Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Arwen)

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager:

Dead Magic areas: As it stands, no, the reason being is that dead magic areas severely curtail the ability of spell casters to actually play the game. When you have only 1 character and that character is a Mage, then dead magic zones are not fun just confusing, annoying and very likely certain death. It is also a large scale technical system that would involve programmer and design work to implement.

Large or huge sized weapons: When a weapon is placed in a creatures hands we size it automatically according to the creature size. If you wanted to make a giant weapon that did more damage you would just put a racial restriction of giant on it and the PC could sell it for gold but not use it.

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Sleeping in the game: 1) Everyone rests independently. Just because you're resting doesn't mean your friend is, too (this makes for a better system in multiplayer).

2) Spells and special abilities do not regenerate over time. The only way to rememorize your spells or regain your abilities is by resting. We may or may not choose to implement a slow regeneration of hit points. This decision will be made as part of our testing and balancing phase.

3) Resting is instantaneous. Resting is something you'll be doing a lot so we don't want it interrupting or slowing down the more enjoyable aspects of your game.

4) Once you have rested, a certain amount of time must pass before you can rest again. The length of this "day" will be determined through testing.

5) After performing a hostile action, you will not be able to rest until a certain 'cool-down' time has passed. This is to keep spellcasters from using two day's worth of spells in a single battle. Again, the length of this 'cool-down' period will be determined through testing.

Resting hasn't gone through formal testing yet so I can't be too specific about it other than saying the basic idea is when you rest your character does an animation of sitting down on the ground and is unavailable for other actions for a short period of time. The exact time spent "resting" is up to balance testing, but it will be quite short.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance Ninja:

Name of the game: "...Neverwinter relies on the supernatural warmth that flows out of the Neverwinter River as it bubbles up through the fire elementals' home beneath Mount Hotenow. If the fire elementals all leave, the river will freeze over, and winter will finally come to Neverwinter."

DS and NWN Compatibility: Oh sure, and while you're at it, you can transfer any monsters form the old "Gold Box" games into NWN. And download skins for your monsters and characters, just like The Sims. And insert any other content, like roller coasters, a lightsaber, and a sniper rifle. heck, why stop there? Why not just turn it around and make THe Sims a D&D game?

Okay, the above was a little extreme. The simple answer is that they're made by two different developers, and we're pretty secretive when it comes to code. We got secret stuff, and they got secret stuff, and never the two shall meet.

Hope that helps.

3rd Edition D&D rules: The best part about 3E for me was the streamlining of combat. No more having to look through charts and tables to calculate THAC0, armor class no longer uses a -10 to +10 system. Now, high rolls are always good. Also, having a character's AC be the target number to-hit is great. This made armor simpler (giving you bonuses to AC instead of setting it at a certain number).

I enjoy the new critical hit rule, where a natural critical roll is considered a threat. A second roll is made. If that second roll would normally hit, then a critical is scored. Different weapons have different critical threat ranges, certain feats will increase threat ranges, and the critical multipliers aren't all x2.

Saving throws are also changed. No more looking up PPDM, RSW, Dragon Breath, Spell, PetPoly scores. Now, there are only three types of saves: Reflex (saves theat require dodging or otherwise evading), Will (magic and other Willpower-based saves), and Fortitude (endurance-based saves).

One thing I didn't like was that magic items lost their mystique, their rarity. now, magic items are treated just like any other piece of special equipment. In my PnP games, magic items are still a rarity, and magic is still a fantastic ability that most people are scared of.

Anyway, that's my two coppers.

David Gaider, Designer:

Shield Guardians: Yes, Shield Guardians are in... and they look very cool, too.

Doppelgangers: No dopplegangers, but yes... you can easily script switching one NPC with another. It's very simple to destroy one NPC and spawn in another at the same point, if you like.

Monster interaction: This is all covered in the faction system.

Say I've got my map all prepared, right. I click the 'Creatures' button and plunk down a group of orcs and a group of giants. The default 'hostile' faction that monsters are given means they are hostile to the PC's and friendly to each other.

I go to the Faction Editor and click on 'Add Faction'. It allows me to name the new faction (I'll call it 'Giants') and to have the option based on a currently-existing faction (I'll base it off 'Hostile'). I'll also make a faction called 'Orcs' the same way.

In the Faction Editor, when I select the 'Giants' faction, it displays a bar graph that shows the relation of the 'Giants' to PC's and the other factions. As easy as pie, I click on the bar over the 'Orcs' faction and drag it down to the hostile level. Now the giants in the game, once set to the 'Giants' faction, will attack both orcs and PC's on sight. This has taken about 5 seconds to do.

I edit the 'Orcs' faction in a similar manner, make sure all the creatures are set to their appropriate faction, give them patrol scripts through the wilderness... and now, when played, the party may very well come upon orcs and giants fighting in the wilderness. If I liked, I could script it so that, say, killing an orc would increase the PC relation to the 'Giants' and decrease their relation to the 'Orcs' (I could even add in the script that a member of said faction must witness the killing to register the faction change). If a faction got raised to the neutral level, you could even engage a member of that faction (which was once an enemy) in dialogue.

The factions are constant throughout the module. If you want the orcs outside the dungeon to react differently from the orcs in the dungeon, you'd have to give them a seperate faction.

Changing creature colors via toolset: Currently, only the PC races can have their colors changed via the toolset. The other creatures would need another skin applied to them.

Halfling feet: The 3rd edition description of halflings (PHB and Monster Manual both) doesn't say anything at all about hairy feet or not wearing shoes. In fact, the pictures of halflings actually show them wearing boots.

Even in the Forgotten Realms sourcebook, it says nothing about halflings having hairy feet. To boot, there are three pictures of the halfling races: Lightfoot, Strongheart and Ghostwise. The Lightfoot and Strongheart both are wearing boots and the Ghostwise, while barefoot, doesn't have any discernible foot hair showing.

Obviously, this isn't intended as a halfling feature anymore in 3rd edition.

You can assume that this is still the case, if you wish. You can make your halflings barefoot in NWN without a problem. There will be no visible hair on the models of the feet, however, unless you go in and change the model (which you are free to do).

Melee and throwing weapons: No, you cannot combine melee weapons and missile/thrown weapons. Two-weapon fighting is for melee weapons only.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

96MB ram: The only change from the previous requirements is a change from 64 to 96 Meg of RAM. All the other requirements are still the same.
We have no information for any server requirements at this time.

Don Moar, Lead Tools Programmer:

Monster interaction: I remember the designers telling me of one of their early experiments with the system.

Basically, they set up two encounters, 1 for halflings and the other for goblins. They put a spawn point for each encounter in the radius of the other so that when one triggers, it would trigger the other. The halflings were part of one faction and the goblins another - they hated each other, of course - but while the goblins hated PCs, the halflings were supposed to like PCs. The idea was to have some reinforcements show up to help the players.

When the player entered the goblin encounter, the goblins started to spawn which caused halflings to spawn. Unfortunately things weren't quite set up properly: the halflings started to fight the player, too. Only once the player died did the halflings and goblins start to fight each other. The halflings won the battle but then, even more surprisingly, they turned on each other until there was only one halfling left standing.

Sophia Smith, Programmer:

Monster interaction: You can create factions for NPC/monsters, and set how they all feel about each other.