[crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?
Hello. Here are some propositions to make CF a different but hopefully funnier game :) 1) Don't give out stats to players. Don't give HP/SP/GR/ whatever. Only give hints about the health (you feel very bad, you bleed a lot) and such things (with great effort you take the armor, but fall on the ground trying to put it on) Rationale: we're doing a game, not some financial computation. Also, players should feel whether they are ready to tackle dragons or are doing damage to an opponent, not merely check stats. Of course, internally, the game could (should) still use numbers/stats. 2) Make attack/defense and other things just numbers with the rule the higher the better. Attack 50 vs defense 50 = 50% chance to hit (or something like that). No is it wc which is better lower, or ac?). In the same way, make weapons +1 just give some attack bonus, that's all. 3) Don't give so many powerful items. Have players actually create such items, with difficulty, so they need to take time (or buy it from other players). Makes a craftmanship or even alchemy skill much more interesting. Want a sword with fire damage? Go find a rare stone of fire or harness the power of a volcano to make such weapon. 4) Reduce loot a lot. Don't put chests everywhere just waiting to be opened. Have stuff randomly grow on trees or plants, fish from sea, mine ore to build items, find stones to build buildings, whatever. 5) Remove map reset. A player destroyed a map? Well, another needs to rebuild it ingame - or let an NPC do it. That costs money and time, that's fine. And no need to rebuild it the same way :) Just some random thoughts. Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'aléatoire !] signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?
Hello. Here are some propositions to make CF a different but hopefully funnier game :) 1) Don't give out stats to players. Don't give HP/SP/GR/ whatever. Only give hints about the health (you feel very bad, you bleed a lot) and such things (with great effort you take the armor, but fall on the ground trying to put it on) Rationale: we're doing a game, not some financial computation. Also, players should feel whether they are ready to tackle dragons or are doing damage to an opponent, not merely check stats. Of course, internally, the game could (should) still use numbers/stats. The idea has merit as there are definite aspects of the game that could use this sort of thing. One might ask oneself if adventure/role players are more feel/mood oriented as opposed to numbers-oriented. I'd be surprised if the answer came back that role players typically prefer environment to the point of removing numbers. (And sure, CF does not have to be one more of the same kind of game, but the numbers do personally help me play the game to the point where if they were gone I would personally get frustrated with the game.) On the other hand, I suspect that crowd would find feel/mood/environment content a big plus. There is no doubt improvement on these feel hints would have a positive effect, and that this would be a good point to work on in the early stages. 2) Make attack/defense and other things just numbers with the rule the higher the better. Attack 50 vs defense 50 = 50% chance to hit (or something like that). No is it wc which is better lower, or ac?). In the same way, make weapons +1 just give some attack bonus, that's all. This seems more workable than removing the numbers altogether. I rarely know what these numbers do anyway, and personally do already prefer the simplicity of higher is better. On the flip side, what does it hurt to have the formula generally known outside of the game? 3) Don't give so many powerful items. Have players actually create such items, with difficulty, so they need to take time (or buy it from other players). Makes a craftmanship or even alchemy skill much more interesting. Want a sword with fire damage? Go find a rare stone of fire or harness the power of a volcano to make such weapon. So many powerful items is not something I have experienced, but, I do find that the unlimited map replay in CF is annoying. (Plug for feature request on limiting, but not eliminating replay). I am in support of finding a reasonable way of to do this (replay/limit powerful artifacts), but I do think that the restrictions should not completely eliminate replay, especially when large periods of time elapse between playing spurts. I personally love the fact that I can come back to CF after months and optionally start over playing long sequences that take many hours of gameplay. I am not in favor of making CF a game where you must burn 100's of hours to gameplay to attain anything cool. That said, the idea of using craftsmanship and ingredients is welcome. I personally never played with alchemy, but have found games that concentrate on resource collecting and craftsmanship have been fun. Note that care needs to be taken... the royalty quests in Scorn tend to be a bit too vague on how to get to the next stage. Not that I am at all a typical CFer, but I've never gotten to the Dragon Lord quest, and the ones before that are way too hard for those not familiar with smallworld. 4) Reduce loot a lot. Don't put chests everywhere just waiting to be opened. Have stuff randomly grow on trees or plants, fish from sea, mine ore to build items, find stones to build buildings, whatever. I am certainly in favor of the later proposition. The prior is unclear. People seem to think that loot is too prevalent in CF, and this is a mystery to me. I NEVER have enough money in CF, but I also have never gotten higher than lvl 30 something. When I was that high, the bigworld reset killed that character, and since then I have never broken 30. 5) Remove map reset. A player destroyed a map? Well, another needs to rebuild it ingame - or let an NPC do it. That costs money and time, that's fine. And no need to rebuild it the same way :) No. Replay limits instead (penalty to loot/experience to the point where if you replay enough, there is absolutely no value to the map except exploration and taking in the scenery). I don't care if there are maps that work the way this is described, but it should not be the norm. This smacks of being a playground for people to spoil the game for other people. I see no good reason to make CF a game where the first guy there is the only one who can play the game at the expense of everyone else. Just some random thoughts. Good thoughts as usual! -- Kevin Bulgrien kbulgr...@att.net ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org
Re: [crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?
Nicolas Weeger wrote: Hello. Here are some propositions to make CF a different but hopefully funnier game :) I'm thinking that was funner, not funnier - but more humor in the game wouldn't hurt :) 1) Don't give out stats to players. Don't give HP/SP/GR/ whatever. Only give hints about the health (you feel very bad, you bleed a lot) and such things (with great effort you take the armor, but fall on the ground trying to put it on) Rationale: we're doing a game, not some financial computation. Also, players should feel whether they are ready to tackle dragons or are doing damage to an opponent, not merely check stats. Of course, internally, the game could (should) still use numbers/stats. I generally like being able to quickly glance at my stats and see how I'm doing. If I need to carefully look through messages to know if I'm about to die, that probably makes things less fun for me, not more. If the human players were spending bunch of time doing calculations (like in live action games), then simplifying such things may make more sense. Likewise, if the game was much more an adventure game, then maybe not having stats would make more sense (by adventure game, I mean games where the focus is on exploration and solving puzzles, like say myst, and not killing things). I'm also not sure if removing stats would help out in your dragon example - the real problem in many cases when you first go to fight something is no idea how powerful it is. In many cases tough monsters can be found in areas with much weaker monsters. 2) Make attack/defense and other things just numbers with the rule the higher the better. Attack 50 vs defense 50 = 50% chance to hit (or something like that). No is it wc which is better lower, or ac?). In the same way, make weapons +1 just give some attack bonus, that's all. I think WC is the only thing that violates that rule, correct? And the reason it does so is because it was based on the old ADDv1 version of THACO/AC (or so I believe). I'll note that ADDv3 actually fixed that - higher the AC, the better. Likewise, the idea of WC basically went away - instead, you just have a bonus to hit. Ends up being very simple - if d20 + to hit = AC, you hit. Making that change in crossfire is IMO a good idea and would be really easy to do - one could easily enough write a script to go through and replace wc X with hit_bonus 20-X (with the script doing the calculation). Likewise, a similar change for AC could be done (new_ac = 20-X) 3) Don't give so many powerful items. Have players actually create such items, with difficulty, so they need to take time (or buy it from other players). Makes a craftmanship or even alchemy skill much more interesting. Want a sword with fire damage? Go find a rare stone of fire or harness the power of a volcano to make such weapon. Agree. Too often in maps/quests, the final reward is some artifact type weapon. It would be more interesting if these were components or pieces to make up really good weapons. And ideally give out very few static rewards (meaning that you always get item X from some quest - make it a treasure list of maybe 10 different items, etc) 4) Reduce loot a lot. Don't put chests everywhere just waiting to be opened. Have stuff randomly grow on trees or plants, fish from sea, mine ore to build items, find stones to build buildings, whatever. I don't know if the problem is so much the amount of loot, or more the lack to spend it on anything. I know there are some exceptions - guild houses go up for auction, and you can spend lots of money if you want your apartment a big bigger or quick exits to different maps. But even many of those are one time upfront costs. At some point in my adventuring, I just don't find anything in the shops to buy very often - I've gotten all the spells, the likelihood of actually finding any decent items in the shops is low. So that money just piles up. I think that is really the problem - unless there are more useful ways to spend money (needed for adventuring gear) it just accumulates. 5) Remove map reset. A player destroyed a map? Well, another needs to rebuild it ingame - or let an NPC do it. That costs money and time, that's fine. And no need to rebuild it the same way :) How do you handle dungeons? Once someone does the goblin quest map, no one can ever do it again (who is going to repopulate it with monsters, etc) One could perhaps make more of the maps persistent on a per player basis (basically store them as per unique maps). So each player could only complete certain maps once. What I don't know how to do in that cases is parties where someone has done a map and other folks haven't (or suppose it is a big party, and several folks have explored a map to some degree). Clearly parties should be able to explore the same map if they wanted to.
Re: [crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?
On Sunday 14 December 2008, Kevin Bulgrien wrote: [...] 3) Don't give so many powerful items. Have players actually create such items, with difficulty, so they need to take time (or buy it from other players). Makes a craftmanship or even alchemy skill much more interesting. Want a sword with fire damage? Go find a rare stone of fire or harness the power of a volcano to make such weapon. So many powerful items is not something I have experienced, but, I do find that the unlimited map replay in CF is annoying. (Plug for feature request on limiting, but not eliminating replay). I am in support of finding a reasonable way of to do this (replay/limit powerful artifacts), but I do think that the restrictions should not completely eliminate replay, especially when large periods of time elapse between playing spurts. I personally love the fact that I can come back to CF after months and optionally start over playing long sequences that take many hours of gameplay. I am not in favor of making CF a game where you must burn 100's of hours to gameplay to attain anything cool. That said, the idea of using craftsmanship and ingredients is welcome. I personally never played with alchemy, but have found games that concentrate on resource collecting and craftsmanship have been fun. [...] 5) Remove map reset. A player destroyed a map? Well, another needs to rebuild it ingame - or let an NPC do it. That costs money and time, that's fine. And no need to rebuild it the same way :) No. Replay limits instead (penalty to loot/experience to the point where if you replay enough, there is absolutely no value to the map except exploration and taking in the scenery). I don't care if there are maps that work the way this is described, but it should not be the norm. This smacks of being a playground for people to spoil the game for other people. I see no good reason to make CF a game where the first guy there is the only one who can play the game at the expense of everyone else. I've got two thoughts here myself. For one thing, the fact that an item can be labeled with a blanket powerful or not powerful may be part of the problem. It might be beneficial to look at ways to make items more useful outside of the context of big numbers, hard- to-defend-against damage types, and hit points. As for map resets: it would obviously take a fair amount of additional new code, but perhaps a type of map that grows or develops naturally might be introduced. If something vaguely resembling the AI code for a resource based RTS game were implemented, computer generated groups could take over cleared areas and redevelop them. One might wipe out a Kobold warren, and then come back not long after and find some kobolds had come back and started rebuilding (adding new tunnels and rooms in the process). Or that Orcs had come along and taken over instead. Or that the ramshackle village of bandits hidden in the woods that was cleared out previously has now been taken over by undead cultists... It might even be feasible to have map-makers predefine who the first few groups running the map will be (e.g. predefining that lizard-people are waiting to move in once adventurers kill off the dragons in the cave). ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
