[Cspace]

With me working on and discussing a number of updates to the characters and abilities and such, don't forget that DS is here for roleplaying.

I've gotten complaints from a few people saying they "don't like stat RPGs", but that's not all there is to DS. In fact, more can be roleplayed than some seem to think is allowed. GMs can have quests that involve nothing but roleplaying (including roleplayed battles), characters can have roleplayed items that don't have an "official" effect, and a number of scenarios can be created by anyone as long as they aren't... Hm, apocalyptic.

I think of the battle system like one of those card games. It's here for anything that could use it, and when someone wants to have a "real" battle of wits. I'm trying to balance it and make it fun, but it's not the only thing anyone can do in DS. Most seem to want it, and most GMs want to challenge others with their quests, but roleplaying is fine as well. It would be good to have some of both.

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To reduce some of the confusion if this applies, maybe GMs could specify when a quest, scenario, battle, or whatever is roleplayed. That way the entire situation could be roleplayed by anyone without concern. Otherwise they probably wouldn't need to specify anything, but having some of both would appeal to a larger number of players.


When DS2 comes, or shortly thereafter, GMs will be able to affect players' rankings when it comes to roleplaying. The points granted will provide some abilities to all of a player's characters. This could be more incentive for everyone to actually roleplay, whether during official battles or something else.


Not to mention, it would probably be more fun anyway.

[Dragonman]

I have an idea to help it, possibly.. One of the largest problems with a forum RPG is confusion. Since they're aren't any visuals or anything, you're dealing with a lot of numbers/stats and reading. Thus, I thought about trying to gear it towards a school-type of thing, where players are revealed to new things step-by-step, instead of having everything thrown at them at once. For example, if they do a quest, they learn about something in DarkStorm, or the more they travel around, the more they discover. That way players won't be forced to read pages of information just to get started. The class trees you've created, Cspace, seem to be along this theory, since you start at the top and work down. I just thought we could try doing the same thing with knowledge of DarkStorm.

And if we ever wanted to keep certain information 'rewards' secret, we could always use PM. Whether or not that character wishes to disclose that information would be up to them.

[/weird DS rant]

[Cspace]

Yeah, that's a hurdle when something like DS has a storyline. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of mysteries that I'm purposely throwing out there... So much that I really haven't explained much about the story (which is definitely my fault). I guess I've been focusing more on AoA when it comes to storyline recently, but I'm working backwards and writing a Codex with all the basic stuff.

Anyway, I agree that having some visual stuff is good. When it comes to the basics, I'll probably be doing more things similar to the tree guide if that helps.

[MA-53]

It'd be cool if we took quests that were major advancements in the story and put them in a forum of their own. Then, when the quest was over, the events could be written off to a library so that people don't have to go through the quest topic...