Yes you can.

~Contemplar~

Lich isn't required, but not using it has costs as well as benefits. I don't use it, but if I'd just started playing I think I'd have to.

Lich has acquired a virtual monopoly on global communication which makes certain aspects of play virtually impossible without it. The only way of making contact between your character and many (most? virtually all?) other characters is to make contact with their player via Lich. If you are dependent on making frequent new contacts (e.g. rescuer, gossip, merchant, mentor, user or provider of services) you will need Lich. I don't use Lich, but it does cost me these aspects of play that used to be available to me and have virtually disappeared from my characters' experience since Lich became widespread.

There is no reason to have lich running. I do have it installed and do reply to OOC questions on the different chat channels but I do not run any scripts. I also capped my PC with no scripts from lnet used. It can be done and does not need to be a requirement.

As for the chat features I know for me and those I RP with regularly we consider lnet fully OOC. No IC communication in our minds. Its up to you to decide but for us when there is RP going on I pretty much tune out anything going on and only use amulets. Despite what most say, at least around the Landing there is still a strong number of people that use the amulets and will communicate IC RP over the amulet.

Pup's Player

Pretty late on my reply, but I don't tend to check the forums on the weekend much.

Pup:
>There is no reason to have lich running.

I read this more like "lnet" than "lich" at first, but reading it again it seems "lich" may have been intended as written. I think there are plenty of reasons to have lich running, but whether or not it's necessary is certainly an open question.

Luxie:
>Some days I still ;untune them all except the TownCrier, just for sanity.

>So if it is the pace of OOC Communication on LNet ... ;kill lnet

I generally prefer the former of these two (;untune on several channels) rather than ;k lnet, since lnet is still useful for direct communications, player locations, spellups, etc.

Rath:
>user or provider of services

The SERVICE verb seems to have helped a bit in this respect. But, unless you're already at a relevant location (e.g. East Tower for lockpicking, Town Square for healing), most people will try to contact you via LNet most likely. So I agree, but to a limited degree.

To give my own answer:

COOPERA1:

>Is it possible to play this game without Lich?

Let me rephrase the question:

"Is it possible to play this game without maps?"

A: Basically no in my opinion. Some extremely experienced players might do without them or any scripts for walking around, but that would only be after using maps for a long time -- even maps made yourself. Trading maps was one of the cornerstones of early communication in GemStone, and I think that continues to be true to this day.

Now, Lich has become the default repository for maps. You can find most of them on gswiki as well, but we were fairly horrified when even us advocates of a particularly small town noticed maybe last year that the map on gswiki was like 10 years old and missing a lot of updates. gswiki usually has the updated maps these days, but not always and not necessarily as fast as lich has them.

So, it is possible to play without Lich, but probably not possible to play without maps -- and certainly not as a newer player. But, let me emphasize that I am including the idea of making your own maps in this. That would be quite die-hard but probably a fun experience up to a point. Under this context, the main reason I highly recommend lich is because it is the default map repository.

>I played off and on when I was in my teens back in the 90s but lacked the patience to deal with what I perceived as tedium in the game.

This is also a valid point. Before I got a Windows computer, in the 90s I was stuck on the Java FE for classic Mac. (Now I play under Linux, but I digress...)

I probably have erased that experience from my memory, so forgive me if I get some details wrong, but it was a pretty rough way to play. The old Java FE had no highlights (not even monsterbold?). I don't think it had macros either (or if so, only certain buttons worked, and maybe they had to be re-defined each login). No indicators of any kind, not even for health status. No way to script at all. Is it possible to play like that? Of course it's possible to play like that, and I did for probably a couple years. But if you had access to a more powerful Front End, would you really want to play like that? Probably the answer is no.

Considering you can pick and choose which parts of lich to actually use, to my mind the only reason not to use it is if you really can't get it installed on a computer (solution: use a different computer or get someone to help you).

I've never used it and never saw the need, esp since the spell active window was added to Stormfront.

I have considered it recently since so much info about this year's Ebon Gate uses Lich room numbers rather then the ones on the official map, but I REALLY don't like the idea of having to store all my settings (including Stormfront scripts and macros) locally. Having them all stored remotely has saved my butt a couple times when computers died on me (having my rogue guild password in there alone made that worth it).

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>I do not like the way Lich invades my privacy.

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, and I'm rather familiar with the Lich source code.

>Lich only "invades your privacy" if you let it.

Oh, the location/spells/etc features? Yeah, those are off by default and not actually part of Lich core (they're a feature of the lnet script).

You can also set it up with a whitelist (to only allow certain people to track you) or a blacklist.

You don't have to read the source code, it's right there in ;lnet help:

;lnet allow list your current permissions

;lnet allow <action> <group> set permissions

<action> can be one of: locate, spells, skills, info, health, bounty, all

<group> can be one of: all, friends, non-enemies, none

Whenever someone suggests ;lnet allow all all, I always suggest that people at least do ;lnet allow all non-enemies so they can blacklist people.

Curious how people without lich do foraging tasks, as just a simple example (not including things like the Confluence or Red Forest where you find whatever you want anywhere).

http://www.virilneus.com/roomdata/room.php will only get you so far (considering, say, the River's Rest maps are out-dated by over a decade). Actually, when I first started using lich I had no idea about tags, and so I had a really difficult time with the Marsh Keep tasks.

Of course, there's always the old "explore the game yourself" approach, but with professional penalties being what they are for some classes, added with the odd quirks of the foraging parser itself (particularly with regard to what adjectives are needed/accepted), I have to say the lich tags for where to find foraged items are pretty fantastic.

This isn't the old days of "I remember I can forage marallis berries on the boulder." There are hundreds (thousands?) of items that can be foraged now, and I don't think the "guess and check" method is a very good one...

Foraging: Then there's Gossamer Valley where all things there grow in only one spot. Handy not handy

---
Rohese: "... the TownCrier (tune in if you haven’t, it’s without doubt the best thing to ever happen on LNet)

>Something I would absolutely not do is run Lich from say Google Drive or with Dropbox (I don't like putting my data out in the world except when it's absolutely necessary)

If you're this concerned about things, then make sure you only connect to the game via the website, and never via SGE or Lich login. Especially on public wifi.

>I also make use of http://www.virilneus.com/roomdata/room.php for foraging needs. I know it's a bit out of date (maps and lack of some herbs), but I have found a couple of things on this map that aren't setup as tags on the ;narost maps in Lich.

Though, as long as the ;lnet script is running, as soon as someone forages that item in that room, it will be queued to be added to the mapdb. Not sure if everyone knows that, but Tillmen has lnet automatically pipe new herbs to him. It's a lot smoother than registering as a ranger at Virilneus's website.

>Overall, I still largely type everything out. I moved away from macros some, I used them a lot in the past but that was more inline of when I relied upon wands as a key hunting method. Pulling out a wand and "wave wand at <target>" gets old. So did constantly typing out skinning steps (so the skinning script was made) and then bundling skins (simple to do, but annoying)....so the bundling script was made.

I'm actually a really big fan of aliases, as I agree with you about typing things out (at least to an extent). I have not set up a new macro in years. My stance-dancing alias is "smash" and my one for incanting 711 is "pain" etc. Of course, there is only a small difference between an alias and a script technically (though aliases tend to be simpler but that is not required). I like being able to override the input to the game (and also not always needing to type a special character to initiate a script). I could probably just paste my override aliases, but I'm talking about making BOUN check your BOUNTY rather than BOUNCE. Or how when the INVENTORY command is entered 4 or less characters, it won't work in RT, but if it is 5 or more characters you can use it any time (so I, IN, INV, INVE are all aliased to INVEN). Who ever types LOO to LOOK when they usually wanted LOOT? Aliases are a great and unique feature of lich which allow you to customize command abbreviation to your own tastes rather than the game parser.

I even like to write a lot of one-use "scripts" directly to the game input line, such as during writing this post, I did:

;e 6.times{multifput "shake my jar","stow l"}

Alternating Ctrl+Enter / Alt+Enter (or "Up up enter") a lot gets old, but that formulation can be used for any simple yet repetitive task.

>You don't need lich. Does it have useful scripts, sure. I know it has ;sloot and I do have it setup, but I only use it if I had a bunch of creatures in the room that I had to quickly slaughter them all with cone of elements and I don't want to pick up half a dozen gems and wands and boxes that were left.

I agree you don't need it, but I agree also with PFLATS:

>I also would like to note that the people who post in this thread to say they don't use Lich are the vocal minority. They're 100% correct, you do not need Lich to play or enjoy Gemstone. But it has a lot of features that make your life easier in-game. The vast majority of players use it.

It is very, very true that the number of scripts is daunting, you'll probably need a little help to set up for first alias, lnet isn't going to work correctly for your needs out-of-the-box and so on and so on.

...and speaking of aliases and scripts and game behavior that annoys me, I think I'll go write my script that uses INVENTORY to check what's in my HANDS but gives the right reply (rather than my full inventory) and override HANDS with my own alias because while GLANCE works in RT, HANDS does not (and GLANCE is an RR-specific verb that doesn't check what's in your HANDS).

The difference is that I don't think I could use Lich even if I wanted to. As a completely blind player with no access to any of Simutronics' front ends due to inaccessibility, I use a third party MUD client that is accessible out of the box instead. I've no idea if Lich provides accessibility to screen readers and, since I've been getting along fairly well without Lich, I haven't pushed to try to install it as it'd likely end in disappointment anyhow.

Ever since your post last year, I've been meaning to look at how lich would interact with VIPMud, and if there would be any convenient way to patch it to be useful for players with vision issues. Then I had some RL issues come up, and it's been backburnered. I still have vipmud installed, and if/when life calms down, I'll take a look at things again.

Lich is able to modify the datastream from the Gemstone servers on the fly, which would probably prove helpful to players with vision issues. It would be rather simple for someone to write a script, for example, to make it so that the inn's training menu has one item per line and by default suppresses any skill with 0 ranks. Or a script that just opens the goals page in a web browser, even if VIPMud doesn't support it.

I already have a script that can surround stormfront's underlined items with arbitrary tokens, like brackets, for front-ends that don't support the xml underlining. Lich itself changes the way boldfaced items are displayed on a per-front-end basis, so including support for a "bold" indicator in vipmud would be even easier.

It's on the repo as drizzleback.

Stormfront links? Drizzleback?

(I'll see myself out.)

I just wanted to add that the 'Active Players' will also only show those characters who are visible (because I'm pretty sure I turned my presence off as soon as I was able to).

So both sides of the statistic are displaying "only those who let themselves be counted".

.

.

Also, while I myself do not use Lich, I love seeing the kind of discussion between PFlats and GSLover. That kind of "Yeah, we can get there from here; we have the technology" is, frankly, what I think technology is all about.
(Similar to watching the people at the Sheraton Chalet in '03 [?] following the Simu-TechTeam around the hotel watching (and taking notes; LOTs of notes) what they did to set up wireless. Now? Sure, every corner McDonalds has Wi-Fi in every location. Then? This was The Great Beyond, and it was gaming geeks doing cool stuff to make things work for their people. :)

Unfortunately, it was too late. Everyone was already on Lich. I mean, I just typed this right now:

>who

Active Players: 308

Staff on duty:

Use WHO HELP for more options.
>;who

GSIV (267):


The only time that I and many other people I know use the amulet is for one of two reasons: (1) Storyline Events. (2) CHE/MHO communications (which are also thankfully cross-realms). The amulet/ESP system is useful and robust now, but Lich is insanely popular. I think there is one more tweak that needs to be make to the ESP system to make it a viable alternative to Lich: It needs to be always on.

Elanthians just need to be able to inherently think to one another without having to remember to rub amulets or use signs and sigils. *Maybe just WEARing a crystal amulet should cause an enhansive-like always on effect?* They can still deteriorate and shatter. Ironically, because of Lich, I'm always on the ESP system, since my scripts renew it for me. But if it wasn't for Lich, I'd probably forget to turn the ESP system back on when it wore off.

>> I think there is one more tweak that needs to be make to the ESP system to make it a viable alternative to Lich: It needs to be always on.

also: A News channel. Just sayin' :)

---
Rohese: "... the TownCrier (tune in if you haven’t, it’s without doubt the best thing to ever happen on LNet)