Smuggler Archive

So, some commentary by the Jedi over all this has spawn an amused idea that I think we might all have fun discussing it and blowing off steam. Plus, well, the Jedi can't tell us this wouldn't fix their supposed issue. So.

Let's just... scrap Smuggler. No, wait, put down the pitchforks.

Let's drop it as it exists now. We have three iconic ground professions: Jedi, BH, and tada-- Smuggler. Two of these are involved in endgame and considered rather powerful. One of them is separated out into its own special ruleset. The other would like us to join the Hunting party as prey, which, hey... we want to be chased, don't we?

However, disparities in mechanics are big, and with crossover, we have Jedi suggesting we make BH and Smuggler mutually-exclusive so they're safe from the nasty "exploiters".

I say... fine. let them have it. Make BH and Smuggler stand by themselves, much like Jedi does. Make them require more to get. make them more powerful to reflect it, though powerful in different ways.

So, a few thoughts. I haven't fleshed this idea out much, it's just something the girlfriend and I thought up out of the blue during the hullabaloo.

1. remove Smuggler. Put some sort of basic underworld-y profession in its place. Something Like Rogue or who knows what. Lays the foundation for the criminal aspect of the smuggler prestige class, and provides the CC role Smuggler currently does, possibly without some of the more well-known "get away alive" abilities such as FD and LD.
2. You must Master this Underworld Profession, Master Pistoleer, Master Pilot(of your choice), and... maybe the engines and weapons lines of Shipwright(I'm not sure if there's room for this last just off the cuff). These seem fairly good smuggler respresentative skills. You must also get through Jabba's Palace/Some sort of Valarian thing. The point here is that you establish a "Connection" to the Underworld.
3. There is now a series of quests(NO XP GRIND). These tasks/quests are long, and designed to test your mastery of every aspect of the pre-reqs. You essentially work your way up in the seedy world of your chosen "court", be that Jabba's Organization or Valarian's or whatever.
4. Your final trial is a somewhat gruelling task involving a smuggling assignment that will, again, test your mastery of all things pre-req. the diffrernce being, that rather than test each facet, it is designed so that many combinations of ability can produce a successful outcome. How you handle the details is left up to you. You've got the skills, now you need to figure out which to use when to get where you're going.
5. Congrats. You are now a Fledgling Smuggler, Much as one might be a Padawan. From here, we may have several trees to template in, or just one very nice tree.
6. Levelling, of course, takes a while, and this is the point where you may start getting on terms if you're not careful. Much of the tree is Smuggling XP. Some may involve slicing XP or whatever. More likely, there are multiple ways to get Smuggling XP. The best grants coming from mission completions, and lesser grants for, say, slicing this or that successfully. Of course, just like the proposed smuggling misions we already "have", so to speak, failure or skimming off the top pops your visibility up, as does slicing a term to see your vis.
7. Our Lightsabers are Illegal mods on weapons, armor and ships, our Force Powers is the ability to sneak, slice, get into places we shouldn't be able to, and get away when the shooting starts. Our visibility is failed missions, skimmed cargo, and failed contraband scans.
8. Sorry, general populace, slices would be gone. Though i suppose they could have lesser slices, but I'd have to INSIST there be visibility for such, possibly varied accordig to some sort of gradiated legality level. Ditto spices.
9. You're a finished template? Grat. You are now Han Solo, or Talon Karrde, or lando Calrissian, perhaps. Maybe thre is some FRS-like system involving rival factions in the underworld, but FRS has shown this is a basically bad idea to base on pure PvP. We wouldn't want fightclubbing.
10. I don't really know what the trees might be. But I think it should let us have some varisation in smugglers. Pirates, straight-up smugglers, business-oriented smugglers... I think that gun-runners and drug-runners would be too specific and shoutld just be in the straight-up smuggler category.
11. I would imagine to be fair, the BHs might need soemthing similar. But they may not want it. I don't know. That's outside the scope of this brainstorm.

Anyway, have at it. Discuss. There's are just general ideas, not fully developed or firm even to me. I'd like to see what fun we could come upwith as an excercise, though. And maybe we could present it to the Devs.

Well, yeah - it's definitely a pipe dream. But sometimes, it's fun just to brainstorm for things you never expect to happen, and maybe two years of bad luck can be paid back in one grand sweeping karmic blast and it'll happen. (Again with the pipe-smoking, but we have to get through somehow!)

Yes I know, and I bet soon as a Jedi spies this, we'll hear all about it. However, I think you misunderstand me. This is not really a serious proposal. This is a "let's chat about this and play around with it and have a discussion". In part this is just to blow off some steam and distract from the war going on. But it's also so we can throw ideas around in case we find something we really, really like. Often small, great ideas come out of these sorts of things. So let's not look at this as "Nice, but will never work" Let's look at it more as "nice, but I think it would be col if" or "maybe you could do this with this part" and so on. The Aim isn't really something to present to the devs, but the community can discuss it, see where people are on things, and generally have a bit of a "what if". And well, something good could conceivably come of it, however small.

So we know it's not gonna happen. What else do we thing of it, as an idea on it's own merits?

Nice idea Kate but for one horrible thing...

It would require yet another respec. One was bad enough. I goot MBH in place of Pistoleer because of the way SOE structured the two professions. I'd be pretty pissed if I had to ditch it without being able to respec into something else.

Going on with the whole "Pipe Dream" thing, what about this:

Once you choose to become a Master Smuggler, you must choose an underworld faction. Once you do, every time you get a mission for that faction other smugglers of competing factions are informed and may attempt to steal your cargo, thus making you lose the mission. You can, of course, work officially for one faction but do a couple odd jobs for another faction, or you can just sell out - but that would open you up to BHs and, really, anybody who works for the faction you just sold out.

BHs come into play once you lose enough missions, or piss off a certain faction enough.

In essence, with different underworld organizations, we would have the same thing the Jedi do with their limp and dork sides (sorry, had to do it). To help streamline things, and to keep with SOE's fetish for dividing everything into two sides that match up with the overall GCW setting, I think the Hutt's and Black Sun would be the best ones to go with.
Even in cannon Black Sun is the imperial syndicate, working with the Empire to a small extent, but mostly picking away at the underbelly of the system (Shadows of the Empire anyone?)
The Hutt's on the other hand, they're old school. Around before the Empire, before the Rebellion, going back to the days of the Republic and who knows...maybe back to the beginning of time itself . In any case, they would be akin to the "rebellion" side of the coin. But not because they're working with the Rebels or anything like that, more because the Empire (and Black Sun) are a greater threat. While both the Old and New Republics were more likely to leave the Hutt's to themselves. The Empire is pushing into their territory..not just within the underworld but also politically as well. "This is Hutt space!"

Personally, I love the prereq requirements, as that fits most smugglers to a T. Possibly even giving them the option, go with either master pistols or master shipwright. Once again the two choices giving a bit of a nod to the different "template" styles, pirates, hired thugs and the like.

I especially like the idea of basing the whole "unlock" system on an extended quest basis, in essence making the whole process into a massive theme park. Would probably be a good idea to have it gated as well, much like the current Village phases. But why stop there? Durring these gated phases you'll have all sorts of would be Smugglers going through the same quest arc. So let's introduce the "smuggler pvp" early on, as the goal of your quest for that "phase" isn't just to complete your tasks, but to keep others from doing the same....this is a dog eat dog galaxy afterall. Put in rewards in each phase based upon peoples performance, that is...how they go about doing the missions and who's plans they muddle up along the way.

After reading over the whole "how to be come a jedi" system I was a little irked by something....all the different quests for the trials have only one possible way to pass them. And at the end of the road, when your on the cusp of becoming a knight...you get to choose which side your gonna be on. For us smugglers I think the end result of what side you first start out on should be determined by your actions durring your unlock missions. You go through it this way and the Hutt's really start to take a positive interest. Go about it another way and Black Sun starts sending you non threatening holomails. But don't do it with a simple FP system, that's too easy. Change things up, keep the players guessing "Well, if I escort this freighter in then the owners would be pleased, but if I capture the freighter and take it's cargo then those fences I know would be happy."

I have more idea's, lots more, but it's almost 5am and I'm a sleepy monkey.
/passout

Heh, well, only as long as we all get to respec into it

I would have no problem doing a lot of work for smuggler. that's not what keeps me away from Jedi, I simply have no interest in it.

It would be great if the 3 profs were all on the same page as Jedi, an end-game kind of thing, each with their own set of features that makes them awesome. It'd be cool if Smuggler was an all encompassing pseudo profession, with different professions inside of it to work with, like Jedi. It would be cool if BH was the same (an investigator/stealth BH would do things differently than a subjugator/weapons expert, etc.) Smugglers could focus on Smuggling, have a special "business" prof, that was like a corrupted version of merchant, so you could sell illegal items, a separate slicing profession, so Smugglers could choose whether to be a slicer or not, etc.

It would probably be pretty great, but the Devs would have to create a HUGE amount of content around each of those professions to make them worth the extra effort of getting them... So I dunno...