[SteveOofDFC]

I used to play a game known as Darkness Falls: The Crusade, preceded by Darkness Falls. DF was on AOL Xtreme games and Gamestorm; DFC was on the Mythic site along with Magestorm, Splatterball, and a few others.
This game incorporated several elements that put it above other text games and I'd like to find something as similar as possible.


1) It had a nice GUI; it was smooth, had health/fatigue/mana bars, a compass, idol indicators (explained shortly), and for certain portions a drawn-out map with a little red dot that moved and represented your character.
The lay out was as such:

[Tamia Local]
You are standing in front of a vine covered tower, dark stones
and blah blah blah blah, more description than I can remember here.

Obvious Exits: West, North, South, and Up.
You see Rashka, Tept, Solmyr, and Pestilenc standing here.

There is a pile of coins, a bronzed dagger, and a lustrous mithril golden dragon's
head spine on the ground.

Also there is Kosen, Blizz, Cuda's Corpse, and Mosch.




It was very easy to ditinguish what in a room was of which importance to you. You weren't prompted at every command what your health was, you could check it by typing "health" or "heal" for short, or simply look at your less-accurate health bar.


2) It was a race-class-guild system, depending on the realm chosen. For example, in Evil realm if I chose to be a vampire I was designating myself as a damage dealing class. The guild that I chose dictated the method of damage; I could join the Blood Coven and thereafter learn spells such as teleportation, lifedraining, etc. and use weapons such as staffs that had a spell attached to do more damage. Likewise, I could instead join the Nightstalkers guild and learn to hide often and use the drain ability as my primary attack, an ability that did a massive amount of damage but left the player vulnerable.


3) There was player-killing allowed and encouraged. It was realm vs. realm, as DAoC is based on it I'm sure you can imagine. There were Good, Evil, and Chaos. We would get together a massive amount of people and hop on a boat over to the other realm (typical boat ride ~10 minutes) where we could kill members of the other realm, taking their good gear if they hadn't gotten to change into "invasion gear" yet, or taking invasion gear if that's all they had on and we wanted it. It added an element of risk that made it interesting.

Furthermore, each realm had 3 idols: strength, knowledge, power. Each level you got a set amount of training points based on your stats (you rolled for your stats at the beginning of the game, we would sit and click the reroll button for hours on end for weeks to get the perfect stats before someone built an autoroller). These points could be divided as the player wanted among skills, and the skills would then translate into a percent. Toward the end my imp had around 300% Backstab ability. A strength idol would add 10% to all melee combat skills (backstab, berzerk, etc.) while the power idol would add 10% to all casting abilities (direct, tap) and some power to your total mana. Knowledge would add 10% exp gain. At a realm's peak, they would control all 3 idols from each realm, giving them 3 strength, 3 power, 3 knowledge, or +30% melee, +30% magic, +30% exp. Defense of these idols was fanatic.
That last also sums up the training system, which was nice. You'd go to train and a window would pop up with your skills; you'd click the one you want, click train, and it would train -- no wasting 5 minutes of real life time watching a spam of the same "lessons" being taught like in Achaea, for example.


4) Gear: there were common items that could drop off of whatever and would be of appropriate level to drop off of that mob/NPC; there were better items that would drop more rarely, and there were rare items that people would spend hours, sometimes days, hunting the same areas looking for. There were also invasion/special event items that only dropped once in the entire history of the game and if they were sold or glitched out they were gone for good, so the supply was everdepleting and the value of them ever increasing. These items were typically better than anything that would drop normally.

The items could have elemental sigils on them (weapon with cold sigil example, this is cold 4 and would add an extra 40 damage: Cold radiates from the iron bronze dagger.You attack the beggar with your dagger and hit for 47 damage! or without: You attack the beggar with your dagger and hit for 9 damage!) (armor with cold sigil *protection* on it would, with cold 4, protect from 40 damage: A cone of cold blasts from Tept's hands as you are struck for 138 damage! there would be a message of some sort indicating that the armor had protected y ou some from cold; otherwise this would have been a whopping 178 damage spell). In this way the items actually meant something, they were more than aesthetic. Also, they could come in different qualities, i.e. mithril would hit for more and was more durable (didn't have to go to smith and repair as often) than was steel or even alloy. There were enchantments that would make the item more accurate as well; shining < glowing < lustrous < brilliant, something along these lines. So you could get a lustrous mithril golden dragons head spine with earth4 sigil that hit like a truck (my fav weapon on my imp =D )The better the metal the rarer the item, same with sigil; for high sigils like lustrous one usually had to find a plain (no enchantment, only metal) version of the item and have it enchanted by a fellow player who played a class that could enchant.
Items could also have spells...i.e. For example, because it's been a while this is completely inaccurate in precise description but fits the point, I had armor that increased my agility by 8%, and on my Coven vampire I had a staff with earth 4 and a spell attached. It was like this:
You put on the lustrous mithril studded Draconian leathers.
You look more agile.
An earthquake shudders from the lustrous mithril staff of solid sand!
You smash the earth giant with your staff and hit for 127 damage!
A sandstorm shoots forth from the staff, enveloping your target!
You hit for 223 damage!

(Most classes wouldn't use these because you need melee ability and the direct ability, usually abilities that are not both held by a single class except the hybrids like Coven vampires).
As one may imagine, landing a boat in a foreign realm and catching someone in their hunting gear was exciting because if you managed to land the kill there was a huge payoff -- you still had to manage to make it back on the boat with the loot though!


5) Combat: it was not complex, it was not simple. It didn't involve lengthy combinations of kick punch garrote tackle etc. that takes 5 minutes as in, again, Achaea, but it was more than the Vagabond's Quest basic attack and see who does the most damage. There was no delay in the screen while moving so one could "run" as fast as they typed, which added evasion and chasing as a personal ability rather than character ability as they were based on your typing skill. Your attack commands were:
For melee, depending on class -- drain, berzerk, melee, attack, lunge, thrust, smash/crush, backstab (had to be hidden), pummel; I think that was it. Certain classes had certain attacks, all classes could use basic attack, lunge, thrust, smash/crush.

For spell: cast. All classes who were casters could cast, but had different spells. They also had the direct ability, which allowed the spell the chance to hit and included a damage modifier so the higher the skill the more damage/more likely to hit. Certain classes, the "pure" casters oriented toward damage, could tap. This meant if a spell cost 50 mana (spell cost = level of spell) the player could choose to allocate more of their mana to multiply the damage. i.e. Pain.V, a level 50 spell, would hit for let's say 150 damage. The average mana bar at level 50 was let's say 600 mana. The player taps 250 before casting, thus the total spell costs 300 mana and does 400 damage. Overtapping (tapping beyond mana available) led to damaging oneself.

Thus commands were simple but strategy was diverse.
Also, one could have let's say 300 total health and get hit for 450 but not die. One had to be first 0d (reach 0 hp) and then be hit again before they would die. This helped make the 0ing classes acceptable but not OP (such as Tapers and Backstabbers).


6) It was fast paced, I could type my way through 60 rooms in under 20 seconds pretty easily. There were many areas in each realm and a fourth realm designated as a high level PVE area where all could go and one could easily be ransacked by a group of people wandering around from another realm when stumbled upon.


7) PVP awards: When killing a player one was awarded "Realm Points", the amount based on level difference. At certain intervals one would gain a new "Realm Title" which would add a certain % on to all skills permanently.


8) PVP Punishments: If you died you could be resurrected. If you were not resurrected in a certain amount of time you "released" which means your soul is brought to a resurrection area, y our body brought there, your items left behind where you died. This process would cost you 2 points of constitution (which could be regained by "cure constitution" at a hospital, the price increasing with level and amount of con to be cured, could not be cured in increments) and if you were killed by an NPC it would cost you a certain % of your experience to next level. If you hit 5 con you started losing % from skills, and at 0 con were nearly useless until it was cured. Also, you could lose your valuable items!