As promised, here are some explanations about what some of the subskills do, or are planned to do:
First the
BRAVO group, with
throttle, garotte, mask and
cloak. These are all thief skills, and there is a pretty elaborate quest in Fenizia to learn them.
Throttle and
Garotte are fighting skills of course, enhancements of strangle.
The skills also opens a number of quests in Fenizia, where you can earn tokens by carrying out contracts for the local Orsini family.
Mask hides the name of the user in the long desc, making the room message: 'A masked figure is standing here', instead of the usual 'Playername is standing here'.
- In any action the masked person would show as 'The masked figure' for instance 'The masked figure says,'... or 'The mask figures coughs conspicioualy.'
- In the WHO list the player shows up only as 'A masked figure'.
- The player has to actually WEAR a mask for the skill to work.
- While mask is toggled, this person cannot be attacked unless someone guesses who it is, and types in the right, FULL name. 'Murder Coolguy' would work, but not 'murder co'
- Attacking or being attacked immediately breaks MASK, with the message 'You rip the mask from Playername's face.' or 'Playername sheds the mask with a diabolic laugh.'
Cloak adds HIDING to MASK, so the cloaked person only can be seen sense_life on.
The long desc (to these with sense_life) would say 'A cloaked figure is hiding here.'
(Otherwise it works the same as MASK).
- In the WHO list the player shows up as 'A cloaked figure'.
Shadowcloak adds invisibility, to MASK and CLOAK. People with both sense_life and detect_invis on would see: 'The shadows loom deep in one corner of the room'.
- In the WHO list the player shows up as 'An invisible lurcher'.
The Mask, Cloak and Shadowcloak subskills haven't been implemented yet, mainly due to some concerns that a certain type of player might abuse them.
The
DRAGONMASTER group will be used for transport and questing in the Medieval Dimension.
A Dragonmaster will be carried by dragons to certain remote areas, the Dragonports, avoiding a lot of walking, and will also be able to take passengers, once a certain level of the skill is reached.
Some of the Dragonports are just shortcuts to existing zones, others will lead to minizones, each with a different quest to solve.
Kvetch is working on this subskillgroup, and can probably explain some more.
The
NECROMANCER group, where you summon various undead creatures, is really a variation of the Elementar skills, but with more powerful followers and some suggestive echoes.
The subskills belonging to it are
UnDeadWorship, UnDeadSummon, UnDeadMaster, UnDeadDragon, UnDeadMinorDemon, UnDeadDemon and
UnDeadOverlord.
You need to collect certain items, before you can summon, and then perform the incantation, and there will be a Necromancer's book with information of which items you need for each creature.
The better you get in the skill, the more powerful creatures you can summon.
The drawback is that there is a certain risk of failing with the ceremony, in which case the creature that you just summoned will turn on you and devour you, instead of following you.
A bit of work has been put into this skill, and Alpha helped with the echoes, but it needs some balancing, and also a quest to learn it, which will probably be put in Hades.
The
PERFORMER group, with subskills like
Juggle, Balance, Tumble, Clown, Trapese, Cockfigting etc. will start some minigames, where you either succeed in your performance and get rewarded with gold and exp by players and mobs in the same room, or fail, in which case they will pelt you with rotten tomatoes and you lose exp instead.
Obviously this is mostly for fun and entertainment, but a skilled performer can use it as an alternative to mobgrinding.
Some work has been put into the succeed/fail messages of this skillgroup, but to my knowledge
Juggle is the only one that is already in.
I'd like Thotter to work on the rest, since he is so good at minigames, (but I ain't sure that I can convince him of doing it).
That's all for today, I'll explain more subskills in coming posts.
