V6 Player Wishlist.

[Kakirot83]

You know off of the above (and perhaps much less thought out), you might consider an action to actually gain the attention of Masters for Master skills. I'm not saying something you know will definately work, and perhaps you guys are retooling it to make it less cryptic, but perhaps an 'out' of sorts for those, who just can't figure it out.

It could be something costly (maybe it's your entire turn, no other actions), but off it it, there's comes a small, perhaps slim-to-none chance, of your character in some sort of personal training, meditation, that for whatever reason, attracts the attention of a Master (hell you could make it the right one, or the wrong one), and perhaps instead of them just training them, perhaps they might 'guide' them on the right path to be eligible to get that skill.

It might seem like something of an easy go (I'm sure people migth start with this, rather then break the 'code'), but on the flip side, it might be much more time consuming and sacrifice personal growth for sometime, to then at least know the magical green path that guides you to that skill you want oh so much, or at the very least, perhaps you, and you alone learn the path to a different skill, and perhaps knowledge is power too.

Just some food for thought.

[Xeniphon]

I have a wish, though it will seem very out of place to most considering I have spent a lot of time eliminating spies from discovering important information...

I would like to see Inner Circles removed.

The first reason is that I saw in several kingdoms, most especially Yun Nan, last version how Inner Circles can form something of an elitist cast within a kingdom. I noticed that while it happened differently in different kingdoms only the few within the inner circle were given the option to really be involved in their kingdom. While being an Inner Circle person was a great reward/compliment enough of those people tended to pay much less attention tot he rest of the kingdom. This created a small group of players that controlled everything while the majority of players were kept in the dark (allowing their potential skills to go unnoticed most often). It also formed cliques that were nearly impossible to break into for even me, much less a newer player... The one thing that allowed many new players during V3 to gain experiance and become not only experianced but downright skilled players was the open nature of PHs and the envirament of the experianced players listen to/teaching the newer ones. Ren Zhe and Liu Sun were both good examples of this, they eventualy became highly relied on staff because of the exeriance of this type.

The second is the fact that, quite simply, Inner Circles are no more secure than PHs if someone wants to get information from one... During V5 I had spies or informants (yes there is a difference, mainly in the type/amount of information given) in 8 kingdom Inner Cicles at verious points in the game (not all at once), not counting those I had personal access to during the duration of the game. I know that a number of other people had at least 1-2 infiltrated and possibly more. To be perfectly blunt the only difference between spying on a PH and spying on an IC is in the degree of planning and the amount of patience a player is willing to invest.

The third reason is that while KT information can be useful to an enemy it is also entirely possible to fool an enemy more easily with it so long as you assume he/she has it. The real benifit to an IC is being able to have a place to talk tactics... However no kingdom I was a part of, even with my detirmined insistance, ever really did more than the bare minimum of tactical discussion in the IC (it all took place on AIM, IRC, and so forth just as it had in V3). The major aspects of the ICs, as far as I could see, were A) strategic discussion and B) the IC OOC thread where the "in the know" clique would discuss things away from most players. Truely only the KT information was the only thing that really couldn't have been dealt with in a PH with a minimal amount of extra risk of discovery, after all if you don't have "Inner Circle" people who make all the decissions how would an enemy know what strategy proposed by what person would be used even if they had complete access to the suggestions? All it would require would be a minimal amount of extra work to not openly state intended actions in the PH while still allowing the rest of the players full cooperation.

While I origonally aproved of the IC when it came out the events of the past version have led me to change my mind. Particularly with the decrease in active players since V3 we need to encourage the new players to get involved whenever and however reasonable.

[Tarrot]

I will say that debates on tactical decisions did go on in the Pei Chanti battle, such as who to support or go against, did go in the IC there and in general weren't handled on AIM/IRC, although actual battle discussion was there when it happened (I just fielded ideas and outputted the tactics). I don't really care one way or another on it, I can see and agree with arguments for/against the IC.

[Sun Tang]

Xeni to practice brevity. Kk thanks. This should be put in the game rules section.

[Lee]

Been going through the rules here and I have a suggestion.

I suggest that in V6 there should be no penalty for character death/retirement.

Dead or retired characters will already lose all their gold and items and extra stats gained from PT and KT so that's a big penalty for players to endure already. Inflicting penalty for a 2nd character only lowers the player's interest and reduced the sim's replay value.

And I could be wrong but I remembered that revenge characters were not allowed in the past versions. I think it should be allowed, to an extent. It's fun. Ling Tong did try to kill Gan Ning to avenge the death of his father Ling Cao and an enraged Liu Bei did attack Wu to avenge his brothers.

[materazzi15]

I second Lee's motion, character penalties, for death especially, seem rather excessive when one considers they are coupled with loss of gold and a previously beloved character who more often than not had had time and effort invested into a backstory, PT & KT participation and so on and so forth.

I cant's put forward my suggestion for V6 because I don't understand why it is implemented in the first place so instead I will pose a question. Why should characters with a high Politics statistic be granted more AP than a character with say, a high Charisma statistic? What is it about that particular statistic that grants the player either more or less AP per PT? It seems rather unfair and to me anyways, unrealistic? You can't possibly say that a politician would have more time on his hand's to study than a diplomat or a strategist, so why is that reflected in the mechanics of the PT? I strongly advocate that it should not and all character builds should have a set amount of base AP per turn. If this is supplemented by the Free Officer bonus or skills that is fair enough but as far as base AP goes, no build should have more than the other, from my point of view it seems blatantly biased but if someone knows some mechanical reason why they have to allow Politics based characters extra AP I would love to hear it. With the information I have however, scrap this part of PT's or at the very least try and implement a measure where the calculator takes into consideration each characters top stat instead of the Politics statistic. That way players could have near similar AP levels as opposed to Politicians having 30/40AP extra....

[Tarrot]

Been going through the rules here and I have a suggestion.

I suggest that in V6 there should be no penalty for character death/retirement.

Dead or retired characters will already lose all their gold and items and extra stats gained from PT and KT so that's a big penalty for players to endure already. Inflicting penalty for a 2nd character only lowers the player's interest and reduced the sim's replay value.

And I could be wrong but I remembered that revenge characters were not allowed in the past versions. I think it should be allowed, to an extent. It's fun. Ling Tong did try to kill Gan Ning to avenge the death of his father Ling Cao and an enraged Liu Bei did attack Wu to avenge his brothers.

There's various reasons that the no penalty rerolls aren't allowed. Revenge characters in particular are extremely petty, and generally only allowed if they've been RP'd previously (ie: Unless you RP'd having a son, you couldn't reroll, and then have said son want to kill whoever as the only reason for being around). Additionally, no penalty rerolls tend to encourage more plotting or stupidcides since hey, no penalty, even if assigned later.

Additionally, there was no penalty really in V4, and this lead to a lot of rerolls of people after a few months who, they would reroll to take on positions that their kingdom lacked of, which unfairly benefited the rerollers and those in power. There are other reasons, but in general when there has been a no reroll penalty it has encouraged a large number of rerolls, which the staff doesn't really want, so it's not an option.

As to Politics and AP, two reasons. 1, from a stat point of view, a person with high politics is an efficient person, and can therefore do more in their time period. An example would be Cao Zhi, who was a very charismatic person, but one who was a political louse, and spent more time drinking with his friends and writing poetry than worrying of political affairs. His AP would be low because he was horribly inefficient. Consequently, Pang Tong while lazy at times, had a charisma so bad he was kicked out of Wu and sent to a border town in Shu, yet if he wanted to could do 3 months of work within a day because his base politics was so high. That's the stat reason.

The non stat reason is that it encourages people to actually put points into their pol score. If you're not a recruiter/politican, there's no reason to have any points in your pol score, but by having the AP portion linked to it, it encourages people to work on raising said score, even if there is very little benefit to doing so.

[materazzi15]

As to Politics and AP, two reasons. 1, from a stat point of view, a person with high politics is an efficient person, and can therefore do more in their time period. An example would be Cao Zhi, who was a very charismatic person, but one who was a political louse, and spent more time drinking with his friends and writing poetry than worrying of political affairs. His AP would be low because he was horribly inefficient. Consequently, Pang Tong while lazy at times, had a charisma so bad he was kicked out of Wu and sent to a border town in Shu, yet if he wanted to could do 3 months of work within a day because his base politics was so high. That's the stat reason.

The non stat reason is that it encourages people to actually put points into their pol score. If you're not a recruiter/politican, there's no reason to have any points in your pol score, but by having the AP portion linked to it, it encourages people to work on raising said score, even if there is very little benefit to doing so.

I don't think it's fair to state that a skilled politician nesecerally means they are an efficient character, after all it doesn't say anywhere in the rules that politics is a representation of how efficient someone is. There is no statistic in the rule list that states the level of character efficiency and if there was it would not [or should not] be tied into any of the other statistics, it would have to be a statistic in itself. Whilst I appreciate your example Tarrot, it still does not provide a strong reason why politics based characters should be branded "more efficient" than any other character. Pang Tong's efficiency may have been just as much to do with his high level of intelligence as it was to do with his political acumen.

I do however understand that the staff would like to make all statistics useful and this does encourage people to invest time in putting points into Politics but resorting to such things kills the realism of the game in my opinion. There is no logical reason why, say someone with a high War stat should be expected to have their character study governmental and foreign affairs in a PT, for that is what Politics is, just because the recruiter/politician types want their key statistic to be more important than it actually is. If your character is not a politician he/she shouldnt have to invest time and effort increasing that particular statistic. If the staff want to stick with keeping Politics as the "AP decider" they should change the description of the skill in the rules to state clearly that in addition to setting your characters knowledge of politics, the politics skill also determines your levels of work efficiency. Though I strongly disagree with that, if seasoned members either don't care or don't see the point in changing the PT system, changing the statistic description will outline clearly "Why politics is used to measure AP but I'm not really convinced you know?...."

[Lee]

My wish list is definitely based on a player's side instead of the staff's but I feel that a fair balance of stuff would keep players hooked. While my suggestions could make running the game more difficult, I actually do hope for a balanced game and fairness to both staff and players.

- Based on Tarrot's response it does seem fair that character rerolls should be penalized but characters that were killed (from rp plots or deadly duels or battles or executions) shouldn't be penalized. Losing gold, items, player's time and effort to bring their character to life is already a heavy penalty. Reducing or removing the 'death penalty' would definitely encourage more deaths as players would definitely have more balls to take more risks and die. And we all love deaths. During the RTK era the total deaths were extremely high and many generals would smile at the face of death than be dishonored by the enemy and be kept alive. Keeping rp consideration in mind, I'd rather see a situation whereby a player play true to his character and have his character die for something the character believes in rather than talking bull and lie to save his own skin just so to avoid penalty in death for his next character. Regardless of the reason, I personally feel that removing or reducing the penalty in death will have more benefit than harm.

- And as I have mentioned, revenge characters should be allowed, but to an extent. Revenge characters should be allowed if a player has rp a NPC successor or has sworn an oath of brotherhood or marriage with other characters. And while I do agree that revenge characters usually are extremely petty (look at Liu Bei and the outcome of his vengeance...), but anyways they add the fun in the rp.This is a pbtrpg after all and in both history and novel, vengeance has played a factor in some of the events in RTK.

[Calistoknight]

I'm I too late? I don't know! But I just thought of this so I'll toss it in here anyways. Not sure if someone has mentioned it but..

I'd like to see I-net changed or the formula dumbed down a bit. It was a bit annoying to have to caculate because it was one of the few actions that involved the entire kingdom and it wasn't simply 1 NPC per city and you're gold. You had to calculate it so you reached the number you needed but not too much over or you were potientally wasting an action. And then you have to recaculate everytime you get a watchtower or a new city. I know an answer would be just keep all your eggs in one basket per say and have a dedicated list, but that sometimes wasn't fesible or really has to be implimented day one.

I'd prehaps like to just see a simpler formula, like 50 I-net needed per city, and 1 int = 1 Inet with watchtowers and whatever skill adding just a flat +10 or something. So you can easily go I have 3 cities and just need to get to 150 and caculate it on the fly rather than the whole .8 something divided by cities, making me whip out my caculator every time.

I-net was one of those things that was really tediously annoying to me the most when doing a KT.

[slick]

Lightning Round: When somebody's character dies, they get booted for the rest of the game or at least a few months. That way the game goes quicker and they can't just instantly make a new officer for their kingdom to abuse.

[Shinpusan]

Lightning Round: When somebody's character dies, they get booted for the rest of the game or at least a few months. That way the game goes quicker and they can't just instantly make a new officer for their kingdom to abuse.

Seconded

[Lance of Llanwyln]

Hi all.
Ideally, everyone would approach each character as being completely new, and take said character in a completely different direction than their last character. If they ended up in the same kingdom, it would be entirely coincidental or due to some factor that has nothing to do with the PC having been in that kingdom.
However, this is impossible, because our characters are played(or not played, in my case) by us as we sit behind the soft, comforting glow of our computer screens. And we form OOC relationships with other players. Some good, some bad. We like to play with people who we get along with, and like to avoid playing with people we don't. So, naturally, when the worst in-game happens and our character dies by some fashion or another, most of us would rather stick with a good place. Or, perhaps, scurry off to the winning side.
This is just a fact of the game, for better or worse. So how do you get around it?

That's even harder. You see, other people are aware, to some extent, of other players and their relationships. For example, let us say my best friend in real life is a ruler(not far-fetched! Lucian was and is one of my closest friends, if anyone remembers him) and I bring my character around to your audience hall looking to join your service. Even if my character is entirely unrelated to Lucian's character, this merits suspicion. A ruler aware of my relationship with this other ruler would be leery about letting me be privy to, say...his plan to back-stab Lucian. Even if I am not cooperating with Lucian in any way, ICly or OOCly, I can still be sidelined to some extent because of my pre-existing OOC relationships. Paranoia can be savvy play.

In the end, it's a great idea, but I don't know how you would enforce it in any good and meaningful way.

[Tian Long]

I still advocate no PC kingdoms. It eliminates so many problems that will only serve to slow things down in the long run and which will unleash a tirade of how imbalanced, flawed or easily cheated the system is

[Ru Chi]

Don't know if it's too late, but would love to see: Shu, Wu, & Wei as NPCkingdoms.