Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

In computer games, nothing gets a player’s adrenalin pumping more than a great boss fight. If a battle can be likened to a multi-course meal, the boss is the pièce de résistance , the culminating moment to which all other minor encounters lead. There is more to designing a memorable boss encounter than giving the boss far more hit points and damage than most other enemies. The encounter should be difficult enough to force players to re-evaluate their strategy and think on what course of action to employ. Below is a list of ways to add spice to your boss fights. Many of the suggestions listed below can be combined with others to create challenging battles. Resistance to Damage Type . The boss may be resistant or invulnerable to specific types of damage. The challenge for the player is to discover what damage type hurts the boss the most and to apply it to the boss without getting killed first. For example, as anybody who has seen The Wolfman movie knows, werewolves can shrug off d...

I haven’t been working much on my 3D models these past several days, having been instructed by Dirtywick to design a puzzle for our module, Shattered Dreams. While trying to come up with a good one, I pondered quite a bit on the difference between good and bad puzzles as well as what principles go into designing different types of puzzles. I’m writing my thoughts here, partly as an aid for other game designers and modders who want to make their own puzzles, but mostly so I can refer to my own notes when the need arises. None of these ideas are written in stone, of course, and I may change or refine my opinions at any time in the future. Please note that the puzzles I’m referring to here are the ones that may be used in adventure or role-playing games. Puzzles to Avoid There are various kinds of puzzles, some of which are so bad that they deserve special mention. The following are the ones that I feel deserve to be in the Puzzles’ Hall of Shame. Mazes . Seriously, mazes are not fun at a...

Good day, hero. The acorns you are holding are magical and may only be planted in a specific grove. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to deliver said acorns to our queen at the Windspear Hills. She will know where to plant the acorns. As always, should you or any member of your party be killed on your way there, we will not recompense you for your carelessness. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. All right, that’s not exactly how my player character received this quest in Baldur’s Gate 2 , but the gist of it is there. The type of quest described here, which is known as the delivery or Fed Ex quest, is a staple in many role-playing games. It is often done poorly, which is probably why players complain when their characters are asked to fill in for the mailman. Another common type of quest is the kill quest, which involves having player characters kill one or more creatures or NPCs. Because a typical role-playing game is already brimming with hostile creat...

This is my fourth and final post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my three previous posts to put this into context. A few years ago, I created a hakpak for NWN1 called the Vampire Hak Pak . Included with the downloadable file was a short demo module entitled “Vampire Kobolds from Outer Space.” I deliberately made the module silly because I didn’t want to waste my better ideas on a mere demo. Nevertheless, the plot follows the basic formula that I outlined in an earlier blog post on story writing. Act 1 . A band of wights attacks everyone in the village where the PC is staying. The PC has to find out where the wights are coming from before more of them return. Act 2 . In a nearby cave, the PC discovers a large group of vampire kobolds from outer space led by Count Alucard, another vampire kobold. The kobolds plan to turn all the villagers into undead creatures and have been creating wights for that purpose. While trying to chase down Count Alucard, the P...

This is the third in a series of posts on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my two previous posts to put this into context. Game designers don’t seem to have much difficulty in coming up with meaningful choices for good-aligned characters. Creating dialog options and story endings for evil PCs, however, has been something of a challenge. Few game designers seem to understand how to come up with evil options that aren’t petty and nonsensical. Because of this apparent lack in designing well-thought-out evil options, I’d like to tip the balance by sharing a few insights on creating them. The first thing to understand is that evil manifests in different ways. Serial killers are not the same as spree killers, and both are completely different from terrorists, even though they all kill large numbers of people. What differentiate “evil” people from each other are their methods and their motives. For example, spree killers don’t go on a rampage for no reason. Over a long peri...

This is my second blog post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my previous post to put this into context. Few Branches Role-playing games from Bioware and Black Isle/Obsidian are noteworthy for allowing players to affect the outcome of the games’ story. Nearly all of the opportunities for directing the flow of the plot are presented through dialog. Most conversation options don’t affect the story, though. If we set aside conversation nodes that deal with gathering information from NPCs, much of what we’re left with are there just for flavor. For example, in the official campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 , PCs may speak with Daeghun bitterly or kindly, but none of these dialog options will affect how the story turns out. They give players the impression that they are role-playing their characters, and a good number of these dialog options may change the PCs’ alignment. Even so, few of them will affect the story in any way. In the OC, how PCs treat their NPC...

Players of the Neverwinter Nights games sometimes complain when the role-playing choices open to their characters are limited. They want their characters to act the way they imagine they would when faced with the situations that the game presents them with. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the options they would have wanted to take are sometimes not available to them. Perhaps the game designers had not thought of making those options available, or maybe they deliberately left them out because these options would have led to certain defeat. It’s also possible that time constraints prevented the creators of the game from implementing them. The question of what story choices to present players with is not a simple one to answer. With the current state of game technology, it is impossible to implement all possible choices that players may want. Nevertheless, this question has to be answered during the design phase of each game or module. This blog post is the first in a series wherein I...

Michele from the Neverwinter Nights Podcast interviewed me regarding a number of things, including my Battle of the Builds module and the new one that I'm currently working on, Faithless. She also gave me a chance to air my views on game design and story writing. Now everyone can hear just how bland my voice is at Episode 57 of the NWN Podcast .

Over the weekend, Corrugath and I annotated the story outline to discuss its areas for improvement. We identified what parts of the story to flesh out and what parts to discard. Our comments, together with those of Melirinda, were color-coded for us to easily spot them from the regular text. We each used different colors, and after a series of exchanges, the text looked like a strange patchwork of tints. All told, it was a very productive virtual discussion. At this point, we have ironed out the main storyline, but there are still a number of side quests and alternative branches that need to be done. Nevertheless, with the material on hand, I decided to create a matrix that identifies which skills may be used in each scene of the story. In this matrix, I blocked out all the skills that players will use on their own as the need arises. These skills are typically the ones that may be used in combat. The skills that I did not block out are the ones for which I need to create situations fo...

Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite On Monday, I rewrote my story outline, deleting entire paragraphs in several instances and writing new ones. I'm not attached to the first draft that I had written, so I had no problem with demolishing parts of my story structure. The most difficult part for me was coming up with non-combat encounters to break the mind-numbing monotony of battling the hordes. There was only so much of it that I could do before I ran out of creative juices. Combat is the easiest type of encounter to put in a game. One simply decides what monsters need to be in each area and where to put the spawn triggers. It's easy to mass produce encounters this way. Trying to come up with role-playing encounters, on the other hand, is difficult because they have to be individually crafted rather than mass produced. Fortunately, Melirinda has been giving me feedback on the outline that I emailed her. She has an excellent sense of what makes for an engaging RPG story and what doesn...

Introduction Welcome to my very first blog. This is an online Designer's Diary that records my efforts to create an ambitious Neverwinter Nights 2 module called "Faithless." This blog may be of interest primarily to other module makers who use NWN2's Electron Toolset. Players who would like to know how my module is progressing without having to peek behind the scenes may prefer to access my post at the NWN2 Modules forum. Faithless: In the Beginning Life is hard in the cold wastelands that border Vaasa and Damara. A major war had been waged there nearly thirty years ago, but many treasure seekers had since picked the area clean of all spoils. Still, with a bounty on the goblinoids that infest the place, an adventurer could do worse than hunt down goblins for five gold pieces per head. Far more sinister things than goblins have started to threaten life at the border, however, so much so that the goblinoids have offered to ally with the Damarans against this new foe....