This week I want to talk about the Immersea Plotline and discuss a little more about how we want it go progress just in terms of process. The idea here is visibly increase how much influence players have over the storyline and the setting.

New Players Welcome

According to our data, we've had about 12 new players come into game or Discord to check us out. Let's do all we can to help make players new here feel welcomed, reach out and try to include them in stories and roleplaying. Make sure that on DM events, you try to give the new players some voice and sense of involvement -- its easy to want to dominate on a DM event, but making sure the spotlight hits a new player once in awhile too is going to be a lot healthier for the community to be honest and finding ways to just share the limelight with everyone on an event always works wonders too.

DM team is still willing to buy copies of NWN for any of your friends who want to buy it and try out City of Arabel. We're also still happy to make some cool cosmetic loot items for you if you can do some advertising for us - we're finding that Reddit and Facebook tend to be yielding the most engagement so far. But advertising is key, our player numbers are up almost 25% compared to March.

Immersea Plot

There were three pre-planned events for the storyline; the first was the Temple of the Drowned event where player were able to ask an Oracle three questions about the plot or anything else they wanted to do. That was followed by an effort to recruit Captain Ironbeard, and a third event comes this week.

But more importantly, players are able to suggest their own ideas for what they want to see happen. I can't reveal the spoilers obviously, but these ideas will influence the outcome of the storyline. The more you involve other players, and create fun events for people (even when a DM isn't involved) the more impact those activities will have.

For example, you want to help the pirates win? So maybe you go to the Wyvernwater with a team of allies to explore and look for weapons (found on quests, explorable dungeons, etc) and then your team does this until you feel you've collected 1000 prestige points worth of gear - you could then contact a DM to 'deliver' your gear to the pirates and do some diplomacy to win their support.

I think the biggest thing we want to reward as a DM team has always been players who just do things to keep players having fun with them. Make Sendings to go do adventures, host a player tournament. The more you help engage everyone else around our virtual table, the healthier City of Arabel is!

What's the end game? That's really up to the players involved and what you do, but the team is ready for anything from Immersea is destroyed and reduced to rubble to a player is announced the King of the Wyvernwater and rules over the town directly controlling its future. Its about us helping you tell the stories you want to tell. However, the ramifications of choices made on the three pre-planned events and the different player initiated events will all unfold in a grand finale event that will be announced ahead of time probably coming in the next week (timeline determined by how quick we get to all the players who wanted to try to impact it).

Following up on the New Stuff Balladeer brought up last blog.

New Classes and Upgraded PRCS

One new class is 95% done, mostly getting tested right now. Discussion on rebalancing PRCs is on-going, and will be a lengthy process, we can't even estimate on when that'll be done. We're open to your ideas!
https://forums.cityofarabel.com/topic/67610/new-base-classes-prcs/23

Magic and Rebalancing
Players expressed in the player survey last fall that they wanted a module with more sense of fantasy in terms of roleplaying, and to remain a low-magic server in terms of level range and power of items. But our power balance was all over the place, with many players wielding +50% damage weapons (+d4 damage when average weapon does d8 damage). That made balancing quests very difficult.

The DM team has worked out a new balance, and we'll slowly be introducing these items through shops and quests. This balance roll out already began last month when we moved players back to maximum HP each level, we've begun to rebalance our quests (in order of how often they're done) in terms of both the monsters and the treasures you find there. You'll notice a wider range of gear and treasure over all. That said, if something looks a little too good - ask us just in case we made a mistake. If something seems too rubbish by far - ask us too - we may have made a mistake.

Explaining all of how it'll work will be an entire blog update by itself, coming soonish as more of the changes are rolled out. Finally, on this topic, no, we don't have a firm idea on what we'll do with crafting yet. There's an ongoing discussion because we want the community involved in this. https://forums.cityofarabel.com/topic/68441/discussion-a-future-crafting-system

New Dungeons, Quests, and Explorables

I'm actively working on a new quest once the Immersea stuff is done, many of you have already seen a mysterious tower in the Stormlands; soon you'll be able to both explore it and find a quest inside.

In the last month, we've added three new quests to the Wyvernwater Isles: Stormbreaker Isle specifically. We did revisions to the Sunken Ship quest in Immersea, including a new optional area. You can find our full list of quests here. I should have all the missing Stormhorn quests back in for you to play after we wrap up all the Immersea events.

Signing Off

That's it for this blog, what would you like to see us talk about in the future? This may be an online environment, but the whole DM team wants to make sure it feels like a friendly group around the table-top who can just chat about where we want to see our game going. So feel free to approach us with anything you want to see us cover.

Hi all,

Just a quality of life note for the entire community regarding resets.

We do our best to do frequent resets however there is not a specific time period for them to be done. Often we are waiting on a module update before we ask people to log off and reset so there in a minimal interruption to gameplay. Please be patient If there has not been a reset in 48 hours please let us know, otherwise, we'll complete the reset when appropriate or time allows.

Happy Gaming!

The third part of the Stormbreaker Isle trilogy; the Ancient Temple quest given by the Ominous Cave has been tweaked based on viewing some different groups doing it.

There was a specific bug with one encounter that used a NWN hak resource instead of one of our custom resources that created an unbalanced situation. This is now resolved. The optional boss fight NPC's AB was much too high, this was lowered and some of his DR was removed to make him more manageable.

The overall loot rewards (especially consumables) was increased so players are more likely to walk out ahead.

Polar Bear Gloves had their damage reduced from d6 slashing d6 cold to do d4 slashing and d4 cold (this is still probably too powerful for monk gear; but a little more reasonable than monks doing 200% extra damage with a flurry of blows).