Luceti Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lucetimods) wrote2012-04-22 01:00 am
lucetimods) wrote2012-04-22 01:00 am
Entry tags:
Hello, my friend. Stay awhile, and listen...
Hail, Lucetians! Gather up your best adventuring cloak and your finest magical staff, for the end of the month event is nigh! Best brush up on the rules of turn-based battles and random encounters, because it's getting a lot like an RPG up in here.
Starting 12:01 AM EST of the 28th of this month and running through 11:59 PM EST the 2nd of May, Luceti will suddenly become one great big RPG! With all the tropes and hilarity that requires. You'll be able to party up, go on quests, talk to NPC's, explore town, find treasures, and fight monsters!
How will all this work? Allow me to break it down in parts.
Parties are a big part of every RPG. After all, what does every RPG essentially come down to? Heroes vs. villains, of course. So your character may join up with a party of heroes, or decide to go with the darker forces and join up with a band of villains. However, since this IS an RPG, there will be job classes!
So what happens when you take on a class? You will gain the abilities of that class! Say Samurai Goroh suddenly became a White Mage. He'd have access to healing spells! The downside, however, is that he wouldn't be able to fight to save his life - that is, he will lose his usual powers. Just like in an RPG (before you switch classes or get into that sub-job business, natch), you only have the abilities of your class available to you. Better think fast!
Both heroes and villains will have job classes. Of course, how they use them will be different! Don't be afraid to add a little unique flair to each class. Additionally, you may choose for your character to get stuck in the traditional garb for that class! They will wake up to find their whole wardrobe has been replaced with an infinite set of the same Black Mage robes. Of course, this part is optional.
But what about roles in each party? You know, those stereotypical personality roles that lots of RPG characters seem to somehow fill.
For this part, we're not going with any hard and fast rules. However, you may take ideas from this page, particularly the "Hey, I Know You!" sections, if you wish. Don't feel you have to fit just one role, or any role at all! This part is more of a guideline to have fun with.
On that note, while it's not required for your hero party to have a protagonist, if it does, there can only be one! You guys will have to figure out how that works for each hero party. If you don't want to go through a whole long web page, here are a few suggestions for Team Hero:
But say you favor the darker side of life. Looking for a little more chaos? Then a villain party might be better for you! Villain parties are no exception to the stereotype rule. Here are a couple of suggestions for Evil Bad Guy Organization (EBGO) roles:
EBGO's will also have expendable minions at their beck and call. Mostly these minions will be hooded or helmeted, and you'll basically never see their faces! They are just NPC's so feel free to imply/handwave/etc their existence. If you wish your character to BE a minion, that's just fine, but be prepared to get treated as so much chaff. You may also have your character be a renegade villain without an EBGO, but when faced with so many teams of heroes, you might not last long! You know what they say about strength in numbers.
Finally, you may pair up a hero party with a villain party! And "designate" them for each other. Heroes may become involved with other villains, and villains may taunt other heroes, but ultimately, designated pairs will have their ultimate showdown only with each other! Doing this is optional, of course, but recommended. Designating an official enemy essentially means that no one else can completely defeat you - you may get beaten up, but you will walk away to face your final foe. This is especially recommended for all you villains out there!
Now, how about some of the other mechanics?
Quests and NPC's are also very possible in RPG Luceti! In fact, you are allowed to have your character become a Quest or Plot NPC. You must devise the quest or plot on your own, but you can send heroes out to find or do basically anything for you, and you will be able to reward them for their successful efforts! Such NPC's may be inkeepers, shop owners, purely quest-givers, etc.
For example, Sheena may become an NPC at the Tea Shop, and she sends you out to find her some rare types of tea leaves that can only be found in the mountains! Return successful, and she will reward you with a tea that gives your characters strength!
Lucetians will find that suddenly, the village and the entirety of the enclosure are simply covered with strange new plants, ancient artifacts, mysterious tablets, and fabled weapons that can be found in the course of their questing. Be creative! Just keep in mind that NPC characters cannot suddenly go join a hero or a villain party. They're there to provide the quests and plots, not complete them!
There will also be a handful of more standard NPC's running around. Or, more accurately, walking in strangely specific patterns in certain areas, saying the same set of lines over and over. Strange.
Hark!, I hear you say. What about them monsters?
Random encounters will of course be a thing! If your character is an NPC, they will be unaffected by these random encounters, even if they are standing two feet away directly in the blast radius of a fireball spell. For hero parties, they will find these random battles popping up roughly every 20 seconds. (Unless, perhaps, you complete a quest that grants you some Monster Repellant…?) The monsters will come seemingly out of nowhere, and vanish after being defeated. If you have a designated villain party, you may find yourself fighting some of their many expendable minions.
So what happens if you run from a monster and duck into a house? Well…
You will be able to explore every building in Luceti! Yes, even people's homes and apartments. You will even get to rifle through their goods and take what you find! And also smash up the several dozen clay pots they suddenly, mysteriously, seem to possess. If you happen to catch the resident at home, they will not at all find it strange you're there, and may even offer you some advice about how to continue your journey.
Don't worry - after the event, all characters will find their homes and possessions mysteriously untouched, and nothing actually owned by the characters in their normal lives will be able to be taken! These items and loot will be of the mundane RPG flavor, and only be of any real value during the event itself.
Luceti itself will remain mostly the same in layout, although it will get a bit of a facelift. Expect something of a more ye oldey feel, with wooden signs over the stores and probably a great deal more horses. Characters will find that the smithy is now a weapons/armor dealer, the grocery store has become an all-purpose apothecary, and the school? What school? That's an inn, friend.
Speaking of loot...
Money is now a thing! Mysteriously, every hero will start off with a modest sum in the money purse they suddenly own. Enough to buy, perhaps, a starter sword, or a modest padded vest. Villains will, naturally, start out with a much more sizable war chest, presumably to pay the wages of their many minions.
You can earn money from completing quests, selling items, or fighting monsters. We won't tell you precisely what monsters there are to fight or how much money they'll drop, but we will say this: no level one slime is going to drop 50 grand. Be realistic about what level of monster will give you what amount of cash! Of course, there will be a whole lot of handwaving here, so don't sweat the small stuff too much.
What if all this fighting tires you out? What if you can't ... go on ... ?
Death is permissible in RPG Luceti! But we'll be handling it in some specific ways.
If you faint in the course of a normal battle, random encounter, or basically any fight that isn't an Ultimate Showdown, you will end up with 0 HP, and you'll faint. If your other party members are still up, they can revive you with magic or an item! But if the whole team goes down, or no one revives you before the end of the battle, it's lights out. You'll wake up at the point of your last "save" - that is, in bed. If you're a hero going solo, then this latter option is what happens to you automatically!
If you get into a more climactic showdown, well, then things will have to get a little more real. If you're "killed" in a Serious/Final/Ultimate/Etc Battle that could not really be classified as a normal battle - and this can happen anytime during the event, don't feel like it has to wait until the end! - then you will do more than just faint. You will really "die." However, since this is an experiment and it's not of benefit to the Malnosso to actually kill people left and right for something this small, your character will instead wake up in ... time out! That's right, they will get put in a nebulous grey "time out" area for the rest of the event, and return as soon as it is over with not a scratch on them. Having not really died, they will suffer no death penalty.
This should also soften the blow a little bit for a character who "kills" their anti-hero best friend in the heat of a flashy FMV showdown.
But just how aware are characters of what they're doing? Are they totally into this, or do they know it's all bogus and are just getting pulled along for the ride?
Well, for that one, you're free to use your discretion! Perhaps they know it's all fake and they just shrug and roll with it. Perhaps they believe it 100%. Perhaps they know this is all bogus, but the more they resist, the more they find themselves getting into it! This part will work much like the self-awareness aspect did for the fairy tale event. You may have varying levels of awareness about what's going on. However, if your character is participating, they will be unable to escape their role no matter what they do, so they'll have to play along somehow!
But what if you want to sit this one out?
Well, that's easy. The "game" will simply treat any opted-out characters like a special type of NPC. Any character not participating will be able to talk to characters who are, and even interact with aspects of the world, but they will be unable to complete any quests or fight in any random encounters. (That is, no monsters will appear to or come after an opted-out character, and if an opted-out character happens upon someone else's random encounter, they will not be able to join in no matter what they do!) They can try and engage hero and villain parties in battles, but inevitably, one half will flee the battle and leave it incomplete for one reason or another. Opted-out characters can basically go about their lives for a few days, albeit with a slightly ... different Luceti operating around them. Not to mention, opted-in characters might find their claims of "this isn't real!" to be a little crazy!
Questions? Concerns? You know the drill! Seek out the mod thread in the post.
Now go, and plot to your heart's content!
Starting 12:01 AM EST of the 28th of this month and running through 11:59 PM EST the 2nd of May, Luceti will suddenly become one great big RPG! With all the tropes and hilarity that requires. You'll be able to party up, go on quests, talk to NPC's, explore town, find treasures, and fight monsters!
How will all this work? Allow me to break it down in parts.
Parties are a big part of every RPG. After all, what does every RPG essentially come down to? Heroes vs. villains, of course. So your character may join up with a party of heroes, or decide to go with the darker forces and join up with a band of villains. However, since this IS an RPG, there will be job classes!
- Knight: Your standard fighter. Tends to wield swords and has good physical stats and health, but can't use any magic. May also use axes and spears.
- Monk: Fights purely hand to hand. Has a bit of a strength and defense boost over your Knight. Also can't use magic.
- Thief: Tends to be very agile, and can steal extra items/money off enemies. As a trade off, tends to be a little physically weaker and have lower health. Will use small weapons, like knives.
- Ranger: Uses all manner of ranged weapons, from bows to slingshots to guns. Has roughly average stats.
- Black Mage: User of offensive magic, like your typical fire/ice/lightning elemental spells. Powerful, but tend to be very weak physically. Might also possess status magic, like Poison. Will use staves and rods almost exclusively.
- White Mage: User of defensive magic, like healing spells and buffs, to up your strength or defense. Might also possess status magic, like Haste. Like the black mage, tends to be very weak physically.
- Red Mage: Can use offensive and defensive magics, as well as swords and axes! However, their jack-of-all-trades nature makes them mediocre to okay at best at all their various skills. Will have roughly average stats.
- Beastmaster: Can control and even tame enemy monsters to fight on their side instead. Some might have whips as weapons, but others might favor instruments a la the pied piper to help win over their enemies. Will also work on wild animals.
- Bard/Dancer: Both classes will use songs and dances, respectively, to grant status, health, and magic boosts to their parties. Alternatively, they may debuff enemies or even damage them, like lowering their stats, making them ill, etc. Use different skills than mages. Have lower physical stats, but higher agility to make up for it.
- Fool: Oh my. What's this guy doing here? What's with that silly hat? Are those bells? The fool is an essentially useless class, with all around low stats and weapons that are both comical and extremely useless. They may try to mimic enemy attacks and fight back - but they will almost always fail.
So what happens when you take on a class? You will gain the abilities of that class! Say Samurai Goroh suddenly became a White Mage. He'd have access to healing spells! The downside, however, is that he wouldn't be able to fight to save his life - that is, he will lose his usual powers. Just like in an RPG (before you switch classes or get into that sub-job business, natch), you only have the abilities of your class available to you. Better think fast!
Both heroes and villains will have job classes. Of course, how they use them will be different! Don't be afraid to add a little unique flair to each class. Additionally, you may choose for your character to get stuck in the traditional garb for that class! They will wake up to find their whole wardrobe has been replaced with an infinite set of the same Black Mage robes. Of course, this part is optional.
But what about roles in each party? You know, those stereotypical personality roles that lots of RPG characters seem to somehow fill.
For this part, we're not going with any hard and fast rules. However, you may take ideas from this page, particularly the "Hey, I Know You!" sections, if you wish. Don't feel you have to fit just one role, or any role at all! This part is more of a guideline to have fun with.
On that note, while it's not required for your hero party to have a protagonist, if it does, there can only be one! You guys will have to figure out how that works for each hero party. If you don't want to go through a whole long web page, here are a few suggestions for Team Hero:
- Hero/Protagonist: Star of the show. Optionally, a silent protagonist!
- Best Friend: Usually better than the Hero at basically everything. Might be secretly jealous, might just be hanging out like a bro.
- Peppy Sidekick: Obnoxious, moral support, comedic relief, or surprisingly handy. Or all four!
- Mysterious Girl: Last child of an ancient lost race, and usually a healer to boot. Her past is often quite tragic. (Of course, feel free to have a Mysterious Boy, too.)
- Anti-Hero: That spooky guy in the corner who doesn't say much. Might go turncoat for the bad guys. A development which will shock everyone!
- Genius/Scholar: Your mechanic, your inventor, your magical prodigy. May be kind of curmudgeonly, but is a nice person deep down!
But say you favor the darker side of life. Looking for a little more chaos? Then a villain party might be better for you! Villain parties are no exception to the stereotype rule. Here are a couple of suggestions for Evil Bad Guy Organization (EBGO) roles:
- Head Honcho: Leader of the EBGO. Calls the shots, like a boss.
- General: Leads all the minions into battle. Perhaps lusts after the top spot.
- Strategist: Lays all the plans for the EBGO, both on and off the battlefield. Perhaps lusts after the top spot.
- Mad Scientist: The EBGO version of Bond's Q. Invents all your wacky, hero-fighting shit. Perhaps lusts after the top spot.
- Berserker: That One Guy who is basically a miniboss. The pawn that gets sent out when it looks, gasp, like the heroes might win. Probably too busy destroying to lust after the top spot.
- Dark Knight: The tragic figure who was seduced to evil, but has a capacity for good.
Ladies.
EBGO's will also have expendable minions at their beck and call. Mostly these minions will be hooded or helmeted, and you'll basically never see their faces! They are just NPC's so feel free to imply/handwave/etc their existence. If you wish your character to BE a minion, that's just fine, but be prepared to get treated as so much chaff. You may also have your character be a renegade villain without an EBGO, but when faced with so many teams of heroes, you might not last long! You know what they say about strength in numbers.
Finally, you may pair up a hero party with a villain party! And "designate" them for each other. Heroes may become involved with other villains, and villains may taunt other heroes, but ultimately, designated pairs will have their ultimate showdown only with each other! Doing this is optional, of course, but recommended. Designating an official enemy essentially means that no one else can completely defeat you - you may get beaten up, but you will walk away to face your final foe. This is especially recommended for all you villains out there!
Now, how about some of the other mechanics?
Quests and NPC's are also very possible in RPG Luceti! In fact, you are allowed to have your character become a Quest or Plot NPC. You must devise the quest or plot on your own, but you can send heroes out to find or do basically anything for you, and you will be able to reward them for their successful efforts! Such NPC's may be inkeepers, shop owners, purely quest-givers, etc.
For example, Sheena may become an NPC at the Tea Shop, and she sends you out to find her some rare types of tea leaves that can only be found in the mountains! Return successful, and she will reward you with a tea that gives your characters strength!
Lucetians will find that suddenly, the village and the entirety of the enclosure are simply covered with strange new plants, ancient artifacts, mysterious tablets, and fabled weapons that can be found in the course of their questing. Be creative! Just keep in mind that NPC characters cannot suddenly go join a hero or a villain party. They're there to provide the quests and plots, not complete them!
There will also be a handful of more standard NPC's running around. Or, more accurately, walking in strangely specific patterns in certain areas, saying the same set of lines over and over. Strange.
Hark!, I hear you say. What about them monsters?
Random encounters will of course be a thing! If your character is an NPC, they will be unaffected by these random encounters, even if they are standing two feet away directly in the blast radius of a fireball spell. For hero parties, they will find these random battles popping up roughly every 20 seconds. (Unless, perhaps, you complete a quest that grants you some Monster Repellant…?) The monsters will come seemingly out of nowhere, and vanish after being defeated. If you have a designated villain party, you may find yourself fighting some of their many expendable minions.
So what happens if you run from a monster and duck into a house? Well…
You will be able to explore every building in Luceti! Yes, even people's homes and apartments. You will even get to rifle through their goods and take what you find! And also smash up the several dozen clay pots they suddenly, mysteriously, seem to possess. If you happen to catch the resident at home, they will not at all find it strange you're there, and may even offer you some advice about how to continue your journey.
Don't worry - after the event, all characters will find their homes and possessions mysteriously untouched, and nothing actually owned by the characters in their normal lives will be able to be taken! These items and loot will be of the mundane RPG flavor, and only be of any real value during the event itself.
Luceti itself will remain mostly the same in layout, although it will get a bit of a facelift. Expect something of a more ye oldey feel, with wooden signs over the stores and probably a great deal more horses. Characters will find that the smithy is now a weapons/armor dealer, the grocery store has become an all-purpose apothecary, and the school? What school? That's an inn, friend.
Speaking of loot...
Money is now a thing! Mysteriously, every hero will start off with a modest sum in the money purse they suddenly own. Enough to buy, perhaps, a starter sword, or a modest padded vest. Villains will, naturally, start out with a much more sizable war chest, presumably to pay the wages of their many minions.
You can earn money from completing quests, selling items, or fighting monsters. We won't tell you precisely what monsters there are to fight or how much money they'll drop, but we will say this: no level one slime is going to drop 50 grand. Be realistic about what level of monster will give you what amount of cash! Of course, there will be a whole lot of handwaving here, so don't sweat the small stuff too much.
What if all this fighting tires you out? What if you can't ... go on ... ?
Death is permissible in RPG Luceti! But we'll be handling it in some specific ways.
If you faint in the course of a normal battle, random encounter, or basically any fight that isn't an Ultimate Showdown, you will end up with 0 HP, and you'll faint. If your other party members are still up, they can revive you with magic or an item! But if the whole team goes down, or no one revives you before the end of the battle, it's lights out. You'll wake up at the point of your last "save" - that is, in bed. If you're a hero going solo, then this latter option is what happens to you automatically!
If you get into a more climactic showdown, well, then things will have to get a little more real. If you're "killed" in a Serious/Final/Ultimate/Etc Battle that could not really be classified as a normal battle - and this can happen anytime during the event, don't feel like it has to wait until the end! - then you will do more than just faint. You will really "die." However, since this is an experiment and it's not of benefit to the Malnosso to actually kill people left and right for something this small, your character will instead wake up in ... time out! That's right, they will get put in a nebulous grey "time out" area for the rest of the event, and return as soon as it is over with not a scratch on them. Having not really died, they will suffer no death penalty.
This should also soften the blow a little bit for a character who "kills" their anti-hero best friend in the heat of a flashy FMV showdown.
But just how aware are characters of what they're doing? Are they totally into this, or do they know it's all bogus and are just getting pulled along for the ride?
Well, for that one, you're free to use your discretion! Perhaps they know it's all fake and they just shrug and roll with it. Perhaps they believe it 100%. Perhaps they know this is all bogus, but the more they resist, the more they find themselves getting into it! This part will work much like the self-awareness aspect did for the fairy tale event. You may have varying levels of awareness about what's going on. However, if your character is participating, they will be unable to escape their role no matter what they do, so they'll have to play along somehow!
But what if you want to sit this one out?
Well, that's easy. The "game" will simply treat any opted-out characters like a special type of NPC. Any character not participating will be able to talk to characters who are, and even interact with aspects of the world, but they will be unable to complete any quests or fight in any random encounters. (That is, no monsters will appear to or come after an opted-out character, and if an opted-out character happens upon someone else's random encounter, they will not be able to join in no matter what they do!) They can try and engage hero and villain parties in battles, but inevitably, one half will flee the battle and leave it incomplete for one reason or another. Opted-out characters can basically go about their lives for a few days, albeit with a slightly ... different Luceti operating around them. Not to mention, opted-in characters might find their claims of "this isn't real!" to be a little crazy!
Questions? Concerns? You know the drill! Seek out the mod thread in the post.
Now go, and plot to your heart's content!
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