Re: [Adonthell-general] Fw: Ideas, review of rules... WARNING does not contain any Yeti

[Kai Sterker]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:04:33 +0200 Nils Fohrbeck wrote:

> To continue the discussion:
> 
> As far as experience is concerned. The reason why or why not we should
> use an exponential formula or not is mostly one of game balance. For
> example we will have to decide just how important we want to make side
> quests. Should they make a big difference as far as experience is
> concerned or should they reward the player with powerful items. In an
> exponential system the player needs a lot of experience points to to
> gain a new level later on in the game. This means that players who do
> all the sidequests will still be on the same level (or maybe one level
> higher) as players who do none of the sidequests. So it comes down to
> personal taste once again.

Never thought about it that way, but it does make sense. I personally
think that solving a quest should give experience similar to killing
dangerous enemies. So an exponential formula would sorta be bad.

Remains the problem of killing creatures. I mean, more dangerous
creatures can't give much more EXP than the first, simple ones,
otherwise you'd level up too fast at the end of the game. An idea would
be to make the EXP gained through killing based on the player's level.
If a low-level player kills a high level creature he'd get plenty of
EXP, but a high-level player who kills a weak creature get's practically
nothing.

So creatures that match the player in strength give always roughly the
same amount of EXP throughout the game. 


> To indicate experience we could just have a little bar (in addition to
> the numbers), which indicates how long it takes to reach the next
> level (Diablo does this quite well).

Yep, I've imagined something like that. 


> Talking about side quests, and killing monsters I think we should have
> some areas that can be cleaned by the player (so there is only a
> limited amount of monsters), while in some  areas the monsters will
> always respawn (so I can go there to gain experience and level up
> before I take on the next challenging enemy I have to kill for the
> main plot).

Yeah. I'm thinking about 'monster generators' that spawn new creatures
of a given kind at a given rate, until an upper limit is reached. We
could even make the creatures spawned dependent on the player's level.
As he grows stronger, no weak creatures are created any more. That won't
be much of a problem, really :).

 
> As far as side quests subquests are concerned all the subquests should
> be rewarding enough, so that noone wouldwant to miss them. So no
> shortcuts are needed ;-)

Sure. The thing is, some subquest are open to certain characters only,
others mutually exclude each others. Some might be too difficult to
complete for average players, etc.

I can also imagine that different parts of the main plot have different
solutions. Some take longer, others are shorter. I wouldn't call this a
shortcut though. It just should allow people to act the way they like.
Violent or peaceful, with cunning or brute force.


Kai