Forum:Natural Selection

Basically, difficulty scaling depending on how you attempt to defeat monsters, based on how you have in the past.

This is similar to how things like trap resistance and status resistance work, only on a much larger scale, and that these effects do not end after battle.

Let's say you fight lots of Rathian. Every time you fight it, you fight with a Dragon element greatsword, trapping it primarily with shock traps and using many flash bombs, and the tail is always the first severance you make. From that, future Rathian would increase in Dragon res and decrease in, let's say Thunder res (the decreasable stat being set and viable, so that it never becomes weak to fire). The skin on their tail would also become thicker. As well as this, the Rathian would build a resistance to the signature move of the greatsowrd (the charge attack). The use of shock traps would mean that pitfalls become more effective while shock trap durations are shortened, and the overuse of flash bombs would mean that flashing a monster lasts for a shorter time.

After the Rathian had built up these resistances, a good idea would be to pitfall trap it instead, not flash it, and use a different weapon type to fight it.

Monster behaviour could also be affected by how you fight it. For example, if you were the kind of person to begin charging an attack behind a Tigrex ready for when it turns to face you, the Tigrex species could adapt to faster turning, to back jumping, or to spinning to knock the hunter over.

The point of "natural selection" would be for a monster to learn how you most commonly fight it and be able to adapt (as a species) to account for this. This would ensure that a player could not keep the same tactic for every battle with a particular monster.