Genesis Forums

Is there a game or Genesis community benefit from the current system that makes herbing almost exclusively a solo and scripted activity?

It seems to me that there should be a way to improve foraging to support social, team-based gathering for fun, profit and experience, without requiring updating existing values in herb rooms.

At it's most basic, simply removing the stops on talking and other character interactions would be a start, but I think I'd like to see more sweeping changes, perhaps:

• One command, perhaps "forage [herb name(s)] [herb description(s)]" to clear a room
• Alter the limits, such that more general searches tend to result in more herbs but take longer.
• More skillful herbalists should tend to find each herb more quickly, find more herbs, harvest more herbs successfully and determine they have cleared a room more quickly than less skillful herbalists
• Add the ability for teammates to "assist" in foraging, similar to assisting in combat.
• Assistance should always decrease the time required to complete the search, with more skilled help yielding better results.
• Above a certain minimum herbalism level, assistance should never decrease the number of herbs found and successfully harvested.
• You should not be able to search for a herb by name unless you have high enough herbalism to routinely identify it, but assisting in a search should not require additional syntax.
• More skillful foraging should result in a quicker refresh, while more oafish gathering should slow a reset

I like it! Making activities like herbing a social activity would be great. Actually, making even combat a social activity would be great. The problem is designing the right interaction that can be created so that people aren't bored to death and just trigger the whole thing. Herbing is inherently a very repetitive task, even more repetitive than combat.

What's wrong with triggering? It should be ok if the character has the skill and the person is sitting at the computer.

-B

bromen wrote:What's wrong with triggering? It should be ok if the character has the skill and the person is sitting at the computer.

-B

I don't think he means scripting, I think he means triggers to fire specials, etc. of course there is nothing wrong with this. But it is boring as all hell. I've had "see no fights" on since it was made, and I can't remember the last time I actually actively read every line in combat.

I actually love having company along to gather herbs the one thing I wish I could do is simply speak to those traveling with me. Maybe there could be a team speak that works even during herbing. It could be like whisper to team and only be heard by them. In addition it would be nice to be able to show one herb while searching for the next, but again this might somehow be manipulated using a team activity. Being able to speak and show while herbing also helps in a rp sense of teaching young ones about herbs needed by a specific guild or useful to everyone etc.

end of two cents