*claps* very bice, very very nice. those are exactly the kind of questions i like to hear.
anyways, we don;t exactly have ennough peopel to start delegating tasks to but i suppose it wouldn't hurt to tell you guys what I already have in mind.
The only question is where to start...
I suppose a little description of Avalon would be in order.
Avalon will be the entirety of the world as far as the game is considered. Characters will come from outside Avalon, but will not be leaving the island until they feel their adventures on the island have come to an end.
I suppose that the most important characteristic of Avalon is its incredibly diverse topography. You know how the 'stages' or 'areas' in rpg worlds tend to have particular theme? Like one area might be a forest under a frozen lake, and that's where you fight all the ice-based enemies, and then after that your party might travel to some forgotten ruin, and there you might fight golems, or ancient machines. Then you would go to the ceremonial graveyard of whatever civilization built those ruins, and the monsters there woudl all be zombie or ghost types, etc.
Well, Avalon has at least one area for nearly every conceivable 'type' of rpg stage. And there is a reason for this. The main goal of the Smith on avalon is to go out and harvest their own materials. They don;t just get on the island and are suddenly presented with everything they need, they have to work for it, and since every type of equipment (even those that don't exist yet) is said to be able to be created on Avalon, the natural world of Avalon therefore needs to posses every material that one could possibly use to make equipment with. However, this isn't just a jrpg version of minecraft. The people who come to this island want to create weapons of legend going out and mining iron is all well and good, and you might be able to refine that iron into the best steel anyone has ever seen, and from that steel make teh finest, sharpest steel blade possible. But at the end of the day, no matter how fine and sharp a steel blade, it's not really gonna do shit for dicks against the scales of an elder dragon powered by the souls of 10,000 giants. So a lot of the higher end materials, the stuff that can make magical weapons, or armour endowed with specific properties, or rings that make you capable of withstanding the magical assault of a litch lord, is gonna be 'harvested' from the monsters that inhabit Avalon. Need to take down some frost giants? go out and kill some salamander, rip out their tongues, make a balrog whip out of them (balrogs being that big firey thing from the lord of the rings that 'kills' gandalf).
So the Smiths won't just be crafting weapons and equipment, they'll be equipping their creations and taking them out into battle, testing the weaponry and equipment out in the field versus Avalon's various beasts, monsters and creatures.
The second most important thing about Avalon is the way it fucks with time and space. As I mentioned before, Avalon exists as an island outside of time, as a result, its residents do not age and the island cannot be changed. Now, you might be wondering 'wait, if the island is populated by nothing but smiths who routinely go out and kill its wildlife and plunder its resources, how the hell does it remain unchanged'? Well, that is because there are 2 types of spaces on Avalon. The majority of the island is comprised of what its residents call 'the wilds'. The wilds are the areas where all the resources (and monsters) are.
The other type of space on Avalon is what its residents refer to as 'safe zones'. Safe zones exist in a manner that is somewhat detached from the rest of the island. When you're in the wilds, time and weather are variable like in real life. in safe zones, time stops moving, permanently stuck at one certain time of day. It is also quite impossible to actually harm anyone within safe zones. It is in these safe zones that the majority of cities and settlements on avalon have been erected, because they are the only place where the residents (i'll just call them players from now on) don't have to worry about their items and materials being reclaimed by the island.
the process of reclamation itself is a rather odd one. it works through death.
alright, i think this next bit will be easier to explain if i just paint you guys a scenario.
character A arrives on the island in safe zone A. He leaves safe zone A and enters wilderness A. In wilderness A he finds some metal ore, mines it, puts it in his back pack. while mining, character A fails to notice a troll that snuck up behind him and clubs him over the head, killing him. Character A then wakes up in safe zone A, having lost all the materials he gathered. Character A then thinks to bring a sword with him, and leaves Safe Zone A again. He goes out, collects the ore again, is prepared for the troll, and turns around and sticks the troll in his gut. He returns to the safe zone, material in hands, and with the ore crafts himself a steel helmet. When he next entered wilderness area A, he notices the same iron ore vein he mined, magically returned to its original stat. also the troll is back and clubs him over the head again, killing him again since the iron helmet wasn't of that good quality. When he wakes up, he finds that his iron helmet is gone, but the ore left over from its creation is still intact in his home in safe zone A.
here's what happened, when he entered safe zone A with the materials the first time, the materials weren't taken into the safe zone at all, they were returned to where he took them from, and a copy of the harvested materials were added to his inventory, making hem his possession in the safe zone. Now, let's assume he collected 3 pieces of iron ore, and a helmet costs 2 to make, he would have had one piece left over that he woudl have left at home. When he stepped back out into the wilderness, the helmet he had equipped stopped being 'his' because he was no longer under the reality-warping effects of the safe zone, and when he died the second time the materials that made up the helmet were returned to the island, and he was returned to the last safe zone he visited (still safe zone A for him).
So the smiths will be caught in a very precarious cycle to advance. They don't need to worry about death out in the wilderness, because death will just result in them being brought back to the last safe zone they visited. What they need to worry about though, is losing materials and equipment. They will need to go out and harvest materials, then come back to safe zones to store those materials. eventually however the monsters that they will fight will become too strong for them to defeat by their own means, so they'll need to use some of those materials in order to craft equipment so they can take on more powerful enemies. But now they have to be extra careful, because dying while out in the wilds will result in them losing the equipment they crafted, along with any material they have on their person. So it becomes a careful routine of going out to harvest materials, killing monsters, making sure not to get killed themselves, then coming back to thesafe zones so they can store the materials that they will need in order to craft more items so that their smiting skills increase, so that they can create better items, so that they can go out and explore more dangerous areas, and harvest more valuable materials, which will be brought back to make even better equipment, lather, rinse, repeat. The ultimate goal, of course, to eventually climb the misty mountain at the middle of the island that rises high above the clouds, at the top of which is said to be the mythical god forge (and yes, this mountain will be populated nearly exclusively with monsters that would be considered at least mini-bosses in any other area, sort of like sin's insides in FFX).
As you may have guessed, a character's battle stats will be nearly entirely dependent on the gear they use(which means that yes, by the time we start creating god-level equipment, we too will be basically like gods in battle). Remember, these characters are Smiths, and their ultimate goal is not to increase their battle skills, but to increase their craft, so when a character 'levels up' they can't learn new battle moves and 'earn more HP', instead they learn how to craft a new sword that unlocks a special battle move, or craft better armour that, in a video game, would increase their max hp just by wearing it. Or hell, they might even decide to instead spend some points into how to make a better pickaxe so they can harvest more durable ore, or anything along those lines.
As for the question of whether or not the arthurian characters will themselves make an appearance. Well... yes and no. the characters proper will not appear. their weapons will.
see, when an item is created in the godforge, a copy of it is 'stored' by the island itself. That weapon or item will then develop a 'spectre' to wield it in battle, and more often than not, that spectre will take on the shape of the hero most well known for using that item in legends (or, in the case of legendary weapons and items that did not have one specific user, the spectre will then take on the shape of the smith that originally created that item). These spectres are considered high-level bosses, and defeating one is often considered to be a prerequisite to being able to climb the mountain.
so, obvious example, if one were to find the legendary weapon Excalibur, the spectre it would generate would be a mirror image of king Arthur, not only in appearance, but also in his personality and fighting style.
if one were to find the hammer Mjolnir, then its spectre would be Thor, and so on and so forth.
Welp, that's the basics of the game idea. I hope all the information is not too overwhelming all at once ^^;
