Re: CF: Races, starting cities, word of recall

[Raphaël Quinet <Raphael.Quinet@eed.ericsson.se>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, hat@linguine.tte.vtt.fi wrote:
> Raphaël Quinet wrote:
[...]
> > once you pray over one of the special (pre-aligned) altars, then you
> > are automatically assigned to this temple for the "word of recall"
> > and "respawn after death".
> 
> This idea combined to the different starting villages to the different
> races would be a good idea.

I have been thinking a bit about that during the X-Mas break...

Prerequisites (code changes):
- the player structure contains a new field giving the player's
  home, i.e. the place where the character will respawn after death
  or word of recall (instead of the hardcoded central square in
  Scorn).
- two new archetypes: a special altar that resets the player's home,
  and a special teleporter that sets the player's home, race and
  other things (see below).
- the character creation process would set the stats but not the
  race and starting equipment.

A newly created character would start as a ghost (or some representation
of a soul) on a special map ("/limbo" or "/start").  That map would
contain special exits to the different starting cities.  In the first
version, they could all point to Scorn, but that could change when more
starting villages are added.  These special one-way teleporters would set
the character's race, abilities and equipment, adjust the stats and set
the character's home to be the place where they are teleported.  They
would in fact do a part of what is done currently when the player selects
a race just after rolling the stats.

It would be nice to have that special starting map, because it could
contain some signs or magic mouths explaining some features of each
race before the player chooses one (including some warnings for the
"challenge races" that cannot use weapons or armour).  Also, it would
then be very easy to integrate new starting villages for some races by
changing the destination of these special teleporters.  And if these
exits also set the character's home, then the word of recall would work
correctly when more than one starting city exists.

For creating a new character, you would immediately get a "soul" after
rolling the stats, and that sould could wander around in the "limbo" map
before choosing the race in which it would be incarnated.  Then the game
would continue as usual, from whatever starting village is the most
appropriate for that race.

As I explained some weeks ago, another nice addition would be that some
temples in the cities would contain the special (pre-aligned) altars that
set your religion and at the same time reset your "home".  This means
that when a player selects a god, he would also be resurrected in that
god's temple.  This feature would add more atmosphere to the game.  Note
that, as I wrote previously, this change of the home location would only
work on the special altars that are pre-aligned to some gods, so that
nobody could use this feature to cheat by praying on a random altar next
to a treasure room and come back to this place easily.

By the way, I am actually willing to write the code for doing this if
nobody has any objections...  I do not know when I would have the time
to do it, but maybe I could do it before the next millenium...  ;-)

-Raphaël
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