• Homework: Create a Town

• Create an Area in NWN

GAME CONCEPT AND DESIGN
COSC 320.101_SU09
SUMMER 2009

Creatures

Ah...creatures. NWN has a huge palette of creatures, and you can spend lots of time playing with them. You can either place the creatures directly on the map, or spawn them in with scripting, or both. It all depends on the requirements of your module.

You can't change the appearance of many of the creatures in the palette. This is because they were made to support the official game and must look a certain way (such as Aribeth), or they're just a monster (like beholders), or it would be difficult or impossible to allow for those changes (making every armor fit on an orc.) The creatures that give you the most flexibility are the humoid ones and we'll look at those when we create a custom creature.

Creature Properties

Basic: These should all be pretty obvious to you by now. The two of interest are:

Phenotype: This has no impact on the game other than how the monster looks. There are only two types: Normal and Heavy. There's no "thin" option.

No Interrupt: If you feel that the creature's conversation is so important that it can't be interrupted by another player, click this button.

Statistics: Here you will see the numerical abilities of your creature. Again most of these should be obvious. For your learning games, you probably won't have to do much, so we won't go through all the slots right now. Suffice to say, however, that any changes you make here will reflect in the toughness of the monster elsewhere.

Appearance: This might seem like an exciting screen, but it's not as amazing as you might want it to be. With most monsters you're pretty much stuck with the way they look in the palette...you can't change they way they look. Only the basic racial types such as Dwarf, Elf, Human, and so forth, can be modified. Not only that, but really the only one that gives much play is the head option, although in some instances you can add wings and tails.

You can click the Color... button to change the skin color of your NPC.

None of the changes you make in the Appearance tab affect the abilities or statistics of the NPC.

Note, however, that you can do "no part" for the various parts and have an invisible NPC...which does have its uses. Give your invisible person an Sword of some type and bill him as an "animated sword" and to the player, it'll seem as if he's battling a floating sword rather than an invisible guy holding a sword. Invisible dudes are also handy for finding valid places on the map if you're setting things down at random co-ordinates through scripting. The engine will--grudgingly--allow you to drop items on other items or even in the tree tops (although the players won't be able to get to them!) but it won't let creatures do that. So you

1. Generate your co-ordinates.
2. Drop your invisible person at those co-ordinates and the game will move it to the nearest valid "walkable" location.
3. Then recover the location of the invisible person (because he may well be somewhere else than where you dropped him)
4. Kill the invisible person.
5. Put your placeable where the invisible person used to be.

Classes: Here you can set the alignment of your creature, and add extra classes to him. Suppose you initially generated him as a Fighter, but you'd really like him to be a 5th level fighter and a 3rd level Cleric. You can add and adjust classes here. Be warned, however, that although the engine will do some of the updates (such as giving him the right number of hitpoints) it doesn't do everything. Click the Levelup Wizard button to make sure he's got the right stats for his new levels.

Skills: This lets you adjust various skills for your creature. It probably won't be of any use for your learning mods. But if you create any adventures for "normal" D&D play, you might want to give him certain skills.

Scripts: Here's our buddy the scripts window. Notice that most of these are already pre-written for you by Bioware and you shouldn't have to change them. If you do, however, be sure to make a copy, change the copy, and assign the copy to your creature.

Advanced: This tab should probably be called "Other" as there's nothing really advanced about the options.

• Blueprint resref. There it is.
• Plot. If checked, the NPC cannot be damaged or killed. Generally, it won't turn hostile if a player attacks it. This is for those instances where the game would come to a grinding halt if the NPC were unable to impart information or have its script change game values.
• Leaves Lootable Corpse. Typically, when a monster dies, the body fades away and a "loot bag" of some sort appears in its place (if the creature had any loot). Clicking this will cause the body to stay on the screen and the player can loot the good by clicking on the dead body. Once the inventory is empty, the body will fade away. It is possible to leave the body on the screen even after looting (or if there is no loot to take)...but that requires a bit of scripting.
• No Permanent Death. This is a bit confusing and should probably be called "No Exploding Corpse" or something similar. Here's the idea. In standard D&D play a character can be brought back to life if his friends are able to bring back even a finger of the corpse. However, sometimes, a combat blow will cause so much damage all at once that the NPC explodes in a shower of blood and gristle (it's quite lovely, really). If you do not want an NPC to explode after taking huge damage (say, you want the corpse to be lootable after death), then click the button and he won't explode, he'll just die as normal.
• Immortal. An immortal creature will turn hostile if attacked and can take damage. However, it can never die. Clicking this is handy for cases when you want the creature to surrender at a particular point...but don't want him to accidentally take "explosive" damage. You can also turn this on and off with scripting.
• Faction. Set this to "commoner" and your creature won't attack the player. Although it might be possible for the creature to "go aggro" if the player attacks it. You might also set it to "merchant" as those money-grubbers are usually neutral to all factions except "hostile." The Faction editor is fun to play with but its display window is not very intuitive or expansive. Furthermore, messing with factions--though fun--can have all sorts of unintended side effects. For your learning modules...set it to "commoner" or "merchant" and leave it at that. If you want it to attack the player, then set it to "hostile" but be careful with your placement. If you have NPCs nearby that don't like hostile, then when the creature appears, the NPCs will attack it and your players might not be able to get any whacks in.
• Challenge Rating. The engine computes all the things in the properties sheet and tabulates a challenge rating for the creature and displays it here. If you feel that the rating is too high (or too low) you can adjust it here. The challenge rating is also used to compute how many experience points the player gets for defeating the monster in combat.
• Sound Set. This is the set of sounds the creature will make when clicked on for conversation or when engaged in combat or when executing animations.
• Perception Range. How far away can the creature "see".
• Variables. Here's some default starting variables. You may find that some are already set up for you by Bioware. Various scripts will check the status of these variables and then alter the monster's behaviour accordingly.

Feats: Feats are generally considered to be extrodinary abilities that the monster has above-and-beyond what is considered normal. Normal for "humans" that is. It may well be that every orc has the "wield giant axe" feat...which would seem normal for them...but is not normal for humans. Therefore, they'd all have that feat assigned to them. (BTW: I just made that up by way of explanation.)

There's a lot of feats here, so you might want to scroll through and check them out. There's no limit to the number of feats you can add to a creature...except maybe "more than all of them."

HOWEVER it is worth putting in here in big, bold letters that for learning modules, it's usually a good idea to scroll down and click all three of the Armor Proficiency feats...(heavy), (light), and (medium)...that way the creature can wear the nifty armor you make and give to them. There's nothing more embarrassing than to create cool-looking armor, equip the creature with it, ("My, doesn't it look nice?") then go into the game and see your creature in "naked mode" because he doesn't have the skills required to wear the armor, so the engine took it off of him. Give him all three proficiencies and he can wear whatever you put on his back.

Spells: This is where you set the spells that your creature knows. I'm guessing you don't need this level of depth for your learning games, so I'm not going to go into it. If you really want to learn more about it, print out the .pdf file, eh!?

Special Abilities: These are abilities in addition to any spells or feats you may have given your creature. Again, probably not necessary, so I'm not going to go over it.

Comments: Again, just for you.

Inventory: Just like giving a placeable and inventory, you can give your creature inventory items as well. You can also equip those items and the creature will wear or hold/wield them if he's able to. Note that there's also a Natural Equipment tab for the things that the creature has by virtue of being a creature. Dragons don't wear armor, but they do have dragon hide, which will show up in, the Hide slot of the Natural Equipment tab. Typically, you'll find Claw, Claw, Special, and Hide slots here. If you copy a creature to make your own version the editor may say something along the lines of "This creature has equipment that must also be copied." ...and you probably don't really want to copy it. So you can open him up and delete the Natural Equipment before saving him to the custom palette.

Building Your Own Creature

It's realitively easy to build your own creature, particularly if you're going to do one of the default race types.

1. Click the Paint Creatures button.
2. Click the Custom tab.
3. Right-click anywhere in the palette and select New.
4. A wizard pops up. Step your way through the creation process.
5. In the last screen, select Open Creature Properties and you'll get the properties sheet where you can change the above properties.