Post by Caoineag on Oct 31, 2005 13:17:13 GMT -6
I think training would be somewhat less tedious and perhaps more challenging if there were more variation in the kinds of encounters within each area.
The first thing that came to mind was a simple 'time' system whereby the game is determined to be in a particular 'time of day' and 'time of year (season)' status, which would be periodically re-evaluated.
Basically, the idea is to allow some enemies to be exclusively nocturnal/diurnal, and/or migratory/hibernating, so that x terrain/location cannot be said to always yield only enemies of type {w, y, z}.
If it was actually decided to do something like this, having more ambushes at night (and possibly less during the day) seems like a good idea.
I'd recommend time compression of around 6:1 (so that one hour spent playing IRL causes six hours to pass in the game world). Ideally, the tile appearances would change somewhat to indicate night/dusk/day/whathaveyou, but if that were prohibitively troublesome, having a message echoed to the players when the time of day changes would also work.
It'd be especially interesting to see areas that are very difficult to pass in the night, but only average or so in the day. Those looking to pass through the area would want to arrive just as day breaks and try to hurry through before night falls; those training could wait around the entrance, skirmish with the stronger monsters, and fall back when sufficiently wounded.
'Course, for any of this to work, there'd probably have to be a non-trivial amount of new enemies, which would no doubt be a lot of work to create and balance out.
Oy. Anyway, just some goofy little extra to throw out for discussion.
Postscript: I certainly don't mean to imply that the game itself is tedious per se; I wouldn't play it if it were. Nonetheless, levelling does occasionally become boring, as for a given strength there aren't very many different places you can effectively train.
The first thing that came to mind was a simple 'time' system whereby the game is determined to be in a particular 'time of day' and 'time of year (season)' status, which would be periodically re-evaluated.
Basically, the idea is to allow some enemies to be exclusively nocturnal/diurnal, and/or migratory/hibernating, so that x terrain/location cannot be said to always yield only enemies of type {w, y, z}.
If it was actually decided to do something like this, having more ambushes at night (and possibly less during the day) seems like a good idea.
I'd recommend time compression of around 6:1 (so that one hour spent playing IRL causes six hours to pass in the game world). Ideally, the tile appearances would change somewhat to indicate night/dusk/day/whathaveyou, but if that were prohibitively troublesome, having a message echoed to the players when the time of day changes would also work.
It'd be especially interesting to see areas that are very difficult to pass in the night, but only average or so in the day. Those looking to pass through the area would want to arrive just as day breaks and try to hurry through before night falls; those training could wait around the entrance, skirmish with the stronger monsters, and fall back when sufficiently wounded.
'Course, for any of this to work, there'd probably have to be a non-trivial amount of new enemies, which would no doubt be a lot of work to create and balance out.
Oy. Anyway, just some goofy little extra to throw out for discussion.
Postscript: I certainly don't mean to imply that the game itself is tedious per se; I wouldn't play it if it were. Nonetheless, levelling does occasionally become boring, as for a given strength there aren't very many different places you can effectively train.