If the dungeon is significantly hard enough maybe then it could be an artifact that doesn’t have a negative. I’m into having artifacts in MD’s, maybe having them in the hidden or locked rooms as well, but only then normal ones.
Why is the point of artifacts being not totally good? If you go to all the effort of clearing a dungeon, you should get something worth having. Perhaps whatever boss was protecting it absorbed the negative effects or it was a specially made one which is why it’s in the dungeon in the first place. Artifacts as they are are generally pretty bad. I find 80% of the time I’ll get one with a negative so bad I won’t use it. Why not make these difficult to get and exceedingly powerful objects actually worth looking for?
Considering strange temples can be handled at any point in the game with a mere pickaxe and mines are mid-game at best, it would make sense for portal dungeons to be the ultimate battle with the ultimate loot.
Dungeons or caves should never be a permanently stuck till finish aspect.
Portals to other realms should be to go to other places. But should also be able to get back to the regular origin realm. Even if a portal can close behind the player after a alotted time period. There should be a way to get back by either opening the original portal or making a new one some other location. Maybe make specialty items and materials prevalent on a different realm.
How about a mix of STALKER and doom like portal realm changes…or even Silent Hill realms? We already have mobs to match all 3.
In PMD there’s a type of item called an “Escape Orb” that allows a player to escape the Dungeon whenever they need to if they have it, but the item is consumed in the process. Since labs were messing with dimensional BS, maybe it could be possible to find something similar there?
I really hate the general idea of being trapped irregardless of magical items.
I stopped playing console games specifically for the reason of dungeon crawls and magical stuff. I play CatDDA because I get a better sense of realism and not mysticism. The more magic reality breaks added. The less I like the game.
I tend to think of the game as one big playground for Macgyver. So adding magic stuff makes me cringe =/
Well considering the fact that you’ve already accepted the overall concept of a reality-tear and presented a suggestion for it, the fact that you cannot exit through the same portal you just hopped through shouldn’t be that big of an issue. In addition, labs already have a ton of crazy extra-dimensional stuff going on. You can enter one and have a shoggoth- a massive Eldritch monstrosity- psychically scream at you until you either nuke it or leave. Extra-dimensional Nether inhabitants and giant mutated monsters are all over, but that one part of this concept is what’s simply too unrealistic?
Also who said anything about the possible escape-thing being magic?
Um…what? 0_o
You don’t think being trapped isn’t an issue? If you walk inside you house and you cannot get out for some reason…that is a problem.
Rhyme and reason mate. You can follow Lord of the Rings because it has a flow of logic start to conclusion rules. But CS Lewis just didn’t have any rules and wrote whatever malarky popped into his head and was all “Yup, talking polar bear…because I felt like that”.
Suspension of disbelief like a movie. Rules and an order to them make more sense to people than a random talking beaver or whatever.
I don’t even know what you’re on about anymore man. It’s a tear in reality leading to a randomly assembled series of rooms and corridors that has a number of floors to it, and that entry can close on you at any point and leave you stranded or possibly even outright kill you. Walking into this isn’t quite the same as walking in and out of your front door. Hell, I was considering suggesting that you’d need some special equipment to enter them in the first place.
Special equipment is a good idea. Kevin already came up with this idea though. Power Armor kinda stuff or STALKER suit.
Nobody did anything with it though.
I was explaining how different authors have different methods of making something believable when it is fictional. The ordering of rules. Cause and effect.
Tolkiens Lord of the Rings compared to his friend CS Lewis books. Tolkien wrote about magic but gave it rules and an order to follow backwards to make it more believable than Lewis’ inane and arbitrary ramblings about talking animals and random crap.
In other words. Give something a history and it makes more sense than random.
So…give portals rules. A history. Give them “why”. If you walk up to a portal…why this or that and pretend it DOES exist.
Nah, that sucks. The whole game is a great big “But what if physics just wasn’t? What then?” so applying that logic to something inherently illogical doesn’t work. I say let the portals be entered and exited at will, but make a special condition, perhaps removing a special item, that destabilises them and causes them to be reset.
Just to break things down for clarity:
Portal based: works
Varying difficulties: sure
Fully random layouts: I assume you mean, “no two areas are the same”, if so yes.
Hidden/locked rooms: yes depending on theme, though dda players are going to expect to be able to subvert this sometimes with e.g. explosives.
Biomes: yes
Static monster population: yes, though note my “or appear accoring to some logic” in the previous comment. Trifids and fungaloids could be growing reinforcements in a special room or from a boss creature, nether creatures could be making new tears and sending reinforcements through them, etc.
Freely return to previous floors: yes, and should include exiting the area entirely.
Description indicates difficulty: yes this needs to happen, particularly if some of them have extra hostile environments (requiring breathing apparatus or environmental protection).
Definitely this, it’s a very thematic way of handling the issue for dda. You should also start getting signs that the portal is getting unstable to warn you to get back out. Ideally we’d have some kind of progression where when portals are introduced, a number of short-lived ones spawn that illustrate to the player that they have a risk of closing on them.
Basically the placement should be logical, you shouldn’t just encounter piles of good stuff at random, there should be some logic to what appears where, some examples.
Corpse of a human with gear on it. This should be rare but can range frm meh to very good (e.g. full power armor).
Items harvestable from enemies.
Alien tech/artifacts.
Items collected from Earth (can be random with some very good stuff mixed in like minireactors).
- Interesting side note, collector aliens could be searching out certain things, like books, fissile materials, rare earths, etc.
In short, I think the best option is to have a small amount of very high end loot, it’s hard to come up with a rationale for there being a lot of conventional loot the player wants, it mostly needs to be exotic.
We’re not reworking how artifacts are generated to make them unusually good. The whole point is finding artifacts with benefits you want and down sides you can tolerate. There cold be some non-artifact alien tech though, that operates on its own logic and has minimal downsides.
This kind of thing needs to be made thematic, perhaps you can acquire an item in a lab that extends the duration of the tear, or re-opens a recently closed one. Both of these would only make sense to operate from the source of the original tear though.
–I have an idea as to help explain why certain things are in various places. As these portals come into being, they gather matter from nearby (which may-or-may-not actually happen in the ‘real’ world.). This would explain as to why you find seemingly random objects around. You should also account for the placement of the portal. If a portal was in a generic forest, it would have gathered matter from inside the forest. This means you’d find basic items a lot of the time like sticks or various flowers and other natural wildlife. Due to strange nature of this place, even without sunlight entire trees still seem to grow inside at times.
–What type of ‘buildings,’ monsters and the like nearby also should be taken into account. This helps explain why there are entire spider nests inside: because it took matter (including the spiders themselves) inside of it. If you find one inside a city, there’ll be things from inside the houses, banks, grocery stores, and other things inside of it. You could even find bits of streets on the ground inside. Cities would often focus around having various zombies inside. In terms of the ‘biome’ in there, you could actually find chunks of various buildings lining the walls. This is something that you should always take into account when choosing to go into a portal or not, since a portal that spawned in a bare field is going to lack anything useful for the most part. On the bright side, it’ll also lack much danger.
–“The ground starts to rumble under you” Could be one thing the games says to hint at the portal collapsing. “You fall over as large tremors shake the surround structure.”
–‘secret’ rooms could should be visible, yet not perfectly obvious. For example, a particular wall could look just very slightly different than the rest, and have a special description: “This wall seems strangely fragile. Perhaps something is on the other side.” Or perhaps in a forested area, mini-forests could sneakily hide loot on the other side. Or, you know, triffids perhaps.
–No. No escape orb. CDDA doesn’t involve magic in the base game. I have magic in my ROA mod because for the ropic of the mod it makes sense: It often adds illogical and weird items. And frankly adds nothing even close to what could be considered actual canon to the game. You’re talking about potentially adding this to the base game, so no. Don’t have escape orbs.
It wouldn’t be an escape orb, it would probably be more like a targeted teleporter, maybe keyed to a particular location so you can get out instantly. Or a modified portal generator that stabilises the portal so it can’t collapse with you in it.
Okay, that would make more sense.
Yeah I wasn’t suggesting to just straight up add an item called “Escape Orb” and leave it at that. In an earlier reply I suggested it be something found in labs that would serve the purpose of getting you out of a Mystery Dungeon, which would kind of imply it would have something reasonably technological about it. I’m still newer to the game so I’m not totally certain on all the stuff that can be found in labs, but I know they’ve got teleporters and contained otherworldly monsters, so it stands to reason they could have some device for stabilizing portals or tears in reality if they could capture things from other dimensions.
So in this revised state, is it something you’d consider having officially supported in the game?
Yes, I think it can be adjusted to the point where it fits in the game.
–Yay! I’m very happy about that! Of course, ingame let’s not call them ‘mystery dungeons,’ since that name doesn’t fit that well into the CDDA theme.
–It’s been mentioned that to create buildings you need some sort of text editor to be able to view it properly. Do you know of one that is free and works really well?
I think Wordpad and/or Notepad++ both work fine for Json. Use Vim if neither of those work.
Pretty much what Kevin’s contention seems in line with what I meant. But I didn’t like the Escape orb idea until Dark suggested with a teleporter. The Labs already have teleporters yeah? So how about we bum the film “They Live” wrist watch teleporter idea? Something small as such at any rate. The item would be a small version or the walk on ones with limited usage and energy. Labs would have them from their research and they are rare because they were in test phases. A few lab zombies could rare drop as well as a few soldiers in rare drops, due too having the unlucky task of entering a multi-dimensional portal and seeing what is what on the other side.
I think MD world spaces should benefit from those ideas of the world space collapsing and giving clues.
lvl1: You detect a tremor (your spidey senses are tingling? lol)
lvl2: A minor quake
lvl3: The world space seems rather unstable and visual vibration cues are detected!
lvl4: “I have a bad feeling about this”
lvl5: THE FIT HAS HIT THE SHAN! RUN MO FO! RUN!!! >_<
lol
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