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Hi,
Opening a thread for discussion of the idea about having variable entity sizes. Right now, and excuse the Dawkinsism, all our characters, mobs, objects and locations are made from the perspective of "middle-world". For the uninitiated, "middle-world" (no relation to "Middle-earth") is the sense of perspective that we as humans are used to dealing with, neither very big or very small.
The idea I propose is that either through character "skill", magical effect or some other method, entities like characters could be resized - for example, a character morphing into an ant, perhaps for the purpose of sneaking under a door, or through a hole in a wall. This could be expanded through the use of either wilds or hidden areas specifically designed to cater for the change in perspective. At this point I'm not proposing that this would become in any way a major part of the game, rather more of an interesting diversion.
I haven't had a lot of time to think about it yet, but here's an off-the-top-of-my-head example of the kind of thing I envisioned for this:
Character happens upon a solid, locked door. There is absolutely no way past, and the key has been broken off in the lock and rusted over time. Magical unlock won't work, but the char notices a tiny hole in the base of the door. The char uses a racial or magical skill to morph into an ant, and enters the hole. They find themselves inside a little mini-area with multiple paths, deathtraps and or puzzles etc that have to be negotiated or solved. Eventually they work their way to the lock mechanism and are able to loosen the bolt. Normal size characters outside the door would simply hear a *click* from the lock to notify them that the lock had been opened.
Other examples might be, being able to climb into the mechanisms of things like a bridge lowering mechanism, portcullis mechanism. I'm half wondering about whether we could use Nib's crossbow stuff to fire a minaturised character over a castle wall attached to a projectile.
So far, I've only provided examples of the small end of the scale of resizing. Being able to morph into very large entities might also be interesting. For the moment I want to leave combat to one side and concentrate on the exploration side of play. (Combat poses serious issues with the fite code for very large or very small characters). Say for example a formation reaches a large chamber with an impassible ravine - water at the bottom, so flying spells are out. A fallen pillar to one side looks like it could be used as a bridge, but it's made of marble and so there's little or no chance of being able to move it - except one of the party is able to morph into a cave troll with STR 80. They do so, and are able to lift and place the pillar across the ravine.
I just think it's an interesting tangent to talk about, should anyone be interested.
Cheers,
Scott.
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It's a good idea, to be sure, to have some numbers for character size that can be referenced. We can obviously do some neat tricks by having this. Right now "size" for chars is just a choice of 5 integers, and they don't do much except for being referenced in some more obscure parts of code.
My biggest question is: would some poor bastard be stuck having to manually set size on 50,000 mobs? 8)
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Don't have to set ALL of those manually 8) Could put onto every race a min-max size range and then have the size parameter that is stored in the files renamed (so the old one is skipped). An invalid size set before the processing of the file would be used to indicate that the mob doesn't have one. Basically, reset every mob to the racial norms. Players would need to be asked what they want their size to be within a larger range from racial average.
Only mobs you want to be resized specifically would need to be tweaked.
