Random encounters

[theebie]

How about having some sort of random encounters in the wilderness / desert ?

There could be a list of beasts, having different rareness, and if you wander around in the wilderness, once in a while the code does a check for a random encounter, and if its positive, some sort of animal is placed somewhere around in the next four or five rooms of where the player is.
That would also give the possibility for appearance of rare "unique" animals, which one could have to capture, or just be astonished about

List like:
rareness:
1: a tregil
1: a gurth
1: a scrab
...
20: a striped rare sand raptor
20: a standard gith
...
50: the ancient scrab with blackened shell
50: the five legged gortok


if the game checks for a random encounter in like 99% nothing happens,
and if it's the one percent where something does happen, another roll is done which picks something out of the rareness-list (big chance for low rareness, small chance for very rare)


The filthy rich merchant says to you: Bring me a five legged gortok, and I will reward you well, dear ranger-friend-of-mine.


Could maybe allow a skill "search-rare-beast" which would allow you for a greater chance to find something (of course ranger only :)

---theebie---

[Twilight]

Even the placement of NPCs has a great deal of thought put into it in Arm.  To give an example, it is not chance that you encounter beastie X only in the south, or only near the Silt Sea, or only in the grasslands.  In some games, this might be regarded as whatever is in the "zone".  Here, it represents the feeding/hunting grounds of those particular creatures.  That is the first hurdle, it wouldn't be one table.  It would be lots and lots of tables.  You just would not find a gortok, for example, outside of its natural habitat.  If you want to hunt gortoks, you go to certain places.

The NPC population appears to be very carefully balanced in how many there are.  Too many aggressive NPCs and you restrict travel.  Over the years, I've seen aggressive NPCs used to either free up or restrict travel by the staff.  Often, well known routes were essentially "closed" by introduction of lots of aggro NPCs, as less well known ones could be used and you might encounter one NPC.

Finally, the game is not about finding the ultra special rare albino silt horror to win.  If the code loaded up such things, even with a small chance of it, eventually they would be regarded as commonplace, at least OOC'ly.  When you see the rare albino silt horror now, you know it is really, really, really rare.  Perhaps even unique.  An idea like this would dilute that feeling, IMHO.

[Callisto]

Would there be a chance to run into Frog Morton's angry brothers?

[Anonymous]

I don't get what you are striving for here.

There are times when you will find a beasty outside of its territory.  But that is the result of it chasing something halfway across the world.  I'd rather something organic like that than some artificial system such as you suggest.

[Sacac's Ghost]

Yeah.. this ain't pokegaymon.. err.. pokeman.. err.. pokemon... that is it.
It isn't.. so I dislike this idea

[theebie]

it would have 2 main positive effects:

a) increase the chance you meet something dangerous in the wilderness (making it a bigger thrill to explore around)

b) open up new possibilities for RP as contracts capturing certain rare creatures can be played out without immortal help

---theebie---

[Quirk]

it would have 2 main positive effects:

a) increase the chance you meet something dangerous in the wilderness (making it a bigger thrill to explore around)

Believe me, you don't need a larger chance of meeting something dangerous in the wilderness. Before the able Dyrinis took things in hand, the Southern desert had become almost unplayable for hunter characters. Gith and tarantula stalked the sands in large numbers. I suspect only the most glaring inexperience in trying to keep a hunter alive could excuse the desire to see more dangerous things out there... or perhaps a hatred for people who leave the city walls.

b) open up new possibilities for RP as contracts capturing certain rare creatures can be played out without immortal help

---theebie---

There doesn't tend to be a huge demand for rare creatures for some odd reason. I think the amount of RP added by this change would be minimal.

Quirk

[X-D]

Makes me wonder how much you have explored Theebie.

The current risk in any part of the world of running into something that can and will have your char for lunch are actually pretty high. And unlike other muds, the stats for npc/mobs here are randomly generated according to race, plus mobs "learn" here, or at least can increase skills.

One day you might go out with your 10day warrior and kill 3 raptor with relative ease, but the next day you might go out and find one that has survived it's own fights for the last couple game weeks and rolled good stats and it messes you up like you had gone against a 50day warrior.

Thats plenty random for me.

Add in that now and again random beasties do chase people across the world, maybe meeting up with your char, at least it's a bit more realistic then something from the silt sea spawning in the grey forest.

[creeper386]

And we could call it, ArmageddonMUD: Final Fantasy Style.




Creeper likes random battles in Final Fantasy, not randomly spawned things on a ***MUD***!!!!!!!!

[Gilvar]

I'd rather see a spin of it, and that is MORE creatures reset, but in such a way that they don't load everytime the area 'resets' but rather in a random way.

Like for some reason or another (probably complaining), fire ants and tarantulas were either removed or toned down from certain areas. (I won't give it all away). It would be nice if they had 'random' spots they'd load SOMETIMES, not like that old inix that was up in Tuluk a ways back that everyone knew would load and would go out and kill it there. Random resets as a whole are neat things. It keeps people guessing.

A few other things that could make debuts, Chaltons. They are said to be seen -rarely- in the wild, and that would be neat. Snakes, 'desert mice', occassional carrion birds, all sorts of things would liven things up.

But no, the random encounter thing has always bothered me. Like you may be standing somewhere and something like "A scrab walks over the dune." i.e. the scrab has just loaded and is now going to attack you.

[Wintermute]

The change that Gilvar mentioned is the change I'd like to see.  In fact, I'd like to see it for anything that has to load - say 'gettable' plant material.  It'd remove that strange veneer of unreality where everything loads at once after a reset or after a certain amount of ticks or what have you.  Random loading positions within certain defined territories would also be neat, but it's much less necessary since after loading mobiles will wander and randomize their position to a certain degree themselves.

[Tlaloc]

Incidentally, there are places in the world with a more realistic ecosystem than what you normally have. I know of one zone (due to Halaster's doing) that has:

1) Critters which load in parts of the area, at different times of the IC year;
2) Creatures that get hungry, and hunt down prey animals to eat;
3) Creatures that get thirsty, and hunt waterscources to drink;
4) Creatures which only become agressive when hungry;
5) Creatures that settle down and sleep at night/day/rest periods (sometimes returning to a 'herd' or nest somesuch);
6) Creatures that have a certain breeding seasons at different times of the IC year, producing offspring;
7) Creatures which, depending on population levels, will naturally clump together and form 'herds', if they are herding or pack-roving animals;
8] Buzzards which, assuming a body is left undisturbed, will eventually swoop down and scavenge upon it.
9) A dynamic system which allows the immortals to increase or decrease the population levels of any of the animal types in the zone.

This was mostly done as an experiment, and in an area that is alittle out of the way for most PCs - which makes me sad, because I'd love to see more areas like this one around. ONe of my backburner projects has been to slowly try to adapt the scripting which controls this zone, to other zones around the mud. One eventual problem may be that this might eat up alot of system rescources.

However, I can see how using this system (dubbed: SimDesert, by Halaster), we could adapt it to do all sorts of fun things, like ocasionally loading up sick/weak/old types of animals, or animals which react in different ways to different stimuli, or rare breeds of animals like albinos. Dyrinis has skillfully adapted some of the techniques Halaster used, and implimented them around Allanak.

I'd love to see more of it, personally.

That all said: don't hold your breath on seeing the whole world converted over to this, anytime soon. The scripting is, at least in my opinion, incredibly complicated. Furthermore, it takes alot of work to fully prep a zone to be converted over to something like this, since, as a few people have mentioned already, alot of thought goes into where NPC's are placed in the game. Finnally, as I mentioned, it might be a large drain on system rescources to use too many of these. I know we had to take steps to keep it from lagging the mud on reboots - and that was with just one zone.

If you want to see this in action, I suggest exploring the world, and searching down the zone. Alot of fun can be had, learning the patterns of the wildlife, and seeing what they do.

[Northlander]

I'm fairly sure that I've been in this zone, and would just like to add that it's all very, very impressive. Even if it, like so much else, was nearly the end of my dear uber-ranger. Had plans to return and spend more time there but, well, things seldom work out, do they?
Best of luck with spreading this SimDesert, staff and ginka.

Making the most of my time off-topic, I'll add that if Callisto didn't have those big, nasty, pointed teeth, I'd hug her for the reference.

[X-D]

Heh, I was gonna ask Tlaloc to tell me where it is so I can avoid it at all costs (keyword: Halaster)

But then, I'm pretty sure I've been there with another char already, at least I did find someplace that appeared to be far more dynamic then the rest of the mud world.

And if it is, all the more reason to have Halaster back.

[Forest Junkie]

I live in this area. The environment is entirely unique, and the movements of the animals within it are extremely realistic, as Tlaloc said.

Totally uber =P

[grog]

It's things like this that always make we want play an explorer character again, of course I've never had an explorer character that exists for more then a month before dying.   I think my last one was being tracked by five different creatures before a sandstorm hit.
But then if it was easy, it wouldn't be so fun.

[Stroker]

You encounter an armed nuclear missible buried in the sand, the timer reads: 0:01.

[Twilight]

I love the area Tlaloc mentioned.  Its up there for my favorite area.  If that system was expanded to other areas, it would be completely badass.

A simple way to get more variety is table loading.  For example, lets say we have a table for wild kanks:

Table 101:  Wild Kanks
20% a greenish-blue kank
10% a young, stylish kank
5% an old geezer kank
5% a huge, half-giant rideable kank
60% a normal, boring, yellow kank

Then in your zonefile (or however you do NPC loading) instead of loading vnum 222222 (boring generic kank) you load table 101, which picks one of the NPCs, with the chance as weighted in the table, to load.  To some extent, the racial stat changes etc. take care of a lot in that they take into account differences between individual NPCs.  Table loading would only add more flavor or, instead of kank table, you could have a grasslands table that had a cilops normally, but very rarely would load a plains ox.  Although really tables (at least in the zonefile loading I am familiar with) are only a crutch and I've only used them on other muds for like 5+ things, as there should be nested loading (load gith with 80% chance, otherwise load kank with 80% chance, otherwise load kank fly with 100% chance sorta thing) for NPCs and items.

Come to think of it, maybe there isn't nested loading.  I've done a lot with it other places, generally works for NPCs and objects, and can be really fun to add in a bit of pizzaz to an area.  Example, those nasty NPC gith bands people complained about.  Pretty easy (again other mud where I have created) to load like 50% chance of one gith, 25% chance of two gith grouped together, and 25% chance of three gith grouped together.  I never seem to see it on Arm though, you can count on seeing those X number of blah NPC grouped.  Except in the area Tlaloc mentioned, which was refreshing when I first saw it.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

My question is: What sort of a system would we have to run to be able to support this and have those infinite players? I want to know, badly...that shit sounds fucking tight.

[Wintermute]

Can there be any doubt?  Halaster is God.