Tomb Titivator
Posts: 911
Joined: Thursday, 17th December 2015, 02:36
Sunday, 12th June 2016, 00:20
discuss simple clocks
some form of clock may be considered necessary, because of how monster wandering works, to prevent behavior like waiting forever for monsters to come to you, a form of scumming which the interface makes very easy. But as in many other games, I think it should be something not even noticeable if one plays normally. It should just make smartasses first go "hey, why don't I just...", and 1 minute later go "ohh... that's why. K, nevermind."
temporary drain/decay over time
sipmly inflict a small amount of Drain all the time, flavored as getting rusty, perhaps capped to some amount. This has all the advantages and disadvantages of any XP-gated mechanic. Drain is almost everywhere these days; maybe we can get on with it and actually have it everywhere. Piety decay may be considered a variant of this.
irreversible drain/decay over time
permanently losing skills would be bad because it essentially allows re-skilling (which is an Ash power) and makes you frequently check that your skills are where you want them to be. This could be done without permitting re-skilling, by setting up a constantly increasing skill point deficit that must be set to zero before skill points can train skills, but that is ugly and hard to communicate. A nicer type of irreversible drain is to constantly reduce the player's XL, and is a mechanism I favor. For example, every XL*10 turns, remove 1% of the player's progress to the next level. This punishes backtracking, but autotravel is rather efficient with backtracking, so unless one stashes a lot (which can be fixed with other overhauls) it's not really a big issue, at least compared to autoexplore's inefficiency. But even autoexplore wastes less time than you spend resting, if you're a normal kind of player and character, so I don't believe it would make many people stop autoexploring.
increasing disadvantage restricted to a level over time
you can give players some kind of malus that increases the longer one spends waiting on a level, but then you encourage weird behavior: it's best to rest off the level you're clearing, i.e. go downstairs, find and get into a fight, go upstairs to rest, repeat. It is a natural problem for characters who tend to rest a lot, like conjurers. There's no good reason to make players avoid resting on uncleared levels beyond the already-present threat of wandering monsters.
increased/intensified monster generation over time
as a form of the previously described clock, this is unfortunately a mixed incentive because generated monsters give experience/items/piety, so it has the opposite effect by encouraging scumming. Making newly generated monsters essentially durable summons is not a good idea because knowing that you're not getting rewarded for killing is a real turn-off because it makes the killing feel pointless.
mark, god wrath, level destruction, doom machines, food
these clocks are not simple to analyze and obscure basic questions like
should time pressure be something you can set back to 0 and fully recover from, by acting in a timely manner for a while?
should the clock be restricted to a level/branch or carry over between levels/branches?
should it kill the player or just make progress harder?
temporary drain/decay over time
sipmly inflict a small amount of Drain all the time, flavored as getting rusty, perhaps capped to some amount. This has all the advantages and disadvantages of any XP-gated mechanic. Drain is almost everywhere these days; maybe we can get on with it and actually have it everywhere. Piety decay may be considered a variant of this.
irreversible drain/decay over time
permanently losing skills would be bad because it essentially allows re-skilling (which is an Ash power) and makes you frequently check that your skills are where you want them to be. This could be done without permitting re-skilling, by setting up a constantly increasing skill point deficit that must be set to zero before skill points can train skills, but that is ugly and hard to communicate. A nicer type of irreversible drain is to constantly reduce the player's XL, and is a mechanism I favor. For example, every XL*10 turns, remove 1% of the player's progress to the next level. This punishes backtracking, but autotravel is rather efficient with backtracking, so unless one stashes a lot (which can be fixed with other overhauls) it's not really a big issue, at least compared to autoexplore's inefficiency. But even autoexplore wastes less time than you spend resting, if you're a normal kind of player and character, so I don't believe it would make many people stop autoexploring.
increasing disadvantage restricted to a level over time
you can give players some kind of malus that increases the longer one spends waiting on a level, but then you encourage weird behavior: it's best to rest off the level you're clearing, i.e. go downstairs, find and get into a fight, go upstairs to rest, repeat. It is a natural problem for characters who tend to rest a lot, like conjurers. There's no good reason to make players avoid resting on uncleared levels beyond the already-present threat of wandering monsters.
increased/intensified monster generation over time
as a form of the previously described clock, this is unfortunately a mixed incentive because generated monsters give experience/items/piety, so it has the opposite effect by encouraging scumming. Making newly generated monsters essentially durable summons is not a good idea because knowing that you're not getting rewarded for killing is a real turn-off because it makes the killing feel pointless.
mark, god wrath, level destruction, doom machines, food
these clocks are not simple to analyze and obscure basic questions like
should time pressure be something you can set back to 0 and fully recover from, by acting in a timely manner for a while?
should the clock be restricted to a level/branch or carry over between levels/branches?
should it kill the player or just make progress harder?
