not to be the reaper of what was meant to be a good thing but the roads need to be less safe..
less safe or have more signs that would lead adventurers to investigate.
I know alot of my early days would be spent walking city to city and it was seeing orcs "Raiding the roads" that would often lead us away, and then perhaps into some fearful duengon.
Now its become segerated into quests, where people immersively say.. "lets go do the orcs"
...common people. also there was a lot people in towns other then GReat gaunt then, because it provided things to do elsewhere, and as well. provided higher levels chance to escort lower levels around, walking often led to some nice roleplay..
once myself and another elf character went exploring to find a camp.. we found and made a camp and spent a few days studying books and such... often interupted by orcs and stuff, but it broke up the roleplay.
I've truely disliked the "Safe road concept" especially at a lower character level.
I agree, but ... due to how often roads were travelled by folk of widely disparate levels and the frequency of road travel, making them "safe" was all but a requirement to keep high levels from missing spawns either purposely or accidently which would often kill lower levels. I can't count the times my own low levels were killed just walking from Isinhold to Redmist in days long past, because some high level PC had sprinted through ahead and left a swath of angry orcs in their wake.
Because of the way encounters were set up back then, the area cleaners required some pretty significant delays used in them to limit exploits. There were also issues that predated the 1.69 update from Bioware. Encounter triggers often recorded the previous PC or Party that passed thru as their scaling level and not who just tripped them. So by neccessity, most roads were made "safe" for travel.
Recently, we've been updating areas and using more efficient area cleaners that as most know, fire much sooner. This has enabled us to revisit older features, mainly making less areas totally "safe".
Because normal encounter triggers are either active or inactive, there's no easy way to set them up to only fire under specific circumstances easilly. We could use triggers around encounters that "turn them on" only when its night, day, a PC or Party of X level wanders by, a random chance, etc... , but that would require a ton of extra triggers, scripts and other stuff and also due to complexity limit the present and future builder pool here.
So other options have been used. Custom scripts are still involved, but they'll be much more "user friendly" and actual 'scripting gurus' won't be needed to make tweaks later.
(IE, they're simple enough even I can use them)
Because creatures that spawn in via a script (or a DM spawning them) are ommitted in the present area cleaners, they've had to be rewritten again. Because any and all non-plot NPCs/creatures will now get cleaned, DMs will gain a new tool so they can toggle the area cleaners for specific maps On/Off during their events. This also means, DMs can set up a "bazaar" or "fair" and leave "merchandise" or other goods left out on display if they wish.
The next update will add some "flavor" encounters to Suzail. Suzail was picked as the first place to host these for two reasons. Firstly, it is/was undergoing an update anyhow and secondly, its a safe bet few low levels will wander across our experimental encounters early on there.
When the next update is ready, you'll see the following in Suzail (and possibly Arabel):
- More "commoners" out during the daytime, fewer out at night.
- Occasional "customers" in shops/temples/inns.
- New "commoners" will have conversations with random "one liners" used. Some responses will also be based on race, sex or at times a PC's stats (Strength or Charisma mainly).
- Alleys in the "seedier" parts of town will have a small chance of a random night time encounter. Night time encounters will generally be fairly easy to survive, avoid or both. Friendly NPCs or guards will generally come to your rescue if nearby as well. Rats, stray dogs, muggers in dark alleys, press gangs near docked ships and various other things may be encountered. Not all town maps will have these. They are initially meant to add flavor to the "seedier" (more dangerous and less affluent) parts of towns. Since the encounters are scripted, we can more precisely control what spawns. In Suzail, as a precaution, PCs or Parties under 5th level will be ignored by the system.
The above system has been undergoing alot of testing and tweaking prior to updating here with it. So far it has been performing as hoped and we'll be updating soon. Eventually, we'll use this new feature to add the following elsewhere likely:
- Random (and likely rare) road encounters of bandit, thieves or even "wandering monsters".
- Encounters/Areas where what you spawn depnds on the time of day.
- Random "wandering" monsters in some wilderness areas lacking a specific influence already. IE, a woods full of orcs wouldn't have a random encounter most likely, but a woods with mostly wild animals, insects or other non-humanoids would occassional spawn "something" hungry that's come there to hunt.
- Random Underdark nastiness in general. When the "UD" is updated, you can expect to find new creatures like ropers, cloakers and many other things roaming the depths under Cormyr. These will use a version of the random scripted encounters.
- Eventually, we'll be able to assist DMs with events by preplacing random encounters they can turn On/Off as needed. IE, builders could place inactive triggers through out Suzail for Vampires, Demons, Drow, a plague of rats or whatever else they ask for and with a simple widget turn these encounters On/Off as desired. IE ... a DM could ignite a city wide event with just a few ports from map to map and clicking a widget they'll have. Because the encounters are scripted, we could better controll what PCs end up spawning. IE, the DM wouls have less fear of preplacing a creature that would too easilly wipe out a low level PC or Party that wanders through unexpectedly.
Anyhow, ever since the first maps got updated with alleys ... folk have been pestering us for the stuff I've outlined above. So Yes, we do listen to ideas, suggestions, requests, etc... . Sometimes it just takes time to get it tested and fully implimented is all.
PS ... there's still a few new features we're adding and testing for this next update. So be patient. "Soon" is the best ETA right now.
