146 réponses à ce sujet

[Eguintir Eligard]

I mostly just meant the

Spoiler

Level 10 goblins

[Dann-J]

I mostly just meant the

Spoiler

Level 10 goblins

 

I'm playing through the campaign at the moment, and I was also surprised at how tough those guys were. They were the sort of encounters I'd expect from the hobgoblin prestige classes mentioned in Monster Manual V (duskblades, spellscourges, warsouls, warcasters, etc).

 

One thing I noticed is that their skins had been tinted green. In Forgotten Realms lore they're meant to have orange skin. Hence the name of the goblin rouge berry, so named because children smear its orange juice on their faces to pretent to be goblins.

[Tchos]

The guard who gives you the quest does warn you that those are no ordinary goblins!  Green and unusually tough.

[PJ156]

A little creativity with critters is almost essential given the small resource pool we have. In my next module I think I shall have a yellow version of the goblin and they will be level 20.

 

And they shall all wear cloth head gear and pretend to be Omar Sharif.

 

PJ

[kamal_]

"Soulsworn batiri", or whatever SoZ has in the jungle that are level 15.

[Tchos]

To be fair, I can be a bit pedantic about what the monsters should be able to do, too, since for the sahuagin, kuo-toas, and sea hag I tried to give them all of the abilities and vulnerabilities they're supposed to have as described in the Monster Manuals.  But even the manuals mention things like "for monsters of this type which have levels in player classes..." or something along the lines of "such and such is unusual, but extraordinary monsters exist as much as extraordinary members of civilised races (players) exist."  And there's something unusual going on in that forest.

 

The ogres with levels in player classes were actually taken from a pen & paper module where they were outlined that way.

 

I did consider making them batiri instead of goblins, but I don't think it would have fit story-wise.

[ColorsFade]

From my perspective, this is one of those Mission Impossible scenarios. If you stick to the monster manual 100%, it makes it very difficult to build a story, IMO. Better to change the levels of some creatures, and possibly give them some different abilities, and make it work for the story, than worry about what a monster manual says. 

 

Building these campaigns/mods is difficult and time consuming enough. Kudos to all the builders who persist. I mean, how many hours did you sink into this mod Tchos? This has been a couple years of work. And people play it and are done in a few hours. 

 

We do a hell of a lot of work to give players a few hours of fun :-) Monster accuracy shouldn't be an issue. The bottom line is fun. 

 

I can't wait to play this mod. Hopefully Sunday. Really looking forward to it. The screenshots look great. 

[Tchos]

CF:

It's probably a rhetorical question, because I couldn't really tally up the hours, and didn't log them, but yes, it was quite a few hours over the past couple of years.  There were stretches of time during that period when I couldn't work on it due to other obligations, or when I was just tinkering with scripts, or doing some undirected experimenting, or other unrelated things.

 

Tsongo:

Yes, there is in fact a level 10 barbarian companion with 17 constitution with 160 HP that you can bring to that fight (actually barbarian/frenzied berserker), and a fighter with 18 CON and 150 HP.    And they can kill some of these goblins in 1 hit, though not the nastier ones.

[kamal_]

There used to be a rule that allowed high level fighter types to absolutely mow through weak baddies. It was something like if the level difference between the fighter and the attacker was >x, the fighter got one attack per fighter level, per round. So a level 10 fighter completely surrounded by fifty one hit dice goblins got ten attack or something. It basically shows up in 3.5 as the Cleave line of feats.

[ColorsFade]

Yes Tchos, rhetorical. I didn't mean for you to actually come up with a number. Point being, it's a lot of time for few hours of play. I tend to fall on the side of "appreciate the work the person put into it and don't gripe so much about little details like brown or green goblins"

 

Kamal, Yeah, the cleave feat line can be fun. I liked that very much about ToEE. A straight fighter with a Glaive and the stats to go after Whirlwind could be a lot of fun in a room full of lower level enemies. Unfortunately, in that game, by the game you get to Whirlwind, there were no situations where you could really take advantage of it. That is something I hope to remedy with my campaign. Not so much for fighters, but for spellcasters. There's a lot of great AoE and Cone spells that are just a lot of fun to throw at large groups of lower level creatures. If the player wants to poke each of them, by all means, go that route. But if you want to break out some fun spells, it should provide the opportunity. And of course, if there's enough of them, a big swarm, the player is still at some risk if they get too relaxed about it. 

[Eguintir Eligard]

That attack was called a sweep but it only applied to level ones from how I saw it used. C leave takes its place just fine though

[PJ156]

I have been watching the download and I am heartened to see that the use of both sites is almost exactly the same. Users seem to be split between the two when I though one site or another might be the more used.

 

PJ

[Tchos]

Yes, I've noticed that, too.  I've also been watching.  I interpret a portion, perhaps the bulk of them, to be separate demographics, where people like me and a few of us here who use both sites more or less interchangeably, are the minority.  So perhaps most of the downloads from one location are not necessarily downloads lost from the other location.

 

Unrelated, but I want to mention here that although I appreciate the support, I don't want anyone to think that a piece of work like this is immune to criticism just because it was free and took a lot of time.  I do hold myself to a certain standard of quality, and if something doesn't meet that standard in some places, I want to know about it. 

[Jezla]

Ychos, I've only just started playing, and havene't done much aside from equipping my character, but I have to say the areas are excellent!  Particularly your attention to the lighting, something which many modules lack.  Well done!

[Tchos]

Lighting is very important to me in terms of area design -- something learned early in my 3D dabblings, where originally I thought it was secondary to the texturing.  Be sure to play with point light shadows turned on, if you can!

[Eguintir Eligard]

no shadows, no eguintir

[Dann-J]

I've noticed one amusing bug on the oversea map. If you set sail while under the effects of an Enlarge Person spell (as my grey dwarf party member frequently is), the ship is so large that it fills the entire screen. The advantage is that it only takes a couple of 'steps' to get from the lighthouse to the port.

 

I also had a conversation node demand that I inform Tchos about the fact that it shouldn't be firing. However I don't take orders from conversation nodes. They're not the boss of me!

[Tchos]

That may be why the SoZ overland map removes all effects from the party on entering.  Now I can see a good reason for doing that.

 

Who were you talking to when you got that message?

[Dann-J]

That may be why the SoZ overland map removes all effects from the party on entering.  Now I can see a good reason for doing that.

 

Who were you talking to when you got that message?

 

I was talking to the guys you rescue from a certain cylindrical navigation aid. I also noticed that the two non-chatty NPCs chose to stay behind.

 

I'm not surprised I broke things, as I often didn't do things in the order I was apparently supposed to. I had a tendancy to run away without finishing fights, returning to town, resurrecting, resting and restocking as necessary, then returning to finish off the encounters later. Sometimes much later, after doing other things.

 

I went outside to rest at several points while clearing out the cylindrical navigation aid. During one rest sequence I noticed a huge group of nasties gathered around outside, although at that point they weren't hostile. They allowed us to rest without incident and go back inside. They seemed to notice us the next time we left though. As usual, my fast running cleric / monk / sacred fist grey dwarf party member ended up the sole survivor, and ran for the boat. He's the one who usually had the Enlarge Person effect active.

[kevL]

I'm not surprised I broke things, as I often didn't do things in the order I was apparently supposed to. I had a tendancy to run away without finishing fights, returning to town, resurrecting, resting and restocking as necessary, then returning to finish off the encounters later. Sometimes much later, after doing other things.

reminds me when i destroyed a vampire's coffin, to rid the world of evil. Only to meet it again upstairs, where he said "We'll meet again !"

i guess the designer didn't expect me to take the backroute in ...


/shrug.

[andysks]

reminds me when i destroyed a vampire's coffin, to rid the world of evil. Only to meet it again upstairs, where he said "We'll meet again !"

i guess the designer didn't expect me to take the backroute in ...


/shrug.

This is a common thing. Sometimes I get myself in situations where I find bugs once I follow a different line. A designer cannot simply think "Well, of course he won't kill that guy. Who would?" There's always someone who will... .

[kevL]

This is a common thing. Sometimes I get myself in situations where I find bugs once I follow a different line. A designer cannot simply think "Well, of course he won't kill that guy. Who would?" There's always someone who will... .

 

yepper