Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

30 Jun 2004 - New Epic Characters - Magical Marauder & Combat Medic
Imna "Mithdradates" Lias- for the Magical Marauder and David "Grini" Villareal for the Combat Medic. Both are listed on the write-up for each.

More : Very interesting. I went and checked to make sure the .bic I used for the screenshots was the final .bic and it was. The character I actually took shots of is the 40th level Combat Medic who does,in fact, have 16 levels of Pale Master BUT seems to have kept her normal arm. Anyone have an explaination for that...I suspect that this is a bug or am I missing something. You can test this out for yourselves as the .bics are available for download.

NEW EPIC BUILDS - SWEET!
It does take a loooong time to get the builds up and running and out to the public. There are a lot of people involved and a lot of detail things to make sure of before they see the light of day but I think they are solid gold and so the work required is worth it. My thanks to those who continue to strive to beat the crap out of the leveling system to produce these crazy powerful builds!

Rob Bartel, Senior Designer

DD and mod teams

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So my questions to those out there is this:

1)What assurances would be required for a piece of custom content to not breach copyright?

2)How can these be evidenced

3) are there any peice of Custom content that fufill these criterea?

4) is my rant at all relevant?
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Community content is a bit of a minefield but still something that we are actively exploring. Generally, we will try to address the legal questions by commissioning works from scratch - that way the builders know the terms and conditions when they begin and can build their content accordingly.

Some content, such as tilesets, can have too long of a development cycle for from-scratch commissioning to work. In these cases we'll try to obtain the content at some point in the middle of its development cycle. Once it gets publicly released, however, we tend to steer clear.

In all cases, we would obtain the content under a signed contract whereby all components of the content and the people who contributed to it are accounted for. In other words, as a mod group, the smaller and more focused you can keep the group, the better. And document *everything*.

Your rant is very relevant, primarily because internal resources on the Live Team are currently insufficient to maintain a steady stream of DD content to you, the community. In other words, we'll be needing your help in getting us to where you need/want us to be.

There will be some bumps along the road, I'm sure, and we will have to be very sensitive when addressing the issue of selling supposedly 'free' community-made content back to the community via the DD initiative. Our hope is that, in doing so, we will be improving the quality of the content itself (1.63, for instance, will include a number of features that have come as direct requests from the custom content community), increasing the likelihood of its continued creation, providing ongoing Live Team support to the NWN community, and extending that support to future titles.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

help me out please, toolset takes...
Ensure that your computer is running in 32-bit colour mode. Anything else, any you will likely run into serious performance problems.

More: In the toolset options, disable environment mapping. This has been known to cause problems on some video cards in the past. Although I don't recall anyone with an nvidia card ever experiencing it, it's still worth a shot.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

1.63 Patch

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It would still be nice to read something about how the optional auto fail/succes on 1 and 20 will work. BW or any other with insight please enlighten our feeble minds
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Nobody said anything about 20 and there are no plans to change the way 20s are handled in the game (or make it optional).

The rule that there is a critical failure on saving throws on a natural 1 is now optional, meaning you can change this behavior in your server's .ini file.

Since I see all those familiar questions again:

Q: Will bug XXXX be fixed in 1.63?
A: Maybe.
Thanks for understanding

More: While I partially agree with you, the point is: A good DM creates a world with a service mentality for his players. He draws his satisfaction from knowing that his players enjoyed a good adventure that was challenging but not unfair, funny but not ridiculous and memorable, not everyday ware. When you, as a DM, realize, that your players enjoy hackfest a lot, you can try to bring them closer to other types of playing, but you should also make sure that they enjoy what they do while playing with you. It's a very thin line to balance your campaign between giving in to what the players want and maintaining challenge and atmosphere.

It is up to the server admin/builder/DM to create a world where players want to play in and that players enjoy, and I agree that many DMs/Server Admins/Builders unfortunately do not follow that guideline but instead create "their world and force people to live in it"

The good servers out there I've seen have ingame feedback systems and guild forums where people can give suggestions, feedback and allow the DMs to see what their players want and react to them. These are the servers that will ultimately get the most dedicated players and have the best atmosphere.

There are decisions in NWNs game design in order to to make it harder to change signature (selling) elements of the game: One of them is "devastating critical is working as intended".

Why? Because, apart from the fact that it's implemented by the book and thus hard for us to change, I think that people who bought HotU for the potential to create an epic fighter with that feat, which is a popular one, can expect this signature ability to work when they play online. This is one of the reasons why we currently have no interest in making it any easier for builders to change how devastating critical works. Yes, you can remove devastating critial and come up with alternate implementations, but it's not very easy to do, and that's completely intentional at this point. I don't expect everyone to agree with this assessment, but I thought it can't hurt to give you our view on that matter. And no I don't think devastating critical is unbalanced.

Keep in mind again: NWN is "create your own FR module", not build your own rule system or world in the first place - To a degree some design decisions in NWN were actually made to protect the common player from zealot DMs/Builders (i.e. making it a bit harder to change summoned creatures than other creatures) and to keep the multiplayer experience consistent over the first few month of the game.

I would reevaluate some of those decisions today after knowing what our builder community is capable of, but I still think they made sense at launch time as because of NWN's integrated feeling. Joining a server doesn't give away what house rules are in effect and can cause frustration from the unsuspecting game owner who isn't aware of the fact just how much gameplay can change from the manual on a custom server. It's mainly an interface design issue in NWN (not making "mods/changes" apparent on the GUI) however.

Back to the change on the 1 rule. I am a big fan of the 1 rule. I think it keeps the thrill in the game by having a good chance that this swarm of level 1 goblins will land an attack sooner or later. I think 5% is good because in my opinion it's a large enough chance to counter a lot of min/maxing and immunity racking.

However as far as I can remember it is indeed a rule that is optional (I could be wrong) AND we added it after NWN was out, actually more by accident than by intent. We found that it is a very useful rule that made balancing HotU a lot easier (i.e. Mindflayers or Beholders are weak creatures for a hero of your level in HotU but they are also signature creatures of the Underdark we wanted in the expansion pack. Without the fail on 1 rule, they would have been completely and utterly pointless). Bottomline: Craig found it reasonably easy to implement a switch in the .ini file and put it in. It's there now and I'm sure people will use it, but I would urge them to think twice about flipping that bit, because it affects your whole world far more than immediately apparent.

A general observation: For some reasons CRPG players expect games to treat them "fair" and fair almost always means the absense of random or unexpected penalties (there are some excellent essays about this expectation of fairness out there, I can try to dig them out). Regardless of the fact that the real world isn't fair, many players hit critical twice in a row by a lonely thief will complain about the game being unfair (because that lonely level 2 thief should have never touched the shiny level 20 hero) or the random number generator being biased. I think people need to be protected from this expectation. A good amount of random unfairness keeps the game interesting and prevents it from completely degrading into numbercrunching.

And yes, I agree with spura that the shifter class will be impacted if the 1 rule is disabled. We designed several of the abilities that can cause nearly instant death (i.e. shifter) to work with the 1 rule (same for the Pale master) in mind. If you switch the rule off, those classes will be hurt.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that a lot of this stuff is my personal opinion and might very well differ from other opinions on the team.

1.63 fixed script function(DecrementRemainingSpellUses)?
Craig fixed several issues with subradial and cleric domain spells, my guess is that this is fixed, but I didn't test it, so I can't tell for sure.

Level Cap

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Not needed by Bioware due to no future plans to continue the series . However Those of us that love this game and want to make continued use of it and our characters do have need for it.
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Seriously, is more than enough for a D&D game. It's not that there are nearly unlimited combinations of levels or objects in the game like Diablo, creating good modules takes time and creating good epic modules takes a very long time due to balancing issues. At some point you always reach the point where you have to part from your character and retire him, because he has achieve the highest level possible. That point is level 40 in NWN and the amount of work that would be required to raise this barrier is very high.

More:
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I would like to see the cap raised only because I want every option at my disposal. I agree that it's pretty useless unless your persistant world alows the players to become deities or other such advanced types. So all and all it's a silly thing...
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Exactly the point why I would be opposed to any change to the level cap. It makes the concept of having different classes even weaker than it already is and I think having to chose what your character is and what his signature abilities are is one of those things that make class based RPGs good. If at one point you can do anything, there is no point in having classes at all. And don't think that this is different from skill based systems, they all integrate methods of preventing players from getting it all - just a bit less apparent than classes

Newbie help...
to create items for your character to use, you need to

a) Create a new module
b) Create a new area inside the module
c) Select the Item Creation wizard from the menu
d) Create the item you want. When you are done, place the item in your module on the ground
e) Start NWN, select custom game and select Join the module you just created with your character and pick up the item
f) Leave the module and make sure to select Yes when you are asked if you want to save your character.

More questions about the toolset can be asked in the toolset forum. Good luck!

sj_tilemagic_i 2.0
The prison scene is now vfx #511 in 1.63.

Cloth Styles

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Anyone have an explaination for that...I suspect that this is a bug or am I missing something.
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Latter. Certain cloth styles override the skeletal arm

Improved Expertise and Spell Casting; an exploit?
I put a scripting level fix for this into one of the previous patches. If you feel overly aggressive I suggest to check x2_pc_craft.nss (or x2_pc_umd.nss) and add a ClearAllActions(TRUE) to the code that handles expertise, which will result in the player becoming flatfooted if he tries to cast spells while the ability is activated.

Improved Expertise and Spell Casting; an exploit?
It's an exploit yes. Expertise is geared toward melee combatants, not spellcasters.