Any interest in EQ:RPG?
 

Hello.

I apologize if I have posted this in the wrong place, and I won't bother to tell you Admins that you can move this if needed, since you already know the extent of your powers.

I have done a great deal of thinking in the time I've been haunting this board, which isn't long, but it seems to me that one of the main problems with attempting to emulate EverQuest, once one gets past the technical hurdles of reverse-engineering the communications methods between client and server, is the fact that we have no sure concept of what kind of calculation take place on the server side.

Sword and Sorcery publishing has released, and is still working on, a Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition version of EverQuest, called EQ:RPG. I'm a C programmer of moderate skill, a little handy with the SQL, and I've decided that it would be interesting to see if I could modify a copy of the Emulator to conform closely to the EQ:RPG rules for character creation, combat, tradeskills, etc.

I was wondering if there would be any interest at all in such a server, and if there is any advice that those who currently run servers could lend to me on things that are Bad Ideas(tm) that one can do without knowing.

I would definitely be interested in such a server, but I have no idea if it is feasable or not. The xp and levels and levels of mobs would be simple to conform to that system, but the skill system is very different. If you can get it figured out I would definitely like to play on it since I'm a big D&D fan. Good luck with it.

The skill system would be largely ignore, and mainly used as boolean values for whether or not you have the ability to use a group of weapons or not.

I'd have to look into the AA's more, to see how they are maintained and spent ( and whether it is possible to make new ones with lower requirements ), but I think the AA system might be a plausible way to enact the DnD 3rd edition Feats system.

As for monsters, I own the sourcebook 'Monsters of Norrath'. It has Cazic Thule in there. He's big and scary.

You can easily make different AAs in the server, but I'm not sure if you can get the client to see those or be able to spend them. The AA menu and costs and requirements are all built into the client and would require distributing some custom client files to change. Thats doable and many servers do distribute custom files, but the question is what file the AAs and costs get stored in. I would imagine the names at least are somewhere in UIfiles, but its possible that the costs and requirements are built into one of the exes. Most likely like spells they are stored in a text file or something, but I'm not sure. Does anyone know?

I would definitely be interested in this :) I'm an EQ:RPG GM myself, and I think that such a server would be would be quite interesting. :) I can't wait to see where this goes!