The Peril System
Within Ataraxy, a world of floating islands, hostile forces and an adventuring player await. The player crosses the procedurally generated terrain facing enemies who gain dangerous Enhancements with the unnatural ability to grant their enhancements to their allies.
These enhancements are new capabilities, additional power, durability or even new tactic. The player is armed with the degrading weapons they claim from the spoils of their defeated foes.
How?
Enemies track how perilous they are. They have a Peril Level which represents how many times they have gained an Enhancement.
The Peril System is the opposite of a player leveling system.
In a player leveling system, the player progresses over a large length of time. They earn rewards for individual achievements and slowly gain new capabilities, power and options for strategic play.
In the Peril System, the enemy progresses over a short duration of time while earning Enhancements for commonly occurring events.
While the player can increase in level over the course of the game, enemies generally have less longevity. To make the Peril System matter, enemies must gain peril at an accelerated rate compared to player experience gain. Ideally, enemies should become more perilous, gaining Enhancements multiple times per encounter.
Things a player typically gains experience for
- Completing quests
- Slaying enemies
- Finding items
- Talking with NPCs
Things an enemy typically gains peril from
- Being within a certain distance of the player
- Damaging the player
- Being damaged by the player
- Healing allies
- When the player runs away
Why?
The concept of pacing exists within all variety of media; movies, books, television, and games. Pacing is the slowly increasing tension within the unfolding dramatic actions. As a story is told, the stakes get higher and the individual actions grow in scale and importance. Pacing is critical to games. Many games are designed entirely around pacing – bosses are given multiple phases, regions are unlocked, spells become more powerful.
The goal of the Peril System is twofold.
- To create pacing by turning up the challenge over the duration of an encounter.
- To create game-play variety through different enhancement enemy combinations.
The goal is that players will find themselves in novel situations that are difficult to overcome.
Inspirations
World of Warcraft Council Encounters
The design reference here is to a specific type of Council encounter. The specific side mechanic is when one of the bosses dies, they grant an ability or abilities to the remaining bosses. This serves to forward the pacing and growing challenge of the encounter as well as compensates for the now reduced difficulty rating with one boss felled.
My goal is to implement this style of mechanic within the general enemies in procedurally generated encounters. When the player approaches a group of enemies, the first few enemies they dispatch may be easy. However, the surviving enemies will grow more perilous after being ignored and watching their companions fall. These enemies will provide a greater challenge than the initial opponents resulting in a growing sense of challenge and suitable pacing.
Additionally, the peril system gives the player valuable decision making when the player can see how enemies will grow more powerful. For instance, if a player can see the benefits an enemy will grant to it allies they may prioritize their targets differently. Finally, with a variety of Peril Enhancements a great amount of challenge and replay-ability can naturally occur in Ataraxy.
Examples of this variant of Wow Council Encounter:
Paragons of the Klaxxi
- There are nine paragon bosses. You have to kill all of them.
- You fight three paragons at a time.
- When one dies, the other two heal to full and another joins the fight.
- The one that joins the fight is random.
- Each paragon has different abilities. Some are more dangerous than others.
- When you kill a paragon, the other two active paragons gain damage bonuses.
- Each dead paragon can be utilized to give a single raid member a buff.
- Certain paragon combinations have interactions with the ability they grant or abilities they have.
The fight is loved or hated by players for its incredible complexity and demand to play re-actively as opposed to memorizing a strict strategy.
There is no strict way to play this encounter given the random order element. From one engagement to the next, your raid’s strategy has to change. There are also decision making challenges about which paragon to kill at any given time (since you can’t kill two simultaneously). If you ignore a low priority paragon for too long they could become too much to handle and dismantle your raid.
Klaxxi Paragons teach a valuable design lesson about requiring mental consideration of the mechanics at play. My Peril System intends to make use of this on a much smaller scale with enemies that grant benefits to one another passively and on death. This combined with the varied natures of the enemies means that the player makes a meaningful decision when determining which enemy to kill.
Shadows of Mordor – The Nemesis system
The system functioned where under certain circumstances enemy Uruk’s could gain power, notoriety and the right to be tracked in a regional power chart. These enemies would gain or lose power depending on their interaction with the player and the player’s interaction with them.
Some examples for the player interacts with the Nemesis system
- An Uruk fills in a power a power vacuum left by a killed nemesis
- An Uruk that kills the player becomes more powerful.
- Nemesis’s have strengths, weaknesses, and immunities the player can learn of.
- A nemesis that survives an encounter can grow more powerful
- The player can put a nemesis in a challenging situation which might weaken or strengthen them.
The Nemesis system does a fantastic job at creating longevity and player stories. The contrast my Peril system has with it is that the Nemesis is a long term system, where the benefits, interactions and challenges occur over long durations of play. My Peril system focuses on the empowerment of enemies within a single combat encounter, and the decisions the player makes when confronted with growing challenges.
In short, my idea is to apply the Nemesis system on a smaller scale to individual enemies within an encounter.
Final Words
There is no single game I have come across that approaches the idea of enemy empowerment over the course of an encounter in a non-scripted manner. In World of Warcraft’s there are many small mechanics such as enrage, or fleeing, but nothing with this degree of meat and focus.
This game began as a side project but I feel this system design is worth testing, so I will be working heavily on Ataraxy to bring the Peril System to life. I will be updating this post as my idea reaches further implementation.
The current version is still in testing for transferring Enhancements.
Thank you for reading,
-Jonathan Palmer
