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Post by amateureschatologist on Jun 24, 2015 20:15:20 GMT -5
The key thing would be "without looking like a twink."
It seems like practicing on players is a one-way ticket to crimcode town, but practicing on NPCs will get me flagged as a twink in no time no matter how much I emote and think while I do it.
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Patuk
Shartist
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Post by Patuk on Jun 25, 2015 3:25:17 GMT -5
Depends on the skill you're after. Stealing things off NPCs now and then gets you in much less trouble than spamming 'north' past a gate guard.
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Post by amateureschatologist on Jun 25, 2015 6:07:45 GMT -5
I guess any of them, really. Stealing off NPCs once in a while probably does make sense, but what sneaking around or trying to hide? How do you effectively train backstab?
Is that thing about crimcode working differently at night true? I played for a bunch of years (stopped like 6 years ago) but somehow never really picked up much of the details of how the crimcode worked. I guess I never really played any criminal types.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2015 6:57:28 GMT -5
Nobody will give the remotest of fucks about over-use of sneak/hide. There's people who just always sneak and hide everywhere. It's something everyone just accepts as how things are. I'd still recommend not doing it around other players while your skill is low enough to fail because they'll guild-sniff the shit out of you, but you will never get in trouble for raising hide and sneak even if there's no obvious reason to stealth around at the time. Just don't sneak past guards if you don't know where you're going.
Steal and pick, just don't spam those. You can do it fairly regularly without getting slapped down as long as you aren't doing something totally retarded like repeatedly stealing coins from the same NPC in order to empty their inventory on the spot. Lockpicking is even less OOCly controversial, I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble with staff over that. They even recommend raising it by renting an apartment and practicing on your own door. But other players won't be too impressed with you if you get caught.
Backstab, you pretty much have to twink that. I've always said that there's no way to become a skilled assassin without twinking unless you're satisfied with it taking a RL year. Each backstab officially counts as an attempted murder, you can't play it off as practice or a minor combat move like kick, and it's kind of bad form to go around backstab-spamming animals. I mean, you can do it, but backstab is basically the knowledge of which internal organs to injure and it's stupidly unrealistic to become a master at it by repeatedly stabbing tregils.
I know a lot of people do that. In fact, almost all assassins do that, whereas hardly any train the skill by actually ambushing other people. You pretty much can't do that anywhere except the 'rinth and maybe the Red Storm alleys, granted, but it should be the only way to raise the skill. Technically there should probably be a human/animal distinction for backstab just like there's city/wilderness for skills like hide and hunting. But there isn't, so you get a lot of assassins who have mastered their knowledge of human anatomy by jamming knives into lizards.
I actually think that's the most severe kind of mundane skill-twinking that one can do, because that skill is used pretty much exclusively to PK with whereas twinking up steal or pick leads to fairly mild abuse at best, and conventional combat skills have a much more realistic system in place to ensure that you don't become a world-class fencer by hunting animals or an expert big game hunter by knife-scrapping your way through the alleys. Armageddon's backstab skill makes no sense at all, especially considering the fact that a number of skills do have realistic duality while this much more significant skill doesn't.
You end up with a lot of characters who should be experienced with butchering animals as they've praticed finding the vital organs of tregils and tandus for a month, but they actually end up being experts at murdering humans despite, in many cases, literally never having tried it before. On the other hand, there's basically no other way to do it as the game doesn't offer the option of studying human anatomy, and combat training doesn't affect backstab.
The skill really should work like ambushing does on SoI where it's just the act of attacking while hidden which gives you a sizeable boost to damage and hit chance, but still goes off of regular combat mechanics instead of some bizarelly detached skill that you can max out while your regular combat skills are still novice and apprentice. No joke, you will have barely scratched the surface of combat progression by the time you hit master backstab, assuming you aren't doing a bunch of sparring in-between to catch up.
But despite all this, maxing backstab by using it for hunting seems to be safe and accepted.
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Post by amateureschatologist on Jun 25, 2015 7:46:41 GMT -5
I hadn't even considered training up pick by picking a lock I actually own. That makes a lot of sense, IC and OOC. I mean, if I wanted to practice picking locks in real life, I'd probably go buy a lock or two to practice on.
Thanks for the advice. I'll have to keep it in mind if I ever roll up a sneaky character again. And yeah, leveling backstab by using it on animals is utterly ridiculous, but at least there's a way to raise it without having to spam-murder rinth NPCs or something.
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Post by lyse on Jun 25, 2015 8:35:15 GMT -5
I always felt backstab should be renamed critical strike or something similar, just so it makes more sense in the way people use it.
Pretty much any skill you want to train is going to make you look like a twink. Because that's the way skilling up works, if you want to be good at something like you imagined when you came up with your concept, you're going to use those skills you need. So don't feel bad about it at all.
Staff will let you know if you're overdoing it on certain things and trust me they will. The funny thing and it's a completely different topic is who and how they decide is twinking. I've been "discouraged" from doing certain things that I'm 100% sure other people were doing with no problem. The world truly will come alive on you if you're doing something they don't want you doing.
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Post by amateureschatologist on Jun 25, 2015 10:15:44 GMT -5
I've always found enforcement of "twinking" to be really inconsistent even in my own experience. Like, the approach I took to practicing spells on one gemmer was suddenly not okay on another one like a month later. I guess that's just down to subjectivity or which staff member's watching you, but it'd be nice if there were some hard and fast guidelines so that we all know what standard we're being held to.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2015 21:42:18 GMT -5
There isn't really any standard. One of the bigger problems with Armageddon is that you can easily raise your skills in ways that are unanimously considered wrong, yet aren't discouraged in any way except for intangible opinions. If you aren't supposed to be able to max out a magicker in a week, I don't know why they make it possible. It doesn't say anywhere that you shouldn't, but everyone will tell you it was cheating if you do it. Instead of having systems in place such as SoI's OOC timer code to prevent abuse, Armageddon just lets you do it and chastizes you afterwards despite never informing you that you did anything wrong at the time. Leaving it up to staff whims to determine if you were wrong then invariably leads to inconsistency and dispute.
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Post by Procrastination on Jun 25, 2015 21:49:05 GMT -5
The basics of stabbing something before it sees you and collapsing a lung is the same across most animals in Zalanthas. If someone walks on two legs or four, the fact there's a soft spot under the arm of a man (behind the arm on an animal on all fours) protected only by a ribs that can be slipped through doesn't change.
Collapsing a lung is almost assuredly what backstab is ICly meant to be, given the echoes. Unless of course its an instant kill shot, and you could then argue that when you tried to collapse a lung and got both or even that you also managed the heart by accident, leading to instant death. Point being, with a cord long blade, slipping it up between the ribs of something to collapse a lung, on an animal or a man is going to be of similar design, aside from the method to get close to the animal.
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Patuk
Shartist
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Post by Patuk on Jun 26, 2015 3:55:04 GMT -5
I dunno, man. With all these insects around, there's plenty of things that have no lungs in the first place.
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Post by lyse on Jun 26, 2015 9:32:00 GMT -5
Lol, just admit it probably shouldn't be called "backstab."
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punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
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Post by punished ppurg on Jun 26, 2015 9:40:59 GMT -5
There's a reason backstab shortens to "bs". If they let training weapons be used to, you know, train it, that'd be something else. But that's been explicitly disabled.
Far as criminal code goes, at the hours late at night and before dawn, the VNPC "sensors" are turned off in the streets. That means unless there's a soldier in your square or 1 square away in any direction, you won't get flagged for illegal activity.
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Post by Procrastination on Jun 26, 2015 12:48:04 GMT -5
With beetles, I can see how that's an issue. Most things in game that people are going to be backstabbing though, are probably going to have some sort of lungs/etc. With beetles, you're just getting close and slipping a blade up between chitin quickly. It could be called a critical strike, and have it echo differently based on what you're killing. I would support that. backstab humanoid - set of echoes. backstab mammal - certain set of echoes and the list goes on.
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Post by lyse on Jun 26, 2015 14:38:51 GMT -5
With beetles, I can see how that's an issue. Most things in game that people are going to be backstabbing though, are probably going to have some sort of lungs/etc. With beetles, you're just getting close and slipping a blade up between chitin quickly. It could be called a critical strike, and have it echo differently based on what you're killing. I would support that. backstab humanoid - set of echoes. backstab mammal - certain set of echoes and the list goes on. I could live with that since we're hypothetically speaking here. But why leave something like that as something narrow as a "backstab", surely there are other fatal blows that someone could deliver besides sliding a blade or spear between someone's ribs. I'm just saying, this might be a case where a broader term might be beneficial to RP.
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Post by gloryhound on Oct 21, 2015 0:41:54 GMT -5
What about sleight of hand?
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