Dungeon Master Forum

What would you think of a monster, which:

- has no graphics at all (invisible)
- has no (direct) ways of attacking & slaughtering party
- moves on at a given speed and at every corner turns
to the left.

This could be used to create timed effects, such as closed doors opening at regular intervals, moving pits, monster generators etc.

Some of these can be accomplished by using regular monsters, but regular monsters tend to move "too intelligently". This one wouldn't care about its surroundings and the position of the party. Think: Can you create a door that opens every 5 minutes (without lots of lots of complex dungeon structures)?

I think you ask for a timer.

BTW To George: what about hooks in RTC to open it to user's extensions, in partcular, giving acces to the API windows. ( this for hard core C programmers ).

What are the current delay ranges? I forget.

All those effects can be achieved already using combinations of triggers and relays - probably not more than 3 or 4 per item. I don't think there are any set restrictions on timers - you can probably make them as long as you want. Note that the DELAY:X parameter works on a basis of 6 ticks per second so a delay of 12 is two seconds.

I suppose that it wouldn´t be much more effort to include a direct timer command than it would be to program the behaviour of such a monster.
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