Goonhub
01-09-2014, 09:35 AM
OH LOOK ANOTHER TERRIBLE IDEA FROM THAT DRUNKEN ASSHOLE
Okay so I've been reading a Let's Play of Risk Legacy - the elevator speech on that variant is that it's intended to be played repeatedly by the same 3-5 people, because Things Can Happen in each game that can change the game board or rules. This sparked an idea! We already have random events, and there are ways for player actions to profoundly change the game - let's step it up a little.
The basic idea I'm having is that each round, the server picks from a list of conditions, each with a 'significance' value (this comes up later). Examples:
- 10 different players fart in the span of a second (this would be 'low significance')
- Any player gets a bank account balance of at least one million space credits (this would be 'medium significance')
- 75% of the players that started the game are dead (this would be 'high significance')
- Or anything else, these are simply examples. There should be enough of these such that when the server picks a few conditions for the round, it isn't easy to predict whether or not any given condition that a given player knows about will be active.
When these conditions are met, Something Happens. Actions would be divided into groups based on low, medium, or high significance, so it wouldn't result in something dumb like the chef dying triggering a meteor apocalypse or something. Furthermore, each significance level group would have an assortment of beneficial, neutral, and harmful effects, making it EVEN HARDER to predict what exactly will happen. Examples:
- All living players get 1000 space credits added to their bank account (low significance, beneficial)
- All light sources change to random colors (low significance, neutral)
- A randomly selected APC or two has its main breaker switched off, its battery drained, and set to NOT charge from the power network (low significance as it's trivial to turn it back on again, harmful)
- 3-4 crates of $department supplies are spawned in $department (medium significance, beneficial)
- The station is pelted with 'meateors' which are just giant meatballs that explode into dozens of gibs on impact with no damage (medium significance, neutral)
- 3-4 randomly selected unlocked genes are deleted or relocked or whatever (made as if they were never researched) in Genetics (medium significance, harmful)
- All living players are healed to full (high significance, beneficial)
- All space tiles are changed to fullblack, all ambient sounds muted including sounds generated by actions like fighting and whacking on windows, heartbeat.ogg plays on repeat (high significance, neutral)
- A group of hostiles are spawned somewhere, number of group dependent on how nasty the mob is, so you might get 4-5 spacebears, you might get 2-3 syndicate killbots, you might get a single king wendigo. (high significance, harmful)
Ideally the server would roll a given amount of conditions, weighted so most of them were low significance, some were medium significance, with only one or two high significance. Perhaps this could scale with player population so a skeleton crew would only get 4 conditions (2 low, 1 each medium and high) whereas if the starting population is in the 40s, it would roll seven (four low, two medium, one high) and if it's something ridiculous like 60 then it rolls ten (five low, three medium, two high).
Again, there would be enough conditions so that people wouldn't just arrange to all fart all at once every round because Something Will Happen, so any given condition won't fire every round or even most rounds. Hell, maybe when the server is rolling for conditions, there should be a chance that there are NO conditions that round (a third? half?) so the players won't even be able to consistently know if there ARE conditions waiting to fire.
I dunno, it just occurs to me that this might add a fun twist sometimes, but if it's structured properly, it won't make things into a meaningless muddle of KRAZY HIJINKS. Conditions would ideally be things that can happen organically in a game and not trivial for someone to trigger intentionally, actions should be things that CAN'T happen normally in a game and range from barely noticeable to gamechangers (heavily weighted away from gamechangers, obviously). There should probably be some sort of announcement when a condition fires so we don't get a billion adminhelps wondering what the fuck (though we would still get a few because the surest way to make sure a bunch of players don't know something is to outright tell them). GALACTIC CONFEDERATION UPDATE: A SPACE WIZARD TWO SOLAR SYSTEMS AWAY HAD A SEIZURE, EXPECT SOMETHING WEIRD TO HAPPEN and cue the chemical dispenser adopting critter AI and wandering around randomly
Is this idea decent? Is it shitty? Do you have ideas for conditions and actions? POST POST POST
Okay so I've been reading a Let's Play of Risk Legacy - the elevator speech on that variant is that it's intended to be played repeatedly by the same 3-5 people, because Things Can Happen in each game that can change the game board or rules. This sparked an idea! We already have random events, and there are ways for player actions to profoundly change the game - let's step it up a little.
The basic idea I'm having is that each round, the server picks from a list of conditions, each with a 'significance' value (this comes up later). Examples:
- 10 different players fart in the span of a second (this would be 'low significance')
- Any player gets a bank account balance of at least one million space credits (this would be 'medium significance')
- 75% of the players that started the game are dead (this would be 'high significance')
- Or anything else, these are simply examples. There should be enough of these such that when the server picks a few conditions for the round, it isn't easy to predict whether or not any given condition that a given player knows about will be active.
When these conditions are met, Something Happens. Actions would be divided into groups based on low, medium, or high significance, so it wouldn't result in something dumb like the chef dying triggering a meteor apocalypse or something. Furthermore, each significance level group would have an assortment of beneficial, neutral, and harmful effects, making it EVEN HARDER to predict what exactly will happen. Examples:
- All living players get 1000 space credits added to their bank account (low significance, beneficial)
- All light sources change to random colors (low significance, neutral)
- A randomly selected APC or two has its main breaker switched off, its battery drained, and set to NOT charge from the power network (low significance as it's trivial to turn it back on again, harmful)
- 3-4 crates of $department supplies are spawned in $department (medium significance, beneficial)
- The station is pelted with 'meateors' which are just giant meatballs that explode into dozens of gibs on impact with no damage (medium significance, neutral)
- 3-4 randomly selected unlocked genes are deleted or relocked or whatever (made as if they were never researched) in Genetics (medium significance, harmful)
- All living players are healed to full (high significance, beneficial)
- All space tiles are changed to fullblack, all ambient sounds muted including sounds generated by actions like fighting and whacking on windows, heartbeat.ogg plays on repeat (high significance, neutral)
- A group of hostiles are spawned somewhere, number of group dependent on how nasty the mob is, so you might get 4-5 spacebears, you might get 2-3 syndicate killbots, you might get a single king wendigo. (high significance, harmful)
Ideally the server would roll a given amount of conditions, weighted so most of them were low significance, some were medium significance, with only one or two high significance. Perhaps this could scale with player population so a skeleton crew would only get 4 conditions (2 low, 1 each medium and high) whereas if the starting population is in the 40s, it would roll seven (four low, two medium, one high) and if it's something ridiculous like 60 then it rolls ten (five low, three medium, two high).
Again, there would be enough conditions so that people wouldn't just arrange to all fart all at once every round because Something Will Happen, so any given condition won't fire every round or even most rounds. Hell, maybe when the server is rolling for conditions, there should be a chance that there are NO conditions that round (a third? half?) so the players won't even be able to consistently know if there ARE conditions waiting to fire.
I dunno, it just occurs to me that this might add a fun twist sometimes, but if it's structured properly, it won't make things into a meaningless muddle of KRAZY HIJINKS. Conditions would ideally be things that can happen organically in a game and not trivial for someone to trigger intentionally, actions should be things that CAN'T happen normally in a game and range from barely noticeable to gamechangers (heavily weighted away from gamechangers, obviously). There should probably be some sort of announcement when a condition fires so we don't get a billion adminhelps wondering what the fuck (though we would still get a few because the surest way to make sure a bunch of players don't know something is to outright tell them). GALACTIC CONFEDERATION UPDATE: A SPACE WIZARD TWO SOLAR SYSTEMS AWAY HAD A SEIZURE, EXPECT SOMETHING WEIRD TO HAPPEN and cue the chemical dispenser adopting critter AI and wandering around randomly
Is this idea decent? Is it shitty? Do you have ideas for conditions and actions? POST POST POST