Big events in cities

[andromacus]

Here another idea I would like to share, in case someone would like to take inspiration.

I think would be great if from time to time some big public events, such as fairs, tournaments etc could appear in the cities.

Due to the vastity of the world, to give the player the possibility to reach them, these events could be randomly generated by rumors got when talking to people (e.g. you ask for "any news?" and you may get an answer like "You know? A tournament of knights will take place in <name of a city in the region> in 20 days"). This would trigger the event to appear in that city after that time, so the player could decide if to try to reach the city or ignore it.

Graphically, I would imagine the event to appear like a set of stalls outside of the city walls. Clicking on them would allow the player to join the event.

Here are some of the events I could imagine:

Fairs: they would be like a set of shops in which there are higher probability than usual to find rare and high quality items (orcish or ebony weapons, potions, magic items, maps etc)

Knights tournament/jousts: these would appear like a set of fights (or one big battle between many opponents) with an appealing prize for the winner (a large sum of gold, a rare or magic weapon, the possibility to join a knightly order...)

Archery tournaments: this would test your archery skills against a set of opponents. Again, appealing prize for the winner

Martial arts tournaments: similar to the knight tournament but where only hand to hand combat is allowed

Athletic competitions: these would test your running, swimming or jumping skills against a set of opponents, with prize for the winner

Banquets: those would be hosted in the palaces. To join them you need to have high reputation with nobility, or find a way to get an invite (maybe by solving a quest). Random events could happen during the banquets and there could be the chance to get special quests by talking with the nobles.

So, these are some ideas. What do you think? Any other big event you would like to see?

[joshcamas]

This would be pretty cool! From pure guessing, it would most likely take modifying the navigation map for npc mobiles, while using flats for sellers at shops, and enemies for anyone that does things like fight each other, like you mentioned. All of this would be theoretically doable without too much technical trouble (just hard work xD). Looks like as long as the person you're fighting isn't MobileTypes.Knight_CityWatch it isn't counted as illegal to kill them, so that's cool! As for enforcing hand-to-hand, just temporarily removing the player's weapons would work, and since there (seems) to be no event triggered when a player casts a spell, I guess just temporarily clearing their spellbook could work LOL

All in all, this all seems to be doable from a technical standpoint, awesomely enough!

[andromacus]

Thanks a lot, glad you like the concept!

About the usage of magic in tournaments, I think they should be treated as cheating. Which means:

If you cast a spell/use an item or potion, you are immediately disqualified

If you enter a tournament with an active spell or magic item which boost your skills or attributes, there is a chance you are caught cheating and then you are disqualified and condamned to pay a fee (+ reputational loss). So you can try cheating, but knowing this implies a risk

I will publish soon other proposal of mods which could be maybe easier to implement (unfortunately I don't have the needed technical skills), so happy if they could inspire you or anyone else

[imsobadatnicknames]

Fairs: they would be like a set of shops in which there are higher probability than usual to find rare and high quality items (orcish or ebony weapons, potions, magic items, maps etc)

I have an idea for how this particular feature could be implemented, althought there's a little detail I'm not sure about.

There are 14 "Shopping plaza" city blocks in the game's world data. They are those blocks of shops and taverns that look like this



It would be possible to look up the ID for every one of these RMB blocks, and create a "fair" variant of each one by adding some stands with special merchant NPCs in the middle of the circle formed by all the shops, and maybe putting some decorations here and there.

Then it'd be possible to create a quest that runs on the backgroud through the entire game, and after a certain ammout of time (maybe a timer with a random value between 1 and 6 months?) uses the worldupdate quest command to replace the regular shopping plaza RMB blocks with their fair variants, and then turns them back to normal 24 hours later.

The only detail I'm not sure about is if it's possible to put mearchants outdoors (meaning, inside RMB blocks rather than RDB blocks), as I think a merchant's inventory and prices depend on the shop quality quality of the interior building block they're in, but I might be wrong about this. If that's the case, I guess you'd need to code custom merchant NPCs that still work in outdoor blocks.