> > Hi, Sam. Thanks for the great games. I had a lot of fun playing both Murkon's refuge and Murkon's vengeance. While it doesn't have as much replay value as MR, I enjoyed MV more. It cut out the one aspect of rpgs that I really dislike, grinding through monsters to gain experience, at the expense of character customization. Murkon's unchanging nature is made up for with the summoned monsters in my opinion. It's one of a very small number of games that I've thoroughly enjoyed yet only wanted to play once.
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> Thanks for your kind words. I hear what you're saying. That's more or less my own feeling about the game, too: better game, but less enduring. I'm glad to hear other people feel the same way, though, because after all the playtesting I did on it before I was done, I got pretty sick of it and so lost the foresight I would have had about whether people would want to stick with it. But it was certainly a lot of fun designing all the puzzles and so forth in it.
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> My next RPG, which I'm currently at work on, is more in the spirit of MR than MV. I'm not far enough along to know how the course of gameplay will turn out, but I'm going to try to keep the monster grinding to a minimum, because I dislike that too. To a point, this is unavoidable. MR wasn't that bad in this regard, but it does have that period between level 4-6 where it can get repetitive. The problem would have been solved by having more dungeon to explore and equipment to obtain during this phase of the game. So I have an eye toward making sure that's the case with any sections of the new game that would otherwise have to be just about levelling up.

MR definitely wasn't bad about it. You're right about level 4-6. It was the only area of the game that required me to kill monsters just for experience rather than to explore and progress. I spent some time revisiting a certain area of level 9, but I was getting so many new items that it stayed interesting until I decided to try 10. As for 4-6, I think the limited new areas available was a major contributor to the problem, but it was also an interesting puzzle.

I look forward to any new rpgs of this type that you're working on. I prefer rpgs with a steep death penalty. It makes me care more about dying. I thought your towns with increasingly high prices were a good solution to this, as it's easy to get started and learn the game without repeated restarts. I only lost my entire party once, in Kaliti, and not knowing the price I was forced to sell my fortunately large hoard of items and venture out with half my party to get more gold for the other half. Having played ADOM(a rogue type game)and a myriad of more standard rpgs, I think this was a good balance between death being final and death being free. I also like your speed attribute. In a lot of rpgs, melee characters become less valuable because they can only attack one enemy per turn. I'd like to see more variety in the pools for you new game, but I'm used to pools that can do anything from killing me to giving me God-like power from ADOM. I'd also like the rogue to have a few more advantages beyond just being able to disarm traps. I think with your experience on MR and MV, you'll be able to make something really great for the third installment.