A Land Far Away

Travel System
The travel system requirements are detailed below.

For a short explanation of the feature specification format, visit:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... hp?t=27229

Functional Requirements
The travel system will consist of 3 types of rapid transit: caravan, ship, and magic portal. These forms of travel are best suited for players seeking to cross long distances fairly quickly and/or as an alternative to overland travel and the dangers therein. This form of travel will come at a specific cost to the traveler. Caravans will offer the least expensive form of rapid transit and magic portals the most.

The costs for the use of these systems will default to a value based on ALFA standards. Builders will have the ability to customize the costs where deviations are desired.

Travel on foot using an overland/world map will take 1 second for every x (10?) miles. Travel on horseback (including caravans) will take 1 second for every x (50?) miles. Travel by ship will take 1 second for every x (100?) miles. Travel by magic portal will be instantaneous.

Travel will incur a 15% risk of a random encounter for every second traveled. NPC guards can be hired for an additional fee and will defend the PC in the event of a random encounter. PCs can hire as many NPC guards as they are willing to pay for.

Travel on foot through the wilderness (off main thoroughfares) will require a Survival skill check DC 15. Failing the skill check will result in arriving at the incorrect destination. PCs will land as many areas away from their destination as the difference between their roll and the survival DC.

Travel across server boundaries will be logged. The acquisition of a visa or the validation of a player will result in recording the departure and arrival times, the source and destination servers, and the player's XP. The validating DM must also be recorded when relevant. Travel information older than 1 week can be purged.

NWN Object Dependencies
Ships, Caravans, Magic Portals, Sailor, Wagoner, Conversation Template

Local Variables and External Configs
iSurvivalDC, iTravelCost, iGuardCost, bCanHireGuards

Logging and Debugging (global LOG & DEBUG (on/off) constants)
None

Persistence Requirements
iSourceServer, iDestinationServer, sDepartureTime, sArrivalTime, iPlayerXP, sValidatingDM

Event Dependencies
OnConversation

Alright, just a general recycling of what I've heard voiced in the forums. Shall rapid transit include random encounters? Should we worry about time & distance? Should we include horses in the discussion?

Comments welcome.

Distance should take time, and may entail risk. Caravans/ships should cost resources, but reduce both time and risk. It would be nice if we have the option to 'hire on as guards', thus we are expected to fight if an encounter happens. It would also be nice to hire a caravan and *not* need to fight unless all the guards are dead ((Money or your life script)).

Horses would be assumed in caravans. For solo travel, if we can get horses working to double movement rate this will halve time. It should *not* lessen risk.

It might be very nice to include a Wilderness Lore roll to actually end up where you intended unless major roads are being used. This could be a small % chance to move a map left/right on as you AT on the mini-maps, or several dozen miles in [d8] direction off on the world map.

Suggestions for time? Use fixed time regardless of distance or a time/distance ratio, like 1 sec for every 10 miles?

I like the hire guards option as an additional fee. You get as many NPC allies as you pay for in the event there is an encounter.

We need to be careful with horse movement if we rely on a phenotype implementation. Movement rate adjustments will be based on the current PC speed. Perhaps we'll have more to work with than we do know so it's worth noting all the same.

Wilderness Lore (it's Survival now in 3.5e I believe) would be interesting but would it come into play when paying an NPC for travel? And who's skill would the system use?

Okay, now that the raging debates over Obsidian's announcement have died down, hopefully we can bring some attention back to these matters.

Since we're near certain that a world map, or similar, is going to be required for NWN2 modules, discussion about our travel system seems extraordinarily relevant. I've updated the language above to include overland travel as a result and it appears we couldn't have asked for a better seque for the introduction of survival checks, as was suggested earlier. Rate of travel is still ambiguous and also needs to be defined.

On a side note, for a travel system to see any degree of use, I think we need to keep travel times on the order of seconds on the low end and minutes on the high end, or ditch times altogether and simply focus on applying random encounters (the defacto approach). Porting players to a transitional area to bide their travel time would make sense for ship and possibly caravan travel, but not foot travel so the latter circumvents that dilemma altogether. I suppose the key to deciding will ultimately lie in what the community feels is the greater disruption to immersion.

So as always, comments/thoughts are welcome.

Well, if we simply recycle a few areas, we can have them walk the same dirt 20 times to simulate 20 areas (with slightly different placeables). Add in 20 RAES checks, and we're gold.

If we still have a force rest option, we can use that during caravans to check for night time encounters. Ships rather require some time floating, though we can also check to see if we want to have them attacked and boarded.

Id like to add one thing to the travel system... Altough no one likes or we can add a time for the travel so that it be "fun" for all, i mean if i take caravan from Waterdeaph to Silverymoon, that yourney should take days if not weeks to complete... But i also hate server hopping and when there is crasy time warps... So my proposal is, if possible to implement... When you travel to a far of area(server), we do not play out the time needed to travel, but the PC(s) must stay on the server they arived at for a X amount of days, to simulate travel time, and people can still play and have fun, and we stop the possibility to jump all ower the world in no time at all... A example would be travel from Baldurs gate to Arabale, spend three days in cormyr, and then travel to Shadow dale, and then have to spend three days there, before heading on as well, Either by walking, riding sailing etc... Of course then we have magical ways that complicates matters but i think its a easy system that allows People to play, and we add time of travel anyway...

/H

That's a good suggestion for overland travel, Fionn. Is that what Creslyn & Squam were working on?

What about ship & caravan travel? The obvious solution is to port travellers to a small "cabin" area for the duration of travel and have random encounters spawn on a timer.

I think an incremental travel approach using these methods would work quite nicely for imposing travel times, as long as servers are not too geographically dispersed.

cipher wrote:The obvious solution is to port travellers to a small "cabin" area for the duration of travel and have random encounters spawn on a timer.

I spent a good few months trying to make this work for caravans in NC.. nearly drove me nuts as I am by no means a good programmer. Your solution cipher is the core of the system I'd like to see.

porting to cabins should give you the option to role-play with your party members while you travel. With this function, I also attempted to implement a system where you could look out of the window and see where you are and also hop off the caravan if you wished. With these I had varying degrees of success.

Since i was spending my time fixing the basics of the system I never got to the implementation of random encounters and hiring on as caravan guards as a repeatable static but that was certainly my intention.

Caravans should certainly make for faster travel, offer a roleplaying opportunity and reduce but not negate risk particularly where there is a caravan guarding static for travel through dangerous areas.

Of course bandits and monsters are going to hit a guarded caravan, obviously they have something worth guarding inside.

I wonder if it would be possible in caravan guarding statics to just have the PCs following a caravan or group of caravans and theyd have to stop critters or bandits from actually attacking the caravan or they'd fail the static and/or lose the opportunity to do it again for a while.

For NWN2 again I must point to the
Persistent World Management System Project

With this during travel one could use the same basic outdoor tile, and then put random variables for travel as suggested by Fionn. [/url]

Aye, i'm a little concerned about that project though. Haven't heard anything from them in over a month.

We've been having this discussion internally at the Sunset Vale team; whether it makes sense to try to implement what has been referred to as the "final fantasy style" overland map, whereby a miniaturized party could move freely (albeit stuck together) around a scaled 32x32 exterior representing the whole area of the server, with triggers and scripts dictating when the party would be jumped to a normal area of interest or a terrain/region specific random encounter.

It is immursion-breaking, in that it adds a wholly different mode of game interaction, and it would require some nontrivial scripting and system development, but it would allow us to do many things that simply aren't possible with the default "click to teleport" world map, or with adjacent exteriors (due to module size/memory constraints).

We could try to build a working example, but it may be a lot of effort towards something folks may never find to be a satisfying solution. Thoughts on this?

I've always liked the idea of this system, without of course knowing how difficult it would be to get it working. In a region like the Cold Lands where terrain and weather are very relevant considerations while travelling, movement rates and maybe even random blizzards or other weather effects would be great to include. Throw in random encounters and chance of becoming lost and you have yourself a very nice system.

Acad, to give comfort on it, i'm trying to learn how to do overland world maps at the moment. Seems pretty fun so far. Once i feel reasonably confident, i'll see what i can do to get maps of the various accepted ALFA2 regions.

White Warlock wrote:Acad, to give comfort on it, i'm trying to learn how to do overland world maps at the moment. Seems pretty fun so far. Once i feel reasonably confident, i'll see what i can do to get maps of the various accepted ALFA2 regions.

Are you making them as nwn2 exterior areas, at a small scale, or as nwn2 world maps? The latter is comparatively simple from my understanding, and the former is something server teams will likely want to do for themselves, if we go that direction.