Designing A LitRPG Game System

Discussion has been initiated, aggregating users for participation.

So, how does one go about designing a game system for their LitRPG?

Ever since reading @Dawn Chapman 's shoutbox post where she shares that her collab partner is designing the system for her new book, it made me wonder about the process.

What is your path? Every LitRPG I've read seems to vary between light, glancing mentions of stats to a more in-depth approach.

Is everything basically a copy of D&D or games like Dragon Age?

Let's do some curtain reveals!

 

I'm often light on stats to make my books more accessible to many different tastes. Aside from that, rules are pretty flexible. Lewd Saga is more about exploration then +8 to orgy skill.

Would I want an mmo where you can expore your perversions? Yes! I would make the fantasy and adventure hard but hooking up would be a breeze.

Now a table top version of Lewd Saga? It would have to be a game where everyone playing was comfortable with...um...speaking their mind and strong enough to keep playing before certain...fustriatons took over.

 

I work on a balanced system by and large if it is a game, then the game would have to be balanced or else we end up with a very skewed demographic.
If it's a game-like world then you don't have to be balanced as much, but you have to understand that everyone is going to have OP power 'X' because it is OP.

Oh Eden, if you do make a tabletop version of that and GM it can I hook into the game...... please.....

 

I'm working on putting one together right now...not physically right now, but, you get the idea. I've cracked out a few of my old tabletop RPG books for inspiration, as well as an old gaming book called "The Book of Mars".

This wouldn't be the first time creating an adaption of a game system into something different. It's mostly a matter of figuring out what stats apply in the game, and how they affect things, then throw in skills and powers and items. When you get right down to it, everything is really quite easy to slide together, just remembering the difference between innate parts of an item or power, and what is really just a special effect. Also, keep in mind just what it is that is being simulated.

What is the difference between a hand held blaster, and a wand of blasting or a super with hands of blasting? Mostly just special effects, and one is a little more difficult to disarm.

 

I've cheated, and convinced myself that LitRPG Game system of the future (for the games I would want to play) are indistinguishable from fantasy.

But on the game side of things, arbitrary limitations and immersion breaking tools for creating game balance, like weapon and armor restrictions, help keep people in the game world and provide soft rules. While some games have socketing and instant crafting & resource collection, in the future maybe having twine is all it takes to turn a walking staff into a magic staff after a player finds a magic gem. With efficiency and boons increased based on lore & crafting rules surrounding arbitrarily "congruent" materials even at the twine-stick-gem level.

I put zero limitation on scroll reuse time, but scrolls for "oh shit" moments are expensive and require activation words and player character resources like mana, health, and stamina. Potions on the otherhand have timers, but separate timers for different tiers of potions based on their potency: and in the case of pure mana, health, and stamina restoration individual timers altogether. Up to a single lifetime use potion (which players who favor Corsair & low-investment non-spell casting classes could potentially use repeatedly after remaking their characters), but more often daily, weekly, and monthly potions with all sorts of potions on timers inbetween from different areas, all separate but covering the 1 month to 1 year tier. So people are incentivized to roam between dungeons and raid areas for the most exciting gameplay, at least as the game matures and information spreads.

Weapons don't just get taken to a blacksmith and repaired instantly, they need to go into the shop like a car would and get repairs, the same with armor, but magic weapons and the in-game insurance system allow for players with faction to use a nations insured items, so when they die or break a weapon, they walk back into the armory and pick it back up. The vast majority of players however don't do this, as the vast majority of players are solo physical combat fighters that qualify as casual. They build their characters around taking advantage of in-game economic systems (wagon guards, city guards, druid / ranger nature wardens or stewardships, crafting and trading), and so the casuals maximize their time online by collecting resources when offline. The tools of upward mobility within the game combined with RMT that isn't universally frowned upon, and that is actually supported through an ingame cryptocurrency system that even NPC nations use, provides players with the opportunity to pay to play independent from the economic hubs of the game.

Facilitating a players enjoyment of the world is a big part of the game design, so instead of punishing the use of gold wholesalers and crypto, the company siphons it away through their NPCs by means of monster raids and items and abilities exclusive to Non-player operated Kingdoms (like magic insurance).

Player crafting & player economies evolve to take advantage of high end trading and casual trading. Fast-Swappable low quality blades, "savage" spiked club weapons made entirely of solid fast regenerating jade, jade weapon cores and decorative designs that can regenerate (over time) any amount of damage, spears as the single most popular weapon in the game creating a hermit crab weapon economy. I jump all over the timeline of the game world so people can see the development of in-game strategies used by players. Early on on the "Central Continent" players took advantage of their ability to wipe their karmic slates clean and ambushed city guards and zerged down bandit camps to get their weapons and armor: on the East coast of the continent with sparse independent "frontier" cities this strategy destroys a huge part of the game lore that was meant to drive game development. Players also got a vast amount of wealth from conquering and utilizing crafting resources meant to be used by super efficient NPCs. After the player uprising, instead of rigidly designed but balanced conflict, a lopsided faction system meant to draw players to a frontier where the Central and Eastern continents would meet for trade, failed spectacularly while enriching the players who crashed the game.

Creating a system where the earliest months and first year of the game saw players sticking to the already developed areas, rather than striking out to make it rich in what was meant to be a "gold rush" nexus of trade and combat. The players that started in the East who took advantage of superior player zerg tactics strip mined the Eastern frontier and traveled to the developed regions with a huge leg up on their competitors.

So part of my LitRPG world creation is saying that in the very first iteration of VR titles, game companies f**k up in a big way and realize that even after screening for psychopaths and sadists, players in an unrestrained world will be huge dicks. Part of the meta-lore of my world is that the game developers of my main game server anticipated player asshollery (because they conspired to have an advantage over the other companies with a delayed release) and they still fucked up by quarantining all their "questionable" personality profiles into certain areas of the game at launch. Primarily the North East coast of the Central Continent. A miscommunication about this between the game developers and the game management staff results in players strip mining some of the most important lore development hubs of the game, and on the Eastern Continent the AI as designed brute forces its built in lore limitations and accelerates a quest meant to take over a year and activates it within the first 2 months.

Everything that can go wrong, goes wrong, and a big part of the lore is that players in competition would rather limit the entire player-bases options for improved gameplay rather than lose power and negotiate with proven untrustworthy persons. The game mechanics themselves were easy once I stalled out item inflation by ruining the server progression at every turn, leaving things up to players and the limited starting faction boons. Otherwise a story ruining facet of "item / ability" rushes would occur, with players flocking wherever a new unique class option was unlocked or items were discovered.

Paladins for example have a ton of "conversion" options (including class changing to monks & priests), but most of them are based around player personality and playstyle assessments, so the most coveted and powerful offensive and defensive variations of the class are unlikely to unlocked by the vast majority of players. If every player could head to Mother Superior's twin domed churches and pick up the hybrid variation of a priest and paladin with the largest possible mana-pool for paladins within the game, people would do just that. By making it so anyone can (with time invested) become a basic paladin, the unique paladin class variations can remain situationally overpowered but shut off to mass abuse. Abuse being a judgement call by game devs, making it so players who gathered together after gaining such a defense oriented class, to better abuse the features and gain an advantage, would also gain access to a more offensive and individually powerful variant of the paladin class as an alternative to the defensive one because of their actions.

cont

 

cont
Thus if anyone ever asks about my game world, "Why did this and that happen, isn't that plot armor?" The answer is no, because I say no. The game world is greasing the wheels of enjoyment so players can find their way down a path that fits with their personality and playstyle. If sometimes its more immediate and convenient, then the player is just lucky. For the vast majority of casual players, whacking and stabbing shit with blind berserk rage is about the extent of what they desire from their free-time, and so they remain physical combat characters. It doesn't matter how great a martial artist someone is when druids entangle their feet and fire magicians launch fireballs that act like flash-bangs concussing players temporarily, fire mages are totally immune to fire in my world, and so fire immunity is the only immunity in the game that is possible to acquire on a massive scale, but fire mages also have an alternative to limited bat-guano derived gun powder so they can use cannons (with built in mana limitations) to gain non-fire physical projectiles. The fire-mage classes can be limited in their attack potential by player immunity, but in exchange they have the greatest variety of attack spells and the most secondary magic & physical spell effects possible in the game, making them incredible support fighters in PvP and the uncontested best damage dealers against anything that isn't fire immune; at least on any battlefield where fires won't result in a handicap for the majority of a force.

So all my stuff seems open ended to me, and gives me a good amount of wiggle room which is probably good in a first LitRPG world, but there are limitations and game mechanics at every conceivable turn.

Balancing fire-mages on a seven sail steel dwarven cruiser being possible because dwarves are the biggest bros in the game and don't go to war with anyone. A low-elf NPC druid can repair a wooden elf ship while elf merchants can paralyze normally magic immune players that stand in water that negates innate magic resistances for humanoids. There is a whole game within a game thing going on with my East to West intercontinental travel, and pirates who use their ships as their weapon can remake their characters, change ship ownership, and do all sorts of things that players who have to build up their characters callouses and spell affinities can't do by remaking their avatar. But its a playstyle limited to a certain hub of gun-powder producing isles, and the game expansion into Western Isles destroys the shipping system when NPCs forced to adapt to player resurrection abilities for fast travel to "home points", have to outcompete players and one another.

Resulting in fleets of junk-like d-day landing craft with single sails and crude rudders being sent in massive flotillas to collect items from NPC nations adventuring non-players & player allies in the West. The pirate play-style resulted in the deaths of the majority of talented NPC sailors, and so the NPCs finally adapted their system to quit giving massive wages to "spawned stupid" low experience nobles, and instead used the NPCs who had gained greater skills and "experience" interacting with players as captains of small crews on cheap vessels. The game evolved in a totally unexpected way, and the pirates couldn't attack out into the West because the value of their ships compared to the value of the junks and their cargo, and because as pirates the magic ship insurance system isn't reciprocal with nations they pirate, and both player respawns with items and insurance have a set range. The set range being built into the lore of the old games so in-game "race" events couldn't be trivialized with resurrections. Much of the old game lore carried over (though not exactly), and so player experience with old game titles is a huge leg up in new ones.

TLDR: Totally open ended with a game world meant to help a player have fun, and a hidden GM suport staff that (once they are more aware of the job they were meant to be doing) reigns in the "aberrants" of the game. Game lore and mechanics spanning 5 game titles (including a "gap" title between WoW style mmos and VR - which I've never fleshed out), and a game physics system which makes an Indiana Jones rolling boulder trap an instant kill on the same level as a dragon breath attack. Takeaway from my own experience: throw wrenches like a Super Mario World bad guy and always crap on a characters strategy so they don't get complacent, pooing on boring OP story lines results in expanding non-op means of countering OP abilities and strategies, and very quickly fleshes out a storyline and game mechanics. To the point where its more fun thinking up new stories than writing the ones you already have fleshed out.


ABOVE: The Matthew James School of LitRPG Game World Design.

 

What about penalties for getting killed? In the novel I'll publish next, the characters are in a realm of the game where everyone is permanent. If killed, it HURTS like a RL injury, plus the deceased endures 15 seconds of pure hell as demons attack and torment him before he respawns. BUT, if a character is killed 5 times within 90 days, then he goes to the game's version of Hell for 1 year. Plus there are weapons and curses that can send a player to Hell for a day, week, month, year. I wanted real consequences for being killed, so that is what I came up with.

Anyone else have consequences for being killed other than the inconvenience of it all?

 

For what I call LitJOB stories dying reduces time making money, but most LitJOB stories have players enjoying their time within the game while making money, so its not often at the forefront that people in the future are less concerned about making money than todays min-maxers are obsessed with EXP per hour and Gold per hour.

I don't want to give away my exact death system, mostly because I'm still tweaking it, but I've linked the consequences of my world to the NPCs and personal play time of the protagonists. I also write from the perspective of the NPCs who don't get resurrection without a mostly intact corpse, and because my game worlds progression is broken, both battle rezzing and player resurrection aren't possible at all. Most of my stories show the upsides and downsides of full immersion VR, so a straight forward dungeon mission turns into a hellish multi-week long adventure with escape as the only goal. With the trapped team not wanting to lose their companion NPCs as the NPCs won't resurrect back at the groups last homepoint, and they are lost so its not like they can rush back and resurrect them without a NPC priest (because players can't rez). Even if they did make it back to the exact place the NPCs died, its more than likely that the NPCs would be eaten / dismembered and therefore not eligible for a resurrection anyways. I have an end game for a "fixed" rez system, for players and NPCs, but currently I'm on the fence about a window for "incomplete corpse" resurrection relatively soon after death with partial bodies. Luckily it doesn't change anything about my story overall, just how messily the NPC characters can die. Fallout Bloody Mess perk vs PG without blood.

Not sure how veteran of a MMO gamer you are @Tom Gallier, but in EQ and older MMO titles raid zones and dungeons weren't instanced, and so outside competition and exploits allowed players to compete that added a time constraint to gameplay. Players have to clear to X mob, then based on the GM edicts about fair-play, the first team to trigger the event would then own the event. When there is a preset game currency to real world money exchange rate, and raid drops are valued at some obscene amount similar to a new car, it might be a big deal whether or not a Guild manages to win the rights to an event. If that event isn't instanced, then they have to fight an open-world boss while also fighting off a competing raid force.

Adding pain to the mix doesn't seem necessary when total "social" death due to some overly ambitious move by a protagonist, who is either a key player or a player meant to stay in the back, results in the loss of an event that could have fed the players families for a year. I go with a more pepper spray in the eyes, shooting pain from a groin kick, and electrocution path with my "pain" system, with fighters (and casters) getting certain berserker boons that reduce the effects of pain. Ambushes can be crippling and disorienting then, and part of becoming good at the game is avoiding pain and fighting through it when its unavoidable... when an open world dragon is raining meteorites and ice-lances or breathing fire, avoiding pain becomes impossible. When dragon fear isn't some randomized "flee" feature where your character loses control and runs in circles, but a mind clouding anxiety caused by being in a vr pod, then people popping xanax might be using a performance enhancing drug for a VR game.

In a game with respawns, the Taskmaker hell path with full 1:1 pain is a little over the top. But because its a story, and because the black market might someday accomodate such games even if legal markets don't, the pain someone experiences leading up to death isn't that big of a deal. The death of their goal is a consequence, and emotional elements of being crippled and toyed with after someone gets the jump on you is frustrating even without any pain. Raging after losing in a WoW Arena match wasn't something I often did, but when the game world dumped RNG in my lap and there was literally nothing I could do in old school EQ after chain resists on CC abilities that lead to a group wipe, I was always pissed. Toss in player created chaos like CC breaking abilities and people not controlling their threat, and a small fortress of competence in a world of incompetence doesn't make any difference. When co-operative games spank you, they often go all out. Like cursed dice that refuse to lose their bad mojo.

Maybe I'm just too sensitive (lol) about the interplay between players, game mechanics, and game health, however I think there are a lot of missed dialogue and character revelation opportunities that instead get slotted into not-quite fetish pain descriptions. There is a place for that, sure, but the soul crushing repercussions of a guild applicant on thin ice losing his chance at the best LitJOB in the game because the universe aligned against him, when he (or she) has been otherwise competent their entire gaming career, would be some major suck ass that people could sympathize with. Who hasn't had a friend, lover, or coworker accuse them of making an excuse when the person making the accusation was upset? Sometimes things are excuses, but as someone who has played healers, tanks, and Crowd Control in high end content, getting blamed for things objectively outside of ones control that you can point to as prove in the combat log, is a uniquely shitty feeling. Especially when the person is just going off based on what something looks like, and not what actually occurred.

 

Everything here is great and illuminating. You guys rock!

 

That is a little to harsh, to go from small blips of pain to a full on year.... Raids would become a thing of the past. It would be 3 deaths then go sit in town until the timer resets for anyone with a brain.

 

This is an interesting topic. I think there is nothing more annoying then getting locked out of a game you like to play. Death in Lewd Saga is flexible. Sometimes you resurrect immediately at your save point. In zones, dungeons or events, you can get locked out of the game from ten minutes to a full week. This ensures there is a consequence if you die.

I also have bounty hunters and dire mages to go after anyone exploiting the game.

 

I don't even mind the lock out as much as the idea of being stuck in hell for a full year. Death should have consequences from the minor and up, but being tormented for a full year for dying 5 times in 90 days.... I would just stay in a safe zone after 3 deaths and wait for the clock to reset. Work on my crafting, spend time with the friendly monster girl NPCs etc.

 

Simple answer? I steal. I am a grubby little thief.

Almost everything in my book has an origin in another game or another game concept. In some cases it is the concept, in others it is pretty much the entire concept lifted nearly verbatim. My leveling system is D&D style multi/prestige classing, a lot of my skills owe origins to Diablo or WoW. My character's unique ability is a weird cross between some skyrim stuff and an obscure d&d sourcebook and so forth. And imho, it is sort of the best way to do it.

Almost nothing is new. I've read probably a hundred litrpg books, and every one of them I can look at something and either trace it's origin, or recognize it as so generic that tracing it would be impossible. And there is nothing wrong with that so long as you are working the concepts into new and innovative ways.

Take my death system. A player who drops in my game enters a bleedout mode. They gain 100 temporary hp, and lose 1/second until they are healed above 100, or they reach zero. If they reach zero, they die for real, if they get healed they 'die' but respawn back in town with a long death timer that prevents them from playing for a while. It is fun, innovative, allows for a lot of soul searching when a good person defeats a bad person since any actual 'death' is usually cold-blooded by the nature of the system.

It is also mostly stolen. Bleedout is a modified version of any 3.x era death mechanic, while the respawn penalty comes from respawning at the spirit in WoW rather than running back to your body. My biggest advice to a new author is to not reinvent the wheel. Just swipe it.

 

You made me rethink it, DJ (and others). Maybe it is too harsh, but it actually was a way to get players to settle down in mundane jobs and help the land flourish. But an escalating periods is better. Fortunately, I haven't published that book yet so it can be changed.

 

Mind you I like the idea but maybe 15 second intervals per death that increase. 15, 30, 45, 60 etc. Say as a counter system with a 90 day hold on each counter. That seems to hold a better idea to me and wouldn't drive people away right away. or instead of 15 seconds ramp it to 1 min at a time in the same style. I just know that with a full year on the line for 5 deaths nope, not many people would risk that. If you do the 15 seconds escalating then make it a year calendar instead of 90 days. The whole system resets every new years, which means people would go crazy at the start and then ease up nearer the end of the year as the time began to really mount.
Just my 2 cents.

 

Human right activists deployed!
that might be too harsh, though I like it went there are stakes and consequences in a tale it has to be within reason... at least the reason in the world created. yours seems like it's on Vader's side of the force XD

Personally I value details and commitment when it comes to world building, I noticed that authors tended to down right break their own world rules to write their MC out of a corner instead of working with what they've already established. whatever rules you put down should effect everyone, not everyone EXCEPT this one person. NO NEOS PLEASE!

 

I have it set up so that players with more playtime rush after every opportunity to advance their characters, and players with less time online use a separate path to maximize their offline time, as my characters are a persistent presence in the game as part of the world's lore. But that also ties in with a world where RMT for a hobby isn't considered a big deal. The people running around a games frontiers and crawling dungeons and sieging monster castles will be having big risk big reward adventures, while the players who know they have limited play time pick up a trade or find a lead on a class that they like, and then pursue whatever steps they have to through offline means.

If a player wants to become a druid or a beast taming ranger that can't be trained in the majority of starting cities, they've got to work towards that goal through some quid pro quo connection. Want a letter of recommendation without proving yourself as talented in some hugely impressive way? Then become a grinder that gets access to the grinder path to a class, which might have perks for the playstyle if one exclusively plays that way... or might result in a path to a more explosive variant of the class that further maximizes time spent online. Of course the pilgrimmage path to a starting area where druid and ranger apprenticeships are handed out like hotcakes is possible, but approaching the game from a Launch Day perspective like most stories do, and the advantage of being a ranger weeks earlier in a frontier setting compared to one bound to the seat of a nations power are totally different.

As far as death penalties go, that can go hand in hand with the flourishing mundane city jobs that you want. I have cities with Arenas where winning in a mini tournament that go on 24/7 result in lowering a players respawn time, and players can piggyback with established gladiator teams to have their respawn timer reset. Arena sanctioned potions and scrolls along with weapon and armor repairs provide support economies for those areas. Plus Arena deaths & City deaths having a lower respawn time (30 mins & 1 hour respectively), which allows players to continue playing the game within the city after death after respawning, ignoring their "Real" respawn penalty. 3 Round flash tournaments between different competitive classes gets participants a portion of the pot, combat experience, and results in the top 3 teams lowering their rez timers. Actual gladiators get challenged and can sling-shot players rez timers for a price because players rising up through the ranks want the experience of fighting with gladiators, so a 3v3 with 2 gladiators and one client on a team, up against a mid-tier rated arena team, gets paid by the client and win the pot.

Though there are far more Arenas on the frontier in "neutral" and "evil" monster race territories, with all the same benefits, so starting out in a city provides a larger support network and zerg force against monsters... but continuing to play with a "see a goblin kill a goblin" mentality and following a nations quest path for career advancement and city perks will result in losing access to the monster operated frontier arenas. With "evil" players having a permanent respawn advantage in evil monster territories because no one else can visit them anyways. The "best" dungeon for set gear in the game and the most competitive arena reside in the same city, which is an isolated but ancient "frontier" city, but because the gear from going into the dungeon is a massive "Launch Day" boon the players that have no need of the resurrection benefits run both the Arena and the Dungeon because of their gear advantages. Overtime that advantage vanishes, as the more competitive the arena the more gladiators are drawn there for the big pots, with the crafters / groupies following behind. So a city that starts as the uncontested best place for making a character on Launch Day as well as gaining rare magic armor, eventually becomes the uncontested best place for purely pvp oriented armor and supplies made to Arena standards.

Truely epic raid gear and legendary gear can't be used in official tournaments, though guilds could resolve conflicts after renting out the venue, and then they can set whatever additional rewards and conditions they want.

If you want to suspend your readers sense of disbelief in what players would or wouldn't do in response to game mechanics, making the game mechanics fun and then saying, "It works" will get you the most mileage. Its what has always worked on me... even with huge continuity errors. Blatant retcons are baller. So rather than taking my Arena / Respawn system and shoving them into the readers mind in a solid block, I spread it out all over the place and only bring it up when its relevant to the story. Which isn't very often as almost all my characters are total badasses who don't die (often) and therefore don't really care about the system except when they need to use it. Which is why I'm totally getting off sharing it here... /ego. The alternative was leaving it buried for years while I write.

cont

 

ego cont-

A highly ranked gladiator has a free pass to travel through any lands with an Arena, and so one of the few paths for a good group to fight within evil territory (against adjacent non-arena operating monsters and people) is to become a skilled pvp fighter and then branch out into the wild with a far more forgiving death to respawn ratio. But with limited Arena tailored boons to be gained from the process. So talented players with limited playtime can move up Arena rankings solo or with other talented players, and if they are truely exceptional regardless of their play time they will have one of the sweetest adventuring set ups possible. In the process they can gain tradeskills and unique classes for developing a character in a major city or trade hub which facilitates the play style and that also has an Arena. (Gladiator is both a class and a "job", no limits on jobs, but there is a single class per person, and so its possible for Merchant classed people to become Gladiators... but highly unlikely without slingshotting shenaniganz)

While massive raid forces with 30k plus members don't really care about what advantages casuals have in frontier villages they've already tapped out, the healthy game market and high end turnover (from uber to casual and back) makes getting item upgrades and tech advancements easy. Casuals with money earned in game or from real life can still set up their characters with the best gear from the marketplace, and widely available but costly "copies" of legendary items are built into the game. Basically everything Legendary has a hand me down version that is craftable once an item is studied, but its limited to a certain amount per year. Those items are available through Kingdom loyalty quest chains and Gladiator Arenas, though with limits on disseminating the "copies", and unlike raid acquired Legendaries, the insurance system makes those items unlootable after death (soul bound / no drop). So the best of the best get exclusive Arena items, made for the Arena, while still having the option of pursuing quests outside of the Arena and their patron Kingdoms.

The ability to insure personally crafted items (through a kingdom) being a massive benefit not available for free to Guild Run kingdoms at odds with most nations, Guilds that are reliant on Merchant Owned companies to receive boons of insurance for their ships & buildings. Which requires paying fees on top of incentivizing a Merchant group to take the risk of sponsorship in the first place. (A problem meant to be alleviated with Continent & Content expansions, but that gets ruined by player actions)

However insurance doesn't offer protection against theft unless the item is totally destroyed, so people can steal items and ransom them back, which could conceivably be a large part of Kingdom vs Kingdom friction, and unaffiliated players could be hired to go all Mission Impossible to steal that shit back or destroy an item in place to return it to its rightful owners. Keep it and make copies for themselves and get a bounty on their head from their former employers, or return it and get copies for free, with enough "faction" gained to have a chance at getting their hands on the real deal or another legendary.

If they steal the Legendary and use it as a pattern, they have to the tech and crafting skill to make the item, and so player crafting as a necessity becomes a huge part of the mundane process that everyone should want to personally have within their group. Especially Raid Guilds.

I've got my world developed to the point where I drag and drop new stories and play around with them, but I've written very little. Even the actual boons of the Arena aren't concrete (as I don't have any characters / stories that involve it exclusively), and so most of my world building is just background useless junk that has made me spend less time writing. But with the added bonus of knowing exaclty how crap works... eventually my stories and others stories will lead to those like Adam Elliott fine tuning the mechanics to their own story. Which is great, because once people have a grasp of what is accepted as "workable" (like fireballs and VR tech getting a pass) they won't spend time picking apart a stories world, but just the plot holes and continuity errors of what Kidlike101 calls "The Neos", and thats totally fair.

final note: decay of resurrection penalties can be linked to achievements and surviving when in danger, spend 1 hour in constant peril, knock off 1+X units of time, 2 hours? 2+2(x), but I mostly write about badasses so the actual decay rate etc for respawn timers isn't something I've fully fleshed out, its on my list of things to do. I've only got one for sure feature of the death system, which is that Arena resurrections can only get someone down to a 30 minute respawn, while "Natural" decay options can result in an instant respawn, and thats why I'm not sure if I want to have achievement / peril duration linked rez timer decay, because continuous instant respawns is crazy overpowered in a world where balance between ubers and casuals isn't possible. Uber Raider with legendaries dies and has allies that collect their gear and send it to them at the nearest spawn point during a siege, and they are back on the castle wall playing conservatively but staying in danger, and the process repeats to the detriment of the siegers. I always hated WoW respawn timers dicking me for picking fights in opposing faction cities, and removing decay "feats" outside of time survived and time spent in the arena would be fair. Plus siegers that die within a city (without being bound there) have the same 1 hour respawn as the defenders, so once the city is penetrated that advantage for the defenders vanishes.