Olympia, Yet Another Beastmastery Fix

From: jeremy@insignia.com (Jeremy Maiden)

Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Many of the proposed fixes for beastmastery (specifically beast
breeding)
being too useful in Olympia have just weakened it or made it more
expensive. Here's another idea, based on making it less repetitive and
encouraging more connection with other activities, at the expense of\
some complexity and no backwards compatibility for g1.

Have 15 types of beast, 8 at level 1, 4 at level 2, 2 at level 3 and 1
at level 4. Stop any beasts from breeding true, the level 1 beasts
can't
be made by breeding at all, and the higher levels are all cross-breeds.

Each level 1 beast has a single good feature (one of: flying, low
weight,
carrying capacity, missile attack, good attack factor, good defence
factor (doesn't seem to be 8, count last two more than once each)).

The level 2 beasts have both the good features of their parents, and so
on until the level 4 beast has all 8 good features (multiple good
attack factors accumulate).

So, the point of beast breeding becomes not to just increase your total
beast stock, but to convert from lower to higher types (allowing for
mortality rates, each higher type costs some fraction of its ancestors
to make).

For an extension into other areas, the 8 level 1 types can be made the
typical wandering monsters of different areas, perhaps latitudes. This
creates a natural trading pattern and an incentive to travel and hunt
monsters, since one person's rat is another person's giant lizard.

Jeremy