Request to implement positive village feelings

Hi there.

Well, we've all had negative village feelings, usually attained by plunging sharp pointy objects into denizens of that village.

I think it would be realistic and interesting to also have positive village feelings. There are already times I am aware of this sorta being, like Phaesteans going to Ibhir Ness. But it would be nice if every village had a few quests, and by completing those quests you'd get the village to react positively. There are some villages that are tied to a God and that God's Order, but this would allow anybody to cause that reaction, or some sort of other positive reaction.

In practical things, maybe let the person have a small discount in that village's shop (e.g. shops in New Thera, Jaru, etc.,) and also maybe lock some doors and only people that the village trusts would be let in, and that would allow some special quest that has a nicer reward yield.

Not sure about any tangible implications, but I think it would be great RP. "Your novice task for the House is to go help Jaru" or something. Also, for example, getting the Dwarves to overcome their natural distrust of strangers by helping them enough to warrant it.

Thank you for reading my idea.

Comments

  • An interesting idea. Perhaps quests that can only be done by people with such relations and a bonus to gold rewards for quests completed for the village (with a reasonable cap).
  • @Greys : aye, that's what I meant.
  • Sounds cool me :)
  • edited February 2015
    Iocun said:
    I think the idea has merit, but only if the system has some level of permanency/longevity.

    Meaning: it shouldn't be the case that you can do a few quests to get a positive feeling for village X so you can get a few shop discounts, then murder all villagers the next day to get some precious XP, then do a few quests again on day three to get on their good side once more.

    Rather, getting a village to think of you in a positive sense should require acting helpfully for several years and having an untarnished track record. Hunting villagers that think of you as a "friend" should be treated as treason and result in you being branded an enemy for good, making it very hard to get on good terms with them again.

    Basically, village feelings should be something that takes years to form and is much less flexible than it currently is. It might go more in the direction of Caer Witrin in that respect. That way, they'd be something that actually reflects on your character's personality, rather than simply being a little mechanical quirk.
    @Iocun : You're definitely right, and that's something I should have put in the OP if I had thought of it. The stuff I was thinking of was like Dwarven Nations with Dwarves, Targ with Jaru and innocents, or you and the other Mhun with Moghedu -- you wouldn't raise villagefeelings and then kill them and raise village feelings to exploit various game mechanics. But most RP relationships with denizens are not that hard-and-fast. So, yes, I definitely agree you should have to act consistently like an ally to get good village feelings.

    I do think permanent enemying by a village should be subject to some caution. If a true-newbie kills the wrong denizen and there are irrevocable conseqeuences to that, that's a big problem. I myself tried to "smile" at a girl in Inbhir Ness and accidentally entered "smite." Thank goodness she didn't die, but BOY was I having a bad day at that point -- I am Dwarven and Phaestean. The situation was RPd to resolve positively, but I am just saying, accidents like that do happen.

    I also think maybe if it's REALLY hard to form a good reputation and you get max reputation then it shouldn't rapidly decline to neutral. You can be Hated in a village and come back in like a rl week and they don't remember. But that particular is kinda details of icing on the cake without the cake having been baked yet.

    Edit: also, optionally, this would allow groups of adventurers to decide and "defend" a village. So, if you don't have something formal like the Mhun with Moghedu, a bunch of hardasses could decide to make that relationship with some village themselves via extensive RP. So, if you go killing that village's denizens, those people then show up and defend the village as allies of that village. I freely admit am not sure this particular thing would be a good idea, because it would open up a can of worms that maybe we shouldn't open up, but I thought I'd toss it out there.
  • Iocun said:
    I think the idea has merit, but only if the system has some level of permanency/longevity.
    Meaning: it shouldn't be the case that you can do a few quests to get a positive feeling for village X so you can get a few shop discounts, then murder all villagers the next day to get some precious XP, then do a few quests again on day three to get on their good side once more.
    Rather, getting a village to think of you in a positive sense should require acting helpfully for several years and having an untarnished track record. Hunting villagers that think of you as a "friend" should be treated as treason and result in you being branded an enemy for good, making it very hard to get on good terms with them again.
    Basically, village feelings should be something that takes years to form and is much less flexible than it currently is. It might go more in the direction of Caer Witrin in that respect. That way, they'd be something that actually reflects on your character's personality, rather than simply being a little mechanical quirk.
    I agree with this sentiment, but I'm not sure it would actually require the system to be all that much less flexible, provided appropriate interactions between the positive and negative aspects (such as killing the denizens immediately eliminating good feelings and making it harder to earn them back). If you accrue good feeling in a similar mechanical fashion to how you accrue bad feeling, i.e., you get a little more liked each time you do X, then working up good feeling to get an advantage then hunting there the next day is going to be something you can basically only do once, or at least that you can't repeat except on a long enough timescale that it's not worth it for mechanical effects. You might want to make good feeling harder to earn, though I suspect it would be naturally, just due to the much smaller number of things to do to earn it. Decay time for bad feelings could be adjusted as needed, as well, of course. The Caer Witrin "kill one thing and get enemied, pay a fine to be unenemied" system seems cumbersome to implement for a large number of villages, and I don't see why the existing feelings system wouldn't basically be up to the task.

    It might also be interesting to have your relations with one village affected by helping enemy villages. For example, if you just go and do all the quests for both the orcs and the dwarves in the Sirrocians (ignoring the ones that involve killing either one), neither village is going to end up looking you, because they know you're just being opportunistic, rather than really trying to help them. Maybe have it take a little longer for those to have an effect, to give time for word to get around that you're a dirty orc-lover.

    Edit: probably partially ninja'd while trying to get my phone to let me post. Alas.
  • edited February 2015
    Minor point but one I forgot to mention: make the positive reputation accrue like negative reputation. So, like you don't get "Hated" with one kill, you go through several tiers of negative reaction, so you'd go through several tiers of positive.
  • I love this idea. My only hope is it would not go to extremes that, for example, Lusternia has where gaining village reputation is something cities can do to essentially 'control' areas. That conflict became so uninteresting after a very short while. 
  • edited February 2015
    @Bluef : some of the villages already seem aligned with a particular City or God and that seems to have had no negative effect game-wide. I personally have no frame of reference beyond that, though what you're saying could well be true if things went south. I hope the Garden could control it in that case somehow.
  • Aalm said:
    @Bluef : some of the villages already seem aligned with a particular City or God and that seems to have had no negative effect game-wide. I personally have no frame of reference beyond that, though what you're saying could well be true if things went south. I hope the Garden could control it in that case somehow.
    Yes, but imagine if all villages were aligned to one area or another. Just hunting there could create justification for PK, something that's already been widely unpopular in areas like Moghedu where the GoM tried to regulate mhun killing. I've been called out (more than once) in certain areas that are currently allied to cities just for being in them. I'd hate to see exploration, hunting and even harvesting impacted if something like this went full-realm. I love the idea of individual + reputation with villages, but if it builds into a city alliance, that would sort of stink in some ways.
  • I like the GoM and city alliances. The fact that it's apparently an adventurer's god-given right to kill people for profit and power kills the idea that Achaea is a roleplaying game for me, so I appreciate any and all efforts to counter that.
  • EldEld
    edited February 2015
    I like city/village alliances as they currently exist, where they've grown out of the historical/RP connections between the relevant cities and villages (Mhaldor/Blackrock, Ashtan/Thera, etc). That's different (I think) from what @Bluef's describing, which is that any city can win control of essentially any village through some mechanical means. Having all the cities fighting over control of village X that happens to have some lucrative quest, with no particular RP reason to be interested in it, doesn't seem desirable. I also don't think that's what the OP is proposing, or a likely consequence of it.


  • edited February 2015
    Eld said:
    I like city/village alliances as they currently exist, where they've grown out of the historical/RP connections between the relevant cities and villages (Mhaldor/Blackrock, Ashtan/Thera, etc). That's different (I think) from what @Bluef's describing, which is that any city can win control of essentially any village through some mechanical means. Having all the cities fighting over control of village X that happens to have some lucrative quest, with no particular RP reason to be interested in it, doesn't seem desirable. I also don't think that's what the OP is proposing, or a likely consequence of it.


    @Eld @Nim @Bluef : That part of it I was iffy writing, and I wasn't sure how good it would be, and hearing you guys, I think it's best left off the table. Politics is not my thing, and I wasn't proposing something that would turn villages into a geopolitical chess game. Sorry if it came off that way. I agree that would actually make the game less fun as you can't even hunt anymore without IC war and ganking erupting, and things previously largely stress-free become stressful. It would become really bad if popular and necessary hunting grounds got caught up in that, for example the Quisalis affiliating with Mhaldor or something.

    I was thinking of village-related quests to be something small but worthwhile, rewarding in an intrinsic sense, and for the thing to operate as primarily an RP goldmine. So, like you give the little girl in Jaru her kitten back and she says something nice when you pass her on the street. I know there's not enough Divine manpower to have denizens actually talking to people on a regular basis, but if there's a village the adventurer is really admired in, there could be an RP event (or better, a SURPRISE RP event) to spice things up. Or even something outside the village where a denizen from that village runs in to a place you're at and says something to you and initiates an RP event. That sort of thing, even if rare, seems to me to have always been liked. Power politics maybe not so much.


  • I could imagine this being a possible tool, eg. Cyrene wants to forge an alliance with Moghedu, so they request citizens to forge personal bonds with the village and repair any negative relations they had in the past, and maybe the Gods in charge could use that to get a general feeling of how Moghedu might respond, but I agree in general that RP should drive org relations, not mechanical things.
  • Well, first step would just be implementing something simple at the individual level which I believe was the suggestion in the OP.
  • AhmetAhmet Wherever I wanna be
    100% against any new villages using the enemying process of Caer. Came to Caer after hunting Azdun, accidentally garroted one bloody spider ONE TIME that I didn't even know was there, and suddenly the whole bloody village is calling for my head. What's better? THEY'RE NOT ALLOWING UNENEMYING AT THIS TIME. SO NO. DO NOT USE CAER AS AN EXAMPLE. AS BRILLIANT AS THE QUEST IMPLEMENTATION IS, JUST DONT DO IT. ITS BAD.
    Huh. Neat.
  • AhmetAhmet Wherever I wanna be
    edited February 2015
    Ahmet said:
    100% against any new villages using the enemying process of Caer. Came to Caer after hunting Azdun, accidentally garroted one bloody spider ONE TIME that I didn't even know was there, and suddenly the whole bloody village is calling for my head. What's better? THEY'RE NOT ALLOWING UNENEMYING AT THIS TIME. SO NO. DO NOT USE CAER AS AN EXAMPLE. AS BRILLIANT AS THE QUEST IMPLEMENTATION IS, JUST DONT DO IT. ITS BAD.
    ITS BAD BECAUSE IF YOU LOOK AT THEM SIDEWAYS THE WHOLE THING COMES CRASHING DOWN ON YOUR HEAD NO SYSTEM SHOULD BE THAT SENSITIVE EVEN IF IT IS REALISTIC IN COMPARISON TO THE REAL WORLD

    Edit: Aside from my ranting, seriously. Please don't. I'll cry.
    Huh. Neat.
  • ShirszaeShirszae Santo Domingo
    Hahaha. I knew the 'I did not do anything' was bull  :p Anyway, while Caer might have its flaws, certainly, I find that overall the system it uses is much more interesting than the normal village feelings.  As for this idea, I would love it dearly if it went in.

    And you won't understand the cause of your grief...


    ...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.

  • AhmetAhmet Wherever I wanna be
    Shirszae said:
    Hahaha. I knew the 'I did not do anything' was bull  :p Anyway, while Caer might have its flaws, certainly, I find that overall the system it uses is much more interesting than the normal village feelings.  As for this idea, I would love it dearly if it went in.
    I think a system that decreased along the lines of the way the quest increases your reputation with them, but doesn't go away over time, it remains permanently like the quest progress does, instead of everything just going to shit as soon as you bump into a villager.
    Huh. Neat.
  • Attacking something causing enemy status is probably hypersensitive given attacks can be forced (unless that's changed). Not sure how Bonko didn't get all of you enemied there by now.
  • edited February 2015
    @Ahmet , @Nim , @Shirszae : I would personally handle liked and disliked status on a curve. If you've done a little good or a little bad, that's forgotten fairly quickly. But with the depth of it increasing, it's remembered longer either way. Hated or its positive opposite should either stay very long, or be permanent without something like an unenemy fine being paid (at the Constable's office or a similar Denizen) or the highest-positive status being tarnished by wrongdoing and becoming worse as a result. That seems logical in terms of people's memories being longer for substantial acts, and also that if you did something like hit a denizen on accident you wouldn't be hated forever for it.
  • BluefBluef Delos
    edited February 2015
    Ahmet said:
    Ahmet said:
    100% against any new villages using the enemying process of Caer. Came to Caer after hunting Azdun, accidentally garroted one bloody spider ONE TIME that I didn't even know was there, and suddenly the whole bloody village is calling for my head. What's better? THEY'RE NOT ALLOWING UNENEMYING AT THIS TIME. SO NO. DO NOT USE CAER AS AN EXAMPLE. AS BRILLIANT AS THE QUEST IMPLEMENTATION IS, JUST DONT DO IT. ITS BAD.
    ITS BAD BECAUSE IF YOU LOOK AT THEM SIDEWAYS THE WHOLE THING COMES CRASHING DOWN ON YOUR HEAD NO SYSTEM SHOULD BE THAT SENSITIVE EVEN IF IT IS REALISTIC IN COMPARISON TO THE REAL WORLD

    Edit: Aside from my ranting, seriously. Please don't. I'll cry.
    Somehow I managed to get enemied to Caer Witrin. I think I hit an archer thinking it was something else..anyway. I had to write a tome about Caer Witrin to get unenemied. So I inquired, how do I write a book about a place I can't visit? You'll figure out a way, I was told.

    Thus Cold Hands, Warm Hearts was created. Erotic fiction about the denizens of Caer Witrin. Unenemied now, I can say hands-down that this village enemy thing is really silly, especially when you have to go through other players to get unenemied. 
  • I want something special for not killing a village if we get positive feelings. Like more knowledge about the village, maybe access to a library in the village with lore stuff about them maybe. Just something RPish and fun and amusing.
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