A Question about Foundry Created Objects for Players.

owlhat

I am new to the foundry, and the Neverwinter MMO (though not the franchise as I have played NWN and NWN2, as well as being a PnP D&D player for the last two years), having only just started playing two weeks ago, and only just got the foundry open up for me last week. In that time I have already crated an idea for a long Campaign, the story will probably take place over 4-5 quests. This will be a heavily story driven, and role-play, series, with highly ambitious plans to create real consequences for decisions you make and a very dynamic relationship with the main character of the campaign. I'm partly basing my style, or at least trying to, on Bioware games, which if you are not familiar are famous for producing very good RPGs, with really good dynamic relationships with the characters. Because of the inspiration of some of my most favourite games, and as I am a writer (although currently unpublished), I am interested in creating a really good story with several plot twists, but I am also particularly interested in implementing something which I have yet to come across in a Foundry quest/campaign, several fully roman cable characters. I will make sure it is completely optional, I am aware this will not appeal to everyone (in fact in may even be an unpopular idea). However, I have now hit a snag. I have read as much as I can about the Foundry, the FAQ, the manuals by Gillrmn and so on, and I have also played around with the Foundry as much as I can last couple of days (sadly RL is not my friend when it comes to free time), so I think I mostly know what I am doing. However, there are people out there who have been doing this longer, or are just smarter than me when it comes to work round the problems the Foundry throws at us, so any advice will be gratefully received.

Now, as you all know dialogue choices do not carry across maps. This is possibly the biggest flaw of the Foundry, for me and what I want to do anyway, and this is giving me a nightmare. I have decided to try and work around this by using tokens, you would get a different one depending on which dialogue choices you have, and then having it exchanged whenever you have a conversation with the main characters of the quests that moves the relationship in a different direction (and I don't just mean romance, I also want the option to even become enemies, if I can get the game mechanics to work). This system has many flaws, the most major one I can see at the moment is that, and I could be complete stupid here and I hope I am, you can only give items to the PC via the objective, interact with object. If I am wrong, and it is possible to give PC objects a different way, or if you have any suggestions as to how to achieve what I am trying to do in a different way, then I would be very gratefully.

I hope what I was trying to put across made sense, and that I did not bore you with such a long post. Any advice, even advice not pertaining directly to my immediate issue, would be great. I must admit to also being curious if any of you would be interested in a Foundry quest like this. If however no one likes the idea, or it turns out to be impossible to do what I want to do with it, I will probably still make it, but just with my character in mind so I can play it for myself (which sounds incredibly sad but in truth it's no different to what I do with my writing, I write it so that I can read it).

Again thank you for your time (I have a tendency to ramble I’m afraid) and any advice you can give.

thestoryteller01

It is also possible to give the player items during a conversation with an NPC. Gillrmn has is fleshed out in Part 2, page 20.

Readying your first paragraph you kind describe where I find myself atm I have pursued a similar idea about gaining "faction" during a long quest. Most editors use variables to achieve that, depending on the players actions values are added or subtracted to a base value and the current value of a variable is checked p.e. during conversations. As I understand it, the Foundry has no variable system. Which means (for my idea) that every "plus" and every "minus" has to be stored as a unique (token)item in the players inventory.

My solution so far is to create 4 (token)items for each faction where A,B C are adding up to give additional dialog choices in hirachical order with the faction leaders (I got the inspiration from Gillrmn's tutorial 1, page 15 btw) while token D makes the player an enemy so the faction leader either refuses to talk to the player or the guards the player has to pass turn hostile (which has to be done with an earlier check for token D so the "regular" guards despawn and a new (hostile) encounter has allready spawned when the player gets there.

I actually tried to take positive and negative tokens into account in a conversation but the dialogue tree became a gigantic terrible mess very fast. Even my A-D solution described above is giving me headaches because I can not find a reliable mechanics for "redemption" after token D has done its work without creating additional tokens.

kamaliicious

Tokens don't carry across quests either. Anything you give the player is removed at quest end.

thestoryteller01

kamaliicious wrote: »

Tokens don't carry across quests either. Anything you give the player is removed at quest end.

OP is only looking for a solution for several maps within the same quest.

owlhat

Thank you for the help I will have to re-read those sections you mentioned, thanks for pointing them out to me I'm also aware of the fact that nothing carries over from quest to quest, even within campaigns (you would think it would, but maybe that's something they can implement in the future...). However, when I begin work on the next campaign I intend to have a conversation which involves several questions on what happened in the last quest and using those answers to determine what token the PC gets to help determine the rest of the quest. At the moment I would be incredibly grateful if they could let us link conversations across maps, but for the moment I will just have to work around it.

Thanks again thestoryteller01, I really look forward to playing your quest, and if you come up with any shortcuts, or things not to do, PM me, and I will do the same as we seem to be both trying to achieve the same nightmare of a task XD Good luck!

thestoryteller01

@owlhat, I am sure your quest will be the one published first so its rather me looking forward to playtest

owlhat

Then I look forward to your reveiw I'll message you when I'm done, and I will watch out for a message from you so I can reveiw your quest