You gys are absolutley great. I love all the ideas and I can't wait to figure out how to implement all these ideas.

Once I get a forum setup this weekend in which we can have these ideas develop into a plan, I think things will start to move along nicely.


With races, perhaps you have to have another, more popular character go and say, do a run in their area of origin, and a reward for completing that mission is unlocking that character type.

Prison is a far far better idea than death, but death should still be an option, I mean.. you get hit in the chest with 150 rounds from a minigun, and wake up in jail? hahaha, it'd be nice, but still. Unless we make it where your stamina runs out after a while and your hauled off.

Thanks! Please Discuss more..

remember, stay low

You know, every time I read your sig Orion, I think of a gunfight involving the limbo

Creative teams are being organized while our centralization is coming into place (Orion's current project).

The groups we know we'll have:

Game World (Universe Builders)
Game Mechanics (rule writers)
Concept Art (No on has chimed in on this one, is this going to be a scarce resource?)
Tech Prototypes (This is a group that will work with the platform, probably with Orion, to make sure Realm Crafter is what we want. anyone objecting to Realm Crafter will need to go through whoever ends up in this group. Also, once we have our platform, they'll work on some prototype solutions to see what we can pull of in the engine and what we can pull off with our available talent)

as I have said before, if you want a position, apply by asking, otherwise respondents to this thread will be assigned and wheedled into groups by choice of the group leads.

I'd like to lend a hand with game mechanics and/or tech prototyping. I could do cocnept art, but we'd end up with stick figures.

Hey Jack, you keep coming back, did you want to help?

Should I PM you or would you like to just post your preferred choices for dev team?

What is the exact difference between CORPG and MMORPG? Like, defining characteristic of each

So, anyone know any SR-style artists? We only have 1 person in that department right now

So MMORPGs are just everyone all at once while CORPGs center on the idea of just offering a means to pick up a party and play a game?

I think the problem of "camping a dungeon" to get an item is easily eliminated. No hot uber items, no static spawns. No newbie zones where you kill everything in sight to get xp. The only time you would use your gun would be on your mission, even then you might not need it. Certain kinds of missions should be instanced based though (like extractions) while others can take place in popular locales.

I can agree with some of that. On a run w/o the good fortune of working for PvP, instancing could be useful. Especially if we pushed a bit of plot into the works with NPCs looking to interact in-depth with a single character in a semi-dramatic fashion. It might kill the love connection for some bloke to just come walking up and ask if you want to party with him.

We should throw out every single current MMO convention. When you get on to play Shadowrun, you are getting on with your RL friends to run as a team. Or taking solo missions. The only time random parties would form would be when a Johnson (player or NPC) put out a call for a meating at a set time and place. Then the Runners would meet eachother, have a few minutes to talk and be given a job.

If I hear |200 Karma Sam LFP, VILLERS| I will shoot myself.

Exactly, if no one us uber than they will be a helluva lot more polite.

I agree, but really as a concurrent opinion:

I think we should look at us as having no conventions like other MMOs because we are not really bound to any of them. We should shoot for originality by choosing what conventions to use in addition to our own instead of just assuming we're going to make WoW with computers in it

PS Still need concept artists

i can do character building in both 3ed and 4ed rulesets for you just tell me what NPC's and archtypes you want and i can hand generate them. Hell i might already have some made. I can also do conversions for the NPC's from all the sourcebooks and adventures, because i have all the old ones in one way or another

One of the thing I like the most about Shadowrun is the way the game is played...

A run usually have those phases:

- The Meeting : You meet your Mr. Johnson, you negotiate, set things straight

- Legwork : You invest some time and money with your contacts, matrix and other ways to collect informations both about your boss and about the target of the run. You aquire floor plans, you conduct astral investigations... That's my favorite part about Shadowrun

- The Run : You act. The fast paced part of a game.

- Wrap-up : You see the conclusion of your actions, what will it change to the world? Will it influence some corporate moves against another corporation? Do you gain reputation?

- Upkeep : You try to pay your expenses and try to keep SOTA, some months are really hard... sometime it's easier. If you neglect your contacts, you may lose their friendship.

...

Then I wonder, beside the Meeting and Run part, Will it be possible to do the other phases?

For sure, when completing a quest, you can do a small wrapup of what happens afterwise... but how does it influence the game world on a large scale?

My knowledge of other MMORPG is somewhat limited... How do other games handle this?

They don't. There will be no quests. Remember that character advancement will not be the focus of the game.

Hey everyone. I know I might be a little late in the game (I just read the whole topic) but I just wanted to say you've got an awesome project going. I don't know what I could do to help, but I'd be glad to.

Has it already been determined that there will be no character advancement? If so, please count me out.

One of the joys I get from playing a game is watching my character get better at the things he does, and learn how to do new things. I want to learn to shoot better, talk people into things easier, and get new and cooler toys. It doesn't have to be vast amounts of improvement, but the idea that a veteran of the shadows is only mildly more competent than a newbie doesn't fit my idea of how the shadowrun world (or even this one) works.

No character advancement totally goes against any of the fun.
How can you have harder runs without being stronger?

Longer runs too.

In SR as in life, as you do things more, the better you are at them.
As well be in this

No single opinion submitted in this forum represents a mandate upon which the game will be built. Everyone is encouraged to express their views, but they are only views (I don't think anyone is under illusions).

I would actually say that the whole discussion of character advancement has come to a simmer around whether or not it is the focus of the game. I must remind everyone that one thing rather decided is against LEVELING not against ADVANCEMENT. We want a skill-centric game (such as SR) instead of a level-centric game (such as D&D). I guess I can take back what I said about only views on this, it is pretty much the only foundation for imminent game system. First thing for the mechanics team will be creating a skill system people can spend hours manipulating and exploring through the game. That will be a real challenge

(Cringes as he says this) maybe some of you should look at D&D online in how they do their character advancement and quests. maybe mix something from that with a rippoff of GTA3 i'm a decent concept guy, the doing is where i fall through.

I really wish we could translate the game mechanics 1:1, but that'd be very hard to do without licensing bliggity blah. I would just like to make it as absolutley close as possible.

So you'd be able to take a run from P&P, and go play it in this game, and at the least feel no loss of fun, and hopefully a great deal of extra adventure

Then the focus will be on skill advancement, and you will have EQ in the future. You should have all the skills that SR has, plus the extras it it needs, but like SR the skills ou start the game with are the ones you pretty much have for the life of the character. Your starting load out will be vital. Advancement cannot be the reason for playing the game, other wise your just making Wow.

Advancement isn't a reason to make a game, it's a tool within that game to satisfy the primary reason: creating something enjoyable. I'd like a system very close to Shadowrun's own: doing stuff nets you experience points (we can't really call it Karma, but the two are practically identical). You then spend those experience points to increase attributes, skills, get new spells, etc. an increasing price like SR's should also be used, although the exact multipliers might need some tweaking just to skirt the rim of legality. Example:

Speaking of legality, do we have anyone here with law experience? It'd be great to be able to skate the line as close as we can, but without someone qualified enough to show us where that line is we'll need to stay as far away from it as we can and still have a manapunk game based on running the shadows.

Intellectual Property litigation is pretty much the only way of ensuring companies such as WK make money. We're probably already crossing some line by discussing this on their own forum.

Keep in mind that we are "inspired" by shadowrun, not attempting to make a generic version.

If we name too many skills, attributes, or concepts the same or use them in the same way as SR we will be exposing ourselves far too much to ever hope to make money (which is part of what leant us to making a Manapunk game instead of SR). I would stress to prospective members of both the World and Game Mechanic design to forget SR and just focus on treatments of the idea of cyberpunk+magic.

Anyone seriously suggesting any partial ripping off of SR or any other MMO title should drop from the project, it'll just bite us in the ass later.

That almost definitely will not happen. For Fanpro/Wizkids to give any input into this game, especially things that will make it more canon, would be stepping on FASA Studios's license. I would be surprised if we ever got more than a passing opinion (i.e. "I like it" or "It sucks"). Going much deeper than that could result in legal troubles for FP and WK.

It should be pretty easy to get something incredibly close without tredding on toes. If we abandon the d6 system, rename the skills we don't drop, add skills, and geenrally avoid any and all references to SR material we should be ok. Of course, all that leaves for us to do is the flavor of SR, but that's as it should be.

BTW, if we find ~2 concept artists, we could break into teams and start development tasks as soon as this week. Everyone's asking their highly artistic friends right?

I can agree with the "NPCs are not gelatinous bags of experience" comment, especially when such a system would make Johnson double crossing really profitable (he could pay you for the mission with money and XP then you could shoot him and get money and XP).

Try to think of other resources to advance as well, such as reputation amongst entities in the game.

I might be off my rocker because it's so late, but could I bring up one issue with this death we haven't talked about? What if it was within the power of magic to bring people back from the dead? Since we're writing our own universe, why not put in something about divine magic and an afterlife system? It would be within our power as designers to even go as complex as a deity system so why have we dismissed ressurection out of hand? As anti-SR as that sounds, it's a very utlitarian answer to a very sticky issue

I had an idea about reputation. Lets call it Heat and Criminalocity. Heat is generated by doing things that are illegal. It is a temporary stat that goes down over time. Criminalocity is point based. You get points for completing missions (well). However, if your heat goes up you start losing Criminalocity points. The higher your Heat, the lower your Criminalocity.

So do a mission well, don't generate a lot of Heat, and you get a high Criminalociuty. Now you can demand a higher paycheck from the johnsons, have some street cred and generally are a good criminal.

Walk around shooting people, do missions with a high body count, Heat goes up, criminalocity goes down. Now you can't demand a lot of money, so you get the low end jobs.

Now if your Heat goes to high you get activly persued by the police etc. Anyways it was an idea I had and I wanted to get it out there.

As for the IP stuff, as long as we don't use any copywriten material we are okay. We can use all the stats, skills, etc we want. But we can't call it Shadowrun, or the bosses Johnsons, ets.

I like the direction, but I think it needs some finer granularity. "Heat" with Knight Errant would be different than "Heat" with Lone Star, etc

It's not a bad idea, I think it should track individually for each entity (all the crops, mafia, yakuza, maybe gangs, etc). Heat should also be a more general team for "pisses off in the short term" since tweaking a mobster doesn't get you in trouble because it's illegal so much that it's just a bad idea.

I would take it one step higher and say that, under such a system, a constant increase in social cred with a single organization could allow you access to missions/services not normally available. Perhaps even allow you to "join". That would allow quite a bit of freedom. For instance, if you puckered up to Ares long enough, they might hire you full-time for anti-runner security (or, given dangerous freedom) lame wage-slavery.

PS I think "reputation" or "street cred" might ring more bells than "criminalocity"

Yeah, Criminalocity was just the word I came up with to explain it.

Not to cause any uncomfortable parallels here, but this concept of heat sounds a lot like faction from World of Warcraft. Too low, and members of the group attack on sight. High enough and they give you stuff, cut you deals, that sort of thing. We would, of course, have to work on how it gets changed, since we're looking for more of a short-term effect that can decrease slowly over time (depending on the group. Some have an elephantine memory for slights against them).

Well, the "heat" mechanic and the "reputation" mechanic would probably differ in that "heat" could only go negative and "reputation" could go either way. One angle I'd like to take is that reputation is core to the advancement of characters as far as opening up "higher level" tasks and runs. It attacks the "I must pwn things to advance" idealogy we all seem to hate. It would make it so one must be judged loyal and capable enough to perform a task, as it would be in the shadows. I certainly wouldn't hire a loose cannon for my important job even if he could kill a green dragon by himself.

Just reputation (without any "heat") might be enough if its behaviour was defined to spike at certain actions then slowly settle down over time (not unlike gas prices. Sudden changes that shock people then roll back to a "comforatble" levels ultimately leading to a net change). Reputation lending to a "live" nature to the game, especially concerning consequences would be important social regulation.

Shadow, that Idea about Heat and Criminalocity, is brilliant.
It sounds like a perfect way to handle things.

Also instead of Karma, perhaps, as lame as it might sound, we could go with Luck. Or something else like that. Your Luck randomly comes into play during, a shootout, and, say a snipers shot bounces off your sunglasses or something.

But seriously, you guys all have great ideas, and I think this is starting to shape up really well.

Our own skill names, weapon names, dunno if Location could be considered. I mean Seattle is a great game setting.

I am currently setting up Noth.slyhost.be as the "official" discussion site for this. As long as I can figure out how to set all this up on a Content management system. But I don't think it'll be hard.

It's got user login, boards, and other stuff

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Edit
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Well that didn't work. I've never been all that great with designing websites.

Can anyone help me, or point me in the direction, of setting up a website in which we can have our own forums, a place to share files, user logins etc?

Thanks

I checked that site and I regretably failed the "sanity check". The instructions weren't terribly helpful, but on the other hand I didn't try too hard.

I would actually really support a luck attribute for the purposes of just giving wiggle room for how frequently bullets are hitting people. High luck people would be more likely to dodge than just purely athletic people, bladdy blah I think this also lends to the conclusion that everything I learned about RPG design can be traced back to Fallout


So, I was thinking it would be cool if our tradeskill system (hate to be so directly comparing to another MMO, but in this case) could allow for things such as contact-like occupations. I did some development on the idea in the last project. Basically, it would allow you to establish yourself as skilled in a specific area of expertise instead of a general purpose shadowrunner. Example occupations would include:

Talismonger
Street Doc
Fixer

Basically, one could achieve this through a secondary skill system (such as knowledge skills) and adjudicating a player's occupation based on their actions and their expertise.

That could lead to elven mages who are talismongers or alternatives to that such a paranormal animal experts, or deckers who can specialize in making programs or making decks. There could also possiblby be odd crosses, such as a mundane paranormal animal expert and riggers who are gunsmiths or something.

Luck as an attribute should apply to everything. So if you've got a 10 luck stat you've got +10 to all activities, etc. It should be harder to up than skills or other attributes though, because of how pervasive it is.

www.bytehost10.com looks ok. It's one of the few free webhosting sites I've found with PHP and mySQL support, which could come in handy for problem tracking later.

I have my own domain, so I made a sub-domain called

http://manapunk.shadowgames.us

I can have a good invision style forum up on it pretty quick.

Do you have MySQL and Perl support? If so, and you've got access to the server itself or can have them run a few short scripts for you, I've got a fairly decent problem report and task tracker I can dig out and we can use. Once we get to that point of course.