Sentient Race template

- Physical characteristic ranges (height, weight, appearance)

- Growth spec (age and advancement, what grows, gets colorful, etc)

- Crafting Spec (part of culture, but technical on what they do best)

- Cultural overview

- History (pre-arcfall, post-arcfall)

- modern societal structure

- Religious tenants

- Birth/Death cycle (do they have a spirit anchor, how do you ascend into one, etc)

- Biological characteristics ("cis genders", reproductive methdologies)

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Spirit Aspects

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Order

- Life (urbae) (oorbay) [was the leaves of the great tree, positioned above the aenimus spirit well which is destroyed]

-- Plants (arbae) (-arebay) [guarded by the most shallow leviathan, in its cave]

-- Animals (krbae) (-kerbay) [Deep in the forest, the centaur town is built around it]

- Reason (oshu) [crescent city is built around this, though it was moved above ground]

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Entropy

- Death (baeru) [was the roots of the great tree, positioned below the aenmius spirit well]

- Madness (usho) [deep in the volcano on the deserted island the quicks populate]

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Void

- Technological (no known word) [the paradoxi rift is a newly formed well for this]

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Spirit

- Aenimus (sheni) [energy, magic] [spirit well WAS the great tree, which bridges the astral realm and splintered in the arcfall]

- Earth (ok) (-ohk) [constitution, hardiness] [deep in the mountains, the umbrus took it from a dwarven colony in ancient times and use it for rituals, main dwarven colony has no idea but all dwarves feel compelled towards it]

- Water (shok) [fluidity, dexterity] [sinqua built their society around this, center of their city in the deepest part of the ocean]

- Air (zhok) [swiftness, persuasion] [Underground in the Fields of Blood, kender burrows are near it but it's encased in earth. felixi feel compelled to be around it]

- Fire (vhok) [strength] [buried under rubble from the pre-arcfall events fleeing the elven guard. The dwarven Fire Clan formed their village near it and work to unearth it. The unbreakable Oath of Iron spear lays buried next to it, which is actually what they're after]

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Timeline

Astral Convergence->~90k years->Arcfall->etc

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Original Name - Aspects (also dictates new name) - Description

Born of Sea (original evolutions)

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draconi - Death-Water - Reptile people, like giant komodos. (7-10 feet in length/height) Scales, claws, one very weak but opposable claw. Spits acid, has acidic blood. Nasty bite, extreme jaw pressure. Can walk on hind legs but they're kind of stubby. Weak hearing and eyesight. PAL - ~90 years.

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goblins - Madness-Water - ancient co-evo with elves. slightly reptilian looks like a tiny elf with very short legs, but ears long and separated from skull. Has very long 2 forward foot digits, two top hand digits that can all (foot and hand) articulate on four points. Very weak grip, but feet can support double their body weight. ~1.5-2.5 feet tall. 2 extremely large centrally set forward eyes. Has stubby vestigal tail. Smooth blue-to-green skin tones. very sharp jagged teeth. rarely born with gills under their arms (not pits, lower along rib cage) (recessive trait) some born with webbed hands/feet (also recessive just more common). PAL - 10 years.

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??? - Plant-Water - Collective intelligence of marine plants (seaweed like), lives in the ocean. can manipulate water itself, which it uses for locomotion (the vines are full of water). uses photosynthesis so can't go deep for more than a day. Can live on land but dries out very quickly. Needs the salinity of the ocean water. Doesn't see or "hear" can feel vibrations and magnetic fields. Congregate around the spirit well associated with plants, in the ocean. (protected by the most shallow leviathan)

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Born of Thought (ascension of spirit)

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sinqua- Reason-Water - merpeople. Have fish tails, some unibody some bifurcated but end in fins. Scaled, have generally swept, aerodynamic heads that can move pitch and yaw at 220 degrees. Heads have chitinous fins of varying colors and depth. Hands are webbed with 4 digits and one opposing thumb (human). Teeth are short and very sharp. Gestate in womb, no external birth. PAL - 70 years

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elves - Reason-Aenimus - Tall (6-9 feet), long ridges extending from ear holes along skull that allow for extremely precise hearing, but at a much higher pitch range. hands with 3 digits on top, 3 on bottom like bird claws (no claws), feet are humanoid with 3 digits front and 1 short clawed digit back. Common in the arcfall era to clip the back digit for nobility. Pre-arcfall Lifespan - ~100 years.

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umbrus - Madness-Aenimus - Co-evolution with "elves", skin is much fairer from living underground. Ear holes evolved to be larger, ridge less promenient, provides diminished echolocation but a much larger hearing range. No back-toe on feet from selective breeding it out. Lower castes have their bottom hand digits removed at birth.

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Born of Conflict (arcfall)

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aquinis - Aenimus-Reason - Elven nobility, post-arcfall. back toe cut off at birth 100% of the time. Skin has evolved with purple splotches and cracks from time in the astral realm.

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Born of Earth and Sky (original evolution)

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dwarves - Reason-Earth - Short (3-5 feet), skin forms harder chitinous plated sections as they age. fire and sharp damage resistant. have hair but lose it as the skin hardens. have no ears only feel sound via vibrations through skin. Can "hear" deeper sounds and very attuned to vibrations in the earth. Communicate with others of their kind via foot tapping/stomping. Eyes are set higher and further apart. have large humanoid hands (opposable thumb, 3 fingers tho) and humanoid feet. Can lock any muscle in place providing an extreme amount of stability and weight bearing capability. Pre-arcfall Lifespan - ~1800 years

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halflings - Reason-Air - short (2-4 feet), extremely delicate skin, brittle, hollow bones. Eyes are set centrally and close together. humanoid, but with 2/1 clawed digit spread and small hands. Has 3 digits, 2 opposable thumbs. Has excellent and delicate grip. Hairless except minor, very small feathers going down the neckline to the end of the spine. The less plumage the "better" socially. Head is small, allowing them to squeeze into things. PAL - ~35 years

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Born of Forest (original evolution)

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centaur - Animal-Earth - eyes are more spaced apart. Has 6 limbs, horse sized body. All limbs have chitinous growth on the hands. Back 2 sets resemble broad hooves. Front set is more like "dwarf" hands but with 3 equally spread out digits (like crow foot pattern). Has nigh unlimited stamina. Can run forever. Strong enough to carry other creatures on back or bear a very high weight. Extremely hard to grapple, amazing upper body strength. PAL - 300 years

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shivari - Animal-Fire - Has 6 limbs but humanoid stance. Dense fur from chest line down and down back. Forward facing eyes. 4 upper limbs branch at the same place (on upper torso), 2 lower on bottom (legs). Hip structure is very broad and sturdy with legs far apart. "legs" are bear paws. Mid limbs are bear paws with more articulation, less broad. Upper limbs are 3 spread digits like "Centaur". Extremely muscular. Excellent at grappling, tremendous grip strength. PAL - ~45 years

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cats (felixi) - Animal-Death - Basically cheetah people. Can walk on hind legs, doesn't normally. All the normal cat stuff. Paws, retract claws, sharp teeth, forward eyes, fur, etc. PAL - ~20 years.

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(spirits)

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spirits - Aenmius - like the arbae but can only possess other sentient bodies. If a sentient dies it becomes this. PAL - infinite

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pixies - Aenimus-Life - Form is like 70% opaque, sparkles flicker around them. Little glowing balls (size of a basketball) with wispy wings (think diablo 2/3 style angel wings). If you could see inside would look like glowing wispy tentacles. PAL - infinite.

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gremlins - Aenimus-Death - Form is fully opaque and absorbs light around it. Radiates darkness. Can not see inside at all. PAL - infinite.

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arbae - Aenimus-Plants - possesses plants. Non-possession form is just a haunting, dull swarm of off white mist that's normally invisible. PAL - infinite.

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buns - Aenmius-Earth - Astral earth spirits. All elemental spirits are a light purple, 40% opaque. Looks like a cottontail (small, up ears). Can command up to 8 phantom objects that normally look like "elf" hands. PAL - infinite.

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foxes - Aenmius-Water - Astral water spirit. Resembles a common red fox (still purple). PAL - infinite

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crows - Aenmius-Air - Astral air spirit. Resembles either a crow or whatever race/animal it feels like resembling with whatever clothes it wants to have. Can only mimic can't invent new forms. Only purple in crow form. Shifted form can be anything. PAL - infinite

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chickens - Aenmius-Fire - Astral fire spirit. Resembles 12 independent bodied chickens. Has singular collective, connected mind. Like to inhabit clothing and walk around as if it was upright. PAL - infinite

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wolves - Aenmius-Animal - Astral wolf spirit. Resembles a common timber wolf, still purple but with nuanced fur shading around cowl and face. PAL - infinite.

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(creations of society)

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biophage (maudlin) - Madness-Life - Biological construct. Has draconi and elven dna at the base so default form is some mutation of those. Has lots of open sores, boils, growths, etc. PAL - ????

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robots (hel'xis) - Tech-Reason - Large, broad chested upright robots. Modular (so mount points on body). Short dome heads that can spin around. Forward, ruby crystal eyes.

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Ancient Ones (existed before the astral convergence)

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t1000 (quicksilver) - Madness-Earth - Liquid metal. Silvery/titanium sheen. Normal form is a blob amorph. Can assume any form it's seen in the last few hours. Has very bad long term memory. PAL - ????

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beetles - Earth-Death - Enormous, house sized beetles. Like japanese beetles. Some have horns, some dont. No wings but there is space between 2 layers of the carapace to store things, entirely deaf and lacks a sense of smell. (or people).

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twitch joke (qantefweio) - Death-Life-Aenmius - Firey energy being. Humanoid but orange/yellow and big big glowy aura.

I've been struggling with this one as it's a large part of the descriptive obfuscation engine that I just wasn't figuring out, but:

Every entity with perception is a participant in this and will have a Familial Matrix. First off, based on your ability in perception you may not notice differences in other entities without concentrating or given you're very oblivious at all.

The familial matrix is made up of the entity involved and records a history of aspects you have noticed at various times. You'll only record an entry in this history if you have enough time to truly take notice of detail of something and if the details are statistically identical (based on your perception) you'll only update the latest one with an extra counter so as not to create some sort of unwieldy blockchain mess.

What goes into the matrix are the sensory details you can discern. Smell, auditory and visual barring closer inspection like taste, psychic and tactile. These will be a keyword store that gets compared against future interactions.

Say you enter a Bakery. You see, smell and hear specific details such as bread baking, the display counter, who is attending the customers and the sounds of the backroom and entry bell. If you enter again later and things are significantly different such as no baking smells, a different attendant, etc you will notice these things and be notified by the system. If you're not very perceptive you may be struck with an odd feeling instead of being told specifically what's different, or you may not notice at all. Narcissistic traits will affect notification as well.

When this involves other living entities you may notice a difference in clothing or hair color. If someone is disguised by magic/mundane means perhaps you notice a LOT of differences in voice, smell, etc and can make the decision to act on not believing their disguise without the system needing to do that for you. Conversely someone you know may be disguised and you'll be notified by their voice that you think it's the right person and can act on that.

So I've been playing fallout 4 again and this time its probably how i should have played it from the start. All sneaky sniper shooting, all settlement help, all minutemen all the time with mods like sim settlements. The mods didnt exist back then and primarily the Automation DLC didn't exist either which I've discovered lets you build unlimited "settlers" to assign to maintaining trade routes between settlements.

This is actually huge as one can abuse Greygarden (the all robots settlement) to be the hub in a hub-spoke network without risking settler unrest in half their population being robots (which is a thing for settlement happiness) in addition to these face laser invincible assaultron "traders" make for pretty hardy caravans.

Why are we talking about Fallout 4 man

We're talking about Fallout 4 for a few reasons. One, the much maligned perk system actually works. Yeah the perks themselves are kinda... meh but its greatest strength lies in the fact that you can onboard a long term play style almost immediately. You'll be level 5 or 6 by the time you get through the first major plot point (resucing preston and founding Sanctuary) and if you chose your "SPECIAL" stats correctly you can be easily on the way to playing how you want.

You can have near full mastery of hacking and lockpicking by then and speech checks are almost all charisma stat based so you'd already be the "i can get into and out of anything" role. You can have sneak and long-gun perks to the point that you can take out half a squad in VATS before they even know you're there. You can have melee and luck or melee and agility perks enough to be bumrushing and one shotting most anything on engagement.

It's underappreciated how good it is to be able to onboard a playstyle nearly from the start because everyone thinks about the mid-to-end game as if you start a game at level 30. (which fo4's system handles as well as you can spend levels to advance stats to unlock more perk potential. play long enough and you can do literally everything)

Warrens never really had a good outlay for perks. Stats yes, perks not as much. There's going to be a system thats sort of a combination of fo style perk bonuses coupled with achievements within the epiphany engine.

Why was the first paragraph about settlements

Aside from perks, I've finally got a better design for personal and guild spaces. In FO4 your settlements get attacked. There's essentially some math on "why would I be attacked" which boils down to how much food, water, power, population and beds that settlement has pitted against the defensive rating for the settlement. You can jack up your defensive rating very easily by plopping down 6 "guard tower" emplacements and assigning one person to them and then spamming level 1 machine gun turrets as they cost very little resources and occupy no power.

Granted this doesnt actually help you defend much. The citizens wont use the defensive emplacements 99% of the time and the attack is coming from one direction anyways so that buys you at best 1 or 2 of those to be useful. Level 1 machine gun turrets are like throwing pebbles at a super mutant. Even 10 of them will barely scratch legendary raiders and be one shot by shotgunners or any super mutant.

Human citizens.. suck. You have to outfit them with decent armor and weapons to be meaningful. Robots on the other hand make great defenders (greygarden mr. handys will all use flamethrowers and basically lambaste entire armies of supermutants in seconds) but it impinges on settlement happiness. These facts dont actually contribute to defensive rating, however, which is part of the issue. 6 Mr. Handy robots farming mutfruit and razorgrain do nothing to your defense rating but will actually defend your settlement better than even you can.

The role of defense rating

Defensive rating is then a prohibitive measure, mathmatically, for the game's raider mechanic. It will also be so in warrens. Your personal/guild space will have factors that will increase defensive rating. Guard NPCs, traps, auto turrets, etc will produce a defensive rating.

If you want to attack a personal/guild space you'll need to plan an assault. An assault will have an offensive rating. Whether its one person doing the assault or a guild your offensive rating will be pit against the defensive rating of the space being attacked. This will translate to a Tactical Logistics Schedule.

Hypothetically lets say you're attacking a guild hall with a def rating of 100. You commit a plan with an assault rating of 50. The Assault Timeline will be 8 real time hours per wave. The assault here would be 3 waves of 50 (100-50) 50 (50-50) and 50 (0-50). After 24 actual hours (8x3) you will get a full real time week where the space is accessible to your guild (or just you) and you can actually go in an attack.

Your assault rating will be divided by the number of waves it took so 50 / 3 = 15 (rounded down) and you will have available 15 rating worth of NPCs to help you attack following the same formulas the Adventure locales use to generate wild NPCs. Everytime someone uses NPC forces in their attack the pool of 15 would be diminished so use them mindfully.

The "Waves" wont affect the actual composition of the defense forces or how the guild/personal space is constructed. It is simply a way to force a schedule on the attacks, much how Eve Online does it, so each side is aware of what is happening and can plan.

Cucuoshin

Astral chickens. You are literally 20 magical chickens. You can all fit in any large piece of clothing or clothing group (chest + head + arms + legs + feet + hands)

Cucuophony - Your clucking is universally understood as whatever native language the listener is most proficient in. Also it's really freaking loud and can be heard in a 5x greater radius. (including whispers, you can't actually whisper)

Psychological Condition: MPD/DPD - You're literally 20 chickens with a collective mind. You have complete immunity to mental altering affects. You also have a LOT of trouble concentrating on anything so arcane spellcasting is very very very difficult.

Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken - You're 20 chickens. You have to issue commands with special syntax: #<numbers> -or- #<number>to<number>. Social commands (say, chat, etc) and commands that are "meta" like queue stop and queue flush are exempt.

Occupy - Allows you to take control of or leave clothing. Sentient beings will not recognize you as another sentient being if you're not in clothing. The less chickens you control in clothing the less believable it is.

Lay/Hatch - You can lay astral eggs in places. Other things can eat or destroy them easily. Ties into ChickenYolo. Eggs must incubate for at least 7 in game days. You can lay one egg per game day which saps 75% of your stamina.

CHICKENYOLO - Does not become atsheni on death. You have a completely unique health system in that you lose chickens on taking damage. Chickens are very fragile but can withstand up to 2 very small pokes but 1 chicken can also absorb the full damage of any one source. At any time you can hatch valid eggs and a new chicken will appear in your location.

Attuned Has 100% success rate on all performance based spell casting checks, automatic pass on all somatic/limb spell requirements irrespective of status. (can cast spoken spell steps while being muted) This doesn't mean you can pass concentration checks.

Abnormal Equipment: VOID - You can't wear equipment really, just the occupy thing.

Physical Growth: CHICKEN - You have 1-to-20 chickens.

Wounds - Special case, see CHICKENYOLO

The seal of mortality has been broken. You are a child of the Arc now. You listen and watch. You have heard and seen the danger of life. You are Cucuoshin.

You are... err.. 20 chickens? Who came up with this? Why would you want to be 20 chickens in a large coat anyways? Well good luck with this one. I don't have anything wise to say here.

This will definitely require some additional properties to things but, cooking.

Originally cooking was designed to just make named things. You chose a typical food name (cake, soup, stew, burger, etc) and crammed two things together in an oven type object and you got a "Object1 Object2 Name" which was potentially edible depending on what both things were made of. This system was more for amusement than anything else.

Cooking is chemistry, however, and I realized that yesterday on the bus ride home. I've got systems designed for chemistry and elemental combinatoric reaction so why shouldn't cooking utilize those. Thus, the cooking system for Warrens:

What lacks

Material is going to need its own secondary Quality system. Not an alternative mutation of Qualities just a second one. The thing that Quality is going to have is a new data point called Reactions. Each reaction will consist of a name a nullable second quality, a minimum critical mass, a ratio, a catalyst (elemental type + value) and a result set. HMR already has something similar to this so that reaction system will probably be coopted.

The future

How this relates to Cooking, though, is there will be food based reactions and qualities. These specific reactions will almost always have catalysts (mainly heat) but the food qualities will be hidden from players without specific knowledge skills. (mainly.. cooking) The cooking based racials will also come into play here.

These reactions will create/affect nutritional properties which will be pinned against each -vore type. These things will "appear" tasty based on the -vore type of your race (or your mental conditions making inedible things seem edible) and affect you after it is eaten causing stat bumps or increased satisfaction after consumption.

Depression Modeling

Originally I was thinking of mood as a state change. It's not entirely that simple. There are states involved but expanding on it isn't simply tracking more states or doing more complex math on existing states.

Depression may result from two root causes: mechanical and natural.

• Mechanical: Sustained or acute failure of goal fulfillment and social pressure.
• Natural: Mental conditions resulting in periodic imbalance states (eg bipolar disorder)

Depression (the system) has 3 primary "tiers" for lack of a better term. Sadness, despair, desperation.

Sadness

Sadness is the most common state and the only one individuals can actively mask to others. Empathic capable individuals will still be able you discern it but nonempaths can be easily fooled based on how familiar they are. Strong familiarity will reduce the effectiveness of social masking.

In sadness goal seeking (AIs) will switch to it's own set to increase the likelihood of short term success. These will generally be based on the individuals preferences and obsessions such as overeating, drunkenness and isolation.

If the depression is natural the downward pressure exerted won't be allieviated by success at these goals but only mitigated by the upward pressure of success. It will be much harder for naturally depressed individuals to overcome these states.

Despair

Despair is the next rung down. It represents the loss of hope and a nigh total absence of confidence in oneself.

The despair goalset is purely avoidance. The individual will seek to remove themselves from social contexts and situations and will actively isolate themselves from their normal mood lifestyle.

Anything related to normal mood goals will cause downward pressure. Wealth seekers will be disgusted with signs of affluence and money. Social seekers will be disgusted by relationships and affection. Etc.

For socially motivated individuals this will cause significant downward pressure. It will take much longer for social goal seekers to overcome this. Any perceived failures during this time will deepen the depression.

Desperation

Desperation will specifically generate goals that are the opposite of normal mood ones held by the individual.

Social individuals will specifically sabotage relationships. Wealth seekers will destroy or abandon their possessions.

Desperation also brings an additional caveat: desperate individuals will exhibit similar traits of psychopaths. Cultural morays may be ignored or actively performed leading to criminal actions.

Anti-culture

When cultural morays are performed the individual performing them will begin to accrue traits specific to that action that will enable them to more easily consider the same actions in the future.

E.g. Everytime someone commits theft the notion of using theft for goal fulfillment will be more attractive.

This doesn't mean the thief in question will consider any other morays acceptable. Each one will be tracked individually per person. As is expected, though, becoming a career thief puts you in situations where something more heinous such as assault or murder is more likely and when that does occur the same path will begin.

Goals

Depression tier related goals will have to be included at the cultural level alongside normal mood ones so they can be accessed universally.

Narcissism

Narcissism is essentially a range held within the behavioral set of the individual. The more narcissistic one is the less likely they are to blame themselves for failure.

Who the individual blames for their depressive state is key to determining the goals they will seek while depressed.

Low narcissistic individuals may also resort to suicide in the despair tier believing the only way to succeed is to remove themselves entirely.

Lexica

It occurs to me I can control ai behavior through the lexica by finding remote synonyms of emotional states and matching them to goal paths.

What was

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinMUD/comments/7gf5yh/no_more_hp/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinMUD/comments/7qtwmt/wounds_and_disease_in_depth/

What will be

It's not a huge overhaul by any means. The main point here is going to be a bit of simplification and expansion.

• Wounds will no longer have ranks or progression. (mainly covered in the first link above)
• Each wound incoming will have a Severity (integer value, between 1 and 10) an Origin (Physical, Mental, Poison, Phage) and a Type. (cut, bruise, etc)
• Each anatomical part will have a capacity of 100 where 0 is "perfectly healthy" and 100 is "fatal". All wound origins are treated equally for "fatal" state.
• Wound spread mechanics will be determined by origin (see below)
• There are new Anti-wounds called Vigors (for each origin)

Combat Mechanics

Physical damage will be split between physical typed wounds and a mental wound called Pain. Some physical wounds will also cause Bleed wounds (also physical)

Vigors

Vigors are essentially counter-wounds. If a wound is incoming with the same origin as a Vigor you already have the wound will be canceled and the value of the wound subtracted from the Vigor. Vigors will regenerate over time to a limit set by race and qualities through successes (mental) and rest (mental and physical). Poison and Phage vigors will mostly come from ingesting specific foods and spells. (and rare in race templates)

Vigors are damage prevention. New vigors will not cancel existing wounds.

Wound Mechanics

Per anatomy:

• Arms, Legs: Strength and use (movement speed, dodge capability, attack strength, grip) diminishes with them being entirely useless at 100.
• Other Parts: Wings, tails, etc. Same as arms/legs.
• Chest: 100 = dead, constitution and strength type powers diminish as it approaches 100. Stamina regen, physical vigors stop regenerating and physical wounds stop healing body-wide at >= 50.
• Head: 100 = dead, mental type powers diminish as it approaches 100. Stamina regen, mental vigors stop regenerating and mental wounds stop healing body-wide at >= 75.

Origin Mechanics

• Physical (Vigor: Fortitude) (Types: Impact, Puncture, Slash, Bleed) - Physical wounds will, per cycle, generate additional Pain wounds for 1/10th of their value in adjacent anatomy. (chest for everything except itself, head for the chest)
• Mental (Vigor: Determination) (Types: Depression, Anxiety, Pain, Mania) - Mental wounds do not spread but grow by 1 per cycle. (except Pain which stays static) Mental wounds don't only target the head. (but most will)
• Poison (Vigor: Metabolic) (Types: All share one type but are still named) - Poison wounds spread to any adjacent anatomy by 1. Poison wounds do not grow or become additive. Poison wounds overwrite existing ones if they are higher in value otherwise they do nothing.
• Phage (Vigor: Immunity) (Types: per disease name) - Phage wounds are specific to their name. They both grow (by 1) and spread (by 1) to all adjacent anatomies.

Healing

Healing becomes far clearer in this new system. Some lingo first:

• Cure: Reduces the value of wounds.
• Clear: Eliminates the wounds entirely, regardless of value.

General cures

• Rest/sleep: Cures mental wounds. (not pain) Creates up to 10 mental vigor, 5 physical. (base)
• Time: All wounds cure by 1 per cycle if under 50.
• Racial - Regeneration: All non-mental wounds cure by 2 per cycle irrespective. Creates up to 20 value Physical vigor.
• Success/Happiness: Cures all mental wounds. Creates mental Vigors.
• Phage Specific: Everything gains Immunities to disease when they become cured fully. Immunities are separate from Vigors and simply prevent diseases from causing wounds specific to the disease.

First Aid cures

• Bandaging: Bandaging can clear Bleed physical wounds.
• Poultice: Poultices can cure Poison wounds and create Poison Vigors.
• Steroidal: Steroids (also Adrenaline) clear Pain wounds.
• Antigens: Cures diseases. (specific to the disease itself)
• Anti-venom: Clears poison wounds. (specific to the name/type of the poison)
• Anesthetic: Cures Pain wounds.

Arcane cures

• Restorative Magic: Cures type specific wounds.

NOTE: This is largely unformatted at the moment as it's a dump from the Guild slack.

Circles of Influence

This is modeled against a series of expanding rings representing relationships and affiliation. Radiating outward it'll be: (anything plural means there's more than one unit)

1. Personal Relationship(s)
2. Clique (social group + family)
3. Affiliation(s) (coworkers, guilds, hobbiest groups)
4. Community
5. Culture
6. Tribe

Tribe is just the place one lives; could be a village, a city or a nation. HMR wont make it past Community.

Needs and Goals

Inner circles exert more influence on your immediate needs while outer circles exert more influence on long term goals. The general idea is the AI "brain" keeps track of needs and wants and sends out Desires which are expected to be acted upon by the npc.

Desires are paired with Actions by the middle layer and Actions have to be matched with todo lists of game-commands. HMR has a really rudimentary version of this already. So Hunger might get sent by the brain, Hunger is paired with Eating in the middle and Eating then goes through a set of conditional logic: what can i eat, do i have that food in my inventory, where can i get food

The first phase is to essentially mimic The Sims with biological and emotional need fullfillment + social relationships. Second phase will be to get long term goal influence in which will involve things like Wealth/Status accrual causing a hungry npc to skip lunch to save money. Third phase will be to involve social status fullfillment and cultural taboos/morays/acceptance which might cause a hungry npc to skip lunch to not get fat or a poor npc to buy expensive clothing and starve just to be accepted socially or of course an npc to extend themselves just to win the favor of someone specific.

I realized memory events need Emotional Weight but not just a single value of "significance" but an array of values for every emotion type; transformative events have to carry how they were transformative. Shared significant events will end causing personal relationship rifts as well: conflicting emotional interpretations.

Technical

Ill probably end up coding it with delegate assignment; makes more sense to hand the lower layer things to invoke than to pass all the data upwards. I do feel like limiting relationships in hmr makes sense like maybe sentient class npcs can only have one person at max level but that can still degrade resulting in infidelity. Neglect it for a week and log into all your crops being withered, your spouse is cheating on you and your dog has run away.

Really trying to think on how to build this out for the admin UI. i already have the "copy existing template" thing so i can probably do a unique intelligence profile per npc; you can just clone existing ones and modify them.

Qualities

Im thinking itll probably just be a set of Qualities: Favorite Food Quality, Favorite gift quality. So if you make an npc with Sweet as a food quality your relationship gets higher bumps when you give them something with the highest Sweet value. Put enough Quality modifiers in and it can interpret a preference matrix.

Context

Pairing with Context and Quality. Contexts: Consumable, Aesthetic, Decorative, Utility, Admirable, Romantic. Admirable and romantic being contexts for relationships and the rest being ones for items,

So with the advent of the other netMUD mud being split off into a repository (https://reddit.com/r/hmrmud) I split Under the Eclipse off into its own private repository.

netMUD the platform is still where it was but it is merged back into the Master branch for ongoing development. The platform will continue to exist at https://netmud.swiftausterity.com/ but the expectation there is to keep it as a platform specific sort of staging/QA environment where I'll make other people builders and admins willy nilly so people can have somewhere to mess around.

Eventually https://eclipse.swiftausterity.com/ will exist and "my game" of netmud (an actual mud) will work with a complete lack of races and planets made entirely of sword shaped things.

There is no eclipse work that isn't netmud (until races start existing that need specific world racials) so most work will still be IN netmud and PRed into the eclipse repo.

No one will get access to the eclipse repo as there is not much point in granting it since everything but IP specific stuff (like.. racials) or data backups will be a part of the platform too. (even all of the non-race specific fighting arts)

A long time in the designing, the Lexical Engine is going to be the underpinning of every system and in fact the entire game world. MUDs are structurally made of words so it always seemed appropriate to me to grant them more meaning and agency overall.

This is a growth from the work done on Markovian Echoes (http://echoes.swiftausterity.com/) which you'll hear mentioned a few times below.

A brief defining of terms

• Lexical Engine - the big enchilada. Really doesn't have much more meaning than a name to encompass everything going on.
• Thesaurus Engine - A subset of the Lexical Engine that deals with maintaining synonym/antonym webs.
• Lexicon - The full store of words, phrases and meanings in the system.
• Dictata - A terrible name for a singular, atomic unit of the lexicon. This is a word or phrase and all the properties assigned to it.
• Lexica - Probably a better name for Dictata but Lexica are living dictata. They are words and phrases in the context of sentences and other words. Dictata is the "data" lexica are the "entities". (probably should be name swapped but Lexica were the data unit in Markovian Echoes)

Functionally

On startup the system will first grab the existing Lexicon from the data store. As the system loads the rest of its data it will scan every single thing put in for its existence in the Lexicon. Every entity name (NPCs, objects, locations, gatherable resources, etc) will become Nouns. Every descriptive element will get added. (adjectives, adverbs) Every command in the code will become Verbs.

Newly added data during runtime will also get processed into the Lexicon similarly.

All of this is exposed in an administrative page where words can then be better described through their Dictata properties as well as be linked to each other as synonyms and antonyms.

There are still no stats

This system is resulting in a doubling down on the overall design aspects discussed in the "2.0" thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinMUD/comments/7hqbty/an_end_to_numbers/

The entire system's core concepts are a split between a handful of Aspects. These aren't just pseudo-stats for characters and equipment but a fully integrated defining of the entire world.

• Severity (power): How "intense" something is. How hard you're swinging a sword, how fast you're running, how hot the fire is. This is the "more" of everything. More power, more fast, more weight, more dense, more sharp, etc.
• Quality (finesse): The technical execution or form of something. "Dexterity" checks in RPGs. How well made is that breastplate or radio.
• Elegance: This is the beauty of form and function. This one is a newer concept and doesn't exist in the pseudo stats. Does not necessarily mean how visually appealing something (but this is where that lies) is but also does not mean how well something functions. (which is Quality) Elegance is sort of an ephemeral, decorative aspect.

These aren't just the "new version of pseudostats" but also stats for words and the world itself.

Why do words need "stats"

One of netMUD's core design concepts as a platform is that there are no hand-written descriptions AT ALL. You can't even add descriptive elements as extras: everything descriptive is done through Lexica. If you want a sharp sword you add an adjective Lexica to the sword with the phrase of "sharp".

The crux, though, is what does that add to the system? What if someone sharpens a sword to have it deal more damage. What differentiates you adding "sharp" as a descriptive to your sword in the crafting process versus someone sitting down and sharpening the sword that lacks a "sharp" descriptive? What if they sharpen an already "sharp" described sword?

The thesaurus engine is what happens.

Dictata and the thesaurus

Dictata have a few essential properties. They have a grammatical type (adjective, noun, verb, etc), a category, a list of synonyms, a list of antonyms and the three Aspect ratings listed above. The ratings are managed by the thesaurus engine. Categories are semi-automated groupings of dictata.

Let's say the lexicon understands the words Big and Small. Big and small are antonyms categorized as "size". Huge gets added to the system and made a synonym of Big and given a higher Severity aspect. Now the system knows something "more" than Big can be described as Huge. Something the opposite of Big can be described as Small.

Let's then add Tiny to the lexicon. Tiny is made an antonym of Huge. The system will automatically grant Tiny a severity 1 less than Small since Huge is > Big and Small is the opposite of Big. Tiny is the opposite of Huge so Tiny is less than Small because Huge is more than Big.

As things become categories and linked through synonym and antonym relationships the Lexicon will reorganize itself so that it can more accurately describe things it's asked to describe.

What does this have to do with the world at large

Back to the Sharp example. Sharp is an adjective known to the system. It is related through the categories for slash/slice damage. When the damage calculations are done the severity of Sharp synonym descriptives will add to any slash damage being dealt.

Similarly synonyms of something like Durable or Sturdy will aid in the defensive and damage resistance qualities of an entity.

Additionally it means if you "roll a 20 or a 1" on something like sprinting, hitting something, shouting, making a cupcake, anything at all the thesaurus engine will take care of adding its own adjectives to your output. You might slam the table instead of hitting it, you might swiftly sprint north, your cupcake might come out smelling Divinely.

Adjectives: First Order Important

Given adjectives themselves will be comprising what is traditionally the "affect/enchantment" system in an RPG being able to add descriptives to an entity manually becomes a bit of a permissions issue. You can't just dump a dictionary of positive adjectives on your sledgehammer and wreak havoc for free. The crafting and entity improvement systems will take care of any necessary gating involved.

AI and the impact on parsing speech

This lexical underpinning is also important for the AI. With the lexicon at their disposal AIs will be able to better understand humans talking to them. When someone employs ironic statements (using opposite adjectives of the outcome) they will eventually be able to better detect sarcasm and potentially how severe someone's mood or attitude is.

That sounds like a lot of curation

It will be early on. As the system grows both internally (Code) and externally (building) it will become less and less as the lexicon fills out.

Other benefits

Translation

Language translation will be built into the lexicon. Phrases and words will become direct synonyms in other languages allowing the system to simply ask for synonyms specifying a language.

The first real iteration of managing mental states for players came in the form of the (F)orced (R)ole(p)laying engine. FRP originally started with just Kender and Goblins having their particular manias which still exist in the racial designs today. Lagoshin would get their own version (schitzophrenia) and combat always had kind of a "stress meter" that determined how aggressive or defensive you were acting.

With the new wounds and phage systems and the current direction for AI design I think it's time to full expand on it for players and integrate it into everything so let's talk about...

Mental Health

There will be a second (but not secondary) system similar to the manner in which Wounds works called Mindscape. Sources of stress such as being attacked, going into deep hunger and thirst, maintaining insomnia, sustaining injuries and diseases, failing tasks and even being insulted will generate "mental wounds". This wont be a "get to 20 and die" thing but the adverse affects of maintaining high stress will be debilitating to say the least.

Affects

Stress wounds will, like physical ones, afflict a player with debuffs. I'm not going to get into numbers here but as you approach the midway point between 0 and "high stress" the mental stress will lower your resistance to phages and slow physical healing.

Other general debuffs will be minor affects to stats and will lower challenge rolls for success. (which will cause more failure which will cause more stress)

Curing

Reducing and removing mental wounds will require you to address the particular issue. Eating while starving will reduce or completely eliminate that stressor. The same goes for thirst and insomnia.

Non-physical stressors will require alternate means. If you're stressed from failing rolls and missing attacks in combat succeeding at the same thing will reduce that. Increasing your social standing with an npc that insulted you will alleviate that stress.

Alternate Curing

Meditating (includes praying to deities) will also "heal" mental wounds but only one at a time. Physical exertion through fitness activities (running, swimming, climbing, etc) will reduce all non-physical stress by minor amounts. Satisfying biologic needs (hunger, thirst, sleep, breeding) will also reduce mental stressors by minor amounts.

Distractions

Becoming inebriated or overindulging in a biologic need (food, sleep, breeding) will create a stagger mechanic for stress. Existing mental wounds will be put into a "dormant" state where they wont affect your character and they wont increase for a period of time. For inebriation it will be for as long as you aren't sober. For eating or sex it will be a set amount of time.

When that time is up those wounds will become "active" again and your total stress will jump up significantly which is not always the best idea.

Severe Stress Problems

If your overall stress total is in whatever the upper range will be you will be in fear of developing Manias and Phobias. (thanks Darkest Dungeon) Ridding yourself of a mania or phobia will be much much harder. The manias and phobias will stop affecting you if you get your stress below their thresholds but will not go away themselves and will immediately begin to afflict you again if your stress goes back up.

Manias and phobias will cause involuntary behavior such as attacking people verbally and physically, self-harming, an unwillingness to eat, drink or sleep when the player issues commands, random wandering, fleeing from combat, etc. Most will take the form of stress avoidance or alleviation in essence causing the player character to reduce their own stress levels involuntarily.

They will also generate ill effects such as visual and auditory hallucination.

Curing manias and phobias

Intense meditation can be used to remove these which will take up quite a bit of time. There will also be medicine skill-based ways to remove them as well as some racials.

Pixie/Gremlin Rework

I've long wanted to rework pixies and gremlins as their skillset is kind of awkward in the current design compared to the old design. This also means "refit" will be moved from Pixies into a common spell and cheap npc merchant class. Both still retain "astralian" statuses and racials.

Pixies

• Mindscaper - If at zero stress manias and phobias will eliminate themselves once a day.
• An aura that alleviates stress over time (minor) for self and one room.
• Comfort - Friendly non-combat ST. Reduces significant amount of mental stress wounds. Can completely remove several depending on their severity. Creates a lot of affinity in npcs. Transfers half of that stress to self.
• Accept - Friendly non-combat ST, can be done once per day. Transfers one mania/phobia from target to self. Also generates a lot of stress for self.

Gremlin

• Mindscraper - Generates a mania or phobia into self once per day up to 6.
• An aura that adds to stress over time (minor) for self and one room.
• Insult - Aggressive ST non-combat. Exacerbates all existing mental stress wounds by transferring stress from self to target. Creates a new one with the overflow that has no specific stressor (requiring meditation to fix). Generates loads of negative affinity in NPCs.
• Twist - Aggressive ST non-combat once per day. Transfers a random mania or phobia from self to target.

Descriptors are going to be a large part of the system contributing towards the long descriptions of basically everything. Long descriptions in netmud will not be something you can set as a custom override ever. All of them will be systematically generated based on contextual factors.

Generally

Descriptors will have a target name, a depth and an adjective. Depth will be an integer from 0 to 10 which describes how deep it is. For example a henna tattoo or one of those fake kids press-on tattoos would be a depth of 0. An actual tattoo would be an 8. A coat of paint on a concrete wall would be a 0 while an engraving would be a 3+ depending on how deep it was made. Filigree would be a 2/3 while something like a silver inlaid design might be a 4.

The target is the actual thing it is. "skull tattoo", "silver inlay celtic knot", "filigree spiral engraving".

The adjective is an evocative description of what it looks like in a pristine state. "Beautiful", "Intricate", "Savage", "Frightening".

Destructibility

Everything but depth 10 can take damage. Damage is shown by the adjective being altered. In the case of extreme damage all descriptors will simply not show including depth 10.

A breastplate with a depth 0 painted design that takes minor slashing damage might go from "Beautiful Painted Falcon's House Crest" to "Scratched Painted Falcon's House Crest". Impact damage might cause the word to change to "Dented" or "Bashed-in". Fire damage might changed it to "Burned" or "Singed".

Repair

Repairing an item may also damage the original descriptor if done at a lower skill level or as a rush job. The goal of repairing is to repair everything to pristine condition but inferior repairs may leave descriptors as "Muddled" or "Uneven".

Characters

The appearance of characters will start off with race and equipment worn/held. There will be custom anatomical descriptors for things like eye color, fingernails/talons and yes genitalia if that's what you want. Anatomical descriptors will be hidden by equipment depending on their body target so darkened glasses will hide eye color from showing up and pants will hide your naughty bits. Anatomical descriptors will be depth 10 and therefore can not be damaged.

There will also be lower depth descriptors for characters. Tattoos will be lower than 10. Scarification will create descriptors as severe wounds heal which themselves might need to be healed more naturally. Piercings will not be descriptors as they are considered equipment.

Objects and rooms

Rune carving and engravings will be 2-5 depth and damaging a rune carving will deactivate it. (or trigger it if it's an activation type rune) Runes can be recarved for less stamina cost and at a lesser skill level to "repair" them even if the original rune was beyond the repairer's skill.

Item creation will involve adding descriptors such as filigree, inlay designs and other niceties. "Form" descriptors such as a "Dragon's Claw shaped hilt" will be depth 10 and will be similar to anatomical descriptors.

Dents/chips made by combat and general activity will show up as descriptors. "repair" will remove those as there will be a "remove on repair" flag for the live game.

Diseases will operate on a pseudo point buy system.

Type and Size

The first choice is type. Type is limited to Magical or Physical. This affects the subsequent choices available. Size has a lot of influence on virulence and curability but it also limits transmission vector. The larger the phage units are the fewer transmission modes you'll have available to you. Smaller phages harder to resist and cure but build strength more slowly. Size ranges from 1 to 100.

• 1-25 Nanophage: Considered transmittable by any means including all parasites.
• 26-50 Microphage: Considered airborne transmittable, transmittable by large parasitic interaction such as large mosquitoes
• 51-75 Phage: Considered transmittable by common bodily fluids. (saliva through biting or sneezing/coughing or scratching)
• 76-100 Macrophage: Only transmittable by uncommon fluids (blood, sexual)

Symptoms

Symptoms have a strength rating. On infection symptoms are ordered for activation and become active when the disease reaches that strength threshold. It is optimal to attach more symptoms to smaller diseases as they have a higher chance of gaining higher strengths.

Curing

Curing is a matter of precisely identifying the disease both internally (how the system deals with it internally on health tick) and externally. (through medicinal skills or medicinal magic) The more symptoms a disease has the easier it is to pin down to be cured.

When curing a list of known diseases with those symptoms is chosen. The fewer the symptoms the larger the list. For internal curing the system will randomly choose a disease and if it chooses correctly it will begin to be cured. If it chooses wrong that gets added to the wrong list and the next cycle continues.

A similar process is made for external curing. Someone performing triage will get a similar list depending on their skill levels and if they choose correctly the disease will start being cured. Incorrect diagnosis results in failure.

Affect Lexicon

• Distraction: Causes a message to the character. Depending on the symptom and the character's wit and knowledge may cause an automated emote. Distractions lower perception for a very brief period during their messaging and in combat will cause 1 stagger.
• Exacerbation: Causes successful incoming attacks to be worsened.

Symptoms: Physical

Placeholders for design elements

Dermal

Gastric

Sinus

Respiratory

Circulatory

Nervous

Symptoms: Magical

Thought

Fortitude

Time

Passion

Something that comes up a lot is physical customization for your character. I use the phrase "Character Customization" specifically to evoke the bethesda game style face and body builder.

At Creation

At the start you're going to, in order:

Pick name and race and set gender (it's a free text field with existing suggestions).

Locking in race will bring up the "character customizer". It will list out the racial body parts. Below that will be a "Custom Biology" array system. Each custom biology must have a parent part (like leg, torso, arm, etc) and will allow you to add anatomical descriptors (https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinMUD/comments/8bh4iv/descriptors_damage_and_repair/).

Here is where you can add "eyes" and make them "green" or "bright red with sharp yellow pupils" or if you're so inclined add "penis" to your torso and, well, describe how big or long or whatever it happens to be. You can add up to 3 custom biologies per existing body part.

Post Creation Admin

After creation you can access the more advanced Gender Management Admin. If your gender is not established in the system you can access a pronoun set builder. If your pronoun set is complete you can submit the gender for Typed (demihuman, humanoid, etc) or Specific (only your race) use to the rest of the world and make it official. Administrative Staff may choose to change Typed/Specific or may simply approve it. Whether or not it's approved you can keep your gender but the pronouns wont stick and you'll get agendered pronouns. (they, them, their)

In Life

Custom biologies can't be damaged like racial based parts. Racial parts change as you advance your attributes.

In Death

If you die and do not restore into your corpse and do not pay for a full restoration you will lose all custom biologies. They will remain on your user account (as saved data configs) but your new body will be freshly randomized. You will also lose your gender and be assigned an existing one for your race or type based on the randomization.

Plastic Surgery

There will be Bioscultpting boutiques in the two major cities. Here you will be able to add, remove and change your custom biologies as well as change your gender.

A bit on gender

NPC psychographs will have an attraction set which will be:

• A specific approved gender
• A set of approved genders
• Traited: This is a demisexual type. They will find specific base attributes (power, finesse, wit, even luck) attractive. (sentient only)
• Fluid: This set of npcs will specifically find non-approved genders attractive. (which will be rare and sentient only)
• Traumatic: This doesn't get spawned initially. If the NPC goes through a traumatic event and developes permanent psychosis without fear triggers they may switch gender settings to finding similar circumstances attractive and seek partners who exhibit the same traits and reputation as the character who traumatized them. Much more likely in children who are grown to adults.

Tattoos was probably one of the more significant systems in the old live version of the world.

What once was

Each "area" had to have a tattoo artist NPC. Tattoo artist config dictated the affect the tattoo had and the bodily location. The player (ala Discworld's tattoo shop mechanics) could set the description. Descriptions were also "sql injection" hackable as they appeared in a prose style conglomerated description much like Discworld's so you could complete a sentence with a short tattoo and add an extra sentence or two after that to describe part of your body. (which was how the seamstresses on discworld managed to have some extremely XXX rated body descriptions when naked)

That's largely unnecessary now as there will be a system in "character creation" where you can describe body parts as well as the attributes body modifications system altering things for musculature or other bits. If you want to add body part descriptions for things like boobs, labia or penises you are free to do that without needing to hack other descriptions.

Tattoos were an equipment choice essentially. There might be 3 npcs who can do chest tattoos so choosing the affect you want was important. There was also tattoo removal services which cost quite a bit.

What will be

Most of the same really except tattoos will be added to the actual body part objects this time which is partially how your naked description will be constructed. It's a bit flipped as artists will no longer specifically target a part. They will still have a specific affect and each artist will only tattoo one part per person but you're free to choose which part they do.

Parts will also be somewhat freehand. Each race has set parts (# arms, # legs, torso, head, etc) and not all parts will be tattooable. (only flesh-material parts are viable) "Imaginary" parts will also be able to be tattooed so yes if you have gone as far as to add your genitals as a descriptive body part you can have it tattooed and get an affect bonus for it.

Players will also be able to become tattoo artists. You'll have to find someone willing to teach the first rank but it will derive bonuses from Engraving and Artistry attributes so dwarves will get a bit of a bump. Dwarves will also be able to use tattooing for their dwarven madness Engraver racial if they get skills in it.

Player tattoo affects will be set as the same effect from whomever they learn the skill from. They can seek another instructor and change the affect (and in fact pass on their current affect to other players through training) but it will be one at a time.

The Benefits

Tattoos will confer minor (like maybe 5 point) attribute bonuses. With the freehand nature of being able to dream up biological parts for tattoo locations it can't be made too crazy.

All of the more complicated racial mechanics will be here in detail.

Process Overview

Players gather raw materials from the world. Ores spawn in the ground, plants grow, etc. These spawns have randomized puissance (magical potency) of the material gathered based on where they are found. When player collect the raw material their specific gathering skill (logging, mining, etc) determines how much of that max puissance is retained and can possibly bump it up a bit. Dwarves specifically have a large chance to bump puissance on mining ore and stone.

To make an object that isn't food (covered in cooking) or tech (below) a model has to exist. These models are essentially 2d renders of the object with named sections. Each named section can have a different material applied to it regardless of how sensible it is. You can make a table with leather legs if you want.

In creation of the item the pussiance of the raw material is drawn upon to add stats and properties which are assigned to the parts specifically. Basic additions such as extra durability or basic element resistances cost little while full on magic like attribute gains or on-use abilities cost quite a bit. Puissance doesn't all have to be used which can leave room for later enchantment.

Higher order equipment is the exclusive purview of crafters. Crafting career NPCs will also be able to craft up random equipment and of course equipment can be created by world builders but there will be hard limits to the amount of puissance any builder-made object can have. Crafters will be able to violate that cap by several magnitudes. The only equipment that will come close to high level crafting will be champion NPC spawn drops. (which are subject to randomization so who knows what will come out)

Modeling and Composition

There will be an entire post on how the modeling system works. Briefly, all objects and characters have a 2d model consisting of 11 rows of 11 nodes each for 121 total nodes. The actual admin is a 11x11 field of dropdowns for texture.

Sizing

Sizing is extremely important to the object system, and especially equipment. PC and NPC races vary greatly in size with some being 30 foot tall ent-like beings whereas others are literally cottontail rabbits or very tiny humans with wings.

The easy route would be to just label every object with a race category. Humanoid, demi-human, giant, tiny, etc. Not so much here. One of the core precepts of the game's design is that literally anything can be used. If you find a large barrel you can jump in and wear it around your torso. Lagoshins will end up primarily wearing humanoid sized bracers as body armor. There should be no limit other than common sense. (and the model capability engine)

That being said there are methods of object sizing. Pixies out of the box can resize objects to meet demand for wearable armor. Craftsman will be able to custom fit objects of the specific material (tailoring, smithing, leatherworking, etc) for people. This is intended to be a major force in the economy.

Tech Crafting

Tech crafting is basically a modular process. Tech things that can be built are internal to the system so nothing new can be made without it being coded in already. Each piece of tech has a list of required parts. The parts themselves are interchangeable and drive what the resulting tech gets as stats, affects and abilities.

Cooking

Food is actually pretty easy and designed towards being silly. If you take one or more edible thing (must have a caloric rating above zero) you can cook them together to make another thing.

The method you cook them is poignant based on the materials being used. the length of time you let it cook affects the finished product. If you cook something twice it will get a specific name modifier. Any valid finished products can be written down as a recipe and named within the recipe which will cause the food item that is made from the recipe to spawn with that name.

Consumption affects are added through a formula within the cooking process based on the ingredients' object properties as well as their names.

There are going to be a LOT of "quest" like systems in place so this is just one component.

Plot

Cities (especially and primarily Eclipse, Aethorzane, Sinqua and the human camp) will have Plots. Plots have an overarching Goal. Most plots will be born out of population control but this will also be where staff driven custom "event" type things will take shape as well.

Plots will also have a Leader and a number of Supporters and Detractors which will be NPCs from the start but players can be added to this list as the plot progresses.

Plots will not all be noir style political dealings. A mundane plot might be local wolf overpopulation or a food/material shortage/overstock. Every champion that spawns will end up with a plot to kill them.

Plots will also have an "end by" date where it will be considered failed.

Goal

Goals have Tasks and Secrets. (https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinMUD/comments/7v1o7i/rep_memory_and_ai_in_depth/)

Tasks are actual things that need to be done. A specific NPC be murdered or paid off. Fetch quests. A certain amount of non-sentient npcs be culled. A certain amount of material be gathered and delivered. A special object stolen from a specific place.

The secrets will be mutated descriptions of the tasks that get generated and put into the memories of the supporter and detractor NPCs so that they may leak into other NPCs via the Rumor system.

Leader, Supporters and Detractors

The entire design is slightly influenced by Civilization 6's "Emergencies" as well as multistep quests from various mmorpgs.

While the plot is ongoing anyone (players or NPCs) who contribute towards completing the goal tasks will be added to the Supporters list which will generate Rumors about their involvement. Anyone who gets in the way of the Goal such as by stealing a task's object and destroying it, murdering a supporter, allying in a fight with a murder target or depleting targeted supplies will be added as a Detractor and also be the subject of rumors.

In a way every Task will also have an opposite Counter Task.

NPCs will decide to be supporters or detractors through the Leader's alliances. Those with poor standing with the leader's factions will become a detractor. Those with positive standing will become a supporter. Being a supporter will greatly increase your standing with those factions. Being a detractor will greatly decrease your standing.

Some Plots may also have success and failure rewards which will be distributed to players and NPCs at the end. Plots that have their goal met early will conclude early.

One thing I never got in depth with design-wise with the old system was bards and music. Primarily the goal here is to have the actual song composition and performance dictate what you're doing. If you don't have a basic understanding of sheet music and song composition a lot of this might not make sense.

Singing

Singing is considered a continuous action. The character will choose to begin a specific song with a specific instrument. There might be room for an "improvisation" mode at some point but not at the start for sure.

Every 4 bars something will happen after the first four. Essentially what drives this is "shifts". There is no "shift" right at the start of a song so nothing can happen.

The first four bars sets the initial status for the song. Subsequently the next four bars do something to the fight.

Scales and Notes

• Basic Reference: http://www.howmusicworks.org/200/The-Major-Scale (starting from there, most of that chapter)

Scales and keys will determine whether the current set of bars is Consonant or Dissonant.

• Consonance: A set of consonance (current 4 bars are the same key as the prior 4) will affect your allies and will produce either healing or buffs.

• Dissonance: A set of dissonance will affect on any enemies in the fight (but only current enemies, it is not an aggro action and will not affect non-allied members in the same area as you) and produce either damage or curses.

Time Signature

• Basic Reference: http://www.howmusicworks.org/508/Meter-and-Rhythm/Time-Signatures

The time signature of the current 4 bars will determine how much influence the effect has on its duration or strength. Slower time signatures (less notes) add to the duration while faster time signatures add to the strength.

Tempo

Songs are considered played at 60 bpm which in */4 time signature would equate to 4 seconds per bar.

Assuming a standard time of 4/4 is how the formulas work here with a base of 16. Duration is 16 multiplied by the time signature flipped over (denominator divided by numerator) while strength is 16 multiplied by the time signature ratio itself.

"Strength" becomes a multiplier for the actual buff/debuff while duration is in seconds. A 4/4 set will produce a buff that lasts the length of the set itself. Slower time signatures produces buffs and debuffs that last beyond the existing set.

Lyrics

Lyrics will determine what happens via keywords and rhyme scheme. Rhyming on the appropriate bar from the prior set of 4 will double the duration and strength effect of the current bar. The system will be limited to 1 keyword per 4 bars.

Rhyming does not mean rhyming keywords with other keywords. Rhyming can be done on non-keyword lyrics as long as one of the bars rhymes with a corresponding bar of the prior set.

Instruments

Specific instrument types will affect how effective your bardic craft can be. Instruments with smaller octave ranges (think harmonica versus piano) may be limited in scale shifts and some may be entirely limited to only buffing and healing. (like single harmonicas) You will be able to swap instruments mid-song so the extreme case (harmonica, again) can be avoided by having several on you. (again, a common thing for harmonica players)

Deafness

Characters who can't hear or understand your lyrics (wrong language, non-sentients, deaf people) are not affected.

Affects

Damage/healing will likely be "dealt" in 16ths. (ie 1/16 per "strength") and attributes in 32nds.

Keywords

• Tiger/Cheetah: Agility
• Death/Life/Heart/Soul: Damage/Healing
• Lion/Bear: Power
• Steel/Iron/Metal/Rock: Body

Heavily stolen from Fallen London, Cultist Simulator and somewhat prompted by an episode of Law and Order: SVU comes the Rumor System.

When an NPC witnesses something done to another npc or player or they experience something done to them by and survive they will generate a specific kind of memory. Witnessing something generates an Story while experiencing something generates an Experience. If an NPC has a Story or Experience they will want to tell it to other NPCs and players they are friendly with in social settings.

When an NPC overhears one of these it becomes a Rumor. If a story or experience is old enough it becomes an Anecdote.

Reputation

Every NPC has an individual reputation value for every npc and player they meet. They also have rep values for factions and other groupings like player guilds, social groups, professions and races.

Reputation is split into Respect and Affection.

Affection is rated (-20) to 20 and show a lexical value:

• Reviled: (-20)
• Hated: (-19) to (-10)
• Disliked: (-9) to (-1)
• Unknown: 0
• Acquainted: 1 to 5
• Liked: 6 to 10
• Friendly: 11 to 15
• Adored: 16 to 19
• Loved: 20

Respect is a tagged system. Witnessing actions being done or hearing about them creates a Respect tag for the actor and the action. An NPC witnessing a player smithing may gain a craftsman respect or watching someone fight off a pack of wolves may gain a combat respect. Respects can also be negative.

Memories

Memories are all encompassing for the AI. They also carry values that make them act like object affects or enchantments. Rep is the accumulation of these memories applied against the base cultural and personality rep. (like if an npc is a racist they will have a base negative rep of most other races)

Memories are made of:

• Opinions - An array of rep modifiers and actors.
• Context - Where it happened (biome, a particular place or locale), date, time of day and weather
• Emotions - How this made the npc feel (Angry, Sad, Happy, Frustrated) and the weight of the emotional change
• Event - An array of Actor-Verb-Victim for who did what to who.
• Order - How far down the grapevine is this memory (first hand witness/experience, rumor twice removed, etc)

Experience and Story

Experiences and stories are First Order memories. After a period of time (dependent on NPC personality) they will both expire into an Anecdote which will have normalized opinions. (towards zero) As first order they will be want to be told most often when encountering acquaintances. Anecdotes get told less being Second Order.

Extremely traumatizing or invigorating experiences and stories will not expire into anecdotes but will instead become Parables which remain First Order, do not expire and will be told most often to new acquaintances or when the NPC is feeling distraught.

On the other hand, if the NPCs current opinions of the actor are vastly opposite of the actions being taken they will generate a Secret.

Eg. if Joanne witnesses Alice being assaulted by Roger but Joanne has an extremely high opinion of Roger instead of generating a Story she will generate a Secret.

Secrets

The secret has the same values that the story would have but their affect on her overall opinion of Roger is greatly diminished. Depending on her personality Joanne may also not relay secrets or may intentionally mistell or excuse them diminishing the opinion values passed on.

Experiences and Stories can also be turned into Secrets through coercion, intimidation and fear. If Joanne witnesses an assault and already has a respect for roger related to strength or combat it may become a Secret out of fear of reprisal.

Rumor

A rumor is Nth order depending on how many people it's been passed to. When a rumor is created it is altered by either Normalization or Representation. Normalization brings all opinions closer to zero. Representation occurs when the actors involved and their opinion values vastly differ from the NPCs opinions of those actors.

If Alice is assaulted by Roger she will get an Experience with very negative opinions of Vandali. Similar to secrets when Alice tells Joanne (who is in love with roger) Joanne will express disbelief and generate a Rumor with a different set of values that may be favorable to roger and negative towards Alice painting alice as spreading lies.

Unfortunately no comps or wireframes at this time so we'll have to use the imaginations here.

The main website is pretty standardish with a top nav. In the top nav (if authenticated) you can choose your currently active character. This will alter loads of things like the crafting sections and other character management features but primarily it tells the system who you're logging into the actual game with on the game client page.

The client page is the header and top nav and then a giant black background space (the main window), a thin horizontal visual separator and the input field at the bottom. Output gets appended to the giant black space as it comes over and eventually you'll get a scroll bar. On the far right under where the scroll bar appears are a little diskette icon button and a red x icon button. The diskette will dump a the full text of your output window to a date-named file and the X will clear the output window entirely.

On the top nav is an additional menu exclusive to the game client page: the ui popup configuration.

Popups

You will be able to created named popup windows and assign configurations to them. These popup windows will add metadata requests to the normal input/output channel to track current health, stamina, needs (sleep, food, thirst) and even a dynamic minimap of what you can currently see. Your popup settings will be saved as configuration for your account so they are with you no matter what computer you're at.

The client will also face out its own popups. If you examine or click on a highlighted link in the output a popup will come up if it has an attached image, audio file or video. Playing the game with 2 monitors would probably be beneficial.

Main Nav

The main nav window is also segmented slightly. The top border is reserved for a static display of where you are. (zone potentially locale name and potentially room name) The entire window is backed by a separate background that will change tint color based on your impending health problems. (gets more red as your health gets worse, can also be turned off in settings, also it does not pulse at all just changes color)

Skill shots

The game is going to have skill challenges as part of the design. These will show up as lightbox frames and you will be able to set the action key in settings so you don't have to use the mouse. They will be QTEs (press a specific key or the action key before a timer expires) and timing challenges. (progress bar that goes back and forth and you need to hit the action key at a specified time)

The timing of these will be handled client-side so yes you could probably write some js to game them. The client will be handed the config for and control of the timer and it will send back the results so there are no lag issues.

Actual Currency

There can be an unlimited number of fiat currencies in the system. Currently there are a few larger ones planned. (humans, elven alliance, umbrus, dwarven clans, sinqua)

The actual money part of the currency is simply values on your character. Currencies will not ever be objects in the world but you will be able to put currency in a containing object and drop that. It is essentially a secret universal inventory.

Fiat currencies can have internal exchange rates but they will need to be exchanged in cities at bank-like institutions. If someone wants 5 human dollars for something you wont be able to give them the equivalent in another currency.

Barter Economies

Some of the cultures have barter economies. This will work quite a bit like buying something in a bethesda (fallout, elder scrolls) game where you can offer to "sell" your stuff and "buy" theirs at the same time. Overflow value gets lost. Draconi, felixi ahd shivaari all have this type of economy.

Goods and Services

Raw materials are more often than not going to be bought by craftsman npcs. Random equipment and such will be bought by fences and resale generalist shops. Many NPCs may want things and will give you money or other things they have in exchange.

Craftsman players are also going to want lots of random equipment to melt down for raw materials.

Thievery

Aside from Kender kleptomania players will be able to steal from each other by pickpocketing. The only valid targets will be those opted into pvp so it is limited to anyone in a guild or those who have declared ronin.

"Drops"

There are no drop tables. Things on a corpse are wysiwyg other than any currency being held which you can loot.

Auctioning

Eclipse, Sinqua and the human camp will all have their own consignment auction houses. They will operate exactly as the auction house in City of Heroes did.

• You will list things indefinitely for a very small listing fee and set a minimum price.

• Buyers will register blind bids for items being sold and can also register persistent blind bids for amounts of raw materials.

• The item will go to the lowest bidder that is above the listing price. A % fee will be taken and the rest goes to the seller. The item is then placed in the lockbox of the city of the winning bid. All existing bids not on raw materials get wiped out.

This post assumes you've read the "zone/locale" post. The tl;dr of that is Locales = groupings of rooms, movement is pretty much the same for them. Locales can connect to other locales or bring you back to a Zone. Zones can also connect to each other.

IntraZone travel and costs

The main method of traveling will be between zones. While most zone-to-zone connections (called Pathways) need to be discovered within the wilderness locales first once you know of one you will permanently be able to travel from Zone to Zone. Traveling between zones costs stamina. It can be overridden (like in the case of between city districts) but the default stamina cost is 10%. This is lowered by 90% for centaur and lowered further still in general by the Hardiness attribute. (to at most 50% reduction, which means centaur can have up to 95% reduction)

Traveling into locales within a zone (or the reverse) can also be overridden but the default for that is 0. Room-to-room in a locale is a fair bit less but does cost a bit of stamina dependent on how fast you're going which is tracked by a hidden "sprinting" counter. Making successive room-to-room movements in or out of combat within 5 seconds of each other increments the sprinting counter up to 10. Each sprint rank adds 1% stamina cost (with 1 being the base) leaving a full tilt run at 10% per movement.

Teleports and summons

There are insta teleports. In some cases it is a function of a spell or racial (like the astrals) and some locales have teleports to specific places. It costs 0 stamina to enter a portal or be the subject of a teleport.

There is one spell that allows direct teleport to another character and one summon spell to bring them to you.

Shadow Walking

Shadow walking can bring you into or out of a locale in a zone. It is specific to umbrus and requires there be a room in the locale with a low enough luminosity. You also can't choose which room. If there are multiples it will take you to the lowest light level room. Conversely you can use it to escape a locale back into the zone if you can find a room with the same low light level to walk from.

Flight

If you can fully fly (not hover) you can launch into the sky and access any overworld zone from there. This can be done from the zone or a locale. Similar to shadowwalk this can be used to escape a locale back to its zone. The stamina cost is a base 10% so you can fly from zones several connections away from each other directly. It takes a bit of time to launch and land, however.

Carriage Service

Larger towns will potentially have NPCs running carriage services. This is quite a bit like you might expect. You pay the person and you are transported to the zone you asked for. You will spend a bit of time in the carriage interior but no stamina cost.

Astral Realm

The wilderness locales in the astral realm will act like they used to in the old system. Each room will generate portals randomly that transport you to a new wilderness locale in a semi-random zone. Some of these portals will have increase gravity so you might end up far far away if you're not careful.

The room's birthmark hash will determine what zone you end up in and some zones (like non-surface ocean, major city town halls, zones with no wilderness locales and the paradox portal) will be excluded.

Realism threatens your quality of life! Removing the base character inventory is something I actually wanted to do for a while but never got around to. That didn't stop me from inventing loads of reasons I should have though.

It began with pockets. I added "pockets" to the armor object type which allowed anyone to add an inventory slot to anything you could wear. Then I removed the "container" object type so backpacks and such was just armor with large pockets and eventually migrated pockets to everything.

I could have removed the base inventory there but it was probably a bit too complicated of a concept for me (as a kid) until I added guns. Guns had their own special inventory for bullets and ammunition clips. Ammunition clips also had an inventory for bullets. The real interesting part, however, was for bows and ballistic launchers. They needed "quivers". (ammo boxes for launchers)

You could have multiple quivers on you including in your inventory and being worn. You could also store arrows and ballistic ammunition in any container you wanted. This created a need for a "designation" command that bound something with stuff in it as your "ammunition source". This is the behavioral pattern I needed to rid myself of base inventory but again I didn't see it at the time and also had no good alternative for NPCs.

Near the end of its life I finally put the pieces in the right spots and came up with the smart sort and find inventory system. The system internally treated all of your various inventories, including the default one, as one giant inventory and allowed you to issue "get/take sword out" to get the sword from any pack without knowing where it was. The key being "out" here; out became the "I don't care where it is just get it from any inventory on my person" keyword. You could also "put sword away" and the system would choose an inventory with enough space to cram it in.

The now

With this system in mind it's important to note that the old system subverted the "physical model" stuff that everything else adheres to. This will not be the case for the new system.

Everything is still a container. The amount of inclusion space is related to the hollowness (0-99%) of the object. The hollowness is rated against the actual dimensions (HxWxD) of the thing to give you the mass that can be contained. The weight of containment has to do with the density of the material makeup of the container rated against the hollowness and porosity. Something made of paper with a high hollowness and porosity will be flimsy and unable to hold a lot of weight no matter how large it is. You can overstuff a container which will cause it structural damage as you move it around. If a container breaks its contents will spill out.

Liquids

Liquid containment is the same as normal containers. Anything can be made to hold liquids but with higher porosity (of the materials used and the container structure) the contained substance may leak out. Liquids occupy "gap" space in the container and add to the weight but not the mass of what's contained. It's a bit of a hack, yes, but necessary I believe. The main problem with abusing this by storing loads of liquid in a bag with your other things is the contained objects will be subject to the liquid which may degrade them over time and certainly get them wet. It will always be best to store your liquids and solids in separate containers.

Smart sorting

Smart sorting will be here in spades. It will determine the best container for your stuff and allow you to use the "self" keyword to find things. "Get/put sword from/to/in self" will search every worn and held container.

Races

One of the advantages of the giant beetle race is that you'll have a base inventory in your carapace where both objects and characters can live. It will be pretty spacious. No other race has a base inventory (hel'xis can with augments) which means when you are born into the world you will only be able to carry 2 things at a time. (until the newbie zone hands you a backpack)

What once was

Runemagic is basically just a concept stolen from Warhammer. (fantasy) It's also not how runes work in Warhammer but that's where it came from originally.

Runemagic refers to carving or drawing runewords into an object. Runewords existed way way back in the RoI twin days. (oldcode v2) The runes themselves are a 4 quadrant "word" of ascii characters similar to a kanji character. There is a formula for turning an english word into what it'd look like as a rune and all of this will apply to the new design as well.

The runes of old were simplistic. There were a few buff runes (power, speed) and a few "damage" runes (fire, lightning, ice, health) and it didn't really get much past that. There were other runes in the data pool but they had no code behind them.

Buff runes were just carved into objects. Damage runes were carved into rooms and served as pseudotraps. If someone stepped on one (using the bump code) the rune would activate and cause a roomwide aoe of that elemental type.

New Design

• Runewords will still look the same and probably even use the same math.

• Carving runes into objects will still provide "enchantment affects" but any type of carving (runes or basic engraving) will reduce the overall durability of the object and increase the difficulty in repairing it.

• Runes will not occupy nor increase puissance space. There will be a "ley" rune which will add unused puissance cap to objects, though.

• "damage" runes will work sort of similar but be allowed to be placed on objects. On use the rune has a chance of activating which consumes the rune and deals damage localized to the object which may or may not hurt you but it will damage the object.

• You don't have to learn runewords but you do have to order the characters correctly. Creating a nonexistent rune has a chance of causing a void backlash to the maker.

• Runes will use the Finesse as well as the Engraver and Runecarving attributes.

• Non-dwarves can make runes but dwarves have significant bonuses to them and exclusive access to an easy way to jack up your Engraver attribute.

Engraving

Straight out of dwarf fortress dwarves will have immediate and exclusive access to the utter joy of Engraving. Grab yourself some engraving tools (a durable sharp ended thing for a chisel and some kind of hammer) and engrave everything you see. Rocks, walls, objects, turtle shells, anything of a sufficient density and low porosity.

Engraving consumes 25% of your max stamina and creates a unique "roguelike" description of a historical event that probably didn't happen. It will pull from your actual memories or just make some shit up.

Engraving has a fairly low chance (higher with more engraving attribute) of granting you an Inspiration which is a temporary buff to random attributes. Inspiration strength is based on your engraving attribute with duration based on your Finesse.

You might also, with a lot of insomnia, undergo an Obsession which is a serious mental condition where you will engrave everything in sight that can be engraved until you get an inspiration which will be tripled in strength with 10x the duration. Don't plan a whole lot for the day once this happens.

Dwarving is fun.

All all ALL output in the game coming from the system is split into typed channels. Technologically it's a massive PITA over the system it replaced. Every single line of output has to be constructed into a message cluster consisting of every single relevant sense it applies to. For example, entering a room consists of:

• Visual: Someone enters the room from the west.
• Auditory: You hear heavy footsteps from the west.
• Olefactory: An slight odor of musk emanates from the west.
• Tactile: <nothing here, there is no tactile for this one>
• Lingual: <nothing here either>
• Psychic: You can feel the energies of a new presence moving in from the west.

Not only that but every output's origination is split into grammatical channels. The above list is just what you see being delivered. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and supporting evidence is supplied and the output engine composes the sentences you'll actually see.

My own normalized designs aside it is important to note before we get into perception because what you see and the perception checks made for you internally are actually type channeled. You might have excellent hearing but poor sight and mediocre smell and taste. You might have minimal tactile senses (like hel'xis and arbathane) and no sense of smell. You could be blind, deaf and mute but have amazing psychic senses.

Perception Checks

With that in mind we can talk about signal strength, the basis of perception. The communication post spoke of "volume" and this is where that comes in. Each output is assigned a base strength. Channel type modifies this based on context. Auditory, visual and olefactory are diminished the further away you are but also are affected heavily by medium (are you under water) and obstructions. (density of room clutter, closed doors) Psychic is absorbed by various elements present in the room (iron most notably) and lingual/tactile are extremely low strength.

At the zone level strength gets diminished considerably. You might still smell or see a fire in a forested locale but it'd have to be fairly large.

There is a Perceptive attribute. Perceptive increases all perception checks as an indirect multiplier. The Wit attribute contributes to the formula as part of the base value as well.

Stealth

Attempting to be stealthy is generally a matter of limiting visual strengths but if you're particularly smelly or noisy you will draw attention and fail. Distracting a victim helps quite a bit in reducing their overall perception especially if their Wit and Perceptive attributes are low.

Sneaking has the effect of inducing deliberate stealth. The strengths of all of your auditory and visual outputs will be lowered based on your Stealthy and Finesse attributes. If your stealthy is high enough (beyond midrange) it will also reduce your psychic and tactile strengths. While psychic checks are always happening tactile only get invoked when you are doing something against another character such as pickpocketing or planting items.

Luminosity

Each room maintains its own light levels based on the room contents, (potentially) weather conditions and medium. There may not be grues waiting to eat anyone but there are spells and fighting arts in the game based on darkness and most races rely primarily on their visual sense over the rest so it's a good idea to carry light sources around.

There will be a couple of modes of communication.

Unaided

• Whisper - Similar to say but cuts volume by 50%. You can also direct a whisper to someone in the room but others in the room still might hear it. Directed whispers run at 15% say volume.
• Say - Local to the room you're in. Might be heard by someone with very good audio perception in an adjacent room. Larger race characters have deeper voices that raise volume.
• Yell - 500% of say volume. Unobstructed this will have a radius of 5-10 rooms. Larger characters have a higher base volume.
• Shout - 10,000% of say volume. Theoretically will reach entire locale as well as be heard from the Zone. Can also be used in zone and may be heard in most locale rooms.
• Special Case - Some races have natural psychic channels that are game wide.

Radio/Enchantment

"Chat channels" work on a frequency basis. You will need a specific device (tech = radios, others are magical enchantments) to listen or talk over them. You can tune your device to one channel at a time. Channels 1-10 are reserved by the system. Anyone can "make" a channel and you can name channels whatever you want but no one else will see or be affected by the names.

Channels 1, 2 and 3 are "general", "OOC" and "Helper" respectively. 4-10 are staff channels.

Channels can be made private with a passcode. Anyone joining the channel with the wrong passcode gets scrambled output and can not talk on it.

Guilds get to reserve a high frequency unreserved channel permanently. The channel is scrambled for any nonguild member. Nonguildies can build "cracked" radios that can listen in on these channels but only if they are on-site in the guild's main property.

Asynchronous

The system will have "messages" which are handled in an ooc manner (like user mail) as well as a message board of sorts. Each guild will have access to a guild-only board.

In-game there will not be mail of any sort. Each major city will have a character based lockbox system where you can leave notes for the user. It is unlike mail as each city will have its own individual instance of it so no world-wide postal service.

All this hatred of numbers and such has left an important concept in the open that I haven't really addressed directly: What is even the point of playing and what is the real difference between me and some noob that just made a character?

Attributes

Some races have a small bump to this but otherwise you will begin naked unto the world. I know somewhere else I've said "there are no stats" but really these are the stats. They are traditional stats and what used to be the skills tree sort of combined. There will be loads of these but there are a few primary ones:

• Power: How strong you are.
• Finesse: Covers all ranges of dexterity and contributes quite a bit to stealth and artistic crafting.
• Knowledge: the "power" stat for mental stuff.
• Wit: the "finesse" stat for intelligence checks
• Health: self-healing and resistance to pathogens
• Hardiness - direct resistance to taking damage of all types
• Skill - weighs in all success/failure calculations (part of Luck)
• Luck - weighs in turnarounds and "saving throws" on failures
• Presence - the power stat for charm checks (involved in mentalism, fear, intimidation)
• Charisma - the finesse stat for charm checks

There are also body-location attributes for arm, hand, fist, leg, foot that get used in physical activities. Religious activities might mention knowledge in conjunction with more specific theological attributes. This is the real difference from what it used to be.

Stats used to define the base values for tree skills. Tree skills used to have a parent-child relationship structure. Attributes on the other hand have a complimentary peer structure. If you're a really studious character and have a lot of knowledge and wit but precious little theological experience you'll still be on a better footing getting into it than someone who's more focused on physical activities.

Enchantment buffs and debuffs will have a direct attribute coorelation so you might see a hat with +2 Knowledge, +2 Divinity and you'll know that it is really good for whatever uses divinity as divinity things also use knowledge and it's moderately good for mental activities overall due to the +2 knowledge even if the divinity buff isn't necessary there.

On a technical level every single time a check is made against an attribute for your character there will be a chance inside that calculation of advancing it. If you engage in a lot of fist fights not only will you get better at using your Fist, Hand and Arm but also Power which means you're incrementally becoming better at physical combat in general.

Biological: Attribute Decay

Some attributes are typed as Biological. Power, Finesse, Knowledge, Wit, Health and Hardiness. Skill, Luck, Presence and Charisma are not. Additionally anything referring to a body part (arm, leg, etc) would be biological but are normally paired with one of the above anyways.

All biological attributes decay over time with a direct relationship to how skilled you are at them. The higher your skill the slower the decay. Yes this means you "lose levels" over time. It is a very slow process, however, so fret not.

Skills

Usable skills, spells and fighting arts all have their own individually tracked power level. The more you use them the more advanced they will get. This one is pretty simple.

These do not decay over time.

Object Affinity

As you use objects (mostly for combat) your skill with the individual object grows. The puissance of the object will also increase slowly with use eventually resulting in the object gaining notoriety among npcs, a unique name (it names itself) and npc-like AI.

NPC Affinities

NPCs overtime as you do good or bad things to them will treat you differently. Non-sentients will hold their affinity at the herd level. If you're nice to enough wolves in the same locale eventually that wolf pack will come to accept you and you will be able to walk freely among them as well as have them aid you if you're around.

Sentients will come to trust you and they will spread that trust among other sentients of the same groupings they belong you.

So guild/clans are going to be one of the core mechanics in the Mud. They were in OldCode but will be even more so in the new system. This is a placeholder for all of that information.

Guilds

One primary thing that happens when you join a guild is you are opted into PvP. You can also declare Ronin to opt into PvP. (discussed below)

• Beyond that, guilds confer a guarded chat channel (will be explained in the chat post) as well as whatever bonuses are requested by the guild itself.
• Guilds automatically are granted a parcel of land in an agreed upon zone.
• Guilds will be able to place all sorts of NPCs on their owned land.
• They will be granted custom spells and fighting arts designed by the guild itself.
• Crafting NPCs will be able to follow craft patterns made by the guild.
• Gathering NPCs will roam the owned guild land and gather materials.
• Sentry NPCs will roam protecting guild resources.
• Merchant NPCs can be set to sell or buy stock by traveling to specific shops in other areas.

Land Ownership

Guilds are granted a parcel of land which acts as a hidden locale in a zone. The locale's size is determined by the grant and it can be enlarged. It is considered a permanent locale and can be discovered by other players through wilderness locale exploration.

Guilds are stewards of their own land. They are able to alter it through the web admin as any staff builder would be able to do. They can construct buildings and place furniture objects. Altering each rooms settings (to make them buildings) will reduce or entirely remove resource respawn. (like trees or ores)

You can also dig out trenches and such and alter a room's medium to make rivers and lakes. Upward and downward building does not affect the locale's "size" in any way as that is just an x axis radius determination.

Declaring Ronin and PVP

Ronin is basically a substitute for being guilded. You will get flagged as if you were in a guild but will not get any of the benefits. (like claiming land, spells, skills, etc)

Being flagged for PvP means you will treat players with hostility if attacked. While friendly fire is a thing (from aoe or missed attacked) it does not trigger the same reactions. You will also be able to target and be targeted by single target attacks and debuffs.

Arts and Spells

Guilds will be granted 3 fighting arts initially. Size and age will grow that number and also introduce cantrip spell slots. All of this is based on negotiation and creation by the staff.

The guild's trainer NPC will have the ability to teach them and the guild can allow non-members to learn them as well if they choose to teach them widely.

Individual Players

Players will also be able to obtain land grants but they will be much smaller and more specific. Players can apply for residence leases (a house or apartment in one of the larger cities), commercial leases (a small shop space also in a city) and homestead grants. Homestead grants are the only ones that allow for actual construction and behave like the guild grants but start smaller and cost quite a bit to expand.

Sentient and non-sentient npcs have different engines governing their movement patterns and general behavior. The sentient AI engine has two primary goals: fill world defining needs (economical, skills training) and then filling out world flavor by having "extra" sentient npcs that go about the business of doing what they specifically want. The Non-sentient engine is completely different, though, as it actually doesn't care about the players at all.

Each Zone will have settings for wildlife populations (herds, yes I know herds isn't the right word for every animal). The herds will keep track of a Strength number and "live" in the zone itself. At some point herds will be able to migrate to other zones as well but the spawning zone will still keep track of its herds.

On load the herds will be created with a range of strength. Over time herbivore herds will grow and carnivore herds will shrink. Carnivore herds will specifically diminish the herbivore herd strength to grow themselves and herbivore herds exceeding a large number will diminish themselves due to overpopulation.

If there are any active locales the herds will contribute members over the lifetime of the locale. Locales set as Urban wont actually get general wildlife. So every other locale for as long as it exists will have herds spitting members out into it. This action reduces the herd strength. If the herd members survive (by exiting the locale or the locale collapsing from timeout) they will increase the herd strength by their relative value.

Herds act as a singular collective superNPC. It has all of the AI components of a copy of that npc (memories, prejudices, likes, etc) and when herd members leave and rejoin the new memories become part of the collective. If that herd member managed to kill things or eat and their skills grew their relative value increases and thus the herd strength goes up. If a herd member dies or becomes a companion to a player or sentient npc the herd will never regain those stats and traits so the herd is diminished.

Herds do not expire or die. Their strength is essentially never reduced past 1 but it means that you will see far fewer of that type of npc in locales in the zone. The number of members that get spawned to a locale relies on both the locale's size as well as the herd strength.

Thus, if a player goes about opening locales and slaughtering all the wolves serially the wolf herd will be reduced to 1 and be far less likely to spawn members into new locales. Eventually the strength will grow and more wolves will happen but it will take in-game weeks if not months.