Additional uses for climb

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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nobody
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Additional uses for climb

Post by nobody »

It was remarked upon over the last weekend that climb could use additional use cases and I wanted to get a topic posted so folks can throw out ideas. Below are what I've come up with:
- A synergy with riding, such that if your climbing is above an arbitrary threshold, when you use the mount command you also roll a climb check and on a success (based on encumbrance and mount size?) it reduces your mount RT by 1 second (with appropriate minimums).
- A synergy with bushcraft to expand the amount and type of things that can be foraged (like bird eggs and feathers, as well as fruits and nuts - to simulate being able to climb trees to get more than just ground forage without having to code those fiddly up-in-a-tree rooms)
- OR code those fiddly up-in-a-tree rooms and add forage to them (as above, bird eggs and feathers, fruits and nuts would all be great tree forage)
- It would also be cool to have instanced caves be reachable by climbing in mountainous areas - they might have resources (treasure, mushrooms/lichen, underground rivers, on rare occasions a room with one mineable resource like granite, marble, tin, coal, salt, etc.) and/or have critters living in them. Making them instanced and randomly generated will make them not viable as places for PCs to try to set up residency / hide stuff, and also keep them interesting in the long term. You could have the instanced rooms be random per day (so everyone gets the same room that day) or per person (so everyone gets a different room, maybe allow them to lower a rope and anyone climbing that rope gets to that room).

Edited to add examples of tree forage I could think of.
Ephemeralis
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Re: Additional uses for climb

Post by Ephemeralis »

Could give climb some 'generic' utility by adding a bit to rooms that expresses that they might have generally climbable 'high ground' in them, like rooftops in urban environments, or fallen trees in wilderness ones, something that ranged and long-reach weapon wielders could potentially exploit for extra rerolls and the like at the risk of being knocked from their position and sustaining extra damage on the fall.
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Lexx416
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Re: Additional uses for climb

Post by Lexx416 »

Having little clandestine rooftop spots in Shadgard (and Future Notshadgard) that are kept behind a decent climb would be a neat perk for folks to invest in climbing as well. Which could lead to future tasks for any Totally Not A Thieves Guild societies that might exist down the road.
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
Heron
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Re: Additional uses for climb

Post by Heron »

I like in-a-tree rooms. The most obvious addition would be to add some kind of combat maneuver that scales in part off climbing, like a lasso move. Might not fit, though.

Here's another one I like: in urban/forested areas and maybe with an appropriate ability, climbing could supplement stealth. This could be abstracted away as hiding in high places, or using high places to your advantage-- dropping from the rooftops to shank someone, or Tarzanning them from the trees.

Unique forage-ables in uncommon places is also a step in the right direction. Ideally, rooms you can climb into will have something that makes it worth coming back. Without a return factor, climbing becomes the one-and-done kind of dead skill we want to avoid. Some kind of druid ability that can be activated to give you a buff in certain hard-to-reach rooms could work.

So! Good things to have:
*Unique resources (Metals, trees, forage, etc)
*Supplementary combat zones (Like ravens and laborers. One area has similar rolls, is more rewarding in X way, but needs climb/swim to access)
*Temporary druid buffs (Honestly iffy on this, so it's a big maybe)
*Information (Get a good vantage point on not-Shadgard, use the 'scout' command, and bring back valuable information!)
*Task objectives (Like above, or different.)
*Combat maneuvers/synergy for climb-prone classes.
*Cool Stuff (Unusual room echoes, hidden rooms, PUZZLES, secret lore)

Climbing is not my favorite skill right now, feeling like a week+ long point tax for exploration. Skill checks are also one of my least favorite ways of gating off areas, though guess-the-syntax or guess-the-password puzzles take the cake in that respect.

My favorite area in the other game would be the one with the ghosts and haunted armor nethrims. You walk around and everything is normal until you pass through the right room in the right direction, and then the same place is suddenly foggy and very dangerous. It might be one of my favorite areas in a text game ever, for the sheer cool factor. Top ten definitely.
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Rias
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Re: Additional uses for climb

Post by Rias »

There are a lot of really good ideas in this thread! I'm excited to play around with implementing some of them.

I'm not so sure about the ranged combat ones, because then we get into the troublesome situation of ranged users routinely positioning themselves where melee has no way of retaliating against them which, while neat for the ranged user, doesn't seem very fair balance-wise.
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