how should epic encounter areas work?
the game in question (as usual): Caveman v3.0 FPSRPG / person sim hybrid. stone age setting. open world, sandbox, survival, emphasis on realism.
from my design notes / todo list:
special encounter areas
one every 25 miles on avg = 10,000 in the game world.
list of 10,000 LOCs (locations: map square x,z, and the x,z location in that map square ).
when player gets within some distance X of a special encounter location, they can have special encounters.
params to play with:
+ frequency of encounter checks
+ chance of encounters
make these work out to maybe one encounter every 15 minutes?
encounter type:
friendly
hostile - valley of the badguys
quest hostile - valley of the badguys (no cap on num appearing)
animal encounter (by terrain type) - valley of the animals
common animal encounter (by terrain type) - valley of the common
uncommon animal encounter (by terrain type) - valley of the rare/exotic
quest animal (by terrain type) - valley of death!
a single type of animal or badguys - valley of the whatevers. from birds to sabertooth to badguys.
number appearing: automatically scaled to party strength (normal or epic). can be adjusted by a multiplication factor (twice as many, etc).
mark it with danger landmarks. make landmarks part of terrain chunks. dont draw on maps. less work.
add new dialog option: "any dangerous places around here i should know about?" tells you what to expect at special encounter area (if nearby).
questions:
does an encounter every 15 minutes or so on average sound too busy?
"valley of the goodguys" - not sure what could be a viable reason for this. but it would give a lot of socialization and trade opportunities to the player. perhaps some place where people frequently meet? and just trigger one or two friendly caveman encounters right at the location?
and "valley of the common animals" doesn't sound that thrilling. skip that one, huh? note that animal, common, and uncommon encounters can be predators or prey. quest animals are always predators.
would a valley full of birds be ok? it might be an interesting change of pace...
how tough should these areas be? normal or epic numbers appearing? or perhaps even some multiple thereof (double epic?). a mix of all of the above?
how big should these areas be? i was thinking a bbox with a radius of 1000 feet around the location for animal encounters and such.
should i do as many as possible that make sense and don't seem too hokey? i've reached that point with quest generators, i have 25 epics done, and still another 29 on the todo list. how much is enough? variety is the spice of life? do all the ones that don't suck? <g>
by mixing it up as to encounter frequency, type, and number appearing, you can get a very wide range of different gaming experiences.
