The Adventurer's Hall should not be a "money sink"!

[Regenshire]

I think the reason why they are considering a currency based hiring system is that it is more then just making custom PCs for your party, its also creating extra PCs that you can swap in and out to maximize your advantage. It’s a roster of NPCs that you can create, a virtual stable. Think about a game like Final Fantasy Tactics where you could have 30 NPCs, most of which are sidelined, that you could swap in and out of your party from the Adventuring Hall at any time.

 

There can be huge strategic advantages to doing this if you know what to expect in a certain area. Because of that, it might make sense to have some sort of cost or limiting factor to constantly swapping out characters.

 

I think you should have a few free, very low cost, or quest based slots that you can recruit from the hall, enough to have a single full party of customs, and then maybe start charging a higher fee to recruit more custom characters to add on to your adventuring stable. Don’t penalize a player for having a base party, but still put monetary cost to having 30 options to swap in and out.

Edited October 15, 2012 by Regenshire

[IndiraLightfoot]

Regenshire: That is not a bad idea. It makes too much swapping at least something that the game frown upon and penalize.

And I know OEI wrote "employed" in some sentence there, but I'd much rather have that language removed for an adventurer hub, it really doesn't fit the huge width of RP-scope that comes with the territory of plyaer-made parties in this kind of games.

Edited October 15, 2012 by IndiraLightfoot

[nikolokolus]

In the first place it doesn't sound like you will have a full party at the very start of the game (like Icewind Dale, or Temple of Elemental Evil) so presumably, if you have more than one character in your party it's because you picked up somebody along the way, and aren't just roleplaying two, three, or four characters.

 

Besides, there's a game mechanic in there by requiring a player to spend a little coin in the adventurer's hall. The pacing of the story is probably going to assume the gradual addition of party members, one way to regulate adding custom characters is by putting a monetary value on their services, else you end up creating some artificial reason for why you can't fill every spot on your roster the moment you discover the Hall.

[C2B]

I just love these threads were *It's like this* assumptions are made from some random thing a developer said.

 

I actually do. Since it brings a discussion, even if I vehemently disagree with it like this one.

 

 

@Indira: My point is it doesn't have to be. There are tons of reasons you can still do all the things you apparently want (I want similiar). Just get a little creative with it. Said Adventure Hall can easily be a buisness and the pay you make is for coupeling said adventurers with the adventure party and actual mercenaries that use the hall for jobs, or, or, or, or......................................................................

 

As with everything it depends on the implentation and is NOT a dead end. You just have to get creative with it. If you do, you find solutions.

Edited October 15, 2012 by C2B

[Rabain]

In the first place it doesn't sound like you will have a full party at the very start of the game (like Icewind Dale, or Temple of Elemental Evil) so presumably, if you have more than one character in your party it's because you picked up somebody along the way, and aren't just roleplaying two, three, or four characters.

 

Nobody has said the Adventurers Hall will be accessible immediately either. What if the hall is accessible at exactly the same time you can acquire a 5th party member of the PE npcs?

 

That would be the best system in my opinion because it means players who want a full party of their own don't have to wait any longer than any other player to have a full group.

 

It would be like if the Copper Coronet in BG2 was the equivalent of the Adventurers Hall. By the time you get there you have access to a full party anyway.

 

It's not like this event you witness is going to happen right outside the front door of the Adventurers Hall, otherwise everyone will witness it and not just you.

[Regenshire]

For the first five custom adventures you recuit I would really like to see quests instead of fees.

 

As an example of what one of these quests might look like:

 

You stumble upon the adventure’s Hall for the first time. Everyone is in an uproar over a job that has gone bad, and they offer you a quest to “rescue a member in distress”, an optional side quest. This side quest takes you into a location to rescue an unnamed member of the hall. Fighting your way through house/cave/dungeon/whatever, you come to the cell where the member is kept. Approaching, you here a voice “… Hello… Is someone there?” and immediately go into the adventures character creation screen where you design this new character.

 

If they make 5 such quests, with varied situations, each locked into how many characters you should have at that point in the storyline, then they can bake in some actual roleplay to these characters and make it more interesting.

 

Also, they should tie in a mechanic I would refer to as character swap slots to these quests. So when you complete the first quest you can swap out one character in your party with this custom character (not add on the custom character). So if at that point in the story you have have a party of three, yourself and two story NPCs, you can’t add on a forth, instead you can swap out one slot with either a story NPC or a custom NPC. As you complete each quest you add one slot until you have all five slots free to swap as you see fit.

 

After all five quests are complete the adventure’s hall is back to business as usual and is opened up to create custom characters at your discretion, charging decent sums of money to create more adventures.

[Rabain]

I would prefer if the creation of custom npcs was not tied to any quests or involved any kind of unlocking at all. I'd rather it was just a nice way of adding custom npcs inside the game without all the multiplayer shenanigans we did in BG games to get the same thing.

 

If they want to add other content to Adventurers Hall great, I'd love all the quest stuff. Just don't roadblock party creation with a bunch of hoops I have to jump through.

[ddillon]

I don't have time to write much now, but: Bump. Can we get some developer feedback on this, plz?

 

I did skim the thread, and lots of interesting things have been said. IndiraLightfoot & Rabain: Thank you for taking up the cause. I needed sleep.

[khango]

In the stretch goal thread I expressed a view similar the one in this thread - namely that I wasn't keen on the adventurer's hall as a stretch goal because it seemed to be a rather unclear concept with the possibility of breaking immersion or causing lots of frustration for different types of players depending on how it's implemented.

 

I suggested that a better goal would be an advanced player-character creation and management faculty, like a 'gallery of heroes,' which let you look at your various characters side by side and start games with them as main char + join-able NPCs at known pre-defined locations, such as specific Inns, rather than having some sort of meta in-game thing where you get a (for a bunch of gold) a vaguely random character of a certain class or have to (even worse) roll your party member in-game.

 

With such a system it might also be possible to vary motivations for joining a party, so they could be mercs, or they could have some sort of semi-random story tie in, or they could just have 'childhood friend' cop-out (or maybe even bio-based?) back stories, but whichever might be radio chooseable when configuring your new game.

 

Part of me thinks that that "adventurer's hall" might merely be a code name for 'Copper Coronet,' which wouldn't be so bad, though.

Edited October 16, 2012 by khango

[Gyor]

You should make inns the place to hire (create) companions. Adventurer's Hall feels kinda artificial.

 

I look at the Adventurer's hall as being a cross between an unemployment office and a guild.

 

Also people assume that hiring adventurers will be the only thing you can do in the Adventurer Hall. I suspect they'll be stores, maybe banking services, crafting station, quest givers, healing, info, resting, special previliages and services, pets and so on.

 

Also really whats the difference between a quest to hire someone and a quest to gain the gold to pay for someone?

[IndiraLightfoot]

Ddillon, no problem!

 

I think this thread has gotten the devs attention, I really hope they think all the objections and suggestions here through.

[Monte Carlo]

* sigh *

 

More "this is breaking my immersion" guff.

 

And the dragons, spells and undead don't?

 

It should simply be a party creation tool. Period. Not all of us want to drag NPCs around all of the time. Also there are comparatively few of them. What if the cleric drives me nuts? And I want a new one?

 

How is that breaking your immersion?

 

The clamour for some sort of uniform experience across all players and the intolerance of varying play-styles is getting tired.

[Aedelric]

I think it should cost a reasonable fee, but not be an actual money sink.

 

I am sure most of us do not want to be put in a situation where we have to choose between having the party of our preference, building our stronghold or getting that new weapon we have our eyes on.

 

If it is used as a money sink then we should have a path open to us to obtain additional money repeatedly, say with participation in an arena or gambling.

[Rink]

I would make it like this: when you create your own character, you have the possibilty (with warning or something) to access the adventures hall with a button and just hire other guys for free (so basically the icewinddale-system, you knew that guys before and want to adventure with them), as soon as you are in game there will be consequences if you want to hire guys from the adventurers hall like costs or quests so it doesn't break immersion and people will not just be like dogs that waited for you all their life to let you take them to their death for free.

If people want to break immersion, because they want to rock through the game with powergaming they can be able to, I don't mind. But if I come across the hall in game, then I would like it to fit the game and be logical.