Adventurer Party Idea

[omni]

Just a random incredibly evil idea I had.

One of the major complaints about adventurer parties is overleveled talents, which as a design choice is defended by the randomized nature of the talents and equipment that a leveled elite is saddled with.

What if instead of randomly generating these guys from scratch, we happened to borrow equipment and/or talent levels from the character vault? Perhaps just copy a build to a tee and reinsert it into another persons game? (on second thoughts duplicating equipment of lvl 50 characters seems overly cruel)

Obviously we don't want the adventurers to DROP all the equipment, but it'd result in coherent intentionally designed characters, solve the overleveling issue (which I hear is solved in the next beta anyways?), and be a heck of a treat if you ran into one of your old adventurers. Plus can you imagine leveled orcs stealing builds from lvl 50 characters, even if not equipment stats?

Plus, I mean we have a vault full of builds, why not use 'em?

Feasibility of course is another matter altogether...

[Zonk]

Well, it would make the game TRULY multiplayer(even if in a very minor way)which some might not like...also doesn't do much for people playing offline...

[marvalis]

Using existing characters as NPC's is definatly a very good idea. It would create a kind of feedback within the game that is bound to make it more interesting and challenging. This also depends on the AI.

[lukep]

Offline players could still benefit, if a set of deceased players was included with each beta release. This would result in all of the adventurers being from one beta ago (which may be a bit uncanny and/or buggy), but would work without reconnecting to the internet.

[eliotn]

Alternatively, the game could generate characters by picking a random class, picking random equipment appropriate for that character's level, and allocating talents and stats using the same rules for characters. More varied equipment could be dropped on death, as I am tired of finding mostly weapons and body armor.

[omni]

FANTASTIC idea lukep, including bunches of builds into releases. As for the bugginess/uncanny state of builds with new betas changing many things, that becomes a self solving issue once stable release is reached.

As for it creating complaints of "true" multiplayer, I'm not sure I follow. I don't see the rationale behind complaining that other players builds are being used by enemies in my game, though I suppose I could see the complaint if it uses names (and admittedly, I use some silly names occasionally) due to breaking immersion. Maybe an inspired by box in the inspect creatures dialog would be more appropiate.

As for just randomly generating them according to the rules PC's face, thats where the whole idea of giving them overleveled talent levels comes from (imho). If they're not coherently built [as is often the case], you just get a high hp little-danger whipping horse. As for equipment drops adjustment, that's something else entirely. If this idea is utilized you just can't have them drop everything they've got, or even neccesarily one piece of what they got because you'll get a ridiculous amount of artifact scumming out of the process.

As an aside, following inscription/infusion builds on characters could also be particularly evil and delicious.

So far, this idea I'd imagine this would flatten danger on adventurer parties, but pop up toughness as well via immunities and resistences. Depending on the state of tactical AI it could create very long pronounced battles, and it may actually create a demand for changing adventurer party battles into adventurer (singular) battles.

Which I don't think is a bad thing.

It may create imbalance issues with anything that is capable of killing *itself* quickly, pretty much any glass cannon concept class. I'm actually not aware of too many of those in Tome though. Of course we're dealing with that already via overleveled talents so I find that argument moot.

If nothing else, this'll help playtest scaling and talent power levels more quickly!