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Caravel Forum : DROD RPG Boards : RPG Feature Requests : Checkpoints Found Percentage (DROD RPG's real analogue to secrets conquered)
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TFMurphy
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icon Checkpoints Found Percentage (+2)  
In TCB, to fully master a hold, you generally had to conquer every secret room as well as finish the hold. Getting 100% Secrets was an important secondary goal (after actually *conquering* the hold) for many.

Hidden rooms aren't quite the same in DROD RPG. Whilst many are hidden in very clever ways, this is merely finding them. While this is a goal in itself, there's something another more involved goal that doesn't seem to be tracked yet.

DROD RPG possesses Score Checkpoints. This is analagous to conquering a room in TCB, and many are at easily found junctures throughout the hold. But some are far more well hidden. These are secret goals in themselves... and as such, are yet another goal for someone to strive for.

So... how about we track these as well, just as Hidden Rooms explored are? I imagine many will want to track down all the Score Checkpoints in a hold, and this would help identify how much more they have left to find.

Also, it offers another possible alternative to Hold Mastery, since completing all the checkpoints seems to me to be a more telling proof of mastery than exploring all the hidden rooms in a hold.
10-01-2008 at 02:13 PM
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Tahnan
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (+1)  
TFMurphy wrote:
....many are at easily found junctures throughout the hold. But some are far more well hidden.
To stress the (perhaps interestingly philosophical) point: all score points are hidden. You just stumble across them as you go. For instance, in what's his name's hold, the one with the aumtlich PC and the maze of eyes, there's a mad eye on a dark island in a red-lit room. (Very atmospheric. Kind of a "mad eye moody". Anyway.) I was playing the hold and thought, huh, there's no reason to kill it, but I might as well. Lo and behold, it was a score point.

The thing is, since score points are invisible to the player and necessarily, I gather, triggered by scripting ("wait for player at", perhaps, or "wait for monster killed"), this is not just a fact about score points in hidden rooms hidden rooms: there are all kinds of places a score point might be hidden. So the "checkpoints found %age" is a really useful idea...but one might also wonder whether there should be some other method for identifying the scorepoints in a room. Is is an acceptable RPG challenge to have a checkpoint that triggers when you step on a scroll facing north? Would the HAs block a hold with that in it?
10-01-2008 at 09:01 PM
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silver
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (+1)  
Because checkpoints can apparently only come from scripting, it's actually intractable to find all the scorepoints... and possibly misleading if we have something like a single NPC who gives "one" checkpoint, but with different potential text based on how you approach it (just as an example) so actually has more than one checkpoint command, but only uses one before script termination.


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10-01-2008 at 09:15 PM
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TFMurphy
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (0)  
silver wrote:
Because checkpoints can apparently only come from scripting, it's actually intractable to find all the scorepoints... and possibly misleading if we have something like a single NPC who gives "one" checkpoint, but with different potential text based on how you approach it (just as an example) so actually has more than one checkpoint command, but only uses one before script termination.

I imagine that differently named checkpoints are different checkpoints. Just because the same script calls them doesn't mean they're the same. What counts is how the CaravelNet highscore interprets them.

So the main possibilities are counting one of the following: (1) every Score Checkpoint command in the game, (2) the number of unique names attributed to Score Checkpoints throughout the game or (3) the number of scripts that contain a Score Checkpoint command. I'd guess (2) is what CaravelNet wants to use, but Mike or Schik will know for certain.

Eseentially, if a script has multiple ways to get to the same "checkpoint" but offers different checkpoints depending on how it was reached, then they should be counted as multiple checkpoints, so long as that's what CaravelNet is doing (which seems simplest - whether checkpoints are used in that way is a hold design issue, and it's up to architects and players to decide whether it's fair or not)

And if some Score Checkpoint is impossible to get to... what's the difference between that and a Secret Room in TCB that's impossible to get to?
10-01-2008 at 09:28 PM
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silver
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (0)  
fair enough. the difficulty I had in coming up with an example of how "number of checkpoints found" could be utterly misleading from a human point of view is hopefully a reflection on how difficult it would be for designers to mess up this percentage. though I by no means claim to be most imaginative destroyer of well-meaning concepts there is :)


edit: the wording implies that I consider myself a "destroyer of well-meaning concepts," but actually I generally only think about ways to destroy well-meaning concepts, but I never really implement them. to the contrary, I often warn people about my ideas in hopes they can shield themselves against them.


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[Last edited by silver at 10-01-2008 10:01 PM]
10-01-2008 at 09:33 PM
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Mechadragon
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (0)  
Checkpoints are scripted, sure, but you could also script in a completely obscure way to open up a hidden room; it goes both ways.
10-01-2008 at 10:00 PM
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Beef Row
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (0)  
Mechadragon wrote:
Checkpoints are scripted, sure, but you could also script in a completely obscure way to open up a hidden room; it goes both ways.

Well, I don't believe this is a request to replace the hidden rooms % with a checkpoint %, as I read it this is a request to list both of these as both are of interest.

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10-02-2008 at 05:46 AM
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Banjooie
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (0)  
Yo, you missed the point.

He's saying that saying checkpoints = scripting, therefore unreliable thing to work by is dumb, because hidden rooms can also = scripting.

Same as secret rooms in TCB.

That said: Fund this idea, because checkpoints are awesome.
10-02-2008 at 10:35 AM
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kieranmillar
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icon Re: Checkpoints Found Percentage (+1)  
The in-game scorepoint list now found on the Restore screen covers off this old feature request: https://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=41708
06-11-2023 at 08:37 AM
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