Olympia clarifications From: skrenta@pbm.com (Rich Skrenta) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 13:24:03 +0000 Veterans vs. Newbies -------------------- I have been asked to publicly comment on whether veterans of Olympia will have an unfair advantage in the launch game, because of knowledge they have acquired from the playtests. Part of the fun of Olympia is exploring the map, skill categories, and other subsystems such as the gates, sea lanes, beast breeding tables, etc. Some of these are all-new for the launch game. The map is completely different, and there are new seeding algorithms for the sublocations and the gates. Knowledge of the map will not carry over. The skill categories, on the other hand, are not changed. Simply renumbering the skills would have little effect. Knowledge of the skill codes themselves doesn't help a player get ahead, since you can't target RESEARCH at a particular skill. Knowledge that a particularly useful skill is in such-and-such category can be useful, however. Scrambling the contents of the categories might help, but it's hard to move "Sailing" to be anywhere except under "Shipcraft" and have it still make sense. So I'm not going to do this. It's hard to strike a good balance between having secret information which is fun to discover during play, and having old players who already have big lists and know everything. I know there are big lists for Legends, Monster Island and Quest maintained by some players. To keep the new-player disadvantage at a minimum, I've put all of the lore sheets for the top-level skill and spell categories into the rules, with the list of known skills within each category. Hopefully this will give newbies a better idea of what each category offers, so they don't have to spend effort learning a category just to find it contains no skills that they're interested in. Some of the playtesters are making available archives of most of the skill lore sheets. While I can't say I'm thrilled to see spoiler lists distributed for my game, it does serve to give those who feel they're at a disadvantage to older players a way to quickly acquire all of this info. Startup clarification --------------------- All new players will be starting in the the Imperial City. I have been asked if multiple games of Olympia will be run. At the moment, I have no plans to run multiple games. Much of the fun comes from having everyone in the world who is playing Olympia be together in the same game universe. -- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@pbm.com> Up