In Town Merchants

[CygnusX]

My latest game is a standard character building type (like LORD, everwars, etc) with a race to kill the final boss NPC.  

I'm currently considering the viability for different in town merchants.  Some obvious choices are:

Inn - regenerate HP as well as provide a safe place to stay.  
Merchant - buy items, weapons and armor
Dojo - where you fight a sensei to learn a new ability, etc
Bank - to safely store your gold in case you get attacked
Special Areas - as required for part of the story/quest progression

But what other simple twist could be added?  I've considered:

Sauna - Will also serve as an in-game chat room.  Characters will also heal here at an increased rate.

Tavern (to order food) - I considered having an energy meter for each fighter that depletes over time (until fed).  Energy in the red zone = reduced stats. Not sure I want to add a feeding requirement though.  Perhaps HP regeneration is tied to how hungry/full you are.

BackRoom (of the bar) - Gamble your money.

[Chris]

Check Moonstone and Samurai

Please rename things you decide to steal

[saljutin]

Butcher - buy meat from animals you have killed during your adventure
Horse "station" - travel fast and safe between cities
Alchemist house - buy potions (maybe even bring goods there) that give temp buffs
"Seductive Women" house - hey everyone needs some fun
Hospital - when you "die" (left with 1HP) you are transfered here

[CygnusX]

I'm still torn over the use of these places....

Every major RPG I can think of (breath of fire, final fantasy, secret of mana, zelda, cronotrigger) has the typical inn, weapon/armor/item shop and the 3-4 houses you can explore (1 or 2 of which will have a treasure or someone to talk).

And the more I think about it, do I really want my character to get hungry and have to eat?  Or get dirty, and have to take a bath?  I think I'd rather spend my time/turns trying to complete a quest as opposed to doing upkeep on my character.

I've even considered having in-town items that cure debuffs.  Such as, eating a hot bowl of soup at the tavern cures mute.  Or, visiting a temple could cure grievous wound.  But again, this all seems unnecessary to the point of the game.  I don't want to focus on unit upkeep, rather figuring out how to advance and killing bad things.

So, I've concluded I need to have 2-3 extra areas per town, and make something unique/puzzel-ish or quest-ish about each of them.  Not sure where I'm going to take it from here yet, but I bet the first quest will have something to do about excessive number of slimes around the village, and a reward for bring back proof that you've killed 10 of them.

Any other thoughts on this?

[Chris]

Two biggest concerns that make me hesitate to make RPGs (I think you should decide on these first before minor stuff like food):

Content creation - RPGs need a huge amount of content. Items, monsters, quests, locations. It's impossible for indie like us to provide this. Imagine trying to compete on this with WoW or KoL

Resets - RPGs are not very compatible with resets/rounds model, at least not the way strategies are. And resets are the only way to solve the content problem (when people say procedural generated or userbase created content I plug my ears since I have been on roguelike dev for a while and I know no one ever made the generated part to work good in practice (except GearHead) and I have been dealing with players for a longer while so I know the results of user created stuff).

[CygnusX]

Well, here is my thought process so far on this design approach. Sorry for being a bit long.

History
In a character level-up system, where pure PvP game is the only way to gain experience, it seems the person on top always stays on top.  This is true for many games I've played such as archmage.  And I loath this problem.  This game can also suffer the most from multi-account registration.

Also, as Nox pointed out in another forum, there are a few ways to handle combat in a bbg style system.  Either auto-resolve, a turn-based system, or some sort of hybrid.  My goal is to make an auto-resolve system that has some element of strategy in it.

So what to do?

Design Concept
After much thinking, I concluded adding NPC's to a character game is about my only option.  If you were ranked below the #1 player, and you couldn't kill him, then it seems having a system of NPC's could be constructed such that killing NPC's > attacking the people levels under you.  

But i'm not satisfied with letting a player attack the NPC they want to attack, so there needs to be some sort of dungeon/exploration system.  You explore an area, have a chance encounter, then repeat.

But, now its snow-balling out of control.  If I have an exploration system with a town, it only makes sense to add a few quests.  Collect dropped items, take this letter here, solve this riddle... etc.  

Implementation
So what am I going to do?  I think I want to make a map that consists of 100 tiles (maybe more), and you cannot advance to the next tile without first frequently exploring the tile you're on.  At minimum, it should take 2 day worth of exploring a tile to unlock access to the next area.  This would produce a reset cycle of a minimum 200 days.  I could later adjust this as needed, but we're going to start slow and force people to work for progression.

Each town you come across could contain 2-3 quest.  But I will only add this if I really feel its needed.  I agree that adding quest not only presents a lot of debugging issues, but a lot of creative time and coding effort.  A good common quest would be to enlist in the battle arena and defeat 10 people at your own level.  This would encourage the PvP side of things.

Concerning combat, I've concluded that it isn't so much about developing a good combat system as it is developing a good experience.  You can reverse engineer the former by doing the latter.  And what I believe has to be done is to make a handful of attributes, with each attribute having a greater effect depending on the opponent.  If you're magic heavy, and you encounter a magic resistant enemy, you might get stuck fighting previous areas until you can level up and add some melee damage.  The good thing about this is that I will offer a chance to run or attack once you see the enemy.  This will let you escape NPC's you know you can't defeat.

Conclusion
I'm not sure if I want to make an RPG race to the finish style game, which is what this thing is quickly turning into.  And I can't really recall any other games like this.  I'd like some feedback before I spend countless months programming something I find out I don't like.

[133794m3r]

the race to kill the thing is pretty much wow to be honest or at least that's how it seems to be to me. and that's how all RPGs are at their basic level. You and your party are slowly advancing towards a more powerful monster and then you have to kill it, then it turns out there's a more powerful enemy on the wake and so on and so forth as it goes. Also as far as quests go, i'd suggest maybe coding up a procedural quest generation system so that you don't have to literally make 2 quests per area/level. This way you can have them attacking mob x to get item y to complete z quest.

Also as far as slowly moving forward, you could once more make each 'tile' be a little procedurally generated dungeon. This way you have MORE content than you actually had to sit down and work on. There's a thread here about how to implement such a thing so i'd suggest that you look there, that way you can have more areas without having to do literally do more work. Now as others have said an RPG doesn't work well with resets. Also it really depends on how you want your game to play out, it sounds to be like one of the older dungeon crawlers(how i am describing it) with you going into towns to get new supplies and killing some creature and then getting some key. One of the downsides of this is that you then have to store this data into a database ie the procedurally generated quests/dungeons. Also you could have the tiles be something like a non-linear type of movement forward with the map requiring x number of 'keys' or whatever to open them. This would then make your game make a little more sense than "you cannot go forward anymore."

Also, if i was you, i'd add some sort of 'hall of heroes' type of thing to the game wherein you record each player who won each of your rounds. This would allow you to have it and then make it feel better. And later on in the future, you could open more servers and thusly have them resetting after certain number of days and other such things as that. now as far as how the mobs themselves and their resistance goes make it psuedo random, as in oneperson gets high magic resistance, another melee, if you have range yet another there. This way they would never know which one they'd get until they get sorta towards the end have the final areas until you get to the end of the dungeon filled with mobs that are similar to the boss ie it's resistance type so that players don't get all of the way to the end and find out that they've went all of that way to have to reset the thing and start over.

Besides that, i honestly don't know what else to say about your game and during your development you will get bored of it as i have sometimes. But i just take a day off of coding, play a little oblivion/rockband etc. and i come back perfectly capable of working upon my code and designs.