idea

[Anonymous]

Since this mud is heavily influenced by DarkSun I think we should Pterran and Aarckocka as playable races and psionic-warriors and Brutes as classes. Yeah i guess this is a ridicuoulous post, but i thouhgt i should throw it out here.
heres a question for the imms, whe you guys created the mud did you think of putting those races in? I bet theres a great reason to why they arnt here.

While Arm is heavily influenced by Darksun, it's mostly just the setting, and the names of things. So there's the Sea of Silt... gith.. Mek... Erdlu etc... but if you'll notice many things about each of them are pretty different (Well, to my knowledge anyway, I'm not that big a Darksun... umm.. theologist. That's so not the right word)  So perhaps a psionic warrior wouldn't be fesable because to really tap the power of the mind, your body would become weaker... or something. I can see that one really being a balance issue too. And also, it seems like that the playable races could have been theoretically been descended from the same types of creatures, if those two races are what I think they are... they really wouldn't fit that mold.

That's just me though.

[cabbage]

how does mantis fit in then?

couldnt those 2 just be said theyre descended from each other?

[Delerak]

Well, the thing is Armageddon is at a point where bringing new races/classes is kind of not feasible because it would be unexplainable in character really.  Arm is known for its RARE instances where you find a defiler or psionicist, or steel, which is really fun, if everyone had steel and everyone was a psi-warrior it wouldn't be any fun, IM thinking it could be done through special app, but a lot of the Darksun stuff did NOT go into Arm, while a lot of did, a lot also did not.

Mantis is hardly a readily playable race. I mean, you don't see them running around Allanak do you? Well.. I mean you used to, but not no more.

Races could be introduced though, I've personally seen many Northland races added (Animal races, granted, but they were still new) It was more or less just taken with the normal tide of Animal migration. Sometimes you'd see more carru and less tembo, more gortok and less skeet, less duskhorn and a new race, like gizhat. So the Gizhat arrived in the area near the Northlands through migration... as I'm pretty sure Tarantulas did (I don't remember how long they've been in, if it's been forever, shoot me)

So yes, a new race could be introduced, but I'd say it'd have to be NPC for a -while- first, or like... 9 karma, up with Mindbenders to keep their population down, and to represent how there aren't many walking around near or in the cities.

[Dan]

Well, personally I think a new race being added would be perfectly reasonable and explainable. Someone explores a bit further than anyone else ever has and comes across a new race of intelligent beings. Of course they would not know each others language but if they were peaceful then eventually trade would develope and leanguages would be exchanged. All this would take some time probably IC years but eventually a new race would be playable and known.

[cabbage]

i think its doable
First if youve played dark  sun then you know that Pterran are a race that lives on the peaks of mountians and is hardly seen by other races, this could be done. They should be high karma. They could be introduced by one flying down or someone climbing the shield wall or something like that.

[John]

New Races have been implemented quite well. The only instance I know of are the firebugs and they were very slowly introduced, by a couple of them showing up, then slowly a few more, at this stage some rumors started flying around about them, and then a few more popped up and a mini-plot involving finding out what they were and where they came from cropped up (which I loved the little part I was involved with. Damn dying all the time  :evil:) and AFAIK now they've been implemented with little to no comment nowadays.

So yes, bringing in the Pterran race for example is doable (I know nothing about Dark Sun ). But the Imms have to decide if adding them would be beneficial to the game. Already we have too many races then we have the players for (gith, mantis, halflings) so I think the Imms are more inclined to populate these races with PCs then implement a new race.

[Rindan]

I imagine it certainly would be possible to add more races to the game, but I would tend to be against it.  Already there are a host of other races that are in game but not playable.  I don't really see much benefit of adding more races when there are already plenty that don't get played.

[Angela Christine]

i think its doable
First if youve played dark  sun then you know that Pterran are a race that lives on the peaks of mountians and is hardly seen by other races, this could be done. They should be high karma. They could be introduced by one flying down or someone climbing the shield wall or something like that.

They can fly?  That probably explains there absence.  Arm isn't set up really well for flying, many outdoor rooms don't have "up" as a direction, and part of the point of flying is to get above melee range.  I think you would want every outdoor location to be at least three levels (ground level, above ground level, and really high) to get the most out of flying.  Often the areas where flying animals are coded in have an extra virtical level or two, but it would be a pain to go through the entire known world and add one or two "in the air" rooms for every ground room.  You might be able to do it cheap and dirty by having a generic description for all the air rooms, but each room description should really reflect the terrain below.  In an ideal world airborn rooms have a good veiw, so they should watch the 5 ground level rooms around them (down, down-north, down-east, down-south, and down-west).  It would be a long, boring job and a tremendous amount of work that would only benefit a few players that happened to be playing the flying iso-race or a flying magicker.

Even aside from the potential work involved in coding in airspace, I don't think any new races will be opened until the existing closed PC races are reopened.  Gith, mantis and halflings, when played properly, don't seem to have much interaction with the mainstream races.  An iso-race set in the mountains on the edge of the known world would have even less reason to interact, especially considering the dominent human's propensity for enslaving everything that moves.

I'm not saying it would _never_ happen, but I wouldn't count on seeing it until we've got 200+ players online during peak times.

AC

[John]

This Pterran race could actually be coded into the game. Without giving away too much IC info, in certain parts of the known world there are humanoid slaves that have their sdesc's as "humanoid". I don't know if they've got their own race coded for them, or if they're just known as an "animal race". I'm also not too sure if these humanoid's are freaks, a seperate race or what, because that's IC knowledge that I don't have.

So yes, there may be several races from Dark Sun that are in the game, but they're on the verge of extinction within the Known World, and are probably completely enslaved and not open to PCs.

Also IIRC a while ago there was talk about races that USE to be around long long ago, when the game was a H&S mud. Perhaps some of the races from Dark Sun are those, that were slowly killed off within the Known World or locked away from PCs.

So yeah, I don't really know much about this cause I'm a newbie, but there is what little knowledge I do have.

[Anonymous]

What if we switch dwarves for halflings :twisted:

[mansa]

What if we switch dwarves for halflings :twisted:

There -is- halflings, and there -is- dwarves.  Check them out in the help files.

[Malifaxis]

I'm too zoned out right now on sleep dep to actually figure out the 'quote' thing, even though I'm sure it's no more than two or three button clicks.

Somewhere above, Angela C mentioned the fact of vertical rooms.  A bit more than two years ago, I was part of a massive project on a mud to install 'flight' rooms above every single outdoors room that we had, and if the idea is deemed 'feasable' by the immorts here, I have a few small suggestions.

If the rooms in armag have any sort of an environmental/terrain flag (which I believe they do), then one of the smaller shortcuts we found was to make a script to add two vert rooms to each room flagged 'outdoors' or 'roadway'.  Each vert room had the four main exits, plus two vert exits for the mid room, and one each on both sides.  All of the rooms had, basically, the same description... Air is air, afterall.

After the initial script ran, all of the immorts gathered and determined a listing of the 'most important' landmarks of the terrain below any given aerial room, and any aerial room near one of these landmarks was given a brief, most times one or two line, description of what landmarks you could see from your nice, lofty vantage point.

It was, of course, a truely monumental feat to edit the rooms, but I know the effort was worth every erg of sweat because of the feedback we got.  Players absolutely adored it.

Of course, on armag, things would be different... which is why we love it.  For example, if there's enough 'terrible sand whipping about' to fill the tundras of russia, I doubt that you could fly and in any way retain control.  Flying, even for a Pterran or a skilled Whiran, should be something to do in moderation... we've all taken a nasty spill from a room or two up.  Imagine what would happen if you were being driven downwards at an extra 40 to 80 miles an hour thanks to the force of that storm you just happened to be dumb enough to spread your wings in.

On the new races idea... I'm a former player of dark sun, I bought the initial boxed set within a week of it hitting the shelves and was hooked for life.  Both races mentioned have wonderful mindsets, and could be quite fun to play because of those mindsets, and also because of all the 'kewl pow3rz that U get.'  Both would have to be tweaked, of course... perhaps the Pterrans (or whatever they may be called if they were imp'd) are a subrace of the gith that split off way back in the day... or perhaps a totally new race that was sent scattering from somewhere within the Sea of Silt to end up on the 'shores' of Red Storm.

Just more ideas from my sleep dep'd frame.

[Bestatte]

I played a game for a few years that had a whole "sky world" above the main rooms, and a "rooftop world" in the center city.  The sky world was pretty neat (even though the Imms never did link them logically and it was filled with bugged exits).

You could ascend from anywhere outside. Descending was another matter altogether. If you were in city A, there were certain "landing pads" you would land in, and "look down" would show you whether or not you were near one. If not, you'd have to keep flying around til you found one to land on. A landing pad might be the gates to the city, or outside the main tavern, or whatever. You could move to the next town, which was considered "neutral territory" but you'd have to ascend from another side of that central town if you wanted to get to the third town - which was the first's rival city. In addition, the "god" of that third town had a shield over its territory, so if you were of the opposing "alignment" you might find that the winds were just too strong to get there.

Wind was a factor in ascending, as was the geography of the area you were in. If the wind was too strong you might not be able to travel in this or that direction. Or you might have to wait for the wind to die down in ordered to ascend at all. If you tried to do certain things up in the air, you'd fall to the ground and generally become a flattened pulpy mass on the roadside.

Looking down would show you if there was a place to land, and woe unto you if you descended over the ocean without checking where the heck you were first. Drowning - was not fun, especially since the water world (they had sailing and islands you could visit) was also fairly buggy.

*The red-haired chick has died in Ocean Sector 2!* always resulted in a groan from the staff, since the game had resurrection and it meant there was no way the body could be summoned to bring back to life.

But I love the idea of a whole world in the sky - landing on a hidden treehouse deep in the gray forest, or behind a temple, or on the outskirts of red storm... though as far as I know, this is already implemented to some extent.

[COGATO]

Though I am not to Gung-Ho about the whole new race option simply because we have some races now that we dont have players for to begin with, I am definantly for adding air space rooms. The possibilities for new in game experiences are almost endless. Face it, most people that have the D-elf option have already explored most if not all of the known world, so there really isnt much more to see. But imagine that long lost floating city of Cren or perhaps coming upon the cliff dwelling people of Narath. This also brings into question, an Underdark, anyone who has ever read any of the Drittz Do'Urden series of books knows what Im talking about. The Underdark is an extremely large network of natural underground caves that would extend under most if not all of the known world which would in turn double the actually explorable size of the planet. As for anything like this being implemented any time soon, its not really a great idea simply because if people had larger areas of space roam, it may become increasingly boring simply because wide spread seperation of the pc population.

[Rindan]

Though I am not to Gung-Ho about the whole new race option simply because we have some races now that we dont have players for to begin with, I am definantly for adding air space rooms. The possibilities for new in game experiences are almost endless. Face it, most people that have the D-elf option have already explored most if not all of the known world, so there really isnt much more to see. But imagine that long lost floating city of Cren or perhaps coming upon the cliff dwelling people of Narath. This also brings into question, an Underdark, anyone who has ever read any of the Drittz Do'Urden series of books knows what Im talking about. The Underdark is an extremely large network of natural underground caves that would extend under most if not all of the known world which would in turn double the actually explorable size of the planet. As for anything like this being implemented any time soon, its not really a great idea simply because if people had larger areas of space roam, it may become increasingly boring simply because wide spread seperation of the pc population.

Let me respond with a cryptic, "You clearly have not explored the entire world based upon the listing of things you would like to see."

[Kalden]

They could at least introduce the Pterran as a race in the world, but not actually playable, like the gith. They sound like an interesting race.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

Just to...uh...cast light upon the subject, I believe that the Pterrans are already in. But don't expect to play one. Of course, I may be wrong, but I don't think I am.

Find them. You obviously have plenty to explore.

Venomz

[No one]

i think its doable
First if youve played dark  sun then you know that Pterran are a race that lives on the peaks of mountians and is hardly seen by other races, this could be done. They should be high karma. They could be introduced by one flying down or someone climbing the shield wall or something like that.

That's Aarakocrans.  Pterrans are bipedal lizards native to grasslands; they don't fly.