[idea] How to make wilderness EXCITING in roguelike

TomeNet has beautiful “open” world system. Its one of the most unique TomeNet features. Yep, we got a lot of wilderness! But right now its in most cases players just trying to pass this wilderness as soon as possible to get into the dungeon. 

In the same time wilderness has HUGE potential of beign very exiting place. All what we need – to motivate people to explore it. How to do so? Lets me propose a few ideas for it:

1) rare boss monster spawns. Group content. Every hour or so all people in-game receive BIG SCARY MESSAGE, like:

%unique_monster% walking around earth again! Only the most powerful heroes could defeat him and posses treasure of the great value! Do you wish to try your luck of hunting it?

Yep, its like event message. But event would be in random wilderness location, sometimes far away from the city. At this location could apper not only boss with minions, but mini-dungeon just in place of this location.

So players could participate in this event. As soon at they accepted participating in this event – they got a message with monster coordinates. From now on they can’t use Recall scrolls – they have to go there by “legs”. Also while they going there – random monsters spawn across them – trying to stop them to get to the boss location (so maybe some people would prefer find friends and go through wilderness together?). 

Boss strenght depends at numeber of players withing event and their lvl. Reward could be fixed and shared to all people who did ANY damage to the boss. So even new players would have possibility to get reward for it.

2) treasure maps and treasure hunting. Solo content.

Lets add several possibilities to get treasure maps – as a random loot from monsters in dungeons, loot from open-world boss or just buy it from Treasure Guild for a quite big summ (more information about Guild is below).

When you got a map, you have a piece of paper which you need to decript. It could be mini-game (GO!), but also we could make even more simple way for this: You need to come to certain coordinates… For example, at first look at map you only got one coordinate: 14.29. When you come to this location – you fight monster (summoned when you “A” map there) and after killing him you got another coordinates where actually this treasure hidden. When you come there – you “dig” (again, using “A” at map, but you had to have a spade or pickaxe in your inventory) and get your chest with treasures and a monster who guards it.

Reward could be calculated to be equal as if you spend this time in dungeon. 

3) Add rare magical shops in open world. lets they spawn for a few time in random areas. To get to it you need to defeat monsters-guards of this shop. Also monsters would spawn again after you killed them, so its not too safe to shop there 

4) CARAVANS. Solo and group content. Quest-caravan system – very good way to get some gold 

a) add special vendor in every city. Lets this vendor selling only not-usable trade goods. 
b) you could sell items from one city to another and get profit from it. 
c) profit is higher if city didn’t visited for a lot of time. Profit low if city is very popular (to prevent “easy” ways).

Note that:
– You cant teleport or recall while you have trade goods.
– You get attacked by bandits (orcs, goblins & etc.. even greedy dragons  ) while you have this items in your inventory. So sometimes its not very safe thing to lead a caravan alone… May be you would need some friends to help you and guards your cargo? Also some expensive cargo could be very heavy and use several slots in your inventory (and have min. lvl req. to prevent cheating with creating caravan with new characters).

Example how it could work:
– you buy “sack of magical rings” from Bree shop for 5000 gold. You can’t use this rings, its NPC-goods.
– you could go anywhere and try to sell them with profit. But if you would listen some rumours in tavern, you could get an idea where this rings could be sold for more profit…
– you begin your journey. you got several attacks on you, but you survived somehow and bring items to Gondolin 
– there you sold your cargo for 30000 gold.

Soon when we would have more players – we could arrange non-fatal-PvP there. If you have cargo – another player could attack you (outside from town) and if you would have 5% of HP – you drop cargo on the ground (but still survive and healed instantly – so monsters wouldn’t kill you if they are around). Its just an interesting suggestion for future.

—————

Now about some more motivation withing this systems. We could add 3 NPC guilds. Its not real guilds, you cant join them (or may be could, but you need to work on it a lot for reputation), but you could get good relations with them. Yep, its close “reputation” system, which I mentioned before. So we got:

Fighters guild
Hunters guild
Trade guild

Fighters: for each rare boss hunt your character participated, you get + to reputation. With high reputation you get bonus to the loot from boss.

Hunters: each treasure which you discovered you get increased chance to find map in random monster (small chance, but still).

Trade: Every time when you get profit (in % to initial price), you get more reputation with Trading Guild which give you some sale to NPC-goods which you buy.

Another great motivation there: add a ladder of players within Guilds at the website for some competition  So we would know who is the best Fighter, Hunter and Trader 

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