Monsters and Undead - more or less? Vote

[Anaris]

I was jesting a little, of course. Now consider it on its merits without the intro.

It's still a TMP clone.

[Tom]

The only way I see it work is to crank their spawn rates up so much on the outer regions of a continent, that you basically force realms to start wars of migration to the continent's heart - just to stay safe from monsters and undead.

There is an interesting idea there. We could seperate them out by region or geography. For example, undead could prefer the south and monsters the north (or vice versa, or east/west - I'm just brainstorming here). And there could be "centers" of their activity, especially dangerous places, etc. That might give things more variety.

[Dante Silverfire]

Why not simply roll a dice a few times, and choose say 5-10 regions on continents and make those regions start being undead and monster spawning havens.

Don't point out which ones they are, and make it them spawn up within the area of those regions and not necessarily all from that region itself. Then highly increase the spawn rate there.

Make adjustments from the random initial dice roll to make sure that the spawn sections are at least somewhat evenly spread out.

Then, just make it such that by holding the central region, for X number of time, (say a month) you can start reducing the spawn rate there.

Meanwhile, double the spawn rate continent wide.

[Chenier]

The proper answer to this question, as with many others, is "it depends".

[Indirik]

Just bring back "too much peace" but with a different consequence:

A realm that has not engaged in serious pvp battles in a while runs an increased risk of having a substantial rogue spawn suddenly erupting. Both the strength and the timing would need to be random to an extent.

So, if there is a lull, there is a higher risk than going to war.

Any "TMP-like" idea like this is a bad idea, for the same reason that the TMP system was a bad idea. You are implementing penalties to being at peace in a way that makes it difficult, or impossible to go back to war. The logical response to the consequences proposed is not "Let's declare war so that we get less monster spawn", it's "OMG, pull everyone back and fight the monsters before we're wiped out!" Then the realm won't want to go back to war at all, because they're constantly dealing with the existing rogue spawn. This was the vicious cycle that TMP caused.

[Indirik]

My vote is "more of both", but with some qualifications.

It needs to be controlled, in such a way that it doesn't interfere too much with PvP warfare. Region-type based spawn is an interesting idea. Mountains have always been considered to be monster spawners on Dwilight.

An interesting idea might be to base it on regional noble density. The fewer knights there are holding estates in a region, or the higher the percentage of land in a region not covered by an occupied estate, the higher the spawn rate. Regions that are fully-covered by occupied estates would have essentially no spawn. As the percentage of unoccupied land goes up, so does the spawn. The important thing here is that the estate would have to be occupied by a knight to count.

This would have the effect of hitting the lowest-character-density realms hardest. i.e. realms that players don't find interesting. As regions go rogue and have no estates, they become centers of increased activity, spawning groups that spread out.

Handle the spawn rate increase in such a way that the longer the land stays unoccupied, the faster the rate accumulates. This way a short transience of low-density doesn't instantly generate huge spawns, but continuously neglecting regions eventually results in big problems.

[Tiridia]

There is an interesting idea there. We could seperate them out by region or geography. For example, undead could prefer the south and monsters the north (or vice versa, or east/west - I'm just brainstorming here). And there could be "centers" of their activity, especially dangerous places, etc. That might give things more variety.

Oooh, I like. You could give the mountains to the trolls and the forests to the undead. So we could have some real cursed mountains and haunted forests. With narrow and long continents one could tend to occupy the other end while the other one occupies another end. Or have their "bases" roughly located there.

With big continents surrounded by seas, you could have the coastal regions spawn some strange sea creatures (or even "sea savages") that drive the characters inland.

[egamma]

Increase both as well droughts. If a rogue spawn pops up there should be a good chance you will lose the region if you don't intervene in time. That creates potential for conflict over the region both internal and external.

NO. The "food game" is NO FUN when there is massive drought. Why don't you come to D'Hara, and help me (the banker) deal with the fact that the ENTIRE REALM is going to STARVE in the next week? How much fun do you think that is going to be for the players? And there's NOTHING we can do about it.

[egamma]

There is an interesting idea there. We could seperate them out by region or geography. For example, undead could prefer the south and monsters the north (or vice versa, or east/west - I'm just brainstorming here). And there could be "centers" of their activity, especially dangerous places, etc. That might give things more variety.

More undead in more populated regions (cities/townslands), more monsters in rural/mountain/badlands/forests.

Oooh, I like. You could give the mountains to the trolls and the forests to the undead. So we could have some real cursed mountains and haunted forests. With narrow and long continents one could tend to occupy the other end while the other one occupies another end. Or have their "bases" roughly located there.

With big continents surrounded by seas, you could have the coastal regions spawn some strange sea creatures (or even "sea savages") that drive the characters inland.

This would be a cool way to do it--undead from the graveyards of the populated places, and just flavor text names for the monsters for mountains, forests, etc. "monsters" isn't nearly as much fun as "mountain trolls" and "werewolves from the forests".

[Fleugs]

I don't think the spawn rates should relate to what a region is (townland, mountain, city, ...), but to the geographical location. Think the Huns invading Europe. Think triggering a gigantic movement of people as the world itself has seen in the late roman/early medieval period (4th-6th century). If you wish, be entirely arbitrary in where you make this happen. I would start by not caring about people complaining because you will always find people complaining. Just decide: "This eastern bit of this continent will have to migrate or die." Then get started.

If you want you can spread this out over pretty much all continents, and choose different points of "invasion" for each continent. Some continents which you would prefer to see vanish as opposed to others you could give a higher spawn rate, i.e. making it harder for the entire continent to survive. Because, you know, when all lands are rogue the only thing left to do is migrate - which will in return populate a different continent and allow it to survive these invasions.

The only big downside I see on this is that the "migrating" people would be forced to be absorbed into the power structures of the continent they migrate to. That may be unfair. But as suggested earlier you could arrange it so that entities of continent A get a place to live on continent B. Heck, after a while the refugees from continent A could just fulfil their destiny and carry on the invasion on continent B - without the need of monsters or undead.

[vonGenf]

An interesting idea might be to base it on regional noble density. The fewer knights there are holding estates in a region, or the higher the percentage of land in a region not covered by an occupied estate, the higher the spawn rate. Regions that are fully-covered by occupied estates would have essentially no spawn. As the percentage of unoccupied land goes up, so does the spawn. The important thing here is that the estate would have to be occupied by a knight to count.

This would have the effect of hitting the lowest-character-density realms hardest. i.e. realms that players don't find interesting. As regions go rogue and have no estates, they become centers of increased activity, spawning groups that spread out.

Handle the spawn rate increase in such a way that the longer the land stays unoccupied, the faster the rate accumulates. This way a short transience of low-density doesn't instantly generate huge spawns, but continuously neglecting regions eventually results in big problems.

The issue with basing it on character density is the same issue that the old estate system had. Realms will consider that they have an optimal size and will not want to enter any war once they have reached it, since gaining lands would only trigger monster spawns.

With a density-based system in place, Niselur would have been overcome by monsters and would never have been able to start the current war. We'd have more peace than now.

[Daycryn]

More of both.

I like region based spawning rates especially. Badlands and mountains and forests are natural places for monsters to come from (it's in all the fairy tales). Also the idea about connecting it to knights or estates is appealing, giving a good reason for knights to exist and an incentive to huddle together with other characters in smaller, tight-knit realms.

[Stue (DC)]

I vote for much more. There is nothing wrong in many regions go rogue, even complete realms falling for not being able to balance regular wars with rouge fighting. If you cannot do both, prioritize!

[Tom]

I think spawn rates should be dependent upon noble/region density.

That is actually a pretty interesting idea. It would serve to wipe realms that are mostly empty off the map faster. I would go one step further and count PLAYERS per region so simply dumping a drone character in your favorite realm doesn't change things.

[Tom]

In order to stir things up every now and then, dramatically increase the spawn rates of everything until the island is swarming with them and things start to fall apart, then crank it back down. The idea would be to not let things get too settled and locked in to a particular power structure.

As everyone who hasn't been living under a rock knows, I am no longer a friend of invasions. However, I do like the idea of not simply raising spawn rates, but change them in waves. So instead of rogues being a constant, low-level nuisance the way they are today, there would be times of increased and times of lowered spawn rates, much like the weather.

Definitely a step forward.