[CF-Devel] rewards for dropping body parts on altars

[Mark Wedel]

"H. S. Teoh" wrote:

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      1) The deity in question doesn't have to reward the player for *every*
     
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        enemy body part offered. We can just have the reward only for very rare
     
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        body parts. All-too-common body parts like orc livers would be completely
     
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        ignored by, say, Lythander, while a gaelotroll's liver might generate some
     
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        nice rewards.
     
     
 This gets a bit more tricky, as now the sacrifice code has to look at treasure
lists to try and figure out 1) how common that particular monster is, and 2) how
common that part from that monster is.

 And idea I had was that you could record number of each bodypart so
sacrificed.  so the sacrifice could could quickly see that this is the 50'th orc
liver, and not give much for it, but this is the first orc eye, and give a bit
more.

 However, to do this would require potentially a bunch of invisible objects in
the player inventory.  Although, more cleverly, perhaps this could just be in
the wisdom skill experience inventory - you would still have a bunch of invis
objects, but at least they are not in the top level inventory, so we won't run
accross them everything we traverse the player.

 This method has an advantage that a fairly common bodypart that is hard to
transport (like demon's ichor) would get a just reward.  The problem is still
that some gods just have a lot more unique enemy monsters.  For example, youu
have kobold, goblin, orc, gnoll, ogre, hill giant as a quick list of enemies of
mostrai/lythanderr (I think thats who they're enemies of).  But there are a lot
fewer of some other monster races, so to be fair, the only just thing is to
allow repeat dontations of the same monster/body part.

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        Another way is to make it level-dependent: a low-level gaea priest offering
     
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        a zombie corpse might be rewarded, but a high-level gaea priest doing the
     
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        same might be regarded with scorn ("What, is that all you can do?!"). On
     
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        the flip side, a low-level priest offering a high-level body part might be
     
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        very risky: perhaps he doesn't yet know the right procedures for
     
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        preparing the sacrifice, and messing it up might get him a punishment
     
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        instead of a reward.
     
     
 certainly level of sacrifice should be part of it.

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      2) We can also reduce the chances for reward for certain deities, whose
     
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        enemy races generate a lot of body parts.
     
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      But as for punishments, there should be a lot more variety. For one thing,
     
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      I think the flower cone spell should not happen that often... It's
     
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      extremely annoying, and also silly in some cases: I find it totally
     
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      bizzare, e.g., for Ruggili to send flowers to encourage his followers...
     
     
 Presumely, a god_sacrifice type object would need to be added, which says what
the relative appreciation of the god is towards sacrifices.  I could see some
not wanting them at all (ie, idea of bring in body parts to put on an altar
could be rather distasteful).  Others, like gods of death, may be happy with any
bodypart, and more happy with those of their enemey.


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      Yeah, I don't expect this to be implemented anytime soon. But I'd like to
     
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      see a move in this direction tho... there should be more variety of
     
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      monsters in low-level maps (or all maps for that matter), and less
     
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      hodge-podge mixing between monster races. (It still makes me cringe to see
     
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      demons and angels in the same room... or red dragons and ice dragons in
     
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      the same cave, etc..)
     
     
 The mapguide does say not to do this.  I think the maps are actually a lot
better now.  However, I think there are still some old maps sitting around which
do have this problem.  its just a matter of cleanup, and I don't think an
intentional effect in current maps.

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      I do think tho that friendliness/hostility should be towards a certain
     
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      person -- just because some smartass player provoked the royal guard isn't
     
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      good enough a reason for said guard to start bashing every player he sees
     
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      coming his way. (Of course, this may not be easy to change, so I'm not
     
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      expecting it anytime soon, but it'd be a nice thing to have).
     
     
 this is fairly difficult, in you now need a list in each monster who they
like/dislike.  Its even trickier in that when the player leaves the game, this
needs to be cleaned up properly.  And presumably, this information should be
relevant accross map swaps (but not resets).  ie, if you piss off a guard,
leaving and coming back in 2 minutes should not result in that guard being
neutral/friendly, but still pissed off.

 Right now, even things like runes and firewall disappears when the map is
swapped out, because there is no good way to ensure ownership (its basically a
pointer, and you can't save that in the map).  So now you need to actually save
it by name (which actually, could be done, and then if that player isn't around
when the map is swapped back in, just set no owner)

 This could be open to abuses.  Ie, player 'joe' goes to some map and sets up a
bunch of spell casting walls (which he gets exp for on kills).  He quits the
game, waits for map to swap out, starts a new character called 'joe', goes to
map to get it swapped in again, and starts getting a bunch of exp.

 This sort of goes back to the highscore discussion - player names are only
unique at the time of creation - they can get recycled indefinately, and there
is currently know way to know what instance of that particular name is being
played.