Hello! Today we’re happy to release the Factions & ConflictRP update, which introduces several new features to Factions and Nations, as well as some long requested changes, additions and improvements to Conflict Roleplay. 

There’s a lot to go over in this news post, so continue reading to find out all you need to know about this update!

Last year in October we released the new Factions & Nations system, and today we’re releasing several new features, both big and small. Some of these features are accessible to only Nations, while others are accessible to both Factions and Nations.

Nation Bells

Nation Bells are a new feature available only to Nations, allowing them to quickly alert everyone currently within their claim.

Once placed, Nation members can ring the Bell to send an alert and play a bell sound to everyone currently inside the Nation, making it useful for warning civilians of an incoming attack, calling people together, or whatever other roleplay purpose you can come up with!

Nation Bells can be crafted using two regular Bells, and Nation leaders can utilize the Nation Permissions category to control access to the Bells..

Only one Nation Bell can be placed at a time, and you can only place them at locations that are high up in the air (this location is dependent on the average of the surface Y value in the Nation claim), and once rung it’ll have a 30 minute cooldown before it can be used again. 

Flavor Text Flags

Flavor Text Flags are another new feature available to both Factions and Nations, allowing you to place small physical flags around your claim that display custom FlavorRP messages when players walk nearby.

They can be used to introduce important locations, explain points of interest, welcome players into an area, or simply add some extra context to roleplay locations without needing signs everywhere.

Players with permission to manage a flag will be able to change both its message and how close somebody needs to be before the message appears.

The amount of flags a Faction can place within their claim will depend on their current level, while Nations will have a much larger limit of 64 Flavor Text Flags due to the size of their claims. 

Player List

We’re also adding a new player list command, accessible via /list in-game. This new command will give you a much better idea of where everyone actually is on the server.

Not only will it display the total number of players online, but it’ll also tell you where those players are:

• How many are inside each Nation claim (Nations with no one in them won’t show up).
• People in Primshire.
• Those out in the wilderness.
• And online across all of TallTalesRP in total.

Each count will also tell you how many of those players have their OOC tag turned on!

Hopefully this makes finding active roleplay a little easier, particularly when many players are online and players are spread between several different Nations.

Nation Activity

Nation leaders are getting a new /nation activity command that’ll show when their Nation has been the most active over the last 7 days.

The command will display the most active 2 hour period for each day over the last 7 days. Those most active periods will also display how many players were within the Nation claim during that time.

This should make it much easier for Nation leaders to figure out when their community is usually active, as well as which days have been particularly busy or quiet.

How Activity is Counted

We don’t want somebody briefly passing through a Nation to count towards its activity. Because of this, a player must spend at least 30 minutes inside a Nation claim during a 2 hour period before they’re counted toward that period’s activity.

So, if somebody enters your Nation for five or ten minutes and then leaves, they won’t affect your activity numbers. If they spend 30 minutes or longer there during that period, they’ll be counted.

Our Faction & Nation team within the Lore team will also have access to a version of this command that allows them to check activity across different Factions and Nations.

Moving Old Factions to the new System

Finally, we’ve created a system that’ll allow us to move Factions from the old system to the new one in a much easier way. Previously, that process was very manual, meaning it took us quite some time just to move one Faction to the new system, but now we have automated most of it.

The new transfer system will automatically move most of the important data/information across, including:

• The Faction and its existing members.
• The current Faction owner.
• The Faction’s claim.
• An appropriate Faction level based on its member count.
• A basic Citizen role for existing members.

The only bit of manual work that needs to be done is initiating the actual transfer process. We cannot do it without confirming each Faction's own primary leader, and unfortunately we don’t have an up to date list of this. Therefore, we ask that each Faction leader fills out this form if they aren’t on the new system already.

As the old system uses WorldGuard regions for claims, while our new system uses Minecraft chunks, claim borders may change slightly during the transfer. We’ll be keeping an eye on this while Factions are moved over to make sure everything transfers as smooth as possible.

We've made some long awaited changes, additions and improvements to roleplay rules in order to allow better Conflict Roleplay for all. These rule changes can be found in:

Preparing Combat

A section of rules outlining player expectations leading into Conflict & Combat Roleplay. 

Death & Revival

A variety of rules to better elaborate on the three types of character death, elaboration on the reason rules are in place and how they intend to work, alongside some new additions to death rules by popular demand! The largest example being post-death consequences.

Communication rules

Some additions to Bird rules, turning birds from an instant-messaging function into a proper strategic communication method that can fail! We have also added two rulesets for Spying & Espionage: the base ruleset and an optional ruleset for rolling such encounters. 

Fair Conflict 

This is a MASSIVE new playtest for a conflict system! It will most definitely see changes over time and will need a lot of feedback and help from you guys to move it in the direction it needs to go. 

The biggest change in our Fair Conflict ruleset is Call & Response. The goal of this new system is to allow roleplayers to enforce Roleplay Consequences, without things like Defender's Choice becoming an obstacle for them.

As a set of rules being used for mass playtest, please act respectfully and honourably when practising these rules. Failure to do so can be punished as exploitation of these developing rules. 

Battleplans

This is another MASSIVE new playtest! The scope of this ruleset is to support large-scale CRP encounters, so they can occur within a reasonable timeframe. We hope that large-scale fights, raids, and Wars will benefit from this ruleset. Battleplans also support more roleplay opportunities for large-scale encounters! 

This ruleset replaces the default PVP upon reaching a certain number of players in a conflict encounter, instead placing CRP, Honour and PvP all together as equally viable options for conflict. Instead, the conflict type is determined by Call & Response, or Defender's Choice (when there is no call). 

We have also added a few unique Raid Types! For example, assassination raids that, upon reaching a win condition during a battleplan, reward the attacking force with a one-on-one combat encounter with their assassination target and one bodyguard. Hopefully making the assassination roleplay of national political figures a more viable type of roleplay conflict!

Artifact Rules 

A new type of Artifact has been added and given a set of rules: Disputed Artifacts. These can be taken from factions & nations via wars and raids. Due to the risk behind Disputed Artifacts, they will be allowed to go beyond standard Artifact strength 👀

Roleplay Sportsmanship

We have added definitions for the following rules;

• Powergaming 
• Metagaming
• Godmodding
• Out of Character Bleed
• FailRP
• Fear of Life 

Hopefully this addition will assist many new roleplayers! And avoid misunderstanding what is, and is not, poor roleplay sportsmanship. 

General Difficulty Classes

Finally, we have added general difficulty Classes (DC’s) and mechanics to lockpicking and overpowering material! 

TA responsibilities and Feat Locking 

While it is explained in the Teacher's Application, a re-elaboration and some further clarification have been added about what the responsibility of a TA is, and situations when a feat might be locked or removed from a player!

Previously called Ticket Etiquette, we have overhauled these guidelines to now include in-game lore & encounters! This document addresses the expectations of players during roleplay events. 

Some information on Random Encounters can also be found in this section! Going over some of the things players may request when they receive a random encounter.

Lore Events: Content Warning

A proper content warning has been added! When engaging with official lore, please make sure you are aware of the content warning, so that you are aware of what kind of topics may be broached during a lore event. 

That's it for this update, it's a fairly large one across the board with multiple new features for Factions and Nations, and many new guidelines written out for better conflict roleplay opportunities.

If you have any feedback on what we added, please feel free to open a suggestion thread on our Discord! Thank you.