NPC Slavery System

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conkerthesquirrel
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NPC Slavery System

Post by conkerthesquirrel » Tue Feb 21, 2023 10:03 am

Currently the only way to obtain slaves for a PC is to find other PCs who agree to it OOCly. This can be a problem for neutral/evil characters if their players want to RP them as slavers, but cannot find any other PCs to play their slaves.

I have been wondering if it would be possible to create a system that does not replace, but comes in addition to, the existing slavery mechanics, that enables PCs to acquire NPCs as slaves, in places like Sibayad or Andunor.

Some ideas:

- Clamp Lassoed NPCs instead of selling them: Instead of selling an NPC captured via Lasso, you instead have them clamped in your name. The NPC becomes a henchman of yours, whose inventory you can access. The maximum HD clampable could be limited by your own character level and intimidate skill score. Maybe they could then even be tied to an item, like a collar, to make them function similarly like golems. The item allows summoning or even trading the enslaved NPC, but should the NPC die, they are gone for good. The collar and their inventory, however, may be salvaged. Collars could come in different strengths; the more HD the NPC has, the better the collar has to be to clamp them.

- Buy Hauler Slaves: These slaves are stupid, strong and buff, but come with no combat training. Usually creatures such as orcs, trolls, minotaurs and the like, these are used to carry large quantities of items, such as coal, sand, ores and wood. Their restraints, however, make them slow and unable to fight efficiently.

- Buy Artisan Slaves: These slaves are poor combatants, but serve you as capable assistants in regards to crafting - they might increase your ranks in a craft, or give you additional crafting points, for as long as they remain your henchmen.

- Buy Battle Slaves: These slaves are meant to be expendable frontline fighters - however, since by necessity, they are equipped so that they can in fact fight efficiently, they are far more difficult to keep in check when in the wilderness, and there is a risk they turn on their masters if they are not scoring high enough in terms of character level and intimidate / leadership.

- Buy Pleasure Slaves: These slaves are skilled entertainers and will grant you a passive income for as long as they remain in a civilized area that allows slavery.

- Buy Specialist Slaves: These slaves are extremely specialized in one or more very specific tasks - it could be a skilled dungeoneer who is able to handle most locks and traps, a scholar able to read scrolls on your behalf, a ranger who will scout out the entire map for you in advance, a wizard able to create portals for you, ... The possibilities are endless.

This would probably be a lot of work and require careful balancing and fine tuning (I assume a non-good alignment would be a requirement to participate in this system), but it could add a lot of flavour to non-good characters and even create (conflict) RP when good characters encounter a PC with a retinue of NPC slaves.


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The GrumpyCat
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Re: NPC Slavery System

Post by The GrumpyCat » Tue Feb 21, 2023 7:04 pm

Going to have to reject this. The system looks quite difficult to implement, it looks rather powerful and unbalencing, and further more a bit excessive in terms of inventory slots. I might consider some extremely watered down version of this, if a balence dev thinks we could make it work, but as written above I dont' think its feasable.

This too shall pass.

(I now have a DM Discord (I hope) It's DM GrumpyCat#7185 but please keep in mind I'm very busy IRL so I can't promise how quick I'll get back to you.)

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