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After being initially wanded for the Prefects by DM Elmo, I have not received my character's wage. I informed with DM ShadowCharlatan, but when he tried to find out what was wrong, a number of errors triggered and he couldn't find out what was wrong. My character was in the Civil Service before, during which I received my wage without any problems. I've given it some time, but there's still no sign of anything working out, so here's a bug report.

PC name: Alaric Griettman
Account: CorrigoEFUR

The signs in-game posted in front of the House of Governance as well as next to the taxation official inside fail to list the exemption for Ordinants to buy an adventuring license, while it is listed in the official topic here - it's confusing and leads to embarrassingly silly conflicts. I expect the forum edition is the correct one, and suggest the signs IG are updated.

Title explains it. An utterly self-serving suggestion, but it seems odd to me that the very people who operate the system have to pay for using it.


Might want to make it free for Watchers too, seeing as many types of announcements are part of their job description.

This bug occurs when rolling multiple instances of one die, say, 2d6.

The bug causes any rolled number to be capped off to the maximum number rollable by just one die.


For example, 2d6 will return 6 most of the time.

2d20 will return 20 most of the time.

21d20 returns 20 (which is not possible).

Screenshot included demonstrating this.





GameSpy ID: CorrigoEFUR

Though the safe resting area has been properly set up, resting is not actually possible due to the fact that "resting in the wilderness requires food" - getting any in this area is not possible.

The towers themselves are no longer there, but there is still an ambient message describing their presence. Either the ambient message is wrong, or the visible stuff is, I'm a bit confused which.

I'm told the towers were removed, so this is suggesting getting rid of that message as well.

Yeah, so the Convocation of Gallants is dead, I hear you say. But this isn't just some short-lived player faction. The Convocation of Gallants is the prophesied army that will fight H'bala on the last day.

Many PCs have already signed their name in the Book of Gallants, which is the Convocation's official sign-up charter. This topic, however, is to generate interest for those people who want to play characters that will be more on the driving side of this organisation.

Activities will (hopefully) include:

- Regular raids into Withered lands.
- Extensive scouting and research into the Withered hordes.
- Big f-ing giant fights against the undead (DMs willing).
- And maybe even some secret plotty stuff!


Those interested in discussing more are welcome to seek me out through whatever means necessary, but I've registered the IRC channel #gallants specifically for this.

Yes of -course- he was H'balan! When was he H'balan? Well, from day one.

Barthimus Reidt was a Sharran explorer of Ymph. Walking the jungles for several years, at long last he succumbed to the whispers of the Maiden in his dreams. He then decided to infiltrate the Wyrm Watchers and support her cult from within.

What could have given it away? He had a tell - whenever he was being a dishonest lying fuck he would rub the back of his neck in pain. Some of you may have seen it sometime. You might have also noticed that he went from pretty much unwithered to heavily withered in about a day. That was from eating withered treats.


Special thanks:

Players in the Wyrm Watchers, the H'balan cult, Order, Iron Legion, DMs - wcsherry the H'bala DM, Talir the Wyrm Watcher DM, Paha for letting me do that bit at the end, Johannes for overseeing the ensuing shitstorm, and I'm sure I've forgotten some of you who have done cool stuff.

Really big props to the player of Ronald Fryth for your attitude towards me at the end. Seldom have I felt like such a badass while playing EFU.


To all of you considering playing a H'balan cultist: it is loads of fun and you will see loads of cool stuff. Is it hard? To be honest, it's not much harder than playing a nature PC, all the same rules apply. Especially if you're a secret cultist, you won't be KOS, and all you really need to do to keep secret is stay away from those goddamn mist censers.


Okay! Screenshots. I don't have many, the run was only a few weeks. Also, some screenshots I swear I'd made are missing, so I must've not made them. Nevertheless:


The Withering


Bullshitting


Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Iron Legion. This has got to be the most hilarious battlecry I have ever heard.


This is the conversation that eventually lead to tonight's mass PvP.

[hide="Spoilers"]So we see Marius Lockleede being accused of theft, trying to break into Cornelius' exhibit. Marius later got arrested for that theft, a situation which lead to his death and the ensuring quest for revenge.

Little did anyone know that the one who tried to break into Cornelius' case with acid was, in fact, mr. Barthimus Reidt. He'd finished not ten seconds before the others walked in, and snuck out behind them while they were inspecting the case. Sadly, I didn't get what we were after.

To this day I do not know what Paha meant with 'the acid shizzles'.[/hide]

On certain occasions, when doing the resource gathering quest, it will happen that the NPC will only accept one particular type of resource, claiming 'we -really- need some XXX right now.'

This is all well and good, and the reasons for why this was originally implemented are abundantly clear.

However, with the advent of private gardening in EFU (what with the locked farm plots and all), finding herbal resources to turn in to this NPC is rather difficult. Certainly you were always unlikely to find any, given the run on such resources, but now that most of them around Mistlocke are held behind lock and key, it's become pretty much impossible.

So that means when the NPC will accept only herbs, you're pretty much unable to continue doing the quest for a time (which could, for example, happen when you've just returned from a risky hunt which netted you plenty of meat, leaving you encumbered and far too vulnerable to head out into spawn country).

This is frankly very annoying, one reason for which given above.

I know the easy argument to make is to wave this off by saying 'go find other PCs and earn your xp and supplies by doing stuff with them rather than gathering on your lonesome', but especially for nature PCs this isn't always as easily done as it is said.

[To put it simply, even though it has been easier to GET levels on EFU over time, it is still just as hard to KEEP them as it was at the beginning.]

When you die, you can respawn for a third of your total XP. This is a completely unadjusted penalty that does not change according to your level, and the basic idea is perfectly sound. The problem is, however, with the height of the penalty, and there's a very simple reason for it that can be demonstrated with a bit of mathematics and graphs.


I'm going to touch on a few basic concepts of the way DnD works here, and I have a tendency to ramble, so feel free to skim a bit.


First of all, let's take a look at level progression. The way it works is that the amount of XP needed to reach your next level is always 1000 more than the XP you needed to get to reach your previous one. So basically it's your current level times 1000. Because the amount added to your total increases each level up, the total amount of XP your character has depending on his level increases exponentially.

Take a look at this graph:



It demonstrates the idea quite simply. The curve of the red line becomes ever steeper, demonstrating how it becomes ever harder to reach the next level. The difference between the two only becomes larger over time. Now, you can imagine that the amount of XP lost on death will also be higher on reaching higher levels. That's the idea, and because it's a fraction, the pattern of the line will be about the same. The amount of XP needed to gain a new level, however, does not increase exponentially. The line is always just as steep.

This means that the XP lost on death will at low levels be far less than the amount of XP needed to reach a new level, and at higher levels will start becoming more and more.

Take a look at this next graph, which demonstrates the penalties in place in the current death system:



As you can see, the death penalty becomes ever more severe the higher your character level is. The purple line is the penalty for respawning, the orange line is the penalty inferred by a raise dead spell.

What's very important to note here is where the lines cross.

The purple and green lines cross at around level 7. This is the point where you will be mathematically GUARANTEED to lose a level if you respawn. At lower levels, you will not necessarily lose a level if you are close to gaining your next one (while needing to be exceedingly less close the lower your level is). After reaching level 7, however, there is no doubt. You will lose that level if you respawn. EFU does not go into the level range where you will ever lose two levels on a single death with this penalty (that would start around level 12). Nevertheless, suffice to say, level 7 is where dying becomes exceptionally harsh and hard to return from.

Conversely, we see that the orange line never reaches the green one in this range. So the 1/6 XP penalty will never lose you a full level on EFU, even if you are level 11 or perhaps even 12. So getting raised, while still taking a chunk of your XP, will never be a very big setback no matter what happens.

So what does this mean?

I think it's very genuinely possible to argue that the spot where the green line and the penalty line cross are the times where death becomes hard. If you take the risk and lose, coming back to where you were from level 7 onward is a big challenge. But do we want it to be?

It's been stated quite clearly by DMs that EFU is easy to level up in. This is very true, and if you take it carefully you'll be able to get there easily enough. However, if you happen to be one of those unfortunate players who has decided to take it on his own with his concept, or who is prone to taking risks that turn out badly, you'll probably get stuck around the crossing point - the lower border of level 7.

To put it simply, even though it has been easier to GET levels on EFU over time, it is still just as hard to KEEP them as it was at the beginning.

Is that where we want people to get stuck on the curve? I don't think it's a particularly exciting place to be stuck in if you want to generate conflict and not get your ass handed to you. After all, the established characters with allies and supplies tend to be averagely at least a level higher.

So what to do?

Well, lowering the XP penalty to 1/6 might be a bit rich. The struggling point as far as brawling with the death penalty goes would be around level 12 - that's just way too high! So it needs to be somewhere in between. Take a look at this:



The blue line in this graph demonstrates the XP penalty if it were lowered to 1/4 of total. You can see the lines cross at a point a little higher, namely the border of level 9.

I think this would be an excellent point to put the penalty at.

Players who succeed because they don't take risks or are just that good (and conversely, don't die) will have as hard a time as ever to reach their level. However, the players who struggle a bit more against the odds will get stuck on the curve at a very favorable point - almost level 9. So your XP range would be in the high level 8s, which I do believe is the main level of fun activity for conflict-heavy PCs in this iteration of EFU.



DMs, please lower the respawn XP penalty to 1/4. It will make EFU become hard at the time it needs to be, rather than well before that. Everything else about the respawning system is fine - the 1/6 penalty is basically a breeze, and it should be (and is, as such, not suitable for use as a primary penalty for respawning).