We are not quite ready yet to start accepting actual requests for Dornish characters, but in order to simplify one of the problems, we have decided to see if we can find out how much interest there is in Dornish characters and what sort of family trees players are interested in seeing expanded.
The situation with the family trees is such that we will not be able to make complete family trees for all the Dornish houses. With just 16 known houses, everyone would be far too interconnected for it to be realistic. It would also lead to an awkward situation if GRRM provides more Dornish house names later on, as these would end up too separated from the others. Given this, we have decided to only complete family trees for a selection of the Dornish houses. Character choices will largely be limited to these houses, as it is too awkward to have players play characters from incomplete houses where you may not have the names of your parents or know if you have any siblings or not.
Keeping this in mind, we would like to ask everyone (current players as well as prospective players) the following questions:
1) Are you planning to apply for a Dorne-based character? If so, is it likely to be a Dornish character or a character from elsewhere in Westeros that is there as part of Daeron’s forces? In both cases, it has to be a character that can be based in Sunspear.
2) Is there a character in the family trees already that you are interested in? If so, feel free to name the character, but this is not necessary, and does not constitute a reservation of that character. We may allow for reservations once we’ve seen what sort of interest there is, however.
3) Which Dornish houses would you like to see fleshed out?
4) Do you have any suggestions for specific characters/concepts to add to the houses?
Answer on the forum, via +mail or email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). The current family trees can be found at http://www.westeros.org/BoD/Houses/ and if you could help with descing Dorne (which would greatly speed up when we can open), please see http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showtopic=31570.
The first of the advancement commmands, +xp/practice, has been added to the game. A brief helpfile can be accessed via +HELP XP, and more information can also be found on the help wiki.
For the moment, use this command carefully. It has been tested, but at this stage we cannot be certain that everything works as it should. Make sure to take note of what your XP is before and after you use the command and also what your skills were at before and after. Report any oddities to us.
One area that needs fleshing out in the +help as well as the help wiki is guidelines for how this command (and the ones that will follow it) should be used. The basic idea is that it should be used ICly. If your character has not been doing something to advance a certain skill, then you should not be using the command to practice that skill. You don’t have to actually roleplay training a skill, but training (or at least learning more through using said skill) should be part of what your character does ICly.
If there are any questions at all, let us know.
Another map has been added to the website, this one featuring the grid layout for Sunspear.
Sunspear? Yes, we have decided to move away from our original plan, which was to open Dorne—or Sunspear and the Shadow City, rather—after the end of the Conquest. Instead, it will be opening as soon as we can get everything needed sorted out. We think that offering people a chance to play in an occupied territory, not the least during the upcoming rebellion, might provide some great roleplay opportunities.
When is “as soon as we can”, you might wonder? Well, we have the grid built now, that was the easy part. Next up is descing the grid, and there’s also some code that will need to be tweaked to take into account two areas (most notably, +rumors and Influence). The most difficult part may be fleshing out the Dornish family trees, and right now Balerion has some other things to work on so he will not be able to get to that for a while, most likely.
If there are any questions at all about this, let us know.
Long overdue, maps have finally been added to the website. We had more ambitious plans for the maps, but those proved too difficult to execute, so in order to get something up there we started from scratched and produced new, simpler maps. Some tweaking is still needed on these (the large version is very large, and the smaller a little hard to read), but its something at least. Find them here.
The two primary RP logs from the Dornish Bread Riot have now been posted! You can find them here.
The consent helpfile has been significantly reworked, partially as a result of our decision to remove the Consent, Death, Mature and Plot options from +Prefs. Consent between players is now always more or less full consent, whereas consent between staff and players is more limited. Updated +helpfiles for +prefs will be installed shortly, and the new consent helpfile can be found here.
Make sure to read through and please let us know if there are any questions.
The Idle Timeout has been removed. This means that you can now stay connected for as long as you want.We are experimenting with this to see if players will find this useful or whether it may have a negative effect to have a lot of idle players on.
For those of you who have routers who disconnect you after a short time of inactivity, see HELP IDLE and HELP KEEPALIVE. Do not use a timer to send anything else but IDLE to the game, as that would make you appear active when in fact you are not.
Experience points (XP) have now been retroactively awarded to all current players at a rate of 2 XP per month that their oldest player object has existed. These XP belong to the player pool. This means that once the tools have been coded, players will be able to transfer these between alts. Additional XP for OOCly helping out on the game have not yet been awarded, but we hope to get to that soon.
Furthermore, the cron job has been started that will award the weekly allotment of XP for the character pool. This allotment will happen each Sunday and will only be awarded to those who have connected within the last 7 days counting from the time that the cron runs on Sunday. This allotment will be 1 XP per week except for every 4th week when it will be 2 XP.
Your current XP totals can be seen on your sheet (+cdb/view me/sheet). The first number represents the total current XP and the numbers in the parenthesis represent the character pool and the player pool.
It is now possible to use +cdb/view to view the data stored in the Counter attributes. This data records who played a specific character before and between which dates that they played it. This should make it easier for those interested in previously played characters to find out how much they were in play and when they were last in play.
Logs can now be submitted via a web interface, which can be accessed from the main logs page. To submit logs, you need a login for the site (the same login can be used to contribute to the player wiki), and to get one of those you need to request one from Nymeria (you need to give a login name, password and the email you want to be registered with).
Logs submitted by players will not appear on the page until they have been checked over by Nymeria or Balerion, and to keep this flowing smoothly it is very important that the instructions on the logs page are followed closely.
We have added a new little system to the game, called Tips. Tips is essentially a database of notices about commands, resources and other useful things on or related to the game. Each hour, a random notice is broadcast to anyone who hasn’t turned off the system. The idea is that it will help players (especially new players) learn of these commands and resources since digging through all the helpfiles is perhaps less than fun.
See +HELP +TIPS for the helpfile, which explains how to turn tips on and off, and if you’d like to suggest any tips to be added, use ‘ex #2936/TIPS*’ to see what the existing tips are.
The search code has been tweaked to allow tier as one of the fields that can be searched. However, tier search will only return NPCs, not PCs. This is in line with our policy of not displaying the tier of a PC in the +cdb output. If any unexpected results are produced, let us know.
A new type of characters will be added: Cameo characters. These will be fully CGed characters, primarily of tier V, that prospective players (inexperienced and experienced alike) can use to sample the game with. We hope that this will provide a way of testing the game for players who don’t want to invest the time and effort in CGing a character before they know if they’ll like it.
In order to build up a small selection of Cameo characters, we will need some help, both with concept suggestions and CGing. If you are interested, let us know. Keep in mind that these concepts should be for characters that can interact with the majority of the playerbase (that is, with noble characters) and they should ideally be characters that are in King’s Landing more or less permanently so that players can easily slip in and out of these roles. The idea is that players should stay in these roles for a very limited time period, perhaps a month or two at most.
A new set of commands have been added, to allow players to vote for the NPCs they most want to see in play. Please make sure to make use of this and to point the command out to players looking for suggestions. For more details, see +HELP CDB WANTED.
We have decided to go ahead and allow alts with certain restrictions. Specifically, alts will be available to current players of Dornish hostages or to players of other characters who wish to play a Dornish hostage. Players will only be allowed one character with a tier higher than IV (to see if any such slots are currently available, see +cdb/quota) and to qualify for a Dornish hostage you need to either have 1 year of prior MU*ing experience or 3 months of regular activity here on Blood of Dragons. You also need to have read all the published books.
Players may start requesting these characters right off, though actually processing the requests may take us a little while since we need add in some more alt-checks in various place. Finally, we will note that the policy we have decided on is that alt information will be publicly available via +finger.