>If the other character doesn't have a particularly high
>profile, just pretend it's someone who has never logged on
>when you're around, or you never talked to.

My comment perhaps takes this a bit further afield, but I've thought each character should act as if they have no 'in-game' knowledge that they themselves didn't directly acquire. For instance, the last one I played I acted like I had heard no more than rumors of each cabal until I had actually spoken to someone either in the cabal or it had come up in conversation (despite having played CF since its inception). This extended to knowledge about equipment, preps, etc.. (preps weren't hard to play ignorant about; it'd been a year since my last char and I've never used many of them).

What this extends to is the development of a whole class of players that use extensive in-game knowledge acquired from previous experience (particularly with regards to preps) and are very protective of that knowledge but use it freely themselves. I'm thinking in particular of folks who *plan* on playing an a/b/s invoker rather than playing an invoker who finds out about wands and staves through life experience in-game.

I realize this kind of playing (pretending ignorance) is very hard to pull off and hard to encourage and the only idea I've come up with so far would be a pain to implement I think: make preps that are not sold in stores unique to each character. Meaning, if I wander around and find that really cool staff after adventuring whatever that particular staff does only does that for me (might do something else to another character who found it) or its location occurs more randomly.

(reading this I realize its not very clear but the idea is that preps would be tagged to a particular character and other characters would either find nothing in the same spot or a prep that had a different effect on them)

The overall effect I'm striving for here is to reduce passage of in-game knowledge about where to find the very special things (and questy things) from one character to another simply because the same person plays them.

*dons asbestos underwear*
Flame on!
Trouble (just this old guy who's been here off and on forever it seems)