Grimrock

Hi,

Can I ask a favour of modders? Would it be possible to create mods so they can be played by parties of every level. Presumably, there must be a simple script that can be placed at the beginning of a game which goes through every level looking for monsters and changes their level according to the level of the party. For example, if the party starts at level 1, then a herder might be a level 1 monster - but if the average level of an imported party is 15, then all herders would become level 15 monsters, any monsters that start at level 2 would be changed to level 16, etc. The script, once written, could be posted on here for everyone to use.

As it stands at the moment, none of the available mods are worth me playing. I've never understood why people play through a game and then play again with a new party from the beginning. How boring! When an expansion comes out for World of Warcraft, people don't have to start again from level 1, they just take their existing party into new areas. When people play D&D in "real life" (!), they don't start a new party every game, they have their party forever and the dungeon master adapts the game to them. Starting a game you've already played from the beginning again with a level 1 party is insane to me - it would be like training for 6 years to become a doctor and then, on the day you qualify, saying "Right, now I'm going to start again and this time train for 6 years to be a lawyer".

I want to be able to import my level 15 party into any new mod and have all the monsters automatically set so that I can level up to level 30 or something in the new game. As it stands, I either have to play a mod designed for starting parties where every monster I fight dies instantly in one hit and I don't even get the experience to level up a single time throughout the entire game, making it pointless to play - or I get a game (such as The Mountain) where it's specifically designed for level 12 starting characters but only big enough to level me up twice during the whole game because the monsters have been manually set suitable for level 12.

Surely this is doable. To be honest, I don't understand why the game itself doesn't have the option to automatically relevel all the monsters when a party is imported (as an option, obviously - not everybody will want that.)

It doesn't even seem to matter if I change the game setting to "hard" - the monsters then seem to be harder but give the same amount of experience. And that would only work once anyway.

Well the thing here is that increasing monster level doesn't make monsters any harder. It just gives them more hit points and damage, it doesn't increase their speed or make the AI less exploitable. So it's just as easy to avoid hits and kill them as before, it just takes more time. That's boring.

Well -I am building in into my mod several mechanics that varies the game depending on how experienced the party is.

That is not only leveling up monsters, that's also change behaviour of certain traps and opening special areas.

I would approve that something like that is important for mods, therefore there is the possibillity to import partys.

Personally, I'd be quite happy for the monsters to just have more hit points and take longer to kill. I, personally, don't find that boring - I wasn't aware that monsters in games had any intelligence anyway, you just hit them until they die and tougher monsters take longer to kill, require more potions of health. To me, chasing a monster around hitting it with spells and things for ages is enormous fun.

What about the experience points granted by leveled monsters ? Does it scale ? Should a mod give almost the same number of level ups for any party ?

Well, presumably there's some sort of formula for how much experience a level 1 monster gives, level 2, etc. You would simply use the same formula to calculate how much experience monsters of any level give, as long as it is kept in line with the level of the party. It's no good having a monster which gives so much experience that the party levels up with a single monster, so the experience given would have to be kept sensible for the appropriate level. I imagine that the amount of experience needed to level up for each level is progressively more than the last so that levelling up is tougher as you get higher levels, so the monsters should give more experience at higher levels so that levelling up still feels natural.

For example, if it takes 1000 XP to level up from level 1 to level 2, then you would expect monsters of that level to give 90-100 XP so that killing 12 levels the party up at the beginning of the game. On the other hand, if it takes 100000 to go from level 15 to 16m then monsters encountered at that level should be giving, say, 1000 XP so that you'd need to kill 100 to level up. That's just an example, of course - the actual formula would need to make sense.

The main issue, though, is that there is currently no mechanic to encourage players to import a party into a mod and still guarantee a challenge and levelling up. If a level 1 party begins a mod and ends at level 15, then logically I would expect a level 15 party that starts the same mod to finish it at level 25-30. In other words, parties of any experience level should get the same amount of playability and levelling up.

Increasing monster level doesn't just increase Hit Points and Damage, it also increases the experience points gained. Taking longer to kill something for no good reason is definitely boring, but running around one-shotting everything is equally boring.

This is where proper game design comes in to play. You can programmatically spawn Monsters based on the overall level of the party, increasing monster levels as needed to create a more balanced experience. You can use Script to determine the level of Champions and increase or decrease environment experience rewards as needed to make sure the Party is at the appropriate level before reaching specific areas in your Game (ie, giving the party 5,000 experience points for clearing Dungeon Level 2).

Without implementing creative ways to handle both new parties and imported parties, all that really ends up getting created is a Mod that "tries to be" as fun as the original Grimrock Campaign. Although, even this is only true in cases where the Mod relies more heavily on Monster battles and traditional dungeon crawler experiences. If, instead, puzzle-solving takes the forefront then the overall Gameplay Experience becomes less reliant on monster implementation.

With that said, no matter what the case, there is essentially a soft-cap on party damage output (unless you override this via custom code), so taking monsters beyond level 3 is probably overkill no matter what

TheAdder wrote:The main issue, though, is that there is currently no mechanic to encourage players to import a party into a mod and still guarantee a challenge and levelling up.

I agree with most of what you said, except that bit right there. Before you start a game you can set the Difficulty Level, which is in fact a mechanic that allows an imported party to face a Challenge.

To avoid misunderstandings: There is a mechanic in the game/editor to level up monsters.

If you put a monster in your mod you can choose if it's a level 1 to level 5 monster. Each level increases the health and XP of it by around 10% of the original value. If you want, you can also level up your monster ingame by script.

Well - even if I told before, that I am building mechanics, that regards the party-level, I don't think, that a party always has to climb up the same amount of levels. It is part of the game, that an experienced party takes longer to climb up the next level. So I don't expect it to happen as fast as with a starter party - and I don't want to support such a behaviour. The only thing I want to do is, avoiding that my mod becomes boring if you choose an experienced party.

So you mean monsters can't be leveled up higher than level 5 ?

Your goal seems reasonable to me, fewer levels up for an experienced party should be the way to go. With that in mind, it could mean there will be some kind of soft cap, where the total experience granted in a mod will be smaller than one level up for a very experienced party. What do you think that cap should be ?

AndakRainor wrote:So you mean monsters can't be leveled up higher than level 5 ?

Your goal seems reasonable to me, fewer levels up for an experienced party should be the way to go. With that in mind, it means there will be some kind of soft cap, where the total experience granted in a mod will be smaller than one level up for a very experienced party. What do you think that cap should be ?

The Editor sets a default cap at level 5, but you could write code to do whatever you like. I fought a few level 5 monsters for testing purposes, and it was not fun at all. Some monsters are more fun at higher levels, like the Zarchton and Mummy. Others are just terrible even at Level 2, like the damn Crab