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...no no not that 420, I mean Magic Item Creation, aka Imbed.
Anyway, it had not been at the forefront of my mind in recent years that Imbed can give experience. In particular, lately I've been using it to start my Gift, rather than fruitlessly foraging for something useless with my sorcerer for 2 minutes.
Today I decided to check the precise experience. It was 80 experience (240 after 3x from Lumnis) for two shots of Lesser Shroud. That could be called 2 experience per mana point, a flat rate, or whatever.
Realizing this was actually a lot of experience, of course I decided to try some more. Between this I had walked to the store, and kept thinking to myself, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!" Well, sure enough, there is some kind of limit to Imbed experience. Maybe it's an in-game timer, maybe a general timer, maybe it's leprechauns.
My guess is it might be similar to the way throwing trash away works.
In my musings, I noted that there is literally no information anywhere on Imbed experience. Not gswiki, not the official website, not gsguide, not even Google could find anything in a quick trial. And by "literally no information" I mean no one even tells you Imbed gives any experience at all.
I welcome your replies and insight.
Living in River's Rest, finding quaint ways to gain experience.
In my earlier years, folks were banned because of this feature - it used not to have any limits, and several used it to advantage.
Today (and since that time in. . 96? 97?) 420 functions as you describe, for the first imbed every 24 hours, if I recall correctly. I also don't believe it to be the only spell or magical function to operate this way.
Doug
Today (and since that time in. . 96? 97?) 420 functions as you describe, for the first imbed every 24 hours, if I recall correctly. I also don't believe it to be the only spell or magical function to operate this way.
Doug
For what it's worth, I do not believe this is a new change.
(And by "new" I'm referring to the Krakii-variable time lens that I see things through. In this case, "new" constitutes "any year with a two (2) in the thousands' place.")
I'm pretty sure this got changed in the mid-to-late '90s, and if I had to guess I would say 1996-to-first-half-of-1997. (i.e. After AOL opened, before the changeover to the web.) Blame most changes due to abusive behavior on that timeframe. I do.
(And by "new" I'm referring to the Krakii-variable time lens that I see things through. In this case, "new" constitutes "any year with a two (2) in the thousands' place.")
I'm pretty sure this got changed in the mid-to-late '90s, and if I had to guess I would say 1996-to-first-half-of-1997. (i.e. After AOL opened, before the changeover to the web.) Blame most changes due to abusive behavior on that timeframe. I do.
I've definitely heard of people enchanting just for the experience. I forget who on the forums said they got to level 50 throwing away an arbitrarily large number of 4x daggers.
My immediate thought, besides that "this cannot actually work" was to get my wife's ranger to start imbuing lots of stuff and imbedding through my Gift. I was even thinking it might be interesting to warcamp using only rods I imbedded myself (well, I was trying to think of something useful to do with an arbitrarily large number of imbeds).
So I can't really in good faith ask for the daily-cap to be removed, since probably the above is about as abusive as whatever reason they axed it. Not that I personally see anything wrong with using a system that grants experience to gain experience. Kaldonis mastered fletching after he couldn't hunt in the Citadel just to gain the whatever 125k of experience given for mastering, and hasn't used the system since then.
>Wow that's a big swing in the other direction, once per day? Surprised they didn't just remove the xp entirely.
I do, however, kind of agree with this. Except well, I do like using it to start my Gift timer lately, so even once-per-day is enough for that convenience.
And yes, I wasn't really trying to say this was anything recent. I knew 420 gave some experience, I had just forgotten that for about a decade, since I only began using it to start Gift for the last month or two.
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
My immediate thought, besides that "this cannot actually work" was to get my wife's ranger to start imbuing lots of stuff and imbedding through my Gift. I was even thinking it might be interesting to warcamp using only rods I imbedded myself (well, I was trying to think of something useful to do with an arbitrarily large number of imbeds).
So I can't really in good faith ask for the daily-cap to be removed, since probably the above is about as abusive as whatever reason they axed it. Not that I personally see anything wrong with using a system that grants experience to gain experience. Kaldonis mastered fletching after he couldn't hunt in the Citadel just to gain the whatever 125k of experience given for mastering, and hasn't used the system since then.
>Wow that's a big swing in the other direction, once per day? Surprised they didn't just remove the xp entirely.
I do, however, kind of agree with this. Except well, I do like using it to start my Gift timer lately, so even once-per-day is enough for that convenience.
And yes, I wasn't really trying to say this was anything recent. I knew 420 gave some experience, I had just forgotten that for about a decade, since I only began using it to start Gift for the last month or two.
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
I always thought it kind of sad that we lost a sorcerer of my acquaintance over this.
Of course, it is possible that the loss was due to scripting, and the review of the case brought to light how 'cheap' this experience was, so the ban happened over the former and a fix was generated for the latter.
I wonder if time-motion studies (heh) would show this isn't any worse than hunting, and should be permitted. Hard to say, though.
Doug
Of course, it is possible that the loss was due to scripting, and the review of the case brought to light how 'cheap' this experience was, so the ban happened over the former and a fix was generated for the latter.
I wonder if time-motion studies (heh) would show this isn't any worse than hunting, and should be permitted. Hard to say, though.
Doug
>I always thought it kind of sad that we lost a sorcerer of my acquaintance over this.
Years later, that's always bad for this game. We have a small community as it is.
>Of course, it is possible that the loss was due to scripting, and the review of the case brought to light how 'cheap' this experience was, so the ban happened over the former and a fix was generated for the latter.
>I wonder if time-motion studies (heh) would show this isn't any worse than hunting, and should be permitted. Hard to say, though.
Well, take the 80 experience my character got for 60 mana. Usually if I killed a like-level creature I could get around this much experience or more, and usually it wouldn't cost 60 mana. The skills and stats required for good imbedding is definitely not a joke any more, either. Even making a few wands with 4 charges of Fire Spirit in a Workshop had me fail at least twice I think (only minor failures though), and my character is nearly capped with fairly reasonable training for 420 (or so I guess).
I would tend to think the argument here against adding the experience back in any form would be the risk vs. reward that seems to be a major theme in game design these days. I imagine we'd need to add Familiar Gate / Mana Focus like failure to Magic Item Creation as a trade-off for the ability to gain more experience from it. There is, evidently according to gswiki, some chance of major failure, but I don't think I've ever experienced it in the last decade, and it certainly doesn't seem to have a chance to kill. Granted I don't do a ton of imbedding work, either.
Imbue can be quite dangerous as far as I know, too. Oddly, I don't think my wife's ranger has ever gotten a major failure on that (the ones that kill); we suspect it might be due to her having 25 ranks of SMC by level 25, which is often something most rangers won't advocate doing, but has always worked out well for us considering my high level halfling sorcerer in CoL. We didn't have the chance to check if Imbue gives any experience or not, but we'll look into it.
Just hypothetically speaking, would players be willing to trade possible death-inducing major failures to Imbed to get back the experience with each cast? Here I assume the present major failures cannot kill, though I may very well be mistaken on that point.
Definitely as far as capped issues hunting, putting more ways for capped or near-capped players to gain experience isn't a totally bad thing. And handing out sacks of Mana Disrupt rods for little-to-no price to young hunters wouldn't seem to be a bad thing for the game, either. (Well...depends on your philosophy of balance...maybe it's too powerful, but I doubt we'd create that many dedicated imbedding characters with such a change.)
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
Years later, that's always bad for this game. We have a small community as it is.
>Of course, it is possible that the loss was due to scripting, and the review of the case brought to light how 'cheap' this experience was, so the ban happened over the former and a fix was generated for the latter.
>I wonder if time-motion studies (heh) would show this isn't any worse than hunting, and should be permitted. Hard to say, though.
Well, take the 80 experience my character got for 60 mana. Usually if I killed a like-level creature I could get around this much experience or more, and usually it wouldn't cost 60 mana. The skills and stats required for good imbedding is definitely not a joke any more, either. Even making a few wands with 4 charges of Fire Spirit in a Workshop had me fail at least twice I think (only minor failures though), and my character is nearly capped with fairly reasonable training for 420 (or so I guess).
I would tend to think the argument here against adding the experience back in any form would be the risk vs. reward that seems to be a major theme in game design these days. I imagine we'd need to add Familiar Gate / Mana Focus like failure to Magic Item Creation as a trade-off for the ability to gain more experience from it. There is, evidently according to gswiki, some chance of major failure, but I don't think I've ever experienced it in the last decade, and it certainly doesn't seem to have a chance to kill. Granted I don't do a ton of imbedding work, either.
Imbue can be quite dangerous as far as I know, too. Oddly, I don't think my wife's ranger has ever gotten a major failure on that (the ones that kill); we suspect it might be due to her having 25 ranks of SMC by level 25, which is often something most rangers won't advocate doing, but has always worked out well for us considering my high level halfling sorcerer in CoL. We didn't have the chance to check if Imbue gives any experience or not, but we'll look into it.
Just hypothetically speaking, would players be willing to trade possible death-inducing major failures to Imbed to get back the experience with each cast? Here I assume the present major failures cannot kill, though I may very well be mistaken on that point.
Definitely as far as capped issues hunting, putting more ways for capped or near-capped players to gain experience isn't a totally bad thing. And handing out sacks of Mana Disrupt rods for little-to-no price to young hunters wouldn't seem to be a bad thing for the game, either. (Well...depends on your philosophy of balance...maybe it's too powerful, but I doubt we'd create that many dedicated imbedding characters with such a change.)
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
As a mid-low wizard, I'm definitely not looking for more spells to have a chance at killing me. I barely use 418/930 as it is due to these 'features'. The minor benefits hardly warrant risking death imho. I would much rather have these bad roll = death situations removed. Maimed and injured is fun. Dead is just annoying.
I also don't think it's a good idea to add more easily scripted xp sources. Because within an hour of this change going live you know that's how it would be used. Scripting xp quietly at a table. Meh.
Now if you wanted to boost the xp gains from the 1/day, I'd be on board. (ie: 300xp+ for that first imbed)
I don't have a TON of experience imbedding, but all my explosions have been hand injuries.
| I've definitely heard of people enchanting just for the experience. I forget who on the forums said they got to level 50 throwing away an arbitrarily large number of 4x daggers. |
That would be me. He's 53 now. I haven't been doing mass enchanting lately because, quite frankly, it's time consuming.
Keith/Brinret/Shiun
Be nice to Wyrom or I will cut you!
>As a mid-low wizard, I'm definitely not looking for more spells to have a chance at killing me. I barely use 418/930 as it is due to these 'features'. The minor benefits hardly warrant risking death imho. I would much rather have these bad roll = death situations removed. Maimed and injured is fun. Dead is just annoying.
>I also don't think it's a good idea to add more easily scripted xp sources. Because within an hour of this change going live you know that's how it would be used. Scripting xp quietly at a table. Meh.
>Now if you wanted to boost the xp gains from the 1/day, I'd be on board. (ie: 300xp+ for that first imbed)
>I don't have a TON of experience imbedding, but all my explosions have been hand injuries.
Definitely appreciate and respect this response, and rather anticipated someone would say that. I'm not necessarily advocating for a change. The inital post was just musings.
More experience for the first imbed sounds pretty cool. It could also be a diminishing returns deal, or drop it from once-a-day to...some other arbirtrary but smaller amount of time.
>That would be me. He's 53 now. I haven't been doing mass enchanting lately because, quite frankly, it's time consuming.
I'm still laughing about this idea weeks later. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's definitely a hilarious idea!
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
>I also don't think it's a good idea to add more easily scripted xp sources. Because within an hour of this change going live you know that's how it would be used. Scripting xp quietly at a table. Meh.
>Now if you wanted to boost the xp gains from the 1/day, I'd be on board. (ie: 300xp+ for that first imbed)
>I don't have a TON of experience imbedding, but all my explosions have been hand injuries.
Definitely appreciate and respect this response, and rather anticipated someone would say that. I'm not necessarily advocating for a change. The inital post was just musings.
More experience for the first imbed sounds pretty cool. It could also be a diminishing returns deal, or drop it from once-a-day to...some other arbirtrary but smaller amount of time.
>That would be me. He's 53 now. I haven't been doing mass enchanting lately because, quite frankly, it's time consuming.
I'm still laughing about this idea weeks later. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's definitely a hilarious idea!
"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes
I think 420 had a two-fer bug. You could do it a lot and the formula was borked so failures never happened. I recall a time when I would imbed for a day and hunt on the wands and rods for the next two or three days. This stopped not when 420 lost the experience for many casts, but when the failure rate was calculated and imposed correctly. I was shocked as heck, but not enough to complain.
I still don't get many failures, I just don't want to waste that much silver on imbedables. I might imbed once a week, depending on what falls out of the hopper and into my hands. I have tendency of giving this stuff away, so check those benches and boxes in the Commons. Usually they are good for a bunch of casts of 401 or 406, sometimes 112 if the mood strikes me.
Magarven the Mad
I still don't get many failures, I just don't want to waste that much silver on imbedables. I might imbed once a week, depending on what falls out of the hopper and into my hands. I have tendency of giving this stuff away, so check those benches and boxes in the Commons. Usually they are good for a bunch of casts of 401 or 406, sometimes 112 if the mood strikes me.
Magarven the Mad
