Donald Hebb

http://www.geocities.com/terrorsmartyr/BladesofAvernum/scripts.html Update- added teleportboss.txt

Error in lockbox.txt- ioweyou.txt could not be found?

The editor is a word processor with graphics.

Stareye, rules are defined by their exceptions (everything is relative). I'd like to see how a town could advance a plot, because I haven't seen it in Blades to date. PS- Zeeqon? I'm glad to see that you're so entralled about paradigms of scenario design! Why not prove your point by putting somethign out? (Or will we only see your briliant ideas in your proffesional-grade RPG?)

I still disagree with you: A town should be transient, much like a 5-minute quickie. Go in, get what you need, get out. Plots don't need towns, the notion of them is mostly superfluous.

To put it simply, I disagree. What does a town do? It provides a hub for the rest of the adventure. An adventure doesn't need a town- see, for example, Bandits II. The amount of work I put into Birmington was, admittedly, pretty large, although only for porting a 48x48 town into the corner of a 64x64 one. Falling Stars' central city, Xabungle, has almost nothing to do with enhancing the plot. Only the important NPCs and events drive the plot, and rightfully so. A scenario isn't harmed by people commenting on what's going on, but it's not a prerequisite. In fact, I'd argue that if you spend too much time on town design, then you lose focus of the rest of the scenario. See, for example, A Gathering Storm. Nobody will dispute it- this scenario has some of the best town design to date. Essentially, that is the scenario's biggest flaw. It has been cited that even in Drizzt's Shadow of the Stranger, people lose track of the scenario when strolling about town. These are admittedly stretches, but each of those examples have towns that definitely contribute to the plot and are attached to it, but they themselves become too much of the plot. Mendor's tremendously large town was the reason why I have played it and probably never will- towns are not the point of a scenario. Make them, make them make sense, and then leave them. Plot advancement is the point of the scenario, not towns. I don't care if a town is nothing but people giving manufactured responses- Unless an important NPC is in a town, then I want nothing more out of a town than vital services (training, inns, et cetera) and maybe a small flash of life (ie. what the town is made mildly unique by). That's it. Now, have you ever wondered why Rhapsody In Blue will never get done? Hm?

I still insist that Deacon was a minimally functional and sensical villain.

I'm lazy, and I want the most dead dialogue possible.

I'm working on innkeeper.txt, a script that would use calls to "simulate" an inn. (Yes, I realize that this makes me the lazies man in existence. ) My problem is that I call a teleport_party();, but it's not allowed. My question is why- if the party is talking to a creature, they're already out of combat mode, so moving wouldn't be entirely out of the question. Could this be changed at all, or is it set-in-stone?

http://www.geocities.com/terrorsmartyr/BladesofAvernum/scripts.html I know, I know- all of these scripts are just more evidence in a mounting pile, all pointing to me as a lazy arsehole not worth his weight period. Eh. (Although I will warn people not to always use this script- It's generally not considered to be a Good Idea(®) to have explicitly blank scenarios in terms of dialogue. Use at your own discretion.) EDIT: Coming up soon- innkeeper.txt, so you can even cop out of having talking innkeepers. Also, ihateyou.txt, you'll see!

You could simulate exponential operations by assigning variables and multiplying themselves by themselves, ie: x = x * x

I'll try to please Diviner Oppenheimer-- err, Bob-- more in my next effort.

Correction- The characters in slots in 5 and 6 are part of the party, you don't control them, but they also join you in outdoors fights.

In the editor, I spend ~30 minutes looking for some way to set a creature's attitude. It hadn't occured to me yet to use "set_attitude(a,", because it was listed as "short set_attitude(a,". Could you (Jeff), in the next version of the editor or at least in the .zip file from whence the editor is obtained, fix this please? Thanks! (I, AFAIK, probably won't be the only person to become confused by this.)

Not entirely true- Bandits 2

Bump, since Jeff didn't get this article in his most recent run-through.

Eighteen scenarios... Not enough... Must keep designing... *twitch*

Obviously, scenarios can differ in many ways, but all good scenarios essentially have some things in common that every designer should pay attention to: 1. Limit your outdoors. Place yourself in the shoes of a player. You open a scenario called "Quest for the Sword", or something. The opening town is decent. Then, when you emerge into the outdoors, you're swamped by a massive, empty world with only one town in each outdoors section. Not a good idea. When you're making a scenario, lots of outdoors may SEEM like a good idea, but it rarely is. A scenario can take place in less than 10 outdoors sections, no matter how large the scenario is. Not only will you not be able to provide +20 interesting outdoors sections to provide, but it will be a burden on both yourself and anyone playing your scenario to wade through that many. Slice your outdoors down a bit, it pays off in the end. And also, as a rule of thumb- an outdoor section should have at least one town in it, preferably more. 2. Limit your combat. Immediately after finding the dungeon in "Quest for the Sword", and quite annoyed after traversing simultaneous outdoor sections for fifteen minutes, you (the player) stumble upon a dungeon. Inside that dungeon, there are many rooms. These rooms exist, of course, to hold lots and lots of monsters. Not interesting monsters either, just lots of them in tedious fight followed by tedios fight. As a designer, this may SEEM like a good idea, but it's not. Players will want to fight a limited number of monsters in any one dungeon. Either make the monsters they fight interesting, or don't place many of them at all. 3. Plan Ahead: Endings are a GOOD thing! Blades was made so that you could dream up your own adventures, and there's nothing wrong with doing so. What you need to do before you begin a scenario, however, is make sure that your scenario has a clearly defined STARTING and ENDING point. If you don't know how or where your scenario will end, you will most likely end up creating a large, fluid puddle of a plot rather than a unified storyline. As a designer, this may SEEM like a good idea, but it really isn't. A shorter scenario loses focus of its objective if it swamps itself down with too many menial sidequests, whereas a larger scenario can have a few sidequests, but requires more focus and planning to be successfully executed without deviating from the plot laid out for it. Sidequests and other types of missions are not the end of the world. They should be, however, either little in number or related to the plot. You don't need to draw every town or dungeon before you make it, but always keep in mind how that dungeon or town will advance the plot. Scenario design is tricky, but if you approach it with a modicum of sanity, then it becomes much easier. -Terror's Martyr

Hunh! I thought you went AWOL years ago. Bonk!

Quote: Heh. This quote is going up on my wall. The idea that anyone writing a game would purposefully put fun second is, I admit, alien to me. You're assuming that fun and story are not synonymous- Perhaps in my initial post, I partitioned the two off unfairly. I like a good story, and have fun playing through it. Redemption has a spiraling-downward, head trip into doomsday narrative. It was one of the first ten (IIRC) scenarios I played, and my standards haven't been higher since. Johnny Favourite (admittedly, a warning in advance: Play this one at 1 am in the morning or later, no sooner) is nothing but a movie roughly transposed into Blades of Exile. There's no action, no real puzzles, except for perhaps figuring out how to get a different ending. I liked playing it, and it even stands on your Solid Adventure's table with a 4.3 Also on your Solid Adventure's table (4.6) is Chains, a scenario with almost no combat except for some menial fights against weak undead- it's story driven with a few quirky puzzles attached, nothing more. To Live in Fear has a 4.1 on your tables. It's a movie scenario: The player does nothing, and yet by what the movie does alone, it's regarded as solid. (Two other movies have also scored Election, a scenario based only on a well-built pretense and a poor cameo of "Mayor Vogel" ( ) has a 4.5 in spite of its utter lack of combat. Other scenarios- namely virtually everything by Alcritas, Quint, and many others- contain fair ammounts of combat, but are also story-driven. Redemption, as I have stated earlier, is one of the most story-driven scenarios (even if it uses a Nintendo-esque style for combat ). My point is thus- Of course you have plenty of people who are eight year olds looking to hack things up. Let them play Za-Khazi. Or better yet, let them play At the Gallows by Stareye, also known as "Exile IV". The eight year olds who like swinging around their Ultra Mega Power-Rangers Demonslayer +50 to save busty damsels from big bad Haakais laden with phallic horns and spikes will always be there. They're easy to please, and couldn't tell the difference between Marvel Comics and The Things They Carried. (They're also the ones that litter your First Efforts table- go figure.) You give this demographic as much attention as it needs, but merely on an idealogical basis seem to neglect the more mature consumers who buy the buckets of fast food that get dumped into your cage each night. Marketing BoA as a medium to kill demons is well and good, and I'm not saying you should stop. I'm just saying that you and potential designers (ie. the ones who go about designing rooms full of alien beasts led by ultra haakais and the like) should also keep in mind that the parents who buy these games for their eight your olds might just be playing these games for themselves as well. PS- Za-Khazi as the third "pre-packaged" scenario for BoE was a horrible move in general. What better way to turn off the more "mature" players (who will make up your designing base, believe it or not)? PPS- http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=001356

Quote: Originally written by Spidweb: I would only warn people not to let the tail wag the dog. Most people play Blades to beat up monsters and get phat lewtz. I'd disagree with that, and so would many Blades-players. For example, your scenario that is more plot-strong (A Small Rebellion) has fared well on The Lyceum's Comprehensive Scenario Reviews: http://pub26.ezboard.com/fthelyceumfrm27.showMessage?topicID=29.topic While simultaneously, Za-Khazi run let the dog wag the tail clear off of its butt and suffered extraordinarily for it: http://pub26.ezboard.com/fthelyceumfrm27.showMessage?topicID=30.topic Za-Khazi failed horribly because it existed only for hacking up monsters and picking up loot. You'll see that most of the comments are fairly constant in their criticisms. The purpose of Blades is to tell a story FIRST and make a fun game to play SECOND- that's why scenarios such as Election, Corporeus, Chains and Quintessence are rated highly whereas scenarios such as Grey Moon: Hand of Darkness, Spy's Quest, and virtually every scenario by Brave Sir Robin are rated significantly lower.

If it works like its BoE equivalent does, then yes. (This kind of node is used to connect the caves in VotDT to the surface.)

If you want a script to boot the party out of the town and into the outdoors, then just create a really tiny town (ie. a small town with its boundaries being extremely constraining) and use a move_to_new_town(); to send the party there. (Be sure to properly identify this town's exit coordinates!)

What file format would one have to use in order to make the sound function, or are all sounds fine? If so, I have some that I would like to try! Many thanks.

I did most of those things for B2. I didn't need to keep track of shops, however, because there are so few in the scenario. I also didn't need to keep track of special items because I never "used" them- I gave them to the party for a cosmetic effect, but I only checked SDFs. I'm hardcore, baby.