Decisions

We need to come to some sort of decision on what it is we are trying to accomplish in the camp.

When I first made a Drow everyone was yammering about how soon we were going to march on the lost city and how we all needed to go out and train so that we would be ready.

Now when I log in people are trying their utmost to be as dramatic as they can be and yes I get it we are drow but if you look yourself up you will realize that we are smart enough to not crap where we eat.

I cannot tell you how to rp so if chaos and evil is your thing, get after it. But if some of you would like to be smart as well, work together and lets retake the city. If we could all pull together for a short amount of time we can worry about Lolth showing up and commanding us all to kill one another.

Right now we are like children fighting over who gets the last moldy piece of bread.

We fought together tonight and defeated a Dragon. Don't let this be the biggest RP victory we accomplish

Quote :

Right now we are like children fighting over who gets the last moldy piece of bread.

What kind of moldy bread are we talking about here? I like my mold to be blue and spongy.

Quote :

When I first made a Drow everyone was yammering about how soon we were going to march on the lost city and how we all needed to go out and train so that we would be ready.

Now when I log in people are trying their utmost to be as dramatic as they can be and yes I get it we are drow but if you look yourself up you will realize that we are smart enough to not crap where we eat.

I haven't been online in quite awhile but know where this is coming from, at least I think I do. It says a lot that a 'law' had to be enacted with the sole purpose of preventing large scale battles within the encampment's confines. Basically we kill one another a lot, like a lot. I, personally, feel the drow should be less dramatic with their grudges. I feel slow and calculated planning is more their nature than outright murder. It is true that Lolth is a Chaotic Evil goddess, but it's also true that the drow as a race are generally Lawful Evil. However, a good explanation for our openly murderous habits could be because of the nature of our predicament. We are not a town, a community, or anything of that nature, we are a refugee camp that tries to uphold the illusion of proper society. Even if you live in the best tent, you will still be a stone's throw away from a shebali butcher's dwelling and his collection of rothe dung. It's more of a "wild west" or disorderly environment we live in. So, to actually explain my point, the killing and so on has its place. We're Lolthites and by that definition we are extremely self destructive.

please keep up the infighting. It makes Lolth quite happy.

I am just going to say this, I have been working heavily on building a bigger badder more evil(er) UD. However, if players think that it is going to be a quick fix or yammer how soon they will be able to just march back into the city understand there are many things in place, hope this helps:

Castle Maerimydra








Undying Temple








Szith-Morcane

Indeed. I have no Underdark characters really, but look at the City of the Spider Queen book and you will see that reclaiming Maerimydra should be a fantastical and difficult journey.

It means you will have sit in tents longer, but I'd imagine the story would be worth it.

I think that's part of the issue tho, it feels like the storyline to reclaim Maerimydra is only ever circled around, not ever advanced.

EVIL is hard at work to build the areas necessary to advance on it. These things take time you see. That's what it really comes down to.

MustangSVT wrote:

EVIL is hard at work to build the areas necessary to advance on it. These things take time you see. That's what it really comes down to.

Oh indeed, I don't think Belsarius or me are complaining about Evil's work. The UD alone has seen many updates lately. I think it's more a situation where the drow have gotten complacent in their camp, many new players not even having really known that the recovery of the city was a goal.

That my friend is where you have a HUGE rp opportunity

I am hoping the retaking of the city is a HUGE endeavor, and fun. I am enjoying myself down here alot, and hope to meet all those players who have not been on in a while.

Technically speaking, there has been sub-plots in the general direction of the re-capture, be it involve exploring in a new area, or establishing new relations. Would that be an accurate statement DM_AXE? Assuming I'm not way off the mark on this one, I'm pretty sure there has been sub-plots here and there that have the recapture of the city as the long term goal.

Yes, there are subplots as well as DM Incubus and Pegasus have started other avenues. What though I see is an issue is, when players leave the UD. Sometimes that can stop or put things on hold pending on how involved that player was. But for the new players, there is always a way to get you involved.

That is what kinda surprised me that the house mothers where allowed to be players, instead of NPC's ran by DM's.

think of a house = guild that players run

Belsarius wrote:

We need to come to some sort of decision on what it is we are trying to accomplish in the camp.

When I first made a Drow everyone was yammering about how soon we were going to march on the lost city and how we all needed to go out and train so that we would be ready.

Now when I log in people are trying their utmost to be as dramatic as they can be and yes I get it we are drow but if you look yourself up you will realize that we are smart enough to not crap where we eat.

I cannot tell you how to rp so if chaos and evil is your thing, get after it. But if some of you would like to be smart as well, work together and lets retake the city. If we could all pull together for a short amount of time we can worry about Lolth showing up and commanding us all to kill one another.

Right now we are like children fighting over who gets the last moldy piece of bread.

We fought together tonight and defeated a Dragon. Don't let this be the biggest RP victory we accomplish

DAS.

I think there are a lot of people who misunderstand the Drow Consept and roleplay poorly. Drow race have an interesting ability to work together in times of real crisis. Just the foundation of Menzoberranzan is the biggest example of this. We need to take that city it's been too long

One would think Lolth would start to get impatient with her matrons.

farinal wrote:

Belsarius wrote:

We need to come to some sort of decision on what it is we are trying to accomplish in the camp.

When I first made a Drow everyone was yammering about how soon we were going to march on the lost city and how we all needed to go out and train so that we would be ready.

Now when I log in people are trying their utmost to be as dramatic as they can be and yes I get it we are drow but if you look yourself up you will realize that we are smart enough to not crap where we eat.

I cannot tell you how to rp so if chaos and evil is your thing, get after it. But if some of you would like to be smart as well, work together and lets retake the city. If we could all pull together for a short amount of time we can worry about Lolth showing up and commanding us all to kill one another.

Right now we are like children fighting over who gets the last moldy piece of bread.

We fought together tonight and defeated a Dragon. Don't let this be the biggest RP victory we accomplish

DAS.

I think there are a lot of people who misunderstand the Drow Consept and roleplay poorly. Drow race have an interesting ability to work together in times of real crisis. Just the foundation of Menzoberranzan is the biggest example of this. We need to take that city it's been too long

Well hey if you wanna help build it, be my guest.

I'm only talking about RP-wise. I know it is hard and I really appreciate your work. Please take no offense.

Issues as I see them:

1. Camp politics
2. Pivotal UD players leaving or only appearing during events
3. Qu'ellars - In theory I have liked them but since this plays to both point one and two it has made it hard to have any real direction since they are set by the powers in charge
4. No real communications between the Qu'ellars of plot lines or if there is not enough downwards to others.
5. Those that play characters of power (Yath) provide little direction themselves and go to point 2 for clarification. This is my personal feeling and perhaps not true of some of the Yath.. those that choose it for the easy way to power but are unable to live by this simple quote "with great power comes great responsibility"

Now as to the regaining of the city... Holy crap if that is all we have going for us what the heck are we going to do when/if we finally get it. We can barely survive some of the attacks on the camp since we all like to play as individual hero's and think we will single handedly hold the hordes back from killing the Ilythiiri and do you honestly think we can do that on our own the retaking of the city. And for those that have realized this please see point 4. You think because EVIL is hard at work trying to get the city completed for us which is a mamoth amount of work besides the other zones he had created in his free time that we are going to get it as easly as that... we have about 4 different subplots that need to happen that I can recall and I dont seem to see a whole lot of movment on any of them for the most part perhaps this is a point 4 as well.

I get as fustrated with us as much as the next person and I can see the fustration level with others have hit the mark as well but give your heads a shake and look at the players and our lack of teamwork before going eslwhere for why things are the way they are in the UD

I hope I have not offended too many people with this I lump myself in this as well since none of us have been perfect.

Shadow

Hey, it's ok to say "we're not trying hard enough", but truth is, you can't expect players to do something like that on their own. The average player will lose interest if the goal is too hard.
From what you write, one should almost expect players to call an admin and say "yo dawg, we conquered the lost city while you were looking the other way". It doesn't work like that. It's normal that players are disorganized, expecially in NWN2 that doesn't have the guild scene of real mmorpgs.
Instead, if a DM keeps kicking the players in the desired direction (either using the carrot or the club, as appropriate for the characters), things will happen, rest assured of that.

Shadow brings up some very valid points. And to address Ravens points, of course DM assistance is needed. However, when we know a plot is to be continued at a later date, or we have been given a task, we can discuss how it can be accomplished. For instance, some of the drow found an amulet. Now we could have sat around waiting for a DM to tell us what the amulet does, or we could work together and figure out what it might do and who has the amulet currently. We could try to perform experiments on the device with the help of the yath or faern of the camp. This is something Edrik, myself and a few others have been trying to do. If no DM is present we can send them a brief explanation of what we tried to accomplish. The DM can then act upon those results if needed. Another expample, apparently a deal has been struck with the illithid. Who struck the bargain, what can we gain from it, what are the consequences, how should we react if they come looking to give us a task? Even without ranking members of the yath or qu'ellars we can still discuss things and try to prepair ourselves for the inevitable.

There is a lot that can be accomplished in the down time between events. Players can discuss previous events, what they did right, what they did wrong, how they can better themselves, how they should react or what they should do when the event continues so they are better prepaired. Additionally, each guild and player should have their own motives that they wish to advance, so that when the city is retaken (or IF it is retaken) they have something to persue. They can also persue these goals in between events as well, develop them further, and see if a DM is willing to help out if absolutely necissary. Bottom line is that we cannot become reliant on DMs for all our fun and future plans, by doing so we essentially doom ourselves to die out.

The glory of this game is that it is what you make it to be. We can sit around waiting for things to happen and be unprepaired, or we can work together to form ideas, become informed, and make a difference that may have a lasting impact on the server.

I do appreciate much of this feed back. Something though I learned on one of my first servers I played on. Players that depend on DM attention to make their guild work, usually and often the guild fails. Now no one is saying anyone is basing their attention and mere existence of their groups on the attention of the DM staff.

But I will say recently the decline in UD players is being taken, and there could be multiple reasons why. I see many players playing, but they are on their alts. If the UD turns bare, then the need for the # of UD DMs will most certainty be re-evaluated and fixed to scale across the server better.

As well as the drive for mapping in the UD. If you play your pc, attention will be drawn to what race, religion, class and as well group. Over time staff tries to work and create things to make our vast cyber cultures of groups happy and I believe as a whole we have accomplished such, just by looking at the positive reviews we get back from our player base.

Also if you see me playing my pc more, it is to keep the presences of the drow players known and have someone else also to chat with down in the UD when I am not on the surface. We do have a few newbies that pop up now and then.

Well nearly 10 of my friends start playing on this server and even just bought the game for it after I told them my rp stories. But none of them right now plays an UD race. I do not know much but they said to me that there were none events and not many people to talk to. Though I do not think this is right. I've seen some really wicked events around UD

But a majority of them told me that they found that using drow words absurd since the characters are already talking in Drow language. I have nothing against using drow words and maybe they're adding some kind of atmosphere to the conversation but this is the feedback I got from my friends.

Yeah, sometimes things happen. Not everyone can stand playing a drow. But most definitely events happen alot. Huge one happened earlier today involving a fire giant death knight.

farinal wrote:

But a majority of them told me that they found that using drow words absurd since the characters are already talking in Drow language. I have nothing against using drow words and maybe they're adding some kind of atmosphere to the conversation but this is the feedback I got from my friends.

They don't already speak in drow actually, the speak undercommon, which is understandable by all UD races. There is no true drow language, it is elvish mixed with some drow slang. The drow language in game is actually identical to elven, so players substitute in certain drow words to replicate the drow tongue and to make it more immersive experience. Regardless, not all drow speak like this, those with commoner backgrounds might be more accustomed to speaking with normal undercommon since they are used to being around other races.