Golems settled, Doyle Ponders on the fifth monster to add. After all, he still has 125,579 points to spend on the floor.
Well, an easy addition is a ten-pack of elder assassin vines. Mining tunnels are pretty decent for the plants to ambush delvers. They can scrunch up behind supports and what not.
After that, ten permafrost lynx as well. No particular reason for them, this was just a chance to give them a try on an actual floor. Though there are still a ton of points.
So many points, it would be easy to overcrowd the floor. Even with the extra “kobold”-sized tunnels, there is a magnitude less space to place monsters. Which is the downside when one tries to make even a semi-realistic mineshaft.
Then again, most delvers avoid a majority of the monsters on previous floors. Well, as long as their intent is to continue deeper. Some will stay on a floor and grind through the monsters.
The epitome of this behavior definitely falls to a recent floor, number 17. If fighting the kobolds and disarming the traps isn’t their goal, parties going through the floor avoid over 90% of the fights.
Doyle looked over floor 21 and nodded to himself. That wasn’t going to be the case here. While the mines weren’t exactly a single path. The actual maze part was more focused around the stuff already intended to be optional. Which was mostly just the bear den at the moment. Though he planned to plant a few ore veins in some of the dead-end passages.
After all, that would make sense. They’re dead ends because at the time the place was abandoned, they were still active. That didn’t explain the twists and turns as ore veins didn’t exactly do that. Or maybe they did? Doyle wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject and didn’t care. Matching the aesthetics is fine, but it can’t prevent the dungeon from working.
Though speaking of working, what would have caused a working mine to be abandoned? Oh sure, there was a slight bear infestation Now. But none of the monsters are strong enough to close a mine like this. Inherently, the value of the ore would match the strength of the monsters unless Doyle went out of his way to adjust things one way or another.
So, that left an environmental factor. Well, sure, it could be that a powerful monster passed through, but Doyle was going to ignore that and instead, put focus on traps. Traps which are hidden as natural elements of the terrain.
The current traps could stay the same, but now Doyle was going to pack the floor to the gills with “natural” traps. Oh, and he would make use of portals to make it even more confusing.
First trap off the top of his head? Classic pit trap, except the trap opens into another tunnel below. Oh, and maybe not actually below. Portals means the place the trap lets out could be anywhere!
And as he sets down an example, finds that the trap system allows something Doyle has struggled with in the past. Way back on floor 4, this feature would have been so useful. The trap system allows on trigger randomization.
As it stands, floor 4 has to shuffle things around to make the ambush spots random. Admittedly, the floor was a little light on points to use traps for this. But going forward? Well, this made things a lot easier.
In this instance, the randomization made it easy to have the collapsing floor lead to anywhere in the dungeon. For even more fun, if the pit trap is the type that closes itself after being activated? Well, not only would the victim be trapped wherever they are, but reactivating the trap would lead to a new location!
That was literally impossible for Doyle to do previously. Sure, he could randomize where it would lead to, but only before the delvers show up. Once they’re on the floor? The pit would lead to exactly one place.
Not that Doyle used that kind of pit trap. Since he wanted it to appear natural, the traps would be purely a matter of the floor collapsing into rubble.
Doyle considers it for a moment. Maybe it wasn’t impossible? He couldn’t have the floor rebuild itself like in the bear den. However, what if you drop enough rubble to fill the hole in? To get the option to reset where the portal leads, all Doyle needs is for the hole to be completely covered again.
Now, obviously, the floor itself doesn’t have enough rubble for that. Good thing the ceiling exists! Doyle doesn’t plan for too many pit traps like that. Most will simply be an open hole to a previous area. Or rather, an area of the floor that to get to, you don’t pass the group before getting to it from the entrance.
That leaves room for them to end up in side-passages. Also, it leaves a permanent hole connecting those locations. Which could be useful or humorous. In particular, there was a limitation in place by default that Doyle disabled.
That default behavior is that the pit trap won’t lead to anywhere visible from the trap. By turning it off? Doyle made it so that the trap could collapse into the tunnel right behind where the group is. A trippy bit of space-bending that certainly isn’t natural for most places, but fun enough for Doyle that he ignores such worries.
Though there was one limitation to the trap, which wouldn’t be a limit if he simply built things himself. The trap will not collapse into itself, so no infinite falling. Doyle can even tell why that isn’t allowed, or rather, isn’t affordable.
Now, the cost of a pit trap in points isn’t some simple formula where deeper equals more expensive. Not that depth has no say in the cost. Rather, the first few meters have the highest jump in price. Which makes some sense to Doyle.
Unless you’re dealing with a vacuum, after a certain point the actual depth is immaterial. Acting more as a time sink than a method of causing harm. Besides, enough levels under your belt makes falling a less than lethal experience. You need to add exotic elements to make a pit trap dangerous.
All that to say, an infinite-depth pit trap is going to cost quite a bit. Not an infinite number of points, but certainly more than Doyle could afford. Though ironically if he had wanted to force it, his portal trap would actually be a good bit cheaper than a literal infinite depth pit.
Not only is there the fact that the portals means you don’t need infinite space, even if that space is being spun up out of nothing. But more importantly, from a cost perspective? The infinite portal drop, once the person gets out of it? They’re back where they started.
A big part of the cost, once you discount the simple space needed, is the fact that it represents potentially an infinite amount of climbing to get out. Which seemed to really burn points.
Doyle found it somewhat ironic as it reversed the cost paradigm. A pit trap of average depth, which seemed less of a set depth, but more of a suggestion and close to how high the tunnel was to begin with, would cost less than a similar depth pit trap using portals. Like, half the cost.
Not that Doyle minded the cost so he threw a good 20 portal pits into the mine shafts. Now, technically he could have got them for less, but was happy to pay a thousand points each. The extra cost comes from allowing them to randomize not just the exit, but the pit location itself.
Doyle could have cut costs by placing each one personally. It isn’t even about the fact that they’ll be randomly placed that increases the price. Rather, it was the fact that as a trap, when placed the edges need to line up and whatnot. So by allowing it to be placed anywhere, the pit trap has to be able to adjust to being placed anywhere.
Satisfied with the pit traps, Doyle turned to the next series of traps. Mainly, the inverse. Mind you, Doyle already has rockfall traps. Except, those are meant to be clearly traps set by some entity.
Doyle pauses as he considers the existing traps and realizes their cost isn’t being included in his current running total. It wouldn’t be hard to add them into said total, except they suffer from another thing. Mainly, they have set locations. Useful when playing around with them and making sure a bear constantly has rocks falling on their head. Less useful for a floor this deep in the dungeon.
So Doyle simply pulls them all out! The evolved bear doesn’t need more rocks to the head, anyway. Which, thinking about it, might be why the bear evolved armor plates? If so, Doyle doesn’t blame it.
Anyway, with the rockfall traps stripped out, Doyle begins to play around with how randomization affects these traps. And the answer is, not much. Or rather, the way the rockfall trap is placed means that the trap doesn’t suffer from the same increase in cost that the pit trap does.
After all, the point of a pit trap is that it needs to look like a regular floor. The rockfall trap doesn’t care about that. When placed, it slices up the existing roof without a care.
Well, not without a care. It makes sure things won’t be falling prematurely. However, it doesn’t care if it leaves visible cracks. So less stealthy, and Doyle gets the feeling that he probably could change that? But it isn’t an intrinsic part of the trap beyond simply making it too obvious.
There is one find! If not related to the randomness. When placing a rockfall too close to the wall, Doyle managed to position some of the rockfall on the wall itself. So yeah, it seems the limit with the trap isn’t being on the ceiling, but rather that there needs to be a fall. A collapsing wall is as valid as a collapsing roof.
The downside is that they’re a lot more visible. A few cracks on the ceiling? That happens. However, to stay up the cracks aren’t ever going to be too obviously a trap. To stay up, a wall doesn’t need that. In fact, given how they get added onto the wall, it seems to require obvious cracks.
And not just in the sense that they are easy to see. The cracks on the wall make it look ready to fall over! So yeah, less of a hidden trap and more of an area-denial trap. Like, “don’t go over there, idiot”.
Which Doyle is perfectly fine with. In fact, it would help push delvers down different paths. After all, they come to a split in the tunnel and one side is obviously going to collapse on you? Well, you’re probably going to check the other side first.
More than that, the “natural” traps are much harder to disarm because they aren’t traps in the traditional sense. The rock falls with a trip wire? You disable the tripwire and things are fine. There isn’t one point of failure you can cut when the “trap” is the simple fact that the wall is a badly balanced collection of rocks, ready to fall over at a moment’s notice.
So, costing only 250 points, Doyle spams out 50 rockfalls. Ten of which are collapsing walls and half of the ceiling traps are tripwire-based. The only thing to note, is that the tripwire traps have a limited range of places they can be set. Mainly based on the need to be near the wooden supports in the mineshaft. Which isn’t too big of a limitation, but it does mean that they are easier to spot.