[CF List] BIGworld

[Mark Wedel]

Todd Mitchell wrote:

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      Certainly, but I was thinking of emulating the effects of civilization.
     
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      Most roads would not be safe at all, such as the road to Brest.  Most
     
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      roads would fall into this catagory since they would be part of the general
     
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      area the map anyway,
     
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      but to have the 'Imperial Road' or 'King's Hiway' or the 'Yellow Brick Road'
     
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      which would partly protect travellers
     
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      by blocking monsters (missile weapons would still be a problem and custom
     
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      encounters could still occur) might be a good idea.  This would just be the
     
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      main overland route between major cities (the yellow road between Scorn,
     
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      Navar, Santo D...) and some waystations and a small area around certain
     
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      cities.  This would expand the area that low level players can roam without
     
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      hobbling higher level players from their explorations (a bunch of orcs in
     
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      the forest would likely be more annoying than entertaining since you would
     
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      be level 5 or so before you went out anyway, but a bunch of giants in the
     
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      forest would be too nasty if they wandered onto the road.  This way you
     
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      could still create nifty encounters while allowing those of lower levels to
     
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      have a small measure of safety (they would still be subject to missile
     
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      attack, but they couldn't be surrounded anyway and would have a better
     
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      movement rate than the monsters who couldn't get on the road to follow
     
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      them.)
     
     
  That all sounds good, but would seem to be a lot of work to do right - a lot 
of maps to get updated with these restrictions.

  I'm also a little concerned that you could get situations where players see 
the monsters but the monsters don't come any closer - first, this would seem a 
bit artificial, but second, also now allows the players a safe way to kill those 
monsters (hit them with range attacks, knowing the monsters won't approach closer).

  Certainly, using such things to keep monsters within the dungeons they are 
from makes sense.  I'm not sure if its worth it to protect all the roads.

  Perhaps the ideal solution would be to store the 'home' location (eg, where 
the monster was created).  The monster may wander from it, but not really far 
(unless under attack).


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      As a related thought - you could extend this a bit further if you could
     
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      block monsters by level, then you could have expanding rings of difficulty
     
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      depending on how far you were from a 'civilized' area.  Then you could have
     
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      some random dragons or other nasty monsters out there in the wild, trolls
     
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      and giants could get a little closer, and finally orcs and gnolls fairly
     
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      close to these 'civilized' areas.  This would give more freedom for random
     
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      encounters and would be pretty easy to implement if the blocking arches were
     
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      available.  An Imperial Highway would be a way to connect these small
     
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      islands of civilization.  Building in encounters in these areas would be a
     
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      matter of
     
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      determing the area 'level range', Random encounters could be a lot more
     
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      variable since you wouldn't have to worry so much about nastier creatures
     
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      getting away (hey it is supposed to be dangerous out there).  It would be a
     
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      guide to dungeon placement as well.
     
     
  I think that in general the outside world will never be that dangerous.  Doing 
random encounters properly would be pretty difficult - knowing what is high 
level/low level/whatever would require quite a bit of updates.

  Also, I don't generally think such random monsters should be too frequent - it 
would generally just be pretty boring if you had to hack your way through 50 
monsters to get to santo dominion.  IMO, the many purpose of such random 
encounters would be to add a little life, eg, there are things that live in the 
forest/mountains/whatever.  Not so much that getting from place A to B should be 
the major challenge - the quests/dungeons are what should be the challenges.



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      I was thinking along the lines of blocking the effects of spells (like the
     
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      flame from a fireball).  THis could also provide a nice spell in itself -
     
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      antimagic shield or antimagic wall by invoking this arch.  This wouldn't
     
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      block spell-like effects, just magic.
     
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      This was just a thought and I have no idea how good or practical it is.
     
     
  There are already spells that do that - counterspell and counterwall are 
supposed to block incoming spell effects.



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      Mountain climbing could be changed to actually allow movement through
     
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      mountains, but not all instead of just speeding up movement by adding in
     
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      no_walk_through to some of the mountain arches and block_all to others.
     
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      Some monsters could climb, some couldn't.
     
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      Creatures who can only swim could be let loose in the water and couldn't
     
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      come ashore.  Maybe there could be 'deep swiming' and shallow swimming for
     
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      the day when boats are available and seamonsters roam the oceans...
     
     
  Perhaps in addition to the other stuff, add terrain flags (grassland, hilly, 
rocky, mountainous, forest), and thus the different skills get used to reduce 
the movement penalty.

  Thus, you could have something like pathfinding which lets you move through 
forest terrain pretty easily.  This is basically just an extension to some flags 
that are current set.

  These skills could actually get associated with experience categories, and 
higher level you are, the less penalty (right now, it just reduces the penalty 
by 4.  Maybe if your level 50 in mountain climbing, it really doesn't effect you 
mcuh at all)