General question on difficulty and stuff.

[Dantius]

So, I want to design a scenario. Being spoon fed Geneforge for just about my entire Spiderweb career means that, well, the scenario I design will be skewed towards a more open-ended one, with more dialog than fancy scripting tricks. Anyways, here's my problem. I want to be able to have complete control over the PC's access to spells, weapons, items, and gold- forcing them to follow the path I want them to. I don't want them to be able to bring in the Divine Slith Spear and a lv. 10 Arcane Blow and Cloud of Blades and blast my scenario to pieces with little to no effort. However, I also want to include some tricky custom monsters and valuable rare items, as well. Should I

 

a.)Start it as a low-level scenario, which I kind of don't want to do, or

 

b.)Remove all the PC's weapons, armor, gold, and spell levels, which, I'm sure, will make me incredibly popular with the Blades community.

 

Of course, ther is also option

 

c.) Compromise and leave everyone unhappy.

 

Any thoughts?

[Enraged Slith]

It depends on the situation. In my opinion, the best way to handle this is by simply including a pre-made party and allowing the player to play the intended way or allow him to play with his own party.

 

However, if the story revolves heavily around the party members, then simply destroy the player's party (warn them first) and replace it with the one you want them to have.

 

Regular scenarios actually go through this process too, simply by trying to keep combat challenging but balanced. Because you can't anticipate the difficulty level or what kind of party the player is bringing in, you just try to give it your best try. I personally like to balance my scenarios with respect to a normal party equipped with a fighter, a rogue, a mage, and a priest.

 

Hope this helps.

[Niemand]

The standard approach here is not to try to restrict the player overly much. Just specify a level range, balance the scenario for parties of that strength and leave it at that. If somebody wants to enter with an over-level party, he or she knows that doing so will spoil the challenge of the game. I don't see any reason that you or any player would have to be unhappy about this. Keep in mind that most scenarios are well enough balanced that you don't have to worry about a level 10 party wandering around with spells and artifacts that will level whole cities. (Note also that the scenarios which are poorly balanced tend to draw criticism from designers, since they make all of our lives more annoying.)

 

There have been well known (and, in my opinion, bafflingly well received) scenarios which basically overwrite the player's party. As long as you take care to warn the player about what you're going to do and give them the option to abort the process, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. I have to say that, personally, as a player, I hate this technique, but many others don't seem to care.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

a.)Start it as a low-level scenario, which I kind of don't want to do

You can make a scenario for any level party you want; there's no rule that says you have to make low-level scenarios. If you want only a certain level party to enter your scenario, it's probably best just to recommend how big a player's starting party should be.

Originally Posted By: Dantius

b.)Remove all the PC's weapons, armor, gold, and spell levels, which, I'm sure, will make me incredibly popular with the Blades community.

I hope you're being sarcastic. In general, this is not a good idea. You could set up something similar to the "Tatterdemalion" scenario for BoE, but I wouldn't go much beyond that. Everyone's playing style is unique, and somebody's bound to get upset if you mess around with their party too much.

Originally Posted By: Dantius

c.) Compromise and leave everyone unhappy.

Who said that compromise has to be a bad thing? There are several things you could do and still have a good scenario.

[Lazarus.]

Low level scenarios are a good way to solve this problem if you don't want to go the more intrusive route. Low level parties have the advantage of being more predictable, in terms of gear and stats, than high level parties that have played god knows how many scenarios filled with overpowered loot. The tradeoff is that making interesting combat for low level parties is tougher, since they have fewer available strategies. A simple breath weapon monster can wipe the floor with low level parties, so you can guess what will happen when they fight that super cool boss that's scripted to radiate fire damage and shoot ice beams. On the plus side this means you don't need to know how to script as well to write decent combat, the downside is that while you can easily make difficult combat you can't as easily make it interesting.

 

Or you can always overhaul the party. I think everyone knows which option I'd advocate, but it's true that this isn't universally popular. If you're feeling particularly benevolent you can even give them their spells and items back at the end of the scenario, which may go some way to appeasing folks.

 

If you wish to compromise, you can always assume that the player is going to bring in a slightly overpowered party, and balance with that in mind. One option would be to have a bunch of shops or some sort of beginning side quest to get underpowerd (or appropriately powered I guess) parties up to snuff. Or you could make them suffer it out-- that'd be fun.

[Lilith]

Another option would be to ask players to enter with a level-1 party, but immediately give them a boost to their levels and equipment once they enter the scenario. That way you don't ruin a pre-existing party, but their abilities are still somewhat predictable.

[Duck in a Top Hat]

I would recommend making a Prefab party and putting it in the scenario folder. It would be easy enough to check if they're using it (with stat checks, etc.) and that way you wouldn't have to change any of the player's existing parties. And it would be a whole lot simpler to make.

[Niemand]

To elaborate on Duck's point: you could do some simple checks to see if the player is not using the prefab party, and if so suggest that they switch, but allow them to continue if they so choose. As long as you don't go making severe assumptions like that the party will have no priest spells or will all be archers, this should work fairly well.