Mutiny of the Bounty Hunters

OnTheBounce · Post by **OnTheBounce** » Sat May 04, 2002 12:02 am

Have any of you considered placing Bounty Hunters in your campaigns/mini-campaigns? I think there was a plan to include them in the core campaign, since there is an entry for "name_CORE_bountyHunter = {Bounty Hunter}" in the characters.txt, however they - like so many other things - didn't make it into the campaign.

The solution to including these is quite simple, really. While the trigger for Bounty Hunters in the RPGs was based on the PC acquiring the Karmic Title "Child Killer", you could easily substitute a Rep level in FoT. Simply have a Quantity Team trigger related to Reputation and you can then have the Action be to have a series of random encounters activated. In the RPGs the Bounty Hunters became progressively more powerful as the PC did and to simulate this you could have triggers to enable the bounty hunters at each bunker since you'll have a good idea as to how powerful the squad should be by that point. The more powerful bounty hunter encounters should also occur in areas of the World Map that are traversed later in the game, as well.

The only real issue I see w/this solution is that if you do this, and you have your PCs tool around in vehicles, you'll essentially be throwing all sorts of goodies their way, unless you equip them to be powerful enough to be able to knock out whatever vehicle the PCs are tooling around w/a reasonable chance of success.

Alternately, you could simply have triggers that lead to Player Indexes being activated during missions chock full of blood-thirsty Bounty Hunters or to set people who would be either neutral or friendly to the players as being hostile.

Any thoughts/comments/criticisms?

OTB

Umpa · Post by **Umpa** » Sat May 04, 2002 12:47 am

i think that you could use bounty hunters in both ways. you could have bounty hunters come for you after you have done a certain mission. or if you are really good nasty bounty hunters may attack.

Is that possible OTB?

OnTheBounce · Post by **OnTheBounce** » Sat May 04, 2002 1:51 am

That's a very good point, Umpa. Yes, you could set up Bounty Hunters that came after "do-gooders" that were hired by crime lords, slavers, etc. It would just take a few triggers based on Rep, but instead of negative Rep, you'd simply have to change the levels to positive.

Thanks,

OTB

Umpa · Post by **Umpa** » Sat May 04, 2002 2:09 am

You could make it so the first fight is with a bounty hunter and it could take off from there

Flamescreen · Post by **Flamescreen** » Sat May 04, 2002 4:18 pm

I wasn't thinking of including bunkers in FoO, only a variation(don't know if possible however), but it would be interesting, storywise, to have bounty hunters attacking one of the bunkers during your abscence.
That could give a scenario twist.

War Bringer · Post by **War Bringer** » Sat May 04, 2002 5:06 pm

OK, it's been established on the other topic that karma can be used as a trigger.

I was just wondering if the karma of characters other then the player be altered? Perhaps your squad members/recruits? It just came to mind that maybe one could also (instead of using tag names) use karma for changing certain conditions/teams/etc. so not to make it so personal to a character you guys following me? I read what I wrote over and I got kinda lost.

basically,

Bill will switch sides if bob, a recruit, is in your team - OTB's idea.

Bill will change sides if all your recruits have good karma - what I had in mind.

I thought maybe if you have a squad that's has the majority with negative karma, you'll be able to "hire" certain powerful (but cold and mean) bounty hunters that you wouldn't be able to hire if your team was made of a bunch of boy scouts.

Does anyone understand what i'm getting at?

OnTheBounce · Post by **OnTheBounce** » Sat May 04, 2002 9:39 pm

Yes, I understand what you're getting at, Warbringer.

The only possible solution I can think of would be to add the Rep to the Recruits in the Entity Editor. Basically, you could say, "These guys are 'bad guys', and these guys are 'good guys' and give them a certain number of Rep points. I'm not sure if the game will recognize anyone but the Main Character's Rep, or not.

There is a huge problem w/this solution, even if it does work. Namely, the game won't recognize averages. In order to get this to work, you'd have to assign Rep levels to each Recruit, then set up a trigger for it there are two people in the squad, three, etc., right up to six. It would be scripting intensive, especially if you want to do this for every map.

If you're not going to do this, Rep is a great, non-scripting intensive way to trigger things because only the Main Character's Rep is affected by the "Add Reputation" trigger. So you can assign a couple of different triggers w/different levels of Rep and not have to worry about how many people there are in the squad or in an area.

If I were you, I'd just stick to the Main Character's Rep. Just like the followers in FO2 would follow you no matter who you had in your party. They might bad mouth each other - go Cassidy! - but they'd follow you until you did something that violated their principles.

OTB