Saturday, January 12, 2013

Monster Maker

Have a chart meant to generate new and interesting mechanics for  monsters.  It's revisiting something I've blogged before here, here, and here.  I basically took Roger's suggestion and made it a dice drop chart. 

Some problems: first, I suggest up/down for player/monster and monster/player relations between the game system factors listed but you might want other relationships like mimic, or reflect, or something.

Second, I keep getting the ones in the middle and it wasn't engineered for that purpose, all things could potentially interesting.  I guess the only way to get around it is to have some kind of abulafia thing that randomizes the sheet before you print it.

But, I did come up with a monster that's chance to hit you is lowered if you're healing (read, wounded) and a monster that gives you psionic powers if it critically misses~~ how cool is that!?

Try it out and let me know if you come up with something cool.

4 comments:

  1. A system like this would be quite interesting in a roguelike.

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  2. Come to think of it, they are all pretty much numerical values (or binary states like sleep), seems like a computer should be able to mix, match, and vary magnitudes to come up with tons of monsters. Though, I don't think I'd want to have to fight some of them, like the one that does more damage when you get hurt, or the one that gets psionic powers when you critically miss it ;)

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  3. Thinking about this idea further: in a roguelike you could have physical location as a possible variable.

    So, for example, you could have a monster that's evil if it's towards the west end of a level but good if it's towards the east.

    This might make for some interesting tactics based around chasing the monsters to particular places or getting them to chase you.

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  4. Cool. And, heck, if a computer's doing the bookkeeping you could get really crazy like: monster does x if you've got a, b, c in you inventory, monster chases anyone with names of a particular culture/language, monsters keep attacking only if they are dishing out more damage than they are getting, monsters are in their lairs at certain real world times and not others, etc.

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