Re: Echeladders
by Interloper » Sun 10. Apr 2011, 03:16
I would use a Fallout New Vegas style system, where you have levels and XP, then killing things grant XP, certain achievements (kill X imps) grant repeatable bonuses - so if you kill 2X imps you get another XP boost, then you also get XP from quests. (in Fallout New Vegas achievements give you gamerscore AND XP)
People will expect killing an enemy to generate XP, which it should. Additionally, quests would be expected to give an XP bonus. The "achievement" based bonuses would provide extra incentives to play certain ways or repeatable goals to work towards. It just makes sense this way.
Ladder naming might occur in such a way that you have say 100 levels (maybe 50 would also be a good cap, but it has to be high, albeit attainable), and then of those 100 you get randomly selected themed titles based on:
-Interests (Like how Jade is interested in nuclear physics, she gets radiation themed titles)
-Titles (ie, Heir transparent)
-Quests (doing significant plot based quests might yield titles, like ectobiolobabysitter)
-Domains (the most obvious one would be puns based on that, like how John gets all the windy levels)
-Height based (Greentyke being the most obvious, then higher titles get more experienced sounding names)
-Strife Specibus (Certain rungs are based on the weapons you wield)
And then those could be matched up with descriptors based on how high you are, so low levels get juvenile titles, high levels get more adult sounding ones.
Practically you could segment off every group of say five and have a set series of puns to use, that are then applied in random order:
So from levels 1 to 10 you can use only synonyms for little kids to describe the height on the ladder.
Two puns from the string table regarding each category are added, then paired with a random height synonym, then arranged in essentially arbitrary order.
Check to see if any can be replaced with quest relevant or other "milestone" levels, if so, do so.