They actually showed up! Five whole real live humans! I’d hoped the tower wouldn’t be too difficult for them. The layout was a total maze, but the monsters were easy, and there was really only one trap.
You might be wondering why I didn’t want the tower to be too difficult, but it was really very simple. In most other dungeon master simulator games, you gained resources for your dungeon by defeating adventurers who came to plunder it. This was true of Questonicia as well, but keep in mind that those other games tended to only have a single player. Since Questonicia was an online multiplayer game, the people coming to explore your dungeon were other players. If more experienced players flooded their dungeons with powerful monsters that could defeat anyone who entered the maze, new players would feel overwhelmed and quit.
Questonicia solved this problem by giving dungeon masters points when their monsters were killed, and when the dungeon’s treasure chests were opened. The higher a monster’s level, the more points you got when it was defeated. Since the points you got from defeated low-level players were worth way less than what a successful dungeon run could earn you, most people who built dungeons had at least a few that catered to newbies. It wasn’t uncommon to see Sprigian players with a series of interconnected dungeons that got progressively more difficult as you went. You could even put a teleportation circle at the top of one tower that led to the bottom floor of the next one.
In order to entice players to search your dungeons, you could set up treasure chests, which would automatically fill themselves with items of your choosing. You could also set the chest to dispense random items, but there were limits. There were rules on what items could be placed in treasure chests based on the point value of all the monsters between the dungeon entrance and the chest in question. This time, I filled the chest with ten low potions. In the game, low potions were one of the worst items, recovering a measly twenty health. Only new players would be grateful to receive one. But that was in the game. What if the people here didn’t have anything like them yet? Oh, and don’t worry: The items in question didn’t come out of my own inventory. After all, dungeon masters couldn’t loot items from chests in their own dungeons. They also couldn’t deal damage to any of their own dungeon monsters. I’d tested both of these rules, and they still held true here.
I could have filled the chest with crystals, Questonicia’s currency, but after the encounter with that huge, bearlike creature, I was really starting to doubt that this was the world of the game I was familiar with. Crystals looked pretty, but I kinda doubted anyone from this world would be super excited to get them. It would be one thing if I made sure to not give out too many at once, and kept them rare—then I could artificially increase their rarity, like diamonds. Unfortunately, though, when you placed crystals in a chest, the dungeon always dispensed the maximum amount. After just a few dungeon runs, they’d be pretty common.
Since I placed the chest at the end, the items I could put in it were based on the combined point values of the Sprigumdrops between the chest and the entrance. Even if there were a hundred of them, Sprigumdrops weren’t exactly worth a ton of points, even at level five. With a single chest, I was pretty limited on what items I could add. Sorry, fellas, no legendary sword this time.
I wasn’t sure what kind of magic or technology was available here in this world yet, so I decided not to go with early game weapons or anything dangerous. Besides, if I gave them better weapons and armor, they might use them to hurt people. Potions could only be helpful, and they were my only other noncombat option besides crystals. There was really no other choice.
In that moment, I didn’t really think about how potions might work differently if this wasn’t the world of Questonicia, or consider that if the people of this world were all equal to low-level characters in the game, then those potions would actually be pretty good. I’m not that smart.
My human visitors made their way through the labyrinth at a decent pace. Seeing how easy the first floor was for them made me wish I’d used more time accelerators to level up more Sprigumdrops, but I supposed I’d rather be safe than sorry. Ideally, when you designed a dungeon, you wanted the monsters to be both easy enough for visitors to defeat and strong enough to be worth a lot of dungeon points when they were defeated. Finding that delicate balance was difficult. At most, a tower dungeon could have a hundred floors, so if I kept this pattern up, the monsters on the highest floor would be level 100. That might sound like a lot, but in Questonicia, a level 100 player was still considered a beginner. I’d been playing for five years, so my level was in the quadruple digits.
It looked like the second floor was still pretty easy for them. Ideally, they’d defeat all of the Sprigumdrops, and then kindly fall into the cleverly disguised trap I’d set up at the end. My aim here wasn’t to hurt them, but to learn from them.
As I watched them on the tablet, I could hear their shouts and conversations. They definitely weren’t speaking any language I’d ever heard before. If they got caught in my little trap at the end, I could safely approach them and try to communicate.
Looking at their combat abilities, I’d probably be safe even if I approached them right now, but if they attacked me, I might end up defending myself, and that could get messy. Yeah, I’d really rather not have to go through that. Just thinking about what I’d done to that armor-plated bear happening to a real person was sickening enough to turn my stomach.