Automated Adventure System

[Misadventure]

Clearly it's best if it has a %chance to produce a given result, either as a binary or as a range. That way you'll never be sure ...

Or someone will crunch it out, like for everything from WoW to Kingdom of Loathing.

[Apos]

@packrat said in Automated Adventure System:

One piece of advise regarding magical items that boost stats.

Please resist the temptation to have items that boost a stat but do so 'secretly' so that 'nobody can work it out'.

I can guarantee that if you make a ring (or a nipple ring) that gives +1 Luck but does not announce this then that mostly means that its secret powers will only be unlocked by assholes who are willing to equip items then +roll three hundred times in their bedroom before loading the results into a spreadsheet and comparing to the unassisted statistics.

It would probably result in a subset or clique of players who do that kind of thing and fairly rapidly know the precise stats of every magical item they retrieve whilst other people flail blindly and feel useless.

lol, man, not that I would, but AS that kind of player in my youth, I can guarantee you that if I didn't want someone to figure out a formula they would never, ever, ever figure out that formula.

[AeriaNyx]

I am STILL full of squee over the run I got to participate in. It. Was. AWESOME. I rarely have a chance to feel really useful as Rei is very much a support character. But man, the variety of skills needed for various obstacles and puzzles is so great! It really gave a lot of opportunity and encourages bringing a diverse bunch of people!

So, about healing -- I think maybe reducing the time between heal attempts from 1 hour to maybe 30 minutes is a really good idea. People can much more easily take a thirty minute RP break and kind of RP taking a break, setting up a small camp, etc, than waiting a full hour.

Another potential idea might be to make items that gift temporary HP for a specific period of time (15-30 minutes)? Like, bandages or cure-alls that might be applied to someone to get them back onto their feet long enough to get to safety and set up camp?

Having a camp function might also be really cool. Where everyone votes to enter a camp mode, where healing might happen a little faster, and people have to sign up for 'watch' shifts? I am likely getting way over complicated, but I'm really so impressed and so excited about this. It is simply amazing.

[Jeshin]

@aerianyx

I could see a variation of the Darkest Dungeon approach to camping being applied. You have to specifically bring the supplies to make camp and when you do there is a % chance of being attacked when you break camp. Would fulfill a lot of the ideas you're proposing.

[Sparks]

@AeriaNyx said in Automated Adventure System:

I am STILL full of squee over the run I got to participate in. It. Was. AWESOME. I rarely have a chance to feel really useful as Rei is very much a support character. But man, the variety of skills needed for various obstacles and puzzles is so great! It really gave a lot of opportunity and encourages bringing a diverse bunch of people!

I'm so glad; that's the goal! I wanted the system to reward diversity in a party but also still be difficult to just steamroll through.

On healing, one thought I had was that you could heal more often than the limit (which I might reduce to 30 minutes in Shardhavens), but it would cost you an amount of AP equal to the minutes remaining. I.e., if there was a 30 minute timer and you heal someone and ten minutes later they desperately need healing again, you could wait for the half-hour to tick over or pay 20 AP to skip the 20 minutes remaining.

I've put aside the Shardhavens for a few to let last balance ideas percolate, though; in the meantime, I'm working on the actual underlying magic system so that the items in Shardhavens will be set up to be meaningful in that system.

[Arkandel]

@sparks said in Automated Adventure System:

On healing, one thought I had was that you could heal more often than the limit (which I might reduce to 30 minutes in Shardhavens), but it would cost you an amount of AP equal to the minutes remaining. I.e., if there was a 30 minute timer and you heal someone and ten minutes later they desperately need healing again, you could wait for the half-hour to tick over or pay 20 AP to skip the 20 minutes remaining.

I don't know Arx-stuff so this might not be applicable to your system at all, but maybe you could borrow a page from WoW's mythic dungeon cooldowns.

So basically the way they did it is that there are some skills on WoW which can be incredibly powerful, enough to turn the tide of combat completely. For example you could resurrect a dead character while combat's still taking place, turning certain defeat into a potential victory. Or you could buff all your group's power by a lot for a limited time.

The two ways WoW limits those, but keeps then important, is by time and by total number of uses. So either you can use your supercharger once every 3 minutes (and since mythic runs are timed the total number of applications is limited too), or you can only use your combat rez X times in the whole run.

Now... you might not be able to count on time being the limited factor here like WoW can simply because people take different times to pose (although I don't know, maybe you do time the runs in your system too). You could however use number of applications instead, which should still work - say, "you can heal your teammates X times in the same run".

[Too Old For This]

@sparks Magic AND Shardhavens?!?! I haven't been this excited in WEEKS!!! (or since Shardhavens started being tested)

[Roz]

@sparks said in Automated Adventure System:

On healing, one thought I had was that you could heal more often than the limit (which I might reduce to 30 minutes in Shardhavens), but it would cost you an amount of AP equal to the minutes remaining. I.e., if there was a 30 minute timer and you heal someone and ten minutes later they desperately need healing again, you could wait for the half-hour to tick over or pay 20 AP to skip the 20 minutes remaining.

One thing I'd keep in mind is that it puts a lot of pressure on healers to shell out extra AP to help save someone while that person doesn't share any of the burden. It makes sense from an AP perspective where AP=time, but maybe if there was a good way to share the cost with the person they're healing?

[Sparks]

@roz Hrm. I suppose I could split the AP cost (or just charge the amount to each).

But I think it'll be alleviated somewhat when AP assists go back in, once the AP is separated into "your own AP" and "assisted AP" so some things can just draw from your own AP, where assists don't make sense. But healing could then use even assisted AP to represent others helping you tend to the fallen party member. Thus the party, not just the healer, would bear the AP cost of healing off-timer.

[Packrat]

Another option could be charging the AP to the person being healed, on the basis that they are straining themselves by pushing on when they really should not, damaging their body and needing more 'time off' to recover after the adventure is over?