Ideas for Vaults

[roctavian]

Between the Dungeon Layout thread and evilmike's comments on Vaults in general,I've gotten to thinking about ways to change the branch to make it more interesting.

There's already discussion about making items/monsters/stairs generate only inside of rooms, and I think that's a good first step. But a few noisy spells, shouting enemies, or alarm traps can get all the mobs spilling out into corridors, which makes for (more) empty rooms and an experience that plays more like D. And that's fine, up to a point, but I think one of the benefits of having different branches is to encourage different exploration strategies, and to make players think more about how they navigate the geography of the dungeon. I think the whole branch would be more fun to explore if the "vaultishness" of each room could be better preserved, and that more could be staked on "cracking open" vault rooms.

What if we had a new dungeon feature, a "vault door"? It would be a bit like a normal door, but would have a few key differences: it would completely block sound, it would take more than one turn to open (like breaking out of a net, not like eating a ration in combat), and it could be trapped. A trapped door would do one of two things: pull the player into the room and slam shut, or suddenly fly open and make a lot of noise like an alarm trap.
In the first case, characters could potentially spend a few turns getting the door open to escape, allowing monsters in the room to mobilize and attack. Or, the players could deal with being caught in an enclosed space with a number of monsters. There aren't many situations currently in the game where the player has to deal with being "trapped" with monsters. There's ziggurats, of course, but those are interesting in other ways, and there's Roxanne but that's a different mechanic entirely.
In the second case, monsters would be set loose into corridors, but with other vault doors blocking off the other rooms, it shouldn't remove later choices to break into other vault rooms.

Another idea I thought of would be another kind of vault guard, but a scout rather than an armored fighter type. They could patrol levels looking for the player, and upon discovering the player could summon up standard vault guards, then run away shouting.

Yet another thought I had was, what if each level of Vaults had a separate disconnected bubble, a "jail vault" so to speak? What if any attempt to teleport while in Vaults dumped you into the jail vault, which would have its own set of stairs leading back out of the vaults? Enemies with teleport other could "send you to jail" and you'd have to fight your way out, then come back into Vaults all over again?

What do folks think? I'll post this stuff on the wiki sometime, but I'm curious to see if this spurs any other ideas from other folks, first.

[Blade]

I really like mumra's idea for vault level generation on the wiki (on the page you linked); I think implementing those (or similar) level types would be a good first step towards improving vaults.

[TwilightPhoenix]

The former trap should definitely block cTele or even teleportation outright for a few turns, that way the solution to cracking open a vault wouldn't be "cast teleport, open vault, get ported to safety if it's a trap".

[KoboldLord]

When I think of Vaults, not a whole lot comes up. It's got the same monster set as Dungeon, and it almost always has the same scattered-boxes layout. Most of the fun to be had in Vaults 1-7 comes from the fact that the D/V monster set is a pretty diverse and interesting set. What makes Vaults special, though?

I'd like to suggest that the Vaults 8 stairwell fight is the most memorable part of the Vaults experience. It isn't a particularly hard fight, but it's cinematic. You're surrounded by a ring of tough bruisers, any one of which would have made you wet yourself if you encountered them when you were back at the Temple or dipping your toe into Lair or Orc. But you've changed. You smite them with waves of fire or frost, you chew them apart in a running battle that spills out into Vaults 7 and 6, you set your own army against them, you ghost past while they stared befuddled. It doesn't matter how. You're awesome now. You're not the pathetic loser who fled, terrified, from oversized bugs and feral animals. You are a physical god and these vault guards tremble before you!

I think it's worth adding a couple more guaranteed checkpoints like this to the game. Vaults 1 would probably be one, and it would be themed around driving the players back out of Vaults. The stairwells back to the Dungeon would be collected into the same Vault, so the player has to pass through in order to get in or out. The opposition should be formidable enough to make the player think twice about challenging it, but not so formidable that the player can't slip past by means of stealth, teleportation, or simply running the gauntlet and tanking the damage. Down at the last level of Vaults, the same stairwell fight as always shows players just how far their character has come. Two levels up from the last level of Vaults would be the Checkpoint Level, which is a full-level vault, one of which is guaranteed to spawn at that level. This mid-Vaults Checkpoint Level would be very small. Probably a few turnabouts that allow for movement for tactical positioning, but you can never get so far away from monsters chasing you that they'll lose track of you, once you've started the fight. At least not for long. All three upstairs are clustered together, and in some distant location all three downstairs are clustered together.

The remaining levels are the same xp jackpot they are now, with whatever other improvements come up. The idea is that running the gauntlet on V1 is highly desirable, since it gets you into the lucrative Vaults below, but hitting up the mid-Vaults Checkpoint Level is a more serious matter.

Vaults guards should probably stop following the player upstairs. They guard their posts, and while they're not the tricksiest opponents to be found they're exceptionally disciplined.

Sentinel statues could be added as a new type of statue, several in the Vaults 8 entry and smaller numbers to the Vaults 1 entry and the Checkpoint Level. Sentinel statues are not meant to be directly threatening, but they've got semi-random spell lists designed to screw with the simpler player exploits. Malign Blink, for instance, jerks the player off of the stairwell if the player tries to camp there. Smite-targeted Slow would make it tougher to just kite the guards around. Corona or Project Noise as a monster spell would keep the vault guards going after the player. Sentinel statues should be worth little xp, since they're not actually threats and they don't directly deal any damage. They should be beefy enough to be hard to get rid of while being pursued by guards, and naturally should be immune to disintegration.

Additional support monsters might include wizards and necromancers as magic support, mid-depth dragons as artillery support, and yaktaurs because it just isn't Vaults without a whole lot of those.

[Tiber]

I think vaults should be more, well, vault-y. Go nuts with them. Yet, sadly, outside of entry and exits, there are only 3 vault-specific vaults (I say that, but I haven't yet found the motivation to make any). I also like some of the level-gen suggestions on the wiki.

Also, Kobold got me thinking that maybe Vaults should have a bit of a specialization. A lot of humanoid monsters are unused or under-used. Why not have vaults be sort of a melting pot for them? Statues are a similar story, and it would be natural to see them guarding the vaults.

[Infinitum]

When I hear "Vaults", I envision wide corridors (2+ tiles) connecting lots of small vaults (entrance, exit or otherwise) across the level. The corridors are solely patrolled by yaktaurs and vault guards, leaving the bigger threats inside the vaults proper (eg Dragons guarding hoards). Naturally, traps are everywhere, there are secure doors needing to be bashed over a few turns and the walls themselves have been magically hardened to withstand all but the most powerful digging magics.

Another way to differentiate it could be to merge it with a deep dwarf branch, eg "The Vaults of Alberecht". This makes some degree of sense as dwarfes are supposedly rich and paranoid in equal measures.

[njvack]

I'd like to suggest that the Vaults 8 stairwell fight is the most memorable part of the Vaults experience. It isn't a particularly hard fight, but it's cinematic. You're surrounded by a ring of tough bruisers, any one of which would have made you wet yourself if you encountered them when you were back at the Temple or dipping your toe into Lair or Orc. But you've changed. You smite them with waves of fire or frost, you chew them apart in a running battle that spills out into Vaults 7 and 6, you set your own army against them, you ghost past while they stared befuddled. It doesn't matter how. You're awesome now. You're not the pathetic loser who fled, terrified, from oversized bugs and feral animals. You are a physical god and these vault guards tremble before you!

Just did Vaults:8 with my first successful heavy armour character -- a minotaur with a battleaxe of speed -- and had exactly this experience. Go downstairs, bring eight guards up with me, kill them all, go back down, grab another eight, rinse, repeat. No resting. It was awesome.

The rest of the level was a bit more challenging, but I agree: nothing's quite like coming down the stairs and murdering the V:8 welcoming party.

I very much like the idea of a Vaults:1 entry welcoming committee (alternately, it could be an entry vault in D) partly to make initial entry somewhat challenging, and partly to really bring that sense of progression home.

[XuaXua]

I very much like the idea of a Vaults:1 entry welcoming committee (alternately, it could be an entry vault in D) partly to make initial entry somewhat challenging, and partly to really bring that sense of progression home.

Many of the Vaults Branch Entry vaults are like this. Pre-V:1.

[njvack]

It's true, though more often than not, I don't get an entry vault, just stairs -- and even with an entry vault, the vault guards generally happily chase me around the level instead of guarding the stairs.

Instead of adding magic users as support characters, the sentinel statues KL proposes could perhaps come in a few flavours -- enchanter statues that'd corona and slow you, warper statues that'd blink you, necro statues that'd animate dead or twisted resurrection, and such...

Also: instead of hitting you with projected noise, they might alarm when attacked -- so on V:8, you'd get to choose between being needled by irritating status effects and such or risking waking the quadrant monsters.

[absolutego]

the first time i found the vaults entrance i had the vault (one of the vaults? i think there are several now, but they seem very rare) with a few guards and it was pretty damn nice. so yeah, i think stuff like that is what vaults should be about.

i recall there were interesting ideas in the dev wiki, but i can't get into that now. if it were up to me, i'd do the following:
1) cut a few levels, as suggested in the dungeon layout thread.
2) trim the monster set. i'm a bit at a loss here, but i'd add roaming vault guard packs to yaktaur, centaur, and orc packs, probably with additional threats. like wizards than can haste or otherwise buff the guards (or debuff/hex you), and/or priests who can heal them, maybe something more elaborate.
3) i'd move away from the current layout of open levels + rooms, in favour of a series of rooms (think city or palace-like) which ideally would act as set pieces. monster packs (and other monsters like dragons) would roam freely outside, and inside the rooms you'd find a given challenge (or loot, or both, or nothing). downstairs should often (or always) be inside a room. there's this awesome yet really annoying giant vault in vaults (at least i haven't seen it anywhere else) which contains a series of small rooms with the craziest stuff: demons, vapours, etc., there's even mutagenic fog. i like it because each room plays differently: some contain fast monsters, others slow bruisers, some you can run away without consequences, and sooner or later you're bound to find something that'll be a challenge because you lack the appropriate intrinsic (resistances, sInv, clarity, rMut, etc). i'm thinking about something like this, albeit less over the top (i think i spent more time on that level that i did on the rest of the branch). there's a connection between "themed" rooms and zigs too, which i like. some of these rooms could be actual predefined vaults while other may be random (the most striking part about the vaults branch is how few predefined vaults it has!). koboldlord's idea regarding the statues is spot-on too: a few simple monsters can be made much more interesting if there's something that blinks you around (careful with those cloud spells), resurrects them, etc.

the problem with all of this is that point 3 is probably a nightmare to implement. there's a lot of work here.

[mumra]

KoboldLord suggested a load of good ways to make V encounters more interesting.

I don't know if you necessarily need to engineer many checkpoints like this though - these kind of events (being overwhelmed, outnumbered, and running away) tend to just happen anyway now and then during the course of a game, and the overall branch changes will hopefully lead to this kind of thing more. For instance, sometimes already you'll happen to roll a V:1 with all three stairs next to each other, and a very much similar situation occurs.

What we can do is in general have better engineered V layouts and monster sets ... so that any level of V could play out like that (or other, equally interesting situations).

Here I'm thinking about what Vaults really is, and how the branch should play out over the entire span of levels. Basically you're breaking deeper and deeper into this network of subterranean vaults ... created by some unknown force to lock away terrible and/or valuable ancient things ... Therefore as you go deeper the vault levels should have better security, and older / more powerful / more valuable contents. There should be an overall feel that you're "breaking" into or out of each level, and finally breaking into the last vault with some loot. So there are lots of mini-encounters all the way down leading up to the final vault guard battle.

What I think we need are loads of vault maps that simply contain room contents - I kind of suggested this right at the end of my layouts bit on the wiki, and some people have suggested similar in this thread. absolutego thought this might be hard to implement; quite the contrary, I think it can be done easily thru LUA and tags, we already have the ability to pick subvaults at random during level building.

So the level generator can create whatever series of rooms, and for each one either randomly populates it from .des vaults (selecting a vault no bigger than the generated room), or just fill it with random monster sets / loot, so not every room is a vault.

Vault designers can also put stairs into these vaults. (The vault design system already works like this anyway) So you can create "arriving downstairs" type encounters - you'll have to fight through monsters to break out of that room and into the rest of this level. In some vaults you could place all three stairs - so if that gets used on a level you'll have to fight those particular monsters. In other vaults just place one stair - you could end up with a level where each staircase comes down into a different welcome vault and you can choose the safest for your character. You can also create "downstairs" vaults - the guards you have to fight through to break out of this level. This can be combined with the idea of locked doors - exit vaults might be locked, and at least one of the other random vaults will be guaranteed to contain a key. So even when you find the downstairs you can't necessarily skip the rest of level. (Also, monsters in upstairs/downstairs vaults can automatically be put into a guarding state by the level builder, so they won't follow you up the stairs or across the level).

I like some other ideas to mess with the doors, e.g. jamming when you try to open them. At first I liked roctavian's "trap" doors, but then I started to wonder how this would play out for more squishy casters who rarely want to be trapped in melee range with some of the threats in V. What I prefer is (as you can see in my wiki suggestions) wider doors, in fact I think I was being reserved with having them 2-wide; I think doors of anywhere from 2-5 tiles width are good. Firstly I think the idea of having massive doors really hits home the Vaults branch theme - these are massive, ancient vaults that you're cracking open to see what's inside, not just some poxy little door. Secondly it means all the monsters spill out at once, rather than being able to step aside and funnel them one-by-one through a narrow door.

I do think all the doors should block sound. However the levels can also have a timer that will randomly open a vault and wake the monsters every now then, so you can't just wait in safety on a non-cleared level.

Something else I thought about is the monster set. The wiki suggests that yaktaurs be the signature monsters. This seems like a reasonable idea. But for me, it still leaves a question begging: Who actually built the Vaults? Where do the Vault Guards come from? Are we to believe that this was all achieved by the yaktaurs, who are a somewhat bland and seemingly less advanced race compared to e.g. deep elves, deep dwarves, merfolk or draconians? It seems more believable to me that the yaktaurs are more like the "pets" of some far more powerful race that also created the vault guards. But who and where are these creators? An ancient race that mysteriously disappeared?

Let me also compare the other branches. Some branches are created, some are natural. Swamp, Shoals, and (presumably) Lair are the "naturally formed" places. Whereas all other branches are created by some sentient process - orcish mining, elves building their halls, spiders building a den, and so on. In each case we are directly battling the creators of that branch. In Lair, Swamp and Shoals we battle its natural inhabitants (and we meet a race who has building a limited amount of structure there). Zot is a strange one but we have the defining Draconian race.

Where Vaults (and by extension Crypt, Blade, and to a certain degree Tomb) might seem somewhat incohesive by comparison, is that we are given no clues as to how or why these places exist.

I was trying to come up either a way to extend the yaktaur race a bit, or come up with a new race entirely to "run" the Vaults. Something that sprang to mind is that goblins are stereotypically a somewhat coin-counting species and locking things away in vaults seems like natural behaviour. Goblins don't get much screentime beyond D:1, and hobgoblins stop being a threat not long after. There is no continuation of their race whatsoever. What if they re-emerged as the "keepers" of the Vaults - still pretty weak, but actually wielding massive power and influence in the dungeons through being the "bankers" of V. The goblins we met on D:1 were simply outcasts or wanderers. The Vaults goblins are often serious spellcasters (perhaps with a hexes theme), usually travelling with bodyguard packs of yaktaurs for safety, and able to raise an alarm when in danger. This then makes sense that yaktaurs are the private army / hired security of the goblins (I think the "captain" title fits well in such a hierarchy).

This is just wild brainstorming but I'd like to know what people think!

[Blade]

I like the idea of a Vaults "master race" as you describe it, but I'm not sure that something so stereotypically weak as goblins would fill that gap well. What about deep dwarves? They already have a varied, rather interesting monster set that only really gets used in zigs (at which point only the death knights are really any sort of threat). Dwarves are typically forgers, crafters, hoarders of wealth, etc...it seems quite appropriate to imagine them crafting an intricate vault to store their loot.

[mumra]

I like the idea of a Vaults "master race" as you describe it, but I'm not sure that something so stereotypically weak as goblins would fill that gap well. What about deep dwarves? They already have a varied, rather interesting monster set that only really gets used in zigs (at which point only the death knights are really any sort of threat). Dwarves are typically forgers, crafters, hoarders of wealth, etc...it seems quite appropriate to imagine them crafting an intricate vault to store their loot.

That was sort of intentional, we know them as very weak but it turns out they're so ancient they have their fingers "in all the pies" so to speak and actually wield a huge amount of influence (combined with having the occasional serious spellcaster, still a glass cannon). But maybe that's rewriting lore a bit too much

Deep Dwarves are another possibility. My Dwarven Factory proposal ended up as an "alternate Vaults" idea (or perhaps substituting a section of V). I think it would fit there, and Blades then makes a whole lot more sense.

Another idea is to just go with the "this race is so ancient they don't exist any more, nobody knows anything about them or why they disappeared". Presumably Vaults is even more ancient than Crypt or Tomb. So whoever built it, along with Blade/Crypt/Tomb, simply left remnants and obscure clues - right now we just have the mysterious Vault Guards. This mythology could be expanded on more. The sentinel statues fit this - more security systems left in place by this unknown race. I'm also thinking energy-based monster(s) (could be that this race "ascended" to a higher plane of existence as pure energy, the dungeon is now irrelevant to them, but just occasionally one of their young is curious and pops back for a history lesson). Perhaps this race also created the yaktaur race as pets (or in a horrific magical experiment gone wrong!) which is why they still guard it as their home.

[Grimm]

I would like to see rock worms removed from Vaults. They can't hide in the metal walls - they are sitting ducks.

Where Vaults (and by extension Crypt, Blade, and to a certain degree Tomb) might seem somewhat incohesive by comparison, is that we are given no clues as to how or why these places exist.

The Vaults could be themed as "the treasure Vaults of the entire Dungeon". The deepest treasure level could be one level below the rune, be much harder, and have the best gold and loot in the game.

[mumra]

The Vaults could be themed as "the treasure Vaults of the entire Dungeon". The deepest treasure level could be one level below the rune, be much harder, and have the best gold and loot in the game.

To me it's sort of like the museum of the dungeon - collections of interesting, valuable, and dangerous things - not just treasure, but monsters too.

[TwilightPhoenix]

What if the Vaults were self-protecting? As in, the treasure defended itself? Rather than all the random monsters, you have animated weapons, statues, golems, mimics, and other artificial creations. Hall of Blades would need to go away if Vaults took this turn, but it'd be pretty interesting to have an "artificial" branch.

[mumra]

What if the Vaults were self-protecting? As in, the treasure defended itself? Rather than all the random monsters, you have animated weapons, statues, golems, mimics, and other artificial creations. Hall of Blades would need to go away if Vaults took this turn, but it'd be pretty interesting to have an "artificial" branch.

This is really good, and further enhances the mystery of whatever force put these defences in place.

I think Hall of Blades could still work, but perhaps as a portal vault on a rotation with Hall of Mimics / Hall of Statues / Golem Factory / The Library (an oldish idea for a "dancing books" blade replacement).

[XuaXua]

A guardian statue idea might be one that casts Charm on enemies and the player, since my primary tactic with these sorts of things (read: stationary guardians) is to throw the bodies of others at them; might be interesting to see it backfire.

[TwilightPhoenix]

A statue that spams Mass Confusion would be quite nasty in that instance.