BurbLulls: I know chronology is one of the least important aspects of Tolkien in ToME, but I would like to see something along the lines of it in uniques. For example, you could only find and fight Bolg, son of Azog and beating Azog himself. This could be expanded in many ways:

This would stop people doing immediate dives to do the bare basics, and might add some flavour. :)

PermanentInk: If you did that, you'd want to make it easier in some way to find the requisite uniques. Could take a while for every single orc unique to randomly appear, especially since at that early stage of the game the player's unlikely to have good detection and such.

MayLith: It's an interesting idea, but I don't personally like it. It would mean you would have to complete Nameless before being able to clear Erebor. That's a one-shot proposition.

BurbLulls: True. It could be made so that certain uniques are far more frequent in certain places. Orcs in the Orc Caves and Dragons in Erebor, obviously.

PermanentInk: Another helpful thing would be to have a list of all those uniques... like a parchment you find lying around the orc caves. Sort of a "hit list."

MayLith: I may be a glutton for punishment, but a 'hit list' sounds rather too easy to me. ;-)

Nobody: Hmm.. maybe some uniques who have different versions of themselves could appear only after you kill the first one? The only one I can think of is Gandalf though... The "the Gray" version of Gandalf shouldn't be quite as high leveled as he is now--probably lower him to around whichever level the Balrog of Moria is (for some reason I keep thinking 50, but I'm not sure if that's right--whatever it is, Gandalf should be similar in strength, since he was only just barely able to kill the Balrog, and he still died.) and have a more-powerful "the White" version show up only after the first Gandalf dies.

JJ Nissen: I realize this is a 2-month old idea, but I just started reading through the ideas, and I figure it's my job to throw in my own. :) Three things on this thread: #I really like this idea, not just linear ideas like Gray before White, but could be entirely non-linear -- This could be a nice way to make the order of events less entirely random...Perhaps, if *you* kill Gandalf the Gray, Gandalf the White won't show up until the Balrog of Moria has been slain. (So The White's prerequisites would be both The Gray and Balrog of Moria are dead, and they could show up in either order (or even together on a level, fighting eachother when you show up!) #To make the "earlier" required uniques more common, some simple things could be done: If the level happened to pick Glaurung before the required unique Dragons had been killed, then simply put one of the non-killed Dragons in his place (a quick check-and-replace, easy as pie) #Or, another way to handle this (for the more suicidal of us:)) -- if you ran into Azog randomly, put the rest of the Orc uniques on the level. This might require special level observation texts, of course. And the uniques could be dispersed randomly on the level, or all in a room together, depending on the relationships of the types of units. This could also be a flag for some types (Gandalf the White wouldn't cause Gandalf the Gray and the Balrog of Moria to appear next to him in a vault in Angband, obviously. :))

That last idea could make some crazy lower-levels of Angband for dungeon divers, where you start randomly running into people with 30+ prerequisites (since some of the prerequisites would have prerequisites) on a dungeon, and suddely you're stuck in a small arena level with 120 uniques... perhaps it's time to look around a bit more in places where you can pick off the lower level uniques easier without their more powerful buddies.

IdeaArchive/Chronological Uniques (last edited 2005-01-20 15:01:38 by fw-ext)