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Post by DM Hawk on Feb 7, 2016 12:57:53 GMT -5
Signs are posted on the Way of the Dragon, the Starwater Road, and the Ranger's Way as they enter and weave through the King's Forest.
By Decree of the King's Forest Lords
Travelers Be Warned!
Orc Aggression on Rise
Limit Travel to Daylight Hours
Travel Under Guard where Possible
Between the hours of dusk and dawn drums are heard in the forest surrounding Dhedluk, Espar, Eveningstar, Tyrluk, and Waymoot. Then, between midnight and dawn as the drums beat steadily, orc raids commence, growing stronger each passing night. The towns have called forth their reserves to add to the strength of their defense. Even so, the locals fear it may not be enough.
Then the heralds ride the length and breadth of the forest with their cry:
"Hear ye, Hear ye!
Archers, Devout, Mages, Scouts, Warriors - Adventurers All - are summoned by the King's Forest Lords to join in the defense of their people. Any adventurer who stands in fending off these orc raids will be awarded 5,000 gold lions along with any plunder they win from orcs slain!"
Night after night the drums issue their steady thunder and at high moon the orcs come. Weary defenders hold their line and throw the orcs back, but each night they give a little more ground before turning the tide.
How much longer can they hold?
Hail Cormyrians!
This is an event open to all player characters levels 1 through 30. Players will be divided into groups according to level: 1 - 10; 11 - 20; 21 - 30.
The event is scheduled to take place on Saturday February 20th, beginning at 2 PM US Central Time. Hope to see you there
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2016 0:59:20 GMT -5
Pig squealing shrills out across much of the chosen battlefield as Helga Battleaxe takes charge! Tusks and heads go flinging and flying up into the air, the mighty battle roars and cries of, "TEMPUS!" boom along the field of battle, and Ragnarok is raised high above this Champions head as it is used to slay orcs by the dozens! Fighting hand in hand with the defenders of Tyrluk, where at the time Helga happened to be, she took her mighty battleaxe to arms, and with both blinding valor and courage, she aids and assists the regional defenders and militiamen! Expecting no thanks or compensation for the time, the War Priestess of Tempus energetically works to slay orcs. Helga Battlexe takes a proactive approach at aiding the denizens of Tyrluk through combat and grand displays of courage, all in the true God of War's name! ...Meanwhile...Out of the Hall of Planning! The lateral difference, Ragnhild Longsword, stations herself between Waymoot and Suzail. With the banner of the Red Knight, the Battleplanner offers wise logistics and plans to defenders and militiamen who might struggle in combat. Using whatever aid of acolytes that the Red Knight temple can offer (with specific request to them being Cormytes), if any, she helps coordinate with them to give the Red Knight a welcomed presence upon the battlefield. With any help she can bring from her goddess' temple, along with herself, is work decreed to be volunteer work, and if any payment is offered the Strategists are coached to re-direct the funds for Waymoot's denizens in order to keep them well prepared. When not talking of strategy or aiding with behind-the-scene logistics with those willing to hear, Ragnhild is directly healing the wounded men and women that would defend Crown and Country. This is a public opportunity to see a very gentler side of Ragnhild when more often than not she is rather vocal of her prejudice against the many monsters that plague the realms. She doesn't speak negatively at all around the wounded or dying, nor the soldiers, in order to ensure utmost morale. Once a day, when in Waymoot, she even performs the miracle of Raise Dead on a fallen soldier and chooses a candidate that has the least amount of members in a family.
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Post by marredwolf on Feb 13, 2016 18:33:34 GMT -5
In Eveningstar, Wurek can be seen packing his gear upon a horse, readying himself to leave town. A townsfolk asks "Why do you leave us now as the war drums beat?" to which he answers "ive always been just a volunteer, the Triad and the Purples are your true protectors and the newcomers as well, the earthkin. I mean to go to a more vulnerable part of the kingdom, tho know that we fight the same war drums."
He leaves on a long road to Dhedluk. Upon arrival at the local inn. he is told many have come and no rooms are available. He then secures a rather secluded part of town to pitch a tent and fire pit to which to cook. He sits there sharpening his blade, apparently waiting for someone to come to town. After a day or so he moves onto Waymoot, and then back again. He takes up patrolling in between the two towns, trying to determine what the orcs are up to, what has brought them to gather united against Cormyr, and what leaders have risen to combat this threat.
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Post by grivel on Feb 13, 2016 19:59:39 GMT -5
A group of four of Oghrann's finest prowl the woods between Dhedluk and Waymoot, accompanied by a human, bearded paladin. They quickly put down any orcs they find before taking rooms at the inn in Waymoot for the night. Their vigil resumes again the next day.
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Post by A Terrible Username on Feb 14, 2016 15:07:30 GMT -5
A small bluebird is often darting along the roads and watching the going ons of travelers through the Kings forest as well as keeping an eye on any orcs from a good distance and safety of the trees.
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Post by lucesi on Feb 14, 2016 18:30:35 GMT -5
From dusk til dawn a grey owl can be seen sharing the bluebird's vigil on the roads and paths of the King's Forest, leaving once the sun's rays hit the trees.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2016 18:51:27 GMT -5
As rumors accumulate and speak, word of Ragnhild's activities seem to be directed out of Waymoot now. Leading a pack of combatants, it is said that the Strategist leaves Waymoot to travel north-bound. The Storm Horns were brought up in recent Tavern talks!
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Post by DM Hawk on Feb 18, 2016 9:12:41 GMT -5
// Hail Cormyrians! DM Penguin and I have conferred and we agree it will be easier to reschedule this event. Please note that Drums of Descent will be rescheduled for Saturday February 27th beginning at 2 PM US Central Time. This will allow both the Emerald Queen and Drums of Descent events to be enjoyed without conflict.
Hey Penguin - leave some survivors for me will ya?
Hope to see you there
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Post by DM Hawk on Feb 26, 2016 19:36:27 GMT -5
Signs are posted on the Way of the Dragon, the Starwater Road, and the Ranger's Way as they enter and weave through the King's Forest.
By Decree of the King's Forest Lords
Travelers Be Warned!
Orc Aggression on Rise
Limit Travel to Daylight Hours
Travel Under Guard where Possible
Between the hours of dusk and dawn drums are heard in the forest surrounding Dhedluk, Espar, Eveningstar, Tyrluk, and Waymoot. Then, between midnight and dawn as the drums beat steadily, orc raids commence, growing stronger each passing night. The towns have called forth their reserves to add to the strength of their defense. Even so, the locals fear it may not be enough.
Then the heralds ride the length and breadth of the forest with their cry:
"Hear ye, Hear ye!
Archers, Devout, Mages, Scouts, Warriors - Adventurers All - are summoned by the King's Forest Lords to join in the defense of their people. Any adventurer who stands in fending off these orc raids will be awarded 5,000 gold lions along with any plunder they win from orcs slain!"
Night after night the drums issue their steady thunder and at high moon the orcs come. Weary defenders hold their line and throw the orcs back, but each night they give a little more ground before turning the tide.
How much longer can they hold?
Hail Cormyrians!
This is an event open to all player characters levels 1 through 30. Players will be divided into groups according to level: 1 - 10; 11 - 20; 21 - 30.
The event is scheduled to take place on Saturday February 27th, beginning at 2 PM US Central Time. Hope to see you there
Hail Cormyrians!
*Bump*
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2016 0:16:00 GMT -5
//Great fun with this team! Keep up the good work. I thought the severity and suspense was captured very well! Looking forward to the ongoing chapter. Also big shout-out to the Ironsworn members that had a presence near Ragnhild's North Team!
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Post by timenewton on Feb 28, 2016 13:25:22 GMT -5
Not sure if it's possible, I know there are restricitons for some DM's but to do a server reset before big events might help ALOT.
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Post by DM Hawk on Feb 28, 2016 17:43:37 GMT -5
Thank you for the feedback. A reset was done ahead of the event. I didn't anticipate the turn out we had, but was grateful for it all the same.
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Fenix
~
Sleepless Golem, aka Kenny
If you read this, send me a love note.
Posts: 2,183
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Post by Fenix on Feb 28, 2016 17:50:23 GMT -5
I wouldnt mind seeing massive level spaced events like this done how they used to be if possible. 1-10 done one day, 11-20 another, 21+ another...I know it might have to be spaced weeks apart, but I think it would be FAR more enjoyable for DMS and players alike to be able to play throught he event without the immense amounts of lag that was involved. It was an interesting experience, but...hell, anybody who doesnt just autoattack couldnt really do a thing for it. If I went to cast a spell inf ront of enemies, id suddenly be in the middle fo town and half of my HP gone with no enemies around. It became rather frustrating after a point when the lag worked against you. Enemies taking several turns worth of attacks before you could even make a swing...
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Post by DM Hawk on Feb 28, 2016 18:03:31 GMT -5
Or spamming werewolf howls? Please don't do that This time my schedule didn't permit breaking things out into different sessions as I've done in the past. The turn out was a welcome surprise and we'll try to accommodate it better next time. We have a few ideas.
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Post by EDM Entori on Feb 28, 2016 18:40:12 GMT -5
Hey I enjoyed the event last night. And sometimes the lag beast rears it's ugly head. But for the most part it was enjoyable. If a little disrupted.
The biggest disruption was the ooc comments about it. Send a tell.
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Fenix
~
Sleepless Golem, aka Kenny
If you read this, send me a love note.
Posts: 2,183
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Post by Fenix on Feb 28, 2016 18:45:07 GMT -5
Or spamming werewolf howls? Please don't do that This time my schedule didn't permit breaking things out into different sessions as I've done in the past. The turn out was a welcome surprise and we'll try to accommodate it better next time. We have a few ideas. In my defense, i had no idea when I would howl. I would try, and i would just teleport back to the middle of espar and assume i didnt howl. it would cancel actions well before it would perform them
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Post by styxxbone1 on Feb 28, 2016 20:43:11 GMT -5
On CoA the DMs would tell players to turn off maps during large events like this. The only exception was for some of the designated "scouts".
The reason stated was that for the player mapping to work everyone in party, with his map on was pinging every other active map via the server. So imagine you have 50+ player boxes trying to update the position of every other player second by second who are literally in different time zones and across oceans. And all this traffic must go -through- the main server.
The server which has to keep track of not only every player, but every placeable and every NPC and all of the combat spells and actions. The lag load grows exponentially.
Another big lag monster is all of the fallen creatures and items on the ground. CoA events often would "pause" the action so areas could be cleared of fallen monsters and dropped items before moving on to the next areas.
The "Drums" event had a few fallen orcs to set the mood, which will add to lag but, the trade off was worth it.
styxx
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Post by Viridian Knight on Feb 28, 2016 21:53:03 GMT -5
On CoA the DMs would tell players to turn off maps during large events like this. The only exception was for some of the designated "scouts". The reason stated was that for the player mapping to work everyone in party, with his map on was pinging every other active map via the server. So imagine you have 50+ player boxes trying to update the position of every other player second by second who are literally in different time zones and across oceans. And all this traffic must go -through- the main server. styxx Just wanted to say for the most part the map has little to no effect on such, the largest problem with parties is if you're on the same map your client is being told the relative position of all other party members regardless of if the map is open or not which gets exponentially worse with each additional person in party beyond 5-6 players. This also includes the server updating each client with regards to HP and any combat rolls made by or against a player in the party or their pets. Likewise don't get me wrong I love being able to party with people. . . I've played on servers that disabled the ability to and instead gave xp out in an AoE effect from whatever died granted based on your character level rather then the highest party members level and while it had it's pros it also had it's cons.
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Post by Penguin on Feb 28, 2016 22:05:30 GMT -5
ON the note of open vs. closed maps, while I can not speak to a technical point of view, I can vouch that when the Emerald Queen's forces attacked Shallybrook there were easily 30 players involved in one area. At first, we had one massive party, maps were up, and we all just hoped. We lagged the server so hard we crashed to a reset.
For the second go around, we had everyone turn off maps, and we separated out into individual parties for each small group. So we went from one large party to perhaps 5 or six smaller parties.
With those being the only changes made, the event ran smoothly. I don't know if either of those options can be carried out for other events, but it was quite successful for Shallybrook.
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Post by Syd's Blue Sky on Feb 29, 2016 7:37:04 GMT -5
I had the Dhedluk group, which was about half the total number of players, split up into three parties, all of them outside their designated gates and actually in the forest areas themselves. That made a very big difference earlier on. It didn't get unplayable for us until Espar fell into total chaos inside the town.
For large DM events I intend to make sure that the corpses are all set to not drop loot on death. There's nothing worse than being the "loot bitch" in a massive laggy event, and being totally chained down to doing nothing but running from corpse to corpse for 5 hours... just to conform with server rules!
I think that would be a fun and useful standard to set.
The more of these large scale events we run the better we'll get at running them. On our end the responsibility is to keep an open and creative mind with regards to the running of the event. On the end of the players, the responsibility is to not actively ruin other people's fun inside the event by complaining.
I saw a few people, I shall not name names, that did literally nothing but complain non-stop for two hours. No RP. Strictly repetitive OOC whining about something that was not possible to fix.
Here's a general rule of thumb, FRC. If you've said it 78 times already, the 79th time isn't going to accomplish anything.
Stay classy FRC.
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Post by Alizarin Spion - Sleeper Agent on Feb 29, 2016 10:29:55 GMT -5
If you've said it 78 times already, the 79th time isn't going to accomplish anything.
What if you say it for the 80th time? Like a very wise and smart leader once said, "Persistence is the key to success" - Donald Trump.
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Post by Calliope on Feb 29, 2016 10:48:53 GMT -5
LOL... no? XD
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Post by Syd's Blue Sky on Feb 29, 2016 18:14:30 GMT -5
If you've said it 78 times already, the 79th time isn't going to accomplish anything.
What if you say it for the 80th time? Like a very wise and smart leader once said, "Persistence is the key to success" - Donald Trump.
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Post by styxxbone1 on Feb 29, 2016 19:43:50 GMT -5
On CoA the DMs would tell players to turn off maps during large events like this. The only exception was for some of the designated "scouts". The reason stated was that for the player mapping to work everyone in party, with his map on was pinging every other active map via the server. So imagine you have 50+ player boxes trying to update the position of every other player second by second who are literally in different time zones and across oceans. And all this traffic must go -through- the main server. styxx Just wanted to say for the most part the map has little to no effect on such, the largest problem with parties is if you're on the same map your client is being told the relative position of all other party members regardless of if the map is open or not which gets exponentially worse with each additional person in party beyond 5-6 players. This also includes the server updating each client with regards to HP and any combat rolls made by or against a player in the party or their pets. Likewise don't get me wrong I love being able to party with people. . . I've played on servers that disabled the ability to and instead gave xp out in an AoE effect from whatever died granted based on your character level rather then the highest party members level and while it had it's pros it also had it's cons. Ahh ok, so maybe they were misinformed about the map, though we did seem to observe less lag when everyone turned off maps.(As DM Penguin also observed.) Maybe this could be tested? And the results worked into future events guidelines? They were correct about the exponential growth in information being sent back and forth between all of the characters in party. With all of this information having to pass through the server. Which as has been said is partly unavoidable. Splitting into smaller parties seems to help. styxx
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Post by Syd's Blue Sky on Feb 29, 2016 21:05:57 GMT -5
Also worth mention is that the server was already overdue for a reset (it had been delayed) when Penguin's event started. The map issue is far from isolated, as about half a dozen things could be responsible.
Either way, we should get some kind of standard procedure in place for handling such events in the future.
The server was freshly reset for the Drums of Descent event.
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