Player-Controlled Monsters

Although making combat more interesting is not normally where I focus my thoughts, I present here a way to implement player-controlled monsters. The idea of PC monsters has been brought up many times, and is very popular with players for obvious reasons. There are, however, some legitimate implementation objections on the part of Origin, and a good number of conceptual details that need examination in order to prevent exploits and abuses. To that end, I have compiled several ideas in what I hope is a reasonable proposal, both in concept and implementation. Others have worked on similar ideas; I intend to someday present a page of all these ideas. For now, check out Runesaber's idea.

Creating a Monster
Monster characters would be completely different from human characters, providing a very different gaming experience and involving much simpler creation and maintenance. To create the monster, the player would designate a given character slot as a "monster slot" and create the new character. (In my opinion, slots 2-5 for all players should automatically be "monster slots," which would prevent the abuse of mule characters while still allowing players to use multiple slots on one server: the others would just be monsters. This is unrelated to the main point, however.) Monsters have only one statistic: experience points. A newly-created monster character would start with a default "newbie" experience level. All other stats and skills are derived from the existing characteristics of that monster type as used for the NPC monsters, scaled by the character's experience points as explained below. Monsters are immune to notoriety, having the notoriety of NPC monsters (meaning they are killed on sight by guards). Monsters cannot interact with NPCs except for fighting. There is no normal "paperdoll" interface for monsters; for monsters that can wield them, weapons and armor are considered different monster types. Double-clicking one's monster character brings up a window with the normal paperdoll options for logging out, status, journal, help, etc.

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Human "Monster" Characters
One idea that might be interesting would be the ability to play an NPC-type human character. You could be any of the normal NPC human characters, of the sort that wander the towns and wilderness: peasants, thieves, fighters, etc. This character would advance like a normal monster character, except that experience points could also come from killing monsters. The appeal of this option is that it would allow people to use their extra character slots (the monster slots) for role-playing purposes, without providing an easy way to abuse them as mules. A human "monster" character would initially have neutral alignment, although any attack on any normal PC human would instantly convert that character to normal PC monster alignment (evil). A related idea might be to allow "ghost" monsters, since there are a variety of legitimate uses of ghosts in role-playing, along with a host of illegitimate uses of "mule" ghosts. A special PC monster option for ghosts count be available at all experience levels; this monster would not be able to gain or lose experience and would behave exactly as a normal ghost, but could not be resurrected. This would allow people to use ghost characters without allowing for some of the abuses that are currently done.

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Experience Points
The number of experience points a character has controls what monsters are available to that character. Whenever a monster character logs in, all of the available monster types are presented and the player must choose which one to be (by default, the player controls the same monster that was used in the previous session). More experience points provide more options for monster type, and allow upgrades within a monster type (from a lizardman to a lizardman with a mace, for example). As the player gains experience within a given type, the monster gains stats and skills within the range specified for NPC monsters of that type. All monster types have a range of experience points, and it is possible to "outgrow" a certain monster type and have it no longer available. Outgrowing a monster during play makes it impossible to gain more experience points, allowing a player to continue to play a low-level monster indefinitely if desired. There are limits on the number of certain types of monsters (dragons, drakes, daemons, etc.) in the world, forcing people not to upgrade when they might otherwise be able to do so. In order to upgrade in this case, the player would have to wait until a higher-level monster died. If a player is able to kill a higher-level PC monster with a lower-level monster character, the lower-level character is automatically given enough experience points to become the higher-level monster (if it didn't already have them).

Killing enemies (humans) is the fastest way to gain experience points. Perhaps killing some types of other monsters would also give experience (although I'm not really in favor of this). Carrying loot also contributes, with large amounts of loot contributing heavily to experience (based on the resale value of the loot). Monsters cannot operate chests (i.e. cannot access the loot inside), cannot drop items or control their inventory in any way, and automatically loot the most valuable item, stack of items, or container from any corpse they find. They also automatically pick up any loot they find lying on the ground. See the comments on monster camps (below) for a possible way to deal with carrying capacity.

The fastest way to lose experience points is to die. Dying causes the monster to drop a huge chuck of their experience: any monster with more than twice the "newbie" experience level is set to newbie again, and any monster that dies with less than twice the experience points of a newbie has its experience points halved. Being near humans and not fighting (inflicting damage) on any of them also costs experience points, forcing the monsters to either engage in a fight or flee. The experience points lost for this is a percentage of total experience and therefore penalizes tougher monsters more heavily than weaker ones. There is also a good chance, depending on monster type and especially attack type (magical vs. melee), that the monster will auto-defend itself if enemies are nearby, making it unwise for humans to stand near a supposedly friendly monster. Monsters also lose a small amount of experience if they wander out of their most appropriate habitat.

For low-level monsters, surviving in the wilderness without being killed is worth experience points, but this is a slow effect and has little benefit for higher-level monsters. To assist monsters in their fight against the humans, some monsters should be able to move faster than humans.

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Advancement Tracks
An interesting enhancement to this system would be to limit a character's advacement to a logical progression: once a "monster" character is on, say, the "lizard" track after choosing a snake at a low level, it moves through lizardman, lizardman with weapon, on up to drakes and dragons; there could also be an "undead" track, a "human" track, and an "orc" track. Enforcement of the tracking would probably not be strict, but would be encouraged by lowering the experience requirements for selecting higher-level monsters in the same "track" as the last monster played.

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Monster Logins and Logouts
Secure logout is possible at dungeon campfires and at encampments. Monsters can create encampments if enough monsters camp in the same area: after a normal period of camping (as for humans), an orc-camp style encampment is created (instead of the "camp is now secure" message). After waiting at the encampment for a short period, secure logout is possible for low-level monsters. High-level monsters involved in creating an encampment generate loot chests which contain a good portion of their loot; they lose experience points if the chest is opened before they log out (along with the points lost from the lost loot). The high-level monster must wait a longer period before secure logout is possible; when logging out, the loot is removed from the chest. It is impossible for the monsters in the camp to tell which chest belongs to which monster, so it is in their interest to protect the camp until they can all log out. After all monsters involved in the camp log out, the camp decays. As a possible enhancement to the camps (encouraging monsters to use them and making them better finds for adventurers), it would be interesting to limit monster carrying capacity (as is done for humans) and have any excess weight (perhaps weight in excess of 75% of their maximum) stay in their chest when they camp and log out, converting the experience points from the "lost" loot into permanent experience-point gain (although at less than a 1-1 ratio, to encourage the monsters to carry loot at all times).

Monsters can log in anywhere that monsters can log out: in other words, dungeon campfires and wilderness encampments. If the logout site still exists (i.e. is a permanent fixture) then the monster logs in near where it logged out (although far enough away that adventurers can't just wait by the "spawn" sites). If the site no longer exists (was an encampment which has decayed) then the monster spawns near some currently-existing site.

Communication
Most monsters are only understood by other monsters. Some monsters (non-humanoid) cannot even be heard by humans. Particularly intelligent monsters may be partially understood, or understood using spirit speak.

There should be a way, using some auto-tracking mechanism, for monsters to locate monsters of similar types. PC monsters cannot attack, and are not attacked by, NPC monsters of similar types.

If taming is allowed (I am currently thinking that this is a bad idea, because of exploits), when a player-monster gets tamed the player loses control of it and it becomes an NPC monster for the duration of the tamed period, and disappears afterwards.

Some Quick Numbers
I will try to present here some first-pass numbers that might make this system work. The main goals are: to encourage people to play monsters, to encourage monsters to fight people, to encourage monsters to carry loot, to discourage everyone from being a dragon, and to discourage monsters from working with humans.

• Gaining Experience:
• newbie level: 200 exp
• each 2 minutes of survival in the wilderness/dungeon (no advancement if safe inside a PC building): +1 exp, up to 500 maximum; perhaps limited to no more than +50/day to discourage people from macroing
• each human (normal PC) killed: +10 exp times level of human (GM = 10, Master = 9, Adept = 8, etc.) [note: cannot count the same person more than once, to prevent abuse.]
• each monster killed by a "human monster" character: 5% of the PC monster exp level of that monster, up to 100 exp maximum
• carrying loot (capped at 25% of total exp to prevent exploits):
• each 10gp worth, up to 100gp: +1 exp
• each 5gp worth, from 100-1000gp: +1 exp
• each 1gp worth, above 1000gp: +1 exp
• Losing Experience:
• failing to defend campsite: -5% of exp when chest opened, plus lost loot (50% of inventory is in chest)
• each 2 seconds on screen with a human: -1% of exp, down to 200 minimum
• failing to stay in habitat (i.e. starting area):
  • dungeon dweller inside inappropriate dungeon: -1% of exp every 2 minutes
  • dungeon dweller in wilderness: -1% of exp every minute
  • wilderness monster in dungeon: -1% of exp every 2 minutes
• Example Levels for Monsters (ideally this list would include all monsters, these are just examples):
• forest mongbat, slime: 0-100 pts
• dungeon mongbat, zombie, human peasant: 50-200 pts
• skeleton, ghoul, human brigand: 150-400 pts
• ratman, lizardman: 200-600 pts
• armed lizardman: 250-700 pts
• orc, ogre, human fighter: 300-800 pts
• gazer, orc mage: 800-2000 pts
• lich, elemental: 1200-3000 pts
• daemon: 2000-5000 pts
• drake: 3000-8000 pts
• dragon: 5000-10000 pts

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