novelty/seasonal items

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 5:19 pm

kinda an RFE really, but this is server specific, so I guess it can go here.

the recent party on metalforge was an interesting experiment, more noticable was the creation of special unique items (speshul party hat et al)

Is there a chance that there could be more of these, at different times of the year.

consider if:
anyone who logged in on halloween was able to get a jack o' lantern (a modified lamp, with a unique image)
anyone logging in at christmas got a santa's hat (with unusual, but not neccessarily good, stats)
anyone logging in on feburary 14th being able to get special mail scrolls that were heart shaped, and had x as the sender.
anyone logging in on march 17th got a shamrock (or a pint of guinness?)

ideally these would have unique faces too, so that they would be easily identifiable, and something that players would want to keep, or maybe even trade for large sums of money (at least relative to their value).

Casper · Post by **Casper** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 5:29 pm

A great idea! Additionally this could be automated if the random treasure lists could be made to only have some items come up on specific days.

This could then have impacts for alchemy, where a recipe could say "get a flower gathered on the 2nd friday of a month" or something like that.

If seasonal items were to be included with proper archetypes it would also be possible to use the DM create command to generate them directly.

However all those items would need someone to make the faces for them, so if someone could, it would be very good.

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 6:52 pm

i dont like the second friday thing for alchemy... it would take several months to make anything usefull. and avoid times too, since players are all in different time zones.

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 10:57 pm

but then it might encourage more trading, which would be a good thing.

bencha · Post by **bencha** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 4:39 pm

cavesomething wrote:but then it might encourage more trading, which would be a good thing.

i like your optimism.
rare items wiil be kept by players and only old well know folks will exchange it. and for the run across shop, there's already many reasons to do it.
you can do it, but just for fun or money, not as a requisite for an alchemy recipe or something like that.

woo · Post by **woo** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 12:12 am

I like the idea as well, however my graphical skills are nonexistent.. If we get a graphics person though I'll be willing to work with them and make the archetypes.

techolous · Post by **techolous** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 2:31 am

I, too like the idea (geez, this is getting redundant). Having code to allow shops to have promotions at different times, and NPC messages changing depending on the time/season would be nice.

Edit:
I could probaly impliment this in things that use python scripts (IPO, bank,etc), but i would need arches. (may try making myself)

A few things that have to be decided upon first though:

Should the IPO start selling odd-shaped paper a few days before a special day. Or just on that day only?

What days should this be done on?

Edit2: Made an RFE here

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 2:44 am

well, certainly in the case of NPCs I am inclined to think that any seasonal messages would have to correspond to game time, after all, it is one thing to find a strange red hat, it is another to have NPCs greet players based on holy days in a religion that does not exist in the game world (almost all holidays come from religious sources (christmas, easter, pentecost bank holiday, halloween, yom kippur, etc etc) or historical ones (bastille day, rememberence day, independence day, may day)

Which would suggest that maybe there should be a calender of holidays in the cf world, maybe varying by god and town (on a given day, shops in one town might be shut because they celebrate a holiday, whereas in another town they might be open, except for one shop, that is run by a follower of gaea who also have a holiday on that day).

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:58 am

hrm, this sounds interesting...

god powers increase on their holidays when they are closer to earth, and prayers could do som ebig damage. of course, they would also be rather weak on some days...

this could make magecraft very interesting...

cavesomething · Post by **cavesomething** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 3:29 am

of course the next obvious novelty day candidate would be talk like a pirate day, which is about 2 weeks off.