Temple Termagant
Posts: 8
Joined: Monday, 3rd January 2011, 14:32
Re: Selling Stuff
Hive: dpeg, your idea is great. As in real life, why not have larvae eating royal jellies turn into queen bees? It might be odd to have multiple queens, but right now a single queen bee in the Hive is so underwhelming that it's a joke, and in the flavor/believability department, some insect colonies (e.g. Rasberry ants) DO have multiple queens.
Troves: Here's my idea: give them a timeout, and once you find one, you're asked for a valuable item or stack of items you're *carrying,* or is in your stash (preventing people from dropping items to avoid being asked for them). The value of the items inside depends on the value of the item you give, but it would generally ask for one of the most valuable things you have.
Or: make them ask for several (~3) items that you may or may not have in your stash:
- (a) a wand of paralysis
- (b) 4 potions of cure mutaion
- (c) a +4,+2 scimitar of holy wrath
Wherein you can gain entrance by submitting any of the requested items, but you'll get better troves for the more valuable ones. Again, it's timed, so it turns the trove into a challenge to find a required item, and an interesting decision on whether to attempt to do so or just go the cheap route. Also, the loot is nerfed, which is good, since with this proposal, you have a better chance of getting in quickly.
Mummy decay: a 'Curse' status ailment is probably the best idea. One possible implementation: a potion quaffed has a 50% chance of being decay, and, if it is, has a 66% chance of dispelling the status. It eventually goes away on its own anyway. You could quaff a potion of water (or other potion useless to you) or two to quickly dispel the effect, then quaff healing / heal wounds, which might be interesting, though it also might make Tomb easier. It's still rougher than standing on potions and picking one up to drink while fighting, since you can be rotted. It might be a good idea to give mummies a way to destroy your potions, too.
Summon spam: trampling over rats and the like should alleviate this.
On chain-summoning: Why not make summoned creatures, even if they normally could summon, unable to? Demons should be an exception.
Alternatively, summoners can't summon other creatures that summon. I prefer the previous idea.
A 'soft cap' on summons might also be better than a hard cap: after a certain point, summoning new monsters makes already-summoned monsters, if there are enough, have a chance to disappear.
Labyrinths: I like them. I also strongly dislike maprot, and it has no place in the game. So how can you make mappable labyrinths non-trivial with autoexplore, requiring though to navigate?
The race to the portal is fun. So make the Labyrinth also a race. You can't autoexplore or dawdle. You want to get to the Minotaur as soon as possible. Some ideas:
1. After a certain amount of time, you're get teleported OUT, with warnings along the way. No awesome loot for you.
2. The Labyrinth causes you to hunger much more quickly, making it a resource drain.
3. if you stay too long, you can get bad mutations such as fast metabolism. (I don't like this one)
4. your other stats (HP, STR/DEX/INT, maybe EXP) also drain while you're in the Labyrinth. Maybe, which one drains depends on the specific labyrinth generated. This also leads to a resource drain. Meh.
5. When you enter, you immediately become hungry (or very hungry) and can't increase your hunger level above that. You're always at the brink of starvation. (or: you can't eat in the Labyrinth. I don't like this as much.)
6. At the exit, there are 3 piles of loot. If you get there very quickly, all three are still there. If you were less quick, one or two will be there. If you were really slow, there won't be anything left.
My vision of the labyrinth is something built around hunger, around rushing, around the food clock, or imitating that design pattern. Doing so would make the Labyrinth's unique challenge work without diluting its special flavor. Minivaults and monsters are also good: I can imagine a player evading, not fighting, monsters in the Labyrinth to get to quickly disappearing loot, or facing the interesting choice of whether the items in a potential vault (which should also disappear) are worth possibly losing loot at the end for. The 'outrunning monsters' part, a lack of maprot, an emphasis on getting out quickly, and the challenges from resource drain and the inability to become 'not hungry' all might appeal to people who don't like labyrinths.
Grinding infinite areas:
-Branch-wide experience caps. "You feel like you have experienced enough of this place already." Those places would keep their infinitude, but would get rid of experience grinding.
-Progressive difficulty has been suggested before.
-one aspect of the game I like is the inclusion of spells that cost permanent HP or MP. It'd be interesting to have monsters with attacks that drain permanent HP (just, say, 1-3 points), 'damaging/attacking your soul.' Like a playstyle frequently making use of Revivification, the extended engame would be unsustainable. There could also be demons in 'shops' in Pan who you could make deals with, trading a piece of your permanent HP ('selling your soul,' which is more acceptable than selling items) for items, good mutations, or other perks. Continuing on with the potentially infinite extended endgame would be limited not by space, or the patience of the player, but by skill. Maybe it's good to have some avenue for infinite play, but it inevitably leads to scumming. That goes away if some unrenewable resource is required. I think this would somewhat alleviate most avenues for prolonged scumming (items, demonic runes, zigs) because they'd never be trivializable. It would also make the extended endgame have an additional challenging facet. I'd personally like to see more spells that drain permanent HP.
The Abyss:
-if you're carrying the Abyssal rune, you can resist banishment (although there are arguments to remove the rune).
-the Abyssal rune could be evoked to create a portal out of the Abyss, or, having found the rune causes exit portals to be generated much faster.
-In Hell/Pan, you can't be banished (except maybe with Lugonu). Flavorwise, this could be justified by saying that those places are already 'below' the Abyss, and that you can't be banished to somewhere *better*. Either that, or that they're in a dimension 'too far away' from the abyss. for banishment to work. This would remove banishment as an escape method in Pan/Hell, which has its pros and cons, one con being that it removes the unique challenge of getting Lom Lobon's rune.
These ideas, though, are not substitutes for interesting branch and monster design. They don't fix the Abyss, just make it tolerable.