Overland Dungeon Encounters

These would all use the existing Roving (Overland) encounters.

In the scene would be a "Mysterious Portal" located somewhere off to the side or randomly located.

This portal is destroyed/disappears if a "wave" event is triggered. Player have the option to do the wave encounter OR the Portal.

If selected, the portal would take the player to a small mini dungeon, that takes around 10-15 minutes to complete. It would have around the same level/number of creatures found in a "wave" event, but it's more of a classic dungeon crawl. No wave events. It has an eventual end and exit (and no respawns) . This could be a "Boss" or an NPC, chest or even something else. And some resources to collect on the way. The random NPC's you can find in overland encounters (when you complete a wave) would NOT be found here. This is just a fun dungeon crawl.

This should still stay within the tier 3-5 range (like the other overland encounters), so most players can do these. And the rewards are also appropriate to such a tier level (and risk reward). It will be up to you to make these sought after.

You could also additionally add these portals having a chance to appear in all of the underused, unvisited scenes in the game. This would add an actual sense of adventure to players.

You could also continue to add different variants of these dungeons that players could visit each release. When entering the portal, you are randomly selected to go to one of these dungeons. From a development time, again these are just mini 10-15 minute adventures. These would not be elaborate time consuming scenes. Just a good fun short dungeon crawl. And you could do many things incorporating different themes.

 

Generally an interesting idea but I would like it more if they would simply add a cave entrance or a sinkhole or something alike to rare variations of the existing encounters you can enter with some additional combat areas below the ground...something that can be overlooked if you are not that observing. Either-or decisions I would like to see in SotA but I think for random encounters to fight either these enemies or these does not sound like a needed choice.

It would be different if there would be really a different choice. E.g. either you are killing the bandits to secure the road or you are instead following the obsidians who just bought some slaves from the bandits. This way your choice would be either to free the current slaves from the obsidians or prevent that new slaves are captured by the bandits but you cannot do both...and at best you can even see the outcome of your decisions.

Maybe there could be even challenges e.g. if you follow the obsidians all slaves or a part of them is sacrificed after 15 minutes or the bandit scouts mention that there is a group of civilians coming in 10 minutes the bandits will start to attack once they appear. Solving or not solving the challenges in time could influence the available reward. E.g. freeing the slaves in time and sometimes a rich trader is offering you a lot of gold but most of the time you will just free innocent citizens who will boost your virtue but maybe even sometimes the slaves are defectors who joined the obsidians and generating this way an additional wave of enemies.
Freeing the remaining slaves out of time instead a chest could be there with the “treasures” of the already slaughtered slaves. There you might have the choice to give most of the content of the chest to the freed slaves (just a small reward but a good virtue boost), keep the content of the chest for yourself (medium reward but small reduction of virtue) or you could erase all traces and kill everyone (large reward but also large reduction of virtue)

 

How about it takes you to player dungeons? We are supposed to get a ranking system. So highest ranked dungeons could show up. I just thought of that because over all I never expected most player dungeons to get viewed or visited.

I could be wrong but if there were more reasons to do everything in the game with achievements and incentives it would happen. I like the OPs suggestion.

 

Fabulous idea! Let the already planned ranking system do an RNG on the top 'X' player dungeons and throw us in. What an incentive for dungeon designers and what fun and varied content for overworld adventurers.

I imagine the ranking may have to look at the solo player's AL and try to match it or if a group do some fancy form of matching...

If that's too fussy, just throw us into any RNG of the top 50 player made dungeons, I'm up for it!.