Shattered Kingdoms

So, these sorts of NPCs that only spring into existence randomly upon entering a room, have always existed to a degree. Once upon a time, they seemed to be limited to relatively harmless things like spiders on the world map and similar such things.

Since the Dreamscape was added though, they appear to have become a staple of most high end areas, with more and more of them even being retroactively added to some areas that didn't have them before.

The idea is "neat" I guess, though I think I can confidently say very few players enjoy it. It is borderline annoying to have the staple mechanic of luring enemies to you and being able to pick your fights or even just knowing how many fights are ahead, rendered completely useless since the NPCs don't exist until you move into the room.

But, aside from that complaint, there is one serious and very significant problem with these things. Their spawn rate escalates incredibly with a bigger group, as the RNG mechanic appears to fire for every PC that 'moves into a room'. This mechanic actively discourages the "knowledgeable" players from taking "newbies" along on a lot of the end game content. A group of 3 people who know what they're doing is less likely to get wiped than that same group with 3 extra newbies thrown in (this is not theorycrafting, this is cold hard fact). A small group can move 5+ rooms at a time in these random spawn areas without anything popping up, and will pretty much never see two of them at once. When you get to groups of 6, 7, or more PCs, you almost literally can't move a single room without random NPCs popping up, and quite often more than one of them.

This is not a fun mechanic. On top of that, it actively discourages inviting other players to do things in game, which I don't think is good on any level. The game shouldn't get /harder/ because you invited more people. This isn't some co-op action game where the NPCs need inflated health because there's more players. Why is SK punishing people for making large groups to do the game's content together?

I was hoping to hear other player's thoughts on this.

I agree witn Syn.

I agree, a very dreadful mechanic and it discourages lrge grouping. Not sure if it's the same mechanic at play, but when I am in the dark and using infravision. I cannot see the NPCs in nearby rooms till I enter. Is that just how things work or am I missing something I should be doing differently?

The difficulty of them is ridiculous. Random spawn NPC's to make an area more difficult is one thing, but not being able to predict NPC's that almost warrant immediate recall is another.

This is just a mechanic of dark areas, I believe. Infravision doesn't let you see into the other rooms, but it will let you lure from them if you somehow already know what's in the next room.

I'm inclined to agree with this assessment. It takes away from the strategy of SK PvE when you can't control flow of damage in a party (the RE NPCs attack randomly, and often are made with reach), or plan and navigate a "safe" route through areas with any reasonable expectation of success. Lure into the character set up to take damage, plan your formation if there's reaching NPCs to lure so that a squishy target doesn't get one-rounded by an elite-flagged NPC of one of the many, many reaching races, and keep your damage dealers able to do that was a staple of SK area exploration right up until the DS was put in, and it's been dropped by the wayside since (as far as I can tell.)

I think also that too much emphasis is put on the RE NPCs as an area's population. They seem to be leaned on heavily as the majority population of new areas, and I personally am inclined to disagree with that methodology. RE NPCs in older areas are not the major obstacles. They are occasional additional challenges when maneuvering through known and planned-for obstacles. An example that comes to mind is the sand golems and rampagers in the plane of fire vs the malignant fires. They pop up, and sometimes at unfortunate times, but they aren't the main impediment to progress. Nor do they kip and bash and taunt and fury and reach and sometimes even have group-wiping gas blasts that spam between combat rounds.

I would object less to this approach, and enjoy having to deal with it more, if SK was as forgiving as something like DCUO in end game content. The high end content there is scaled so that you need a full 8 raid members with decent gear to get through it, it's really hard sometimes and "casuals" find it impossible at times even with a full raid group until they get the next tier of gear and go back to it. But what that game offers that SK doesn't is a landing pad for failure. If you TPK on the last boss of a raid, you don't lose a full group's kit. One unlucky repop in certain parts of end game content in SK is potentially weeks of gathering and enchanting and brewing and scribing and all sorts of other time-sinks just wasted. You can't get back to the gear, there's no "checkpoint respawn" where you can regroup and try again. It doesn't make me want to take part in or lead groups to high end areas when a single unlucky mistake or moment of bad timing (like walking into a no-magic room and having 3 elite-flagged reaching barbucklers spawn when the room looked empty before you moved) can wipe 5, 6, 9 people's gear in a way that makes it irretrievable. For all the rest of the suck that is the Dreamscape (I really hate that area), at least if you TPK in some parts of it you get your gear back and can try again.

Syn's not wrong in that it inclines people to avoid taking newer, inexperienced people to higher end areas. I've more often seen characters say "no, let's *not* invite X or Y, because it'll be easier if just we go" than "sure, grab X, Y, and Z, even if they're not really l33t because we can keep them safe and show them the ropes." That happened with outer planes before DS, but very rarely, because there you *could* keep them safe and show them the ropes. The REs happened, and increase with group size, but they weren't unmanageable. With areas like DS and such, you can't keep them safe, and their presence actually could wipe the group even if they don't make a mistake just because you get that extra barbuckler or two spawning every step you take.

I used to be a player. This mechanic never bothered me as a player. And, as crazy as I'm sure this sounds to some people, I actually liked it. I find it boring and easy when everything is entirely predictable. I prefer there to be an element of risk and randomness that keeps you on your toes. I prefer to think of my characters as heroically battling through waves of monsters rather than walking around every encounter and making it to the final boss with no resistance. If every Super Mario level were just your final fight with Bowser, would that game have ever taken off? I have my doubts. If you could always just look before you move and navigate around stuff, the Dreamscape would go from being somewhat challenging to being a total cakewalk. Would it be more fun for that? I'm not so sure.

I think the point about how bigger groups attract more attention is a valid point. My counterpoint is that in tabletop RPG encounter design, party strength is a relevant factor. If one troll would be a challenging matchup for one PC, but there are five PCs in the party, would an encounter with one troll still be satisfying to the players or should the GM scale the encounter up so there are a few trolls? There are algorithms to do this in most modern RPG games and, if anything, I think the algorithm for how SK does this could be updated. For instance, on SK, having a party of two and adding one vet is different than having a party of two and adding one newbie. Basing any encounter scaling on character level alone is insufficient if it is to mimic the outcomes generated by RPG methodologies. There may be other ways to do this that preserve the fun of making encounters challenging while, at the same time, do not disincentivize the inclusion of newbies. There is a middle-ground between "fun challenge" and "getting trounced by multiple gas blasters." To that end, I have made some tweaks to a certain much-loathed gas blasting monster in a certain Outer Plane that will render them less frequent, so as to be far less likely to wipe out entire parties that go there.

My solution to this on a general level has been to add more rewards for beating the random encounter monsters, as well as more intermediary loot on the way to final bosses. After all, in a tabletop game, you get more XP and gold for three trolls than for one, so you should also get more meaningful rewards for overcoming larger encounters on SK. However an extra 5 gold pieces or XP is not worth much to a group that is mostly GMs, so I went with equipment instead. There are a lot of new items that got added in on some of the random encounters in the Dreamscape and elsewhere, and the new zone where this mechanic is in place had rewards on the random encounters from the jump. Incidentally, some of these rewards have yet to be found in either the new zones or the old zones.

A secondary reason I have always liked random encounters is that they are sometimes great for leveling. In certain parts of certain zones, you can just walk back and forth and generate encounter after encounter against monsters that can be managed by master or champion characters and level up super fast, without having to wait for area repops. I rarely see people do this, even though it could make for faster leveling than even some of the best traditional leveling spots in some cases.

I'm not strongly opinionated about this issue, by the way; I merely wanted to state my preferences from when I was a player and to share some of the logic behind the design of encounters within the framework available to builders at SK. I think these things can serve a good purpose, and, on the other side of things, they can also be overdone and annoying. I can make specific tweaks in response to specific complaints that I think are merited (such as the aforementioned gas blasting tweak, or creating more rewards, or maybe even quests to bypass some of these places) but, as OA pointed out, I don't think there is a "one size fits all" solution to how this mechanic is implemented across the board, since, in some areas, it has never been a point of irritation, despite having been there for years.

Just a quick thank you to TR for bringing this up. These concerns are new to me and I am certainly willing to make some changes, although what exactly should be done is not yet clear to me. Probably either a tweak to spawn rate and/or possibly pre-spawning one room around you. I am a bit hesitant to do the second, because it will generate a lot more creatures.

A few things.

The unforgivingness OA mentioned is probably worthy of a topic in and of itself.

But as it was brought up, I would like to touch on it briefly. To my knowledge, and as far as anyone I've spoken with IC is aware, nothing has been added or changed to shorten how time consuming these trips are (there's a certain ring, but...given the lack of the other items that no longer function as they once did, that ring appears relatively useless, since it won't work for multiple people). Maybe there /does/ need to be a quest or some such thing added, that upon completion, teleports you to the start of the Nightmare Temple, Iron Citadel, etc, in the vein of a 'checkpoint'. Yes, this would probably make end-game content easier.

...Is that a bad thing? What's the point of an area, and a 'boss NPC', that a player can go RL years and years of playing SK without ever encountering? Would it somehow be bad for the game if the end-game content was actually regularly in circulation around the game world?

Now back to the topic at hand.



The only place it's really possible to do this is 'overworld map' areas. Inside areas (all the end-game zones with 'bosses) tend to have hallways/etc that you can't "navigate around". And it's not like you just get to the Nightmare Temple and then walk up to Ephialtis and fight him. There are multiple, unavoidable encounters in the way, that aren't exactly a cakewalk, numerous scripts, including one that can and will flat out just wipe your whole group for lulz.



As you say, modern video games have algorithms/etc for this. But, even in tabletop, there's a very key difference. The GM is actually there, knows who and what the party is, and generally tailors the encounter specifically for them. SK does not work like this. There's nobody there to take into account 'oh hm, this group has less melee damage and is mostly mages, maybe we should tweak the adventure for that'. Is your group a Merc, Barb, and Priest? Fight a unicorn. Is your group a Warlock, Bard, Rogue, and Swashbuckler? Fight a unicorn. Is your group a Scout, Hellion, Necromancer, Mercenary, and two Priests? Fight two unicorns.

I really doubt there's any way for random encounters on SK to ever be 'satisfying', because everyone gets bricks thrown at them, the only thing that varies is more people get more bricks. If your group isn't designed to handle bricks, oh well, sorry, all we have are bricks. Come back when you have the right group composition.



This has been noticed by people, I imagine, and is certainly a nice bonus for being forced to deal with these encounters. However there are some problems with it as well. You can't locate the things on them. There's no way to tell how many of them there are. I could go kill 10 of a random NPC, and it not drop anything. But maybe if I kill 10 more it'll drop something? Is the bracelet this thing dropped uniuqe? Or can I kill 15 more and get another bracelet? Who knows?

I'm not sure if that's fun or unfun, it's not really either to me. There's plenty of stuff with 'static' locations/spawn.



I can't claim to have the knowledge of these areas and NPCs you do, but I can only think of a couple random spawn NPCs that still leveling people could handle, and the thing is, I'm personally not aware of any area where those 'manageable' ones aren't also in the same space that fytrysks/etc also spawn. Sure, you can level on some of this stuff. You're almost for certain going to die eventually, though, and then need a group to get you back there, which is probably why people stick to the 'traditional' areas, where they know what to expect.



My 2c on this are that it's because this mechanic seems to have become increasingly more prevalent and is basically the majority of some area's NPCs now. The Wastelands has it, but it's really minor, and there's a kaleidoscope of monsters that are set out on the map. The dreamscape? Would be practically empty without this mechanic. The Frozen Wastes has like 2 or 3 types of NPCs that are static, and a dozen kinds of random spawn ones. (Those numbers are a bit exaggerated.)

For the record, not trying to nitpick Thuban, just trying to offer a different view on those points.

I love and hate random encounters.

For one, as Thuban mentioned, I like the idea that you have to play reactively and be prepared, and I enjoy it when areas aren't just "walk here, lure this" over and over. If that were the only challenge areas presented, it would get dry fast. It already does.

However, as Syn mentions, I also think that there are problems spots and problems with the spawning mechanics in general. By far the worst offender is a certain terrain type in the Infernal Dominion with gas blasting NPCs, while the second worst area is the entire Dreamscape, especially areas that can spawn NPCs which turn your party into yummy porridge. Two of those serve a very high likelihood of a full party wipe.

While I like random encounters and enjoy them, I think they could serve to be toned down. Here's my two thoughts.

Dulrik: For a coded solution, I think the game would be a lot better off if random encounters could be somehow changed to only spawn at most 2 NPCs per step. As it stands every PC has a potential chance to spawn their own random NPCs. I can't think of a much more appropriate coded solution than that however.

From the builder side, NPCs that do AOE damage simply shouldn't spawn if more than 1 can appear, in my opinion. I actually learned the spawn locations of gas blasting NPCs myself and went through great pains to avoid those places, but it doesn't change the fact that you're playing with fire every time you are forced to move through those areas.