CLOK BBS

Hello all, it's your friendly neighborhood Marauder. So, I was thinking on Rooks and the pros and cons of amalgamated familiars compared to animated corpses and I had a thought.

Why don't we have a lore-friendly method to put our animated minion into cryogenic stasis? It could be a new ability to allow Rooks to properly store corpses at length, halting their timer for animation purposes and making them semi-permanent items and to be cast upon your animation to put into a state akin to hibernation that lets you store it for any period of time, or it could be a stationary piece of furniture that's specially enhanced and enchanted for holding corpses and animations in stasis.

This way, if a Rook has a particular animation they like and they go to the effort of TRAINING the familiar controlling the corpse? They can preserve them without mechanical issues tearing the animated minion away permanently. Last I checked, animations do gain skills like a player would and thus should be able to be stored in case someone has the controversial idea of grooming an undead bodyguard into a masterful killing machine and they equip it with rare gear.

It could also take the form of a new guild service that can be paid for in recognition OR riln much like a special inn room.

Just throwing in ideas into the idea pot here. Rather than looking at it from a perspective of "I want to become attached to this animate and use it and only it, and not need to dig up or murder new things to get a new animate," I just think that animates can be quite cumbersome at times for general RP. For the sake of events, or travelling into town when dragging along an infested animate might not be a good idea, thusly the ability to temporarily banish an animate would be useful.

what do i mean by temporarily banish? There's a spell called Summon Mount that does exactly this, but with mounts. I wouldn't mind dropping an aditional ability on the ability "Call Animate".

By utilizing a bond between yourself and your familiar, you can call your animate to you and keep it close by, should you ever need it. When you are not in need of your animate, it can be sent to roam freely, though it will attempt to always stay near enough to arrive quickly when called upon.
Summons or dismisses your animate. An animate can only be summoned to you in the wilderness. Casting the spell while the animate is present will dismiss/despawn it to await re-summoning.
Usage: cast call_animate

Yes, this is a blatant rip off of another spell in game, but I just think it would help facilitate healthy gameplay RP between people. I know that when I played a Rook, I tended to avoid meeting other people if it meant dismissing my infested man.

I tried and tried to think of a tactful, easy way to provide an answer to this question but the more I thought about it... there really isn't. It all comes down to the behind the scenes history of the Rooks. The reason rook minions are the way they are is because there were many chefs cooking the code on these and we also had some past Rooks who used to store legions of dead corpses in their house which did not please the powers that be. So we took steps to discourage corpse hoarding. Also it is intentional that Rooks only have one major minion at a time and are not able to swap back in forth between different ones.

But all is not doom and gloom. You can, even now, using existing mechanics do what you are describing. Just use the MINION LAY command and watch as they lie down and idle away the day while staying put. This will allow you to galavant around town without that pesky undead thing following you around. To get them to follow again, simply use the MINION GUARD command while next to them. I know that the MINION STAY command 'should' do this, but sadly it does not. Please refer to the above explanation as to why. Also VERY IMPORTANT!: Please DO NOT log out of the game while the minion is somewhere in the world under the MINION STAY command. Be sure to go back to them and get them back on their feet before you log out or you could permanently lose the minion.

I know what many of you are thinking, "Noctere this stinks, do I have to go back n forth to the spot where I have the minion laying?" Well if it is a corporeal minion, then yes. But if it is a non-corporeal minion then you can use the MINION FADE command. Assuming your sorcery is high enough to unlock it. Minion fade will make your incorporeal minions appear and disappear on the spot at will. Very useful for those who want to hide their minions from others. Also it is not a form of stealth so there is no chance for someone to see them. Although some annoying thaumaturgists might sense them.

As to animate training... that is sort of a gray area and I think there was never an intent for minions to level up over time. But right now it is not considered a cheat so unless you want it to be 'looked at', I would suggest just keeping it away from our gaze.

Noctere wrote:As to animate training... that is sort of a gray area and I think there was never an intent for minions to level up over time. But right now it is not considered a cheat so unless you want it to be 'looked at', I would suggest just keeping it away from our gaze.

If minion training is removed, I would say you'd have one of two things to do at that point, because to be frank, it's one of the few reasons to use Minor Animation over Sorcerous Amalgamation at all. If you remove their ability to train skills, you might as well retcon Possession and Minor Animation itself, or remove the sorcery/2 formula for animated corpse skills and turn it into having them have skills up to the user's sorcery and a "every 500 sorcery, you get a 10% add to the animation's skills upon raising, but they can never exceed your sorcery in level".

Because, as you said here...

Noctere wrote:I know what many of you are thinking, "Noctere this stinks, do I have to go back n forth to the spot where I have the minion laying?" Well if it is a corporeal minion, then yes. But if it is a non-corporeal minion then you can use the MINION FADE command. Assuming your sorcery is high enough to unlock it. Minion fade will make your incorporeal minions appear and disappear on the spot at will. Very useful for those who want to hide their minions from others. Also it is not a form of stealth so there is no chance for someone to see them. Although some annoying thaumaturgists might sense them.

Amalgamals and shadow familiars themselves do have better portability if only because they can become invisible for the most part, and they do not require a proper corpse for raising.

Skills meant a hell of a lot, though I will admit I have not used an amalgamal yet and cannot comment upon their ratings because the one I have seen in combat was many months ago and I don't tend to keep that in memory for long.

If people are thinking "Oh, I can make this really neat and powerful and hard to unlock sorcerous amalgamation which is pretty much supposed to be the top tier of sorcerous minions... but I'll just keep my minor animate because I can train it.", then I'm thinking it's time we disable all skillgain on animates.

This matter has been 'looked at' and properly tested/reviewed. We have come to the decision that Rook animates should never be getting skill gains from use as they no longer have the same mental functions in death as they did in life. The way animates currently work is if the caster animating the animate has 2500 skill in sorcery then all of the skills in the animate will also be at 2500. However if the animate has a skill which is at 2500 and the caster only has 100 skill in sorcery then all skills will be maxed out at 100.

This way just like with the amalgamation spell, all skills of the minion depend largely on the sorcery skill of the caster. Otherwise we would have rooks who never bothered to raise their sorcery skill running around with skill capped minions.

(Edit: The below is wrong and me being dumb and misunderstanding.)

So instead of needing to train up multiple skills on an animate and risk losing them when the animate dies, you just need to train your own sorcery skill and all the animate's skills will rise to match it? If so, that's one hell of a buff. Good on you, Rooks.

I'm of two minds because I have two ways of reading that post. either, YAY or yay.

so, YAY: Is this a large buff towards Animates, allowing sorcerers to essentially bring a lower class mob to their equivalent skill level? If so, this largely changes the way sorcerers use their animates! This is great, but very surprising and I'm not entirely sure about the reception by normal lay-people.

yay:
I'm happy something was done to mitigate or end the "Hey, can Rooks get a storage option for their animates?" debate.

Yeah, capping off the Rook's animate's skill levels in order to prevent it from becoming stronger than the Rook himself makes sense. Unfortunately, this ultimately does result in animates becoming slightly less useful in longevity. Now, animates are an older feature that many people have worked on, and I completely understand why you wouldn't want to continue to support it. I hope that in the coming years, there will be a rewrite of the Animate system.


edit:

So I dived in to check the change. To clarify, you will not find that your animate's abilities will suddenly be equal to your sorcery. It still very much works like the old system, where if the creature you're animating has a skill of 200 and you have a skill of 700, that creature will retain all of the skills it did in life, but won't suddenly inexplicable become a master of whatever it used to know. so this ultimately does cumulate to be a nerf of sorts. tiny yay for ending years long questions and debates.


For me, animates hold a very special meaning. My first main character I ever played, and dedicated countless hours to was defined by the existence of minor animation. It shaped his creation, and ultimately his ending.

I dearly hope that animates and other pet-NPCs like hireable mercenaries will be one day rewritten into much simpler, easier code for the staff to work on, and for them to get attention again one day.


Amalgamates are an amazing creation, though, and for all new upcoming rooks, you are still a one-man army capable of controlling multiple nethrim under your command. The core tenets and ideas for gameplay are still there.

Of course, I understand the limitations of time, attention, and everything else kind of makes the chances of a rewrite of this archaic system very slim, if not completely nonexistent. But I still dream of a day, where years down the line, the animate system rework will arrive. And everyone at that time will complain and throw a fit that animates are different, and no one is happy, and I'll look back to this post and laaaaaaaaaaugh and cheer.

Oh, so an animate's skills are lowered if necessary so they don't go above the caster's sorcery skill? The line

Noctere wrote: if the caster animating the animate has 2500 skill in sorcery then all of the skills in the animate will also be at 2500.

had me confused.

Correct

Well, damn. And here I was going to tell a friend to go get a new werewolf ASAP.

Please allow me to clarify. The skill vs sorcery system has not changed, recently. No buffs or debuffs have been done in that area. I just meant to explain how the system currently works. The only change is that animates no longer gain skill.

Example A:
If caster sorcery = 100 skill
living humanoid = 200 skill
that same animated humanoid will have = 100 skill

Example B:
If caster sorcery = 200 skill
living humanoid = 100 skill
that same animated humanoid will have = 100 skill

Example C:
If caster sorcery = 200 skill
living humanoid = 200 skill
that same animated humanoid will have = 200 skill

Jirato wrote:If people are thinking "Oh, I can make this really neat and powerful and hard to unlock sorcerous amalgamation which is pretty much supposed to be the top tier of sorcerous minions... but I'll just keep my minor animate because I can train it.", then I'm thinking it's time we disable all skillgain on animates.

Sorcerous Amalgamation is far from hard to unlock and pull off and my point was not to have Minor Animation become power crept and entirely ignored as an alternative. My belief is that it should be an alternative or it should not take its own ability slot, because if you want to be a studious Rook, you already have sixteen guild abilities, many of which require others to even get.

If we're meant to be using amalgamals solely after we get it, then why does Minor Animation and its linked spell exist? Amalgamals are easy to make in succession and require far less work than an animated corpse, especially now.

Side note that I forgot to include: Amalgamals are boring IC-wise. They're additional help in combat, that's all. Maybe if we could control THEM instead, that'd be more interesting, but as it stands, from a non-lore, non-mechanical point, they have no RP value beyond easily-accessed combat assistance against your enemies.

Yes, they bring the concept of binding multiple spirits to one mass of nether, but that's lore and not something anyone but Rooks will generally experience as the Parlour does not tend to give out trade secrets to non-members easily.

Kinda related - kinda not, but would it be possible to have a "minion hide" command added? This would be to order corporeals to hide in the shadows. They could still be detected with perception, unlike with "minion fade". I think this would be a really useful addition if you need to rest during combat or just want your guard/animate to lurk instead of just looming creepily.