The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Nomadic
Welcome ladies and gentleman to The Campaign Builders' Guild 2nd Edition!

New site looks nice, good job.

Quote from: the_takenYour letter looks allot like a one of those scam emails people get from Nigeria. The ones stating that there is an opportunity ahead and emailing the guy could net you tons of money, if you send him money first.

We should all probably send Weave money, just to be sure. Can't pass up an opportunity like that.

This game is gonna waste so much of my time.

Looks like enchanting skill is making a comeback. Not sure if i like that--it just seems like such a necessary skill to have.

Kinda curious what that "aft" is on the skill's list.

QuoteNo suggestions for making submachine guns and assault rifles more attractive choices though?

really[/i] need light and heavy machine guns both. You could just describe everything machine gun like with the heavy machine gun's stats.

Another option is to require heavy's to have a setup time. I don't think you can really fire heavy machine gun's from the hip unless you're Jesse Ventura. A penalty to hit to represent carrying weaponry realllly meant to be mounted somewhere might also be appropriate.

I think you're being unfair to spambots. They're not just about viagra.

QuoteMount's Bond: at 4th level a yojimbo forms a bond with his mount, allowing the mount to serve as an animal companion, but only effective as a druid level of -3.

Ancestral Weapon Bond: a yojimbo may optional take Weapon Bond in place of Mount's Bond, this allows the yojimbo to form a bond between an ancestral spirit and his primary weapon, granting a bonus +1 to Attacks equal to 1/4 yojimbo level minimum of +1.

Honorable Allies - grant all allies within 30' range a +1 bonus to attacks equal to ¼ your yojimbo level for a duration equal to ¼ yojimbo level in rounds.[/quote]power attack[/i] here. :))

Congratulations man!

Quote from: Elemental_Elf I think it'll be cool to be a Battle Mage who dual wields  Magic and a Shield. Get in close, shield bash the enemy, then flame thrower him to death!

I hope you'll be able to do the opposite as well--wield flameshield or resist frost in the left hand and charge forward with a longsword in the right. It seems like the system they're trying to set up will be great for general fighter magery.

Quote from: Elemental_Elf - Mysticism is gone and its spells distributed amongst the other Schools.

- Bows are going to become more deadly allowing for more one-shots however to balance this out the Bows take longer to shoot and you are very vulnerable to melee when shooting. Furthermore, arrows, and especially special arrows, will become much more rare.

- Daggers will become much more powerful if used for sneak attacks (a developer stating they'll do 10x damage on a sneak attack).
[/quote]
Good, I think. Both of those worked much better at lower level, but bows & backstabbing just seemed to get frustrating once you got past 10 or so. (Especially backstabbing with bows ^_^)

The gigantic racial picture pretty much put me in stitches.

Quote from: Rorschach FritosBrainface, what MUD's do you like going to? I don't know which game-oriented MUD's are the best to start with.

. (This does not happen often.)

[spoiler=Split Infinity]
splitinf.org port 4000
character: Pollux, nightling rogueish thing.

Split Infinity is based on nightmare, a skill-based mud. (You train blacksmithing by sharpening weapons, you train blunt defense by being hit by clubs.) The class system was entirely freeform. You picked a number of skilled dependant on your stats and that was your class. (I had a guy with all the theiving skills, psionics, and... physician.) It features a funky mix of demon-invaded fantasy worlds and spacestations full of blaster wielding security forces. While it was somewhat active back in the day, with people logging on from across europe and america, I don't think it's seen a player log on in years.

Pros:
It had a pretty awesome creator and player base. Universally nice people. This is not always a given on muds. Oh god, it is not.
While it didn't have that many areas, most of them were fairly awesome. Dreams and nightmares in an opium den could send you to toonland heaven or a trojan war hell. Predatus was a heavily polluted world overrun by vicious mutated animals evolved to retaking the world.
Also, the start location was a pirate island.

Cons: It was a fairly small mud. There weren't actually that many areas to explore, and eventually you got to just die on predatus over and over. Also, training weapon defenses was a soul crushing ordeal, but that's more of a fault of the nightmare system as anything else.
It's pretty much defunct, which is a damned shame.
[spoiler=screencap]
Calle de los Piratas [n, w, tavern]
The few honest people who dare to travel this part of town at night carry torches and walk in groups. Shadowy figures flit
along, bound on some nefarious purpose. A suddenly choked-off groan echoes in the ominous quiet of the street. Very dim
light filters through the windows of the tavern, while the building to the east is only a dark looming mass. The wharf to
the south is quiet and still.
A light sea breeze blows away the smell of stale ale.
Screams, laughter and shouts from the nearby tavern occasionally mask the thunk of waves hitting the wharf supports.
A trash can and Players' Board [296/296 posts read] are here.
The air is much more humid.
[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Retromud]
retromud.org port 3000
(website only loads as "http://www.retromud.org", NOT "http://retromud.org")
My Characters: Ghalt, werewolf ranger.

Retromud is an experience based mud (i.e. you level up by killing things.) It has several worlds, a bunch of classes, a solid party based system, and a good amount of "service" abilities. Like, there's a merchant class that can make castles for other players. It also unfortunately sports a rather large learning curve--it's one of the few games I've played, for instance, where you can be punished rather severely by the game for leveling up too soon. What it definitely does have that most other muds don't is a relatively large player base: there's usually a good couple dozen players on at all times, sometimes more.

Pros: Even though it's not *exactly* my cup of tea, this is a really well-developed mud. Like, there are a spells to raise and lower the water level in an area.
Huge: there are five different planets each full of areas of their own.
There are many, many races and guilds (classes) supporting a variety of gameplay.

Cons: Once you level past the protected "newbie" levels, the game will search out new and destructive ways to kill you and crush your dreams. Gameplay can be seriously unforgiving at times.
The game makes fun of you when you typo. Combine that with typing in random commands trying to find a secret area and maaayybbee you want to punch your monitor screen.

[spoiler=screencap]
North Entrance to Keystone
 You can see the pennants waving of Keystone Kingdom's proudest city, the
'Keystone of the World', known as Keystone City.  The walls create a sense of
strength, pride, and more than a little bit of awe.  Truly, this is the best
humanity on Welstar has to offer.  A long stream of merchant's caravans seem
to be constantly streaming in and out of the place.  There is a player-owned
Fort here. You probably shouldn't go in unless you have been invited. It looks
brand new. It is of incredible quality.
   The sky is dark blue and a yellow glow comes from the east. Fluffy white
clouds drift lazily overhead. It is fairly well lit here.
  Obvious exits are: east, fort, gate, north, northeast, northwest, southeast,
southwest, up, and west.
A sundial
[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Havenmud]
havenmud.org port 4000
players: Fortunado, half-elf marine; several alts; Mahkefel (coder guy)
Havenmud's another nightmare based mud, but modded to be somewhat experience based. (You gain experience by fighting or using a skill such as sailing, and use that experience to advance any skill.) This is currently where I play so I am slightly partial to it. It features a fairly generic fantasy setting with mages and fighters and all that. It also has a fairly interesting sailing system and well-developed towns and areas.

Pros: Haven's a pretty huge mud: it used to have a larger playerbase, and has all the areas to support them. (Retromud's probably a bit larger.)
You can buy a ship and sail around the world, sinking pirates as you go.
IC chat and OOC chat are split. You can talk about what your cat is doing or how awesome your +15 hackmaster is on the OOC channel, but your character is limited to IC conversation.
Cons: There's not really any crafting system, and it can kinda devolve into a brainless leveling grindfest. Roleplaying opportunities are also kind of hard to come by if virtually no one else is online.
Like a lot of muds, there are also "gotchas". I.E, you can swim out in the ocean and drown fairly easily. It does not outright conspire to murder you like retromud though. >_<
[spoiler=screencap]Inside the Parvan Town Hall [east, out, west, north, up]
The inside of the town hall does not give great relief to those scared by the state of disrepair in the rest of Parva. The
main hallway seems infrequently travelled. A stairway leads up to another level, and halls lead off to the north, west, and
east. A pictographic sign sits in the middle of the room, detailing the contents of the rest of the hall.
The town hall smells of a strange mix of rum and vomit.
A large news board is here.
Rodrigo de Vivar is here.
Hernando Morgan the Muscular Brute is here.
[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]

Multi-User-Dungeons, they're like a free text only World of Warcraft.

Though there hayday has kind of passed with the death of the 56k modem and the coming of the free to play mmorpg, there are still a number of active muds and active mud players (crazy people like me).

In case you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, a mud's a lot like the old text adventure games. You're presented with a text description of a room as well as any objects, npcs, or other players within, and you have a number of text commands you can type to interact with said objects, such as "go north", "cast magic missile on brainface", "look at shrubbery", etc. Using such commands will give you some feedback in the form of text or an update to the room description.

These games are generally all played with a "client", such as telnet. You can connect to a mud by typing, say "telnet retromud.org 3000" into a windows command prompt. Telnet is absolutely not specialized for playing muds, it's made for running commands on remote servers and many mud-specific clients exist, such as gmud (a graphical program) http://sourceforge.net/projects/g-mud/ http://darkover.isilm.com/download-gmud.php or tintin++ http://tintin.sourceforge.net/ (for you people that love command line programs).

The players on such muds are divided generally into 1 or 2 admins (usually the person paying for the server and calling the shots), several creators (who can code areas and make stuff), and any number of players (who, if you can't tell, just play the game.) Creators are, for some reason, sometimes called wizards. I don't know why.

One of the upshots of muds is that they're simple enough (they have no graphics!) that pretty much anyone can "code" for them, adding zombies or blaster wielding ratmen or whatever else they can think of. Generally admins don't let someone go straight to creator, you kind of have to earn your stripes by playing the game. The exact process varies wildly depending on muds and their admins.

Most of the muds I've played on, if you can't tell, tend to be gamey-combat oriented with a mix of roleplaying. There's a variety of mud types, some are closer in style to a free-form chat room without any actual magic attacks or whatnot. They also run the gamut of genres from post-apocalypse to sci-fi to generic fantasyland.

I don't thiiinnk anyone else has made a mud-post before. Maybe other people could post what muds they have played on with reviews and all that razz.
Or maybe I am so damned old that only I have played these things. :/

They use the timestamp of the post submission as (not edit timestamp!) as part of the random seed.

During the preview pane, that info is just never displayed or sent to the user's computer.

There's a couple ways to game it (there has to be without disabling editing), but they should generally be awkward and obvious.

Prooobably confused as fuck, at least. I'm not sure how much pain a disembodied brain could actually feel, and for that matter i'm not sure how much of the rat's brain is actually used.

If it's not an entire brain, it seems like the rat's ability to perceive any suffering would be negligible. (Of course, they'd be dead still, so there's that.)