Monday, November 30, 2009

Going Back to the Beginning.

Having mainly just conversations left to wrap Risen Hero up I had decided to do a play through, mostly just to go through the old companion conversations and maintain the same personalities. I was rather surprised that most of my problems to fix where random descriptions for placeables and creatures of no real importance and a candle that had a flame almost burning off to the side, only like 6 inches from the wick.

Early on in the game the player finds themselves in a kobold's den. You may fight your way through the tunnels and gain all sorts of experience and treasure or one could find a way to confront the chieftain alone and avoid the multiple fights along the obvious route. While doing this play through I realized that a stealth character is really difficult to play. Even the OC sneaking really didn't help against encounters. So I decided that I needed to develope this third route (stealth) through the kobold cave.

I approached this as a trigger based system that would turn on the encounters for hide failures and reward the player for actually hiding so the experience levels should work out fairly close. I need to thank both _knightmare_ and and Lugaid of the Red Stripes for their advice on the making the trigger reset after a certain amount of time.

The idea of the system is the player or companion that enters the trigger must be in stealth mode. The script them cycles through the companions, if they are in stealth mode and within 5 meters of the player they get a chance to help the player. If they succeed either a spot or listen check the DC of the encounter hide is decreased by 1. They character that enters the trigger must make a hide save to avoid the encounter and receive the xp reward.

This script will likely reappear in different areas of the game. The XP rewarded is based on the player's level and number of successful saves in a particular area stored on an ipoint placeable assigned by a local string. I have also included a bonus for the sent feat released with SOZ, it will make it so the player doesn't need to do a spot or listen check.




The script in action

This is the first set of armor the player will find. The second set isn't much better but it is medium armor.