Dungeon Master Forum

I have a spell suggestion. But it`s only my suggestion, so if you think it`s crap, comment it

I was thinking, if this would be possible in RTC, to make a special spell, that, when you cast it on a monster, marks its moves in the dungeon. I was thinking about a sort of creature sidesteps, but it`s already reserved for the party and I guess it would be hard to include. Besides, monsters in DM rather doesn`t have foots! That could be rather a special sort of a cloud: imagine, when you`re casting that spell to the monster, that monster leaves a special cloud (say something like a death cloud, but red or purple etc.) when moving, say, 30 moves, or 60 seconds, for example, then a spell stops working (after X monster movements or a given period of time).
Each monster after every move would let a big cloud that, after some time, gets smaller and smaller and finally dissapears. This could be usefull for example when you`re chasing a monsters like gigglers etc. Say a giggler stole something, you cast that spell on him, and you exactly know where he went (actually you`ll get know 30 gigglers moves).
Or you can cast it to strong monsters, that you cannot defeat to see its moves in a looped dungeon.
Will that feature be hard to add?

ok, maybe marking creature`s movements by air (clouds) was bad idea (each cloud should have a very loooong livetime, besides clouds should "move"), but maybe it would be better to mark creature movements on the ground, say, using a special floor decoratoin (not a footsteps of course): say a red version of poison puddle no matter with a type of a monster. It would have the same livetime as character`s footsteps, wchich means a party leaves footsteps while a spelled monster leaves a "red puddle" or smth, using the already existing (modified) game structure in RTC used for marking party movements.

Monsters can have an action every time they move
What you would do is have the spell convert the normal monster you target into a monster type that has this cloud generation action every time it moves.A relay would then kick in after x seconds and change that creature to a normal creature ... probably through the same cloud generating relay to make sure it's the same creature

You can do something pretty close to this already.

Monsters have attack methods which can be executed on every step they take - that attack method could create your new "footprints" object (cloned from ones the party use so they expire in the same way) - so that would give you the trail you want.

Getting it triggered from a spell is a bit more tricky though. You could have the spell do a convert of all monsters of type X to type Y (where X and Y both look identical, the only difference beting that Y has the extra attack method) - a bit messy, but it would work.

so it is possible to differentiate marks (floor decorations), depending of a monster type, for example gigglers leaves red puddle marks, dragons leaves green puddle marks, demons leaves purple puddle marks etc.? great! but what if one is placed by another (for example: giggler leaves MARK TYPE 1 and then comes the dragon, wchich leaves MARK TYPE 2)? will the first floor decoration be easily replaced by second dec?

yes, as you would simply create a different action for each monster type that generated a different cloud, footprint, etc

Note nothing will replace anythign, i din't think...they will probably all sit on the ground together like the current graphics sets do on walls...

Lol, nice to see that my double posting was GG's double posting...rather than 'do this obvious thing'