The Unlucky Newb

I'm in the middle of my "ten thousand changes at once" pass for combat.

I've redone the way monsters work but I still need to add some of the new kinds of monsters to the game.

And I'm in the middle of redoing the way items work, and I'll need to add some of them to the game and redo the interfaces for a lot of the stuff relating to that too, before I can really test all the stuff I've been working on in the combat engine.

So now I'm thinking about doing the Monster Manual and Item Adding Front Ends to the database, so I can use them myself a little, to populate the game with some junk that I can use to test stuff.

That's where I bogged down yesterday, researching all the different kinds of handguns to figure out how I should add things like that to the database, figuring out how much I should boil everything down into an abstraction and stuff, how simple I can make it and still be able to do all the "cool stuff" I might wanna do with it later (like silver bullets and junk), I need to build the format and structure of the things that you'll end up seeing as a bunch of crap in drop-down boxes when you go to add something of your own to the game, y'know.

And I've redone the combat and random encounter system, and got it operating in an organic way that I'm pretty I'm happy with, with a bunch of placeholder hooks put into it for all this cool stuff I thought of as I was doing it, besides ambushes and surprise, like "hunting" and "tracking monsters back to their lair for bonus treasure" and having encounters that aren't fights, where maybe you just came across the corpse of an adventurer as you were exploring, or some kid from town that fell down a well and broke his leg, like the start of a "quest" (I guess, although I hate that word ahaha) but maybe its a trap, and some other kickass things like that.

It made me think about the way that there's this argument you hear sometimes, about the way a bear shouldn't drop a chainsaw as loot, 'cause that doesn't make sense.

But it does make sense if the bear killed some adventurers just like you and their corpses are laying around his cave heh.

"You have discovered the Corpse of an Unlucky Newb."

And that made me think of cool junk like allowing the players to join the Town Guard for "standard issue" riot gear and equipment and stuff, and then making 'em track down serial killers and solve mysteries around town and crap like that.

Which would be totally cool in a bizarro parallel universe fulla time travelers and radioactive mutants and sorcerers and robots and Planet of the Apes dudes from the future and Evil Twins with ancient alien necropolises to tomb rob and whatever.

Y'know, like Time Police Online or something.

I'm probably going to cut my "starter world" back to a single town, a single safe starting place, to start with, and then maybe replicate that out in other countries, allowing folks to build and run their own towns out from there, sorta like a chain of safe harbors and islands taming a world of chaos, I like that organic "empire" building thing.

Well, I was thinking about having more than one town to start with, but only the first one wouldn't turn out to be some kind of evil Lovecraftian trap fulla body snatchers or a classic Fistful of Dollars setup or something heh.

Yah, see, I need to think about junk like this some to get my energy level back up after reading about handguns too much ahaha.

Post Apocalyptic Hedge Wizards with Gas Masks and Hockey Sticks for Staves and Monks with a sawed-off Shotgun in one hand and a flask fulla Mutant Hooch in the other for the occasional dose of liquid courage as required.

Cowboy stories fulla con artists and double crosses and junk.

But I can't think about that too much 'cause I got a lot of boring ditches to dig first heh.