From: "Timo Viitanen" Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.development Subject: Long rant about dungeon design and stuff Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:02:07 +0300 Reading D&D Dungeon Master's guide just inspired me to post this for all the dungeon crawl makers out here (most of people seem to be making ambitious projects realistically depicting entire worlds with hundreds of thousands of randomly generated NPC's, quests and plots so they won't be as interested) : Doors as real obstacles. Different types of doors - metal, reinforced, enchanted ones. Ones that are opened with special mechanisms - levers and stuff. Ones that you need to talk to, answering riddles or speaking aloud passwords, to open, ones that do not exist, but are just illusions of doors... More furniture. Pillars, strangely shaped rooms, different types of walls and floors, paintings and tapestries (that might hide secret passages, treasures and hidden switches), pedestals to hold the most precious treasures on display (that might be trapped, like in that one Indiana Jones, so that, for example, when you take the Crown of Seven Sovereigns from the pedestal at the bottom of the Tomb of King Grohlom VII, the doors slam shut and acid starts to pour in until you replace the crown, work around this to find a rock as heavy as the crown and replace the crown with it) More traps. Intelligent placing of traps - places where the player is likely to tread and most damage can be done. Some neat trap types where the trap tile only works as a "trigger" or isn't even needed, causing the statues lining the narrow corridor breathe fire at the PC, shut and lock the portcullis from which the PC entered, call hidden Iron Golems upon the player, cause a minor cave-in... Make light an important resource. If parts of the dungeon are continuously lit, do it by placing torches or magical lamps on the walls. That way, a monster can zap a wand of whirlwind to extinguish the light source of the PC, or take the torch hung on the wall and run away, leaving the PC stumbling in the darkness. PC's should be able to gain allies, hirelings and companions, roughly of his own power or even greater - a lord of a remote fiefdom who allows the player to use a room of his keep for headquarters and grants aid - money and manpower - to them for exceptionally difficult undertakings. A travelling merchant of formidable wealth who has a great spirit for adventure and isn't entirely without skill at sword and guile and might occassionally come along the PC to help him. These could really spice up the game. Also, a few ideas not inspired by the book that should be the bible of all roguelike developers: No eating corpses. If you want to eat a dead foe, firstly it should be something one could imagine eating. Then it should be cooked. In the case of some nasty things, use lots of spice to avoid vomiting. Eating a dragon corpse isn't likely to confer fire resistance, though it might taste fiery. Most of the time, monsters are part of a group, which can be split into smaller subgroups. A group is good at tactical planning - ambushes, covering ranged attackers, using magical items optimally - of course depending on the intelligence of the group and if the PC caught them off guard. A goblin patrol might consist of four goblin fighters, one goblin legionaire and three goblin archers. If they met a hostile foe, the legionaire (the group leader) would command the fighters to attack the PC and the archers to fire upon him, while it itself would use its rod of slowing upon the player. Now, if the player mowed over the goblin patrol, like he would likely do in a roguelike, the goblins would try to flee when the opponent proves overwhelming or their leader is killed. Suppose one goblin survives. It would try to find its way back to the goblin tribe, of which the goblin patrol was a subgroup. There, the goblin witch doctor would heal it and it would be assigned to another patrol, or the chieftain's personal guard (since it would be concidered a veteran after surviving the confrontation against the hero). The defenses of the tribe would be increased (that's what the patrol was for, detecting potential intruders), possibly by calling all the other patrols in to defensive positions. Now, suppose that the goblin found that the entire lair of his tribe had been eradicated and looted, littered only with corpses stripped of valuables (Now, who might be responsible? ;-). Since there is no more a group "goblin tribe", it would try to seek out the nearest known group containing mainly goblinoids and join it. If the goblin had been an out-of-depht or otherwise very powerful monster, it might have tried to gain minions and a lair and make it's own group. Ugh... that was a long rant. Sorry for the extensive rambling ;)