Greyhawk Interview at RPG Codex

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

Tim Cain from Troika answers more questions about Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemtental Evil. Here's a few of them:

You've said you felt nostalgic over the Greyhawk setting. Is this the only reason you picked it over, less conventional D&D settings like Dark Sun or Planescape?

When the opportunity to do D&D 3E came up, I sat down with my entire collection (100+) of modules and tried to decide which one I wanted to do. The module had to be one I enjoyed playing (of course), but it also had to be big enough to feel "epic". Many of the modules that fit the bill were Greyhawk modules, which I had grown up playing with AD&D. The Temple of Elemental Evil became the obvious choice when I noticed the level range began at level 1, while my next favorite, Against the Giants, started much higher. ToEE is a big, fun adventure, more complex than the standard dungeon fare of the time.

Currently, NPC's are AI controlled in combat. There are pros and cons to both methods, if you change it so that the player controls them, what steps will be taken to keep the player from "breaking" the NPCs' personality because they have direct control? Do you think this issue is easier or harder than a decent combat AI?

First, we are only debating letting the player control their NPC followers during combat, so there isn't much of an issue with the NPC "breaking personality". If you force a good NPC to help kill a good creature, he will still leave the group after combat, so it's not a good idea if you are planning any long-term strategy with your NPC followers. No, the biggest problem is how to let the player control the NPC without revealing too much about the NPC's character information. For example, if a multi-classed rogue-fighter joins the group as just a fighter (perhaps planning to rob the party later), how do we prevent the player from seeing the NPC's rogue abilities during combat? It's easy to hide this information if the player doesn't control them, but difficult if we let the player control them and thus select their actions each turn.

Read the whole interview at RPG Codex.