Party Makers

[Kelandon]

Purely for the purposes of testing the coding of a scenario that I'm working on ( ), I made a god-party-maker. It's a scenario that levels the party up to an extremely high level (about 100 or so), gives it god equipment and lots of cash, and then ends. I think this qualifies as a utility or something. Three questions:

 

1. Does anyone want it?

 

2. Does anyone think I should submit this to Spiderweb as a utility scenario?

 

3. As a related point, does anyone think I should submit my high level party maker to SW as a utility scenario? It's designed to make a party level 35-40, with documentation explaining how to change the scen to make the intended level higher or lower.

 

I am unsure if any of this stuf would be useful to anyone other than me, so responses either way are welcome.

 

EDIT: Gah, now that I think about it, this probably should go in the Editor forum. If a mod agrees with me, feel free to move it.

[Toenail Returns]

hmmmm... I like the idea of that. I'd sure like to step out of that scenario with a level 50 singleton holding a flaming sword and a Martyr's Shield. And that's at the minimum of what I'd like.

[Vent]

What would be great would be great for players would be a general party maker that allows :

- To build any party level requirement;

- and provides shops adapted to various categories level;

- and allows get approximate amount of gold adapted to various categories level;

- and that allows to get any gold or items you want without to need to use the char editor which is boring about items.

[Kelandon]

I was thinking about working on a general party maker that would work sort of along these lines. But the general apathy that this thread received convinced me that no one yet cares. Maybe later, when some more high level scenarios are out.

[Drakefyre]

I made a party maker like Vent wants for BoE. It ended up taking more work than a real scenario and I'm fairly certain that nobody ever used it.

[Lattan]

What's the point when we've got a character editor?

[Dragongirl]

I actually tried to dl Drakefyre's party maker scenario at Alex's site but was unable to.

 

If you can give me a site where it is available, I would greatly appreciate.

 

Using char editor seems like cheating somehow.

[Kelandon]

Yeah, with a HLPM, you can know for sure that you're at the power level that the designer of the scenario wants you to be. Using the Character Editor, you could end up anywhere.

 

Besides, a HLPM is far more powerful than the Character Editor. You can give custom items (as long as they don't have custom graphics), for example.

[Therakul]

There is also the fact that with the Character editor, at least when it comes to leveling a character up, I found that I had to change the ExP of the character, and then save, load, get a point or two, go up almost two levels, get another point, save increase the ExP again, and then repeat. I don't know if I was just stupid and missed the "easy way" or if it had to do with the fact that the party was already in a scenario and it's level could not be tampered with so long as the party was currently active.

[Lilith]

Level won't change until the PC actually earns additional experience, but you should only have to edit XP once provided you edit it to the right value the first time you do it.

[Kelandon]

My impression after mucking about with the Character Editor for a bit (trying to create a god party, I admit) is that the add xp function is a bit unreliable. I couldn't get it to work right. That's another advantage: my HLPM can take you up to level 100 in seconds! No complex Char Edit manipulation necessary!

 

Ah, to hell with it. I'll finish it off so that it will raise chars to whatever level they like, and then I'll submit it as a utility. I'm tired of talking about it when it's 75% done and not released.

[Vent]

Drakefyre, I don’t know for the party maker you did but I know that I used a lot a similar scenario utility for neverwinter.

 

In fact, I’m not surprised that not a lot of people used your tool because you hide it pretty well. I searched throughout all your (cool) site and in few other sites and didn’t succeed to put my hand on it. At least I didn’t felt on your tricky traps set all around the net with false url like the trap where dragongirl felt in.

 

Kelandon, your post was initially made for authors not for players, perhaps there's not such a demand from authors.

 

If you provide a tool that only allows setting the level you want, that will be already great from a player point of view in order to manage better the skills points available. Therefore, if you prefer to release it with only base features and see later when there are scenario for higher-level parties, go on, stop chit chat, go back work, finish it and release it.

 

I agree that until there isn’t any higher-level scenario, the urgency of a more sophisticated tool is very low.

 

That said, from an idealistic point of view and from the professional grumbler that I am, that doesn't solve all the problems:

- As you explain, getting items is now very boring with BoA character editor (with BoE character editor it’s much more cool), you can only get a limited set of very powerful items. That’s why few shops with items available in the original game would be very useful.

- Allows the player to get the amount of gold he wants is just to let him buy the items and saw the regular prices without to quit the scenario.

- For a player, when creating a party, the problem is always what items, spells, alchemy and gold a party of this level should reasonably has. That’s why I suggested two sorts of merchants, one set with any items and another with items level roughly adapted to the party level. You could also add a standard amount of gold available that roughly depends on the party level.

For levels 1 to 32, the BoA bundled scenario could be used to determine roughly what items at which level. After that level, it’s just a suggestion, in fact that could be also a suggestion to authors that want create higher-level scenario.

- From other similar tools that I saw like one for neverwinter, some other features could be useful:

* Having sort of dumies of different levels to test if you can hit them or not and at what rate.

* Having arena with various set of monsters and different proposal depending of the party level.

* Having some locked door of different level, in fact not very useful for lock picking but could be useful to see the effect of the unlock spell.

[Therakul]

Go ahead and make it Kaelandon, I'm working on a scenario that is for 40th level parties and higher. It's not a very long or big scenario, and I have no clue as to when I'll have it finished, but still, there are some people working on them.