Dungeon related ideas for JADE

[pblack]

Again... another suggestion box topic.

This time... the dungeons.

Some thought i had in the shower:


Make monsters team up/fight each other more often: this is i think, one of the most important features ever (yet) to be implemented. It already exists in a very small scale i think, but what i have in mind is more elaborate.

First, making monsters natural enemies of one another and more easily angered by " - foo - displaces the - foo -" messages. It always bothered me that in most, if not all games you play, the common monster seems to always be patrolling for YOU, because there's no other enemy that he could care about.
Ocasionally you see neutral monsters fending off some hostiles and such, but my idea goes past this "mood swings". It could mean dwarves attacking goblins on sight, orcs attacking rats and such for food, goblin slavemasters whipping other goblins around and things like that. It always seems like you are the only dangerous thing on the level, specially in cavernous ones. The bugbear is calmly walking in between a flesh golem, a giant spider and a goblin berseker, but when he sees YOU he charges.
I'm not saying it should be a slaughter fest in every level, but make it noticeable beyond simple "lawful vs evil" types of combat. Dragons of different kinds could be natural enemies. Should be interesting to get a named great red wyrm to follow you to a white dragon vault (it would also make the wyrm really powerful if he manages to survive). Maybe no dragon fights karmic ones. Dragons are, after all, very intelligent creatures.

Second, make monsters team up and find allies. On the event of an orc hunting a giant rat for example. If another orc is around and sees the event happening, he gets closer in order to help his fellow orc. This would not impede the event of two orcs fighting afterwards to see who gets the rat corpse thou. Some other monsters might make for likely allies too. An ogre might help an orc chieftain in distress, a chaos brother helping a chaos sister, ratlings of all kinds.... well...you get the picture. Similar monsters helping each other out.

All this would be of little significance if it were not to be implemented in a noticeable scale. Every other level should allow for the observation of some kind of interaction between the creatures other than just randomly walking around.

This would also allow for intresting scenarios where there could be a specific dungeon level where a war between ettins and ogres was being waged, and the monsters, too focused on the war, weren't initially hostile. So maybe you could try to settle things in a peaceful (or not) manner. But that's just a consequence of the general idea i'm proposing.

All this should minimize the general random feel of most dungeon levels. If well implemented could make the entire game come just a bit more alive, with orcs that despite being dumb, are humanoid creatures gifted with (some) intelligence.

[Epythic]

Make stealthy tactics more viable.

[Keuran]

I support this. A very valuable advantage is if the player's outnumbered and they get lucky, a monster that the monsters attacking the player really hate might walk by, giving the player a chance to escape or kill them all while they're distracted.

[Sradac]

Idea stolen from portralis, but Boss/Elite monsters. The leader of a pack of monsters or beasts is leader for a reason, they are smarter/stronger/more fierce than the rest of the group. So they should naturally be buffed up and probably have better things to loot from them. I think the elites and boss's in portralis are a little bit too common, it'd be better if they were a bit more rare, but not too hard to find.

[pblack]

Idea stolen from portralis, but Boss/Elite monsters. The leader of a pack of monsters or beasts is leader for a reason, they are smarter/stronger/more fierce than the rest of the group. So they should naturally be buffed up and probably have better things to loot from them. I think the elites and boss's in portralis are a little bit too common, it'd be better if they were a bit more rare, but not too hard to find.

Doesn't the usual chieftain count? I mean...every orc vault has one and only one chieftain (every organized vault at least). Same for gnolls.

Or are you talking something like in the blue dragon caves or D:50? Cause the purple dragon and fisty are real "bosses" already.

I guess that with monster inventory, the general feel of JADE will change. The only reason why i think you (and even I) don't associate a gnoll chieftain to a "boss" is because his loot is just as random. Perhabs with monster inventory we could expect the chieftains to wear better armor and weild better weapons. At the very least, i think that those chieftains in lesser vaults should always weild prefix and/or suffix weapons.

I see many frustrating deaths ahead of us when you lvl 8 assassin dies a horrible death from the weeping battle axe of penetration of that pink gnoll.

[brim]

I think this is a very cool idea. Don't forget though, that if some orcs are hunting a rat and a juicy gnome PC walks into the room, unless he is quite stealthy, they are going to forget all about that rat and go for the Gnome. Likewise, if there were so-called "natural enemies" between races, it might be interesting if an orc PC encountering hostile dwarves would send them into the "blind rage" state simply because they hate orcs.