Last night I was brainstorming with a few friends of mine, both of whom used to tabletop D&D with me as well as play EQ back in '99 to '01. I told them about the idea of setting up a private EQ server purely for running a small role-playing server to get our old gaming group going (we know live throughout the country), and they were pretty stoked about the idea. We chatted for a while and came up with a preliminary list of how we would modify "Live" EQ to work well for a party of 6 full-time players and a GM. Here is what we came up with. Keep in mind, the server will ONLY be up for the private weekly gaming sessions (2-4 hours typically), and the party will always be grouped while going out on their "adventures".
1) kill a name mob and its' dead. forever.
2) loot tables for named mobs are updated so it drops everything (or the best items where there are too many). No more need to "camp" a mob for items.
3) all placeholders for named mobs will never pop; the named will always spawn instead. In the case where one named mob is a placeholder for another, the position of one will be modified and both will spawn simultaneously side-by-side.
4) all dungeon zones are permanently instanced. Kill a mob in a dungeon (named or not), and it's dead forever. The corpse will remain for that session (even if looted ideally), but will be gone in future sessions.
5) mob corpse decay time reset to 24 hours or so
6) mob respawn rate set to 24 hours or so
7) when a session is over (2-4 hours), mobs that were killed are deleted from the database so server reset will not respawn them. If this could be automated that would be huge.
voice chat is handled outside the game and used for in-character discussions among the party
9) all out of character discussions must be done with /ooc
10) /petition used for players to have private discussion with GM
11) for players that can't commit to playing every week, a pool of mercenary characters will be available to choose from. This way if a certain key player class doesn't show for a given session (Cleric?), then somebody can always play a mercenary cleric-for-hire. Alternatively, on the rare occasion that > 6 players show up, some can play mercenaries which will adventure outside the group (thus no xp...unless they KS
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12) I haven't decided if it will be pvp or not, but it really doesn't matter as the players all know each other and work together well, PKing will be a non issue. I've never played PvP, but I assume that when you are grouped AoE spells don't hurt group members. If they do, this would probably be a regular non-PvP server.
13) each "adventure" spanning anywhere from 1 to 4 sessions will result in a variable exp awarid given directly by GM to players depending on their relative success at achieving objective as well as quality of role-playing. This reward will probably represen 30%-50% of overall advancement rate and will counteract the fact that indoor dungeons are not re-huntable.
14) NO TRADE flag removed from every item
15) LORE removed from every item
16) Quest / Tradeskill flag removed from every item
17) for important "adventure" items the item lore will be updated to increase usefulness of Identify.
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spawning of unnamed mobs in outdoor zones will be unaffected, other than their corpses will remain thorughout the session (ie server restart).
19) dead = dead, until resurrected by player or npc (gm). When a player dies, he'll simply log out. He's either done for that session, or can play a mercenary (ir available and needed), or can choose from several pre-rolled level-appropriate avatars that GM has available.
I haven't looked at the EQ Emu database in detail yet, but I think some of the above is going to be fairly trivial (I'm a SQL guru), whereas other stuff might be a pain. In particular, I think a lot of the mob state about what is alive and dead is totally within the server instance, and therefore updating the database so that the named or dungeon mob never respawns is going to be a PITA. I'll either have to manage it manually, or will probably have to do some significant server coding to make it happen. If anybody knows for sure either way please confirm.
Has anybody done anything like this? I want to build this in a way that is reusalbe by the community. For example, wherever possible I'll write SQL scripts which work directly against the PEQ database to change the initial state of objects, mobs, etc. That way if I grab an updated db, I can simply re-run the scripts to get (mostly) back up to date. Of course, this means I'll have to keep a "deleted" list of dead mob's in order to re-sync at a later date, but assuming I have to do this manually anyway then I'll just write the scripts to begin with after each session and can re-run them as needed in the future starting with a "clean" PEQ db.
I want to keep server code changes to a minimum, ideally none at all. Does anybody know if any of the items I've listed above would require server changes, or if it could all be tweaked from the db? Like I said I'm no PEQ expert yet, but I know my way around databases quite well.
I don't mind making server code changes if necessary, but if I can keep everything isolated to the database I think it will be easier for others to "play around" with running a server like this. I'd also like to grab server enhancements from the community w/o worrying about having to merge in my customizations.
Anybody have any thoughts on these ideas, or perhaps some others to kick around?
Thanks,
- Rhino
kicking a private RP server idea around
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