Gameplay Systems Overview

Ancient Tier Overview

Ancient-tier equipment extends endgame loot with three escalating rarity bands that can be rolled automatically or forced for testing.

Eligible base items

• Weapons, armor, and lights between levels 30 and 91 are valid targets for tier rolls.
• Items outside that range or already carrying a tier flag are skipped to avoid stacking bonuses.

Rarity bands

• Ancient — exclusive to level 90–91 drops.
• Runic — available on levels 60–89.
• Elite (Mythic) — covers levels 30–59.

Drop rates and forced rolls

• Each eligible object instance automatically checks the tier thresholds, from highest to lowest rarity.
• Chance to upgrade: Ancient 1%; Runic 5% if Ancient fails; Elite 10% if earlier rolls fail.
• Builders can force a tier through ancients ancient|runic|elite <vnum>, which validates the level range before cloning a boosted copy.

Bonus packages

• Armor and lights gain a single stat package. Ancient grants 60–120 points, Runic 40–80, and Elite 20–40, spread across hitroll, damroll, mana, hit points, or movement.
• Weapons receive flat boosts to damage dice: +25/+25 (Ancient), +10/+10 (Runic), or +5/+5 (Elite).
• All boosts are logged to the console, replacing the old Discord broadcast workflow.

Command output and safeguards

• ancients without arguments lists every live object with a tier flag, including vnum, holder, and location.
• Optional filters (ancients ancient, ancients runic, ancients mythic) narrow the results and display visible counts vs. total copies.
• Results truncate after 200 matches to stay readable.
• Tier bonuses never stack: pre-existing flags are stripped, and ineligible items retain their original stats with a clear rejection reason.

Automated Quest Masters

Quest masters offer repeatable, fully scripted assignments that track progress, payouts, and cooldowns without immortal intervention.

Requesting assignments

• Players interact with a designated quest master mobile and use quest request; the command is rejected unless the character is in the same room as the quest giver and off cooldown.
• Cooldowns are enforced through the nextquest timer, which decreases in the background tick handler and notifies the player when a new job is available.
• Each request clears any stale objectives before rolling a new kill or fetch assignment, ensuring only one target is active at a time.
• The first live quest template adds a rescue assignment: quest admins can configure area range, schedule, level band, captor sex, rewards, and custom briefing text, then quest masters issue rescue runs when the template is enabled and due.

Tracking objectives

• The quest interface supports quest info to recap the active target, remaining time, and current quest points. Kill quests describe the target mobile, while object quests reveal the item and the character holding it.
• Progress flags (questmob, questobj, and countdown) update automatically as kills and pickups occur, and they persist across sessions via the standard player save file.
• Abandoning with quest quit or timing out resets the objective, applies a new cooldown, and frees the player to request another run later.

Rewards and shops

• Successful turn-ins through quest complete award quest points and gold, with the quest master announcing tailored flavor text for kill or recovery victories.
• Quest points unlock consumables, practices, gold bundles, and customizable channel colors via quest buy, all sold directly by the quest master without staff involvement.
• Unavailable rewards are refunded instantly, and every transaction adjusts the player’s quest point total before delivering the item or perk.

Enchanting Guidelines

Enchant armor and weapon spells revolve around managing failure scores, smoothing risk, and preserving the system’s soft caps.

Failure scores and modifiers

• Both spells start at a 25% failure score before modifiers and are clamped between 5% and 95% final chance.
• Enchant armor removes up to 50 failure points from caster level, while enchant weapon removes up to 75 when the target is a weapon.
• Blessing an item subtracts 15 failure points; glow and hum flags add 4 and 3 points respectively.
• Extra affects (aside from the acid breath safeguard) add 20 failure points for armor or 25 for weapons.
• Existing AC, hit, or dam bonuses impose a quadratic penalty, making successes rare beyond +3 or +4.
• Charms incur an additional 50-point penalty and are best avoided.

Failure outcomes

• The worst roll no longer destroys the item; it instead removes one step from the strongest bonus if it was at least +1.
• The second failure band strips magical affects but now stops one stage short of wiping every modifier unless the player overrides a warning.
• Successful casts bump armor to one level shy of hero rank, and non-weapon targets of enchant weapon jump to level 55 or higher.
• Existing +2 hit or dam bonuses on non-weapons add 100 failure points apiece, drastically curbing further growth.
• Exceptional results can add glow and hum, raising future failure scores.

Preparation and smoothing options

• Prioritize high caster levels, blessings, trimmed affects, and clear stop points to stay within guardrails.
• Incremental investments (scroll ink, rare dust, faction favor) can shave failure in small steps, helping players work toward the 5% floor.
• A pity counter that reduces failure after each miss—and resets on success—tempers unlucky streaks without guaranteeing success.
• Near misses default to the safer downgrade outcome, and exceptional catalysts let players opt into higher-variance rewards.

Soft caps and ancient synergy

• Weapons gain 1–2 hit/dam per success, and armor gains 1–2 AC reduction, but the 95% failure cap and quadratic penalties make values beyond +5 or −5 extremely risky.
• Ancient, Runic, and Elite tier bonuses apply after enchanting. Since bonuses do not stack, treat ancient drops as complete unless you accept higher failure odds.

Alignment & Censor Flag

The score sheet prints an alignment title based on your numeric value and, when the pottymouth flag is active, adds a dedicated speech-filter line under Visibility & Authority with the red *Censored* warning.

• Alignment tiers: Anything above 900 is labelled angelic, followed by saintly, good, kind, neutral, mean, evil, demonic, and finally satanic for the most negative scores.
• Pottymouth toggle: Staff and players can run censor to flip the PC_POTTYMOUTH bit. While set, the score command prints a separate speech-filter line in the Visibility & Authority section with the red *Censored* notice and your communications pass through the censorship filter.
• Clearing the warning: Use censor again to leave censored mode, or ask an immortal to remove the flag if it was imposed administratively.

Hitroll & Damroll Mechanics

Legacy combat modifiers track accuracy and bonus damage, combining stored fields with Strength-based bonuses and weapon skill.

Building the modifiers

• hitroll and damroll fields on CHAR_DATA accumulate equipment and spell affects; Strength adds tohit and todam bonuses via str_app_type.
• GET_HITROLL(ch) and GET_DAMROLL(ch) sum stored fields with Strength bonuses (clamped by get_curr_stat).
• Character recalculations zero the stored fields and rebuild them from all equipped items and active affects targeting APPLY_HITROLL or APPLY_DAMROLL.
• NPC prototypes copy predefined hitroll and damage bonuses when loaded, matching player calculations before Strength and other modifiers.

Using hitroll

• Each swing builds a weapon skill score (skill = 20 + get_weapon_skill), capped between 20 and 120.
• THAC0 interpolation subtracts GET_HITROLL(ch) * skill / 100; every hitroll point removes up to 1.2 THAC0 at 120 skill.
• Low skill adds a penalty term 5 * (100 - skill) / 100, weakening both the hitroll bonus and the base threshold.
• A pseudo–d20 roll must exceed thac0 - victim_ac; higher hitroll lowers that target regardless of armor.

Using damroll

• After base dice and situational multipliers, damage adds GET_DAMROLL(ch) * UMIN(100, skill) / 100, scaling linearly with weapon skill up to 100%.
• Final damage is floored at 1 and then constrained by calculate_damage_cap, ensuring class/stat ceilings remain intact even with stacked bonuses.