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First, the premise would be SF, not Fantasy. Not that I don't love fantasy, but there's a real lack of good, person-oriented (rather than ship-oriented) SF MMORPGs out there. The main idea would be this: The PCs are colonists to a new world. Their mission, to subdue the wilderness and create new civilization. They are 'ported across the universe from the homeworld, but it's a one way trip, as thus far, the human consciousness is only prepared for one such journey. Your
There are no levels. All PCs are human. However, there are several different body types available for each sex, lots of ethnicities and accessories, and so forth to customize your look. Ideally, something like the Sims 2 sim generator, but with a 'muscular' bar as well, so that you can have Rambo or Uber-Geek if you like.
There are lots of different professions, which substitute for class, and you can have one Primary (which starts you off with significant boosts in several profession-related skills and one nifty Expert Ability), and then you have two Secondaries, which give you smaller boosts to their related skills. So, as soon as your character hits the grid, he or she is roundly competent at their chosen profession, and able to muddle through a couple of others without great difficulty. For Professions, keep in mind that the focus is colonization, so your professions are going to be along the lines of: Geologist, Chemist, Engineer, Architect, Hunter, Farmer, Animal Breeder/Trainer, Medic, Politician, Artist, and Security. And then you'd have lots of skills, some of which would overlap between professions. So, both the Hunter and Security might have Firearms as one of their main skills, while a Chemist might have Herbalism as a minor skill, while Farmer might have it as a major skill.
Characters can learn any skill that they like, by practice, but they have a head start on the skills in their profession. If you find another PC with a higher skill level in any skill than you, they can train you, which helps you learn skills faster for a time. PCs who have high levels in a skill can also spend time (it takes a background couple of weeks...i.e. you click the skill, and it takes a couple of weeks to complete, but you can do everything as normal while you wait) creating a skill 'manual', which lets a character of half your skill or less gain a couple of skill points immediately. These would all be useful features, because skills would be very slow to rise.
The world would be huge and wild; the only non-player created civilizations would be small areas cleared for the 'porters and a couple of NPCs. The NPCs would offer very basic supplies (rations, basic clothing, basic tent, knife, stun gun, etc.) for free. They will also buy supplies from you: meat, cloth, basic constructed knives and guns for slightly more than the materials cost. Other than those very basic things, there are no NPC vendors. There are no random weapon/armor/stuff drops. However, when you hunt and kill, say, a deer, you get /lots/ of materials. The whole skin (provided you know how to skin it) can make an outfit, lots of meat, hooves and bones, etc. So you don't have to kill 25 deer to get five deer hooves. Likewise, other resources will be largely plentiful; you'll need Geologists to find and mine an ore vein, but the vein is likely good for 100 to 300 pounds of ore. Likewise, a single tree can provide 2000 firewood logs, or 50 decent building struts. Occasionally you will get Rotten Wood or Insect Infested Wood, or Bad Ore, or Poisoned Meat, or something, but for the most part, you will get plentiful supplies for your work. Also, when you exhaust an ore vein, or cut down a tree...it doesn't come back. Things like ore never come back, while plants and such have to be planted by a Farmer to regrow, and it takes a couple of weeks for plants, and about a month for a tree. Likewise, if you kill all the deer in an area, you don't get any more deer unless an Animal Breeder had some breeding stock that he'd captured and trained. Or unless your hunters go out and round some up, and bring them in. (And no, they wouldn't be 'deer', exactly. They'd be 'food animal' of some sort.)
But with your abundance of raw materials, you could build houses and larger buildings with the help of an Architect. If PCs built several buildings in the same area, then they would eventually attract certain NPCs. The NPCs would belong to several in-game factions; corporations, governments, and communes that are seeking to convince the teeming hordes that this new planet should be built along X lines. Joining a faction would provide an immediate benefit in exchange for accepting a limitation on your behavior, and then you could work up to new benefits as you went along, whether those would be nifty tech toys, or a biotechnological implant, or what have you. Some of these factions would be anti-PvP, and when you joined them, you would give up the ability to target other PCs in a hostile manner in exchange for the ability to not be targeted /by/ them in a combat capacity at all. Some factions would be PvP, but only against a specific other faction's PCs. When you join, that faction would become targetable, and all others would no longer be. Non-factioned PCs cannot be targeted in a hostile manner at all, unless they themselves choose to flag themselves as such.
There would be some danger to this, because death means getting regrown from a vat. Your memories, and therefore your skills, are degraded, although you retain your equipment. Of course, there would be hostile critters out in the wilderness; most of the prey animals will attempt to run rather than fight, unless cornered, but some deadly creatures out there have not learned to see humans as anything other than prey. Since killing creatures gives no XP or special magical drops, there are not hordes of ravening monsters out there. Creatures are distributed based on their habitat needs, whether that's a herd roaming the plains, a pack of nocturnal critters hunting at night and sleeping in their underground dens a day, or mostly solitary creatures with large territories. THey would also compete for resources with the settlers and each other; areas with herds of herbivores will find that their herbs and grains start disappearing. If a pack moves in to settled areas, they'll go after the Breeder's stock, represented by an occasional 'kill notice' coming up, and an animal disappearing.
PCs can place Bounties on other PCs. Security folk get their reputation and money largely by hunting these PCs down, stunning them, and dragging them to the nearest town jail. As soon as the target crosses the threshold of the jail in the custody of the Security person, the Security PC receives the bounty. While in jail, PCs have all their stuff taken and placed in a security box (openable only by them at the end of their term) and have to remain there for anywhere from an hour to a week, depending on how many Bounties have been placed on them. They cannot talk on general channels, but can still chat with anyone who has them Friended, or with the Organization they belong to. Friends can bring them certain materials to practice skills on (papermaking is OK, explosives or firearms is Not OK) while they're inside. They can also just log out, and log back in when their sentence is up.
Oh, and yes. There would be mysterious ruins to discover and explore, dark caverns, and also some nonstandard threats and opportunities like disease spreading through a settlement, or being able to crossbreed animals or plants for particular qualities. Mounts would be available at the discretion of those with the Animal Training skill. You just have to capture (or raise) one, break it to saddle, train it, and then give it to another person or keep it yourself.
Clothing would be made by PCs for the largest part, and dyed, woven, or whatever, according to the whims of the tailor. It wouldn't generally give benefits (with the exceptions of camouflage, etc.) to a character, but you could choose whatever color you can get from the available resources; whether that's finding a violet rock to make violet die, or red stain from red flowers, etc. Making clothing, like a lot of the other craft-skills would be a minigame that encourages creativity and innovation, rather than grinding. Most craftskills would also take time, to make up for the abundance of materials; a dress might take a day or two (backgrounded) to make, while a large town building could take the better part of a month.
Products would also degrade: unpicked fruit grows rotten, clothes wear out, unmaintained buildings decay and eventually disappear, gadgetry eventually goes bad. Thus the economy would have a self-sustaining element to it.
It would be very sandboxy. No 'end game', no raids, no Uber Gear to get. It would be focused on exploration (players' could create their own in-game maps by exploring widely and having the cartographer skill), interaction, and creation.
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Coastal areas, shipwright/fisherman professions, etc
Time dilation/generational play?
Allow PCs to form self-selecting subgroups/factions/settlements
- ooc means of group communication
- ic means of group communcation (bulletin boards, walky-talkies)
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I'm not big on the generational play. I'm not against it, but it's not part of my 'ideal'. Ideally, actually, I'd like to /slow things down/ quite a bit, hence the slow renewing resources and craft times, although without grinding.
And yeah, I forgot to mention it specifically, but PCs could form Organizations pretty much at will, and then do things like build offices, purchase organization bank accounts, and have their own comm channel.
Walkie-talkies and stuff, probably sure. I wouldn't really want the landscape cluttered up with billboards and things like that, though, and if you give players the ability of making them, they'll start sticking them in all sorts of bizarre places. Maybe some small signs or something.
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