*i

I don't think you need to give everything equal time, so long as you give all aspects some explanation and perspective. Things that are evil and wrong for the sake of being evil and wrong are not good storyline devices. The point with VoDT is that if you consider pollution to be your villain, it is ultimately shallow and the moral gained from the story is as well. We can debate about any implied moral all we want. All that matters is that if one was attempted, then it failed. Future attempts that present morals should be able to look at VoDTs shortcomings and improve upon them.

Creator, you should append the previous post to the bottom of your article as a summary.

Sounds like a repetative and ultimately anti-fun combat experience to me.

I agree it's how you portray the characters. If you can do insanity/demon possession in a unique way, then it is worthwhile. If it is insanity/demon possession for the sake of insanity/demon possession, then it is probably worthless.

Well, if you posted your file, it would be a lot easier to diagnose. I always put the init_quest() code in my START_SCEN_STATE, but it should not really matter. Try putting them there and restart the scenario and try initiating a quest that way.

The Challenge Pits When designing a scenario, an author will attempt to provide challenges to the player. Effectively challenging him or her is vital to the success of any scenario. These challenges generally take two forms: tactical and logical. Implementing these effectively is a challenge in itself. Doing so is more of an artform than a science, but there are some key pitfalls to avoid. Tactical Pitfalls Tactical challenges put the player in difficult combat situations. Many players say they want good challenging combat. Knowing how much (quantity) and what kind (quality) to implement is a difficult judgment and is a balancing game every designer must play. In terms of the quantity of combat, the designer should try to keep the combat fresh. Fight, after fight, after fight, after fight of hack slash mania gets old very quickly. This is not to say that you should not have some combat, but you need to be careful not to overuse it. If the player just hacked up twenty skeletons, they probably will not need another room full of them. Do something a little different in the next room that may not involve combat at all. The pitfall to avoid is making a dungeon full of monsters and leaving nothing really interesting there in terms of the combat. Smashing up lots of bandits becomes very, very tedious and the player needs another way to satisfy his or her interests. The other issue with quantity is not how much combat, but how strong the monsters in the combat are. A common mistake of a novice designer is to equate big numbers in the monster stat fields as a challenging, interesting, and fun combat experience. 99% of the time it turns out to be aggravating, mundane, and boring. Raising stats to increase a challenge is fine, but as you increase the stats, the fun factor first increases until some fuzzy point where the combat becomes tedious and then the fun drops like a boulder off a high cliff. To increase the fun factor past this, you need to improve the quality of the combat. There are many ways to improve the quality of combat. All involve doing something unexpected, out of the ordinary, and hopefully thrilling. BoA offers a powerful scripting tool to work both internally and externally to the monsters involved. Working internally involves using monster scripts to influence the behavior. The original BoA scenarios are full of little tricks that have a various creature do something unexpected and out of the ordinary whether it be firing a harmful beam, summoning allies, or teleporting PCs. These got a little old after some time and the scripts used there are quite elementary and mundane. For future scenarios, designers will need to come up with new tricks to improve the combat experience. Just remember that harder does not always equal better, creativity does. External combat effects involve using scripts or effective placement to do something unexpected. An example would be having a big fight and as the party begins to win, several allies bust in and surround the party renewing the challenge. Simple things like having monsters sneak up on the party can be an effective way to improve the challenge and catch the player off guard. Doing things the player does not expect is key to improving the effect of the combat. Just remember to avoid the key pitfall in combat: more is not always better. The Logic of Illogic So now you've just had the combat that made the player's heart race. Now you want to switch gears and do something more cerebral. You want a logical challenge or some kind of puzzle. Well, that's great, but you need to be careful to avoid the pitfalls of logical puzzles. Logical puzzles should be there to challenge the player, not annoy them. Do not make something so elaborate and complicated, that it would take hours upon hours to complete. Creating the appropriate amount of logical challenge is much more difficult than with tactical challenges because the stats of the party generally do not matter, but the stats of the player (which you have no way to monitor) do. In creating these, make sure you have plenty of clues and explanations of any necessary background information necessary. Mandatory riddles should be avoided since they often assume a cultural or language background the player may not have. The key pitfall to avoid is making invalid assumptions about a player and failing to provide enough necessary background information to him or her. The common novice mistake is to assume lots and lots of secret passages and levers are a good thing. This is patently untrue. I cannot count the number of novice dungeons I have played that were "puzzle dungeons" of little more than secret passages, pulling levers and switches to open gates, and finding keys to unlock doors or chests. These have been done a bagillion times before and we do not need more of them. It is fine to use these traditional outlets if they make sense. If it makes sense to have a gate or a locked door, feel free to use it. If the secret passage is there for a good reason, use it. This brings up the point of logical puzzles versus illogical puzzles. The logical challenges you have should be logical and make sense in the context of the dungeon. Having a teleportation maze in a goblin lair is generally not a good idea. Ideally, you want to make the logical challenge blend in with the dungeon. The puzzle is there because it should be there and makes perfect sense. Designers should at least attempt to justify their logic puzzles lest they become pointless illogic puzzles. Even experienced designers fall into the pit of creating a puzzle just for the sake of a puzzle which is not a logic puzzle, but an illogic puzzle and serves to annoy the player rather than impress him or her. Staying on Level Ground The main point of this article is convey what to avoid when making combat or logic puzzles. Do not make them too hard or obscure. Do not make them tedious and aggravating. Do not just throw in combat or puzzles for the sake of combat and puzzles, they should make sense. These anti-fun combat or puzzle experiences turn off many players no matter how good or neat the reward is. Remember completing the challenge should be a reward in itself, the item reward should just be a reminder of the experience.

The Challenge Pits When designing a scenario, an author will attempt to provide challenges to the player. Effectively challenging him or her is vital to the success of any scenario. These challenges generally take two forms: tactical and logical. Implementing these effectively is a challenge in itself. Doing so is more of an artform than a science, but there are some key pitfalls to avoid. Tactical Pitfalls Tactical challenges put the player in difficult combat situations. Many players say they want good challenging combat. Knowing how much (quantity) and what kind (quality) to implement is a difficult judgment and is a balancing game every designer must play. In terms of the quantity of combat, the designer should try to keep the combat fresh. Fight, after fight, after fight, after fight of hack slash mania gets old very quickly. This is not to say that you should not have some combat, but you need to be careful not to overuse it. If the player just hacked up twenty skeletons, they probably will not need another room full of them. Do something a little different in the next room that may not involve combat at all. The pitfall to avoid is making a dungeon full of monsters and leaving nothing really interesting there in terms of the combat. Smashing up lots of bandits becomes very, very tedious and the player needs another way to satisfy his or her interests. The other issue with quantity is not how much combat, but how strong the monsters in the combat are. A common mistake of a novice designer is to equate big numbers in the monster stat fields as a challenging, interesting, and fun combat experience. 99% of the time it turns out to be aggravating, mundane, and boring. Raising stats to increase a challenge is fine, but as you increase the stats, the fun factor first increases until some fuzzy point where the combat becomes tedious and then the fun drops like a boulder off a high cliff. To increase the fun factor past this, you need to improve the quality of the combat. There are many ways to improve the quality of combat. All involve doing something unexpected, out of the ordinary, and hopefully thrilling. BoA offers a powerful scripting tool to work both internally and externally to the monsters involved. Working internally involves using monster scripts to influence the behavior. The original BoA scenarios are full of little tricks that have a various creature do something unexpected and out of the ordinary whether it be firing a harmful beam, summoning allies, or teleporting PCs. These got a little old after some time and the scripts used there are quite elementary and mundane. For future scenarios, designers will need to come up with new tricks to improve the combat experience. Just remember that harder does not always equal better, creativity does. External combat effects involve using scripts or effective placement to do something unexpected. An example would be having a big fight and as the party begins to win, several allies bust in and surround the party renewing the challenge. Simple things like having monsters sneak up on the party can be an effective way to improve the challenge and catch the player off guard. Doing things the player does not expect is key to improving the effect of the combat. Just remember to avoid the key pitfall in combat: more is not always better. The Logic of Illogic So now you've just had the combat that made the player's heart race. Now you want to switch gears and do something more cerebral. You want a logical challenge or some kind of puzzle. Well, that's great, but you need to be careful to avoid the pitfalls of logical puzzles. Logical puzzles should be there to challenge the player, not annoy them. Do not make something so elaborate and complicated, that it would take hours upon hours to complete. Creating the appropriate amount of logical challenge is much more difficult than with tactical challenges because the stats of the party generally do not matter, but the stats of the player (which you have no way to monitor) do. In creating these, make sure you have plenty of clues and explanations of any necessary background information necessary. Mandatory riddles should be avoided since they often assume a cultural or language background the player may not have. The key pitfall to avoid is making invalid assumptions about a player and failing to provide enough necessary background information to him or her. The common novice mistake is to assume lots and lots of secret passages and levers are a good thing. This is patently untrue. I cannot count the number of novice dungeons I have played that were "puzzle dungeons" of little more than secret passages, pulling levers and switches to open gates, and finding keys to unlock doors or chests. These have been done a bagillion times before and we do not need more of them. It is fine to use these traditional outlets if they make sense. If it makes sense to have a gate or a locked door, feel free to use it. If the secret passage is there for a good reason, use it. This brings up the point of logical puzzles versus illogical puzzles. The logical challenges you have should be logical and make sense in the context of the dungeon. Having a teleportation maze in a goblin lair is generally not a good idea. Ideally, you want to make the logical challenge blend in with the dungeon. The puzzle is there because it should be there and makes perfect sense. Designers should at least attempt to justify their logic puzzles lest they become pointless illogic puzzles. Even experienced designers fall into the pit of creating a puzzle just for the sake of a puzzle which is not a logic puzzle, but an illogic puzzle and serves to annoy the player rather than impress him or her. Staying on Level Ground The main point of this article is convey what to avoid when making combat or logic puzzles. Do not make them too hard or obscure. Do not make them tedious and aggravating. Do not just throw in combat or puzzles for the sake of combat and puzzles, they should make sense. These anti-fun combat or puzzle experiences turn off many players no matter how good or neat the reward is. Remember completing the challenge should be a reward in itself, the item reward should just be a reminder of the experience.

An article should be as long or as short as it needs to be to convey all the topical things you want to say.

I think we are being very general here and not discussing specific situations. We are saying it is possible to do, but doing it well and convincingly well is quite difficult. Just saying how is easy, but carrying it out in a believeable way is the challenge.

Towns are a tool that can serve to help advance the plot. There is no set thing saying what a town should or should not be, it's in the eye of the designer. Towns are not necessary, but they can be very useful. TM, you need to broaden your perspectives rather than presume that your way of advancing the plot (with dungeons and heavy NPC involvement) is the only way to do so. It all comes down to how a designer pulls off using the towns in their own creative ways. If they can pull it off well, more power to them.

That's probably it then. Each NPC that you want to the player to be able to talk to needs to be assigned a separate personality number.

Personalities? Are you referring to the thing that lets you define NPCs that you can talk to?

Every character has default items built into the corescendata.txt file. You should create a character identical to the doomguard and just have it set to drop the sword and have no armor.

spiderbytes - Realize that different people have different tastes and as a designer it is impossible to please everyone. Some people prefer to be given a set character and play the set storyline. Others may not want to be boxed in. That's fine, don't play it. Am I limiting my audience? Perhaps, but I really do not care. I'm not going to change a good idea involving an expression of artistic style just because some people may not like it. Imagine if every artist tried to please everyone. We would have no art, would we? Here is why there are limitations to a specific PC in Emulations: 1) Primarily plot reasons. I wanted to make something more personal to an individual character. Having a party would really diminish the effect of the storytelling, which is not something I am willing to compromise just to please people. 2) The combat balance. You do not get priest spells (or a bunch of other skills) in this scenario and that's part of the challenge. Since you get the really cool "skill drain" attribute in the middle of the scenario, this allows me to direct what skills you "learn" allowing to make more interesting combat. Refusing to play with the suggested party will make the plot not as appealing and will really make the combat too easy. You can do this, I really do not stop you. I'm just saying that you will probably be unsatisfied with the scenario on a whole, because you did not play as directed. Since I inform you up front in the read me, your lack of enjoyment in this respect is solely up to you. If you decide, "I don't want to be restricted." Then do not play it, simple as that. We can argue all day about what Blades should be about. I feel that it should be about good storytelling. (If you disagree with this, this is a philosophical difference with no resolution so we must disagree.) Since I believe telling a good story is the most important part of a scenario, I feel that anything that will improve the flow of the story is a priori over anything else, including things that may make some players unhappy. The final point I keep repeating is this. I always inform players up front of any limitations. If they want to box themselves into the tradiational RPG style and not try new experiences, they have every right not to play these scenarios. However, if they want a different experience, then I suggest they give it a try.

In my experience, players can always find ways to cheat if they want to. I've come to the frame of thought to make no attempts to stop them anymore. If the player chooses not to play the way the scenario was intended, it is to their loss alone.

You could always put a list of scripts to be tested by the players/designers much as you do with scenarios. If you get a decent number of people verifying the effectiveness of the script, you can add it to the full list. Just put a disclaimer above the table of untested scripts that these have not been tested yet and may not function.

Hey, if you are really nice to Bob, err...Anaximander, you can get him to disrobe for you.

Not per se. You can always use the erase_char() and spawn_creature() call, but that is probably what you are not hoping to do.

He's a "reporter" in ASR. He works for that strange wizard in Krizsan you met in E3, the one that gave you the Ring of Magery quest.

The same was pretty much true in Blades of Exile as well.

Emulations has no shops at all and it ranks quite well on the solid adventures table. Granted the setup is somewhat (hell, a lot) different than the "Vogel Standard Model" of scenario design. I guess the one thing I would like to add is saying that these words of advice do not fit all scenarios. More important beyond actual implementation of the suggestions is to ensure they make sense in terms of the environment in the scenario.

Skyle, you're alive!!

Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: I just don't understand what I detect as a continuing thread of resentment at Jeff Vogel. It really stems from a pretty much complete abandonment of Blades of Exile. For instance: 1) Refusing to fix bugs that cause advertised features in the editor not to work. 2) Neglect of the scenario ratings tables. No attempt made to keep ratings honest, infrequent updates, and poor feedback to designers. 3) Only one scenario design contest and only mild support for subsequent community contests. To be fair, he has done all right in this. Hopefully BoA will be a continually evolving system with decent updates. However, past history has made me skeptical.

Actually you need to code healers in. Look at the sample dialogue scripts provided with the game to give you lots of examples on how to do it. It should be at the end where he has: code = . . . break;

Try this: move_to_new_town(which_town, x_coordinate,y_coordinate);