Parley Hatch
2abfe4abd1
Working title 'tgame' is provisional. Top-level samples/ and docs/samples/ are gitignored; visual/art pipeline lives outside this repo.
65 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
# Expeditions
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How materials, recipes, and trouble enter the game. AFK timer-resolved, no real-time gameplay.
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## Mechanic
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- Pick a destination (zone).
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- Pick a team (1 minion solo, or up to N for team expeditions).
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- Set off. Time passes (minutes to hours depending on distance + risk).
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- They come back with a report — loot, events, possibly injuries or worse.
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## Risk tiers
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- **Safe** — predictable, modest rewards, low variance, no real risk.
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- **Standard** — some variance, decent rewards, occasional minor injuries.
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- **Dangerous** — high variance, premium rewards, real injury and (rare) death risk.
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Riskier missions need better gear, better team comp, and Soldiers as escort. Soft-gating: you *can* send an underprepared team into the Mire, but they'll come back hurt or not at all.
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## Team composition
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- **Soldiers** required for hostile zones, otherwise penalty.
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- **Beastmasters** can pacify creature zones, reduce hazard rolls.
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- **Scholars** boost recipe-find rate.
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- **Gatherers** boost yield by biome subspec.
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- **Merchants** boost found-coin and trade-route bonuses.
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Team comp is its own puzzle separate from gear loadout.
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## Resolution: procedural event log
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No LLM, no runtime AI. Templated text snippets with slot fills:
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```
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[hazard, biome=Mire, severity=medium]
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"{minion} stumbled into a {creature} nest. {teammate} pulled them out, but {item} was lost in the muck."
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```
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Selected by zone + risk tier + team composition + trait rolls. Templates have conditional branches (different snippet if a Brave minion is present, etc.). Authoring the template pool is real work but standard work.
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## Drops
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See [14-materials.md](14-materials.md) for the materials taxonomy.
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- **Raw materials** (primary) — biome-appropriate; ore, wood, botanicals, bone, hide, etc.
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- **Refined / components** (occasional) — when expeditions encounter abandoned camps, ruins, or merchants
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- **Recipes** (occasional) — sometimes specific to the zone's flavor
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- **Trophies & curiosities** (rare) — relics, artifacts, named weapons, lore items
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- **Trait shifts** (sometimes) — minions return changed by what they saw
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- **Relationship changes** (always-ish) — who saved whom, who was reckless
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- **NPC encounters** (very rare) — recruitable adventurers met on the road
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## Wounds vs. death
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Working position: **wounded by default**, true death only on catastrophic failure in the highest-tier zones.
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- Wounded → infirmary for X hours, can't expedition during that time.
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- Wounded with Brave trait → shorter recovery, gains scar (cosmetic + flavor).
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- Death → permanent loss, with a memorial entry in the Library.
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Reasoning: losing a leveled-up portrait you've grown attached to is brutal. Permadeath everywhere makes players resent the game. Permadeath as the *worst possible outcome of the worst possible expedition* makes it dramatic.
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## Open questions
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- How granular is the destination picker? Region → zone → encounter, or just region → zone?
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- Do players watch a real-time progress bar, or does the report just appear on completion?
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- Should expeditions chain (a successful expedition opens a follow-up that's only available for 24h)?
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