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Player character/party should be punished for making themselves walking targets

Night Goat

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Obviously you should not be attacked by a brigand but by a high level enemy of equal potential.
Unless he's a lich or an idiot, that high-level enemy of equal potential isn't going to put himself in a situation where he has a 50% chance of dying just for some loot.
 

rogozhin

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Last two posts make good points, and in the end it comes down to how the encounter is designed: Insanely powerful Sauron looking NPC just walking up to insanely powerful Sauron looking PC would be stupid if the NPC is simply out for loot, but if he's looking for a duel to test his strength (or maybe to claim some specific item of personal value to him), it makes sense. If it's about bandits or assassins targeting the PC as a risky but lucrative source of loot or bounty, they should be outnumbering him and using ambush tactics.
 

Crevice tab

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Last two posts make good points, and in the end it comes down to how the encounter is designed: Insanely powerful Sauron looking NPC just walking up to insanely powerful Sauron looking PC would be stupid if the NPC is simply out for loot, but if he's looking for a duel to test his strength (or maybe to claim some specific item of personal value to him), it makes sense. If it's about bandits or assassins targeting the PC as a risky but lucrative source of loot or bounty, they should be outnumbering him and using ambush tactics.

Sauron level NPCs shouldn't be random encounters (except very, very rarely for variety). Dark Lords aren't a dime a dozen. Otherwise you get Skyrim's dragons everywhere clusterfuck- legendary monsters tend to get really boring after you kill several dozens. Killing an epic level character should happen at the end of a long quest or even series of quests where you actually get a feel of what that character is about and why is he important. Basically there should be a point where people stay the fuck away from you unless they're actively suicidal.
 

laclongquan

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Or a stealth thieves after your ass. They stealthily sneak to your ass, pick your pocket, then run like hell. You have one or two turn to deal with that fucker or he would have been out of range and you cant catch up.

The key, is the stealth level is changed according to level. At low level, typical thieves with normal invest in stealth. At high level, it's a special race with max invest in stealth. For example 3.5 DnD rule, at low level it's human with max invest in stealth, at high level it's Gnome with nondetection, bonus +2 to Hide outside, max hide, AND equal level to player.

Player will have to invest in Detection method, with max investment, and use it constantly.
 

abnaxus

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I wonder if this concept could be expanded further? No one should be walking around Markath or Riften in Skyrim in daedric armour without a dozen high level assassins or competing heroes noticing it and coming straight for you to kill you and take your shit. Just stay in a peasant's clothes, so no one knows who you are. Otherwise, get ready to be challenged and attacked in the streets anytime.
180px-TR-npc-Gaenor.jpg
 

Viata

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Killing an epic level character should happen at the end of a long quest or even series of quests where you actually get a feel of what that character is about and why is he important.
Do something like Pokemon RBY, then. Your rival(high level enemies in this case) showing up in places you were not expecting or almost finishing a dungeon.
 

Overboard

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Three mages from hidden places cast Grease, web, and Hold Person on you. 4 archers start peppering you full of arrows from far away. You certainly can take them, but they are surrounding you, meaning you are going to go from one direct to another to kill them one by one, meanwhile still getting arrows on your ass. What the fuck!

Reminds me of this movie:
http://youtu.be/TmSKWKK_udQ
Start at 7 mns if you want the relevant section, or just watch the whole thing to enjoy a classic.
 

Trash

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Nice thread, Wyrmlord. Being the chosen one is a staple of crpg's. There being consequences for the pc is however something you rarely see outside of main quest twists and turns. I loved it when I was confronted in Arcanum by enemy parties of murderers that were specifically looking for me. Or how killing some npc's suddenly got me an'invite' to the Dark Brotherhood in Daggerfall. It's the kind of reactivity I'd love to see more of. Why not have your party be sought out by other adventuring groups looking to loot your corpses? Why not kick off a sidequest with a thieves guild robbing you when the player reaches a ridiculous amount of wealth? Where is the mercenary company hired to take out my stronghold when I get too strong? There's a lot that devs can do to keep even the most OP player on his toes.
 

Wyrmlord

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In the Baldur's Gates, so many who saw Drizzt Do'Urden thought, "THAT guy? If I am the one who kills him, it's gonna be grand". Just knowing this guy is wielding two powerful scimitars and is a juicy target to prove yourself would incentivize the players to kill him.

It would make too much sense to turn it around and see yourself as a potential target as Drizzt is. If you walk around with 20 fame, have the Helm of Balduuran,.etc, other evil parties would as much leap at the chance to kill you as Drizzt.

I think the STALKER games did something in that regard. For the artifact quests, other stalkers and bandits would also be on the search for that artifact and could get it before you. And there would be a roster or ranking of people in the Zone who are the most powerful - and you'd see your 500 kills pale in comparison to the Duty guy with 900 kills who is probably wiping out a bandit base that you could have wiped out.
 

hakuroshi

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In the Baldur's Gates, so many who saw Drizzt Do'Urden thought, "THAT guy? If I am the one who kills him, it's gonna be grand". Just knowing this guy is wielding two powerful scimitars and is a juicy target to prove yourself would incentivize the players to kill him.

Yeah, 'cos you can savescum.
And even if ironman, you'd lose nothing but time spent.
Bandit attacking powerful character puts his life on stake.
 

Trash

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In the Baldur's Gates, so many who saw Drizzt Do'Urden thought, "THAT guy? If I am the one who kills him, it's gonna be grand". Just knowing this guy is wielding two powerful scimitars and is a juicy target to prove yourself would incentivize the players to kill him.

It would make too much sense to turn it around and see yourself as a potential target as Drizzt is. If you walk around with 20 fame, have the Helm of Balduuran,.etc, other evil parties would as much leap at the chance to kill you as Drizzt.

I think the STALKER games did something in that regard. For the artifact quests, other stalkers and bandits would also be on the search for that artifact and could get it before you. And there would be a roster or ranking of people in the Zone who are the most powerful - and you'd see your 500 kills pale in comparison to the Duty guy with 900 kills who is probably wiping out a bandit base that you could have wiped out.

That's a trope in westerns. The old and jaded gunfighter who just wants to be left alone but gets constantly bothered by young upstarts looking to make a name. Fame should be a double etched sword. Either through sidequests, consequences in your main quest or encounters. There's massive potential here that devs have rarely if ever touched upon.
 

Crevice tab

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Do something like Pokemon RBY, then. Your rival(high level enemies in this case) showing up in places you were not expecting or almost finishing a dungeon.

This. Epic enemy trying to catch you unprepared >>>>>>> suicidal bandits trying to attack a demigod. Even better if he'll appear after the PC is injured/had a long fight.

Nice thread, Wyrmlord. Being the chosen one is a staple of crpg's. There being consequences for the pc is however something you rarely see outside of main quest twists and turns. I loved it when I was confronted in Arcanum by enemy parties of murderers that were specifically looking for me. Or how killing some npc's suddenly got me an'invite' to the Dark Brotherhood in Daggerfall. It's the kind of reactivity I'd love to see more of. Why not have your party be sought out by other adventuring groups looking to loot your corpses? Why not kick off a sidequest with a thieves guild robbing you when the player reaches a ridiculous amount of wealth? Where is the mercenary company hired to take out my stronghold when I get too strong? There's a lot that devs can do to keep even the most OP player on his toes.

This*10. I'd like to see an RPG where choices and consequences are the core of the design instead of at best a secondary part. Arcanum and Daggerfall get pretty close to this at times but I'd like to see a game that really goes all out on this shit.
 

DraQ

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Another solution is that a method of attack that is annoying to player
The aim isn't to annoy, however. It's to kill before getting killed yourself, and, failing that, to escape.

For example try to arrange for "rocks fall everyone dies" while the player/party are walking down a mountain path.

Another option would be trying to frame the player for something.

imagine you walking down the tract. Three mages from hidden places cast Grease, web, and Hold Person on you. 4 archers start peppering you full of arrows from far away. You certainly can take them, but they are surrounding you, meaning you are going to go from one direct to another to kill them one by one, meanwhile still getting arrows on your ass. What the fuck!

The key is maximum range to attack, with status-affected spells, because direct damage spells can be shrugged off.
4 archers 3 casters is already quite a bit above your usual band of brigands.

Or a stealth thieves after your ass. They stealthily sneak to your ass, pick your pocket, then run like hell. You have one or two turn to deal with that fucker or he would have been out of range and you cant catch up.

The key, is the stealth level is changed according to level. At low level, typical thieves with normal invest in stealth. At high level, it's a special race with max invest in stealth. For example 3.5 DnD rule, at low level it's human with max invest in stealth, at high level it's Gnome with nondetection, bonus +2 to Hide outside, max hide, AND equal level to player.
Or how about no, at least to your blatantly level scaled and racially homogenous would be thieves?

First thing first, in order to have NPC thieves game needs a bit of asshole UI - player shouldn't be helpfully informed the moment he loses something from inventory, unless he willingly gives that item up.

Anyway, thieves, brigands and occasional would be duelist are fine, but I think you guys are missing the obvious:
A king, major noble or another person of influence would probably love to get their hands on an artifact last seen about a millennium ago when it was used to write a good chunk of region's history in addition to a good poertion of local myths and tales.
And, in a feudal or similar system they would have little to stop them or make them reconsider.
 
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Crevice tab

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Anyway, thieves, brigands and occasional would be duelist are fine, but I think you guys are missing the obvious:
In general it's often baffling how civilized, in the modern day sense, supposedly rough fantasy regimes tend to be.

Fantasy settings as implemented in cRPGs, even supposedly gritty and grimdark ones, are surprisingly fair, especially towards the player.

Has anyone ever seen local noble or another person in a position of power wanting the PC to hand over some sweet artifact weapon they just obtained and using all means at their disposal to get it, even attempting to murder or imprison the PC if they refuse? And why the fuck not - it's not like most of those settings are democracies, republics or even constitutional monarchies - the guy would be in the right in such case, and having to choose between becoming an outlaw through no fault of your own or giving up something that could really make the difference in your quest would make an interesting choice, especially given how organic it could be in terms of implementation.

In pretty much every cRPG you can pretty much walk into a local noble's palace, insult him, shit on his carpet and just walk out - why?

Or why can't you be wrongfully accused of something as generic mechanics instead of carefully scripted plot-hook?
A king, major noble or another person of influence would probably love to get their hands on an artifact last seen about a millennium ago when it was used to write a good chunk of region's history in addition to a good poertion of local myths and tales.
And, in a feudal or similar system they would have little to stop them or make them reconsider.

Anything that isn't carefully scripted tends to be shit. Of course everything tends to be shit nowadays but radiant quests and other randomly random randomness is not the way to go if you want a game world that makes sense.

I like the idea of taking a player's shiny artifact once in a while. On the other hand even in the middle ages nobles didn't just take stuff off the mercenaries they hired without good reason (or payment) because they'd find themselves at a shortage of mercenaries otherwise so the artifact needs to be important enough for the noble to ignore the hit to his reputation but at the same time not powerful enough that the player can casually defeat all the forces said noble throws at him. Tossing the PC into the dungeon should happen but not too often.

A more subtle approach like thieves, assassins, ambushes etc seems more in line with what should happen to a powerful character.
 
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pippin

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Reputation systems would work well if we had carefully crafted moral systems. Sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons, bad people do good things for bad reasons, etc. However, due to how easy is to kill everyone in any rpg, this is hard to accomplish. It doesn't help that most of the times, when you kill people, the answer is something like "whoa, you're mean". Being lectured by that old military guy in Deus Ex made me feel somewhat bad about taking the easy path, for instance. In a similar way, having to choose bewteen saving some farms or the trapped vault people in New Vegas got me thinking a bit as well. As most things, flaws can be fixed with good writing and design.
 
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Robbing a normal looking guy who you've seen taking something valuable off the city bank = okay

Robbing a guy who is wearing demonic armor that was probably taken off his latest victim because they sure as hell aren't selling those at the general store = hahahaha no

To even attempt the latter you'd have to be a total badass as well, which raises the question of why you'd be performing the robberies yourself instead of sending your subordinates to do it. If you know the hero is carrying the key to your defeat it makes sense to hunt him down personally, but even then you probably have a loyal right hand man insisting he can totally do this while you wait right here sipping on your juice.

Killing an epic level character should happen at the end of a long quest or even series of quests where you actually get a feel of what that character is about and why is he important.
Do something like Pokemon RBY, then. Your rival(high level enemies in this case) showing up in places you were not expecting or almost finishing a dungeon.

Hah. He even does that intentionally once, waiting right by a teleporter saying he knew you had to be the one causing the ruckus downstairs, fighting the generic bad guys.
 

Norfleet

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That's a trope in westerns. The old and jaded gunfighter who just wants to be left alone but gets constantly bothered by young upstarts looking to make a name. Fame should be a double etched sword. Either through sidequests, consequences in your main quest or encounters. There's massive potential here that devs have rarely if ever touched upon.
Yeah, but that's a trope of fiction. The actual Wild West was not filled with gunfights, and you wouldn't believe the really low body counts that allegedly famous gunfighters actually had. The infamous Billy the Kid was involved in all of 4 confirmed kills and the total of 9 dead (other 5 were part of a mass shootout), with a grand total of 5 gunfights. 5.

How many gunfights will the player get into just leaving the tutorial?
 

laclongquan

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Another solution is that a method of attack that is annoying to player
The aim isn't to annoy, however. It's to kill before getting killed yourself, and, failing that, to escape.

For example try to arrange for "rocks fall everyone dies" while the player/party are walking down a mountain path. <== Fuck your deus-ex-machina in the ass. Hard, without lube.

Another option would be trying to frame the player for something. <== full scale quest design.

imagine you walking down the tract. Three mages from hidden places cast Grease, web, and Hold Person on you. 4 archers start peppering you full of arrows from far away. You certainly can take them, but they are surrounding you, meaning you are going to go from one direct to another to kill them one by one, meanwhile still getting arrows on your ass. What the fuck!

The key is maximum range to attack, with status-affected spells, because direct damage spells can be shrugged off.
4 archers 3 casters is already quite a bit above your usual band of brigands.

Or a stealth thieves after your ass. They stealthily sneak to your ass, pick your pocket, then run like hell. You have one or two turn to deal with that fucker or he would have been out of range and you cant catch up.

The key, is the stealth level is changed according to level. At low level, typical thieves with normal invest in stealth. At high level, it's a special race with max invest in stealth. For example 3.5 DnD rule, at low level it's human with max invest in stealth, at high level it's Gnome with nondetection, bonus +2 to Hide outside, max hide, AND equal level to player.
Or how about no, at least to your blatantly level scaled and racially homogenous would be thieves? <== Fuck your lack of understanding . in IWD/BG setting, Gnome got bonus to Hide, meaning a Gnome will stealth better than most.

First thing first, in order to have NPC thieves game needs a bit of asshole UI - player shouldn't be helpfully informed the moment he loses something from inventory, unless he willingly gives that item up. <== Fuck your blind play too. I like my screen inform me fully that one fucker has just roll a successful steal of my 1 gold coin because I am going to find that thief and fuck them extra hard.

Anyway, thieves, brigands and occasional would be duelist are fine, but I think you guys are missing the obvious:
A king, major noble or another person of influence would probably love to get their hands on an artifact last seen about a millennium ago when it was used to write a good chunk of region's history in addition to a good poertion of local myths and tales.
And, in a feudal or similar system they would have little to stop them or make them reconsider.
Your objection to my solution, at base, is nothing more than "you are not fancy enough". Fuck fancy! My solution is based on feasibility.
Your alternative is full scale straight from-the-ground-up design for quest mod which good luck to you getting people do it. Quest coder seem to be all prima donna with their own stuffs do, not spare time to design according to OTHER people's idea.

My solution is something a coder can design into his/her encounter mod, because it's gameplay/mechanic. Straight up tiny side-details in a scenario, you can stuff any kind of lore into background i dont care.
 

Trash

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That's a trope in westerns. The old and jaded gunfighter who just wants to be left alone but gets constantly bothered by young upstarts looking to make a name. Fame should be a double etched sword. Either through sidequests, consequences in your main quest or encounters. There's massive potential here that devs have rarely if ever touched upon.
Yeah, but that's a trope of fiction. The actual Wild West was not filled with gunfights, and you wouldn't believe the really low body counts that allegedly famous gunfighters actually had. The infamous Billy the Kid was involved in all of 4 confirmed kills and the total of 9 dead (other 5 were part of a mass shootout), with a grand total of 5 gunfights. 5.

How many gunfights will the player get into just leaving the tutorial?

I know it's a trope of the fiction, hence my use of the word 'western.'
 

Regvard

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Why are you alone in the first place? You still can't have parties in games with a Z coordinate? I recall some recruitable npcs in Skyrim but how did their AIs perform, did they keep up?
 
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They're serviceable, as long as you follow the roads and paths. If you jump over rocks and ravines and climb steep mounts they're gonna take a while to catch up. Still, never "lost" one to evil geometry (though the other day one of them got locked inside the alchemist's shoppe because it was closing time and we were kicked out, but the owner locked the door as soon as I was outside. I prefer to think it was intentional and they wanted to have hot lesbian sex in peace).

Oh, and if you play a rogue they'll happily hold torches while you try to sneak in the shadows. And depending on their morality they'll get angry with your crimes. I had the bosmer dude from riverwood go postal on me becausr I attacked a thalmor patrol unprovoked (admittedly not a very civilized thing to do). That's another reason to be alone.
 
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kris

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Obviously you should not be attacked by a brigand but by a high level enemy of equal potential.
Unless he's a lich or an idiot, that high-level enemy of equal potential isn't going to put himself in a situation where he has a 50% chance of dying just for some loot.

It would work if that high level enemy were controlled by a human. ;) they just see the loot and XP.
 

Delterius

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Similarly, in Baldur's Gate 2, having a piece of the holy silver sword made you a walking target for the githyanki, since you can't put your hands on a powerful item without consequences.

I wonder if this concept could be expanded further? No one should be walking around Markath or Riften in Skyrim in daedric armour without a dozen high level assassins or competing heroes noticing it and coming straight for you to kill you and take your shit.
The BG2 example is a good idea for some quests but the Skyrim one is insane. If anything what most RPGs need is a damn morale check to keep xvarts from bothering the player.
 

Damned Registrations

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Similarly, in Baldur's Gate 2, having a piece of the holy silver sword made you a walking target for the githyanki, since you can't put your hands on a powerful item without consequences.

I wonder if this concept could be expanded further? No one should be walking around Markath or Riften in Skyrim in daedric armour without a dozen high level assassins or competing heroes noticing it and coming straight for you to kill you and take your shit.
The BG2 example is a good idea for some quests but the Skyrim one is insane. If anything what most RPGs need is a damn morale check to keep xvarts from bothering the player.
This, pretty much.

One thing that does make sense about level scaling is that the player probably shouldn't encounter enemies so weak they'd clearly be terrified of him. And the daedric armour in elder scrolls isn't just 'fancy armour', it's fucking demonic armour that can only be acquired by killing incredibly powerful foes. Robbing a guy in daedric armour would be like deciding to rob a cop in riot gear. The people worth robbing are the ones in expensive civilian clothes.

That said, the PC in an elder scrolls game is also usually walking around with half a dozen or more daedric artifacts and legendary items halfway through the game, and presumably at least once in a while should be approached or outright attacked by an organized force of mercenaries out to deliver said items to a wealthy figure- the player ends up doing this shit all the time after all. Mind you, once the player gets strong enough, he should have the option to retaliate against whoever is sending goons after him. Whether that takes the form of sneaking into his mansion at night and cutting his throat, or storming in during broad daylight and hewing everyone apart.

survivor.jpg
 

Helton

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It could be cool, I guess, to be the victim of a caper. Like Edward Norton in the newest Italian Job.

Gotta be careful though. Most implementations of this idea would probably suck.
 

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