A FAQ sheet for new accounts/players

[Psycho Pixie]

I recently had a friend sign up to play cantr and after about 2 days, he was so totally lost he begged for help. in a text based game like this we eed a FAQ sheet to give to new players so they at least know how to play the game. A instrction manual of some kind?

this s what I emailed him, he really wantsa to play right and be part of the game, i figure no CRB here by telling him what i list below.

~~~~~~~~~
to explain a bit about buttons.....

events inventory location buildings people objects activities

events are the current text and whats happening in the game, you have to refresh it to see people reply and such, of click the events button again.

inventory is what you have on you, as a charicture. notes weigh nothing, everything else has wieght. a "charry" as a max load of 15000grams.

location is where you are, with resources avaliable in that spot, and the little ducky midway takes you to an animal page. I will get into that. Location also tells you what roads you can take. when you take a road, t automatically sets you to the max speed yyou can move.

buildings and vehicles tells you, obviously, what vehicles and buildings are where you are. DO NOT GO INTO BUILDINGS UNLESS YOU ARE INVITED OR TOLD TO. most towns attack people who wander in and out.

people are those in town or at your location with you, oldest to youngest in town. those on bikes, boats vehicles, show at the bottom regardless of age. to change someones name so you can i.d. them in the future, click on their name on the events page and click the smiley face. then change the name to their proper i.d.

objects is stuff on the ground. DO NOT PICK UP RANDOM OBJECTS UNLESS SOMEONE SAYS YOU CAN. they kill thieves, taking random resources without permission will get you killed. asking politly on the events text page if you may have said objects is fine, they will say yes or no. most towns also dont object to you picking up food... som food. not all the food. if you say or indicate you are a "newspawn" generally someone in each town will help you get started. Heather has lucked out before and gotten shields, weapons food and a job in the first day on many occations.

activity: thats where ytou see what the town is working on. an example of how to make stuffs:

to make a stone hammer : you need stone and wood. once you hav the needed supplys, go to the bottom of the most any page and click the funny liitle tools box, scroll to tools, and then find stone hammer. once the activity is started, you go to inventory, click the star symbol next to one supply, at a time, and use the amount needed for each resource/supply. when all resources needed are set to that project, go to activities page, scroll to your activity and click the "P" for participate.

"I" means info. "X" means remove project, any project NOT at 0% or that has resources on it, cannot be erased.

[The Industriallist]

Actually, the bits about what not to do would be CR issues, kind of. Especially the buildings one, since I don't think its obvious that walking in an open door would get you in trouble.
Giving a distillation of Cantr common law doesn't seem like a good idea to me, since many characters never aquire enough experience in there entire lives to see the universal patterns of OOC induced law.

I wouldn't go any farther with that kind of advice than to suggest that you examine your environment before you try to interact with it. That ought to be enough.
Maybe even that is a bit sketchy, I don't know. For me, that was enough.

The interface explanation I like.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

perhaps just tone it to the point of saying look for notes on te ground explaining local laws.since a char who gre up in the area would know the local laws

[Junesun]

I think that it's a good idea to have a FAQ for the interface. Afaik, the available guides so far only focus on how not to break the CR and things of this nature, but most new players have trouble adjusting to the interface long before that, and not understanding what is going on and how to do things might be scaring off quite a lot of new players. Especially those players who don't use IE or who have no idea that they could access Alt descriptions using their browser are likely to give up if they can't find anybody to explain the most basic things to them.

I once sent a detailed interface explanation, which I had written for Chris Schulman (now the Spanish translator), to Jos, suggesting that we provide some guide or other to it. I haven't heard of it since.

[formerly known as hf]

A short FAQ would be good - the interface for Cantr is mostly quite intuitive -

but there's bits of it that can be really confusing. I'm quite new, but I managed to work my way through problems understanding how to do things in Cantr by RPing my way through the problems...

[SekoETC]

I think there should be a warning about picking things up since everyone logically thinks that if they are just lying there, they're abbandoned. And not everybody is kind enough to explain to newbies that they should read the laws and stop taking things. No, they shout "Hey you, drop those things or you'll be attacked". Now you probably freak out, thinking what right does that man in his twenties say that, this place is a nuthouse and I better get out of here. Now you go to the road, wonder why it isn't progressing visibly and soon log out because nothing is happening. In the while people come after you with crossbows, tell you to turn around but you can't hear them since you are offline. And then you die thinking that Cantr sucks. It happens.
We had this person in Krif hills north asking the way to the nearest shop.. and someone else stealing valuable clothes from inside, now he must have been quite happy before we killed him. You can't avoid using real life logics.. and you can't avoid start using Cantr logics when you get that far in the game you understand the common rules. It's sort of like morale developing, your new charries magically know from birth that it's not wise to do some stuff. It's not written in every place that picking up things is not allowed, for example when I was first spawned in Swedish area I picked up everything that might be necessary but dropped the shovel at least when somebody complained. (*Waves at Pirog:* Hi! Thank's for not stabbing me back then! )
Can anybody claim that they would start with their 15th character going into buildings and taking things unless they want that person killed? That's the normal approach and you should be doing that (although it's damn annoying) since there is no pre-gained knowledge. You are just fooling yourself telling yourself that you was a stupid n00b before and now you act like a reasonable person. It's natural for a person to pick up everything useful to survive in a strange land.

[The Industriallist]

Taking everything in sight only makes sense if you don't think about it. If that were permissable behavior, wouldn't one of the 20 other people standing there have done it by now? Then trying to deal with death threats by running away from people doesn't make much sense either, from the basic game logic that you won't be any faster than they are, so what good does running do?

I never made the common newb mistakes. I made some uncommon ones, but not the dangerous kind. All it took was first reading all the written stuff shoved at you in the beginning, which I think most people must ignore. (isn't it written clearly that other people may not be awake at all times? That's one major newb mistake gone, if they would RTFM). Then exploring the interface completely before trying to do anything. That's just the approach I take to games.

I did go through the buildings, but I didn't take anything. I can't remember whether that was for lack of opportunity or because I reallized that people would know that things were missing. The building rule isn't usually fatal, if you don't do anything stupid afterwards.

[joshua johnson]

I have to say that my two of my first three characters were all nearly killed, and I thought this was a game for maniacs. I was very frustrated. The first one was chopped in half and in jail, just for picking up a few things, wandering into a few places and trying out some machinery in a building. By the time I got to the third character, I had figured out you better look for some local laws on the ground. Of course this third character had the misfortune of being spanwned into an area where there were no posted laws about not picking things up. It was a forest, and there was some wood on the ground, so I picked some up. I got blasted by some real jerks, so I said I would put it down if anybody wanted it. Nobody answered so I kept it. And then they shot me. It was extremely frustrating.
I have to say that in many role playing games, that is where things are found, on the ground. It is not obvious to a brand new player that things on the ground may have been worked for.
I would guess that many, if not most, new players get into trouble with the local regulations early on.

[The Industriallist]

Bad luck, that.

But notice that in every case where you got in trouble, you tried to act on things before you had fully explored the world in a...um...non-invasive manner.

If you look at the location tab, unless you are in a rare 'no resources' location (of which I think only two exist, but there could be more...) you will see that things take time to produce. So logically, they have value, and people might object to you taking them.

Still, some explanation of the mechanics of production would probably be helpful to beople who expect something more like Diablo.

slightly off topic: What MMORPG games feature all things good coming off the ground and have unlimited PvP violence? I would expect that to lead to an astounding amount of PKing.

[joshua johnson]

But Industrialist.....I thought I was investigating in a non-invasive manner. I did not hit anyone.

The goods were in plain sight. I figured other people had discarded them.

With my first character, I figured investigating buildings was part of the game. I thought they were part of the "game landscape"

Using machinery also seemed to be non-invasive. I had no idea that someone had worked to build these machines with their own labor. Again, I thought they were part of the "game landscape." Sort of placed there by the game-makers so that players could interact with these machines.

If you look at many games, buildings and machinery and things on the ground are for using. Ownership by someone else was a somewhat foreign concept for items that are on the ground or in plain view.

[The Industriallist]

I agree with everything you said except the first line. Non-invasive doesn't just refer to not attacking, or even just bothering, people. I wouldn't touch a single control that I thought would modify anything at least until I had investigated as far as I could without doing so. That might include going into buildings, but not taking things or using machines.

I also contest that anything you can pick up and carry away that has any value will be something people would preffer if you didn't take, no matter what game it's in.

Still, I agree that it ought to be mentioned in the seldom-read introductory material that everything in cantr is there because someone made it (with exception for the 'location' tab).

Or is it already? I think it might be...
Did you read all the 'description and background' information, and the full page that comes up during the player registration?