Quest Digest 9/2/95, Part1 From: ">>-Josh->" <J.P.Gallagher@durham.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 09 Feb 1995 18:50:29 +0000 ____________________________________________________________________ | | | THE QUEST DIGEST | | The forum for the E-mailing Quest-players | | Compiled by Josh Gallagher: J.P.Gallagher@durham.ac.uk | | Date: 9 February 1995 | |____________________________________________________________________| o This is not an automatically generated compilation, so if all contributions could be sent to me in a seperate e-mail with paragraphs initialled, I would appreciate it a lot. o Please do not use this list for your own purposes; people do not appreciate thousands of pieces of mail arriving a day! o If you ever want taking off the list, just say, and I will be happy to do so. I don't want telling off for any nuisance mail! o All material here is the exclusive property of the author and may not be used elsewhere without their permission. JPG> Hello folks, and welcome to another digest. A special welcome to the 6 new people to the list. I hope these addresses don't bounce... some have in the past, and I have been unable to get a working address for these people. If you are one of these people reading the digest in rec.games.pbm, then please contact me again. JPG> Please try to cut down on the quoting; the digests are long enough as it is! And thank you everyone for intialising the paragraphs too. JPG> A final request; please do not use Steven Fairbrothers e-mail address for questions. It's nice to have him on the list, but he does have to pay for all the e-mail he reads. Any questions you have could be e-mailed to me, but you would be more likely to get an answer if you snail mailed KJC. JPG> I will try and get the digests out more often... please excuse the work-imposed delay at the moment. I will at least keep a minimum frequency of twice a week. JPG> Without further ado, on with the messages! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 14:30:52 +0000 (GMT) From: The Hamster <godfrey2@coventry.ac.uk> Quest Helpline service. This helpline is chaired a by a panel of experienced Quest players, who will be available to answer any queries or solve any problems to do with Quest. Send e-mail to <godfrey2@cov.ac.uk> and give "Quest help" as the subject line. Contact me if you want to join the panel. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: DEAN P R SHEARS <eeshears@swansea.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 10:30:37 GMT0BST DS>I would just like a quick say about hit'n'run tactics and stealing in towns. DS>Since none of us really roleplay our teams (elves, humans and dwarves all hate halfbloods yet most of us choose them as thieves) why do you persist in thinking that fights should be changed to suit teams full of fighters. DS>In manny D&D campaigns, the final scene is the battle with the all powerful sorcerer which parties of 7 or 8 can often lose. In quest it is far easier to kill the magi than in other games. And besides the fact, have any of you ever cast a death spell??? They rarely work at all!!! And on top of that, it costs thousands of gold pieces to get a mage capable of even the lowliest death spell. If groups are willing to spent there gold on their magi then how would powerful teams by compensated when their magi were reduced to conjurers?? DS>And stealing in towns isn't so bad either. By buying sleep for the party, you avoid having any spells cast at you and all attempted thefts (except by KJC thieves) fail automatically. In a real world teams could easily walking into a sleeping eenemies encampment and slaughter them while they sleep -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Ewan Jones" <c1ej@dmu.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 06 Feb 1995 13:11:38 GMT EJ Has anyone started an official alliance yet ? EJ If anyone knows Leeds well could you tell me if there is an abundence of b&b places there (i.e for the Leeds pubmeet), anyone else going by the way? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bensey <9365040@mull.sms.ed.ac.uk> To: ">>-Josh->" <J.P.Gallagher@dur.ac.uk> > DT> In response to Neil Benson's roleplaying ideas last time, and no I > can't be bothered quoting: > > DT> Yes, I would like to see more roleplaying, yes I would like to see the > newsletter jam packed with character oriented stuff rather than player > oriented stuff. In the ideal world there would be so much in the > newsletters that they'd have to be published every three or four game > weeks....(sorry Bill!)....BUT I think Neil's suggestions go too far in > defining power structures and Kharne-wide politics. Many players just do > not see Kharne in the same way as Neil does; I for one see the place as > much less organised than this, with any political power having a maximum > range of an arrow's flight from a city's walls. Except come to think of it, > cities are too anarchic for even this... NB> I considered this and I recognise the point you are making. I would even go so far as to say I agree with you. But I thought this was one of the easiest ways to include evrybody in the atmosphere quite easily. > DT> For roleplaying to be at all successful, it has to be acceptable to ALL > the players in a given game. Only if ALL the players in game 5 were to go > along with Neil's sugestions would they work - I for would be willing, but > I think it would be too hard to organise. NB> It doesn't take all the players to believe in it. Only a few who are willing to play the characters are needed. If other players don't like the idea, they can ignore it. As long as it didn't hog the newsletter then it shouldn't bother them, after all, it doesn't directly affect their game. >The answer, of course lies with > the existing alliances, and with any emergent official alliances. NB> There are NONE in game five. Most people start an alliance to run as an advocate to someone else's, so we have a vicious circle. Only a pure role-playing society would work, and that looks like what I'll have to do. >My group > is not an alliance member yet, so I don't know how much communication and > role-playing goes on within alliances, but there isn't enough of it in the > game newsletters. What communication there is in the newsletter tends to > revolve around inter party combat; surely we can do better than this? Let's > see more letters written by characters than by their players... NB> Foot stomping response!!> ================================================== > SA> I'm not sure, is to recruit > the fighter, cast some strength miracles to boost up the skills, and > then buy the chosen weapon. The fighter would now get his raised skill > as weaponskill. As I said, this might have been a bug, and it > might be removed, but it's worth a try. NB> I'm not revealing the bugs I found. You never know who is listening... 8-) > SA> About the Twilight of the Gods destruction... >>[...details cut...] NB> I've wiped out five out of six characters, just couldn't get the pesky elf mage to stand still long enough. But I must admit I've had all 15 of my characters killed. Anyone else seen that lovely obituary at the top of their last turnsheet? And before you all ask, all fifteen characters were killed when I left my group in a warzone for 18months without playing. But worse than this was the fate of Shadow Dancers in game 5. Fifteen suits of +3 armour Disintegrated and 22000 gold stolen in one turn. Not bad for a day's work, even if I do say so myself. > SA> The highest paid temple quest I have seen was 1260 gold/character > for killing a valkyrie... NB> Lowest I've seen is 0 gold for a bunch of gnolls - yup, zero! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stefan Andersson <t94stean@und.ida.liu.se> Date: Mon, 6 Feb 95 17:48:51 +0100 For inclusion in the Digest (from one who have read some without having access to the net): I got a big file from Stefan which turned out to contain a hundred pages of Quest Digest. Among the numerous subjects discussed there I noticed something about a mapping program that is to be released soon, that uses ASCII characters for map symbols and requires typing a number for entering terrain in a square. Well, pardon me if I'm not impressed :-), but I wrote a mapping program years ago - I can't remember the exact date but it was before the second edition of the rules (you can tell because the program includes terrain types that were later left out) - that uses real symbols both on the screen and on printouts (Yes, I wrote a printing program too - I didn't know it was "supposed to be tricky") ;-) and lets you enter terrain with a single keystroke (once you've positioned the cursor and selected the terrain symbol from a menu at the top of the screen). It can also jump to any given location, and find a named or numbered settlement or the "biggest" (lowest numbered) settlement on the map. It also has a special almost automatic routine for entering roads (which can be done at any time, not necessarily after everything else - or did I misunderstand that comment from whoever it was? [As I said, I've got a hundred pages here...]) and various other features, but I'm not going to quote the whole manual. And that's just the editor. As I just said I have written a printing program too - in fact I wrote three slightly different ones. The "standard" one that comes with the standard distribution is for Epson-compatible printers, but I also wrote two (printing at different scales) for my Canon BJ, and could probably write one for your printer too if you would give me the relevant info. [BTW, does anyone know if there is a "generic" way of printing graphics on the Amiga? That is, send this and that data to the printer driver and it translates it into graphic data for whatever printer is set up.] There are also a couple of small programs for moving and merging maps (The idea is that you keep maps in separate files until they overlap, then merge them after moving one of them around to make it fit. As long as you do it this way it won't be necessary to move blocks around within a file.), one that gives you the big view by drawing a "world map" in colour on the screen, another that gives a more permanent big view by printing a simpli- fied world map on two sheets of paper (showing just water, roads and settlement, and what's mapped and what isn't), and a statistics program that can tell you how much progress you've made on the mapping since the last time you ran it. It stores the data in plain ASCII files as well as printing it out, so I might as well include the latest version here: 2. februar 1995 Open.......... 7194 19.5% 18.0% Fields........ 439 1.2% 1.1% Rough......... 673 1.8% 1.7% Forest........ 2145 5.8% 5.4% Heavy Forest.. 3477 9.4% 8.7% Jungle........ 240 0.7% 0.6% Barren........ 71 0.2% 0.2% Desert........ 381 1.0% 1.0% Mountain...... 860 2.3% 2.2% Hills......... 703 1.9% 1.8% Marsh......... 212 0.6% 0.5% Swamp......... 269 0.7% 0.7% Volcano....... 0 0.0% 0.0% Road.......... 547 1.5% 1.4% Castle........ 0 0.0% 0.0% Ruins......... 0 0.0% 0.0% Village....... 66 0.2% 0.2% Town.......... 41 0.1% 0.1% City.......... 20 0.1% 0.1% Water......... 19462 52.9% 48.7% -------------------------------- TOTAL......... 36800 92.0% ================================ Biggest city is YOORWA (#1) This is the real data from KJC game 6 and yes, you *are* supposed to be impressed! :-) [The date, which is added by the program, is in Norwegian but may be changed easily.] Anyway, the programs are written in Amiga Basic so they're rather slow, but you could always do a couple of turns while the map is loading. (Or have dinner, go to the movies, paint the house... :-)) (NO, it isn't really THAT slow!) And of course being written in Basic SHOULD mean they're easy to convert for other computers. Volunteers? I have recently started writing some programs in AMOS Basic, including a new and better (not to mention faster) editor and a program that converts a selected piece of the map into a text file that can be loaded into a DTP program and printed out as a very neat-looking map with a special font. This is mostly for people who can't get the ordinary printing programs to work, but if you want your maps to look really good... Oh, and if you wonder how much all this is going to cost you, I have re- leased the programs as "Fileware", which means you "pay" for them by sharing your map files with others, preferably including me. (Of course if you like the programs so much you DO want to pay for them don't let me stop you!) Just send a blank disk to me or Stefan, and you're Bob's nephew (or niece). If you own a non-Amiga and want to have a go at the converting, send a blank 3.5" PC-formatted disk (NOT High Density!!) to me and ask for the source code. (Or maybe Stefan can be persuaded to email it...) A final word on mapping: No matter whether you use my program or someone else's or write your own, it would be a very good idea if we all kept your files in the same format. Or at least there should be some way of converting between different formats. This is getting long, so I won't get into the details of my own file format here, but I have written a separate file and sent a copy to Stefan, so if you want a copy just ask him! Ragnar Fyri Idunns vei 15 1370 Asker N O R W A Y ps: Josh, you "sound" so impressed when someone "gets the formatting right" - HOW ABOUT THIS??? ;-) JPG> Well... no initialised paragraphs there! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 06 Feb 1995 18:33:07 GMT From: editor@elbon.demon.co.uk (Paul Noble) >KH> Someone told me that to avoid monsters running away I could cast >Battle Lust on them. Would the same work against a group of mages using PN> I tought of this but I think it's been band as has dispel II in towns >AH> This gave me an idea - how about dropping the magic phase completly >and instead merge it with the melee rounds . So while the fighters are >swinging their axes , mages will fire off spells according to those >listed after their ASL's . This would mean the mages would have to be in >melee for at least one round . Still its not perfect but the basic idea >sounds good to me . PN> it would also introduce the problem of accidentally mashing your own chars when you cast a fire ball into the melee. Toasted buddies! =) >AH> Are you saying a character cannot be killed by Call , but just knocked >down to 1HP ? PN> That exactly what he's saying. I've heard Wraths can kill but I personally don't believe it. >SA> What do I hear...? Groups should be able to become impossible to >attack?!? KJC, get serious, does this really improve the gameplay? PN> This flag to be group invulnerable takes 8 weeks in advance before the group becomes flagged or not. >SA> Will the thief go free as it is today, and the only looser being >the alliance? >If not all the money is payed the same turn they are received, the >local thieves implemented by KJC will rob around 10% of the money PN> These are two points of which I hadn't really thought about, I bet that even though an alliance group can sleep for free then the same group won't come to the defence of the shop if robbed. Perhaps another position needs to be created, that of Defender of Guardian who will always fight a group who fails a robbery against the HQ, also the group thief skill/awareness should be taken into account with the shop defenses. Only the thief and lookout would fight the first round from the robbing team. PN> It just pisses me off these KJC thiefs, you may have the best thief in history but a> you can't stop them and b> you can't even fight them c> they are intangible d> Buying sleep doesn't stop them e> you can't hide your gold, what are they? Thiefs for so long they can smell gold? >SA>He must BUY the weapon, to receive a weapon from a fellow group >member doesn't work. PN> It's worked ok with me handing weapons around, actually the one time it didn't work was when my P got skill in xbows rather than bows, I think I bought the char a weapon but am unsure. SA> About raising dead characters... >I have discussed this subject a bit in Dungeoneer issue 3, but I agree >much with what Neil David Callaway said. It is not the money that is >important in this matter, PN> I think you're forgetting what it was like when you knew little and had barely enough gp for your rations, there can't be a buying order for resurrection it would tip the balance into the older groups favour beyond measure, no matter what the price of such a service it will be too much for a young group, an older group should be prepared to take loses. I know lots of really new groups that have been mashed by a strong group and they have the goal of doing in the older group when they are stronger it won't be very nice if when the younger group finally manage to exact their revenge and top a couple of the enemy chars and low the next turn the said chars are back at full strength. PN> Perhaps if you use a ressurect spell it should be more of a reanimate which would produce a depleted char with less potential and it degrades the longer you keep him. SA> To Phill Coleman: >Too many editors have taken the job because they want a free group, >and the game has suffered a lot because the editor doesn't do what >he should - editing a regular and entertaining newsletter! PN> Yep if you become editor, you must do it for the game and your editorial enjoyment and not for personal gain. >and didn't even played in the game he was editing the newsletter for. PN> I don't agree here, I think it is best not to have a group in the editorial game, especially if the editor plays in the game previously, I deliberately play in a different game than G1 as editors are editors they are normally the more actively vocal players, I found almost straight away that I wanted to talk in the Newspaper, just to contribute and be heard, if the editor plays in the game and has an opinion, no matter how small, players of opposite alignment and persuasion will be reluctant to write into the newspaper and people not writing is detrimental to the game. >FET>A nice addition to the chatlist would be, if - when encountering >other parties who have similar words on their chatlist (non hostile >encounters only!) - you could get a message like these: PN> I took over a group and on the chat list was the name of one of the party chars and just before I got the group it had that the char in question was wondering why the group was talking about him, cool! >JPG> Does anyone know whether this list has been mentioned in first class yet? PN> First Class, the fabled magazine covering Quest and other such KJC games, I personally think it's a myth, never to be seen again. All the reports for the games written 6 month ago must be out off date by now. PN> Me and Roj came up with further developments on the aligned city idea. Perhaps when a alliance sets up in a town then the city becomes more evil aligned and the chance of S orders starting fights and certain spells being allowed comes into force. To neutralize this social degrade a good alliance must setup in the same town. PN> As a city becomes evil certain services become rarer and eventually disappear as less NPC's visit and less shops are open, this way the city could end up being a dead end in which only evil groups would dwell and it would cost a bomb to relocate. PN> Obviously the temples of opposite gods would disappear. All it would take is each alliance to have a flag for good, evil and neutral. If a Good alliance took over then less spells would be allowed and S orders would be less chance and fights would be outlawed. This would be difficult but if the thief was caught then the group would be sent to some penal town or village (maybe even to an evil town) where they couldn't get back to the same city straight away, maybe just escorted to beyond the city map by the militia. Neutral would just be like normal. Evil cities should allow you to take on the militia. Maybe the militia could be employed so a certain group/groups would be used to force out thieves. PN> Lars, sorry about the CM's wrong group. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- (JPG> End of part one...) Up