Dungeon bosses

[tukkek]

Would be interesting to have a NPC Boss encounter on the final floor of a Dungeon, for several reasons:

• Pacing. Unlike other RPGs, current Dungeons don't end with a bang or challenge other than the normal mechanics.
• It could drop a "Boss chest key" to some high-graded loot (DC20 + dungeon level to unlock without key).
• It could be a unique type of fight (see BossFight.java).
• A Dungeon with its boss defeated could become "pacified", meaning that the player is free to explore and loot afterwards. A pacified Dungeon could also have a chance to removed from the World map later on, uncluttering it visually.
• Would give players a reason to return to uncleared dungeons that were too hard to finish at an earlier point.

The tricky part would be balancing this static encounter so that it's not too hard for a player to get there and win without heavily stocking up on consumables (although that'd be expected to some extent) but also be enough of a challenge that it justifies the entire rest of the dungeon becoming pacified (ie. the player needs to prove he's strong enough that clearing all the previous content could be done trivially so we might as well skip it).

A good compromise would maybe be having pacification not actually clearing the dungeon of Encounters but either halving the encounter rate or deleting some encounters from the encounter table (like the Leader NPC does) - maybe based on the bosses' alignment? After that, maybe have a 1/30 daily chance of removing the Dungeon from the World map altogether, giving the player enough time to explore it at a more leisurely place.

Would not apply to Wildernesses.

[tukkek]

One way of doing this would be to have a recurring 50% chance of adding a static Inhabitant to the final level of each dungeon. As such, players can choose to begin or not a Fight if and when they are prepared - and, should they choose not to start a Fight, it could still add some value as an NPC instead.

[tukkek]

Once this is implemented, it should be easy to have Town Quests that send you to kill these enemies (if the challenge is within a decent range of the Town's population). This is a bit offish as exploring an entire Dungeon is much more involved than the other quests but it would tie in that type of content which is not covered by the quest system right now.

Extending the duration arbitrarily might not be the best idea either as those quests could end up dominating the quest board, shoehorning players who use quests as a main gameplay driver into doing Dungeons (which they can be actively avoiding by doing Quests instead). If other quest types already have higher duration, then maybe apply something similar here to a small extent only.