Groups
Forming a party, the leader's settings, shared looting, and how enemies scale to the number of attackers.
A group is a party of adventurers travelling and fighting together. One player
leads it, the rest follow, and the leader holds every setting that governs how the
party behaves in a fight. party is an alias for group and passes its arguments
straight through, so the two commands are interchangeable.
Forming a Group#
group create opens a new group with you as its leader, and group create <name>
does the same with a name attached. group name <name> sets or changes the name
afterwards.
group invite <player> offers a place in the party. The invitation lasts thirty
seconds by default, and group invite <player> <seconds> sets a different window
anywhere from five seconds to two minutes. The player accepts with group accept,
gaccept, or join with no argument at all.
Membership#
group leave takes you out of the party. group disband dissolves it entirely and
belongs to the leader alone, as do group boot <player> to remove a member and
group order <name1> <name2> ... to rearrange the party listing.
group leader <player> hands leadership to someone else.
Members always follow the leader. This is not optional and there is no setting for it.
Companions, heroes and minions are added to the party automatically as NPC members when they are summoned, and removed when they are dismissed or fall. See Companions.
Leader Settings#
Three behaviours are controlled by the leader, and each takes on or off.
group autoattack on makes the party join a fight the leader enters.
group autoloot on loots corpses automatically when something dies.
group autobury on buries a corpse once it has been looted.
Information#
group status shows the party HUD, and group status full adds the health bars of
players and enemies together with a threat breakdown. group target lists what
each member and each enemy is currently fighting. group stats shows a combat
leaderboard for the party and group stats reset clears it. group loot lists
what the party has looted and group lootcheck <number> inspects one of those
items in detail.
Looting Together#
loot takes what a corpse holds and loot <corpse> names a particular one.
lootall empties every corpse in the room at once. Both require a party of at
least two members, and both announce the results to the group. If the leader has
turned autobury on, looted corpses are buried afterwards.
Group Chat#
group <message> speaks to the party. Anything after the command that is not a
recognised subcommand is treated as speech, so a message that happens to begin
with an ordinary word reaches the group rather than being swallowed.
How Enemies Scale to a Party#
Hostile creatures grow tougher the more attackers are actually engaged with them. The count is taken per creature and includes only things that have really fought it: players together with their heroes, companions and minions. Bystanders passing through are not counted.
Two things change. The creature soaks more damage before it falls, and its own blows land a little harder. A lone attacker faces no scaling at all. Four attackers face a creature that absorbs 2.25 times the damage and hits about 18 per cent harder. The curve keeps climbing to twenty attackers, where the creature absorbs 4.5 times the damage and hits 50 per cent harder. Bosses, champions, warlords and elites are already formidable, so they receive only half the party bonus.
The scaling is applied to damage as it lands rather than by inflating the creature's health, so damage already dealt is banked. If the party shrinks, the multiplier drops at once and the remaining health falls at the faster rate. A lone survivor of a big fight never runs into a sudden wall.
Even so, a larger party still kills far faster than a small one. The curve is deliberately sub-linear: it makes a fight last, not stall.
Threat#
Defenders attack whoever holds the most threat, and threat is generated
automatically by dealing damage. threat shows the table for your current enemy
and threat <target> for a specific one. Certain abilities, taunts among them,
force a defender's attention regardless of the numbers.
Related Systems#
- Companions for heroes, henchmen, minions and pets.
- Clans for longer-lived fellowships.
- Communication for the wider channel system.