As some of you have noticed, hiding has changed the way that it awards exp. Before I go into the details, I would like to give some backstory.
In Dragonrealms, you can be hidden or not. Some verbs make sense to be used while hidden - SMILE, THINK, SAY, any number of metagame commands like EXPERIENCE, etc. Others force you out of hiding, because you can't reasonably be hidden while performing them - YELL comes to mind, HUZZAH, SHIVER, and plenty of others.
Additionally, we have the concept of roundtime. Actions take time to perform, and we approximate that time by giving you roundtime - A dynamic value that restricts you from doing other active things for a short period of time. Some commands require little attention to perform, and thus can be done while in roundtime - The idea is that these commands take so little focus that they can be done while you're performing this other, major task that gives you roundtime.
Now, think about what 'roundtime' is for a sec. It says "It took me 3 seconds to swing my scimitar". Since we have no way of taking that time up in the past, your action that takes 3 seconds puts you 3 seconds in debt to the future, essentially. Even though your action appears to happen immediately (and for all intents and purposes, it does), in order to properly represent the duration of that action, roundtime is applied. The roundtime of an action is intended to force you to be committed to that action for that many seconds, whether it's juggling, slicing or... hiding.
Now we get to the crux of things. As many of you know (and many more can surmise from the above paragraphs), there is an overlap between the verbs that you can use in roundtime, and the verbs that pull you out of hiding. Taking that a step further, it's possible to hide (which gives you roundtime, implying that it's an intensive action that you need to focus on), and then HUZZAH or SHIVER or whathaveyou. This will give you the training benefits of hiding without any of the other penalties of being in hiding (namely, creatures continuing to attack you and give you experience). Obviously, this is a pretty optimal way to train if you want to slot some hiding into your otherwise unhidden combat routine - Just HIDE and immediately HUZZAH, and you'll get hiding experience while having a very tiny chance of the creatures acting while you're in hidden (since it's only a split second).
This is, in a word, silly. Imagine if you will an adventurer engaged in deadly (well, probably not deadly) combat with one or more horrific monsters. All of the sudden, he distracts them [somehow] and sneaks behind a tree, only to a split second leap back out of hiding and cheer loudly. Now, I'm using a HUZZAH because it's amusing, but the same is true for anything that should reasonably pull you out of hiding (which is not to say that I consider SHIVER reasonable in this case). Worse still, not only are you leaping immediately out of hiding, but you're leaping immediately out of hiding - Before the roundtime is expired. As noted above, you're in time-debt for those seconds of roundtime, and being able to take such a major (and contrary!) action during that time doesn't make sense.
So we've got a problem description, and I think "problem" is a pretty reasonable name for it. It's the intersection of two systems that are working perfectly in their own right allowing something that is entirely ridiculous in application - Such is the case with most edge cases. Now, we need to look at solutions.
Obviously, one solution is to make all of these verbs that pull you out of hiding stop doing so. I've always rejected that solution (this issue's been around since before I was a GM) because it causes either inconsistencies or a lot of work. Either you're doing these things in hiding and nobody can see you doing them, which doesn't make sense for verbs like HUZZAH, or we have to go through and find every verb that can be used in roundtime and pulls you out of hiding and fix it. That's a huge pain in the butt and forces us to be constantly vigilant. Certainly we would miss one, and the discovery of it would circulate quietly amongst the folks 'in the know' until we found out. It would become an annoying game of cat and mouse that nobody wants to play.
The solution I decided on took a lot of the above into account. The idea behind the change was, hiding is something you need to be doing the entire time your roundtime is going on, just like everything else. Unlike SHIVERing while slicing a sword, forcing yourself out of hiding while you're in hiding RT causes a direct contradiction in the fiction of exactly what you're doing. So, the change that I made was to grant hiding experience at the end of your roundtime. If you've come out of hiding since then (except by being pointed at), you don't get the experience.
Thanks for reading, and hopefully this gives some insight into why the big bad GMs took away your training mechanism.
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