaining about it. It'll probably stay a Magick class.
Rest of the stream was good. I echo @Krysaliss and @Kabaal on the sentiments of an RP or Lore council. I think it would great for that game's overall health. It is harder to quantify who to place on that kind of roster than it is to put together a bunch of screaming cavemen for a combat council, though.
I genuinely don't think ANYONE in the garden groks the game's culture well enough from a player perspective to pick players who have had a successful RP influence on the game. That's not a diss, it's just ridiculously hard to do from the outside looking in perspective.