[crossfire] Cartography

[Nathaniel Kipps]

Some of my ideas have been voiced in IRC already, but I'll throw a few
things in here.
--DraugTheWhopper

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 1:40 PM Nicolas Weeger
<nicolas.weeger at laposte.net> wrote:

> One idea was giving them a limiter number of uses, so players are motivated in
> exploring and making more maps.
>
> I'm not too sure though, maybe that's an artificial limit...

On one hand, you don't want to be constantly requiring players to do
busywork to keep their maps up to date, but you also don't want them
to do the process once and then benefit from it in perpetuity.
Possibly a distinction could be drawn as to whether the player uses
their own map, vs is given a map by another player (or an NPC
cartographer)?

> Also, it probably wouldn't be a skill, but rather an object (cartography
> toolkit).
>
> Options include requiring a writing pen and using it; the magic mapping skill
> (so the map is the result of that spell), or using something based on the
> player's field of view; the toolkit being usable a certain number of times only
> or not.

I strongly like the idea of using tools instead of a skill. Perhaps
most ideal would be to use a tool to write in a book or scroll
(scrolls for one-offs, a book for your own personal map collection),
but this implies that you can easily manipulate two items at once.
(And I've never bee too impressed with how user-friendly the marking
system is(maybe that's another discussion)) While a protocol extension
(and accompanying client-server bits) would create the nicest looking
result, can we rely on monospaced fonts to provide a text
representation, like Nethack?