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 Up