Choose Your Language

Thursday 19 March 2009

Keeping The Faith!

This week I planned to spend some time making items that I am going to need for the quests involved at the start of the module. This should have been a reasonably straightforward task, but it was interrupted by a few things I discovered along the way:

1) A bug with opening books with a contents menu. (Now fixed.)
2) A bug when players switched PCs while reading a book. (Now fixed.)
3) A bug in the ambient system where NPCs would stop walking. (Now fixed.)
4) Players could change their god (not wanted) between levelling up. (See next.)

It's amazing how many things you can "suddenly discover" need dealing with when you are set on moving onto the next stage of building. The fact that a player can change the god they follow during a level up was something I did not know about and only came to light as I tested an XP award. This becomes a problem in the Althéa Campaign, because a PC is not supposed to be able to change their faith this way. Changing the god a PC follows is only meant to be possible if a PC finds and reads a holy book on a new faith. Once chosen, a PC then keeps their faith for the rest of the adventure ... unless there are some very unusual circumstances for such a change. In the end, I managed to fix this as well.

As far as making a start on the new areas where the early quests take place, I did take up Frank Perez's (Faithless) recommendation of Smorpheus' Toolset Visual Index DELUXE, which (from what I have managed to see so far), may go some way to helping me with the huge number of placeables that are available to choose from when trying to decorate an area. If I find I use it more and more, I intend to give some feedback for the author.

8 comments:

Wyrin said...

what was causing the option to change deity on level up?

so far I'd only seen this occur when the deity didn't match an entry in the 2da - so was this due to your systems where not all deities are available from the start?

only ask as it could be a useful exploit actually...! and I've wondered about calling just that part of the character creation GUI actually in game, as that could be handy

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi Wyrin,

In my case, I did not want "humans" to be able to choose their god from the OC lists. I have my own gods for my campaign. At level up time, I noticed that the player is offered a deity if they have not yet chosen one - and even if they choose "No deity", it changes what I had down as their deity.

I wanted it to say "Searching for your faith" as opposed to "No Deity" or some other deity name that is not in my campaign. I set this phrase at area enter script.

At level up, even if the player did not choose a deity (and left it on "No Deity"), I needed a way of changing it back - which I did in their heartbeat script.

Basically, if you change the "Deity" to something other than one of the OC, it seems to offer a diety choice again at level up. At least, that is what it appears to me from my testings to date.

I hope that makes more sense. :)

Lance.

Frank Perez said...

Hi Lance,

There's at least one other situation wherein player characters may change their deity. If the character levels up in a class that requires worship of specific types of deities that the PC does not currently worship, the PC *must* change their deity. For example, a favored soul of Mystra who changes alignment to evil and levels up as a blackguard must change their deity. Some interesting power builds can actually be created by exploiting the rules in a way that would make an RP-loving dungeonmaster cringe.

Thought you might want to know.

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi Frank,

Goodness me, I was not aware of that ... too many new classes for me to get to grips with. ;)

Thank-you for bringing this to my attention. I thought at first I might be able to implement my own "version" of how this class could play with my own gods (in Althéa), but after giving it some more thought, I may just suggest this class does not "work" in the Althéa campaign due to the different gods and the way "faith" is used.

OR ... maybe ... is their a 2da file that *might* easily be edited in some way to change the god names but maintain the class possibility?

Any suggestions on this would be helpful, as I have not ventured down this route before and someone else may be able to let me know what can or cannot be done with this?

Thanks in advance.

Lance.

Frank Perez said...

I'd like to help, but I'm afraid I haven't had any experience editing class and deity data in 2DA files. Nevertheless, if there's a way out of your predicament, my guess is that editing 2DA and possibly TLK files may be the answer.

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

That's OK. :)

I decided that I will probably recommend not playing this class in my campaign anyway ... unless I do manage to work out which 2da files need editing (and then, only if it is a reasonably straight forward thing to do). ;)

Lance.

Amraphael said...

Hi Lance, I saw you comment and wanted to tell you that you were on the mail list for beta-testing but obviously didn't receive the mail. I used your Althea-mail. Please send me a line if you want the information on another mail-address or if you want me to resend it.

/Amraphael

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi Amraphael,

I have resent the request email to you. Hopefully, everything will go through OK this time. :)

Lance.