Talk:Scepter of Goth

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F Penguar... Greetings Nightshade (Don Campbell) and Pandora (Ryan O'Rourke) - Stile (Robert Wallace) *DM, Scepter of Goth, 1984

--- I was a long-time user and eventually DM on the Virginia Scepter system (Presto) Thought I'd mention that the creators of Meridian 59(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_59) were influenced by Scepter (reference: http://ieatcode.com/meridian/) As was Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythic_Entertainment), creators of the still-running Dark Ages of Camelot(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Of_Camelot) -Steve

Assassin character class
I was in the Assassins' Guild on the original Scepter of Goth on MECC in the early '80s. I think I was the Guildmaster, but I don't remember for sure. The Assassin character class could not be directly selected by a player; a player had to apply for membership in the guild, and if we voted him in, a DM would re-assign him to the Assassin class. I vaguely remember that a character had to start as a fighter or a thief in order to join the Guild, but I'm not sure of that.

(I edited the page on character classes to say that a player could not "directly" select the Assassin class, and left it at that.)

--J. Michael Hammond ("jmike" and "glymph" on MECC back in the day) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.104.232.98 (talk) 19:38, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

More about Spell Chants
I haven't edited the main page for this because it seems a little verbose.

As I recall, the spell chant system originally did not require that the character "learn" a spell - I think that came later. In the original system, the character had to be an appropriate class and level, and the player had to know the "spell chant". The spell chant did not have to be typed exactly. I think the routine went like this: at a prompt, you'd type "cast" or, say, "cast fireball". Anything after the "cast" (or maybe even the "ca") was optional and not syntax-checked, as I recall. Then you'd be prompted for the spell chant. As I recall it, the algorithm went like this: each spell chant had two values: I'll call them the "length" and the "sum". When the player typed in the spell chant, first all the non-letters were squeezed out. The length of the resulting string was the "length". Assigning A=1, B=2, ... Z=26 (case-insensitively) and adding those up gave the "sum". If what you typed had the right "length" and "sum", your character would attempt to cast that spell, no matter what spell's name you put on the "cast" line.

In general, weaker spells had very short chants (one or two words), and stronger spells had longer chants (up to a whole sentence for some of the biggies.)

I think there were two stated reasons for doing things this way: (1) In the case of a small typo -- really, only a transposition error -- the character could still cast the desired spell. (2) In rare cases, a typo would result in the accidental casting of a different spell from the one intended.

A fellow Scepter user from my home town, Doug H., claimed to have programmed his IMSAI 8080 (the old kit computer with the front-panel switches) to automatically create a 1st level fighter, go to one of the safe rooms, iterate through possible spell chants, and save the ones that were real spells. A 1st level fighter could not cast any spells. But the error message that came up when you tried an invalid spell chant was different form the error message that came up when you tried a valid spell chant but were not the right character class and level to cast that spell. So Doug would occasionally "steal" a valid spell chant this way. I did see this system up and running; his fighter was trying chants something like this: "aaaaahzzzz", "aaaaaizzzz", "aaaaajzzzz", and so on. (Because of the length/sum algorithm, guessing chants took enormously fewer iterations than guessing, say, passwords would take.)

I recall finding a unique scroll with the "enchant a weapon to +1" chant on it. I was able to make some in-game money by selling that information to some of the other players. I imagine Doug H. did the same thing with some of the chants he "stole" but I wasn't in on it with him.

--J. Michael Hammond ("glymph" and "jmike" on MECC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.104.232.98 (talk) 19:58, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Good/Evil, death and Piety
Let's see, I remember a few facts regarding this stuff.

Death you could "Save" and lose 2 levels or fail and lose 1/2 your levels based on your con. You also lost a point of con.

I don't remember piety effecting your rebirth chance, but when it went negative all non-hostile monsters would attack you (become hostile). Our server had an item that could steal a point of piety and we used this for PvP (since actually killing a player was extremely tough one-on-one).

One of the things the DM could do is flag your character "Evil". This turned all monster hostility off which was really nice because you could take on high-spawn-rate high-experience monsters one at a time and the other hostile monsters would just sit there and wait their turn.

Also, some chants from our server (Anaheim, CA):


 * Fireball: ball of fire fly to thee
 * Teleport: Up up away in my beautiful my beautiful balloon.
 * Harm: Oh yeah, well take that!

Reclassification discussion at Talk:MUD
I've opened a proposal that would affect how this article is categorized/handled at Talk:MUD Anybody interested is invited to comment. :) —chaos5023 (talk) 21:26, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Redirect to "List of..."
If page 13 of Designing Virtual Worlds is the most significant coverage this game has received, then this is not enough to justify this large article (WP:N). This is trivial coverage, enough for verification in a broader article. Coverage is equally light in the other hits at Google Books. Publications briefly mention it, then move on. We need to do the same. Marasmusine (talk) 06:30, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
 * ✓ done czar  20:15, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Scepter Found!
Muinet - Where old games go to die!

Point your ssh client to: muinet.com (password is muinet) port 2233 This has been up and running since late November 2020. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.237.133.204 (talk) 22:38, 19 January 2021 (UTC)