Davairus Implementor
Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Posts: 10351 Location: 0x0000
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Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:13 pm Post subject: A newbie's AR quick intro |
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I threw this together for newbs quickly to run through things you need to know about the game. This is aimed at people who either, never played muds before, or have played muds before but not this one, and are wondering what to expect and what to do.
What's this place about then?
Two things.
1) This place is going to remain 100% completely free, extreme to the point where, we won't even *accept* donations from you if you offered. We won't ask.
2) This place has enforced rp, but retains a firm pk-focus, and our mission statement is "brains over brawn". The emphasis is making decisions on battle should ultimately be how to survive and/or defeat your opponents.
The roleplaying/playerkilling relationship
We have:
* people who play just to do ranking/quests/training, doing little of either beyond their ranking interactions
* people who exist for just roleplaying, and don't involve themselves in pk'ing at all, unless a pk pays them a visit
* people who exist for simple pk, and scrape by doing the bare minimum of roleplay we allow
* people who make elaborate rp's and can pk pretty well when called for (but rarely as well as the devout)
In other words.. explorers, socialisers, killers, and achievers, the whole spectrum.
We expect you to have a reasonable name and a description by level 15, other than that, just don't talk OOC, and the Immortals are not going to be bothering you.
The learning curve
Well, steep is putting it mildly. You'll get out of mudschool and be able to follow an adventurer for figuring out your way around a bit. But to become a player on the pk scene? Give it a year or something. Six months and you will competent at surviving a pk, and probably good enough to start trying to pk yourself. See the blurb on TMS, "experience the whirlwind?". That isn't a joke. If you have no prior experience at playerkilling you're going to feel like a butterfly caught up in a hurricane here. You'll find plenty people in the same boat. The biggest hurdle is realising the need to learn the routes of the realms, and getting that done takes a while.
There are classes which make the opponent's fleeing a little more difficult, those would be the more newbie friendly ones. (Anything with dirt kick pretty much). This is how our world roughly breaks down as far as its playerkilling aspect goes:
Area knowledge
The game is 10,000 rooms which is about half the size of most the big muds. We're not simply doing this out of a notion of quality over quantity, as our remaining stock areas will still testify. Rather the world size is because we dont want it to take 30+ mins to find someone. We prefer large detailed areas over small foxhole-like zones, so that tracking someone can involve running after them through several areas, even the mighty potion of recall has a twist to the escape... teleport will insta-full loot you if you hit something nasty with it that kills you.
Preps: Good potions aren't too hard to find, all the decent ones are around Seringale. Detects, cure blinds, and sanctuary potions. There are some curing items, and a couple limited items, but nothing adding uber-spell affects like haste, frenzy, etc. Its basically something like, quaff the sanc potion, and the other guy quaffs his sanc potion, and you duke it out using the balanced skills. Not something like, spend 3-5 hours gathering, then quaff 5-6 different potions before you can enjoy a balanced fight with someone. (sanc to lower the damage, haste to nullify the affect of sanc, enlarge to raise the size, etc) You will need to find the purple potions. You may need fly scrolls depending on your class.
Limited items:
1) Armors - The equipment balance is setup so that a rare is qualitatively (at most) twice as helpful as a non-rare of the same rank. When you get into the high ranks (40+), almost all the items are high level enough to have a good base to begin with, so they'll likely be rares.
2) Weapons - Rare weapons are usually set up 50% better than their non-rare counterparts.
We have made a conscientious effort to prevent the gap between rares and non-rares from getting too big. There's a difference between reaping the benefits of experience, and using esoteric knowledge to rape newbies. You will find if we err, its on the side of caution 99% of the time. The equipment is balanced.
Characters
Gold: Lots of things exist to make gold worth collecting - gambling, random equipment, useful potions, etc. Enough that nobody ever has any gold. Storing some away to be able to buy a guild outfit with it is a good idea.
Cabal skills: Most cabal skills are either pretty weak or just have specific uses. For example a Justice can call a (i.e. one) special guard, and use it to attack criminals. Every cabal has a similar flag that identifies the cabal's enemy - wanted for Justice, anathema for Knight, contracted for Legion. Decent skills are provided to hamper people who have acquired those flags somehow. Not the kind that freeze people or drop them to half health in one go or something, but things like, giving their location, transferring them to a dungeon for a one on one deathmatch. The bottom line here is, the skills impact gameplay for sure, but you'd need the flag first, otherwise there's definitely not much a cabal mortal has over an unaffiliated one. Cabals aren't a necessity for notorierty in high levels.
Class skills: This is where the lethality is, aside from large equipment/prep mismatches (e.g. rares vs naked guy, or sanced vs unsanced). Skills (the abilities you learn by levelling) range from the simple to the complex, and it depends not only on what class you are using, but what race you picked to go with it. Stats, varying by race, affect what you're best at.
Example:
* Dirt kick (numerous classes). Lags low-dex people if they flee with the affect. Stat DEX. Elves and halflings fit the bill for this skill here.
* Barrage (warrior and berserkers). Nullifies the opponent's shield block, and makes his arm ache to prevent him going to two-handed dual wielding instead. Think that's nasty? Good luck applying it. To barrage, you need to be dual wielding yourself. There are three other skills, to complement shield block/two-handed/dual wield. The better player will get the upper hand, plain and simple. That's going to make up for significant equipment disparaties, but not the preps.
* Dispel magic (mages). Strips the opponent of all spells affecting him. This is something that can be countered by wearing save vs mental, so there's a more subtle affect of the target lowering his damroll to protect him from this deadly spell, which benefits the mage as well. There's no such thing as 100% protection from dispel magic, and if you're crazy enough to try to take a mage out without the saves with a class dependent on preps for sanctuary, you'll be hosed. There are other spells to attack different categories of save vs spell, so you'll need to cover that.
So you can see the emphasis on the PK here is using skills/spells and making good decisions in battle to conquer your enemies - brains over brawn. Things like equipment/preps sit in the background add an extra dimension to the gameplay - but the abilities are at the forefront. It'll take practice to remain good at it, even after you've got the mechanics down.
To see what skills all the classes get, browse the webpage, they're all there and the pages are scripted to give you popups for the respective helpfiles. There is a LOT of detail here, it is strongly recommended that you rely on these websites to learn what everyone's got.
Quick start
This is an explanation of a few vital things that go into a character. Its not going to be everything.
* practices
You'll gain 2-3 practices each rank (wis dependent). Your skills will take 1-4 practices to get up to 75% (int dependent). Practice EVERYTHING. It all has a use of some kind. Read the helpfile for the common usage, try the ability out, use your brain to think up any other ways to use that skill/spell.
* trains
1 train every 5 levels, 3 to start. A lot of options are available to use your trains up on - you can put them into stats, or hp mana moves. If you train stats at level 1, you get 2 stat points for your train, so that's very nice. As you might expect, you should max out your stats if you want a hard hitting character, or sink things into hp if you want to be weaker but healthier (ultimately, this means your character is more survivable). Con drops 1 point per 5 deaths - save some trains so that you can keep it max.
* levelling
Goods: Arena, goblins, troll den, drkyshyre wood
Evils: Arena, goblins, elf valley, emerald
* some must-read helpfiles
alias, appraise, color, combat style, magic, map, multi, newbie, note, outfit, reboot, rules, tick, weapon type
Getting advice
Post on the forum, right here. Someone will help you out. We'd prefer you to use the forum instead of going OOC with players in-game to ask the questions, especially since we can share the answers with other newbies here. If you really would rather remain private look for Immortals (level 51+) after trying to figure it out from the helpfiles.
There are logboards for AR around on the net - we don't officialy endorse them. But they're a source of information as to how all the skills and spells play out in battle. You can't really find better help from our community than going to a place like that, posting your log, and asking for pointers.
Last edited by Davairus on Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:44 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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