bovis wrote:
Does anyone want to help me with the creation of my hold, maybe some experienced hold maker could give me something to start on, and a few tips. 
I could, as MeckMeck suggests, give you something to start on and perhaps a few tips in how I look at hold building and general DROD playing. If you're interested, send me a PM or e-mail, and I'll get back to you.
MeckMeck GRE wrote:
For the start : Do you want to say some basic rooms for your hold ? Well, PM me and I might make few rooms for you. But I should need some kind of genre your hold should be (puzzle/action/RGP/mixed/Exploration) and what difficult.
Indeed, genre can be very important in terms of the rooms to include in it, but unless you're making a very specialised type of hold, your hold will eventually be likely to be of the "
normal"
puzzle containing type.
For some hints :
Your rooms have too aims : Fun and difficulty. Fun doesn´t mean a slaughtfest. Its basically the balance of difficulty itself.
Fun is relative to who is playing. Some people hate large horde manipulation, while others hate specific solutions relying on monster movement order. To a point, you're right; balancing difficulty does make a hold fun, but so can really tough lynchpin solutions. It all depends on who your target audience is.
Try at first to make some roach or orb based puzzles. They are very easy to make (such as 4 doors and 4 orbs which do different things or a roach you have to lure out of a cage you cant enter and also have some forcearrow traps).
They are a simple option, and what I did personally, but that's only one out of a large number of starting ideas, and it's not particularly good unless you know what you're doing (orb/door puzzles can get a little too reliant on guesswork).
Then you could do trapdoor mazes with a red door that had to be opened or Roach queen puzzles ( Exaple of one of eggeggs : You have to kill 2 roachqueens which are on two squares next to each other. You can kill one but cant the second because she ran away. If you go On the sqauare the roachqueen was on then you are blocked by an forcearrow. You can move right or left but not any more down [what you need to exit]. You have to wait for a spawn roach and lure her inside the empty square. Now the other queen cant flee to that square. You can kill the roachqueen and than easyly the roach [which moves towards you])
Monster manipulation puzzles are excellent ideas, but rather than trying to shape a room to a preset recipe, like above, try instead to find a basic concept and fit it to a room. Innovation often comes from alternative thinking and experimentation.
In short, your hold will be whatever you're prepared to make it into. The quality of a hold is not only dependent on your skill as a hold builder; it's also proportional to the amount of effort you put into it.
My general advice would be to step back, sit down, and have a good think about your hold. What sort of hold do you want it to be? What sort of puzzles do you want to make for your players, and who are you intending to play the hold? How serious are you about what you want to do?
Then, with your analysis over, go and experiment! You might just discover that inspiration you were looking for.
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Resident Medic/Mycologist
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