Blacksmith Repercussions

[8bitgentleman]

Right now stealing or killing the blacksmith has a huge advantage. The weapons on the wall are much more powerful in relation to the weapons you can craft and there is no real disadvantage to killing him (other than having to travel to tacotown for another blacksmith). I don't really have a solution for this I just wanted to start a discussion about how the world of Hawkthorne should react to you killing the blacksmith.

[reddfawks]

Hmmm, I would think having to wait until Tacotown for things may be a repercussion in itself, buuuuuuuuut....This may be a bit of a crazy suggestion: The other vendors all raise their prices a bit if the Blacksmith is dead, since there's less "competition" now?

[8bitgentleman]

I like that idea reddfawks, totally doable. I was thinking that you should't be able to marry hilda if you've burned her family alive...

[niamu]

I'd like to see the entire town become a ghost town without the blacksmith there to drive the economy. Or perhaps the townsperson that is carrying materials for the blacksmith to make weapons out of slowly helps build a new shop that Hilda becomes the owner of.

I'm against Hilda not being able to be married to a player if the blacksmith dies because then the player misses out on part of the episode parity. In the episode Hilda is wed even though the blacksmith dies.

[niamu]

I think we should have the NPCs in the town move in and out of buildings in the future. Then it should be possible for an NPC to catch you in the act of killing the blacksmith and then there would be consequences unless you manage to kill that NPC as well before they leave.

As for what the consequence is... I really want to go all out and have one of the NPCs conjure a huge storm in the level through magic and the storm will kill you and wipe the town off the map.

If you manage to kill the blacksmith and burn down the shop and there are no witnesses the game would behave just as it does now with the exception of the other blacksmith shops raising prices as @reddfawks suggested.

[edisonout]

I'm feeling mean - would it make sense to reduce the size of the inventory so you could only have say 4 or 6 items at a time rather than 14, so players have to be selective rather than collect everything on offer on the walls of the blacksmith?

Going off topic (as I tend to do), players can currently get multiple of the same item (eg. 3 crimson swords) but unless they are projectiles, they're never removed from the inventory so having lots makes no sense to me.

[8bitgentleman]

I think arbitrarily reducing the size of the inventory isn't the way to go. Perhaps we should give each item a weight and introduce a maximum load that the player can carry. Instead of having a full inventory the object would be too heavy for the player to carry.

[niamu]

I prefer if we stick to more direct consequences. Losing inventory ability as a result of killing an NPC doesn't seem like an expected outcome that any player would have.

[8bitgentleman]

@niamu I agree that reducing the inventory shouldn't be a consequence of killing the blacksmith but it adding weight to weapons in general could be a way to prevent unnecessary farming of weapons.

[niamu]

@8bitgentleman I don't think weight should be accounted for. It's just another manual value that we need to maintain and set on every item/weapon. And it's another UI element to add to the inventory that does nothing but restrict the player.

Besides, we have item persistence working across levels now which mitigates the farming issue. If there are too many weapons in the inventory it's probably because the player bought them now.