I gave this more thought. It seems good, but at this point I think may be beyond my own decision.rijackson741 wrote:How about this:
Any monster in a spawn area of only one square is a sentinel (probably easier to check this than add a new property to every monster?), and is immune to ranged attacks. The player gets a message such as "your attack has no effect", or "your attack has no effect from this distance"
If you engage a monster from distance 0 (or 1, depending on how you want to count distance) monsters may flee or follow you if you flee, but only within the bounds of their spawn areas. So safe areas are unaffected for melee combat.
If you engage a monster with a ranged attack, then you just took the gloves off. Then it can flee anywhere, and chase you anywhere.
With the above rules nothing about existing combat would change, and ranged weapons would therefore only add to the game, rather than changing the existing game. If a player decides to shoot a vile plaguestrider from a distance with the new ranged weapons, and it follows them into a safe area and kills them, lesson learned
That would be more coding for sure, but it might be an acceptable solution.
I'll be glad to just code whatever the community decides on and/or our fearless leader suggests.