Yeah, it's perplexing. There are so many better ways to do this. If you want to do "Virtual Tabletop," Fantasy Grounds et al. could open up so many more opportunities ... but on Sunday nights and the occasional Friday night, a big thing with the "Mead Hall" (a loose collection of associated guilds, into a sort of "mega-guild") is that they'll have "pub nights" where anyone can wander in and RP, and it seems to be a sparse enough server that it's fairly rare that some lunatic comes bouncing in randomly with no intent of playing along. (I couldn't imagine trying something like that in Ironforge back during the days of WoW Classic. I mean ... if you wanted to do any "serious roleplay" without constant interruptions, you had to get pretty far off the beaten path.)
Anyway, I digress. The attempts to handle combat are pretty awkward. Combat is seriously abstracted. Attack, offense ... whether you're at range or in melee, fighting with a battleaxe or a coffee mug, it's almost immaterial. Pretty much everyone has generic offensive and defensive capability, with some slight variation for very generalized classes (warrior, spellcaster, healer). More experienced characters have cooler stuff they've been awarded by "GMs," but I have very little sense at how they manage to moderate it all.
(What happens if you have one "Monty Haul" GM who gives his players too much cool stuff? Well ... it just seems to be that the GM, if he doesn't like it, *could* theoretically nerf your stuff in his particular adventure some way or another, but nobody likes doing that, so the cheesy folks who invent all sorts of new powers for themselves tend to dominate things, just like they would on GenesisMUCK, because the GMs don't appear to say "no" very much to the regulars.)
It's a bit of a mess, but Gwendel is heavily invested in it, so ... eh, that's how it is, and I'm trying to participate a bit (especially since I'm not GMing anything at home for the foreseeable future).
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Anyway, I digress. The attempts to handle combat are pretty awkward. Combat is seriously abstracted. Attack, offense ... whether you're at range or in melee, fighting with a battleaxe or a coffee mug, it's almost immaterial. Pretty much everyone has generic offensive and defensive capability, with some slight variation for very generalized classes (warrior, spellcaster, healer). More experienced characters have cooler stuff they've been awarded by "GMs," but I have very little sense at how they manage to moderate it all.
(What happens if you have one "Monty Haul" GM who gives his players too much cool stuff? Well ... it just seems to be that the GM, if he doesn't like it, *could* theoretically nerf your stuff in his particular adventure some way or another, but nobody likes doing that, so the cheesy folks who invent all sorts of new powers for themselves tend to dominate things, just like they would on GenesisMUCK, because the GMs don't appear to say "no" very much to the regulars.)
It's a bit of a mess, but Gwendel is heavily invested in it, so ... eh, that's how it is, and I'm trying to participate a bit (especially since I'm not GMing anything at home for the foreseeable future).