Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum News

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(Originally posted by Gopher)

Here are today's Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Tim Cain, Lead Designer and Project Leader

Quote: Spell Components

Spells that have significant material components (i.e. components with a GP cost specified in the spell) will cost gold to cast. So while you don't need 500 gp diamond to cast Raise Dead, you do need 500gp. For spells like Fireball that need bat guano and sulfur, you don't need anything nor do you need to spend any gold. We just assume you have those components o*n you.
I mean, who doesn't carry bat guano around?

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Quote: Game Art

As far as I know, we are implementing all of our own art. And all concepts and 2d artwork (portraits, interface, etc.) are being done by Chris Glenn. What he is using for reference I'm not sure. But personally I think his stuff is freaking amazing.

Quote: Skin Tones

Currently our engine incurs severe penalties and does not have an easy API for manipulating colors or hues o*n a subset of colors of a texture o*n the fly.

One idea was to have our texture artists redo a bunch of different skin tone textures with all the armors but I don't think this will be feasable within our estimated time frame. I think it is something that we want to add, but probably wont make it for our ship date.
But you never know...

Quote: Using o*ne-Handed Weapons With Two Hands

A little FYI, I think the way o*ne handed weapon attacks are done right now assume that if you have nothing in your other hand that you are using it two handed. We thought and thought and thought (for hours, or maybe minutes, we started playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos after a few minutes) and could not come up with a reason why you'd NOT want to wield a o*ne handed weapon two handed if you have a spare hand (you get 1.5x strength bonus). If you guys can come up with a good reason why we will probably change it.

Quote: More o*n Attack With Two Hands

Currently, it does render you with o*ne hand holding it and Weapon Finesse is o*nly used if the damage it will produce is higher than the damage that not using would produce (IIRC). However, Deflect Arrows does provide an interesting issue.

I think the way it is right now is kinda cheating because you will be switching from 1 handed to 2 handed during the same round (if you were to deflect arrows). I don't know how big of an issue it may be. Perhaps balance and playtesting will show whether or not we should have a option for changing it.

I'll ask Sean if we can add an option to Attack /w Two Hands to the Standard Attack action.

Sean Craig, Core d20 Implementation

Quote: Putting Away Your Weapons When Casting Spells

At some point you have make allowences for how the game is actually played. It would be a pain in the butt if you had to go into your inventory and put away your two handed sword every time your wizard/fighter wanted to cast a spell. So in our game it's assumed you can switch as a free action. We go past that, actually - even if you've got a dagger in each hand you can cast spells. You put your weapons away, cast the spell, and then pull the weapons back out again as a single standard action. This might seem unrealistic but believe me, it's better than the alternative.

Similarly, we're not requiring an empty hand for Weapon Finesse or Deflect Arrows.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic System

Quote: Purchasing Enchanted Items

Dheylin, do you mean enchanting your own weapons/armors? ("buying" enchantments?)
If so, item creation is in. if you meant purchasing already enchanted items, then (as the others have mentioned), most likely high-powered enchantments won't be sold in stores near you. tim could tell you for sure about what kind of magic items are sold by vendors

Quote: Subraces

As for the drow question, I believe the concern is not whether they are too powerful or unbalancing, but the design team does not want to introduce a PC selectable Race that *should* evoke certain types of responses (dialog or otherwise) but won't, given our timeframe.

*ahem*, more succinctly, if we don't time left to properly script/dialog how NPC's should react to a party of Drow waltzing into Hommlet, then that is a strong argument for not including Drow. This is more important to the design team then just throwing in the Drow for their (IMO) awesome bonuses.

I hope that makes sense. in short, no guarantees o*n subraces (either way) ...the subraces that are just a set of modifiers and require little or no extra scripting are more likely to make it in, if any of them do. (i.e. this same argument can be made for the half-dragons, celestials, half-ogres, etc - but something like a Wood Elf would be nice and easy).