I'd still like to see a racial reset potion.

Charge 70$, include a stat respec. We already have magic empath abilities that change everything else, and the lore says that they are WAY more insanely powerful than we think.

<<+1. Add some flavor text when you use it. Make it a scroll that opens a moongate that summons a conclave of hooded empaths. They immediately come in, Cast's nissa's binding on you. World goes black with their cackling. you wake up as a new race. Everything you were wearing is now at your feet. Make one scroll for each race, and limit their availability with periodic restocks. While we're at it, I'd like to see the option to have this change your name too. >>

Personally, I'm not in favor of a name change or a race change option. Very little choices in games are permanent.

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>Personally, I'm not in favor of a name change or a race change option. Very little choices in games are permanent.

Name changes no. No one brought them up. Mechanically your character IS the name. It's what people use to identify you. Everything else is simply window dressing.

Race changes yes. Mechanically it makes sense that if we allow stat respec, spell respec, etc. we either need to uncouple race from stats entirely and make it a pure roleplaying choice, with no mechanical benefits or drawbacks, or we should allow it to be reset like every other thing with mechanical benefits.

One of the problems DR faces is that choices made in the game environment 10-20 years ago are having unintended consequences (good and bad) 20 years later.

And the next argument is 'skills' or 'guild' and I'd say sure. With the caveat that you start them at 0 and all the accumulated skills go into an RPA style bonus pool in a manner similar to how 3.0 worked. It would be a great way to allow new game+ mechanics.

No one (no, really, no one) cares if your BobDawg character is a gnome, kaldar, or three legged cavalry mule with wings and a dragon head. If race is critical to your RP, then you bloody well shouldn't be changing it unless you're a hypocrite. And to everyone else it's just not that important. This is an especially silly argument given empathic (and necrotic) shifting already exists, is quite common and accepted. Putting it behind a Scoin paywall properly makes it an uncommon and infrequent occurrence which would presumably require a massively skilled empath. I'd also be happy with it being an in-game alterer style thing, but assumed it would get more traction as a payed item.

>This is a weird argument to support why characters should be allowed to change races.

?

'No one cares what your race is' is a strange argument for allowing it to be changed?

>>'No one cares what your race is' is a strange argument for allowing it to be changed?

For starters, if someone wants to change their race it might be because they care.

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>I've seen quite a bit of role playing revolving around character races. Personally I don't want races to become window dressing.

And I've seen quite a bit that isn't. If the person makes a consistent RP around his/her race, then they shouldn't be changing it. If they don't care, why is it your problem?

> I also wouldn't mind having some kind of ancestoring or skill exp transfering thingy. A great way to remove some of those uber no longer played guys and allows people to put the exp to good use on another of there characters. A magic cube that dumps bonus exp into someone's learning pools so skills can progress faster or something would be nice.


I'm probably in the minority, but I would also support this.

Take all of your skills. Dump them into a magic receptacle. Put that into your vault, and then reroll your character. That way you can pick a new race, name, and guild if you so choose. Then when you get the cube out, it turns that experience into "bits" (similar to the 2.0 - 3.0 transition) for your new life to boost draining. Maybe it also gives you some RPAs to get started in your new life. It's not purchasing skills, and it's not something that someone should do lightly; however, if it is a way to do something new with a slight edge over starting a character from scratch. A new game + option, of sorts.

> It would just create even more, newer levels of drama when people trash the reputation of one name and just change it to start all over again. Allowing more anonymity within the game wouldn't be a positive thing.


They can already do that with F2P characters and gweths.

> The problem I see with race reset is that skill learning is still attached to certain stats. Someone could roll an Eloth or Gnome and dump most of their tdps into mentals and push their skills up faster than normal. Then when they reached a point they were comfortable, reset into a more physical race and use their new tdp bonus to dump into physical stats to make themselves stronger. If skill learning rates were divorced from stats, then I would have no problem with race resets.

See my suggestion of new game plus, but the game really doesn't work the way you're suggesting. For the fastest advancement, you need to spend time in combat. For combat to be effective, especially at the low levels, you need to train a lot of stats - especially strength and stamina. If you're talking about the upper levels, then they would already have their int/wis up to a 40s or 50s range and they're going to see diminishing returns from there. Could people do it? Sure. Would they? I don't think it would be a big problem, especially if it were priced right.

>It would just create even more, newer levels of drama when people trash the reputation of one name and just change it to start all over again. Allowing more anonymity within the game wouldn't be a positive thing.

Completely agree.

The name IS the player association with the character. By changing the name, you change the character into a completely new one.

Players track other players by character name. I don't think that should ever be changable without creating a new character. It's not something subject to mechanics whims, and taste is always subjective.

>The problem I see with race reset is that skill learning is still attached to certain stats.

Which is why I said to couple it with a mandatory stat respec...

>>They can already do that with F2P characters and gweths.

That's not the same as doing it with a 100+ or 150+ circle character. There are mechanics already in place in the game to deal with people who roll characters to just troll (THUMP, gwethsmashers, SEARCHing characters). All those things come with skill/stat contests that wouldn't work against a high level person. At least when someone buys a HLC and uses it to troll the community people know the character by name. Allowing them to change that name would remove the reputation that they created and only make it easier for them to keep trolling or not be held accountable for the trolling that they did.

It also makes the buying/selling of characters more legitimate by allowing people to become a completely new character within the community. Seeing the same characters passed around to new owners every few months is bad enough. Seeing new character names on the same character every time it got traded/sold would be worse.

Then there is the whole trying to keep continuity within the RP setting.

> It also makes the buying/selling of characters more legitimate by allowing people to become a completely new character within the community.

That happens. This has happened as long as this game has been on the web. Individual characters are sold. Full accounts are sold There is no way to stop it.

> Seeing the same characters passed around to new owners every few months is bad enough. Seeing new character names on the same character every time it got traded/sold would be worse.

> Then there is the whole trying to keep continuity within the RP setting.

So ask yourself. Which one of those makes more sense in an RP setting? That there's someone in this big, giant world of Elanthia that could have trained without you meeting them, or that someone woke up one day with a completely new personality, new set of friends, and new habits?

>>That happens. This has happened as long as this game has been on the web. Individual characters are sold. Full accounts are sold There is no way to stop it.

No, there is no way to stop it, but they shouldn't get to hide behind a new name also.

>>So ask yourself. Which one of those makes more sense in an RP setting? That there's someone in this big, giant world of Elanthia that could have trained without you meeting them, or that someone woke up one day with a completely new personality, new set of friends, and new habits?

Neither. If we have to deal with it I'd rather know who those characters are rather than having to learn new names.

>>We're probably not going to see eye-to-eye here, which is fine, but from a RP perspective, changing owners shouldn't even been a thought. People could disappear. Move on. Never speak to you again. That fits a narrative. Trying to memorize someone's name because you want to blacklist a character since the player behind it changed, does not.

I think allowing someone to re-anonymize themselves can create situations where players (as players or as characters) remove a specific risk associated in acting a certain way.

In other words, a player who plays a loud and proud Necromancer for X years can suddenly go "you know what, nevermind" and wipe the slate clean. This is an IC/RP example of issues that can arise.

Alternatively, a player who happily murderfaces anyone open for X years can suddenly go "well, too much heat on me now, nevermind" and once again wipe the slate clean. This is an OOC example of issues that can arise.

Add in situations where people offload characters they're bored with after cratering their reputations, and thus being able to wipe the slate clean, and you have even more issues that can arise.

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>I think they were talking about the fact you could roll up a mental heavy race, TRAIN skills at a faster pace, then switch to a more physical race. A stat respec would be exactly what this person gaming the system would WANT.

In which case, I think that's kind of silly. That would really only matter significantly at the 300+ ranks range, and I don't know why anyone would really waste 70 bucks to speed through a short range :-/

For those who may have missed it in previous discussions of race changes:

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http://forums.play.net/forums/DragonRealms/Abilities,%20Skills%20and%20Magic/The%20Experience%20System/view/3696

>> so what's the cost of a race change? Granted, Soch said it is too high for such a "small" change -- all I was asking for was more clarification on how small the change is and how large the cost is.

There are several costs. The first cost I think of is technical - It's a heck of a lot of code. It's not just "change the race and be done with it" - There's a whole bunch of items, systems, etc that rely on you being the race you are. What about racial perks? What if you're in moonskin? What about race-specific items, etc, etc. It can be done, but it's NOT a pretty picture.

Then, there's the lore cost. Right now, since there's basically no representation of stats, it's really easy to hand-wave a stat respec - Nobody can tell when you do a stat respec unless they're very intimately familiar with how your stats affect your performance, and see you before and after. A stat respec, then, really doesn't have a lot of lore impact, and is certainly low-impact enough to use as a solution when we DO make changes that affect how people have trained their stats.

Changing your race, though, is vastly, vastly different. How would people feel if half of the people in Stone Clan all of the sudden became Togs, or Gnomes, or (worse) Elves? How would Rakash communities feel if all of the sudden, half of their members left and were replaced by people who until that day were halflings and prydaens? It gets really messy, really fast. Racial communities start to fracture around the edges (Not the cores, because they're dedicated to their RP decisions, but at the edges), which leads to smaller communities. Not to mention whatever voodoo we have to cook up on the back end to make it even remotely consistent for people to magically change their race. The RP question is a very big one, and in one of the few games left out there that DOES care about roleplaying, this is a huge deal.

There's also the customer support cost. "I accidentally changed my race, help!" If we say "too bad, you confirmed the choice", that's a very possible recipe for unhappiness large enough to discourage somebody from leaving. If we revert them, even in 'rare scenarios', we end up spending an enormous amount of time either writing code to handle racial reversion OR manually doing it, both of which keep those GMs from doing whatever they would normally want to do (which, I can assure you, is not handle an assist about somebody who messed up a transracial operation).

That's just off the top of my head - I won't even go into the higher-level game design/theory stuff about permanence, choice, freedom, etc, both because I'd rather not write a thesis and because I have much, much better things to do. That is the tip of the iceberg of 'how large the cost is'.

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>I've given race changes a lot of thought. While I think I have a design that would deal with the technical side of things, I'm completely unsure what the ultimate nature of the resistance to allowing it would be. I'm not sure how many worms this sealed can has. I'm also not sure it improves the game in a meaningful way (we may disagree on what improves the game, but I can usually justify that my projects do so on some grounds), "why not?" is not a compelling argument for something that'd require this much dev and concept time.

If we couple the race reset with a stat reset (as I can't see a reasonable way to do it without that pairing), my first question would be what does the race reset add that a stat reset does not.

For me, that's the ability to remove racial penalties to stats which either were not important when I rolled that race/class combination, or have otherwise changed during the duration of my playtime to make the stat penalty more severe than it was. The example I have handy is a level 70 thief who had to push discipline to 55+ and sacrifice all other stats, to be able to run 3 khri. As a dwarf that's not bad. As a human it's not great. As a halfling it's crippling.

Above and beyond that, I can't really think of a compelling reason for either respec to exist in-game, since the alternative answer invariably becomes 'train more skills/levels for TDPs and power through'.

Is it something I think will really see the light of day? No. I suspect the return on investment is too low compared to other projects someone qualified for this could be doing (i.e. you). Is it something I would like? Sure, since I suggested it.

>>If we couple the race reset with a stat reset (as I can't see a reasonable way to do it without that pairing), my first question would be what does the race reset add that a stat reset does not.

Fair enough.

The way to do it without pairing is to make the racial "shift" cosmetic (like age shifting is). I'm not sure that makes sense but I reckon it wouldn't be especially hard to decouple stat-mods and race.

-Armifer
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Sorry double post, the idea still bugs me. I'm not sure I'm ok with it even as I proposed. Why do you need to change race anyway? Can nothing be a hard choice with no do-over?

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<<<Non permanency of choices like race or class is sort of an increasing trend in gaming as of a few years ago. It doesn't really surprise me that people are pushing for it in DR too.>>>

If everyone was jumping off a bridge.... I think it stinjs and is very millenial.

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>Personally, I'm not fond of the idea. To me, the lore and culture of a race includes its physiology and mental makeup (as reflected mechanically in stat costs). Take Gor'Togs, for example. Part of their lore is that they are strong and enduring. Removing all stat cost modifiers (or letting Gor'Togs operate under the Gnome stat spread) would undermine that aspect of their lore (especially among players who don't consider the game's setting unless it's reinforced mechanically).

To me, this argument takes far too much of the game out of the game.

By this logic it should be physically impossible for any two players to swap weapons. A gnome can't use a weapon a tog can because of physiological differences. A gnome shouldn't EVER be able to use anything but small weapons, under 10 stones, because of base physics. The argument gets incredibly silly with little effort.

>Nonpermanency of choices like race or class is sort of an increasing trend in gaming as of a few years ago. It doesn't really surprise me that people are pushing for it in DR too.

Persistent games change. The meta evolves to fit current patches and content releases. People want the ability to continue playing single persistent characters which are capable under new metas without having to create an entirely new character every time the company patches one and suddenly no one wants mitigation tanks, it's now dodge-tank or nothing. Builds which are ideal for PvP are crap for PvE, builds good for PvE are crap for raiding, and so on.

>Why do you need to change race anyway?

That's bad game design. When 3.0 rolled through stats were allowed to be changed because of how massive the changes were. Remember that pre 3.0 30 stamina and strength were...basically all you ever needed or wanted. Similar changes have effected the overall meta-analysis of racial stat bonuses according to how tons of systems work, how stats have been tweaked in 10+ years, and so on. Given the option, I would prefer to play a single character and 'update' him to reflect new normal, rather than delete/shelve him and make a new one. Grinding up 50+ levels is boring as sin.

Also, rather like stat and spell respec, I don't see how this effects you. Don't like it, don't use it. But then again, I have a hard time taking seriously someone who uses 'milenial' as an insult.

>The way to do it without pairing is to make the racial "shift" cosmetic (like age shifting is). I'm not sure that makes sense but I reckon it wouldn't be especially hard to decouple stat-mods and race.

My question about that is, you'd be leaving whatever stat spread the player chose at creation, and then allowing them to float to a new race? That's a huge can of worms. You're completely de-coupling race and stat spreads. And, personally, I love the idea.

Just like a Tog can choose to be an archer, a blacksmith, a berserker, a scholar, or a mage, I think any race can/does have people who have different stat distributions. Sure, they should be less likely. But our characters are roughly the 1% of the 1% anyway. We're walking statistic bell curve breakers. I love the idea of making race a pure RP choice. Bear in mind that DR long ago did away with other non-stat racial benefits like size based encumbrance, and has never had health/mana changes on race. We still have a couple of odd things, like cat claws and snake jaws, but mostly race is already an RP choice.