"Ride" option for Carts (no "K")

[Peter]

I was thinking how about this, as a simple way to mitigate some of the problems with the current travel system.

Simply allow PCs to ride in carts. Of course, this would necessitate a lot of redrawing of legs and such, but there's three solutions to this:
1: tough it out, Jorb;
2: Add a "Riding Cloak" or somesuch that obscures everything except for hats/hair/tools/back slots and thus is the only thing that needs animating. Make it be required to ride;
3: Arrange it so only the top half of PCs is shown. Sure, they're sitting down, you just can't see it.

In game terms, While riding a cart, your fatigue and SHP regeneration is slowed considerably. This may seem like a debuff, and it is to a point, but it also makes it so that you don't have to stop and feed the passengers so often.

The key to this is that you can :lo while riding a cart and continue to ride it. This is good because then you can pay someone to ferry you to some other town or otherwise drop you off somewhere.

There are a few ways that this can be improved; it might help if you auto-disembark when you reach your selected destination, but that involves a clumsy selection interface. Presumably you should be able to kick someone off of your cart.

Now, there's the possibility that someone could load up all their alts and pull them along somewhere, and I don't see much in the way of easy solutions to that, but what are ya going to do.

Each person should take up one square when aboard the cart. It's easy to say that a person needs more space than a chest or basket, but I think that it makes sense for someone to be able to load up a piece of luggage and still share a cart with someone. On that note, why not have carts display loaded items? Hm... come to think of it you'd need to make rotated art for chests at least, and maybe one or two versions of the baskets. For the short term, I suppose that it could just show a smaller tarp over that quadrant. Of course, it would force Jorb to make some rotated items...

Oh, and one last thing; pulling a cart with a person in it should provide a very small but steady trickle of LP. This is to encourage new players to offer caravansary to others even over small distances. Of course, for higher levers, there's more LP to be had defending a caravan from animals...

[sabinati]

i don't know man, seems kind of sub-par when compared to other options. unless there are a lot of roads built, you'd move at crawl speed to most places. the one pulling the cart would be subject to wild animal attack, not so great for noobs. horses, boats, some kind of flying travel option??, and improvements to the recently implemented teleportation system all seem better and easier.

[Peter]

Well, sure, horses are nice and fast if you don't want to carry anything, but if you want to bring a couple chests, you'll use a cart anyway. It may end up using a similar system to hand carts one way or another.

Flying, if it gets in, would presumably be a very high level achievement.

And what's the likely hood that J&L will allow boats to take less than six weeks and thirty players to construct? Anyway, they'd all be limited to sea.

Anyway, my point is that as a short-term solution, riding carts would be a nice way to travel and would (like many of my suggestions) allow new players to do something besides light fires and pick apples. I'll admit that traveling deep into the woods wouldn't be safe, but what roads there are that exist between the major population centers are pretty safe. And don't forget it's a lot easier to build roads now when you can plow out the whole route and come back around with a cart full of boulders.

I imagine that if one wanted to ride a cart out into Mordor, one would have to pay a high-level character handsomely to drag it out there.

[ZeroZiat]

Or make Caravan vehicles and allow Oregon Trail migrating. Random diseases ftw.

[Peter]

There should be a "yes to all" button to the question "Should we apply salt to the wound?"
And "Should we shoot that animal?"

[Jackard]

why would you need to draw the rider at all, just make it a covered wagon. bonus: more than one rider