new player towns and such?

[Thirty]

Well, monsters can move in to a place, set up camp, and if undisturbed it may grow into something bigger. Might it be possible for players to do this? Find a good looking area, with water, farmland (or something that can become that), and natural resurces like wood and maybe ores and such. Or, possibly, something else we want, a mine, a strategic pass, whatever.

Ok, players set up camp. Then comes the hard part, clear out the local monsters, preferably while making at least some sort of fortification, say a wood wall. Keep a wide enough area clear of monsters that NPC tradesmen and farmers and such can work, and eventualy they start coming in (incentives might speed this up). Of course, you have to KEEP it clear, or the NPCs leave. Basically, you do the feudal lord thing, you protect, they supply some taxes.

At first, a few tradesmen, they dont give you much when you sell, ask too much when you buy (no competition), and have a small inventory. Later, with competition and growth of the businesses, they give more for sales, ask less for buys, and have a large inventory full of usefull stuff. And, uh, they supply a lot more tax revenue :)
(some of which is used up in protecting, guards, sewers, etc).

Then of course, monster armies, dragons, and the ultimate terror, other players, try to take it all away from you ;)

Waddya say, if THEY can do it, can WE do it?

[Slitherrr]

Well, consider that the staff has already said it'd be possible to set up castles and etc... Obviously, any important residence would eventually gather people to run the surrounding land and so forth... And therefore, eventually turn into a town. In other words, almost certainly yes.

[Thirty]

Cooooooooooooool :)

Gotta re-read the FAQ/info I guess.

Once the player towns start to crowd the map, time to make a player monster race ;)

[BelDragos]

That would be cool. Everyone could be members of a Monster Hoard that the Gods commanded to wipe out the PCs. Think of the carnage!

[freejack]

It sounds like a great idea but to be able to do that would be very, very difficult. I would assume they would limit the number of "towns" that can be started/operating or else everyone would want their own town. What about placement of town centers? Remember in UO someone would place their castle near a choke hold and cut-off everyone outside their guild from getting into a cave or pass. Good idea, just the implementation was flawed.
I'll throw this out and see who hit's it. What if you do find that great piece of land and want to start a town. Before you can build a town center/castle you need materials/supplies. So, place an object (like a chest) in the area you want to start the town and start filling it with supplies (wood, money, supplies). Once the requirements (time, and amount of supplies) are fulfilled the town is generated and placed within the area by the gm. The kicker would be that once you place the materials into the object they are gone forever whether you complete the requirements or not. Any thoughts on this?

[Thirty]

Uh, supplies yes, but you need someone to use them. That means either PC or NPC workers, and while working they need protection. The hard part of this isnt building a town, its clearing ou all the monsters. Remeber, here monsters move, so you have to clear a very wide area to make sure more dont start to trickle in too fast, and then keep it clear. On ambush, one dead NPC, and whatch all the rest either hightail it out of there or demand much higher pay.

Speaking of which, you may need to pay people to build, and if you are really rich, pay guards to at least take some of the burden of monster clearing off.

Monster clearing around player towns has the advantage of giving low level people something usefull and profitable to do, even after the game has gone a while and the local big monsters are driven out. This is because here monsters keep coming, and have to be recleared. You might also need to say make a fort to guard a pass near say the goblin home area, to cut down on the numbers. It would likely be expensive and dangerous, because they might do an organized mass attack on it. Basically, there would sometimes be full scale wars.

[freejack]

My thoughts weren't in that direction but more toward the "game engine" producing the building. Once you've "cleared out" or secured an area you would then start gathering supplies. Once the required supplies have been gathered and in the amount of time set forth by the game you would then be granted a builing by the game system which you would place in a clearing. This way the system does the building and your/our job would be to keep the area secure and produce the supplies required to build the town. I think it would be cleaner and be more enjoyable since you would spend most of your time fighting and/or gathering (2 great parts of rp'ing).

[Saint Faucet]

All that is currently known about this topic is:

1) town/fortress/etc. building will be possible

2) BUT it will be extremely expensive.

Nothing else has been mentioned beyond that.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

I would like to set myself up as a Land Baroness with lots of npc peasants. :0)

[BelDragos]

How about construction within established cities? The wealthy adventurer could have a home in all the major cities so they may travel in compfort. There should be a system set up where the characters could build their homes taking in account location. The dangers are different in cities because there is not any wandering hords of monsters other than PCs. They would have to contend with thieves, smogglers, land developers, local government, ect... Once you get through the red tape is should be easier to build but the threats are not so obvious and easy to defend against. The same goes to building your own MEAD HALL. You still have to contend with supply and demand, crooked officials demanding bribes, guild wars between thiekes, Ect...

[Slitherrr]

That would not be the only difficulty... Already-established kings/barons/rulers would have to give their permission, else conflict with them would result. If a group were to set up a castle at a bottleneck in a trading route, they would obviously be resisted, and not just by PC's that want to travel through. As for game mechanics, it would logically be a slow process... Not just gathering supplies, but people to build, people to inhabit the castle, people to work the surrounding area and generate revenue to keep the castle going, etc. etc. etc.

[Rolfe]

Slitherrr and Faucet are absolutely right in that there hasn't been a lot of information on this posted yet. The reason is because we haven't gotten that far yet. We're still hashing out more basic things like combat, magic, NPC interaction/Merchant interaction. You will be able to build a guild hall and it will be expensive.

As far as realism and the limitations on everyone being able to build towns and castles all over the place, we've thought that the best solution would be to simply limit the number of NPC merchants in a given area by the amount of PC traffic an area gets. So everyone can spend loads of money and build keeps and castles all over the place, and most of them will go broke doing it. You won't get any NPC merchants unless you have decent PC traffic. There will also most certainly be existing rulers that you'll have to deal with. Most every scrap of land will be claimed by someone, sometimes by more than one ruler. Whether every claim is legitimate or not isn't so important as the size of the armies of the rulers who hold those claims and their determination to hold onto those claims. So you can't just build a castle outside the front gates of Sanctimonia or New Dundra (Dwarven & coming soon!) without answering to the existing ruler.

[BelDragos]

Assuming I took care of the red tape (permission from the local government) and hired workers and bought supplies could my Mages Guild establish guild houses within the cities for members to visit? A teleport station could link the houses with the Hall for fast travel in an emergency.
It would require lots of money to build the houses but it would provide a place for adventurers to visit for spells.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

Aye, it would be nice to have a guild hall in or near town.

[Saint Faucet]

I'll have to check on this, but I seem to recall Rich posting something about be able to build Guild Halls if the members had pooled enough money together. I don't see why the Halls wouldn't be built near/in a town (unless the Guild is intentionally trying to distance themselves from others).