Zelda rpg mod?

Hey again!

I'm glad everyone has given this some thought, especially GameMakr. If adding some type of rpg system to Zelda ever did come to light, I would imagine it would be something of an(optional) game patch, so it wouldn't necessarily interfere with the more "classic" Zelda game play that some players might want from Zelda3C. Of course with all the work that would be required to add some quality rpg spice, I would suppose you would want to force players to enjoy the fruits the of your labor and make it an optional patch

Anyway, I've given it some thought. And sometimes(and rightfully so) it feels like trying to take Zelda 3 for the SNES and make it into a full blooded RPG seems really silly, if not downright hard. Just FYI. But at any rate, this is what I've been thinking....

I'm not sure how hard it would be to change this, but Link, like in almost every Zelda game, gets a total of 20 hearts. Heart Pieces are found and Heart Containers are rewards after beating certain bosses. Now, if we couldn't change the life meter into numbers, then we'd be stuck using hearts and I'd probably go with the "heart per level" idea that GameMakr mentioned. This way it would be easiest to implement and I don't think there would have to be a lot that would change, if anything(Only that you'd probably never find heart containers). So eventually after thwacking enough red knights and getting your 5-6th crystal, you'd have 20 hearts and that'd be that. Personally, I think that's kind of a crappy idea. Fun, but I think a lot of work would be required for little payoff.
What would be really nice is if we could change the life meter into a number. I figure Link has something like a byte(255) for health? If every heart is broken down into 8, then 8*20=160, no? So in theory, by the end of regular ol' Zelda 3, Link has 160 health points, and is taking minimal damage from most enemies with the red tunic. I figure for an rpg hack, a byte is enough health to work with (255 max hp?), but it would be nice to have a 16bit number to work with for Link's health. I guess if someone is going to do a heavy ASM modification, making a 16bit integer won't be too hard . But I would imagine, just off the top of my head, keeping things similar to the environment that Zelda 3 has, if you made an rpg mod, you'd start Link off with 24HP, just like 3 hearts. And everytime you grabbed a heart container, you'd get 8 more HP, in addition to levels you'd normally gain.

What would be really nice (again) is if we could find a numeric hp value to everything(Link, monsters, green knights/blue knights/etc) and find a way to randomize it a little. Let's say, for sake of argument, Link with his first sword(lv1) does a flat 8 points of damage. Now you go onto a screen, and there is a green knight. If a green knight takes 2 hits to squash, we can surmise he's got a flat 16 points of health. It would be nice to have some type of code randomize monster's health when you roll onto a screen, so a green knight could have anywhere between 16-40 points of health, blue knight 24-56, red 60+. Maybe somehow have Link's current level factor into the randomization of monster's HP?

Well, that's my idea for right now. It's terribly late and I've got to get some sleep. Hopefully I'm not too incoherent to make any sense here, so I hope this helps get some ideas rolling. All I figure right now is that Zelda itself is pretty different from something like Y's. Or rather what I mean is that the game engine is made to work around collecting and adventuring, not necessarily constant battling. So if someone wanted to make a good rpg mod for it, you'd have to pay attention to that fact and somehow properly address it.
I'll try and add more ideas about this later...

This sounds like a great idea! I would be very interested in a Zelda RPG like the one that ahuman described.