Hamlet
Today, a relative newcomer to Avlis is in the hot seat -- Caydo! For those of us who have not had a chance to play over the past few years, please introduce yourself?
Caydo
Hi there! Uh, well I'm a player, an event DM, and pretty new CCC member. I've got what other folks have called a menagerie of PCs that have been in various plots. Also I've got a bundle of oddball NPCs I pull out for events now n' then.
Hamlet
That you do! Personally, I am a fan of the Unnamed Elf in Bandages. He was just trying to fit in with the Greater Mummies, wasn't he?
Caydo
He really was, just having a good time then he was mistaken for undead...one thing led to another. Sometimes people just have a bad day on the wrong end of a sword.
Hamlet
NPCs are people, too! How do you come up with your many characters, as a DM? Any inspirations in particular?
Caydo
Much like general writing, I'm not really sure where my muse comes from, sometimes a character just pops into my head. Though sometimes they'll come from various sources. Friends, family, previous media I've seen that I'll mix up. Or previous NPCs I've made in pen and paper that I've reconfigured and changed a bit to make fresh for Avlis/myself. E.g., Trango the Legit came from a gryphon in a Ponyfinder campaign named Shady McGee (a shady business owner.)
Hamlet
I had to look up Ponyfinder. (Worth it!) What other roleplaying formats have you dabbled in? As a DM, or a player.
Caydo
Let's see... D&D 3.5, D&D 5E, Pathfinder/Ponyfinder, a smidge of Exalted, Fate: Accelerated, Honey Heist, and Cyberpunk 2020.
Hamlet
How did you stumble upon Avlis, for that matter? Or were you led here by a fellow Avlissian? (Not blindly, I hope.)
Caydo
I was brought into it by fellow DMs Blackravenfeather and EternalTime. I met them playing another game, became friends, then eventually they told me about Avlis and walked me through the process so I could give it a try. Been here ever since, forum says that was in 2018 apparently.
Hamlet
Do you recall your very first impression?
Caydo
I was pretty excited about it, if memory serves. Initially trying it out, once I got everything installed and was fully set up to go traipse around IG, I thought it was pretty fantastic. It wound up being everything I wanted games like World of Warcraft to be and weren't.
Hamlet
Once upon a time, I was watching a friend play World of Warcraft and there were a pair of Tauren just watching the sunset, while getting stomped on by various passer-bys. One of them could have been you? Then again, that was almost 15 years ago.
Caydo
Hah, I'm a fan of cows and Tauren so maybe? That's a pretty good analogy of the differences though. WoW is all about "go fight stuff, get gear, go to new place, repeat" with some story sprinkled into text blurbs that people skip. Avlis has, you know, characters, character development, story (driven by DM and organic), so... yeah. As a writer that really appealed to me.
Hamlet
Certainly, we are story-oriented. But when it comes to game mechanics, Avlis has a lot of systems which have gone beyond Bioware's original design. The same can be said of many Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds, of course. -- What do you like the most about Avlis, when it comes to the game itself? Features and customizations, for instance.
Caydo
The wand/scroll making system is pretty fun, made plenty of those with varying results of power level/effectiveness. I've recently been playing a barbarian and trying out the rage system. That's been pretty awesome. Crafting is one of those things that I think adds a lot of life to the world, having PCs make and sell stuff rather than just having Bioware merchants set up to sell bland goods. Same goes for p-merchants/inn rooms/persistent storage. It all does a great job of making the world feel consistent/more immersive/more alive.
Hamlet
As a member of our Creation Control Center (CCC), you are currently focused on DM tools. Is there anything big and shiny that you would like to bring to the world? No spoilers, of course.
Caydo
Hm, right now I'm focusing on transitioning the tool DMs use to create/save NPCs for EE. I've added a few smaller pieces of functionality recently to non-EE that I'll probably update a little bit later (related to audio.) Other than that, I've been looking into ways to use added EE functionality to create custom UI. There's a lot of potential in that space, I think. Though I've been here and there trying to ponder what larger system I might want to put in, still thinking, ha.
Hamlet
May the suspense commence. -- What's your most embarrassing Avlis moment so far? Behind, or in front of the DM wand.
Caydo
Probably accidentally killing a PC was definitely a "oh, whoops" moment, heh. But it's easy enough to fix, thankfully. Just meant a "that totally didn't happen, please continue RPing as if you didn't just drop dead outta nowhere, thanks!"
Hamlet
Slip of the wand, surely! -- What has been your biggest challenge, as an Avlis player and as a DM?
Caydo
I'd say at first it was learning all of the general knowledge about the world that there is. There's just a lot of it, but it was a fun learning process to get it all sort of figured out. When I first rolled up Iku I didn't really know the world too well, the gods, etc. So having a character that could change who he was if things got crazy as I better learned who/what things were over time was great (granted I never did end up using the change ability beyond going to be a wolf for awhile.)
For DMing, it was just having patience and not doing too much as I went through. It's a lot easier to run multiple NPCs in pen and paper sometimes versus in Avlis until you get the hang of stuff. Learning that took a couple times of "well that went nuts behind the scenes, seems like people had fun though."
Hamlet
You have 8 active player characters, per your forum signature. Juggling between them does not constitute a challenge for you?
Caydo
There's a few more in the vault too, recently I made a kobold even, heh. A few folks have met Tuka.
Naw, I wouldn't say that's a challenge for the most part. At least as far as playing the different character personalities. I'd credit that to my writing different scenes/stories for a long time. Now, remembering which of them has met who... that can be tricky. I did end up making a spreadsheet for who knows what about crafting (so far it's split just between Krek'siss and Marina so not so bad, wand making is basically just Iku and Krek, so again not too terrible to manage.)
Hamlet
Any regrets? Trick question, I know.
Caydo
In making that many characters? Not really, no. They were all different ideas that I wanted to try and see how they'd play out in Avlis. Though some of them I wish I'd had a build in mind. If anything it's mostly stat related stuff. For Snurr, he's not using the right base stats so someday I might try to fix him, that sort of thing. Or I'll just make a new character in the same vein. Or even an NPC. Plenty of ways to make a character to build a story around them.
In general? Not that I can think of. Anything that I'd have done differently now was due to a mistake I learned from (e.g. accidental PC-icide.)
Hamlet
The Avlis epic refresh & remort systems certainly helps with build-related slip-ups. -- Any last words, then? ("I'll be back!")
Caydo
Uh... let's go with "Dragons and kobolds are awesome." It's good to let people know the facts, heh.
Hamlet
It is known. Thank you for your time and see you In Game!
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