Spice and making it interesting.

I had an idea on OOC to take spice out of the game, from shops and refined materials, and make it something that crime clans had to develop and push.  The plan behind this is to have spice be something that needs to be bought and sold… pushed and controlled… by crime syndicates.  Having them control it brings in a level of roleplay that hasn’t been used before, in this mud.  People needing to find contacts, sellers, pushers, thugs, holders, bosses, and the such, to keep a certain trade going.

Governments will be in charge of keeping control of spice flow, where as Crime syndicates will be in charge of pushing as much as they can into the system.  There are further aspects that I would like to involve, such a people needing to trade certain items for spice that the crime clan can trade in to a clan shop… a buyer or “fence”.. so that they can use their sales as a means to make money.  I think that would be a good incentive for them to sell their product and could make them enough to compete with opposing clans… but that is up for discussion.

With Spice being taken out of the game, Governments will need to find a way to compete with their competitive criminal rivals.  Government spice will be legal for -their- personnel, but at the cost of being less effective.  Criminal spice will be more effective, but will incur the wrath of government officials.  I think this balances out the RP and STATISTIC gameplay….  Sure you can have an illegal spice, but you will be subject to persecution by local officials… This adds to RP and PK evenly, I believe.

I hope to get feedback on this, and it will likely require re-coding spice… but I hope people see the upside of my input.  Thank you for your time in reviewing this subject.

I actually think this is a great idea. Awesome post, man.

I like this a lot. Perhaps make it lethal to overdose on some types as well. I am also a big fan of being able to poison someone.. if only we had more food eating in the game spice/drugs could be used to poison and enemy before a strike or even as a lethal dose.
Maybe slightly off topic there, but could be worked in. Maybe let crime clans develop things to fillsyringes with, like drugs that can have long-lasting/permanent pains. I don’t know! But I like the idea of a new spice code.

(OOC) *Cronlan: Make spice like blaster crafting, different materials can make different kinds/qualities and clans can develop to make better stuff. Governments can get the crappy stuff for medium stims while crime clans can get some real nasty stuff going.

EDIT: Forgot to add my OOC comment

Yes, My original idea in this is to have governments have real crappy, but “safe” stims, while crime clans have the awesome, but dangerous(addictive.. will leave you blind after 2 doses and screw you over for PVP) materials.  As far as poisoning goes… I would like to have a review of “Poison weapons” as well… To have Crime/Paramilitary clans be able to create… or perhaps even medical as something to sell to military components… poisons to use on weapons that cause -real- dibilitating effects.  Especially things that effect weapon durability differently.   Also… and this maybe taken from skyrim… Give people the ability, or feat, to place poisons onto a person that will cause debilitating or damaging effects.  To create a poison and “Slip” it onto them to cause a certain effect, be it health, mental stat disruption, or stat loss, onto the person in question.  but this may be going off topic

Still, allowing mom and pop groups to make spice would be a good idea. Just make it so that their spice is the sort that can very much so mess your world up in a bad way.

Definitely…. I want government spice, which you have to be in their clan to get, to be safe and less potent…. while having criminal spice be stronger, but far more dangerous.. I want players to feel the danger of dealing with criminals.. but still feeling like they come out on top for cheating the system.. while clan members of the government feel like they have a safe alternative and have free reign to jail those who go outside their law.  Really, it isn’t to cause crime clans to be stronger, but it’s to cause a rift between criminal and government organizations so as to drive RP and cause them to have a -reason- to be at odds…. But I do really think crime clans need something to bring to the table for recruitment and.. well.. and overall reason to exist.. just having a “ping ship’ battery really doesn’t do it for me.

Good stuff, OP! I was comparing our spice code earlier today and it turns out we are pretty close to stock SWR when it comes to our spice code. So the question is: forget what you know about spice, what is your dream implementation? I’ve been doing a little legwork since you brought it up on OOC the other night and here are some of the ideas I have scribbled out:

What role should spice play on lotj? (in no particular order)
Criminal moneymaking
Criminal roleplay
Smuggler leveling
Temporary buffs

As it stands right now, we have 6 or 7 different spice types that have different effects. This could be greatly expanded so the question is, what else could spice buff? The combat uses of spice are obvious, but could be expanded to other classes. Why can’t an engineer dope up and build ships or armor faster? Could a pilot shoot faster if he’s spiced out? There is a lot of wiggle room here and we can create. We could really blow this list out long, kind of what Cronlan said in his post. We could have a lot of different recipes that yield different affects to different degrees of strength with different degrees of addiction, etc.

The whole arena of addiction/overdosing is appealing. What should happen to someone who overdoses on spice? What negative effects does someone who gets addicted suffer?

You raised a very important question that I haven’t really thought too much about: Why would a government want to outlaw spice? There has to be some sort of mechanic/reward beyond doing it for roleplay’s sake.

Walldo.. I love your ideas for spice, outside of combat scenarios… I do think that there should be a reason to spice up for every class, but rather than have us think of that now.. as a pre-determind scenario.. (and my spelling is probably off) Let’s make that something that the scientists.. the cookers.. of criminal clans, have to come up with… Let’s have that be part of the creative process in.. well.. creating spice.  Criminal organizations should have a closer feeling to the spice they create… The boosts it applies, as well as the negative influences it has.  I think this is something that should be thrust upon the creative minds of the players.. and up for review by the imms.. rather than something that is set in stone.  It allows players to feel they have a wider range of influence.. and actually gives them that wider range of influence.  So long as both parties are in agreement… when if they aren’t, balance has to be taken in to perspective.

This is something I was dreaming about, we even went as far to talk to Gathorn and Coffinc about developing a spice that could temporarily enhance the takers’ focus, allowing them acute control over their targeting habits (+hr)

At the time, over a year ago, Gathorn informed me that there already exists something very simple to this… if I recall +1 hr for a very short time period. Due to the cost ratio, we pulled away from that avenue because, in their words, there was nothing they could do without recoding the entire spice system.

Some other ideas we had to turn Ba’shiar into a pharmaceutical company:

Spacer’s Delight: A substance that temporarily enhanced the evasion of incoming fire, when piloting a small spacecraft, by 50% due to its chemical ability to remove negative g-force effects from the body, allowing for extreme evasive tactics.

The Angry Gamorrean: Smash! Increasing muscle connectivity communication, the user of this extremely addictive drug would expel tremendous amounts of additional ‘damage’ with a weapon or their barehands (+dr)

Moon Gas Inhalant: Slows breathing to an almost dead-like state. Appear as if a corpse, only to fool your opponent and spring your trap.

Blue Rancor: Receive a surge of energy, returning most of your movement, a percentage or a flat amount of 1000 movement at the immediate expense of health.

Other ideas might include +hr, +ac, +hp.. really simple ones.

Much more abstract:

Use a datapad at an accelerated rate, speeding up times to hack lifts etc.

Scan four rooms away, instead of just two.

I mean, this list could go on FOREVER, but their feasibility is getting way out there.

How would the moon-gas work? You suddenly appear as “The corpse of ‘Person'” instead of “‘Person’ is sleeping”?

This is awesome. I was also told that it would take a core rewrite to do something like this, but if that’s on the table, then all about it. I’m mostly with alevious re: implementation. Clans should develop their own brands, submitting the proposed stat changes and penalties just like a regular development.

Regarding the tradeoffs, what if we started with base chemicals that have known properties and there was a little matrix for picking your tradeoffs, so that if you increase duration, that increases complexity, but if you made the stat change smaller than the base chem, that would bring it back down, and then when the spice was developed and assigned to the clan vendor, the price would be a function of the spice’s complexity. The tradeoff tool could be a web app run through the website, if needed or easier, but it would allow people to design some really custom stuff for their clans or customers’ needs, as well as encourage segmentation because given the average price of developments, you’re probably not going to have copycats.

Personally, I’ve always believed that you should be able to name your spice when you make it. Have your own “brand” of drugs, so to speak. Also, I really think that the narcotics science really needs to take a role in how potent the spice is. This could be manifest in more potent spices give longer durations on their beneficial effects, but you get addicted faster and suffer harsher withdrawls as a result.

These are good some ideas. I just sort of went through the slist harvesting ideas and you really could have a different spice affect for nearly everything. I think some sort of system where players pick and choose what their spice does would go a long way towards reproducing the engineering experience to smugglers.

Different rawspices will impact the overall potency and addiction level of the final product. This would allow crime clans to develop/own unique rawspices which translates into unique final products. Players will be able to choose up to 3 affects. The more affects they add the less effective it will be overall. Obviously factors like smuggling, makespice skill, and sciences will also come into play here. There’s probably room to fork in some science class stuff like skills to analyze a spice to see its affects, a way to track where or who made it, etc.

makespice‘’ affect1 affect2 affect3

If this is a good direction then we could easily have a HUGE list of 200+ affects for the basics + skill buffs + whatever crazy stuff you all think up like what Aleksei posted up above.

Also, hallucinations and drugs like that. But that’d probably need some extra coding. Merely for RP and similar purposes.

Does that affect1/affect2/affect3 stuff make sense? is it warm or cold?