A second LOTJ mud based in the old republic.

I was talking to some other players earlier about cloning the LOTJ mud and creating a separate star wars mud based in the old republic story line. I had come up with the idea by myself sometime ago and I just put it out there and others liked the idea too. So I thought I would put it up here and see what everyone else thought.

LOTJ has been very successful for so long, I thought an expansion could be considered.

I really don’t know the technical details that this would require because I’m just a player, I’ve never been an imm. But the idea is to take the LOTJ mud, copy it, and switch it around anywhere from a little to a lot so the RP would be set entirely in the old republic setting.

It would be when the Jedi are plentiful and before Darth Bane and his rule of two is started. So there would be a jedi academy and a Sith academy on korriban. Forcers would be a class you can select at character creation but only after some kind of check is done on the player to make sure they aren’t some dumb kid that just wants to screw around. The forcer RP would still be held to a higher standard as it is on LOTJ.It would just give all qualified players the chance to RP a forcer when the chances of ever being able to are so slim to none on LOTJ. Non-force characters could also be made of course.

I think it would allow for a lot of new interesting RP situations.

The Jedi fighting for survival. Trying to find as many force sensitive beings before the Sith do. All while trying to protect the republic and not be seduced by the dark because of having to fight a war. Plus the masters have to look after their padawans while everything else is happening.

Many power hungry sith lords maneuvering for more power, trying to outwit and kill their competition. Finding strong students in the force to use. The sith academy would have to be extremely dangerous with a high mortality rate for the student players as only the strong survive, rival students can end up killing each other or be killed for failing their teachers. Or just be killed in some training accident. And once they are fully trained they become sentinel’s or assassins and eventually sith lords. Sith Lords could take on many apprentices. Train all of them to some degree. And then have them all fight each other to the death, and the last one standing would become his True apprentice.

For those thinking it would be a problem of people making piles of forcers until they got a high max force level. It would have to be made so you can’t see your max force level at all until you reach it(This would add to the high mortality rate in the sith academy as well) and not being able to select another force character after death until a time limit ran out.

The training in the force RP period for the apprentices on both sides would have to be much slower in order to balance out being able to select forcer as a class. After spending 2-4 real life weeks training a character and finally becoming a knight and eventually a master or sith sentinel/assassin/spy and eventually sith lord, players will take their characters life more seriously. Rather than throwing their characters lives away for the fun of it all to just recreate a new one easily and fully level it in 2 days if those features weren’t in place. It wouldn’t be just for that purpose but the academy would also double as a forcer RP academy as well so everyone will know what they are doing as a forcer. A good number of really cool and fun quests would have to be thrown in also.

There could even be other factions of forcers as well.

There should be items scattered around the universe that would give characters a rare and larger advantage over others. Like a single unique ancient holocron that teaches abilities in the force that was long since forgotten.

There could be many forcer feats that could be made also. I can’t think of any right this second but there is a lot of potential.

There could be an ability to experiment in the force and create/discover new abilities and teach them to others. Like scientists can develop in LOTJ. It would all have to be RPed. Or create/discover new abilities and build a holocron (high level skill) and instill the teachings into it to pass it on to future students. All of these things would create a large power struggle between the jedi and sith.

Pking would be more common in this mud.

Throw in the mandalorians and their bad ass culture to top it off and you’ve got yourself a pile of dynamic fun to be had.

I’m just throwing idea’s out there to flesh out the old republic mud idea. The academy part of it doesn’t have to be that way. But it made sense to me.

The challenges for it that I can think of is you would need more staff members to maintain the mud. And you’d need some players who are already known to RP forcers well to start things off. I think after the 2-4 weeks the new student players will learn how to RP forcers well and naturally pass it on.

At the beginning aside from 2 or 3 new planets and a few new area’s on existing planets the mud would look mostly just like LOTJ but it would evolve just like LOTJ has.

I have other idea’s on the training aspect of it. Things that would make it more interesting than just repeating the same command until the % got higher. It would be actual training exercises with 4 or 5 tiers to them. Starting out in baby steps, serving to build the characters awareness and connection to the force.

Here are a few examples.

Making a flame simply flutter and putting it out could be the very first exercise for a brand new apprentice. Then finishing it with restarting the flame with the force.

Levitating small light objects. Then a more heavy one. Then several heavy ones. Then several heavy ones while doing a single hand stand, then several heavy objects while the apprentice is also levitating himself, and after a while of that they’ll be lifting star fighters which would be the final test in that area.

The same could also go with deflecting blaster bolts. With little hovering target drone droids. Starting from one drone, Then several, Then several with the apprentices eyes covered. After a number of successes it would unlock a higher tier of training until there is a final event that the padawan must reach before advancing to the next exercises. With the target droids it would be the padawan deflecting all of the hovering droids blaster bolts back into them so they blow into pieces, with his eyes covered.

There are many many possibilities with this. I think an exercise could be made for every lower level ability in the force until maybe level 20 I guess. and it would take 1 or 2 weeks to reach level 20 also. After that it would start slowly speeding up. Because the dark side is so seducing from how easy it appears to gain power fast. A darkside/sith character would level faster. But like I said, very high mortality.

I know it is a long time but it is authentic. It takes around 10 years for a padawan to be knighted and probably another ten to become a master, if at all.

There could be some features added for the aspect of jedi falling to the darkside as well but I have to think on that first.

Anyway thats it for now. If I come up with more idea’s I’ll put them here. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks.

So in effect you want to be able to play a forcer without half the effort on a seperate mud that not everyone will play at the same time… Sounds more likely to just ruin the mud outright in one fell swoop by halving the already decreasing player base. Perhaps you need to rewrite it to just see some sort of automated forcer training academy for whichever(or both) force alignments that is more of a mass automated training prog. We haven’t got the players to support any kind of Academy like you suggest, not to mention it would ultimately end up as ‘If you don’t play a forcer you’re a dead man walking’ with how the whole forcer system is setup. Increasing forcer numbers would have the same effect as how it is now, except more one sided killings by whichever side has more sensitives.

As it stands its bad enough we have as many Sith as we do but with luck some of them will start dying and not just sit them out till the end of Era 3 and only pop their overpowered head in when they want to be a douche to the rest of us.

A very small part of me says yes, it’d be nice for everyone to get the chance to play a free forcer, but the training regimes and life expectancy in the early stages would need to be one in every twenty apprentices survives before they get anywhere near knighthood. A game full of forcers would just turn whatever story we try to run into an all out shitfest, it was proven with the whole infuse thing with Orion during the Neru Bas era. 30+ forcers does not make for an enjoyable game.

this won’t happen for a billion different reasons, sorry

For the idea itself, I like the concept, but like its been pointed out….it’d completely split the playerbase in my opinion. I’ve seen it happen to muds (even my own mud I ran for years and years) before in the past. I like some of the things Kora mentioned. I’ve no clue what the current secret % rate is to roll force, but maybe raising it by 1-3% would help. Though honestly, there seems to be a lot of force sensitives out there to be found, the issue really comes with them not being as active as a lot of the other players (or at least active during the times that those who can sense them are around). There’s no point in awakening someone who plays once a week really and a lot of times the people who are awakened just go inactive and you never see them again.

As far as the Eras go, I’d be more than happy to see the "Old Republic" as Era 2, versus 1…making 4 standard eras versus 3.

You both don’t seem to understand how half of these people think, there was 3-4 Jedi from era one who just upped and stopped playing the characters mid way through for no apparent reason. They’d log in now and again and never say anything and just sit on the characters as some sort of backup char when things quieten down, there’s a few Sith doing the same thing too. Its not that i don’t like that there’s a shitload of Sith around, i’ve had next to no involvement with them so it worries me little, its just the whole "help darklordofthesith" seems to of been made to limit them and its just been completely ignored.

As was mentioned the mud is post Sith Wars so it should be in effect if you want to remain remotely canon. Everyone can say the Era 1 JO sucked but when people get their forcers then don’t play them it sort of ruins a clan that is member reliant to the extreme.

More pre-planned CG’s would be nice, it’d fill that free forcer itch with the upside of a bloodbath to boot.

I would love an earlier era 1, but the rest of this thread is just silly. =p

There are ways to increase player base. Maybe rewarding 10-25 account points for voting for the mud on mud connector and any other sites like it? Seriously LOTJ should be in the top 10.

There is also players joining star wars themed forums for star wars games and putting a link in their sig’s to a landing page on the LOTJ site that helps explain what LOTJ is and how to play the mud. There would be people joining who don’t have a single Clue as to what a mud is. So that would have to be taken care of.

As for a second cloned mud. I retract the idea and I agree the earlier era’s/time lines.

I’m completely in agreement with recruiting. Star Wars has a massive following, and I’m sure a pretty good portion of the fans out there would be into something like this if it weren’t so obscure.

Yeah, Obscure is definitely the word. I wouldn’t have ever known what a mud is if it weren’t for a small twist of fate 10 years ago. But I think those two idea’s might help to some degree. There are fans out there who would really be into playing if they only knew about it.

Maybe there should be a vote to see how many players would like to see old republic era’s and time lines in the future.

I’m sure if we spoke to some of the guys at places like Wookieepedia or TheForce.net, etc, we could get ourselves put out there for new people. We could seriously bolster our numbers if we presented ourselves properly.

We should definitely start reaching out and getting some ads up on other more well known Star Wars sites. The problem with this is, RPC isn’t always on to help noobs and everyone knows how ‘helpful’ the MUD can be sometimes. I would like to say most of the time people have no problem helping, but everyone also knows that veterans like to throw in jokes and these may or may not throw off potential newcomers.

So in order for something like that to work, you’d need to assign a number of different people who get on during various times of the MUD the ability to become a ‘temp imm’ that has only the ability to trans to newbies and ONLY back to their original position. That way when someone new hops on, needs help, you can give them much needed 1 on 1 help and guide them through the newbie academy and answer questions as needed. Also, to ensure even more so no abuse is used, everytime a veteran activates their ‘temp imm’ status, everything is logged from that point on for immortals to either view it later or not.

As for the topic, a second mud would be bad, but I wouldn’t be opposed to maybe starting off in the Old Republic era at the start of a new TL. Let that run for a bit, pwipe, then get back on the normal rotation for the MUD. *shrugs*