I’m curious to know players’ thoughts on the encounters that are presently within the game.
Not enough options on whether I like encounters or not. In “meaningful” games, you take what you can and move ahead where there’s uncertainty with “survival” of paramount importance. But give me the Duns in an Indie game and I’ll seek out encounters intentionally. Should I answer “No and Yes” to the same question?
There’s only 10 questions allowed… . 
Just comment like you have seems the best way forward… So “sometimes” would be the best response but I ran out of questions…
Clint
How much work is it to put in new ones for a particular scenario? Does it really add that much value to the overall game? Will it hinder production of other products?
I know that discussions have taken place about other kinds’ of changes that might…those being, among others I’m sure I forgot about, changing the combat algorithim to have higher modifiers for troop type and terrain, tactics and so forth; the thought about nations having specialty troops, like dwarven Hi is better than elven; giving the character bonus to the player at game start to put where he wants;
I’m asking because I don’t know how you all feel about it as players in the community or the management that administrates the game. It does seem to me that there have periodically been questions about this sort of thing and each time it becomes a sounding board for someone to complain on, or worse, imo, a question to which the answers don’t matter. We know what you would like but we can’t do it or won’t as the case is…really adds up the same way…it was asked but it wound up being asked for the sake of asking…
What would be the point in adding to existing modules…if you just added to the existing modules, making them, in effect, new ones…why add the other modules?
there it is…lol
Jason M. Roberts
Administrator in another vein
Encounters provide more personalized flavor to the game. They attempt to make you realize that your orders are for characters and they sometimes have unexpected “surprises”.
That was why they originated. Of course, we all play the game to win. Thus, if we collectively come up with correct answers, we’ll use them. Thus the idea of some sort of steady stream of new encounters adding into the game from time to time is interesting.
Also, note that sometimes if there’s a “safe” answer such as FLEE (i.e. issue no order), then in the sense that you’re trying to win the game, the other 2 order choices for the character that turn may be more important, so sometimes encounters are ignored because it’s the right thing to do in the circumstances. That doesn’t mean encounters aren’t interesting or that they don’t add flavor to the game.
Heck, at this point, DS grudge teams all but depend on dragon encounters and a major part of DS strategy is to get camps in the right places as fast as possible to ID the wyrms and go recruit them asap. Are those encounters important? for sure!
Anyway, once again, Thank you Clint for the wiki!
Dave
I think the main thing I’ve wondered about encounters is why oh why does an intelligent person like an emissary who I’ve placed nice and safely in one of my pops go wandering out camping at night???
Seriously though I think the encounters are good, partoicularly the random ones because they add an important elelement of chance.
Hexes are larger than pops. It takes days to cross a hex, lots of camping opportunities outside the pop centre. Here’s a 2nd Edition item - Move to Hex and then qualify - Wilderness of Pop…
Yes but don’t they sometimes wander off even if you’ve left them in that safe walled major town for a couple of turns? Maybe I’d better check but if they don’t then you’re right and it actually makes good sense . . .
Well, even when you consider you’ve given them very clear Pop Centre specific instructions, they do have 2 weeks… And if you consider the enemy is camping a day’s walk outside the walls for security reasons, you can appreciate how a ScoChar doesn’t always succeed, how enemy characters don’t show up, etc.
How much work is it to put in new ones for a particular scenario? Does it really add that much value to the overall game? Will it hinder production of other products?
At present it’s a fair bit of work, but we’ve had to do a lot of that converting the Mac to PC. We’re aiming to get a “simple” system for setting up encounters where you just call routines from a drop-down menu so that you can simply create the encounters from an in-game perspective. Making sure that they are in flavour is another aspect of this as well. We’re hoping that by the time the Menu driven Enc system is set-up it should take about half- 1hr to create the engine of each encounter, and then the actual text another hour. So that’s not too bad and well on the way to being developed. The main coding time now is each of the drop down menus.
After a bit I’m hoping that we can have a GUI where players can create their own encounters, but I’m not sure about that at present. I know players will then want “what if…”, “or can you do this?” which can take up a lot of time to code but are possible options for the future.
[ul]
[li]Basically balance; right level between boring - nothing happens and OMG! Each of the KS went through about 10 times for balancing but even now I’m not sure…
[/li][li]Knowledge of the Enc; so we’d have to tweak it, no back doors to gaining 20k gold if you say “Clint”
[/li][li]Appropriateness; we have to have something basically within the LotR world, and we’re used to doing that with the Tolkien Estate.
[/li][li] Something that I’ve no doubt missed, but will come back later!
[/li][/ul]
Ideally with encounters I’d like to have the portrait (we’ve got some snazzy new art) show up, not just in the challenge, as I think that will add to the flavour of the text/enc as well.
First off we’re testing it in KS (the second print off of the start turns is today, and we’re testing the game balance this week). So that’s where we’re at with them at present. Looking at the poll players seem to want new encounters.
Clint
Should have an “Encounter Contest”, 
Sounds a good idea! No seriously… 
When we’re done testing KS I’ll have a look at that…
Clint
Hello everyone
As part of our continuing development we’ve created the following Wikki pages. They’re intended as a method for players to update simply the encounters on-line so that as a community you can have simple access to them. We’ve copied across the Bobbins information to the site.
http://www.middleearthgames.com/encp...hp?n=Main.Home
So ideally we’d need you to check it out, feedback as you feel appropriate. As before the content is PLAYER content not GM content, so any responses, comments are all those by a player (and so attributed). We’ve not corrected, updated or changed any of it.
As a bicky-bonus you’ll find a link to the KS encounters as well. Read the instructions for Site Use before asking “how does it work”… please…
We’re adding some functionality to the site as well, you should shortly be able to create a pdf of the pages for you own storage but if you’re aware of anything else that can be added (and how to do it ideally!) that would be great.
Clint
Don’t know how , but assume that at begining of game arties are random all over – but lately in the games I am in – for both evil and free games seem that at least the choice arties , by that I mean the agent , mage and curse arties are below mordor or at least one turn movement from Mordor in any direction – for my evil games this is great !!