Some variants have introduced wilderness to the game. Usually this also involves multiple towns and multiple dungeons.
There seem to be a few ways of doing this that I can think of...
0) There is no wilderness. You have one town above one dungeon and that's it!
1) Wilderness is done at a different scale. There's a single wilderness "level" which contains many towns and/or dungeons. When you enter one of those (like entering a shop in the town level), the scale switches back to normal. I seem to remember a couple of old variants (Kamband? Kangband?) using this style of wilderness.
2) Wilderness is done at the same scale as the dungeon/town. There are multiple wilderness levels arranged in a grid and you go from one to the next by walking off the edge. Each town takes up an entire grid to itself. However, dungeons are not done that way. Each dungeon is a stand-alone stack of levels beneath a grid location. My old Cthangband worked like this (although it also had towers going up in some locations as well as dungeons going down).
3) Wilderness is abstracted. There are multiple wilderness "locations" - some of which are towns and some of which are dungeon entrances - but they are not directly connected in an edge-to-edge manner. Instead, when you choose to leave one you are given a choice of which one to go to, and you are sent directly there. You may have a chance of a random "encounter" on the way, in which case you'll be placed in a small randomly generated outdoor "level" with the monster or monsters. I don't know any roguelike that does this, although it's done by a couple of non-roguelike games.
4) Wilderness is done in a grid manner as in option 2, but the grid is fully 3d. This means that you can - for instance - go down from the town to level 3 of the dungeon, move horizontally from level 3 beneath the town to level 3 beneath the wilderness, and then come back up and arrive in a wilderness level. With this method, each location in the grid has a maximum and minimum dungeon depth and you may need to travel underground to get to where you want to go. I don't know any game that does this.
So what do you guys think? Are wildernesses a good idea? Do they make the game more interesting, or are they a tedious obstacle?
There seem to be a few ways of doing this that I can think of...
0) There is no wilderness. You have one town above one dungeon and that's it!
1) Wilderness is done at a different scale. There's a single wilderness "level" which contains many towns and/or dungeons. When you enter one of those (like entering a shop in the town level), the scale switches back to normal. I seem to remember a couple of old variants (Kamband? Kangband?) using this style of wilderness.
2) Wilderness is done at the same scale as the dungeon/town. There are multiple wilderness levels arranged in a grid and you go from one to the next by walking off the edge. Each town takes up an entire grid to itself. However, dungeons are not done that way. Each dungeon is a stand-alone stack of levels beneath a grid location. My old Cthangband worked like this (although it also had towers going up in some locations as well as dungeons going down).
3) Wilderness is abstracted. There are multiple wilderness "locations" - some of which are towns and some of which are dungeon entrances - but they are not directly connected in an edge-to-edge manner. Instead, when you choose to leave one you are given a choice of which one to go to, and you are sent directly there. You may have a chance of a random "encounter" on the way, in which case you'll be placed in a small randomly generated outdoor "level" with the monster or monsters. I don't know any roguelike that does this, although it's done by a couple of non-roguelike games.
4) Wilderness is done in a grid manner as in option 2, but the grid is fully 3d. This means that you can - for instance - go down from the town to level 3 of the dungeon, move horizontally from level 3 beneath the town to level 3 beneath the wilderness, and then come back up and arrive in a wilderness level. With this method, each location in the grid has a maximum and minimum dungeon depth and you may need to travel underground to get to where you want to go. I don't know any game that does this.
So what do you guys think? Are wildernesses a good idea? Do they make the game more interesting, or are they a tedious obstacle?
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