Originally posted by derwoodly
I think it is too expliotable. NPC mobs artifical intelegence is not smart enough to be able to figure out when a high level player is trying to scare them off on purpose or attack them. Fear is a powerful weapon that should be an ablity or spell.
sorry, but I can\'t get what you mean by exploitable?
as I understand that npc fear idea seems like a good idea, perhaps not so specificly to spawn owning, on that topic I have already given some of my sugestions a while back, but more generally if a char buffs up too much the smaller npcs would surelly be frighten by him, even if he is not looking, most animals irl ususally are reasonably good evaluatng if they should fight or fly to live to fight another day, but I have an adicional sugestion, don\'t make it so binary, \"safe or not\", if there is 10 \"weak\" guys in one direction their \"risk factor\" would be added togheter making them as frightning as one \"tougher\" guy, if on one direction there is a tough guy, but in the other direction ther is a \"tougher\" guy the monster would tend to go in the direction of average orverall safeness
but of coure a group of tough guys could group in a hunting pack and scare a simple rat around till it is surrounded, with no way to flee.
I really like the idea of using some basic baysean calculations (they seem to fit many real life decision making simulations real nice) if the odds of staying in place or moving in one direction and surviving are less than moving away in another direction it would be realistical to flee (of course, add some random over or under self-confidence and perhaps a gray area instead of a pure if bigger than N then run, and perhaps even some gradation on the running speed based on how much bigthe risk it is (or it think it is) running, and perhaps even based on the distance to the said risk.