Twilight Forums

You know, I was thinking about it. Of course, both the term and the concept are too KoLish.

The way one 'repeats' the game, is pretty much a defining characteristic of the game. I thought of various concepts, and.. "hey, why not torture my dear forumites with one of my Vogonian speaches?"

-Path defined by class: When a Naturalist "ascends", he might reincarnate. Maybe his path options are considered "living as an apropriate animal of his choise". This would not mean that he would be an animal (this would mess the game a lot) but merely that this animal's spirit lives within him. Examples: the lizard (bonus to escape, penalty to activity per day) or the "Roost" (penalty to damage, greater day activity). Instead, when a Psion ascends, he reaches a greater state of mind (see Matrix) undrestanding the way the multivese works, and merely choosing to relive one of its variants. Examples might include the "socialist world" where there are no chips, but the items are boosted, and the shops will noit sell anything, or the "Underworld" where vampiric or werewolf oponents, scaling with the character, may appear at random in any zone with encounters.

-Philosophy: maybe there is a set of many philosophies to choose from, like 'agnosticism' or 'nihilism', that define a single quest of the character, and the ascnesion texts of his next life.

-Recursive Hell/Heaven: Maybe the character discovers that the world he lived to, was hell itself, and that he manged to free his soul. Uppon ascension, he might decide to challenge "another world".

-The Eternal Champion/No rest to the wicked: ok, the Michael Moorcock's concept is an absolute. The character discovers that he is "the one", and that his soul deserves no rest. He is destined to be cast again in the mortal coil as his punishment for an unknown past. (ok, I adjusted the Michael M's concept for the game)

-The tomorrow's dream: The character wakes up. He discovers that the timeline is just before he finds his talisman. And he knows what will happen. And he must do it. Again.

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Er, if by KoL-ish you mean "completely stolen from Nethack." Well, maybe not the precise mechanism, but certainly the name and general concept.

Long term, I probably won't call it ascension. But what I do call it will probably depend on how it works. Which will depend a lot on the plot/conclusion of the ultimate quest.

I guess I run the risk of having "ascension" becoming ingrained if I don't use a different term, but I can live with that.

Heh heh heh. I like the tomorrow's dream concept. Dreams within dreams within dreams.

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Have a nice day.

Maybe it could be like this is just a dream and you wake up in the Shiloh Sanatarium. In the confusion, you run out into the streets and what happens when you first start playing happens again. And you find a new talisman. Also, it gives you the narrative background to add more stuff and bonuses.

So if it's just a dream, does that mean you wouldn't keep any stuff from ascension to ascension?

Next I suppose we'll have to postulate some sort of "dream catcher" that snags money and items right out of your dreams and deposits them into your "real" life, which is of course itself just another dream.

And once you wake up several hundred times, you find out that you, in fact, are the mayor of the fine city and you suddenly start a game that seems suspiciously like simcity but with crime rates several times higher than it should be.

Then, when night falls, you play twilight heroes as it is now. And then, crime falls drastically in areas where you patrol.

And then you're late for work.

Dangit. >.<

Oh, and maybe you can find a dream-catcher that lets you keep your earthly belongings from each dream. And it should probably have the drop-rate of around 1 or 2 percent to stop everybody from having it and it would only drop when some very specific needs where met. Like adventuring in your own mind when you're in the nude. Or something.

Although, having done that, it's nearly impossible. So maybe you should just be able to keep them from dream to dream. But you only get them when you're mayor!

Why is that whenever i try to play this game i lose myself? No really, I heard so many legendary comments, that I said to myself "Damn, I must absolutely play this!". And whenever I get down to the chair and connect to it,the interest fades within minutes. That's bad. This game seems to have been the inspiration for many other games.



I can't help not thinking that I got this one from a novel I read in the past. Still, I cannot remember absolutely anything except the concept itself...



Hmm... you put exactly that kind of questions that make me think a lot Ross... I can think of two versions:

-The Hitman Contracts scenario: Whoever played this game, will encounter an interesting narating concept: The main character, Hitman, is a retired assasin. At the begining of the game, a man enters his home, and shoots him. From the moment he drops to the ground, to the one he lets out his last breath, he thinks of his past missions and achievements, and game actually revolves at (re)accomplishing those missions inside his dreams as he is dying. The moral? The character already posseses all that he has. Actually he also posseses whatever he will find in the future. But he is dreaming... he is reliving the moments that he found those articles... All his transactions with other players, his assets, skills and all, are actually achievements of his past. And now he is reliving them, moment to moment.

-I woke up and found the rose of my dreams in my hands: The character wakes up, to discover that all he managed to do inside his dreams, actually happened. But only for him. His dream is real, but only *he* knows it. The objects he collected inside his dream are actually real, and in his hands... But the story has yet to come...

UN: The second scenario worked perfectly for Silent Hill. Especialy the fourth part, features this in a very vehement way, still being an excellent game .



Ok, with a bit refining this could be a perfect idea, but I suppose far beyond the posibilities and/or the scope of a web based game...

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I asked Ross about this in the chat once, and the idea he proposed involved Time Travel, which I quite liked. It would need to be voluntary, I think. This may seem obvious, but if it's not, you get into a Dark Tower style narrative, which really wouldn't fit this game.

One idea I had was that, on new ascensions, you had the chance to be evil, which would yield a different quest path. It would be a bit of work, obviously, but I think it'd be a neat mechanic.

Nice concept, but having it forced seems bad to me. Anyway, whatever it is that makes you travel back to time, it had better be large enough to fit my cars XD.



Very nice idea but like you said, it requires a lot of work. Actually, it reequires double work for quests, a lot of work for encounters, and a vast amount of work for balancing the two paths. Still, it would be very nice, given time to develop .

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How about something like Quantum Leap?

Personally, I like the idea of being able to 'repeat' a class with a different 'philosophy' - it wouldn't need to change any quests at all, just a re-writing of content to fit the new philosophy would change, perhaps some of the simple noncombat adventures that don't contribute to quests could be altered to fit how you'd respond with your new philosophy, that kinda thing. I like this idea because you get to (maybe) have different philosophies that slightly affect how your statistics progress.

Here's a quick example of what I was thinking:

Nihilist. You believe that self-improvement is masturbation, and that self-destruction is the One True Path. Apart from having undiagnosed schizophrenia, you're always beating people up in basement boxing clubs and making soap. This means you're tougher, meaner, and much better at kicking ass than the average Joe.

(Extra Strength gained at level ups, maybe slight bonus to hit with melee, causes some adventures and combats to be re-styled with subtle Fight Club references. One example of this would be the noncombat in the Nearby Slums turning into you wandering the streets with a mate, smashing parked cars' headlights, leading to the same bonus.)

This would take a lot of extra work (I mean, you're looking at changing the text for at least half of all adventures) but it wouldn't mess with balance, just add a lot of flavour.

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out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Spooky, man. Just yesterday I started thinking along lines somewhat similar to this. Not entirely as described, but close enough to be recognizable. Rather than a fixed philosophy that applies for the whole run, I'd been thinking more that your characters' noncombat choices would begin to influence their reputations as different types of hero. This reputation would then influence other combat and noncombat areas, and the results that you get there.

Over time, if you start making different types of choices, your reputation can drift, opening or closing options for you, or giving you different results in certain areas.

Like you said, implementing this could be a ton of work, so it might take some time before any of this sees the light of day (or the light of a CRT).

The real shame of this is, I've been trying to figure out a mechanic like this for roughly the past six months. Six hours after I finally feel like I've got something sorted out, someone else comes up with a nearly identical suggestion. How weird is that?

That sounds like a brilliant mechanic. I love the idea. Of course that would be a LOT of work to write the material, but I think it is definitely a good idea (although your not thinking about trying to include it before beta, right? Cause that would be insane....)

Before beta? Goodness no! The next three weeks will be devoted to fixes, patches, security, streamlining, and stuff like that. Plus a few useful features where appropriate. Probably not a whole lot in terms of content, unfortunately.

After beta, when all the chaos dies down and I've fixed the worst of the bugs people dig up, I'll start introducing more content, and this will (slowly) be part of that.

Except computer content, of course. Right?

Awesome. I like the idea of philosophy being so involved. Makes for a ton of interesting viewpoints on the game.

Dreams and philosophies. And unicorns. Hmmm.

Now you're scaring me. I was actually thinking something like this (having just beaten a few low-level quests) and was going to post it right in this thread - basically the system you described, except for making repeating a quest interesting.

Your choices (how you solve previous quests, how you behave talking to important NPCs, what selections you make in noncombats) affect how you receive new quests (ie, maybe you befriend Rage and Rand doesn't tell you about the break-in, you find out from Rage letting something slip, or you threaten to beat the crap out of Rage and he tells you everything he knows) and maybe receiving different side-quests, or perhaps a few particular quests can have alternative, darker-side styles.

To borrow a little bit from KoL (I don't like to do this, because this game should be its own as much as possible, and comparing it constantly to KoL is unfair) I thought of the philosophies as star signs with a cosmetic, flavourful, and perhaps slightly larger mechanical effect.

The behaviour idea was more "I can see quests becoming slightly boring - how can they be made interesting to people who aren't the kind that find repeating as fast as they can interesting".

But yeah, that's weird that you came up with the morphing reputation thing. Maybe there's something to be said for those tin-foil hats after all.

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out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Makes me think of Fallout and Fallout 2.

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

Maybe we're all each others' multis. That's roughly where the idea came from. You people are seriously making me consider investing in those crazy pyramid hats that supposedly block out mind reading.

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out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Makes me think of the Punisher.

I read too many comic books.

So I had another idea. Take the philosophies concept and apply it to movies instead.

So your ascension has a backdrop of a an over-arching quest based on some famous movie - maybe a small sidequest at each level that advances the storyline, and also colours your combats and noncombats.

At the moment, the ideas I have are a Fight Club based ascension (where you loosely advance through the chronological storyline of Fight Club the movie [sorry to fans of the book] to Project Mayhem to duelling with Tyler) and a Matrix based ascension (where you, again, loosely advance through the chronological storyline of the Matrix [but not the second or third]).

Mostly, you'd get to make a bunch of references to Matrix or Fight Club culture, and take Matrix and Fight Club behaviours to logical and ridiculous extremes in solving problems (you know, like, changes to what happens in standalone noncombats and maybe quest-advancing noncombats).

It means a lot of extra content writing, but it also means not very much balancing and mechanics work.

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out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

That's probably the coolest idea suggested so far. I dunno if it's feasible, but seriously. So fucking cool.

Pretty cool idea shokwave. From a coding standpoint, it would probably be one of the easiest options to do. From a content writing standpoint - the hardest. I'm not sure exactly what you were thinking, but actually, there could start out with only a few such storylines (maybe 6 or 7?). It would be very easy to add extra storylines as they were finished, and eventually there could be quite a few.

How about this: After defeating the final boss (whoever that may be, I've been hearing it'll be Mick?), it says he is still alive, although just barely. In order to defeat him, you must muster up all of your strength and sacrifice yourself to destroy him once and for all. You die in your efforts, and are summoned by the Devil (whatever you wanna call him, lucifer, the devil, satan, mephisto, etc.) Who makes a deal with you. You can go back and relive your life, chosing a new class, etc. However there is a catch. Umm... Haven't decided on the catch yet. But something along the lines of you must blah blah blah soul blah blah blah sacrifice blah blah blah hell.

Thoughts?

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TheK3vin- #325

http://soundcloud.com/thek3vin

Heh, I thought it would have like, 4. I couldn't imagine writing seven alternate content sets. Like, you'd definitely have to have someone else helping out to write that much. It's insane!

Actually, I guess it depends on how much content each type changes. But what I was envisioning was basically your character wears a "what would Neo do" badge and solves his problems and quests etc that way.

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out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

I imagined that by the time something like this might happen, Ryme might be full time, with an extra person or two to help him.

here is my ascension idea: Alternate continuities
(im not a native speaker but i hope i can make myself clear)

lets take spider man as an example and regard him as a twilight hero.
spider man starts as "just bitten by an irradiated spider"-Peter Parker (level1) discovers his powers and saves the world (clears the game).

Now since the first appearance of spider man several versions have been implemented. We have several comics, tv shows, movies, whatever... Each re-tells spider mans story in a different way. thats called "Alternate Continuities".

so why not regard every ascension run as such new versions? it would go well with the super hero theme. (besides: allthough i like most of the ideas suggested yet most of them feel quite KOLish)

after finishing the game players would have some choices to start in a new Alternate Continuity.

permanent skills:
would work greatly with this concept. there are many examples of super heroes that are getting more and more powers each time they appear in a different implementation.
special equipment from previous ascension could also be obtained like this.

ascension paths and types(i dislike this KOL terms. i just use em to explain things):
players could have choices like

comic: normal ascension

cartoon: less serious than a comic (casual ascension)

graphic novel: way more serious (hardcore)

live action tv show: even more serious (bad moon if you like...)

additionally payers could take some restriction like PG-13 or NC-17 forbidding them to take drugs




so what do you think?

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i rather wrong the world, than have it wrong me.
Cao Cao

Personally, I'd go with the player philosophies idea, or the morphing personality one. There's so many games out there that it seems like no matter how you accomplish the quests/storyline, nothing much changes, maybe only a couple of lines of dialogue. The personality affecting the story in a major way could really add a lot of flavor to the game.

I have an Idea.
maybe , the player will loose the fight with the main boss , and will be forced to go back in time and give himself a better tallisman.
Also, I thought that it will be cool if not all quests could be played in one Ascension, and in each asension there will be a different and random set of quests.

There'd have to be some sort of bias against selecting one that was in the previous batch, or it'd get as frustrating, as, say, the first Diablo game.

So you get to Mick, you figure out Mick is responsible for all the crime everywhere in the city and if you give him the beat down ... you will be out of a job.

Mick knows this to so offers you a choice;

1- Join Mick
Unlocks a very hard path, people can attack you and such you keep all your things but you are now working as a bad guy trying to cause crime and such.
Chips earned can go to fortifying your hideout (buffs to defending yourself in the base) hiring thugs (npc's that heroes trying to attack you have to beat up) and scary doomsday device (takes say 50 million chips to complete)
Joining Mick let's you keep all your stuff, powers, etc, etc but is REALLY hard.

2- Kill Mick and ...
You kick back and rest on your laurels a little, the city is safe, free of crime ... and boring you maybe decide to go on vacation, you spend a long time away and then officer Rand calls you, apparently Mick didn't stay dead! Cloned? Twin Brother? Who knows! Who cares!! You gotta get back to town right now and take him down!
Choosing this option let's you keep your stuff (would probably need level requirements examined a little more) you keep about 10% of your chips and also let's you keep (much like KoL) a skill (or maybe 2, two skills sounds good) before you start as a level 1 hero again.

3- I was just starting to enjoy this...
You come to an agreement with Mick, you won't defeat him ... yet, you enjoy the thrill of being a hero too much so you agree you'll give him a month or two to build up his empire again then come smash him.
This option let's you keep all your stuff and all your chips as well as all your powers AS WELL as letting you go back to a level 1 hero again and select a new class.
But it would give you a xp and chip penalty (quite a severe one, maybe as much as 40%) tax you more at the auction house (yeah she's the one that let Mick carry on in business...) and generally be quite mean at times.

Anywho, those are my ideas ^^

I honestly despise the idea of ascension. In fact, I despise KoL too.
I'm sure I'm not going to get any props, but I don't like replaying a game with some extra stuff. It's boring. I'm not sure what happens afterwards, but I'm sure between now and the time when that issue becomes deathly important, something will be thought of.

So don't replay it.

Simple.

Well, I'd call it "retcon" in honor of all the comic book origin stories that get rewritten whenever the writer paints (draws?) himself into a corner.


Perhaps at the end of the final Epic Battle, the dying Mick (insert patented "Haha, I have an ace up my sleeve, foolish hero!") uses a proto time-machine to transport his consciousness back in time. Having done so, reality warps around you, as Mick (knowing exactly when and where you're coming) has prepared specifically for you, ensuring your defeat. Before history consumes your victory entirely, you must do the same - so you hurl your talisman through the time portal as well, where it lands precisely where you found it in the first place... but with some of your future self's wisdom (skills) attached to it as well.

Or, alternatively, having defeated Mick (and then, thus, having been utterly defeated by his own retcon), you limp back to your hideout, and resolve to retcon yourself (using some gizmo). The advantage of doing it from the hideout, I suppose, would be a better explanation of how you keep your junk between retcons (you do the old Western Union telegraph to yourself, with the location of your Swiss Bank Vault Account? Or you can send objects but not matter, so when you first visit your hideout, you find a vault already in place, having been sent by yourself. But you don't know the password, since you used your exploits to create the password... thus, (even though you know OOC, you don't IC) you have to beat a few levels before you can actually access your past incarnation's treasures.

Uhh, yeah, so that's why we're spawning new ways of handling so called "ascension".

I'm not so sure of this idea, but mixing time periods might be cool. An ascension where you're fighting zombies and dinosaurs? I think that's pretty cool. How about the Ice Age, Vikings and Feudal Japan? Hehe. Current TH kinda does that already with the Zions, robots and post-apocalyptic things to relate.

New ways of handling it doesn't change the fact that it's still ascension. Now, if you propose setting the level back to one and creating a whole new higher-tier area which you're trapped in until you do X, at which it goes to another new area which you're trapped it, then that's not really ascending: that's continuing a journey.

It's a bad example, but what I'm saying is that if these ideas don't involve going back to the old quests, then they're not ascension, which is fine. And I'm taking the stance that ascension is a horrible idea.

I'm going to have to agree with getting a new area with new things to do, as opposed to going back and starting the game over again, with a slight advantage (e.g. a skill from your previous run-through or what have you.) I mean, I do enjoy the game and the quests very much, but going and doing the same things over and over repeatedly gets tedious to the point where it's no longer fun to play.

No offense (might sound a bit flamey) but have you guys even read the rest of the thread? The ideas here reflect upon not having ascension repeat the same quests. As in, you play different quests upon ascension.

Yes?

I'm also going to bump up my idea of alignment as a bystander, hero or supervillain. Or maybe a hero gone supervillain. Or something. Extremely complicated to code I imagine, but it would freakin' freakin' awesome and would not be predictable. I can try to help you on this intensely, if you want. Sounds like a fun project to me.

hey-oh
Calling this whole thing ascension is a bit misleading, mainly because it has KoL connotations. Rebirth or something might be a bit less confusing.
And from the thread I've skimmed, the "redoing old quests" part isn't dealt with, and when it's dealt with, it has good ideas like shokwave's movie idea.

Thanks. The problem, I think, with avoiding re-doing old quests is pretty much there's not enough time to write a significant number of new quests. To combat this, however, I present a few options:

Quest Pool, a bunch of minor quests for each level, and Rand randomly assigns you one of them (or perhaps there's some choice adventure during the previous quest that helps determine which one).

Content Rewrite, whatever changes (philosophy, aspect, alignment) when you re-do the game changes the context of quests and how you solve them (only cosmetically) to suit your new attitude, like beating the crap out of Rage or hiding a shiv in the bathroom.

I might come up with more, these are the two that stand out as strong possibilities.

_________________
out-out the lights-out all! and over each quivering form
the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm
and the angels all pallid and wan, uprising unveiling affirm
that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm.