When forming parties ICly to tackle dungeons on the server, whether to group up for XP, or in search of magic treasure, we tend to encourage people to form groups that focus more on the characters than on the player level. We feel that groups encourage roleplay and interaction, as well as participation across diverse character levels. As such, you will gain approximately the same XP while in a group that you do when solo, for each individual monster kill.
That said, there are some OOC considerations that need to be taken into account.
Dungeons on Cormyr and the Dalelands are designed around an expectation that players will adventure within a group. Dungeons are balanced around a party of approximately 5 characters within the intended level range of the dungeon. Therefore, when grouping for an adventure, please keep your party size between 4-6 characters. Parties larger than this range trivialize the intended challenge of the dungeon.
When adventuring, every party member is expected to take an active role in combat, such as swinging a sword/etc, casting offensive spells, firing arrows or other missile weapon, etc. This explicitly means lower level characters are NOT hiding invisibly out of sight of the monsters while letting the others do all the fighting because they are below the intended level of the content. We don't want to see low level characters being dragged through high-end epic dungeons, as that defeats the purpose of the content designed around their appropriate level.
Please refer to the Dungeon List.
Mentoring and training roleplay is encouraged, and often essential with certain factions. We also understand and encourage helping newer players and characters as they discover our server's areas and dungeons. Dungeons on Cormyr and the Dalelands have been balanced around parties of an appropriate level and size. Bringing higher-level characters to lower level dungeons trivializes the intended challenge. Higher level (or even epic) characters should not be doing all the work, carrying the lower-level party through the dungeon.
In addition, when a character's level is too far away from the party average, they will receive reduced or no experience from combat. (This is mostly to prevent a lone epic character from just power-leveling a single new character.) We'd much rather new characters adventure in level-appropriate groups where possible. To this end, we suggest these higher level characters mentor by observing the party's tactics and offering advice. Alternatively, they may wish to switch to another character of a more appropriate level.
As a small reminder to our older players, and some of the newer ones, we'd like to share a small missive about dungeons and how your character might go about doing them. That is to say, just because you can solo something that's far below your level, you might choose not to do so.
Often, especially in the case of epic casters needing gold for their spell research, players have their characters run through lower level content. This is usually for several various reasons. (It's fast; there's a lot of gold to be had; it's the only place they can reliably solo; etc.)
We would like to remind everyone that this can be disruptive to lower level characters and those trying to handle content at the appropriate time. Rewards for doing dungeons are meant to be utilized at the levels they were designed for. While we currently have no rules about running content lower than your current level range, this reminder is to ask people to try, if at all possible, to stick to the intended range of content they are in at the time (or reasonably close to it on either end of the spectrum).
Ideally, characters between level 16-20 should not be soloing dungeons that are below the Mid-level range; characters over level 20 should be not be soloing dungeons that are below the High-level range.
Dungeons on Cormyr and the Dalelands have been tweaked, adjusted, and constructed with the idea in mind that characters have an adequate, or even generous reward at the end of them at all levels. Traversing back lower than the intended range can be easier. However, it also takes up time and resources from the lower level characters that might be interested in doing that content.
Sometimes characters die in dungeons. Often, when adventuring in a dungeon, this is roleplayed as being knocked out. Someone being "knocked out" can still RP their injury or condition, though it isn't expected nor required. When not in an event, please respect a player's wishes. If they're roleplaying being knocked out or wounded, please roleplay accordingly rather than contradicting them.
Respawning (when not in an event) is typically interpreted as your character being defeated. They somehow got away, wounded, and were helped back to one of the temples. Often this is accompanied by memory loss due to injury, for ease of storytelling purposes.
If players respawn while adventuring within a dungeon, do not then use Theavos' Portal to return to your party. Especially, do not respawn, rest, rebuff, and return to your party using the portal or teleportation. This is an abuse of a mechanic that is there for your convenience; such actions may result in a level loss.
Ninja looting, or triggering spawns and not fighting them/ignoring spawns to get to treasure, is not permitted on CD. If you spawn an encounter, you are expected to fight it. Triggering and leaving encounters is just plain rude to your fellow players; this behavior may result in level loss.
With an active player base, there will be times when multiple groups of players end up in the same dungeon. Ideally, players will join up and form a party to complete the area together. However, if the party that was already in the dungeon (be it a solo character or a party of characters) do not wish to join up with the newer group, the newer group is expected to leave the dungeon and find somewhere else to adventure
. In these instances, the players who were already in the dungeon (or about to begin said dungeon) receive priority.
In short, do not try to force a person or party that is already adventuring in a dungeon to leave by running ahead of them, ignoring them, or looting while they are fighting.
This behavior is highly rude and inconsiderate of your fellow players, and not being That Guy is baked into the server rules.
NOTE: All dungeon areas will give a message in your combat log if a dungeon is already occupied when you enter it. You can also use /listdungeons as a command, and /listpcs when you're in it, to see who (even if hidden) is in it so that you might message them privately for the aforementioned inquiry as to joining them or not.
The goal of CD, above all, is to have fun - and while rules and restrictions aren't inherently fun themselves, sometimes they're necessary to make sure other things don't become horribly broken. Item restrictions are one of these cases.
Specifically, we try to keep the "power creep" of items in check. There is an upper bound on the power of items in CD, due to the setting, and we already play a little looser with that. Still, there's a limit - and once you reach that limit, that's it - there's nothing better to find. We don't want lower level characters having tons of powerful magical items meant for far higher levels; we want to preserve the fun of being able to go out and find something new and exciting.
At the same time, forcing you to rely on remembering and knowing what gear is appropriate for each level isn't fun for any of us. So we've put in an automated system to handle that.
Items are grouped into tiers, usable by characters of progressively higher levels. These are colored names that tell you roughly how powerful an item is:
You should not be giving or selling items of a higher tier to lower level characters; items that are too far above their level can't even be picked up. You ABSOLUTELY should not be "holding on to" items for anyone who's too low level to carry them.