Wiki Questions

Roven

Hey everyone - I have a couple of questions for you all in relation to certain pages on the ImperianWiki, and any guidance you could give would be most appreciated!

The first thing that I'm trying to find is an official description or overview of what attitudes the three Circles hold. It seems like this kind of info should be easy to find, so I'm probably just failing miserably at searching the help files. I think it would be great to have more fleshed out, player-written summaries of the main conflict narrative that exists in the game, but I'd at least like to start with what the official summaries are. Can anyone point me to a description of Magick, Demonic and Anti-Magick Circles? 

I started writing off-the-cuff descriptions of my understanding of them, trying to expand the Newbie Guide a little, but I quickly realised that those perspectives could be completely wide of the mark. If anyone who's been around for the last 6 or 7 years would like to rewrite and improve them, please feel free to replace them with something better!

The other thing I'm curious about is whether player-written books and articles could (or should) be added to the wiki, provided they are available in a publicly accessible library? I don't want to diminish the usefulness of in-game libraries, particularly profession-specific or personal collections, so perhaps this isn't advisable, but I'd still like to ask. Just as there are player-written guides and summaries on the wiki, many of those beautifully written in-game articles are both informative and comprehensive on particular topics, and it seems to me they would be a brilliant resource for other players to get a sense of the roleplay and some of the perspectives that go along with it, while still offering useful information.

Any thoughts?

Taqja

As a note, I'll keep an eye on this topic and see if I can fill in any of these gaps in the Help File system IG as players provide material.

From rudimentary glancing over the descriptions, nothing seems to jump out as incorrect. I do think it should be noted the Demonic circle is also represented with two faces depending on council (Khandava) or city (Stavenn); I hate to boil anything down to D&D alignments but I see Stavenn as very Lawful. Khandava, on the other hand, has a particular interesting twist since it's essentially a nature council that turned and bit the hand that fed them.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing what people suggest!

Lionas

Taqja said:

Khandava, on the other hand, has a particular interesting twist since it's essentially a nature council that turned and bit the hand that fed them.

Excerpt taken from The Spokesman Review (Mar 6, 1991):

Roven

@Taqja Thanks for explaining Demonic a little further, new Khandava definitely seems a much more interesting org than the one I remember.

So, am I to take it that there really aren't any authoritative descriptions of the three factions and what their goals are? Anti-Magick seems to have a clear driving goal and well-defined boundary about it in terms of the faction narrative, but I'm not as clear on what unites Magick and Demonic (to a lesser extent) in purpose against the other circles, except in a reactive sense.

 I'm also keen to hear what the more experienced players think of it!

Ahkan

I've never really seen any particular org really stick to its story line. You can't even apply D&D labels because the game is so fluid, which is entirely accidental.

Notable examples:

-Game mechanics oddly influence a lot of decisions of the player base. (Can I pull this off because of...)

-Game balance is in a constant state of flux. The population follows this flux. The dominate side always is always the beneficiary of this.

-Antioch right now will do anything to not lose. Demons? Sure. Magick Sure? The goal is winning.

-To be fair, a lot of people don't want to lose. AM just has the population right now to say "aint no rule."

-Demonic and Magick have been tossing the idea around to tag-team Antioch because the bandwagon is stacked. (They probably won't, because the obelisk system is bad/boring/boring/bad)

-As the story line goes, the Gods are dead because Kinsarmar was like "oh, shiny!" (Unfortunate victims of story line, but still awesome.)

-As far as gameplay goes, Celidon would shoot their own mother in the face with a bugged weapon to win at anything to prove they're not snuggly.

-Khandava and Stavenn spear headed the whole "use the hammer against the demons" movement at the end of the last event. Kinsarmar defended the demons. (unfortunately story line)

-When Affliction dominated Imperian, Stavenn went out of it's way to chaotic-evil the game and rub their e-peens in people's faces. Most of those guys are druids/wardancers/outriders now.

One of the huge benefits of the Jackson Pollock nature of Imperian story telling, it leaves a stupid amount of room to fill in the gaps or play the grey. Some days, two super orgs will unite against the third, some days they won't. A lot of it really depends on the emotions of the people playing. A good example is Celidon. If you take Celidon off the bench and say "Go kill Steve." They'll say, ":effort: and decline." If you kill Gurn or Ziat and then ask them...you have an army worthy of mordor. On the flip side, Lionas would stand his ground against any sort of logical argument which would end in a million fights, just so he can say "FOR THE LEECHWOOD." I mean, the catalyst for Khandava's new roleplay is that they couldn't (refused to) (because they're jerks) play well with Kinsarmar and Celidon and we capitalized on six years of bad design to form a second demonic org. Some people call it trolling, others will call it roleplay. Alas, the final group is a crew of people who will do anything just to make other people miserable. I won't cite their names because of the repercussions of butthurt.

Sure, Imperian is a mishmash of interesting personalities that people like Gurn will say is atrociously toxic, but it really makes for a more dynamic environment that you won't find in any of the other games. One day, Bathan will be your buddy and you'll be thunking skulls together. The next day he'll summon a Roman Jelly bean into the world with the sole purpose of destroying your home and killing your whales. Let's call this Imperian's charm.

P.S: Aleutia and I agree, none of you know what Khandava's rp is. :P

*Edit: I flamed Khandava a bit more.

Also: Stavenn's role is kind of D.O.A. right now. A lot of their back story was grounded in the gods. The event killed off their entire back story and accumulated roleplay. No one really had the impetus to keep that going or shift it into anything coherent or interesting. Demonology tried, but man, you can't build an empire on that. I was hoping someone would roll in and necromonger it up.

Taqja

Well, I'll interject a bit in hopes of drumming up some other players' input.

As far as circle distinction, it basically hinges on "do you magick!?!" and "do you demonic?!?!" but there is a lot of room for interpretation. As a mortal people would attempt to explain to me why magick was bad or why demons were fair use despite the clear dangers... and everyone had a lot of their own ideas -- which is awesome, because it's a lot like real life where people come to the same conclusions using a hundred different lines of reasoning. For example, to hear some people say it, anti-magick lost a lot of that 'clear goal' @Roven mentioned when the Gods died, because a chief reason people would pull out for "why magick is bad" was "It's stolen power from the Gods!!!" ("Magick is a crutch" is another thing I heard, but I always felt like that was weak because anything can be a crutch...) And yet there's plenty of reason to believe that magick is unstable.

But even so, there's a lot of rich history for each city/council and why they shun/embrace magick (or the demonic arts). For example, I was shocked when I read HELP FIRSTAGE for the first time. Stavenn was the first city to rise in opposition to Caanae (which, the latter having fallen, leaves Stavenn as the oldest standing city in Aetherius). It makes sense for the most ambitious city to have had demons on their side from the very beginning... but magick wasn't even released on Aetherius until almost 1000 years after "the beginning"; until 1000 in the Age of Awakening (~1900 years after "the beginning") Stavenn actually didn't allow demonic use.

As far as the magick circle goes, Kinsarmar's history is rooted in occupation by Stavenn -- even pre-magick -- so there's a lot of contention there. Celidon's founding was highly interested in avoiding traditional settlement (they left Khandava because it was getting too cramped, basically), and it seems a lot more focused on living peacefully with nature instead of carving a place out in the middle of it (like Kinsarmar). Before Khandava turned demonic, it seemed (to me) a vaguely granola/northern Washington sort of place. Then the Queen's corgi bit the royal hand that fed it. (So most magick orgs hate Khandava the most because of their betrayal of nature and magick.)

Oh, and Antioch -- the bastion of light and purity and all that? -- was actually a movement of pacifists who fled Stavenn in protest of Stavenn's occupation of Kinsarmar. Not in protest of the use of magick or demons. And Ithaqua was started as an offshoot of Khandavans who were shunned for worshiping the demonic goddess Nemesis but still wanted a piece of nature. (And Aetherius gave them nature, alright. A massive frozen forest filled with gosh darn frostwolves.) When Ithaqua transitioned away from allowing demonic worship, they often got in conflict with Antioch because the AM God Illuminas had awesome fights with the AM God Baar. (I mean, really, Who blocks out the sun and stays on good terms with the sun god?)

tl;dr: sometimes it's hard to "cut and dry" the circle goals, everyone hates each other for different reasons!

Sarrius

Antioch was, ideally, a bit like the City of God illustrated by St. Augustine. This also was tinged with a lot of whacked out 'The Gods say this and that. Who are we to argue?', which always blew up in their faces when the gods rarely did anything of note to actually help them out. Of course, now that the gods have died, they have taken less of a 'divine direction' approach. Instead, the way the council has been moving has been this - 'Magick is a powerful force, there is no doubt about that. However, it is too powerful - it is unstable, damaging to reality, and it is difficult to truly control. We have much more safe, efficient sources of power (the constantly regenerating resource of mortal willpower, marvels of Engineering, etc) - what use have we for magick?'

EDIT: In addition, a lot of AM's culture is now splintered across sects and cults. This used to be how it was for orders, but the orders were much more ingrained the society. With the death of gods, the circle pulled together in to something else in each of its orgs, and then didn't let the sects and cults fill the gaps left by the orders. This is good, because cults and sects are such an incredibly mutable and volatile kind of system that making citizenship orgs and guilds hinge on their RP sounds absolutely horrifying. Instead, we use cults and sects to explore ideology instead of using cities or councils or guilds to promote the ideologies of orders.

Enryk

Okay, here's another question. Clearly NPCs have resistances to different damage types, but how does one determine what these resistances are?

DISCERN in Perception doesn't work on mobs, and while it would be very nifty to have certain profession skills that give different pieces of NPC information, I expect this doesn't really exist yet.

The reason I ask is that it will be difficult to put up health values on the wiki if different types of attacks give conflicting results. For example:

H:272 M:352 <eb> say rubait spider

You say, "Rubait."

The sound of your voice rips into a giant tarantula's organs, causing him to 

double over in pain.

Damage dealt: 23 Remaining: 26.94%

H:272 M:343 <-b> 

You have regained your mental equilibrium.

H:272 M:350 <eb> say rubait spider

You say, "Rubait."

The sound of your voice rips into a giant tarantula's organs, causing him to 

double over in pain.

Damage dealt: 8 Remaining: 0.00%

The final blow proves too much for a giant tarantula.

You have slain a giant tarantula.

You bend down and pick up the corpse of a giant tarantula.

H:272 M:341 <-b>

H:272 M:341 <eb> point firelash at spider

You form a lash of fire, and send it to scorch the flesh of a giant tarantula.

Damage dealt: 31 Remaining: 2.50%

H:272 M:337 <-b> 

You have regained your mental equilibrium.

H:272 M:337 <eb> point firelash at spider

A giant tarantula wounds you with a glancing cut.

Damage Taken: 4 cutting (raw damage: 5)

H:268 M:343 <eb> 

You form a lash of fire, and send it to scorch the flesh of a giant tarantula.

Damage dealt: 1 Remaining: 0.00%

A giant tarantula's body can no longer take the heat, and he expires in agony.

You have slain a giant tarantula.

You bend down and pick up the corpse of a giant tarantula.

H:268 M:332 <-b> 

Lionas

In the examples you showed there, the lower damage was on killing blows. You don't see damage beyond a mob's health.

EDIT: And different attacks do different amounts of damage - not related to resistance, just different base damage.
It's generally a time-to-cast vs damage consideration.

Enryk

I mean that one of them shows a total of 31 health, and the second a total of 32.

Edit: Hmm. Maybe damage is dealt in floating point numbers, and it's a rounding thing?

Sarrius

That is how it works, yes.

Lionas

It's not a float, but when it's displayed to you it is rounded (and a result of the same rounding that makes your health/mana/etc inexact).

It's really an integer division problem.

Jeremy Saunders

Mobs do not have any resistances. Boss mobs do have an all damage resistance, but that is a little different. We also do not do the damage manipulate that we do with the player health/mana, so I am not sure why there is some variance for you. I did not look up the skill.

Lionas

Sometimes mobs of the same type are slightly different level or health, yielding different belief values and different xp, but I doubt that's the case with vermin.

Dicene

If you watch carefully you'll see a lot of little number oddities like that.

Notice that 2.5% of 32 isn't 1, it's 0.8. The rest of the IRE games use raw numbers(or rawer numbers at least) while Imperian divides everything by 11 because it's easier to grasp smaller numbers and it looks better. Assuming I'm rounding right and not bad at mathing, the spider has 349 real health, rubait is doing 255 damage and firelash is doing 340 damage. If those numbers aren't exact, they're close. Would be cool if there was a configuration option to show exact numbers, just for the hell of it.

Lionas

Dicene said:

If you watch carefully you'll see a lot of little number oddities like that.

Notice that 2.5% of 32 isn't 1, it's 0.8. The rest of the IRE games use raw numbers(or rawer numbers at least) while Imperian divides everything by 11 because it's easier to grasp smaller numbers and it looks better. Assuming I'm rounding right and not bad at mathing, the spider has 349 real health, rubait is doing 255 damage and firelash is doing 340 damage. If those numbers aren't exact, they're close. Would be cool if there was a configuration option to show exact numbers, just for the hell of it.

Jeremy said:

We also do not do the damage manipulate that we do with the player health/mana, so I am not sure why there is some variance for you.

Dicene

Don't think that's what he meant by damage manipulating. I took it as him saying resists and things aren't applicable to mobs. If they were dealing with those small numbers instead of the normal raw numbers and dividing by 11 those percentages would have been 25.8% and 3.22% respectively. I can't think of any way of rounding would cause that kind of discrepency. The numbers I worked out get you far closer to the percentages shown of health remaining, so I'm pretty sure you misunderstand his comment. But by all means, if you can show a way using the small numbers to get those percentages, prove me wrong.

Edit: Didn't mean for that to sound so arrogant, but it's hard to be eloquent when writing this over my phone. If I'm wrong, I am really curious what would cause the percentages to be weird and what would cause different max healths for the same creature.

Edit 2: Any other solution would also have to explain how a critical hit on an attack that does x damage can do 2x+1 damage. That suggests that either the base damage is decimal, or that the real damage is being modified and rounded (divided by 11).

Iniar

@Dicene or anyone, should the ability files on the wiki (eg. http://wiki.imperian.com/Predation) contain info about cumulative lessons required/credits required or is that another useless (calculable) datapoint? Or would it be preferable to use either instead of Rank+Percent?

Dicene

Personally, I think just the rank and percent is enough. We could have a single page that has data on learning and a link to a calculator like the one on the Maius website.

Or, you could try both and see which one you think looks better.

Noala

Hello. May I request that someone with the Wyrmriding skill place it up on the Wiki? Im really interested to know what it contains.

Also if anyone else can place some of the other missing skills (Evocation, Naturebinding, Pioneering, Supremacy) It would be swell too . Thank you

Aleutia

@Noala - If it's not posted you can check the skillsets yourself. Just do AB <SKILLNAME> FULL. Once you see a skill you want to read further into, you can view it normally with AB <SKILLNAME> <SKILL>. This works for any skill in the game

Noala

oh. Even if I dont have the skill? O.O

Akumu

Yes. You can even do AB <SKILLNAME> FULL for ANY skillset in the game, not just the ones you know. That goes for AB files as well such as AB <SKILLNAME> <ABILITY>.

Noala

Ah it worked! Thanks.

Oh, they summon an Icewyrm? Strange, I thought for sure it would be an earth-wyrm, since they live out in the dessert and savannahs.

Eusto

Noala said:

Ah it worked! Thanks.

Oh, they summon an Icewyrm? Strange, I thought for sure it would be an earth-wyrm, since they live out in the dessert and savannahs.

Themewise, the Outriders are focused more on the Ithaquan aspect of anti-Magick, which is indeed cold and frosty.

(that and I didn't want to have to reject a bunch of wyrm customisations named Jim)

Noala

Okay so I had some free time and tossed up the Wyrmriding kit on the wiki. It has everything but the ranks and % learned, but I think it is a good bandaid for now ^^.

Iniar

request someone fill Combat Focus bit for this - http://wiki.imperian.com/Renegade. thanks

Labil

It was my fault, when I posted Assassin/Renegage's HELP PROFESSION, I left out by mistake Combat Focus in the Renegade one.

Just copy over Combat Focus from http://wiki.imperian.com/Assassin

Iniar

Need help

http://wiki.imperian.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Svorai&action=edit&redlink=1

Iniar

@Jeremy:

Is there any way we can pull information from the server for this:

http://wiki.imperian.com/Revenants

[GUILD LEADERS]
      Harbinger of the Damned: Raykel
                  Secretaries: Caitryn, Dassiu, and Emileigh
             City Affiliation: Stavenn
            Guild Professions: Deathknight and Diabolist

Iniar

Hi all,

I'm asking a new question, mostly because I'm curious.

Recently, I wrote a little stub/intro for the wiki Summoner page:

The Philosophy of the Summoner

From the notes of the Noctusari, circa 36 AM

The Summoner, is not simply intellectualism, but rather the strenuous enslavement of power. To subjugate hapless beings is one thing, to subjugate that which denies subjugation with every fibre of its existence, and then forcing it to yield its power to your control is another altogether.

As such, the Summoner class is central to the Noctusari. Our newer powers are no stranger to us, for the art of Shamanism was taught to us by Cadmus, the last Shamanic God and Demon Lord, and Insidian's treacherous Hypnosis is an exemplary demonstration of subjugation. Yet, at the end of it all, the Summoner has, and should always remain, the heartbeat of the Noctusari - not for antiquation, not for legacy, but rather because the definition of Power is simply and undeniably Transcendent when you subjugate that which defies subjugation.

Would people be happy to write something like this for the respective class pages? Essentially I want an advert for each class - a little short thing about history/roleplay that can get people -excited- about playing a specific class. Even if you had a quick idea, the impressions you've built about a certain class or the players of that certain class, or the even the manner you think about and act out your character being in, say Predator, that could be handy. We could flesh it out here if necessary.