Years ago, in the age of heroes (A truly prehistoric time predating even fishing, let alone monstrology) I saw a Dorms thread on an idea for player-made dungeons, and I recently had an idea to actually make something like this work. Before, it would have been unfeasible to impossible, but nowadays, I actually see a lot of the possible tools to make something like this great in place, between things like Castle Blocks, furniture craftable through Housing Tours, and of course, Monstrology and the Monstrodome.
Either through crowns or high end crafting, you could craft a series of themed dungeons; you place them as housing items, and they work as portals to a customizable dungeon instance. How would players make these dungeons, you may ask? The owner, when using the portal, would get to pick between "Test run" and "Edit" modes.
Edit mode would be a basic level editor, with tools to customize what monsters can spawn (Obviously, only monsters you have summon treasure cards for), place rooms and halls, and even determine enemy patrols (What enemies wander in what chunks), as well as customizing rules of the dungeon (For example, a dungeon where players arent allowed to use cards upgraded with spellements, treasure cards, or equipment cards, or even no equipment at all!). You could perhaps even set up puzzles, and flag enemies to cause events when defeated. (Opening doors, spawning wisps, spawning furniture, or even spawning more enemies!)
Test Run is just testing out your dungeon. You run through it as a normal player would, with a few restrictions. *Enemies have halved drops for EXP, items, and gold, if any at all. *You cannot extract monster animus, much like in the Monstrodome itself.
If you beat your dungeon in a test run, you can upload it much like you could your castle for touring. Players entering your dungeon can then run through it with a slightly less restricted version of the test run rules (75% drops from enemies, and halved animus extraction?)
On completion, you'd be asked to rate the dungeon on a few fields (Creativity, difficulty, and aesthetic), and, if you and the uploader are both capable of text or open chat, leave a short critique in text, with simple things like "The rules are too strict", or "this dungeon could use more mana pickups." being available for those who only have menu chat.
Lorewise, it could be worked in as a school tutoring activity. Ambrose asks you to make some training exercises for your fellow students, since your wizard would canonically ne one of the most seasoned in Ravenwood by the time you should be able to access such an in-depth mechanic.
The ideas a long standing pipe dream, and one I doubt will be a thing for years still, but I always love to theorycraft new mechanics like this.
Not gonna lie i love the idea, though i doubt if they did anything like this, it would be anything like this.
I feel like they're more likely to play it like this:
Pick a theme or world you like, this will change what the rooms in your dungeon would look like, This would play like a multi-leveled tower so you wont have to write dialog or story, as that would be impossible for a user to generate and for the admins to moderate.
you can add as many levels as you like, but like a monstrodome, It'll drop gold and XP and that's about it. Though maybe it'll drop a not that great level 5 hat or something here or there. you can go as large or as small as you want, sadly cheats would prolly not be here though i can see it working like just- the bosses you extract with animus keeping their cheats, but they already remove them for the monstrodome so i can't imagine them keeping it for the, what i'm terming, monstrotower.
When in the furniture setting and you click on a monstrodome, the little thing pops up that lets you into the menu to enter in the TCs you want, though this time with the monstrotower, you can press arrows to see a masive amounts of pages, infinite or capped, you can go on for quite a while. each page being a new level in the tower, and each time you skip one and have a mob after it, then it will just be a health and mana room.
Sort of like: [Fight - Empty - Fight - Empty] would turn into [Fight - Wisps - Fight - Exit]
Rooms at the end could become a treasure room, 1 peice thing from each enemy's drop table throughout the tower. This could mean you can monstrologize Malistare and fight him, presumably without cheats, but he'll only drop 1 item and the chances of it being what you want are low, but not zero. So lets say this is your tower:
[Fight x 2 - Fight x 4 - Fight x 1 - Treasure Room]
That would mean you would get exactly 7 items, 1 per enemy, randomly dropped from their drop tables. Sure it's slow but if you're making it easier after prolly buying the TC from someone else with empowers, of coarse it will have its down sides. But i feel like it's better then dropping nothing, which lets be honest is going to be the case.
As cool as this sounds, I feel like it would just be a way to farm bosses at the ends of long dungeons without having to fight the rest of the dungeon, or if cheats aren't preserved a way to turn super-tough bosses into punching bags. And if it doesn't give anything of value it's dead on arrival since KI probably doesn't want to code in such a complex system for people who won't use it much.
