Daily Local Reports

[anoobowner]

I apologize in advance if this has been suggested before and shot down.

Expanded Daily Locale Roleplay Reports:

Summary:

In the manner of a Lord's Regional Report, I believe a shorter similar daily report containing minor details about the region a character is currently in or traveling through would enrich Battlemasteria and add both roleplay opportunities and flavor to the events therein.

Details:

Specifically, I believe events that ARE NOT important in mechanical terms ought to be reported so as to add a dimension of 'the world exists beyond the features the players touch'.

Events that could be present in my interpretation: Overall events such as the weather, the phase of the moon, farm descriptions not pertaining to bushels harvested that day, whether a peasant market is being held that day, church being held that day etc.

Events that DO NOT fit in my interpretation: Battle reports, peasants complaining about taxes, anything your strange uncle who hangs out with rebels would tell you, monster presence, anything that would be in a Regional Report, anything that only reports an economic.

The primary emphasis would be to have a pseudo-random extended dictionary of potential events or situations that are indexed on a daily basis. This is a super rough idea of what such a report could look like:

Local Report for Laraibina

• Overcast skies cause sporadic rains to fall.
• There is a new moon in the sky.
• There are many people traveling on the roads today.
• The local sheriff is hosting an archery tournament for the peasants.
• Many houses lay derelict due to a small population.
• Some small distance away from the road, a large patch of burned trees scars the landscape.

If implemented in a way that such events are not 'hard coded', expansion of this system could be relatively easy. Categorically, purely local events ought to be linked to their region type while global things such as the phase of the moon ought to work similar to the season's ticker. Weather could be thought of in larger bunches, such as rain could descent an entire part of the continent. Perhaps the northern and southern parts of the world are more prone to snow, hale, and rain than equatorial continents? Maybe it always is cold in Beluaterra?

Benefits:

1. A report like this would be sent to all players. This could especially enhance the experience for newer players with less to do and people who like to roleplay.

2. This would make Battlemasteria feel more alive and real. In my experiences, players tend to be somewhat selfish when it comes to what they roleplay about. This would be the Battlemaster equivalent of public highways or utilities: the community and developers would contribute to the roleplaying and believability of the world in places where it is not exciting for players to do so.

Possible Exploits:

In once sense there are no exploits, but there are certainly a few issues to contend with in this feature request.

1. The elements of the Local Report ought not to interfere with events players are better off roleplaying. For example, a note that is specific about a religion's daily rituals or practices ought to be avoided. However, if the region has a place of worship a note about peasants in attendance or the smell of a free loaf of bread is acceptable because it is a universal feeling or experience.

2. I naively assume implementing it would not be difficult in technical terms because it is only a report, but this would be extremely demanding on the coders in terms of getting a large enough library of possible events to where the report doesn't just seem like a stagnant random set of 3 things with 3 possible outcomes. Also, if any report is dependent on the information of a region (as in a badlands would have fundamentally different things happen in it than a city as is true in real life) nasty conceptual complexities would have to be sorted.

3. "Local Report" is a bad name for this thing, but I can't think of another at the moment. Someone would need to think of another.

4. Actually gathering all of the possible report types would require a lot of suggestion and vote from the community and creative thought from the developers. Everyone here is a volunteer of this wonderful game, and coming up with a resource bank of events is conceptually challenging for anybody.

Thank you for reading!  :)

[Chenier]

Only if we can check this off. We get plenty of uninteresting reports already, and I'd rather have as few of them as possible to be able to focus on player-written ones or important game-generated ones.

[anoobowner]

I agree with your sentiment. I believe however there is a space between uninteresting to a player and impractical for a player to out of the their way to roleplay that the game could be written to fill. Whether something like this would be interesting or not would depend entirely on the creativity of ourselves and the developers in this matter.

[Indirik]

It's ... an interesting idea. Could provide some RP fodder, perhaps especially for advies. Doubt there would ever be dev time devoted to this, though.

Might be interesting, though, if you came up with a list of things you thought could be part of this, and add them somehow to the RP guidelines sections of the wiki. Some people may want to use them to help generate ideas for their RPs.