Cheating With Dm's Part 2

Ok, my last question was about DM's cheating by giving to much exp and equipment, the answer seemed right, but now I have another question. If you gain to much equipment in the time you played then some is taken away, but what if you only gain one piece of equipment, that would be ok. But what would happen if the DM gave the player a custom weapon that is magical and its special abilities were beyond normal. How would this happening be stopped?

Apparently the way they intend to work out the "value" of items to the vault is by adapting the PnP formula for calculating the cost of creating an item. If the item gives large stat increases, it will have a high cost which is likely to exceed the limit the vault works out for the session, so the vault will probably not allow it.

The above poster is correct.

The vault will check your character's wealth against both his level and the time spent away form the vault. If you exceed what is deemed reasonable, you will be prompted to relinquish your extra goods or modifications before you can save your character to the vault. You can opt to save your character locally, however.

There will be 3 types of characters in NWN.

Local characters are stored in your hardrive. Don't expect to play with these excpet in single player mode or campaign created by your (very trusting) friends, and perhaps some fre-for-all servers. This shcratcers can easily be modified by anyone using the NWN toolset.

Vault characters will be more safe in the sence that although they are not cheat proof, they serve a purpose for DM's. How? The vault guarantees that any one particular character will abide by some preset standards in that a 5th level character will not be carrying a sword +5 of mage slaying. So lets say your a DM and you painstikly create a very involved adventure geared towards 5-6th level characters. By accepting vault characters you can be sure that they will be 5th and 6th level in power and wealth.

Server side characters are stored on the server you play in. These are unhackable characters. They are kept safe on the server and only the server DM's and you will have acces to it (although you cannot modify it, the DM;s certainly can). This is excellent for some persistent worlds, as well as small DM and player parties (the typical PnP session type of game).

And what happens if you decide to keep that +5 sword of mage slaying? Are you saying the character will be totally removed from the vault? Or are you saying that the character will stay at whatever level they were at in the vault as well as having a character stored locally. To me, this would be fair. Otherwise that or you are saying that because I want to keep the new item, I have to destroy my character in the vault, that's a lot to ask. It's already been stated that if a character is not in the vault, the character is considered tainted, so what would it matter if the character were saved locally? Wouldn't the game know whether or not a character came from the vault? Couldn't the option be to just give up those XP's or whatnot for that one game where the item is received? It's not the player's fault that they get such a cool item.

When you take your character out of the vault, it logs it. When you bring your character back after a session it will know how long you've been adventuring and calculate the amount of experience, items etc. it expects you to have. If you have more XP or whatever you will be given the option to lose however much over the limit you had or to keep your character as it is but have them unvaulted.

You are all talking about vaulted charactors and what a good idea it is, yes the charactor will be saved on the server that runs the game, but as fra as I have understod Interplay is NOT going to create a deticated NWN server, which means that the only way you can log on to a game is if you know the IP of the gameserver. so in local games you don't really need it. The are of cause project like The Ironworks's Undermountain project where it could be very usefull but for the most part well!!! I dont really see what its usefullnes is!

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Khelben

[This message has been edited by Khelben (edited 03-07-2001).]

[Kinthalis]

Actually Bioware is hosting the Vault itself. Characters form the Official Vault will be stored in a Bioware run Server.

No game will take place on this server, but characters will be saved to and signed out from this server (atleast official vaulted characters will).

Ofcourse there will be other ways to save your character depending on what type of server you play. Some will require you to use characters stored on their own servers, for example.

Also, Bioware will be hosting a matching service, similar to Battle.net.

[Balgin]

That sounds better since I have one of those annoying, fluctauting IP adress that changes every time I go online so I can't come off, ring a friend and tell him and then reconnect. A stable matching service will cheer me up no end.