Vaults Vanquisher
Posts: 454
Joined: Thursday, 1st November 2018, 02:33
anti-luring feature: statues
Here's a similar but different approach: Instead of empowering monsters that are tracking the player, empower other stationary, indestructible monsters when the player is being tracked. These stationary monsters, "statues," do nothing when the player is not being tracked by other monsters. They enter an inert state. When the player is being chased or whatever, they activate and attack in whatever way they can. Generally, they should do things that discourage the player from approaching them with the threat level depending on how serious we are about keeping the player from bringing a monster past them in the situation at hand. They could be purpose-designed or they could be derived types based on existing monsters.
Placing these things as part of dungeon generation curbs a lot of degenerate player behaviors, from pillardancing to long distance luring. You can put them all over the place, breaking up layouts, interrupting loops, and making encounters play out more like you would naively expect from the way monsters and terrain are generated. Now you might worry that this will encourage abuse of noise-based luring in place of other more visually oriented methods. That's a problem with noise mechanics that can be addressed separately.