Randomized Field Enemies and Items

[winkio]

So, I had this pretty good idea I've started implementing into my game, and I just wanted to hear any thoughts/suggestions on it.

The idea is to have randomized field enemies.  What this means is that each time you leave a town, on each map, there are never the same sets of enemies in the same location.  Sometimes there are more, and sometimes there are less.  And sometimes, there are special enemies or mini-bosses and sometimes, there aren't.  Also, different quest items or other special things may or may not appear in different places.

So, any comments?

[Starrodkirby86]

This is a good basis of the Mystery Dungeons system or any other randomized systems. A script like this has been done before, and it is an innovation. This is a very good idea at times, but only if there's some monsters and all doing this and that...I suppose. Not very sure, I guess. But yeah, it's all good. XD Randomized enemies break the monotony, only by a little bit though.

[winkio]

Yes, I was actually doing it using events because its quicker.  But I'm thinking about randomizing pretty much everything except the mapping in fields:  NPCs, enemies, items, chests, etc.  The only thing is, if I put important events or anything in randomly, then people with bad luck may get really frustrated.  Like, I have this quest where you have to kill this miniboss that has a 40% chance of appearing, and it took me 7 tries to make him appear.  And it took me about 5 minutes to fight my way to where he should have been.  I'm just saying, it's hard to find a balance between breaking the motonomy and breaking the game experience.  If only randomizers weren't so random... 

[Starrodkirby86]

Yes, I was actually doing it using events because its quicker.  But I'm thinking about randomizing pretty much everything except the mapping in fields:  NPCs, enemies, items, chests, etc.  The only thing is, if I put important events or anything in randomly, then people with bad luck may get really frustrated.  Like, I have this quest where you have to kill this miniboss that has a 40% chance of appearing, and it took me 7 tries to make him appear.  And it took me about 5 minutes to fight my way to where he should have been.  I'm just saying, it's hard to find a balance between breaking the motonomy and breaking the game experience.  If only randomizers weren't so random... 

If you're trying to get a mini-boss or something to appear and it's totally random, then you might as well just go and start rigging the random system. Make the chances surefire or really high, so then the mini-boss appears. After that required event is done, it can go random again...That's how some random systems do their work...

[winkio]

Yes, I suppose.  Well, now to stick a load of special awesome weapons and armor and a load of ridiculously powerful enemies in at low percentages

Actually, should I do that?  Make the amount or rarity of items and stuff correlate to the amount or difficulty of enemies?  Or should they be independent?
Because it would be ridiculously lucky if one time, an awesome and rare sword is guarded by a huge miniboss and another, its guarded by, oh, something like a lvl 1 chicken.  You see where I'm going with this?  I guess my question really is, should I put anything far from what normally goes there in with low random chances, or should I keep everything about the same level of difficulty, just different organizations and stuff with nothing extra?

[Starrodkirby86]

Same difficulties as the items come, but not everything should be...yeah...Nevertheless, it's totally up to you. Personally I prefer that enemies of a higher level should guard rarer or stronger items. Just don't put the strongest items only accessible to those. Use it wisely and balanced.

[winkio]

Hah, I figured out a better way: Correspondence

Now, my system has two sets of randomizer variables.  One set stores the current state, and the other stores the previous state.  In this way, whenever the player is in a town, they know the state of the field that they came from AND the state of the field that they will go to.  Because of this, I can offer specific quests based on what state the field will be when the player next enters it!  I can also change events based on the field the player just came from.  It's BRILLIANT!

[Blizzard]

Sounds like an interesting idea. I have seen a troop randomizer script somewhere, but I think it was SDK dependant and had some issues or wasn't very versatile or something like that.