Here's something I've been thinking about recently.
The monsters in Tendry's Tale, and therefore the default ones available in the RPG editor, with very few exceptions have
exactly the same stats as the ones in Tower of the Sorcerer. This works out very well for Tendry's Tale, but not so well for user-made holds. So many of the holds I've seen -- including my own -- have a problem with the player ending up with way too much money. Why is this a problem? Because shortage of money is one good way to create interesting choices for the player -- should you spend money to get this key now or will that leave you short later? -- and so on. When the player has money practically rolling out of their eyeballs, you may as well not bother using greckle gates at all, because it will be automatic for the player to open them, knowing that he can get away with it.
So, what are some possible solutions to this problem?
(0) One possibility is of course to shrug and just build a hold where money is never an interesting decision. Doesn't stop there being lots of other interesting choices to make in a hold.
(1) Use altars/Machines like the ones in TotS in your hold. Of course, you will need to do some scripting, but you do at least have considerable freedom to set the parameters as you like. Jeff_Ray's The Test of Mind does this quite well, with altars whose cost
doubles each time, thus using up a lot of money and letting the player use them far less often than the ones in TotS -- which in turn gives him more freedom to include ATK and DEF gems and all the optimisation choices they bring.
(2) Give the player a really big purchase that they need to save up for. This is of course the route taken by the first half of Tendry's Tale, and is also seen in TotS (the Super Magic Mattock) and Fetch the Pie (the Serpentskin Shield). The problem with this is, firstly, unless you warn the player a long way in advance it's quite likely they will think it's a hold where greckles simply don't matter and spend them too freely and have to restore; secondly, once the player
does know about the purchase, they know exactly what they need to do to get it. (Though there can still be interesting decisions about
where exactly to save the necessary money. I'm not saying this is a bad route; it can be done well. I'm just pointing out the potential problems with it.)
(3) Give the player lots of moderately large purchases spaced through the hold, so that they definitely can't afford to get all of them as soon as they become available, and they have to decide which ones are more urgent to get and when to get them. This is what I'm trying to do with Nobard's Hold, although I'm finding it increasingly difficult as the hold grows more complex
(4) Change the amount of money monsters give. Simple as that. To do this, put a character in the first room with this script:
Set var "_MonsterGRMult" = 50
Set var "_MonsterREPMult" = 50
The value 50 makes monsters give 50% (that is, half) of the money they normally would. You can change 50 to any other value if you like. And if you already have a "
setup"
character in the opening room, for instance setting the player role and starting stats, you can add these lines to the existing script rather than putting them in a separate character.
And that's all I wanted to say. Really, the main reason I made this post was that I wanted to give other architects something to think about before beginning a new project. Solution (4) in particular would be a drastic thing to do to an already half-finished hold, but if you did it right at the start of the building process it would seem perfectly natural. I don't want to sound like I'm prescribing anything, but I hope at least some future holds will do this.
Does anyone have any other ideas for possible solutions?
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50th Skywatcher
