Originally Posted by
Scooter Fox
Wait, what archaic style of design? It's literally a one screen map. Do you need waypoints and portals for every dungeon level too? Or is your point to remove the in-game time needed to travel between locations? I thought that's the point of the corruption clock - don't wander too much around or you'll suffer, plan your travels instead. If that's gone, you can remove the whole background corruption increase completely since you won't be able to pass 90 days ever unless you explicitly want to pass it or you do some extreme challenge game.
I feel kind of weird that I'm agreeing with gr3ybird about something.
While I don't see anything wrong with making the game harder (by increasing corruption) as time goes on, it is problematic and somewhat unintuitive that the overwhelming majority of the time you put into the clock is doing wilderness excursions, despite the fact that there's no real indication that this is the case, nor is there really any indication (AFAIK, unless there's a fortune cookie now or something) that day 90/180 etc. have any real significance. Probably it would make more sense to reduce the amount of time that it takes to travel a wilderness square, and increase it for dungeons. Really, the way that the day 90 limit is set up, it pretty much only punishes unspoiled new players, and maybe the odd ultra who can't get to the stone circle in time.
Some sort of town portal or returnable beacon or something does make a lot of sense. Yes, there's some circumstances where being able to skip a level would result in a genuine decrease in difficulty--skipping DH, maybe passing back through the cat lord level--but for the most part, the convenience could probably balance it out easily enough. Maybe something like this: Town portal is a class power available to all PCs, let's say, above level 15. You have to visit the town before going there (obviously). "Towns" in this case would be Terinyo, DT, Casino, HMV, I guess. Using town portal is a 20 turn action, and is automatically interrupted if you are attacked. So you can't use it to escape unless you're somewhere safe enough to w5 or smith. Disable it on non-teleport levels (but you can pass through them from another floor), D:50, and the ID. Adjust the corruption clock to reflect the difference in how players will be using their time, and adjust the final score so that you need a lower turncount before you get good scores. Maybe do a little tinkering with crowning costs since it's easier to haul huge piles of trash loot back to stores. I think it's doable without a huge amount of trouble.