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

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

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:
> On Jan 12,  7:21pm, Raphaël Quinet wrote:
> > - 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).
> 
>  Probably don't need a new archetype for the altar - extending many
> altars to allow them to set the home might make sense.  So a flag
> or some other value in the altar specifying that is it updates the
> return to home would probably be better.

I was suggesting a new archetype because I thought that it would be
easier to differentiate between "normal" and "special" altars.  My
goal was to avoid the accidental usage of the special altars on the
"normal" maps, and to make it easier to locate all special altars
by simply grepping through the maps.

Also, contrary to what Christian suggests in his mail, I think that
these altars should be immune to the "consecrate" spell, and it is
probably easier to enforce that with a new archetype, although the
spell could of course check if the altar has the special flag set.
This is because these special altars would mostly be found in maps
called "Temple of SomeGod" and it would not make sense to allow
someone to consecrate the altar to another god if the whole building
still belongs to the original god.  (sidetrack: maybe we could have
a more powerful consecrate spell that also renames all exits that
lead to this building, but that would be difficult to implement
because we have no pointers to all exits).

Of course, one could argue that we should have two separate flags:
one deciding if the altar can be (re-)consecrated or not, and one
deciding if it updates the return point when a member of the
appropriate religion prays over it.  But I think that the various
combinations of these flags would only confuse the players.  It is
better to make it clear that one can pray safely over some altars
without having some side-effects.

[...]
> > 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.
> 
>  But most all of that could be done without the special new map (the
> player archetypes could contain the home city also, and just updating
> the archs to point to the new village could be done.)  It does have the
> problem that if you add a new class, you now need to update that map to
> contain the teleporter for that new class.

That's right, but if you take the time to add a new race to the game
(and document it and write some background story about what these
creatures are), then maybe the effort of adding one more teleporter
to the start map would not be so great.

>  I could certainly see some benefit to having documentation within the
> maps. On the other hand, having everything documented within crossfire
> may not make sense.  Another solution to this which does not require
> code changes is to make up some relatively quick and complete documents,
> put them on a web page someplace, and change the motd of the day to
> include something like 'For hints on creating a character, look at
> http:/whatever'.

I agree.  I just thought that the "limbo" map could be a nice addition
because it would be nicer for beginners and it would add more atmosphere
to the game.

[... about special altars ...]
>  This makes some sense.  Ideally, most towns should have a row of
> temples, so you can pray in a town nearby where you are adventuring
> so if you use word of recall to get back to town at least somewhat
> close to where you are.

That's exactly what I was thinking about.  Also, maybe some temples
could have one main altar (that sets the return point) and a couple
of smaller altars (normal ones, aligned to the same god) so that one
could pray on the small altars if it is not desirable to return to
that temple later.

-Raphaël
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