NPCs coming and going

[Dinonykos]

Is it possible

1. to allow the player to create Characters,
2. to let NPCs join the party and leave it several times WITHOUT those NPCs appearing in the Training Halls AND
3. to save the stats of the joining and leaving NPCs (so that they still have their experience points and the items that they had before when they join the party for a second or third time)

in the same scenario?
Perhaps I want too much (I guess that this was not possible in UAF...)


Furthermore, if the max. party size is 4 (for example), does the player have to dismiss party members if an NPC joins the party?

[manikus]

Okay-
1, Yes!
2- Yes!
3- Kinda! [img]tongue.gif[/img] Well, maybe soon.

Max party size- in FRUA the max size was 6 for PC's, but was 8 total. I'm guessing that the max setting in DC might not work that way. You should do a little experiment and report back to us and more importantly CocoaSpud.

-manikus

[Dinonykos]

I've at least figured out that the max. party size only plays a role at the beginning of adventuring (as implied by the editor), so NPCs are also added during the game when the max. party size was already reached before. That's nice. So if the max. party size is 6, you can walk around with 7 characters nevertheless and even visit and leave a training hall without dismissing a character. I have not yet tested how many NPCs you are allowed to add...

It's only a little sad that there is no possibility to switch on or of in the editor wether you are allowed to control NPCs during combat. That would be a cool feature!

[manikus]

The way it works in FRUA, and may already in DC (I'm not sure), was if you had a PC paladin that was higher level than the NPC, you cuold control the NPC in combat.
Something more to test.

-manikus

[Dinonykos]

I have decided to allow only pre-generated PCs in my Adventure. To give those PCs more personality, they should give comments or discuss while adventuring.
But certainly they should not say anything when they are dead or heavily injured. So I would need DC to check the hitpoints of a certain character.

E.g.
If PC Jakob is present in party and has more than 10% of his normal hit points, he says: "I like the architecture of this building."

How can I do this?

[manikus]

I don't know if this can be done this way. I know that by using GPDL, one can create any variable, I just don't know how to associate it with a particular PC.

However, if you wanted to have the even occur if a specific race, class or gender were in the party and that character had at least 10% of her hit points, I think that can be done. If there was only one dwarf, you could have an event fire where he said, "The tunnel seems to be sloping down."

How to do this? It's using the Logic Block. (You may need to call on a GPDL function from within the logic block.)

[Dinonykos]

Okay, so if every PC had a different combination of gender, race and/or class, it could be done.

If PC Jakob is a male dwarf and no other male dwarf is member of the party, it would work that way:
If a male dwarf with at least 10% HP is in party, Jakob says: "The Tunnel..."


Mmh... Another Idea:
I do not want to include the possibility to ressurect characters anyway. Perhaps I could let the game end everytime a personal character dies.
Is that possible?
(I can certainly test that myself, but perhaps you or somebody else already know... [img]smile.gif[/img] )

[manikus]

Originally posted by Dinonykos: Mmh... Another Idea: I do not want to include the possibility to ressurect characters anyway. Perhaps I could let the game end everytime a personal character dies. Is that possible? (I can certainly test that myself, but perhaps you or somebody else already know... [img]smile.gif[/img] )

I think the way that DC works is that a character who has hit points from 0 to -9 (maybe -10) they are unconscious and at -10 (or -11) or worse they are dead. This means a couple of things to me:
1. It's kind of silly [img]smile.gif[/img] I personally feel that they should be unconscious at 1 to 3 or 10% or some similar number and be dead at 0. That's the way we always did it in the ol' Pen and Paper games.
2. You can accept this and not provide any spells or healing to ressurect.
3. You can set up a Logic block to check after each time damage is dealt to see what status PC's are in and if they are unconscious due to lack of hitpoints, change their status to dead and not provide any way to resurrect.
OR
4. You could make all of your characters elves, which can't be resurrected. (unfortunately this is hardwired at the moment, so you can't give this attribute to other races).

[Dinonykos]

Thank you very much so far, Manikus!

3. You can set up a Logic block to check after each time damage is dealt to see what status PC's are in and if they are unconscious due to lack of hitpoints, change their status to dead and not provide any way to resurrect.

Isn't a ressurection spell necessary to ressurect a character? Or is it ALWAYS possible to ressurect in a temple?

[manikus]

Okay, I wasn't quite sure about what I had written earlier, so I've spent the last hour or so researching the topic of character status.

Here's what I've found:
Characters that are reduced to 0 to -10 hit points during combat are given status "dying" and at end of combat, they are auto-bandaged, putting them at 0 hitpoints and giving them the staus of "unconscious". Unconscious characters can be healed by spell, effect or rest.
Outside of combat, if a character is reduced below 0 hitpoints, they are given status of "dead" and can only be brought back with a resurrection spell.

To sum up, I was wrong above. But, combat still works the same way- you've got to do more damage than would kill them, to actually kill them.

As for what spells the temple has, that is definable by the designer, so you don't have to give them that spell.