Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Other Games => Topic started by: Kameleon on August 16, 2011, 03:05:18 pm
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As a short introduction, I have had this OP posted on a couple of other forums for a while now - in the interest of recruiting new players to Deckeon. I've had a few people suggest I copy the thread over here on the Bay12 forums, as it would likely be of interest to a lot of people... so I am.
Deckeon, a Shadowrun MUD:
Address :telnet://deckeon.mine.nu:2065
Deckeon is a Shadowrun MUD (Multi-User Dimension/Dungeon) that follows the 3rd Edition rules and takes place in Denver in the year 2065. I've been a player, builder, and part-time occasional pseudo-staff member on this MUD for over a decade under the name "Kameleon" among others. Over the past ten+ years, we've seen Deckeon continually evolve, moving closer toward complete compliance with the (albeit now outdated) 3rd Edition Shadowrun rules and implementing many features that are completely unique to Deckeon.
Deckeon is completely free to play, and only requires a download if you want to use a MUD client instead of telnet (very reccomended). Connect to Deckeon at: deckeon.mine.nu port 2065, or if you use the ZMUD client, then navigate to the Deckeon entry.
I personally and strongly recommend MUSHclient (http://www.mushclient.com/) to connect to the game. It's free, and works well on both Windows and Linux (in wine).
OSX users may want to take a look at Mudlet (http://www.mudlet.org/), which is a fairly feature rich multiplatform client (and one of the better/best ones for OSX) which also supports Perl scripting.
MUDs:
A MUD is a command-line, text based MMO game that operates over the telnet protocol. Most modern MMO's are MUDs with graphics:
(http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m233/ColdSnickersBar/abuse.jpg?t=1178831966)
Shadowrun:
Shadowrun is a pen-and-paper roleplaying game invented by FASA Corporation that takes place in a cyberpunk setting (think Bladerunner, Johnny Mnemonic, and especially the book Neuromancer) that also includes fantasy elements.
The year is 2065, and while technology and capitalism have grown out of control, a natural cycle of the universe has brought the planet closer to the astral plane and revived magic. The megacorporations, as powerful as nations now, have rushed to invest in this new area of research, creating an age of reason matched with superstition. The near-apocalyptic circumstances of this transformation has left the corporations in control, and in the chaos, the players - "shadowrunners" - provide dirty deeds for pay.
In this theme, the players play professional criminals in the vein of "heist movies" with a cyberpunk setting.
But I hate elves and fairies!:
So do I. I've always wished SR didn't have fantasy in it, but they actually do a good job of merging the genres, and it has an outstanding game framework. For instance, racism is big business in 2065, and an important part of the setting. In fact, I guess the people of 2065 hate elves and fairies too.
Why you should play Deckeon:
The feature set of Deckeon is immense, and we have a dedicated development staff, led by the awesome Trip, that releases updates at least monthly. The game has been in constant improvement since the mid-90's.
We have a corps of in-game players assigned to assist players called "newbie helpers". They're easily identifiable from the player list by entering the "who" command, and looking for the (NH) badge next to the names.
We have many GMs, in stages of authority, from RP-Assists that do daily roleplay and small runs to GMs that do epic stories that could even span years (up to and including an evolving story that spanned 3+ years).
Our consistent updates bring the game ever closer to the 3rd Ed rules. Recently, we added specialist awakened characters such as elementalists and conjurers.
Are you always getting lost in MUDs? Deckeon has a fully functional ASCII map that displays where you are at all times:
(http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m233/ColdSnickersBar/vmap.jpg?t=1178831884)
Deckeon has fully implemented all the core aspects of the SR game including adepts, cyberware, conjuring, rigging (pimping rides), astral projection, decking (computer haxxoring), and you can even play as a LoneStar agent (a cop).
As a decker, you can open doors from the matrix, hack into the phone system and tap other players' phones, shut off camera systems, or just datamine to sell info to databrokers and strike it filthy rich (and then spend it all on expensive decker gear). You can also program utilities to help you hack systems as your character gets better at decking.
(http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m233/ColdSnickersBar/inv.jpg?t=1178832023)
Mages can astrally project and enter the parallel invisible astral plane, where they can pass through walls and see aspects of the world not visible from the "meat world". You could even just view astrally to see the astral plane while awake. Just don't leave your body laying around where it's vulnerable. Of course, you can always just burn your way through your problems using dangerous spells.
Realistic methods of communication such as cell phones, radios, telepathy, and matrix forums give your characters the ability to coordinate or plot against each other.
If you earn the $$ later on in the game, you can build your own areas and send the build orders to our developers. Have your own safe house, or even your own nightclub.
You can either choose a pre-built archetype to try the game out, or build a custom character using the SR rules.
For people that like to get absorbed in the theme, the game is (lol) roleplaying enforced, meaning that players are not allowed to give in-character info over out-of-character channels, vise versa, and you must remain in-character. If you like a strong cyberpunk theme, then this place is great for you.
Why you should not play:
Deckeon has a large (lol)roleplaying component. If you don't enjoy roleplaying, you may not get a lot of enjoyment from this game, and the GMs and other players won't enjoy you.
If you like to cyber, don't do it on Deckeon. The GMs will humiliate you. We see everything.
If you have any questions about the people in the game, the theme of the game, or the features of the game, or if you need help playing or working a MUD client, please feel free to ask me in this thread. If you have criticism of the game, then discuss that here too. I work on the game, and I like to hear things that I could make better.
Useful links:
http://deckeon.net/ (http://deckeon.net/) the official site
Some more basic info:
The game has no set "classes" that you are required to be. It's an open-ended creation system where you can select individual skills and stats based on a priority system.
The closest thing to a "class" in the game, however, is the magic stat. People in 2065 are either born with magic, or they are not. Like the gays, it's biological. People with magic are called "awakened". While the magic they are born with is the same on a basic level, it can manifest itself in different ways, usually based on how the person lives their life a child. An awakened person cannot change the nature of the magic later in life. Here are the most basic types of awakened people in 2065:
The Hermetic Mage:
This is an awakened person that had an active, scientific, interest in his magic and actively choose to research magic while growing up. Hermetic mages study sorcery and believe that their power comes from their own personal connection to the astral plane. Hermatic mages use spells, can astrally project, can view the astral plane, can summon elementals, among other things.
The Shaman:
The shaman was unaware that she was awakened until she was approached by her totem. The shaman's totem guides her on her quest to learn about her powers, and in return, the shaman embodies the spirit of her totem. Shamen take on characteristics of their totems (or perhaps the totem chooses shamen that already have these characteristics). Totems can be the spirit of many concepts, but the most common are living creatures: Bear, Wolf, Cat, Raven, Rat, etc. There are exotic shamen, such as toxic shamen that follow the spirit of pollution. These are not available to the players at creation. The Shaman has similar powers to the Mage, but summons spirits instead of elementals. For instance, if standing on a street corner, the Shaman could summon a city spirit; if sitting in a bar, she could summon a hearth spirit.
The Physical Adept:
The physical adept was born awakened, but grew up using his powers to augment his athletic ability. Physical adepts are capable of supernatural feats of prowess: they can perhaps jump stories high, or maybe keep their balance on a tightrope in a windstorm, punch through walls, or just go Keanu on people. Adepts select their powers at character creation. Adepts cannot cast spells or visit the astral plane. They can view the astral plane if they select that adept power at character creation. They cannot conjure.
There are a few other types of magic, which are mostly variations of the above:
Sorcerer: Can only cast spells.
Conjurer: Can only conjure.
Elementalist: Can only cast spells aligned with their element.
People who are not awakened are referred to as "mundane". The vast majority of the population of the world is mundane; however, magic is a big enough business that universities offer degrees and research fellowships into it, and the megacorps sell spells from their own R&D.
Tips & Tricks / Getting Started.
Purely combat characters are also referred to as 'Street Samurai'. These are mundane (non-magical) players, who purchase and surgically install Cyberware into their bodies to increase their attributes, armor, or even skills - in order to amplify their ability to kill stuff. These are likely the easiest class to pick up and learn for players new to the Shadowrun universe, but are a struggle monetarily compared to Deckers.
Magical characters are one of the more challenging roles to play (Adepts less so) and require a large amount of patience and ingenuity to be able to hold their own with or against their Street-samurai / combat brothers. Forthcoming updates to Deckeon will include Sustained Spell Foci, a major facet of the casting classes in pen and paper Shadowrun - and will narrow the gap between Cyberware and Casting classes in the future.
Deckers are the hardest to learn, but are easily the most wealthy characters in Deckeon. They move money in the millions. Deckers have an entire economy amongst themselves - selling addresses, data, utils they've programmed, decks and information. Soon, they'll be able to sell custom decks they've built.
Keep in mind that if you want to play a character who's going to be doing lots of decking (computer hacking), decking has the highest learning curve. If you do choose to be a decker, here's some advice:
-Buy a cyberdeck. Spend as much as you possibly can on it.
-Buy a datajack implant and get it installed! You can't jack into the matrix without a port implanted into your brain.
-Don't forget to buy utilities for your cyberdeck.
-Use the 'util load' command to load utilities into active memory. They do nothing if they're unloaded.
-Use the 'deck' command to see the stats on your deck, and to see which utils are loaded.
-type 'help deck', and read everything in there, and read all the related help files.
-Be sure to follow the directions in the tutorial quest carefully.
-Write down every LTG address you find. Keep these safe.
-Seek out with and socialize with every decker you can. Deckers work as a community in Deckeon. They sell eachother things, and they're the only source for the best equipment, utils, LTG addresses, and passwords.
-Never give out LTG addresses for free, utils that you program for free, passwords for free, and especially equipment and cyberdecks for free.
-Never jack into the matrix if you're injured in any way. Any kind of injury gives you penalties to everything you do, and your char can't deck effectively if he's hurt.
Progression / Levelling.
- As you play the game, you will gain a % of points in one of 6 Categories (Roleplaying, Killing, Rigging, Hacking, Casting, Runs).
- When the % in each category hits >100% (and rolls over to 1% again) you will gain a Karma point.
- These Karma points can later be redeemed to increase your Stats, Skills, Spells or Adept Powers (using the raise, learn, and purchase commands).
- Every 10th Karma earned does not go into your Karma count, but instead is considered to be a 'Good Karma'. These 'Good Karma' points are typically saved for those rare HOLYCRAPOHFUDGE moments where you absolutely need to get out of trouble fast. These are used by typing the command 'hog' (stands for Hand of God) - and once used you will automatically succeed any task/roll for the following 10 seconds (and/or if used when dying, will bring you back to full health and stun).
- To earn Kill % you'll want to get out there and hunt stuff in various level areas. Run % is garnered from doing NPC 'jobs' from agents called a Johnson. Casting % obviously is gained from exercising your magical skills, as RP % is gained from roleplaying and chatting with other players. Hacking % for actions in the Matrix, and Rigging % for doing Rigger stuff.
Lost? Confused? Stuck?
- Type 'options' to see your options
- Type 'options map' to turn on that advertised map.
- Type 'options people' to make the map more detailed. It's reccomended.
- Type 'options exits' to turn on auto-display of known exits from rooms.
- Type 'options people' to show a list of all players and NPC's in current/adjacent rooms.
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This looks fun. Been looking for a decent MUD/MOO/MUSH since HellMOO split and got wierd. I like the way you implemented the fate point system.
A couple of questions. How grindy is this? I suppose compared to HellMOO if you've ever played it. I noticed you said you get Karma for kills and magic, does that mean you go to a spot and just kill things for a while to run up your Karma? Wouldn't that mean Mages and such get Karma faster then a Street Samurai, seeing as they combine casting and killing?
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We work pretty hard to balance the karma gain rates between classes / tasks / jobs.
I won't lie, it's a little grindy. It's a MUD after all. It's can also be good casual fun that you can play from home while watching TV - or even from work between other tasks. From a big picture view, there's a lot of grinding to fill your time and gain karma between the actual GM events (which can be sporadic and seasonal at times). We also work very hard to keep the grindy aspects as varied and ever-growing as we can, to provide as much solo and group content as possible to fill in the gaps between GM run stuff.
So while the caster gains for both kill % and cast %, he's also got to contend with drain and lower physical attributes - making him more easily killed, requiring some spacing and logic behind his attacks, and overall taking him a bit longer to complete the task. All in all, the gain rate between the Street Samurai and the Mage would be very close.
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Fair enough. I take it there is permadeath?
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Yup, perming is possible but also avoidable. 'Doc Wagon Contracts' are what are used to guarantee survival, just bear in mind that different zones require different levels of contracts in order to be picked up and saved from perming.
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I just wanted to drop in and say awesome work. The Shadowrun universe needs more love. Unfortunately I don't personally have the time to devote, but I still wanted to say thanks and congrats.
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I'm a bit confused about the interface. I can't seem to leave the evil bus station...
Also, your resources link is 404.
Forum also seems to be down. Real impressive.
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This looks pretty awesome actually, Never really played muds except a little hellmoo but I'd certainly like to get into this at some point.
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I just wanted to reiterate that feedback, both good and bad - is highly desired.
Deckeon has been alive for over a decade now, and there's a core few of us that remain (or revisit periodically) from the beginning. Those of us who do obviously gravitate to staff orientated tasks, so while in a position to effect change - we've learned the game many times over in ten years and in a lot of cases forget where some of the early game challenges lie for newbies.
Activity is it's own catalyst with Deckeon. Over the years we've seen it go from nobody playing - to daily averages of 30+ concurrents. The more people that are on every day, needing help, and otherwise slowly learning the game - the more involved the staff get in effecting change where it's most useful, and doing roleplaying and run events once they have a suitable audience for them.
My one piece of advice that I do remember from my early days, is to stick with it. I'm not a MUD person myself, never was engaged with anything else I'd tried - but I am a Shadowrun person. Deckeon has appealed to me in so many ways that I keep going back despite many long breaks. Now I'm back again, loving it as much if not more than ever - and helping bring in new players as well as build new content for a great game.
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I've never really heard of shadowrun save the game that I know had little to do with the "real" shadowrun. But this seems like a pretty cool game and such. The really advanced decking whatnot looks awesome. I do however enjoy RPing, done quite a bit of it over chats/gmod/etc. But I guess basically, is having almost no knowledge of shadowrun can I jump into this or am I going to get mauled by canonnazis?
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SR isn't typically the kind of game where you run afoul of canon in character concepts and such. Not to the degree where, like in World of Darkness games, where you can make a character that is basically antithetical to the canon.
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nenjin is right, Shadowrun is by and large a very relaxed and open game - both in play style and universe. There's not much canon to run afoul of, and what there is is easily shrugged off or ignored.
Deckeon is also historically very relaxed about such things, aiming to provide a long-term game for people to enjoy. Even if we had a player-base large enough to nitpick and cherry pick such aspect of roleplaying, we wouldn't.
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Well, I love RP muds, so I'll probably give it a shot! Not that I'll likely get far, as I usually spend waay more time roleplaying than training and such. That and I have no clue about the ShadowRun universe, might read up on it first.
Also, 'street samurai'?! If anyone calls me a samurai, I'ma kill them. Or try to. :P
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First impressions.
Game seems great. Low player count so I presume equally low grief count.
Interface seems a tad clunkier then hellmoo, but there is also a LOT more data being displayed at all times. The lack of names for people you meet is nice, since you don't automatically know who is who, but it also makes finding certain people, like Kim the bartender, a bit trickier.
The tutorial was nice, though it missed a few commands. Skill displays your current skill levels, Cyber displays your implanted cyberware, and inv displays your inventory. There are far fewer bodily functions in this, though there are still toilets. No hunger or thirst as far as I can see, which is nice. Also, unless I missed it, you can't examine items before you buy them, which is slightly frustrating.
Started myself out as a drone rigger, not sure where to get drones though.
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EDIT: My complaints were addressed, so I've got nothing to say here. It can be confusing, but just ask ooc (type ooc <message>) and they'll help you out.
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I just wanted to reiterate that feedback, both good and bad - is highly desired.
Deckeon has been alive for over a decade now, and there's a core few of us that remain (or revisit periodically) from the beginning. Those of us who do obviously gravitate to staff orientated tasks, so while in a position to effect change - we've learned the game many times over in ten years and in a lot of cases forget where some of the early game challenges lie for newbies.
Activity is it's own catalyst with Deckeon. Over the years we've seen it go from nobody playing - to daily averages of 30+ concurrents. The more people that are on every day, needing help, and otherwise slowly learning the game - the more involved the staff get in effecting change where it's most useful, and doing roleplaying and run events once they have a suitable audience for them.
My one piece of advice that I do remember from my early days, is to stick with it. I'm not a MUD person myself, never was engaged with anything else I'd tried - but I am a Shadowrun person. Deckeon has appealed to me in so many ways that I keep going back despite many long breaks. Now I'm back again, loving it as much if not more than ever - and helping bring in new players as well as build new content for a great game.
Gee, what a wonderful speech. But your links are still dead, and I still don't know how to get out of the #$% bus station. Please act upon your words.
Go west, then when you're in front of Pearl something, south a square, and use the taxi command. When the taxi arrives, I don't know. I went to the shadowclub and it was a pizza joint and Kim wasn't there, and I'm afraid to just go somewhere and start shooting.
Edit: Wandered around. Appear to have walked into a Gang clubhouse somewhere. I'd be surprised if the Doc Wagon can patch me up at all. I appear to have been shot about twenty times.
Edit2: HI EUCHRE! Ended up in jail walking into a place with a pistol on me. Guess who I met.
Edit3: Got out, withdrew some cred from the bank, wandered to the mall, went through a checkpoint safely, tried to go back through, claimed I was sneaking a weapon in when most I had were some pistol clips, got tased, and sent back to jail.
Edit3: Combat is very clunky. Seems macro commands are almost required to win combat. Likewise, can't find the command to take off armor or put away items.
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I'll just start answering questions in point form ;
- type 'taxi' and wait for it to show up. Type 'taxi list' to get a list of locations you can take the taxi, in the form of taxi <location> once it has arrived.
- Open/close jump/crawl and scan are all directions (command <direction>).
- If you need a safe place to stash some gear because you know you'll risk going to jail ahead of time (usually when you have a bounty you want to burn off), go buy a car from Wild Willies. Hold your 'small key' in your left hand ( 'lhand small' ) then unlock the car, open it, stash your stuff in it, close it, and lock it again.
- If you need to destroy a specific object on the ground, try swing <obj> as well as swing at <obj>. Ditto for shoot or cast. Sometimes different commands end up with different syntax that nobody's noticed, bothered to report, or bothered to fix. If you see one, bug report it.
- Ammo has legality ratings just as your guns do. If you can't put it in your backpack for concealment, read above for car-storage.
And to make something clear before we proceed any further, beorn080 you are correct ; Macros are almost definitely required. It is a text based game with lengthy syntax and oft-repeated (spammed) commands, it's in the players best interest to alias as much as they can. I personally use aliases for mass commands such as speedwalking (up to and including getting onto/off of vehicle for the trip), or changing equipment, moving between two common locations, etc. Take a bit of time to set up some aliases (MUSHclient makes this very easy, but Deckeon also allows up to 50 aliases to be pre-set) and play around to get a feel for how much/if they help you.
Also be sure to use a client that lets you hit up one or more times to find and re-issue a previous string of commands, allowing for fast repeat attack/movements. Additionally, most MUD clients also allow you to string multiple commands together when broken by a specific character(s), such as 'open west && west && close east' or ' open west ; west ; close east' (or even 'open w;w;close e', unless you happen to have a container with a keyword starting with E nearby anyways).
Macros and Triggers are allowed on Deckeon in most forms. As long as they are not playing the game for you, Deckeon only reserves the right to ask you to discontinue later if found to be unfair.
As an example, as a caster I get really tired of having to mash out 'cast 5 acid-stream bear' or worse yet 'cast 5 lightning-bolt...' or 'cast 5 flame-thrower...' only to typo something, miss getting my spell off as soon as my spell pool refreshes, dying and having to spend another 20,000 nuyen on docwagon contracts. Instead I save myself some time and alias those spells as such;
acid - cast 5 acid-stream
fthrow - cast 5 flame-thrower
lbolt - cast 5 lightning-bolt
barrier - cast 6 physical-barrier
heal - cast 8 heal
Then all you need to do is provide a (direction/)target such as 'lbolt troll' or 'acid east banshee' or in the case of a door you're trying to bash down with spells, 'flame exit east'. Ditto for healing yourself with those macros, or using utility or defense spells.
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Other various tips off the top of my head.
- 'help' is your friend, but be warned there's some gaps in help files. Try variants with a space, a - dash or an _ underscore if the help term you're looking for is (potentially) two words.
- help map, map a1, map a2, map a3 - all very useful.
- Denver's grid is based on a 5x7 structure. Every 7 squares north or south is a major west-east street like 14th, 15th, etc. Every 5 squares east or west are the north-south streets also as shown on the map.
- Turn your automap, autopeople, autoexits, etc ON. It's not 1992 anymore folks, unless you're specifically looking for that throwback nostalgia - don't shoot yourself in the foot and ignore the vmap. (ps - that's the command to look at your automap without moving, 'vmap'). Turning this stuff on/off is done through the 'option' command, 'help opt' or 'opt <map/exit/people/etc>'.
- info #(or <keyword>) while in a shop will let you get info on an item. Once you've bought it 'look'ing at it or 'examin'ing it shows you some level of info, but the rest can only be gleaned through the 'identify' spell, or going back to that vendor to refresh your memory.
- Deckers, go for wealth as either your first (then buy best deck you can find out of the gate, and use that to make money / earn karma) or your last priority (build your character with high int/will and appropriate computer skills to speed up your early game decking grind, earn money with meat world autoruns from 'Johnsons' found around the city.
- Casters (shamans/mages/elementalists/etc) - willpower is your first key stat, but don't ignore quickness either. Body and strength will keep your alive in a fight, so don't neglect there too much. Combat spells are best cast @ odd forces (3,5,7) as there's increased TN's for your target to deal with them, but no increased TN's for you (those increase on the even #'s for you). Spell foci are nice and all, but don't get caught up sinking karma into them early game. They can be lost, destroyed, stolen, taken away, etc. Shadowrun is fairly unforgiving, and if 1/2 of your combat ability is built up in various foci - you're in trouble if you find yourself naked.
- Casters with the 'conjure' skill will want to use the 'order <mob> <action>' command. Remember the following ; they have to materialize first (order <mob> mat), then have them follow you (order <mob> follow <player>) and guard (order <mob> guard <player>) you. Mobs can not cast spells, period - I know, it would have been fun... but so easily abused too. Mobs can hold/wear armor/weapons, but they're also tempermental and may just up and decide they hate you some day (or you go linkdead/disconnect/afk, and they break their bond when you reconnect) and require killing to get any expensive gear back.
- Riggers are not 100% complete, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It's been this way for years, mostly because there's nobody who's played a rigger long enough on tabletop, willing to stick around and suggest/assist/expand, and test. Mostly the stick around part though. That said, as a rigger there is a lot you can do, and a lot more you can do with GM's custom creating items for you to play with - but it's not terribly automated, and not as fleshed out as it will be (eventually). That said your rigger would still make a damned fine street-sam / cyber-wared up combat character, as something to pass the time / break from Rigging until/when it's finished.
- The 'Shadowclub' and 'Mana Burn (east of Pearl Plaza) are the two hangouts for mid to high level characters, where you'll get the most/best RP. Seven Shades and Club Apocalypse hold lower level J's (Johnsons, job-givers - help job, job info, job accept, job drop, job reset).
- The current job system has a 'job reset' command, that resets your wait timer and target #'s back to 10-12. Please feel free to use this, if you should find yourself failing your rolls when asking for a job from a J, and your time/targets start climbing to 12, 15, 18, 20+. Everyone else spams the reset command to keep targets @ 10-12 to get a job, over and over. It means rooms with J's get a bit spammy, and characters with hearing amps have to learn to ignore it.
- There are a lot of little hidey holes and secret shops that sell a handful of items all around the map, both Denver (south of 'the wall), UCAS (north of wall), or the UTE Nations (Grimmway Park/Redfeathers area, accessed via the Helicopter).
- Find PC's, roleplay with them to break the ice, start asking about where you can find better gear - go from there. Some players even have their own 'biz' license. These players are able to act as merchants and sell items from their inventory to players. You can quickly check for these such players with the 'list <player>' command, though they are rare at a cost of 1mil nuyen. These PC's make a living out of knowing where to find the best of everything, and being able to get you kitted up.
- Spam the 'who' command, hell - map it to a handy button on the keyboard. Sometimes people log in and out very quickly (30s - 5mins) as they're checking on something, or get distracted IRL. If you have a quick question that's been frustrating you for hours, sometimes they can answer it quickly before leaving again - freeing you up.
- OOC and newbie help channels for assistance, just fire away with questions. Be patient with waiting for replies, sometimes people wander away without marking AFK - for up to 15-20mins.
- Set up aliases for rapid-movement. As example, going from The Shadow Club to Pearl Plaza I set up a macro/alias called 'b2p' (bar-to-plaza) that exits the club, gets on and cranks my bike, goes east 30 times, north 7, east 2, north 1, gets off bike and draws weapon/shield/activates foci. Do the same in reverse to return, right down to the 'job complete' and 'job accept' to pick up a new one. This will make running jobs pretty mindless and easy, for some great coin and karma gain.
- Macro/alias for things like getting on and cranking your vehicle. It gets to be a pain having 1001 keys in your main inventory, but similarly painful to manually open the container, take out the right key, hold it, geton bike, crank, etc. Simplify by macroing these kinds of things.
- Learn to use the 'draw' and 'holster' commands well, as they'll save you actions in putting things into/out of containers, time in combat, and spam to your fellow players.
- I also use MUSHclient triggers to log all oocs and tells to a seperate notepad window within MUSHclient is very handy, especially when rapid moving as shown above. It's easy to miss tells and oocs in all that movement/map spam, and can save you having to page-up 50 times to find that flash of purple text you missed. It's an easy trigger for '* oocs *' and '* tells you *', send '%0' and output to a notepad(append). You can then mini/cascade the windows within MUSHclient itself, and arrange so the game window and notepad are both visible at all times, like this;
(http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/8892/oocpad.png)
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Oh, and the Shadowclub is not the Pizza place. Look around the area that the taxi drops you off a little more closely.
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Thanks for the feedback. Despite my earlier fustration, this still a fun game.
Super hint for new players: You can earn Karma (the game's level up points) by just talking to other players. So for those who made lousy character choices (like me, lol), talking to fellow players will let you level up!
Also, me and beorn080 are starting up a B12 clan. Get a radio, tune into frequency 1212, and chat with the coolest little guys in the world.
Oh, and I'd like to save up and purchase a penthouse condo with my fellow B12 players. It'll provide a secure place for deckers to jack in and for everyone to stash their stuff.
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Mmm. I've played a bit longer, and it is quite nice. However, it REALLY isn't newbie friendly. The first combat a character is likely to attempt are ghouls, and I suspect only a seriously tweaked starting character would be capable of taking one on right out of chargen. Perhaps giving that gentleman a few targets players can go after, some lower and some higher, unless ghouls are really the lowest of the low on the legal to kill spectrum.
Regarding Macros. I'm not quite sure on the specifics of the combat system, and I may be missing something, but it seems that any auto aggroing mob basically instantly hits you. That may just be because most of my attempts have been against ghouls, but still.
I'm not sure on how to order my conjured spirits into the material plane. I just projected and can't figure out how to return to my body, and when I order my conjure companions to materialize, I get a thing saying do it yourself.
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Your initiative and reaction really help in combat, giving you first shot and forcing a wait timer on your (N/)PC opponent.
For magicals and non-cybered characters, get accustomed to hitting things from a distance. If you can nuke it in one shot, you're safe. Athletics, strength and quickness (not to mention unarmed skill, or edged or polearms with the appropriate weapon) will also save your bacon when you only do light damage on that cast and have to fend off attacks until your spell pool refreshes.
Also, use the advice I gave above for chaining attacks and movements together. ie; 'north ; cast 7 acid-stream <target>' would move me north and immediately fire off the spell. This can be handy in a lot of cases.
Flee with no direction will flee in a random direction, breaking combat (and the mob won't follow). You can also flee <direction> to specify the route to take.
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I don't know what you mean by Mages having it hard in combat. Simply summon up a layer of several bits ablative meat, order all mat, order all guard <yourname>, then order all swing <target>. Support with combat spell of choice. And the armor did help Kame, thanks. I think most of it is just figuring out HOW to do things initially.
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This looks interesting, and I may try it once I get bored of HATEMOO. The main off putting thing is the roleplay element; aside from playing a character in a way that I wouldn't normally act in real life, roleplay has little to no interest to me.
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Mostly, it seems to just be don't use hard numbers for stats and skills in IC chat and use shadowrun slang instead of curse words.
Edit: Hehehe, Shamans are overpowered. Those walls of ablative meat are much stronger when you start conjuring them at force 6.
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Beorn is right, the roleplay element is really very minor. Don't discuss IC (in-character) stuff/stats/info in OOC (out-of-character) is the gist of it. Beyond that, roleplay your character a bit to get some conversation / banter going. It'll only benefit you from RP % gains :)
Also, Beorn - that wall of meat is all well and good for newbies, but starts to lose it's utility later on. Don't get too reliant on it, or at least be sure to keep your stats and skills growing as you progress so as to be able to survive without a horde of spirits surround you.
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So, while I'm not really ready to dive into a MUD, even an excellent SR one, I have to ask.
What's the possibility of someone creating a graphical tileset to run with your client? Possible? Totally unfeasible? I'm asking on the off chance one of the people around here with a SR fetish who likes your game would want to make a tileset for it.
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I'm surprised it took until page 2 for someone to bring up the topic of a tileset. What with the audience and all ;)
To my limited understanding, it *should* be possible. Using LUA / MCL and even Perl scripting ontop of clients like MUSHclient, zmud, cmud, or mudlet - to create a tileset oriented client.
That said, I don't know that anyone's embarked on such a project to date. You're right though, it would open the doors to people who would otherwise miss out.
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I'm just remembering the look and grittiness of the old Sega Genesis Shadowrun walk around map, and thinking "yeah, that could easily work here." I do have a hard time getting into ASCII rogue likes, because I'm a graphics whore. I suppose if it hasn't happened with games like HellMOO though, I shouldn't be getting my hopes up. That and Deon hasn't materialized yet.
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Another tip, play with your prompt (help prompt) to customize it. Add things like your spell, combat, or hacking pools to it, so you can mash a keyboard for look or vmap thus refreshing your prompt every 1-2s to accurately gauge when to fire off your next action.
Having pool vs not having any left, can make a world of difference in combat. Especially for dodge rolls, and spell drain rolls. For more info on your stance, which dictates how dice pools are used, try 'help stance'.
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Is the game sort of like HELLmoo, just without all of the goons and the pee and the killing of orphans?
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Yes, it is similar but different. Things like HellMOOs autoattack don't exist, and it is significantly less newbie friendly, though in a passive manner. It is very hard/impossible to figure out some of the wordings and tricks to survive, and you will die repeatedly once you reach a certain point in the newbie job chain. However, the people are FAR friendlier on here overall compared to the people on Hell, and it is unlikely it will ever have a large goon contingent.
Kame, if I write up a series of additional rooms for the tutorial, who would I see about getting them added to it? And is there an organized way to submit additional help files?
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PM them to me here, or PM me for an email address, or Google doc it up and pm me for an email address to share it to, etc.
I'm a builder, and as such am able to effect a lot of physical changes - from typos through to new rooms for the tutorial area(s). I'm more than happy for the assistance, and promise to make it high priority to enact those changes if approved.
Same goes for help file updates. You'll likely get more traction on getting them added by sending them my way right now, as opposed to bug reporting them on the game server itself.
Once you've been playing long enough and have a feel for the game, community, mechanics, etc - you can submit your own application to be a builder and work on stuff yourself. That requires a show of commitment to the game obviously, ontop of a solid understanding of how most everything works.
Also, I can't promise as to the Goon contingent, but I can promise that they'll be well behaved if they exist at all. I'm a looooooong time goon myself, and have seen them at their best and worst (from EVE through to various games they invade for trolling purposes). There's an identical thread to this in the SA Games forum for recruitment purposes, so some will trickle through. Heck, it was a goon that suggested I post this thread here :)
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Alright. I'll start writing up some additional tutorial rooms for possible addition.
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However, the people are FAR friendlier on here overall compared to the people on Hell, and it is unlikely it will ever have a large goon contingent.
Oh thank god, because i was thinking of playing this, and after seeing what they did to Ace of Spades... ugh.
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...about two hours into making a custom character, writing up extensive answers to the RP questions...only to discover that apparently the game doesn't allow mages to install cyberware. *sigh*
I had an extensive plan to start out aspected sorcery for defense/healing, firearms for offense, and then gradually cyber out to become a decker/rigger.
Doesn't look like that's an option. I don't really want to play a mage so I don't mind the essence loss. I just wanted to have the option of casting a couple spells to surprise people. But since I went aspected instead of full mage, I don't really want to change the character concept to be a mage.
Meh. Probably have to start over.
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I had an extensive plan to start out aspected sorcery for defense/healing, firearms for offense, and then gradually cyber out to become a decker/rigger.
Yeah, that's basically asking to be all things in one character. Shadowrun doesn't roll like that, despite how the video games have portrayed it.
Spellcasting and cyberware are largely incompatible, as a point of canon and the rules. Character creation in PnP Shadowrun has always been gnarly, and the essence vs. cyberware distinction is buried pretty far down in CC. You hit on the one 'canon' thing that does have an impact on game play.
In standard 3rd Ed (or is the Wiz Kid's version 4th? I don't even remember) you can get around that somewhat with Bioware. But you do pretty much have to pick one of two paths: cyberware or magic-capable, at the start of character creation. You can achieve both but the trade offs are traditionally huge. You end up being mediocre in both and good at neither. To me effective new Shadowrun characters are about specialization. Only long running, long surviving characters amass the karma necessary to be truly diverse. And that's by design.
But not on the magic vs. cyberware front, it's just a truism that they're in opposition. And for magic in general, it benefits a lot from being a focus of a character. It costs so much to have any spell casting ability that, if you're going to use any magic, you might as well commit to being a mage. Physical adepts ride the middle road between mage and something else the best, but they still can't include cyberware. There's a reason you can only start as a spellcaster instead of becoming one later, and why it takes a dominant share your character creation points to get the ability. It's a path you commit to.
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Technically SR3 rules allow for casters and adepts to take cyberware, at the cost of reducing their magic rating by 1 point for each point of essence lost (rounded up, so even 0.01 lost rounds up to 1.0).
Historically it's been avoided on the MUD, as as you guys noticed - it was feared that it would get mages and shamans an edge over other archetypes. But due to the decreased magic rating, it's been discussed again recently - with potential that eventually mages and shamans (and perhaps adepts, though reducing adept power-points would be difficult in MUD mechanics) would be able to install cyberware.
In tabletop, where your character is likely lucky to earn 20 karma over his lifespan - this nerfs co-mingled awakened/cyber right quick. In a MUD environment where we're talking about high-level characters with karma in the 200-300+ range, it's a different story. A mage would technically, under revised mechanics, be able to spend a buttload of karma initiating 3-5 times, then burn those magic rating points in trade for cyber. The effort and time involved to accomplish this, not to mention the karma cost, is roughly on par with dropping all that karma into skills/stats/spell-foci for roughly the same results. Making it a bit of a wash long term. This also brings them up to parity with high end street sams, instead of being ahead of. 300+ karma in stats and skills, and millions of nuyen in best-of-the-line cyber can make for one twinked cybered character.
That said, if you want cyberware now - don't roll a caster. It's a long ways out yet, if ever.
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Full on mages and shamans don't NEED cyberware. All their spells basically do the same things as cyberware, better, and for free once you purchase them. Plus conjuration acts as a very nice meat shield. Not sure how aspected works comparatively.
Also, I don't think its that mages CAN'T install cyberware, it's just that its a REALLY bad idea for them, since essence determines the magic stat, and the magic stat determines how powerful a mage can be. Honestly, just go one way or the other. I've rolled up a Gator Shaman, and I am fairly secure in my power.
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I've only played first edition shadowrun, and back then it was just a 1 to 1 essence loss = magic loss. Spellcasting with a 2 or 3 magic attribute wasn't ideal, but it was functional, being able to see astrally was useful, etc. And since you could always add cyberware later, but you could never become awakened without starting that way, it made sense to keep all my bases covered until I had a good feel for how this particular MUD implemented things.
So since apparently I need to reroll, is there a convenient way to do that that doesn't involve deleting the character completely and retyping all my answers to the RP questions, and so forth? If I permadie, is all that retained? While we're at it, since magic+cyberware isn't an option, what other surprises are in store for me? Is rigging usefully implemented in the game, or is it something you can technically do but never really serves any particular purpose?
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Technically SR3 rules allow for casters and adepts to take cyberware, at the cost of reducing their magic rating by 1 point for each point of essence lost (rounded up, so even 0.01 lost rounds up to 1.0).
And that's a huge, huge penalty you pay to mix and match, which I thought kept to the spirit of the game and the rules. If you're making an even trade off, it really begs the question why not always take magic at character creation? Firearms, melee skills and cyberware always things you can acquire later in game.
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Delete and re-do, unfortunately. Or find a way to make that character that you've already invested so much time into, work? :)
It's a harsh mistress at times.
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LordBucket, to answer your further question. You are right, Rigging is not 'fully implemented' in game yet, and has been on the to-do list for years. It all technically works, but with no actual purpose to it. What little can be done with custom devices, needs a high level of GM intervention to create the objects manually for you.
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I checked it out, and a number of things bothered me to the point where I deleted quickly.
First, the newbie area states in /blinking/ words (blinking is bad form in MUDs to begin with) that mages /cannot/ do cyberware. I didn't test it myself, but to my knowledge Shadowrun allows mages to use cyberware, at a decrease to their essence/magic. It's not wise, but it's allowed.
Combat will tell you that you 'have no actions' if you try to spam attacks. It will not tell you when you can attack again. This makes combat very awkward.
The spelling and grammar. My gods, the spelling and grammar. I lost count of how many typos I saw in the newbie zone alone. The newbie zone is where you make your best impressions, for goodness sake. The very first NPC I found in the game proper ignored capitalization in the first half of his 'say', and started it up again in the second half. There isn't even any consistency.
I also didn't like that some 'vital' NPCs are protected against attacks and spells by impossible TNs, so you can't even try to hurt them. I know the reasons for it, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
I know this comes off as offensive, but it isn't entirely my goal. There might be an awesome game under all that, but I can't get past the fact that it looks like your builders have the typing skills of a twelve year old kid. The game needs professionalism.
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The wait time in the status bar tells you how long it takes to act again, but there is no countdown, so you can lose time compared to NPCs unless you spam, which I'm sure isn't appreciated. It is a clunky system, but it can work. At least, I have it working, but then again I run with an army of ablative trees and trash to protect me.
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To reply to some of your points Rabek,
- The blinking words got your attention didn't they? I don't mean to sound glib, but I've addressed the past challenges with magic + cyber a few posts up - and it needs to be as apparent as possible for incoming players. As much as blinking text may be a taboo in MUD circles, it appears to have served it's purpose, no?
- While combat 'no action' returns will not tell you how much time you have until your next attack, your prompt does by default. Try a 'prompt all', or even something like (I apologize for the broken/incomplete color codes) 'prompt {G({x%e{G)({y%n{G){x H:%h S:%s Mv:[{G%v{x] W:[{c%w{x] %1 %2 %5'. Sub the last two for appropriate pools where necessary, as those are casting and astral. It does mean spamming enter or look or vmap or something equally innocuous every second or two, to refresh your prompt and know where you're at. Sure it's a bit spammy and clunky, but it works. Feel free to post a suggestion for something better/alternate/different though.
- I've got absolutely no argument or excuse for the spelling and grammar. It has always been an area of challenge for the game, dating back to the original founders poor grasp of the english language (apparently). That said, nobody knows they're there to fix until someone bug or typo reports them - so feedback of that nature is invaluable.
- I can't help but feel you were stretching for a 4th bullet there, as having some select impervious NPC's is pretty essential the maintaining a playable MUD for the rest of the playerbase. If you can kill off one of the newbie shop merchants, or an important key of a scripted run chain - and they don't repop until the area resets (or worse, until a server reset or crash)... you're not doing anyone any favors in return for the realism you seek. I for one think it's a fair and understandable tradeoff.
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To reply to some of your points
if you're looking for feedback, I could probably offer some. But I expect that a lot of the things I have to say might be somewhat impractical to implement. Shadowrun is an interesting world and a fun pen and paper game, but pen and paper games generally translate poorly to computer games. Just in the few hours that I've played, I can see a lot of things I'd have done very differently. But implementing a lot of them would require a reset of the entire world, which is a non-trivial thing to suggest.
In terms of the new player experience, however, I can suggest a few things right away that you might be able to make use of:
1) An awful lot of things have no help entry. Lock-picking, reputation, hacking, decking...I wasn't making a list, but during character creation it seemed like about every fourth thing I wanted help on had no entry, even when I was asking for help on items specifically listed on a help page as something that I could request help on. Additionally, there seems to be some confusion in the help entries regarding descriptors that have a hyphen and descriptors that are two words. Both conventions are used, but sometimes the format listed in one help entry (for example, type "purchase" and you get a list) isn't the form that's needed to actually get a help entry for that thing. Or in some cases there's apparently no entry at all.
2) Many things that do have a help entry, have useless help entries, and sometimes the information I'm actually looking for exist in help enties other than the ones I would naturally go looking for it. For example, "help strength" tells me that dwarves get a +2 strength bonus, but "help dwarf" doesn't list any dwarven racial bonuses. This is sloppy. "help intelligence" gives me a paragraph long philosophical dissertation on what is and isn't intelligence, but it gives me no actual game significance of the attribute whatsoever. If I type help intelligence, I probably want to know what effect the attribute has in the game, I'm not looking for a dictionary definition of the word. In fact, the vast majority of all help entries in the game have this kind of issue. Help is very often not helpful in the least.
3) Many things that a player would obviously want to be able to do have no obvious help entries, and are totally unintuitive. For example, logging out. There's no entry for how to safely log out on the help menu. "Help logout" and "help logoff" have no entries. And if i simply go to sleep then disconnect, when I reconnect I have an "afk" prompt instead of the standard prompt, leaving me to guess that afk is a command I can use to make it go away. Or do characters always remain in the game world? If so, there should be some way to find out about that, but I don't see one. Do I need to log off in a hotel? I have no way to knowing. Logging off is just one example. I routinely ran into scenarios that apparently lacked help. At one point I cast control-action on some random human. Then tried to give him commands, but couldn't. The help entry for the spell contains no useful information. So I tried using sayto to issue commands. And the response I got contradicted the fact that my target was under my control. Too many aspects of the game are shrouded completely in mystery with no obvious way to find out how they work.
4) The character creation interface is klunky.
* I don't feel like I should need to type things like "bod +" six times if I want 6 bod. "bod 6" would be far preferable. And if I type bod 6, spend the rest of my points and want to change my bod to 5 to spend that extra point elsewhere, I really should be allowed to.
* There appears to be no way to undo anything. Accidentally press up arrow and enter (repeat in mushclient) too many times and you may have to delete and and start completely over. This is especially annoying at the skill stage where, for example, you start with one free karma in addition to your attribute and skill points. But the karma can only be spent to increase something by 1, which can create situations where if you'd spent the karma first you could raise a skill higher than if you spend a skillpoint first. This kind of juggling during initial character creation serves no purpose but to annoy first time players.
* The info descriptions for equipment and cyberware are generally useless. If I type "info chipjack" it's probably because I want to know what the thing is and what it does, not merely how much essence it consumes, which I can see on the list anyway.
* Which body positions armor fits to is not entirely intuitive. There are a few pairs of items that from their descriptions seem like they should both be wearable together, but they are not. It would be nice if "slot" information was available for item
* During character creation it should be possible to sell items back for full value. It's an unreasonable nuisance to have to pay a resellers fee just to figure out what does and doesn't work.
5) There are many obvious shorthands that are missing. If I'm in a vehicle and type "dashboard" it's probably reasonable to assume that I want to look at the dashboard of the vehicle I'm sitting in. I shouldn't need to type out all of "vehicle eurocar dashboard". I should be able to type "hold deck" rather than have to specify precisely the model of cyberdeck I have.
6) Many location descriptions contain text that implies things that appear not to exist. For example, the description of the jail holding cell clearly mentions a fan. But there's no fan you can interact with. It's one thing to provide scenery, but it's another it tell me that there are things in game that I waste time trying to interact with. The convention appears to be that most locations have a big, long useless but "flavorful" scenic descriptions. Which starts to get annoying that I'm skipping over so much descriptive fluff when there's such a terrible, recurring lack of information that would actually be useful.
7) The layout, difficulty and rewards of the early couple missions and early gameplay in general are very discouraging.
* I've been given a mission to retreive a file from Feathers 'n Leathers, but I have no password for the site. I'm told that without a password I will try to automatically hack in when I connect. And I do. Yet, despite having 6 computer skill, 6 electronics, 6 intelligence and almost every software as high a level as I was able to buy, after nearly a dozen connect attempts I've failed every single time. My best guess is that it's because I'm using an allegiance sigma cyberdeck. But if so...if the #2 "trainer" mission is uncompletable with max possible attributes, skills and software...simply assuming that a new character will start with enough money to buy one of the more expensive decks and designing the early missions to require it...that thoroughly reeks of lousy game design.
* My Johnson directed me to the Software Emporium if I wanted to upgrade my software. The mission description implies that it's easy to get there. I was not able to find my way there on foot after ten minutes of real time. Yes, I checked the map. Repeatedly. The map as shown by the map command bears only a casual resemblance to the map as is traversible in the game.
* When I finally gave up trying to find it and simply took a taxi, it turned out that there was no software available for me to purchase of any level higher than was available during character dreation. Meaning the trip was wasted anyway. And strangely, the taxi deposited me in a place that was apparently off-limits for taxis. I was dropped off, went in, went back outside, asked for a taxi and was told taxis couldn't go there, requiring me to wander around randomly for a while trying to find a spot taxis could go.
* Eventually I gave up and just drove around in a motorcycle somebody left running, killing random people. In high heels. With a gun equipped. And no motorcycle skill. Yet I had no difficulty riding around, and there were apparently no skill checks required for driving. Which leads me to wonder why bother investing skillpoints in vehicle skills.
* When all was said and done, by the time I finally was ready to delete and recreate my character, I had spent about three hours in game. And in all that time I had earned under a thousand nguyen, and 7% killing towards a single point of karma. And given that I need 7 karma to raise pretty much anything I care about, that suggests to me that any kind of standard rpg-style gradual progression of character power is totally out of the question. The character I made is pretty much the character I'm going to be stuck with for the foreseeable future, with minimal potential for growth. That's more or less standard shadowrun, but it's awfully discouraging.
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Overall the game has a distinctly unfinished feel. It feels like a flavor, text and map conversion of some other game. For a game that's been around for ten years, it has an awful lot of rough edges. Skills that are purchaseable at great expense that only later does a player find out that they're not fully implemented. Cyberware with obvious potential uses that apparently are for "RP purposes only." And all the previously mentioned issues of incomplete help and awkward character design. I realize I've only been playing for a few hours, maybe it gets better...but if you've been working on this for ten years, honestly I'd expect it to be more refined than this.
22 separate language skills and 29 build & repair skills, but how many skills that the average player is likely to find useful? Why are there 11 vehicle skills and 11 vehicle build & repair skills when so far as I can tell, vehicles are terribly implemented, don't seem to servce much purpose, and rigging is not well implemented? Is water travel so important to gameplay that it's justifiable to have eight separate skills for: sailboats, motorboats, ships, submarines and B&R skills for each of them...when apparently a single computer skill is all that's relevant for decking?
I realize that you're constrained by the fact that you're trying to be faithful to an existing pen and paper game, but like I mentioned before, sometimes that doesn't work very well. The overall feel here is that you simply copied lists of things from the source material and never quite got around to checking to see how relevant the items on those lists were to the game. The fact that roughly a third of all the cyberware I bought turned out to be for "RP purposes only" corroborates that.
There are more things I could point out, but honestly I don't really expect you to act on any of this. If the game has been around for ten years, it's unlikely that me after a couple of hours will be able to suggest anything that hasn't already been said by somebody. A change of media usually benefits from careful adaptation. There are several tvtrops entries (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PragmaticAdaptation) on this subject. For whatever reason, that was not done here. And to do it now would require throwing out a lot of what's been in use for all these years, probably a complete wipe and restart, and the serious displeasure of the existing player base. Again, I don't expect any of that to happen. I'm simply sharing my views as a prospective new player.
But you might consider at least implementing the help and character creation suggestions from earlier in this post.
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On second thoughts, I don't know if I will try this, sadly. :( I never have much luck with games requiring macros for combat, and now that I learn roleplaying isn't really the big focus I might give it a miss.
Looks kinda interesting, though!
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Great feedback LordBucket. I've relayed that as appropriate.
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On second thoughts, I don't know if I will try this, sadly. :( I never have much luck with games requiring macros for combat, and now that I learn roleplaying isn't really the big focus I might give it a miss.
Looks kinda interesting, though!
The macro's aren't too bad. Mostly its just to take really long phrases like cast 3 flame-thrower ghoul and turn it into something like alt-c ghoul. Honestly, I'm getting by spamming flame-thrower at force 3 with my wall of conjure 6 litter. So far I've killed a king and his guards, and an army of ghouls, and only die when I notice my wall of ablative litter has been stuck at an obstacle. Need to find more things to kill, gang members go down pretty easily two, even 2-3 of em.
I also agree with LordBucket. This game does have a REALLY rough feel, but I can almost understand why. It feels like everything was created on the fly as it was needed, and rarely revisited. It IS really nice underneath all the lack of polish, but a small team or even a person dedicated to cleaning would work great. For example, the newbie quest chain. It ends, seemingly, at an old man who is looking for a ghoul bone. Ghouls are NASTY. The only reason I can kill them out of chargen is because I take the time to summon a swarm of conjure 6 minions. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to use minions until I was told about astral vision and the order system, and then I was told about the order all command. Not much in the help files about any of that, especially in the conjure file.
I'll fill out more in a bit.
Edit: I would just like to mention specifically that all complaints are about the actual game and the automated responses, runs, help system, and the like. The player base is extremely helpful and newbie friendly, and have entertained all my questions so far.
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I'm playing this. Anyone want to work together on some decking? It's sort of a learn-as-you-go thing.
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Hey there guys, I've been a player on Deckeon since about '02 and more recently a builder and GM there and it's been really great to see the level of interest from all of you. Also been great to get as much critical feedback as you've given us both here and in game. My girlfriend just moved 2.5 hours away to pursue a masters degree so I'll likely have a bit more time on my hands and my goal is to get the game a bit more newbie friendly. Help files, better in-game tutorial, more appropriate newbie areas, etc.
In the meantime, here's some tips on starting a new character that will be the least frustrating (possibly munchkinish advice here, but imho it'll make for a character that is a lot more fun... feel free to disregard any of the points here if it offends your sense of RP):
0a) HELP RACIAL - this will show you two tables that list the bonuses/penalties for each race
0b) Don't be a human unless you're a physical adept (even then probably don't) or a masochist. Humans get no appreciable benefits and having your stats capped at 9 is painful in the longrun. I generally take resources E and race D which opens up basically all races except troll and elf variants.
1) Take attributes at the highest level possible for your archetype (with the possible exception of deckers wanting to have resources A for the best deck), they are very expensive to raise with karma later.
2) Max out your body and willpower stats at chargen. You roll your body stat to resist most types of damage, as well as black IC for deckers. You use willpower for resisting mana-based spells, drain for mages and shamans, and killjoy for deckers, among various other things.
3a) If you are going to use guns in combat, raise the clubs skill so you are able to defend yourself from melee attacks with your firearm. Don't bother with taking the laser or launch weapon skills at chargen, you probably won't ever come across them, and certainly not early.
3b) If you aren't going to use guns in combat, pick a suitable melee skill, raise it to 6, and get a weapon with good reach (sadly difficult to determine by looking at items). Things with reach 2 are stuff like whips, most polearms, and the combat axe (edged). Most sword-type things are reach 1, fwiw. Reach in melee lowers your target number (TN) or raises your opponent's tilting the balance in your favor. Also trolls/giants/cyclopsen have a natural reach of 1.
4a) Useful miscellaneous skills include:
- lock-picking (though currently hard to find picks... find someone IC and ask, will be hopefully adding easier access to picks soonish)
- etiquette (allows you to have better success at asking the Johnsons who give autoruns for jobs before your timer is up)
- athletics (a number of places have swimming/climbing checks and failing these gets annoying fast)
- negotiation (each success gets you 1% extra cash for selling stuff at a vendor, more importantly it gets you 5% more cash/karma per success when turning in an autorun to a J)
- biotech (used via the 'firstaid' command. can heal physical damage, though can actually deal damage if you fail the test... still a good way to stabilize someone who is dying)
- search (sometimes worth 3-4 points if you have low int and don't like having to search an area twice for an autorun item)
4b) Generally unimportant skills...
- any vehicle skills (there are driving checks but the only consequence to failing them is that your vehicle gets scraped up, vehicles are cheap and can be repaired anyway)
- electronics (currently only used to hotwire vehicles, though hopefully this will be a useful skill in some cases in the near future)
- diving (athletics should cover you here)
- fishing (just used for fun)
- interrogation/intimidation/leadership (sometimes used but generally unimportant)
- stealth (sometimes used but isn't generally like WoW stealth aka omg where'd you go?!)
5) generally it's (mathematically) best to min-max your character's attributes and skills. 1 point at chargen can be used to raise something a full level, but raising something with karma is the new level of the thing times a multiplier, so the higher the level the more karma it takes.
6a) playing a decker: if it were me, I'd set the character up in chargen as a street sam with a datajack and 6 computers skill. I'd pick attributes A skills B race C/D Resources D/C Magic E. You won't have cash for a deck starting off so just grind it out in the autorun system or kill stuff for loot. I'd save up for the Renraku Kraftwerk deck (say 600k or so after utils and whatnot) and by the time you got there you'd probably be able to raise your computers a little above 6 anyway. It *is* possible to be an effective decker straight out of chargen, but making money is a lot easier than getting enough karma to raise stats 6 times.
6b) If you want to be a decker right away, take resources A and shift everything I said above down one priority (don't be a human though, pick something with better body because black IC is painful with even with 9 body, don't be something with low int and quickness though or your reaction will suffer which is also annoying).
7) Before you go up against a ghoul, make sure you're got at least 2-3 impact armor rating and a weapon that you know how to melee with. Even with less than 6 body that should keep you pretty safe. Remember you can always 'flee <direction>' to end combat and get away if you start to take damage. Though you might have to stand up first if you've been knocked down (stand && flee e).
8) At least do a 'prompt all' when you start to get a decent prompt, though the one Kame posted above is better (mostly because it's mine that I gave to him :p)
9) ask other players IC for help or directions. we're all very willing to help a newbie out, but when you ask about IC stuff in the OOC channel we tend to be less helpful because many of Deckeon's previous GMs were sticklers about keeping the channels separate.
I guess that's enough for now, hopefully that'll help some of you get a better start in Deckeon :)
Thanks again for the feedback, us builders will definitely be taking it to heart and trying to improve the learning curve for newbies in the near future.
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A long time ago I played AwakenedWorlds and after spending time on Deckeon I am wondering, outside of the location, what is the difference?
For anyone who is curious, AW is based in Seattle. http://www.awakenedworlds.net/
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for all of you who made deckers and had trouble getting useful utils, the mob who upgrades programs and fixes deck mpcp has been made a bit more capable so you should be able to buy utils up as far as you need for early decking now.
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To reply to some of your points Rabek,
- The blinking words got your attention didn't they? I don't mean to sound glib, but I've addressed the past challenges with magic + cyber a few posts up - and it needs to be as apparent as possible for incoming players. As much as blinking text may be a taboo in MUD circles, it appears to have served it's purpose, no?
It did, yes. But I've had friends in the past who enjoy color in their MUDs, but claimed that the blinking can trigger their epilepsy. It's a strong taboo for me for that reason. Caps in bright red can be just as eye-catching without being repulsive and possibly inconsiderate.
- While combat 'no action' returns will not tell you how much time you have until your next attack, your prompt does by default. Try a 'prompt all', or even something like (I apologize for the broken/incomplete color codes) 'prompt {G({x%e{G)({y%n{G){x H:%h S:%s Mv:[{G%v{x] W:[{c%w{x] %1 %2 %5'. Sub the last two for appropriate pools where necessary, as those are casting and astral. It does mean spamming enter or look or vmap or something equally innocuous every second or two, to refresh your prompt and know where you're at. Sure it's a bit spammy and clunky, but it works. Feel free to post a suggestion for something better/alternate/different though.
A simple countdown would suffice. Automated instead of requiring commands. RetroMUD does this with a skill called 'spirit eye' or somesuch. Each 'tick' or second or what have you would give an updated progress bar of sorts. I imagine Deckeon could do just fine with a number instead of a progress bar.
- I've got absolutely no argument or excuse for the spelling and grammar. It has always been an area of challenge for the game, dating back to the original founders poor grasp of the english language (apparently). That said, nobody knows they're there to fix until someone bug or typo reports them - so feedback of that nature is invaluable.
Perhaps sending a newbie builder (if you have any, or a more skilled one if not) through the area as a brief cleanup would be wise. I build on MUDs. I know you can't catch every spelling and grammar issue. Give it a brief once-over and reward players somehow for reporting typos. That's how it's done everywhere else I've played for any length of time.
- I can't help but feel you were stretching for a 4th bullet there, as having some select impervious NPC's is pretty essential the maintaining a playable MUD for the rest of the playerbase. If you can kill off one of the newbie shop merchants, or an important key of a scripted run chain - and they don't repop until the area resets (or worse, until a server reset or crash)... you're not doing anyone any favors in return for the realism you seek. I for one think it's a fair and understandable tradeoff.
Perhaps I was stretching, perhaps not. When I entered the game, I was assured that roleplaying was a key facet of the game. My primary games are all RPI (RolePlay Intensive, for the uninitiated) games. They do not protect key mobs from death except by the mantra of ICA=ICC (In Character Actions equal In Character Consequences). I understand Shadowrun is more violent than other settings, so I can see why this is the case, but making them more powerful rather than immune might help. Faster spawn rates, perhaps. Anyway, as I said, it's just a pet peeve. Pet peeves don't always appeal to ideal logic.
As a final note, I feel I should give some background. I've been MUDing for the better part of twelve years now. Well, MU*ing perhaps, though MUDs are the large majority. I've played many, many MUDs, so I'm pretty picky. I know what works for me and what doesn't.
I should have disclaimered on the first critique, but I only listed my personal issues with the game. In no way do I mean to suggest everyone will feel the same way. I may, in fact, be far too critical. I'm of the, perhaps, radical opinion that the lack of quality in most MUDs is part of why less people play them these days. Not the only reason, surely, and I've played MU*s (mostly MUX) with an 80+ player minimum at any given hour, up to maximums over 500. But anyone who plays many MUDs can attest to the swarms of mostly stock, poor quality games floating around. Deckeon gives the impression that it's one of these. I know it's not. I poked around enough to see that glimmer of 'something more' that might be hiding. But, as has been said by others, it's rough. There's something there, but I don't feel like digging through the dirt of that first impression to get to it.
Much like writing a novel, if you can't catch someone's attention in the first paragraph, you don't have a best seller.
Probably a poor metaphor, but I wrote this post at 11:50am after not going to bed the night before. I'm sure you can decipher my point, though.
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Perhaps I was stretching, perhaps not. When I entered the game, I was assured that roleplaying was a key facet of the game. My primary games are all RPI (RolePlay Intensive, for the uninitiated) games. They do not protect key mobs from death except by the mantra of ICA=ICC (In Character Actions equal In Character Consequences). I understand Shadowrun is more violent than other settings, so I can see why this is the case, but making them more powerful rather than immune might help. Faster spawn rates, perhaps. Anyway, as I said, it's just a pet peeve. Pet peeves don't always appeal to ideal logic.
I can tell you that, in SR, the chances a random player will try to blow away (or succeed in killing in some way) a vital NPC are almost 100%. It's a very violent setting and it's got a fair number of fans who qualify as goons. Just by reading I can tell that the world is designed for quite a few people; much in the same way MMOs have vendors who start at max level so newbies in the newbie areas couldn't just gank them.
If they've made allowances for other NPCs to die as a point of story development, it would be alright wouldn't it? To me it even makes roleplaying sense: if you're in a slum that sees new people everyday, some of them you can trust and many of them you can't....wouldn't you put some bad ass retired mercenary in charge of running your guns 'n ammo shop? :P
For an RPI player, I can see invincible NPCs as problematic. As a GAMER though, I don't see many other ways around the situation. In some games I know it's basically been a running joke that the best way to level up is to slay the shopkeepers.
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Rabek Jaris, I understand what you're saying completely - and you bring up some very good points.
I can see us feasibly being able to ramp up threat and stat levels for some mobs, and take away their nokill flag. There's a few whose threat level or stats may dictate other functions (J's for example) that likely wouldn't see such treatments, but many that could.
Also a great idea on a typo contest. I'm going to chew on that.
You said you build for other muds, and if you're so inclined I'd strongly encourage you to become familiar enough with the game to apply as a builder here too. That kind of attention to detail is exactly what we need.
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Don't be a human
stats capped at 9
That contradicts what the help files say. I can't quote you which exact help text it was, but when I made a character it said that stats were capped at double their starting cap, then modified by racials. So, help says that 12 is the cap for humans. The help also claims that humans constitute the majority of the population. Basically, character creation pretty much encourages us to do exactly what you're advising us not to.
Having this kind of major game-crippling affect attached to an unchangeable decision before a player could possibly know any better...it's an awful way to do things. Especially when your help files are encouraging people to cripple themselves. And reading about this just prompts to me wonder how many other major problems like this exist that might require me to play for months before I realize that oops, I totally crippled myself.
This probably isn't the best way to encourage players to want to invest time in the game.
Don't bother with taking the laser or launch weapon skills
at chargen, you probably won't ever come across them
So why does the skill exist if players will probably never actually find an item that requires it? I mean, personally I didn't even consider taking it...but it seems like your model is to throw dozens of choices at the player, but there's only one or two "correct" choices. Why? What's the goal? To make people play for months and then start over to fix all their mistakes?
unimportant skills..
electronics (currently only used to hotwire vehicles
Totally counterintuitive. Electronics skill was so useful in the pen & paper version that it never even occurred to me to not take it. Look at the help entry for it. It describes electronics skill as governing the use of "just about everything in common use." Your help files, previous experience with shadowrun P&P, plus common sense all agree that this skill should be important, but you're telling me you didn't bother to implement it any any useful way?
And as to hotwiring vehicles, I saw a 33 skillcheck required to hotwire a beat up old van. 33? Seriously? What design philosophy is at work here? What was the intended goal? To allow people to spend months grinding a skill to have a chance to maybe do something that's totally unnecesary?
vehicle skills
So, you're flat out saying that a quarter of all the skills in the list are useless? And if you include B&R skills, then what...half? Why are they there? Why differentiate four different kind of boats when even car skills are a waste of time? And if vehicle skills are useless, we can probably add gunnery to the useless list, since it seems to be for guns mounted on vehicles.
Basically looks to me like out of the couple dozen skills you have to choose from the only significant skill selection anybody needs to make is: "choose which type of weapon you want to use."
Like I said in my last post, it totally looks like you just copied the lists from the source material and never actually bothered to check to see if anything on those lists had any relationship with the game you were making.
if it were me, I'd set the character up in chargen as
a street sam with a datajack and 6 computers skill.
Sounds like your advice is pretty much the only valid option if you want to have a character with skills that actually do anything. Which begs the question why character creation is so lengthy and complicated when apparently there are only about two meaningful choices to make.
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Karock, I don't mean to be harsh...but nothing you're saying here encourages me to want to have anything to do with Deckeon. Basically you're telling me that the game is just as poorly made as it appears to be.
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That contradicts what the help files say. I can't quote you which exact help text it was, but when I made a character it said that stats were capped at double their starting cap, then modified by racials. So, help says that 12 is the cap for humans. The help also claims that humans constitute the majority of the population. Basically, character creation pretty much encourages us to do exactly what you're advising us not to.
Not sure where you saw that, please let me know if it's in a help file somewhere and I'll get it changed because that's flat wrong. Racial maximums are generally (6+bonus)*1.5 rounded up (so humans with starting max of 6 and no bonus end up with 9 racial max, a troll has a +5 body bonus so it's 6+5=11*1.5 = 16.5 = 17 racial max). You can look at the help racial-max to get all that info without having to calculate it yourself though.
Having this kind of major game-crippling affect attached to an unchangeable decision before a player could possibly know any better...it's an awful way to do things. Especially when your help files are encouraging people to cripple themselves. And reading about this just prompts to me wonder how many other major problems like this exist that might require me to play for months before I realize that oops, I totally crippled myself.
Race and magical ability are the only two things that can never be changed. Many of the veteran players who went human end up wishing they'd chosen differently, which is why I mentioned it. If you've got your heart set on being human then nobody will stop you.
So why does the skill exist if players will probably never actually find an item that requires it? I mean, personally I didn't even consider taking it...but it seems like your model is to throw dozens of choices at the player, but there's only one or two "correct" choices. Why? What's the goal? To make people play for months and then start over to fix all their mistakes?
Nothing prevents you from picking up new skills later, in fact it is quite encouraged. Many of the skills I listed as unimportant are used for various things but aren't important right away for new chars. Some of the skills are definitely underutilized (particularly electronics) which will hopefully be remedied by the builders and coders soon, but for now I just figured I'd list out what makes the biggest impact for new characters.
Totally counterintuitive. Electronics skill was so useful in the pen & paper version that it never even occurred to me to not take it. Look at the help entry for it. It describes electronics skill as governing the use of "just about everything in common use." Your help files, previous experience with shadowrun P&P, plus common sense all agree that this skill should be important, but you're telling me you didn't bother to implement it any any useful way?
Yeah, I can't disagree. I've only been building for a couple months but it always boggled my mind that it never got used for more stuff, my P&P chars always had electronics and found it very useful.
As for the majority of skills being 'useless' (your word, not mine), most of them are implemented, can be used, function as they do in P&P, but just aren't really necessary for a new character. Obviously not everybody is going to need a vehicle skill, or every build/repair skill, etc. But they do come into play periodically and add flavor to the game. How often does a P&P character need to know how to drive a vectored thrust aircraft? Probably never unless the GM is running a campaign with one in it. It's the same deal here. GMs set up runs periodically and knowing one of the lesser used skills can save your team's bacon. I just swept them under the rug because being a new character is a lot easier when you have the skills that offer the best bang for the buck.
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I haven't played much shadowrun, mostly on the genesis though I recall making a character at a camp once. Wasn't there catchall skills for firearms, driving, and repair? Not as effective as the specific skill, but made raising the skills under them slightly easier and made it less restrictive for what to start with?
I do agree about Chargen though. The number of choices are MASSIVE, and unless you know what you're doing, its hard to figure out. For instance, I'm rolling up a mage, due to stupidity regarding contracts and exploring. Looking through the list, several spells have no help file. Identify, Regenerate, Death Touch, those three have no description at all, while Poison and Disease have descriptions, but they don't help at all since there is no way to know what the effects of the various poisons or diseases are. Likewise, Physical Barrier. It has a decent description, but says nothing about objects going out. Can the player shoot through it? Cast spells? Only certain spells? Sure, you can take it and test it, but as has been said, its a waste of points.
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Some help files aren't adequately multi-named. Of the ones you were looking for are under;
help physical-barrier
help deathtouch
Good reminders on the lack of help files for identify though, had regenerate on the list already.
Physical-barrier only stops physical attacks coming in, not going out.
Good questions all around, if nothing else it's helping us identify common new player questions.
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Bump.
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How does one go about buying LTGs?
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What are LTGs?
And how do I fix my Deck?
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LTGs are like IP addresses or domain names of the internet today. Basically addresses for matrix systems that you need to know in order to connect (or break into) the system. They can be bought from players, found by finding a telecom in the zone you're trying to connect to (so a telecom in, say, the finchi building will put you in the finchi system which you can then analyze from within to learn the address for yourself), or by various other means.
If your deck has suffered MPCP damage you can repair it by taking it to a techwiz npc (the same guys that sell utils). It tends to be very expensive, as the MPCP chip is the main guts of the deck in the first place. This is analogous to burning out a CPU or motherboard on a modern computer.
Fortunately your deck rarely suffers such damage, chances are you're just talking about the condition monitor value, which is the 'health' of your matrix icon (sort of your virtual self). This is out of a max of 10 just like your health and stun bars. To heal this without jacking out you can use the medic-utility, otherwise it will automatically refresh to 10 whenever you log out and jack back in.
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Ah, you can analyze them for the LTGs, didn't know that. So good, can get my own LTGs.
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I began to play yesterday.
The community seems little but bery noob friendly, even for noob question (first MUD ever).
Nice one ^^
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It is the nicest Shadowrun MUD I have found to date, that is certain. Would love it if someone made an offline street map for navigation, as I find the ingame one to be nearly useless.
Also, if anyone has Terminlogy questions, a good fast(faster than looking up the manuals and better than the in-mud help) resource is http://gaming.thecasavants.com/SRIII/srterms.htm
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Could someone who played both this and Hatemoo compare the worlds for me?
My main motivation in such games is usually exploration and the other Shadowrun MUD I tried seemed to have forgotten to make an interesting world to explore (Empty streets and boring shops.)
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compare the worlds
Deckeon is far kinder and gentler: No rape/orphan slaughter/etc. There's more RP enforcement and you get xp for talking to people. Game mechanics are generally more complicated. I didn't play either long enough to get a good sense of late game grindiness, but in terms of early character development, Deckeon is much slower to see any initial skillgain: you might have to play for days before getting a single useful skill increase. Deckeon's community is in general much friendlier. The flavor texts are more descriptive. Deckeon appears to be more quest driven.
My main motivation in such games is usually exploration and the other
Shadowrun MUD I tried seemed to have forgotten to make an interesting
world to explore (Empty streets and boring shops.
I suppose it depends on what you find interesting. Deckeon felt bigger to me. But a lot of the "bigness" is made up of fairly empty streets. Deckeon's location descriptions are, in my opinion, far more descriptive, but the contents of those descriptions are often comparitively dull. But that's because it's not trying to appeal to base emotions. In the orphan house you can find blood and vomit and dismembered bodies, and watch as people kill one another and rape their corpses. I never saw anything like that in Deckeon, but Deckeon's scenery descriptions are generally more detailed.
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while the grammar in Deckeon is lacking, the descriptions are often very engaging and helpful in visualizing. The conversations with NPC are not bad for a MUD.
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Could someone who played both this and Hatemoo compare the worlds for me?
My main motivation in such games is usually exploration and the other Shadowrun MUD I tried seemed to have forgotten to make an interesting world to explore (Empty streets and boring shops.)
Deckeon is MUCH deeper then HellMOO, but it is also a lot trickier to get into. Combat is nastier, there are fewer things automated, and in general the help files are lacking. That said, the community is amazing.
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One final difference in Deckeon's favor: No restrictions on item usage.
If you find a good shotgun, you can use it. No referencing your "Shotgun Skill" in order to see if you'll get any experience from it, you just use it.
For deckers, this is significant.
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A new week, a new bump.
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yeah, we had a fun GM run sunday evening with at least one player from these forums. I was helping behind the scenes trying to get the right mobs loaded up at the right times and the runners pretty effectively mowed them all down hehe. Think I managed to connect a few times with some pistol shots, but couldn't take anyone out :p Will have to try harder next time :D
Hopefully have some fun new things built this week to ease some of the learning curve with various parts of the world... stay tuned :)
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*Raises hand*
I was in the Sunday evening run. We got lots of nuyen (money in the game, one nuyen = one dollar).
It was hard to keep my shotgun going, they just kept comming and comming. But it was fun.
And I can attest to their willingness to help new players, as I am possibly the most annoying newbie ever. :P
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I checked it out today for
a few yow almost 9 hours - it did suck me in. It was pretty cool, if a bit frustrating trying things and finding places. I blew up my sucky starting deck and died twice, once to getting run over by a subway train heh. Now I have to decide whether to start a different character to take advantage of what I learned would help early on and what seems useless, or just to try a different character type...
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I've only used one character. After accidentally walking into customs several times, I lost all my leftover starting cash (and it was a lot), along with my SMART shotgun.
Today, I spent the entire time scrapping enough to restore my deck to the point I started at, due to MPCP damage.
But between generous players (and they do exist) and Sunday's run, I'm happy with my character.
Although, if you're going to start over, you might try a magic user. You'll get to see a whole other world. And it's easier to restart on day one than later.
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This sounds like fun, I haven't played MUDs yet, but I can learn my way around both roguelikes and BYOND games, this is basicly the middle ground (with
some a lot of text adventure thrown in), right?
Love cyberpunk, even if I am a PnP-RPG-deprived individual
So, is there some kind of... organization... Bay12? What kind of characters does it need? I remember hearing about Radio Channel 1212 being B12 operated...
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I'll be back in as soon as Deus stops eating my time.
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So, is there some kind of... organization... Bay12? What kind of characters does it need? I remember hearing about Radio Channel 1212 being B12 operated...
We're not really that organized yet. Just pick a character you like. And give me all your money. :P
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I got the recommended client -- any plugins that work with Deckeon? A UI of some sort would probably help not having to...
Actually, this client has a lot of scripting; is there a simple way to brute force "look/examine/whatever" on everything in view and output the text to another window?
EDIT: and what client settings should I use?
EDIT2: Questions, questions. It asks for a name in the beginning. Is this just a connecting username or a character name? Is there a name generator?
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Re the name: Yeah that's gonna be the name that shows in the "who" list, and your character's runner name/callsign.
For names, I sometimes use http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=dwarfnamer (go up and there's a few others besides dwarves), this page links to a few http://gmtristan.com/generate-a-cool-name-for-your-mmo-character/
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Or you could just use your B12 forum name. :P
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Numbers in a character name? Never heard of that one outside stuff I've read about Paranoia --and those follow a formula, even if most are puns-- but in cyberpunk, who knows.
Which should I do? Just getting a second opinion before I make a bad first impression.
Now to look at those generators and find something pronounceable... ...and memorable...
Ha, this much time and I'm still on the welcome screen!
EDIT: Hahaha, OK, over-the-top-fantasy generator is out most soundly.
EDIT2: Ohhhkaaayy... "Evil Names" gives output like ominous-sounding DF names, fully translated. Nope!
EDIT3: Vampire Names on "Modern" does, as the maker said, make some promising "genericly menacing" names...
EDIT4: ...except when it doesn't. "Homer Strangelove" indeed!
EDIT5: "Evil Sounding" (Makaroving everything "evil" in Tolkien?) makes some shady-sounding gibberish that sounds like it might mean something terrible in another language...
EDIT6: "Kaiju Name Generator" is for Japanese movie monsters... Might work considering the setting's street speech being like someone who vacationed too long in Tokyo and then came back to whatever big American city they came from...
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You know, I'm gonna stop editing that one.
Anyone have some examples? A list of all known NPC names or something? I don't know what I'm shooting for.
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You could use Matz? Or Matz Five?
Or...Darkdeath Evilman.
...although my character philosophy vears more towards Unlosing Ranger.
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Have you been playing with the "over-the-top-fantasy-name" Generator? :) "Darkdeath Evilman"?
Matz it is, I guess, if no-one objects. Now to look at the character generator... :-\
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Hmm... are Drone Riggers implemented? Always wanted my own robot army...
EDIT: Then again, if building a better motorbike doesn't work well, I guess deathbots are too much to ask for.
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nah there's a lot of issues with riggers currently. like it technically probably *works* (with GM assistance) but it's hard to do anything useful with it. more of a toy. it's on my list of stuff to try to build into usefulness but there's a lot of stuff that's more important on the to-do list ahead of it.
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Thanks for the warning.
Hmm... Whats with the website tagline under the title? A play on the "sinister" environment?
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I don't see why numbers would be so bad - 50-Cent, Johnny-5, Number 6, 007, etc.
Just to repeat the warning I read up above - riggers don't seem to be fully supported and it looks like they require a lot of manual work by the GMs. I was kind of tempted too but seeing that I figured I could stuff in a VCR anytime later. You can implant a VCR at chargen or in cyber shops and I have run across remote control stuff, not seen a place to buy drones yet but I've only scrateched the surface...
Heh ninja'd ;D
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<gulp>
I went for a custom character (I just have to design everything in detail when I play a game!) ...now I need the guy's real name...
...And I still don't have any idea what people in Shadowrun name their kids.
Any way to keep it from disconnecting me when I idle for a while asking questions?
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Rolling up a smart, durable, awkward dwarf for the more... cerebral stuff but also being able to pull a trigger before he dies in combat.
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the whole 'everyone is left handed' thing I believe is because if you equip a weapon or hold something it puts it in your left hand by default, and then if you equip two weapons the right hand is generally considered the 'offhand'. something like that anyway.
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One thing I redid my character for was a way to open locks - it was frustrating as heck being stopped by all the locked doors. So I suggest either huge strength, magical boomy spells, lock picking skill, or a possibly a gun that can blow it open (I didn't have much luck with a rifle which is supposed to be strength 9 or 10, but I also didn't have a smartlinked one which is making a HUGE difference in combat)...
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I would assume a shotgun would be better for breaching than a rifle... do "master key" shotshells exist in the future?
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while in the military I used slugs to breach doors, since they wouldn't ricochet like buckshot. A lot of soldiers have pellets in their shins/knees from improper attempts.
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I would assume a shotgun would be better for breaching than a rifle... do "master key" shotshells exist in the future?
The rulebook has a pistol-like weapon, but I haven't seen it in-game.
Shotguns work well enough on wooden and glass doors, but don't work on Metal ones.
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I'm sorry but I'm a little lost on how I'm supposed to use triggers with MUSHClient to send all OOC and tells to the notepad for this game. I read the post that mentions how to do this but I don't understand. How am I supposed to do this?
Also I am interested in trying out Deckeon but I have never roleplayed in a Shadowrun game before. My only experience with this franchise would be the SNES and Genesis games as well as my reading of a 4E core rulebook that I no longer have in my possession. Is there a place where I could reference the setting and how to roleplay in said setting?
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Ha I just did this and I knew nothing about MUSHclient
Go to Triggers-Add
Put the following in the Trigger box: * oocs *
Put this in the Send box: %0
Pick Notepad(Append)
BAM click OK you're done
edit: Do the same with the other trigger( * tells you *)
Then when it's running it will open a Triggers: window with all that output copied there
(THere *might* be one step to enable triggers that I don't remember - holler if the above doesn't work)
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Also remember to tile/cascade the window(s) within MUSHclient itself, as the notepad it automatically creates and pops will appear behind your game window. You'll need to stretch the client window to be large enough to allow room for both game window and notepad window to be visible.
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Also, if anyone has Terminlogy questions, a good fast(faster than looking up the manuals and better than the in-mud help) resource is http://gaming.thecasavants.com/SRIII/srterms.htm
That link is great for learning street slang, but don't worry much about it.
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Thank you very much for the help. I was considering playing Deckeon earlier seeing as a friend of mine from another game is interested in playing (though as Lone Star), and that I've been wanting to play a game other than Decker and the Shadowrun games for the Sega Genesis and the SNES that has decking. I always managed to play a decker in those games even if it was kind of hard to get started.
-edit- I've run into a problem during character creation. I've tried everything but I cannot read any of the help files on the starting builds. In particular I'm trying to read the help files on Tech-Wiz and Combat Decker. What am I supposed to do in order to read these files in order to decide which one I should pick?
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Type: help tech-wiz
and
help combat-decker
All help files link to single words, so the hypens are important.
Also, one idea to try is buying your deck in-game instead of during character creation.
While the deck available in character creation are cheaper, there are better once in-game.
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Don't pick a prebuilt build. They all suck.
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Yeah I couldn't find that either or it wasn't really descriptive - I just picked some of the archtypes, created that character, and looked at their skills, stats, spells and equipment. Then I used the DELETE command to delete the characters. Then I built a custom character anyway, heh. The advice given above was pretty good (stats 1st, skills 2nd, etc)
Wow ninja'd - twice even...
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Actually, after reading what LordBucket had said about this game, I don't know if I even want to finish with character creation. I couldn't find a single help file on any single archetype and I don't know the game well enough to create a custom character. Sorry, I'm out.
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Well, the community is very nice, and very willing to help you. Just type "ooc <question>" to ask a question, it works during character creation.
I should also point out that the archtype descriptions really aren't very helpful. For instance, "Combat Decker" is exactly what you would expect: Somebody that can use a deck, and that can fight. The archtype is a paragraph that says basically that.
You can also just ask here. I'd be more than happy to give you my two cents, for what it's worth.
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Actually, after reading what LordBucket had said about this game, I don't know if I even want to finish with character creation. I couldn't find a single help file on any single archetype and I don't know the game well enough to create a custom character. Sorry, I'm out.
Take a stab in the dark. Character creation gets quicker and easier the more you do it. Worst case scenario you delete, or go log another alt and try again learning from any mistakes. And please, ask in OOC if you're stuck or have questions, again even if that means re-rolling again once you've asked the question and botched your first character.
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Hopefully have some fun new things built this week to ease some of the learning curve with various parts of the world... stay tuned :)
Well the thing I've been working on is finally live :) After the newbie run you will be guided to an information broker that will be able to provide a lot of information about the world that would otherwise have to be found through trial and error, as well as some basic gear that is hard to find for new players (like lock picks).
Took a while since I ended up having to write about 50 KB of text to describe all the areas, hints on where to find gear, etc. :D Enjoy.
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Does hotwiring even works? I made a mistake of raising electronics skill(The game oes a good job of not telling you half the bloody skills have no in-game application.)
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Definitely, but the game's method of rolling dice makes high target numbers difficult regardless of number of dice.
Type [Vehicle Help] to learn about vehicle commands.
Yeah, my character also has electronics. In one run, I used it to steal a car for the team to use for the transport of a scientist we were going to kidnap.
Since I could do that, I consider my purchase of the electronics skill worthwhile.
To hotwire a vehicle, type "hotwire" while on/in the vehicle. And make sure you at least have a basic medical plan, because it is possible to die from electrocution.
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Oh, sure. I have 6 in electronics and 6 in INT, I've tried hotwiring for like 10 minutes, but that never worked even on the simpliest cars. The only time I was ever electrocuted was me trying to jack a LoneStar cruiser.
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You gained a point of karma for Grinding Johnsons.
Oh my.
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Oh, sure. I have 6 in electronics and 6 in INT, I've tried hotwiring for like 10 minutes, but that never worked even on the simpliest cars. The only time I was ever electrocuted was me trying to jack a LoneStar cruiser.
It's all about dice rolls. You've got to keep trying with the same car until you succeed.
[====Dice Roll Tutorial====]
In Deckeon, your skills checks are determined by dice roll. Having more than one point in a skill does NOT increase the result directly, instead it allows you to roll more dice.
Your success is determined by comparing your highest dice ONLY versus the difficulty number.
Whenever a dice roll is six, the dice is rerolled, with the result being the new number plus six. If you roll another six, roll again.
So really, having more points in a skill only reduces the number of times you need to try. While useful for skills with long timers, such as medical, having more than 2 or 3 skill in electronics is kinda wasted.
[====End Dice Roll Tutorial====]
Combat is different, I really don't understand combat.
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Was really excited to try this out, but I only get Connection Time Outs when I try to connect via telnet. Is the server having issues at the moment?
EDIT: It's working now. Pretty interesting, nobody on in OOC or anything though that I can tell :(
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Anyone know how I can activate my cyberware arm-blades? Got them installed and everything, but I don't know how to pull a wolverine with em.
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I seem to remember a command for it, but since I never had them I don't remember specifically - do a COMMANDS and look one by one for something likely I guess :(
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Soo I was going through the archives of other games and came across this, is it still alive at all ? It looks really interesting and I love the shadowrun world
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It IS still alive and healthy. I don't get to spend much time with it these days but I recommend it. Use MUSHclient to connect to telnet://deckeon.mine.nu:2065
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Cool thanks :) I have started playing and downloaded mushclient. I'm cure elfs buying a cyber deck now, is there anyway to get a map for where I am or anything ?
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It's been a long time since I played, but don't you start with maps in your inventory? Or they're in the help system - there's about 4 maps covering the city...
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Hmm ok, are there any graphics for the game detailing where you are ? Like on the first page. found out it was vmap command.
Also I have something in my left hand how do I put it back in my inventory ?
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Wow, mud is still running? Played for years a while back. ;p Is everyone still just hanging around in the shadowclub chatting it up?
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I know there's commands to specifically wield/unequip for each hand, look in the command list for something starting (or maybe ending) with l and r...
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Wow, mud is still running? Played for years a while back. ;p Is everyone still just hanging around in the shadowclub chatting it up?
There is a lot of that. It's actually one of the best MUSH for roleplaying in a balanced way. Good times.