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Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Friday, 21st July 2017, 21:00by ichbins
Abyss and Pan currently both have issues, they are an endless flow of levels leading to potentially unlimited xp but also to potentially endless tedium, as you can walk/dive through both branches for thousands of turns without making any progress if you are just looking for the runes.
Idea: Remove portals to Pan from Depths. Once you are in Abyss and pick up the abyssal rune, you are immediately teleported to Pan. Pan contains of five levels in random order, the four fixed rune levels and the fifth which is randomly picked from the existing "special" floors (holy, hellion island etc.) with the demonic rune. Each level has exits to the abyss which will allow you to leave, though once you're out you will never be able to enter Pan again.
Re: Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 06:41by Majang
Generally I like the idea - maybe you can have a Pan rune every other level, to give you a little bit more tedium in clearing it (tedium is a design feature of Pan and Abyss).
One problem though: sometimes early players who get banished into the abyss at XL 17 or so get lucky to not only escape it, but to escape it with the rune (happened to me once). They would certainly not survive Pan at that stage and had to leave it right away. Your current solution would deprive them of a 15 rune victory. It would work if you allow them to reenter Pan later through the Abyss. This also means that the first level of Pan should not be a rune level.
So maybe a better idea would be to just move the entry to Pan permanently into the Abyss, and let people only get in there by choice.
Re: Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 10:30by Fingolfin
Majang wrote:Generally I like the idea - maybe you can have a Pan rune every other level, to give you a little bit more tedium in clearing it (tedium is a design feature of Pan and Abyss).
One problem though: sometimes early players who get banished into the abyss at XL 17 or so get lucky to not only escape it, but to escape it with the rune (happened to me once). They would certainly not survive Pan at that stage and had to leave it right away. Your current solution would deprive them of a 15 rune victory. It would work if you allow them to reenter Pan later through the Abyss. This also means that the first level of Pan should not be a rune level.
So maybe a better idea would be to just move the entry to Pan permanently into the Abyss, and let people only get in there by choice.
Or make the abyssal rune evokable to enter Pan, but it would work only once
Re: Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 11:53by 4Hooves2Appendages
I like Abyss, and I like Pan, and I like the way they are connected.
I don't think tedium is a design feature of Pan/Abyss. The primary objective is presumably unpredictability.
Re: Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Saturday, 22nd July 2017, 19:24by Airwolf
The exits from Pan through Abyss:1 seem very anticlimactic for level-27 Pan-annihilators (not all level-27 characters, DUPZ, etc), especially after getting the Abyssal rune. I do realize complicated exits are a feature of Pan compared to the Hells, but the Abyss:1 exits just seem tedious, not hard, to my extended characters.
1. Why not use the Abyss's levels? Exit to Abyss:5 or Abyss:3–5 (randomly, perhaps weighted on XL, but there really shouldn't be much variation in XL except unspoiled players—that Orc vault!—and stunts).
2. Why not just skip the Abyss and make all exits back to Depths? The exits could all spawn under the Panlord so that you need to kill or lure away the Panlord to use the exit.
Re: Merge Pan and Abyss
Posted:
Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 18:01by archaeo
I've always favored the idea that, on the lowest level of the Abyss, portals randomly appear to the realms of the various named Pan Lords, while random ones show up as you're searching.