Changing rp points from per character to per player

The more you push this idea the more I am liking it.. granted I am pretty heavily intoxicated.. Yesterday was Father's Day and my dad passed two months ago so I'm kinda indulging, but I'm looking at it from the viewpoint of a writer...

A writer reaps the benefits of the characters of his book... A player is the one creating the atmosphere, the RP, and the character... I can't see much harm in allowing a newly made character the ability to have custom items, titles, or even edges.(They are pretty mediocre, honestly) The point where I'd draw the line would be plots, relics, and more RP heavy items. As some IMMs have stated, it'd be too much of a pain in the ass to tailor a quest, plot, or relic to a character that was just created.

So I roll a silent assassin. I don't speak to you because, I don't want to get emotionally involved. I just study and assassinate, falcon eye for good measure.

Then I start shifting RP points from all of my other chars, not for edges, oh no, I am not really that foolish, I would do it to make every item I wear -60AC. And that's face value, not "worn" value, so my AC would be somewhere around -900+ at level 1 with no buffs active. Why should you care? I earned the points, according to you, they are mine as a player to use, but they are not. They are mine as a character to use.

My ONE question for those of you who ARE for this idea is this;

How is the concept of spending RP earned by character A on character B, NOT OOC?

I'm surprised to hear you against this fool hardy as you'd likely benefit quite a lot from it.

I will not argue that players like myself who play MANY characters would benefit.

But as stated above, these points, while being wanted in a hurry, were intended to promote longevity of characters. The purpose being to provide characters who had accomplished their goals, Leader of this, Q-that, Mastered all skills, something to keep working for. The thought being that if we could get Leaders with some longevity, we would see more world plots moving forward. In its own way it has worked, but the order by 5 and it will be here tomorrow world we live in now, has left most players aggravated because they want the rewards without having to serve the time. The whole thread to me says "I want to place a preorder for an edge on my next character, someone already beat this one once."

Like I always say, its not how many times you fall in Aabahran that tells the gods what your worth, its how many times you get back up.

I want you to reward yourselves for getting back up, and that's just how I feel about it.

50 minutes ago, Unknown Criminal said:

Just for kicks id like to ask, what is abusive about having X available skills/buffs/bonuses on a char that was born yesterday apposed to A char born 6 weeks prior if the cost is the same to the player.... They can only spend it once, who gives a crap if they load a new char with it or an old char with 6 deaths to its name? The difference between me loading 2 edges onto a new (berserker) or a 10 deathed berserker means absolutely nothing to anyone except ME, ive been playing berserkers to edge out my kingpen in order to try and make the hall of fame with my personal HERO.

I totally understand where everyone is coming from when they say each char needs to put in its time in order to peak, HOWEVER, each PLAYER has been putting in as much time as ALL of their chars combined!  The PLAYER should receive the same bonus too be played however they like distributed between any of their chars that they seem fit because the PLAYER is the person behind the characters that make YOUR gameplay fun, not the character behind the player :)

UC

Wouldn't this same reasoning also apply to other things, such as equipment?  After all, I spent X hours building up my full suit of Adeptus, why shouldn't I be able to transfer it to my next character by dropping it somewhere and then picking it up on my new fire giant half an hour later when he's at level 15?  I as the player spent the time getting it, I as the player should be able to keep enjoying it, right?  If I want to take every bit of useful eq I find on my various characters and channel it all into my one hero character, no big deal, right?

No.  Not a fan of this at all.  RP points are plenty easy to get as is for your character, and do exactly what they are supposed to do - reward that one character for RP activity, just like getting eq from a corpse rewards that one character for PK activity.  Want one character to get the rewards of many?  Play that one character as much as you would the many.  I'm all for finding ways to lessen the timesink aspects of FL, as they're the #1 holdup to me rolling a new character, but RP points are not a problem in that regard from my perspective.  Play an RP heavy character and you'll have trouble logging in without getting any. ;)

I recently played a battlemage as a complete experiment, I wanted to see what high ac felt like, I wanted to check out the sigil skills but I knew it wouldn't be a long lasting character so I didn't bother with a history or developing his story. 

During this time I was a hunting partner for two new players, helped them learn some new items etc. I rpd with them to try hook them into the game. 

Imagine if I knew I could keep all Rp points during this, they would of gotten a much higher quality experience as well as anyone else who interacted with me. This could be every throw away character. The average Rp would get raised incredibly. 

In reality, I earned 40 or so points and completed my experiment none the richer. 

Someone was saying something about rewarding behaviors you want to see, I think this change would do wonders. 

With this focus on long lasting characters, I won't be doing more experiments like that. I won't be interacting with new players, I won't be enriching anyone's hunting party. Which do you think new players would prefer. 

Let that sink in.

2 minutes ago, Wade said:

Imagine if I knew I could keep all Rp points during this, they would of gotten a much higher quality experience as well as anyone else who interacted with me.

Imagine how much more fun you might have had during those few hours on this bmg if you had actually treated it like a character and gotten into its mindset.  My favorite character in my entire time with FL was a character that started as a throwaway, so I get the temptation to make them just fine, but I also don't expect rewards on them if I'm treating them as such.

5 minutes ago, Wade said:

Someone was saying something about rewarding behaviors you want to see, I think this change would do wonders.

Someone was saying that RP points incentivize cheap RP that makes you feel like you've been serviced by a prostitute.  This change only adds to that aspect of them.  You are specifically asking for RP points to be treated as rewards in this thread, yet condemning them as such in another.

The behavior that RP points are intended to encourage is character development through RP - making your character a richer, more engaging and hopefully longer-lasting part of Aabahran.  The behavior this would encourage is playing one character for the benefit of another, which is a blatantly OOC motivation for anything you're doing in game.  Again, I have to ask, how does your argument not also apply to eq?

14 minutes ago, Wade said:

With this focus on long lasting characters, I won't be doing more experiments like that.

Why not?  You said your goal was to test out high AC and Sigil skills - did you fail to accomplish those goals?  Are you saying that you wouldn't play a character for that character's sake, but only if it helps out another of your characters too?  That kind of play has never been allowed in the history of FL, so I don't know why you seem to think this is a new "focus" of the game - it's always been in favor of heavily investing in one character, maybe two or three max if you've got the playtime available, but throwaway characters have never been something anyone should expect another character of theirs to benefit from.

I would just do it during Halloween, save myself a bunch of time.

Rp points arent an in game currency, like you said in the gold argument. You can't compare it to equipment.

53 minutes ago, Wade said:

Rp points arent an in game currency, like you said in the gold argument. You can't compare it to equipment.

Sure you can.  You just have to note the differences as well as the similarities.  My bringing up eq was an attempt to employ a reductio ad absurdum by showing that the argument you are making can be applied to many other things that we also very strongly view as being character-specific - I was not arguing that eq and RP points are the same, only that the argument as presented works equally well for justifying both being shared between characters.

What remains the case is that you are asking for the actions of one of your characters to provide a direct benefit for another of your characters, which has been against the rules of FL since its inception.  I strongly doubt this will ever change, nor do I want it to.

58 minutes ago, Wade said:

I would just do it during Halloween, save myself a bunch of time.

HM is arguably the worst time to test out what a character feels like to play - it's great for checking out little features like what each religion's DI does, or trying to get a malform up to see how it works, but it simply does not last long enough nor provide enough of a simulation of a character's life for you to get a sense of what playing a cleric with that DI actually is like.

Knowing the location of items is a direct benefit to other characters. Should going somewhere to find something that you haven't heard/seen about in game be against the rules?

At some point you have to stop, things like the lifting of the rules regarding items on the forum and the wiki database are a massive quality of life improvement despite being OOC.

If people enjoy leveling/playing multiple characters/helping others, why should that be less rewarded than sticking with one character? 

In WoW, you can transfer items and gold to other characters, same with diablo.

This change wouldn't change anything for current players who like sticking with one character, and so what if someone wants to use their points to roll up something and deck it out? If anything, this change will help the underdog issue we constantly suffer from.

11 minutes ago, Wade said:

 

Knowing the location of items is a direct benefit to other characters. Should going somewhere to find something that you haven't heard/seen about in game be against the rules?

Actually, if there were any conceivable way to make this so, I'd be in favor of it, and I've RPed more than one character as being so limited.  But there isn't, not without demanding such an absurd level of over-the-shoulder monitoring by IMMs that even Stalin would call it too much Big Brother.  The key difference here is that knowledge of the game is not something we can actually limit, so it being transferred is just something we accept and move on from - allowing RP points to be transferred is not bowing to the limits of reality, it is actively condoning and rewarding OOC motivations and behavior.

14 minutes ago, Wade said:

At some point you have to stop, things like the lifting of the rules regarding items on the forum and the wiki database are a massive quality of life improvement despite being OOC.

I fully agree.  That we don't live in a perfect world of being able to limit knowledge transfer between characters means we, in the service of the public good, make much of this information instead freely available so that newer players aren't floundering in the dark compared to old players.  This allows characters to start off at a greater, but still not equal, degree of parity with each other, so that no character is starting with too much of an advantage carried over from one's other characters - which is exactly why RP points should not be shared, so that one character isn't starting off with an advantage conferred by the experiences of another (if preventing such is within our control).

18 minutes ago, Wade said:

If people enjoy leveling/playing multiple characters/helping others, why should that be less rewarded than sticking with one character?

Each character is rewarded according to each character's actions.  The player is receiving just as many rewards, but those rewards - like the effort put in - are simply spread out among their many characters.  If you want the rewards to be concentrated in one character, play one character.  If you enjoy helping people level, playing multiple characters, and helping others for their own sake, then I fail to understand how the inability to combine RP points from them all hinders you from doing those things in any way except in your own mind.

23 minutes ago, Wade said:

This change wouldn't change anything for current players who like sticking with one character, and so what if someone wants to use their points to roll up something and deck it out? If anything, this change will help the underdog issue we constantly suffer from.

This has nothing to do with helping underdogs - the idea of combining RP points from multiple characters into one is simple power-gaming, focused entirely on making one character as l33t as possible at the expense of one's other characters.  Actual underdogs either won't be powergaming to enough extent that they'd bother hoarding RP points long enough to buff a char, or they misunderstand the game so badly that this wouldn't help them in the slightest.

28 minutes ago, Wade said:

In WoW, you can transfer items and gold to other characters, same with diablo.

Yeah, but this ain't WoW or Diablo.  The list of differences between those games and FL is as long as my... leg.  We'll go with leg.

Wade you truly baffle me.

On one thread you call people RP whores and then in this thread you openly admit you would RP more if you could combine the points onto one character, but since you can't you basically don't even try or just do the bare minimum.

Then you try to point out the flaw of Pali comparing RP points to gold and EQ but then immediately compare it yourself by citing how Diablo and WOW works with passing on gold and EQ, and those are not even RP enforced games.

Do you even know what you want dude? I just see hypocrisy in every post. You seem all against RP points and what they can buy but on the other hand you'd love to pimp out your main character by earning scraps of RP across multiple characters...

And every time someone responds to you with any logic you just change the subject and say "ya but" and then bring up some other hypocritical point.

I seriously don't know what you want or why because when I read all your posts and look at the big picture there is nothing cohesive.

30 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

On one thread you call people RP whores

Wrong.

31 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

in this thread you openly admit you would RP more if you could combine the points onto one character, but since you can't you basically don't even try or just do the bare minimum.

On that particular character, correct. Keep in mine that MY bare minimum is far from THE bare minimum, the description for that particular character got a fire dragon which took a decent amount of effort to write.

34 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

Then you try to point out the flaw of Pali comparing RP points to gold and EQ but then immediately compare it yourself by citing how Diablo and WOW works with passing on gold and EQ, and those are not even RP enforced games.

The remarks about Wow/diablo were preemptive for if Trick decided to join the discussion, I know he likes to compare to those games so I try to as well.

37 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

Do you even know what you want dude?

Does anyone really know what they want though dude?

38 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

You seem all against RP points and what they can buy but on the other hand you'd love to pimp out your main character by earning scraps of RP across multiple characters...

I've never said I want RP points removed, I apologize if you've gotten that vibe somehow. Firstly, I don't have a main character, in the past week I had just over 10 50's denied and during that process of going over each character and what I learnt from each one, I identified an issue that over them I had a decent amount of rp points that were essentially worthless because they're spread too thin. I opened up this discussion with an idea I had, I don't see the problem.

44 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

And every time someone responds to you with any logic you just change the subject and say "ya but" and then bring up some other hypocritical point.

I admit I'm not the most coherent debater, I've never claimed to be. Though if I miss a point that someone really wants answered, they're welcome to remind me and I'll address it.

45 minutes ago, Manual Labour said:

I seriously don't know what you want or why because when I read all your posts and look at the big picture there is nothing cohesive.

I'll try to be more coherent in future, I type the way my mind thinks which happens to be all over the place. English was never my best subject, I was always much better at the sciences and math. If there is anything you or anyone else would like further clarification on, I won't take offense if they ask me to further explain.

48 minutes ago, Wade said:

Firstly, I don't have a main character,** in the past week I had just over 10 50's** denied and during that process of going over each character and what I learnt from each one, I identified an issue that over them I had a decent amount of rp points that were essentially worthless because they're spread too thin.

That right there is your problem.  You're not actually making characters, you're making ranking machines (even if they have a fancy description).

Also... do you really mean to say they were all denied?  As in, the IMMs had to deny the characters?  Or do you mean that you deleted them after spending a few hours at 50 per character?

I asked for them to be denied. I didn't save scoresheets, but quite a few of them had over 100 hours. 

I happen to enjoy leveling and pve content quite a lot, the by product is I tend to have lots of 50s. It's a playstyle that isn't rewarded but its a playstyle I enjoy.

It also happens to be a disadvantageous way to play, which is why I'm in limbo about if I actually want to play or not. I play to have fun, but if I'm forced to play a certain way I don't find fun then why should I play?

Instead of keeping it to myself, I opened this discussion to see if perhaps other people have thoughts on it.

22 minutes ago, Wade said:

It also happens to be a disadvantageous way to play

That depends on your goal.  If all you care about is leveling and killing mobs, then how does the inability to consolidate RP points hinder the ability to do this?  If your goal instead is to develop well RPed characters, then yes, you're going about it in literally the worst possible way by not developing them over time, and that's entirely on you for playing as you do.  If your goal is to develop strong PK characters, again, you're going about it in one of the worst possible ways, as you're not sticking with any characters long enough to learn and test strategies and various equipment builds against various opponents, and again, it's entirely on you for playing as you do.

It sounds like what you want is to play Diablo while RPing.  FL is never going to be that.  You can do that within FL, just chat with people and go on eq hunts and make a new character every few days, but you can't expect that to bring you the long-term rewards that consistent RP/PK development over a long-lived character will.

29 minutes ago, Wade said:

I asked for them to be denied. I didn't save scoresheets, but quite a few of them had over 100 hours. 

I happen to enjoy leveling and pve content quite a lot, the by product is I tend to have lots of 50s. It's a playstyle that isn't rewarded but its a playstyle I enjoy.

It also happens to be a disadvantageous way to play, which is why I'm in limbo about if I actually want to play or not. I play to have fun, but if I'm forced to play a certain way I don't find fun then why should I play?

Instead of keeping it to myself, I opened this discussion to see if perhaps other people have thoughts on it.

You should make a Merchant :P

Or a Herald. If you like PvE a Herald is the way to go. Was some of the most fun I ever had here.

edit: and I agree with Pali. Based on what you say your goals are for playing this game, why would you even care about RP points at all?

He cares because he is affected by the RP points and his particular playstyle, not unlike my own, makes them harder to heap into large piles.

The edges are cool.

The equipment is cool.

@WadeDo yourself a favor. Roll a Herald, not some flower sniffing, tea chugging, tree hugging hippy Herald, but an inquisitive take no crap I am going to know everything there is to know about Aabahran Herald. I think you would be richly rewarded. Side note, neutral Heralds go on a lot of trips, and I know you love to travel.