Non violent game world activity - target wheels.

Just an idea to generally test the actual combat abilities without having to go into actual combat to do so - scattered around various ruins are target wheels. These magic devices helped train soldiers when the ruins were fortifications and by their nature were very heavy or magically fixed. Now adventurers often find them and attempt their skills at the wheels. For ranged it's simply a target. For melee, it magically spins and one must hit the right spot with a weapon when it pulses at a certain moment with dim magical light!

An adventurer can learn a thing or two from these wheels, but not consistantly - perhaps they worked better in the old days, but now generally each adventurer can only use a wheel once. After that maybe in days or weeks they can use it again, perhaps after years (and since they tend to aid only those of level 1 to 2, they are probably no use after that). It's up to the DM! As best you can make them feel like they might never find another and this is a special moment!

Players can roll to hit with their weapon - if they hit and do 4 or more damage, they gain 10 XP! If they miss they can try again, but there is a 50% chance they will get no XP from it. You really want to hit on the first go. Also the devices give nothing to those who recieve help - they were made to resist cheats!

These wheels can be found in various ruins, so they become a kind of treasure to discover!

A note on XP - I'm planning for all non violent activies to grant XP. It depends - you may feel PC's have to have survived an actual combat to be worthy of getting to level 2 (if you're fine with it, no need to read this paragraph!). Ask your players if they think so to. If so, then set up a combat or three they could choose from and if they never go into any, perhaps they stay 1 XP short of level two in perpetuity! If they are okay with leveling without ever facing combat but you wish they had, atleast you now know that these are combatless level 2 characters - and so a different thing than those who survived combat to get to level 2! Possibly no one else but myself might be bothered by this - so just indulge this inclusion! :)

Non violent game world activity: Making torches

This is in rough draft form, so forgive the stream of conciousness format!

This time it's making torches, either for sale or for personal use. I'm thinking maybe you roll a DC 15 check, with the GM randomly determining if it's a INT or WIZ check to find or dig up a pool of bubbling tar.

Once you've found one the GM randomly determines if you use INT, DEX or WIZ to make it. Ie, if you're figuring out the technical details - or if you're just juggling the components into place - or if it's a matter of working with what you have into a synergous whole.

Roll a nat one and you fail and the pool has been used up (whether that's forever or a few weeks is up to the GM)

These tasks assume this is not the end of the world stuff - your character is not pushing themselves to the limit, because frankly that's a sucky way to live. So you can make two attempts at torch making a day.

Must figure out a way of fitting various tasks with each other.

Also write them all up in a set format as well.

Subscription Model Idea

I thought of this when I first head of games selling lifetime subscriptions for over a hundred.

I'm assuming they take most of the lifetime sub money and bank it, drawing on interest from it to pay for the player.

So what if you took that to the traditional subscription model?

You pay a subscription as usual per month, but part of it is taken and banked. Once you have paid for a certain amount of time, the game becomes free to you!

'Cept for expansions and stupid mini pets/the usual gouges.

The ironic thing is I think anyone reading this might start comparing that they'd be paying several hundred dollars for a game when other single player games come out at around a hundred or less. So it might not seem like good value if someone presented to you that you can buy the mmorpg lifetime by subscribing for several hundred dollars. But yeah, your already doing that with wow or whatever, anyway.

That's another post I was gunna write - With people who play wow, if you take how much they've paid in subscription then go back in time to just before they started playing, and told them they have to pay all those subs upfront in order to play, would they pay it? Like say they've been playing for two years - before they started playing, if the game asked for them to pay $360 upfront or they can't play, would they have paid it?

I bet the honest answer is no.

Peasant Play!

What I think would be neat is to have what I call peasant play in a mmorpg.

Basically you have an alt that you can set to be a peasant. It's perhaps alot like monster play in lotro, where you have a monster and playing it gives your hero character extra destiny points.

The peasants top level would be about 10 or so! Level 10 is epic! And they would have perma death (before you moan, c'mon, it's only ten levels lost and peasants can do peasanty stuff at level one, just not as good)! Also other players, when on their hero's, would get bonus points for killing mobs around peasants, so as to rescue them (peasants can fight mobs but aren't designed to - they engage special peasant resouce nodes like animal traps and crops).

The idea is that peasant play for a few minutes every so often would be attractive in terms of resources and it would give a sense, when playing, of how big and dangerous the world is.

Also there could be events where hero's might have the chance of saving many peasants lives. Yeah, granted they may fail and your peasant dies, but again peasants would be able to do their stuff at level one to a certain extent, and level ten wouldn't be hard to achieve at all.

Peasant play!