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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Appless week has now finished.

freedom

Ogre quest got an update; mostly minor adjustments to NPCs (let me know if anything is suddenly way off; guys should hit a little armor but also not be running around with 9 natural AC anymore and crazy high HP; so it should be a wash on balance, I wasn't trying to make it harder).

Testing a new feature for the quest that will replace the random disease triggers ( but still testing, players will automatically delete the feature when they go to take the quest - so I just want to grab someone after a reset to test it out first).

Updated Goldfeather (Haunted Ruin) quest NPCs; quest story should be more clear now, along with why these particular NPCs are attacking you despite their nature. This did alter an NPC on Tessaril's Tower quest (which will get an update later so this is all fine for now). Lots of new loot on this quest. Quest should be a bit more strategic, it'd been edited quite a bit from super dangerous immobile NPCs you were suppose to kill from a distance originally, to slow moving NPCs you were still suppose to kill from a distance) to now being a variety of NPCs that do different things for you to figure out in game how to battle. Hopefully, making this more intersting.

We are changing our guidance / approach to returning PCs

If you want to bring back a PC from an absence of over 6 months just grab any DM first so we can check for any loot, or previous affiliations, which might be unbalancing or make no sense to the current setting.

A full application isn’t required.

We would always advise rolling something new after a long break, as the setting’s political (and sometimes geographical) landscape may be vastly different from when the character was last active.

Ran the first attempt at this; players got half-way through the challenges. The dungeon remains unconquered...for now.

I have two more teams who hope to try, please firm up a time you want to make this happen with me.

If anyone else wants to put a team together to brave this dungeon, let me know!

This is to take place Saturday evening.

I have received a handful of questions to be answered on the day, but please do keep sending them in and I'll look to address them.

The Events function in our Discord channel has been set, same as before. Hopefully there's a good attendance and people get as much out of it as the first Town Hall.

Thank you.

@Strife-and-Discord said in Module Changes:

Death System Related Changes:

We have tweaked the XP penalties, lowering them from their current level. The changes are as follows:

Respawn XP Penalty reduced from 25% to 20%
Raise Dead XP Penalty(Via PC/NPC Priest or Scroll) reduced from 15% to 10%
Resurrection XP Penalty(Via NPC or Scroll) reduced from 10% to 5%

Edited the steps. Reminder that this is still advised!

Plot tickets area also a good way to communicate with the team about questions/concerns/advice for your character moving forward with various game elements/stories/plots/goals/etc.

House of Ash has a bounty hunter now
There's a bounty hunter outside the east gate
There's a bounty hunter in Redwoods

not all bounty hunters accept the same items - some are specialized to their areas

Hi all. We're conducting a top to bottom review of the items produced from the crafting system and looking for some community help. We've been making adjustments piecemeal but there remain items that just aren't "worth it". The first of the crafting streams we are diving into is https://nodebb.cityofarabel.com/category/368/crafting

If you've been using the crafting system for metal armours, we'd love to have you participate and contribute. The other crafting streams will be done along the way so if you've experience in Tailor & Leather Working or Gems etc, we hope you'll participate when we're there.

If you're interested, drop us a message in the Faction Request Channel on Discord.

Happy Gaming!