Drakefyre

Well, most of us have experience with BoE, so we got through the 'I have all the power and can create stuff and make it go boom' phase a while ago.

Look at Chains, Tatterdemalion, Nephil's Gambit, Requelle's Nightmare, etc.

Towns don't need to be static - things can happen in them.

My History Stuff

That's because a lot of this was decided by community consesus before Avernum came and ruined most of the dates.

It's easier to be helpful if you ask specific questions.

For an example, look at Chains. I had a much better time in the towns than I did in the dungeons. Towns in Chains are basically what I'm shooting for in the article.

Corescendata2 is also an item list.

I definitely think that you misunderstood my main point about towns and plot.

The towns themselves rarely advance the plot. It's the characters inside them that really make a town - the rest is just a shell for them. But there's no reason that it can't be a pretty shell.

Trouble in Mendor and A Gathering Storm go overboard with respect to towns. That's not at all what I'm advocating with this article.

Article - Designing a Quality Town

Towns. Every scenario has to have at least one of these. Most likely, almost everyone has an unfinished, 50-town 'masterpiece' somewhere on their hard-drive, begging to be cut down and simplified into a releasable scenario. Overestimating your ability to create towns and underestimating the amount of work they require are two mistakes commonly made by newer scenario designers. This is especially pertinent with the Blades of Avernum Editor's terrain system.

Towns take time. A lot of time. In Blades of Exile, it was possible to slap together a well-designed town in an hour or two, and spend another hour or two writing dialogue for it. Well, no more. In Blades of Avernum, it's not uncommon to spend around six hours just designing and tweaking a 48x48 town, and writing dialogue can add another three to four hours if you do it right. That's around ten hours spent on a single town. Fifty friendly towns, each full of personalities, will make anyone go crazy - it would take more than 20 days, non-stop, to write those towns.

That's why this article is here. I aim to help you cut down on the number of towns in your scenarios and refine the ones that are left. The easiest way to do this is with a series of questions that should be answered for every town, along with some helpful tips that I've picked up along the way.

Really, the first thing to do is decide whether a town you've planned is necessary. What is its purpose? Does it do anything to advance the plot or add atmosphere to the scenario, or is it to provide a break from dungeons and give shops? Towns with the latter purpose will only hinder the completion of your scenario. Think about the scenario with and without the town - if it would run pretty much the same way, definitely consider removing the town.

The first order of business when creating new towns is choosing a size. 32x32 will suffice for most forts, small towns, temples, smaller dungeons, and so on. A 48x48 town is generally large enough for anything you're trying to do. A 64x64 town in Blades of Avernum is a lot bigger than one from Blades of Exile. A town that size should only be used on something that is truly massive and you're sure that you can't fit in a 48x48 town.

When creating your town, you want to think about the region in which it's being set. What's the environment like? How far from the largest cities is it? How do people here make a living? How strong is the presence of authority? All of these things should be reflected in the making of the town. You won't have a mining town in the middle of a forest, but you may have a logging town. In the mountains, it would generally be a mining town. Have mines, miners, ore storage, people that sell mining supplies, and maybe even a miner's union. It will help you set the mood of the town and help you get a better idea of what goes on in the town.

If the town is far away from other cities and has few authority figures, is crime rampant? Or is it a peaceful backwater village that doesn't merit much attention? Do people feel resentful towards a faraway government that they never see? An easy way to get a handle on the sentiments of the people in a town is to place yourself in their shoes and see what kind of reactions you would have if you were a firebrand, a simple trader, a priest, et cetera.

The town should also have some connection to the plot - having towns for the sake of towns is just asking for trouble. Without a plot connection, it's hard to be motivated to complete a town. Maybe the town of Greenleaf is nearby an evil mage's lair and magical fringe effects have caused two-headed calves to be born. Do they know he's there? Or are they clueless? In real life, events like these caused the town to start branding people as witches. Does this happen in your town?

In any case, they would not stand idly by. The main plot usually has an effect on every town, and thusly on the characters that populate it. Any events that happen affect people, and they should talk about it in their dialogue. Everyone has an opinion on things, and most people aren't shy about sharing it. The more depth you add to a character's dialogue, the better the player will identify with them and the scenario as a whole.

On the subject of dialogue, it should be full and fleshed out. Almsot everyone should talk to the party - even if it's just a simple 'I'm busy right now' message. People are more than just shopkeepers or soldiers or priests. They're fathers, daughters, neighbors, et cetera. They have hobbies, relationships, sons away at war, and so on. Bringing that out in dialogue is a lot easier in smaller scenarios, but it should happen to some degree in all scenarios. People like the king have more to worry about than just the party and their mission.

Also, town design should be logical. There are generally paths in a town that lead through it, sections with houses for the town's inhabitants (it's unbelievable how many scenarios ignore/leave out these), and some easy-to-reach figure of authority. The mayor's office is not going to be in the back corner of a town behind forty houses with no sign and no paths. Generally, there is not a lot of empty space around town, and if there is, it's usually spread out by leaving more space between buildings.

That being said, towns should not be (and are not) designed in perfect symmetry. To add realism, most designers make towns a little messy. Not every building came up at the same time - there were some when the town was first formed, and the rest came up into open space at a later time. If you have that mindset when designing towns, your towns will generally seem a little more realistic than the 'planned community' that's extraordinarily neat, with a lot of buildings the same size and in neat little rows.

With Blades of Avernum, we're given more tools that should be taken advantage of. Not everything in a town is the same height or even on level ground. Using hills in some capacity makes a town look better, and so does adding signs around buildings (even if it's not the terrain and a custom state instead).

Towns should be built to engage the player and advance the plot, not merely be a break from dungeon crawling. A good town can do much more to advance the plot than a dungeon can. Character interactions will draw the player in, and making a town consistent with its surroundings will set a mood for the town and give it a natural environment. And above all, remember that towns take time.

It also involves time travel and rocketship bombs.

I'm moving this to the scenario editor forum.

The Responsive World

Something that a lot of designers of neglect to consider is the fact that the world, or at least the area of the scenario, will change in response to what the party does. This can and should be different depending on the scale and type of scenario that you're writing, but it should happen in all of them, unless you make it a point of the scenario that the party has no effect on anything (which would be very weird and very interesting).

There are quite a few ways to go about making a fully responsive world. The easiest and most common is changing dialogue based on events that happen and things that the party does. A step up from that is changing dialogue and the perceptions of the towns by including some sort of a 'reputation' or 'karma' counter that can be used to lower/raise prices, get hired by more prestigious people, and so on. The last step is causing far-reaching effects as a result of what the party says, doing other events, et cetera.

Changing dialogue is the preferred way of getting these changes across to the player, and it's incredibly easy to do so in Blades of Avernum. Having dialogue depend on a condition, having strings removed and added, and dialogue actions like INTRO and DEP_ON_SDF all greatly improve the control that we have over dialogue. This makes it a cinch to change everyone in the town from being scared of the baddies to happy that you killed them.

This does not have to be contained to the threatened town - maybe all of the towns nearby have heard of what you did and now more options become open. That's getting into the second type of changing world, based on the deeds of the party and changing the perceptions of the characters with regards to it.

Another important thing to remember is that if the big den of monsters has been cleaned out, all outdoor encounters related to it should disappear, either with a message upon encountering them, or just purely destroying them. Outdoor encounters, unless used properly, do not add a lot to a scenario.

The second method of changing the world requires an SDF or two that would serve as a reputation or karma counter. As the player did more quests or said things that people liked, NPCs would become more friendly. This can also work the opposite way, and it's great to see either one. Knowing that your actions have an effect on how you can play the game makes the player think.

It's fairly easy to implement these changes too. Something easy to do is call a state when entering a town that uses an else-if ladder to determine a dialog box to show that describes how the town feels about you. It could be "They notice you and start talking excitedly. These are the adventurers who killed X, Y, and Z," or "The citizens of the town sneer at you as you walk by. You certainly don't feel welcomed here," or something in-between.

There are still dialogue changes, and everything from the first level should be included here as well. In addition to those before, using actions like SET_SDF upon giving a favorable/unfavorable response will allow you to let the party express their opinion through dialogue, and then you can concoct the appropriate responses. This is particularly effective in scenarios with multiple sides to join, as it can be used to determine how each side views you, à la Geneforge.

The third method is by no means the most intricate method available, but it's still more complicated than the two described above. This can't be used in all scenarios, but it can be extremely effective when it's used properly. It still builds on the first method, and it's possible that it would implement the second as well. The main idea with this method is 'consequences'.

Everything the party does will have consequences and repercussions in the world - some foreseeable, and others not. If the designer implements them, it makes for a much more challenging and fun game to play. Shutting off the power to an old factory that's spawning muck monsters may also shut down the waste-processing plant, which could dump sewage into the water supply, poisoning a town.

Variable Town Entry is generally fit for a purpose like that - if a town changes radically, especially its terrain, and if people die or have dramatically different dialogue responses, you'd be better off creating a whole new town and just replacing the old one. This generally fits in when a disaster occurs, towns are wiped out or attacked, or even when there have just been so many changes that it would be better to just have half happen in a completely new town.

Something you have to ensure when working with VTE is continuity. If someone gives you a quest in the old town and is still alive in the new town, they should still give you a reward, or at least acknowledge the deed. Maybe the economy has crashed between getting and finishing the quest, and he can't pay you in gold - only copper. This creates a little bit of an 'oh, man' factor, and it encourages the player to replay the scenario and see if they can complete the quest before the disaster occurs.

Imagining and implementing these consequences will allow for a fuller game that immerses the party and lets them know that for every action, there is a response, even if it may seem like there isn't. A very good way to mix it up a little is to have the original quest you were supposed to solve create a horrible and unforeseen problem that you now have to deal with, because you were the one that mucked it up in the first place.

As a player, you always want to play in a world that makes you feel like what you do is either important or has effects. Playing in a static world is no fun. Even though this may not apply to some scenarios (especially ones where you can't go backwards to places you've already been), it helps if every designer would consider them.

DragynBob Sado-Masochism

Or DataBases.

It's an inside joke, either way.

Custom Creature Template:

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*sigh*

Now I need to write another article.

There's nothing wrong with having Bob. There's nothing wrong with eliminating Bob. There's nothing wrong with avoiding Bob altogether.

After all, he's an integral part of DBSM.

When you have someone like Commander Groul, control is not his only motivation. There's also prestige and pride in it, and the thrill of getting away with something you shouldn't be doing that keeps him going.

And this also means that I have to write some more articles now, but preferably on some more BoA specific stuff.

Just toss the move_to_town() call in at the end of the cutscene.

If that doesn't work, run it inside town boundaries and then add the move_to_town() call at the end of the cutscene without any time given for the party to move around.

I mentioned in the 'Why?' thread some scenarios that stumble because they are too plot-heavy.

I have also said that I'm not in the 'plot is god' group. However, it's easy for a fun scenario without a plot to get between a 6 and 7 from me. That may be a good rating for some people. However, a boring scenario with a plot will get around a 5 - 6 from me. The perfect scenario is one that's fun, has a great storyline, and brilliant sequences in it that add the 'wow factor'.

I agree with Thuryl. It seems like you're encouraging one-dimensional characters, which I always hated as a player.

I think that it would be fine if you took the whole range of SDFs from 250,0 upwards. Using the end y-values from earlier x-values is generally not a good idea, especially in some towns.

A stack would not be hard to implement at all, and neither would a normal array or an array-based implementation of binary trees. I think you're asking for a bit much with linked lists. It's also certainly possible to develop a hashing method that would be limited to a set of SDFs that's not being used for actual SDF purposes.

This is not intended to be a 'How To' article, first of all.

EDIT: I'd appreciate it if we could keep the AC-specific comments @ the BoE thread.

No there isn't, he just wants there to be one.

Article - Choices and Linearity

When planning out your scenario, you will have to make some decisions regarding the progression of the plot. There's the question of how much impact the player's actions will have on the scenario, and what will always happen regardless. You have to decide if the player is ever able to make choices that will have far-reaching (or simpler) consequences, or whether the party is swept along in the story.

The first point of discussion here is the amount of choice the player will have. There are many scenarios where the party is able to choose a side to join - some of it is done outright ("Which side will you join?"), and some is done more subtly, even so discreetly that they might not even realize that they're picking a side. Then again, most scenarios don't use choices of this scope at all.

An overt choice, such as in Tatterdemalion, can be used well, but it generally separates a scenario into two (or three) smaller scenarios that much each be played to get a full feel for the scenario. A Small Rebellion also uses a choice like this to expand the scenario and give it another dimension - the ability to play for a sympathetic group of rebels. Ideally, the choice will come somewhere between the time it does in the above two scenarios. In Tatterdemalion, you choose at the beginning, and it feels too early. In ASR, you choose seemingly too far along to experience much of the rebel story.

A subtler choice, like in Of Good And Evil, will still have the party making a choice between two forces - in the case of OGAE, it's morals and orders, and the effects of the choices aren't known until the second play-through ends. This is very successful in OGAE, and it can be replicated easily in Blades of Avernum. Part of the challenge is presenting the sides so that it appears to be a dilemma to the player, and so that it strikes the right chords in the player's head. You don't want to ask them outright to switch sides or choose one, but their actions should influence the direction the story takes, and they should be able to realize it after a while.

The third possibility is to not let on to the party at all that their actions have influenced the game, but keep on changing the game based on them, and not let them find out until the end. OGAE and Falling Stars use a karmic system to determine their endings, how NPCs react to the party, etc. It's an invisible reputation counter, basically, and it has a lot of influence on how the game unfolds. Again, when this is utilized properly, it makes scenarios much more fun.

Still, you don't need to have choices like the three kinds described above to make a good scenario. You can present choices and options to the player, or you can force them to follow a linear plot and keep the story moving quickly. This opens up another discussion and the second point of the article - linear scenarios versus the open-ended scenarios.

Linear scenarios are usually plot-driven, and they have a quickly-paced story that should grab the player's interest and not let go until the scenario ends. An Apology does this, Redemption does this, Emulations does this, Revenge does this, and even Quintessence does. Those aren't all of the linear scenarios, but they are some of the most prominent, and some of the ones that use linearity well and to augment their scenario.

A linear scenario may have outdoor sections, but there should not be too many of them, or it will kill the urgent mood (if one exists) and become boring to the player. A linear scenario can still have sidequests, but they should never detract from the main plot, and it's even better if they add to it. The combat in a linear scenario should be interesting, fun, and important. It should never have the feeling of being repetitive (and this holds true for any scenario), and it doesn't have to exist at all.

The driving force behind most linear scenarios (and all of the good ones) is a gripping plot that involves the player and thrusts you into the action. It's primarily a story-based scenario, and if the story falters, the scenario will falter too. As a player, linear scenarios are my favorite by far.

There are two types of open-ended scenario - one with a set plot that can be deviated from, and one that attempts to be a world that immerses the player, usually without a definite ending point, except running out of missions to do. Most scenarios fall under the first description, but only the smaller ones succeed. Scenarios that try to emulate Avernum 3 or another giant game will inevitably fail or fall short. There are some notable exceptions (At the Gallows, Falling Stars), but generally, scenarios on a smaller scale will work better. The second type of open-ended scenario has not really been fully explored in Blades of Exile, but the Adventurers' Club scenarios and the Wreck of the Slug attempt it.

Open-ended scenarios that follow the first model are more likely to be well-received, based on the high favor that a plot curries in the community. Still, don't go overboard on the sidequests, sidedungeons, and sidetowns. Never forget that the main plot is the focus of the scenario, and everything else serves to flesh out the world and offer a break from the general plotline. Limiting the scenario's size also makes it more likely that you'll actually finish designing it, especially when you get into a more open-ended scenario that is slightly detached from the story. Linear scenarios can generally get away with being a little bigger than they need to be because the designer usually has a connection with the plot that keeps them going.

The second type of open-ended scenario is, in my opinion, not suited to the Blades of Exile/Blades of Avernum medium. It's far too hard to create a whole world in this system, and we generally like to focus our attention on small parts of worlds, backwards frontier settlements, isolated valleys, et cetera. It's a giant undertaking when you attempt a scenario of this sort, and it's generally not as fun to play. A scenario does not need to be as big as a commercial game because very few players want to spend that much time in a world that you create with a driving story keeping you there.

TWOTS and the ACs all suffer from that tendency, and you're generally better off focusing on one of the other types of scenarios. I personally favor a linear scenario, and large scenarios need to be extremely good to keep my interest throughout the entire scenario. Don't forget that a party is not obligated to stay in the scenario the entire time - you can't just make it interesting at the end, because nobody will see it. You have to start out strong and keep the pace for the entire scenario.

All of this is just meant to keep you open to the different mindsets of scenario designing, and some of the common pitfalls in each. You're certainly free to design whatever you want to design.

Aceron ran boards from 1997 to 2000, and the Lyceum started in 1999 on ITW and then moved to ezBoard and became the premier BoE board after Aceron's collapsed after he left.

has_num_of_item(item) will return the number of charges.