Article - Tips for Creating Challenging Monsters
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Triad Mage
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written Monday, March 22 2004 02:37
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Article - Tips for Creating Challenging Monsters At some point, you'll get tired of the general types of monsters and want to create something more interesting, more challenging, and more innovative. These are some general tips to make your monsters more difficult without making them boring or repetitive. Depending on the degree to which they're used, they can make any level scenario more challenging and interesting. 1) The basic thing you can do is increase a monster's level, which will greatly increase a monster's damage, health, spell points, and general effectiveness. However, it doesn't do a lot to make them new and interesting. 2) Experiment with melee attacks. Increase the melee stat and strength of a monster and decrease the monster's HP or even the number of sides on the dice for innate melee attacks. A 20d5 attack is much better than a 5d20 attack, and a 20d5 attack is more likely to pierce armor and do damage at higher levels. 3) Increase the effectiveness of spellcaster AI by adjusting spell levels. Using the call 'change_spell_level' you can adjust spell levels to 0, 1, or 3 (two is the default). Setting the spell level to '0' will mean that the monster will never cast that spell, meaning that you can effectively choose which spells a mage or priest will cast, reducing (or eliminating) the amount of castings of woefully ineffective spells. 4) Use disabling special abilities. Disabling special abilities are ones that limit the mobility and effectiveness of the party, like slowing, cursing, webs, paralysis, confusion, et cetera. Paralysis should only be used sparingly, since it will doom a singleton (one-PC party), which many people play with. Still, webs, sleep, and slowing will allow your monster to get extra attacks in, while slowing down the movement of the party, forcing the player to use different tactics. 5) Target a certain type of PC. Using the dumbfounding ray special ability will remove spellcasters from the battle, making the party use melee to beat you. Using an antimagic field will also do it, as will adjusting immunities. Likewise, giving a monster high armor and low immunities will necessitate using spells to attack it. 6) Play around with monster behavior scripts. Stareye wrote a behavior script called 'magekiller', which will make the monster attack the PC with the highest amount of mage or priest skill. Other behavior scripts involve regenerating, hasting, blessing, and other things that monsters shouldn't be able to do but can. Be careful with some of them, though - making a behavior script too powerful will seriously annoy the player. 7) Use the ray special abilities. Rays only take one AP to fire, and they're a good way to put medium-level parties on the defensive. 8) Don't ignore the eight item slots you have! One of the most powerful tools that designers have is the capability to equip our monsters with weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and more. Giant Chiefs in Avernum 3 quaffed an invulnerability potion before every battle. Giving an invulnerability elixir to a warrior-priest will allow him to cast defense priest spells without having to worry about dying for a few turns. Giving a goblin a scroll with Lightning Spray will shock a low-level party. Tweaking items and testing various combinations will ensure that you've got the right balance for your scenario. Still, all of these are only useful if they're used in the right setting. Having an outdoor combat full of heat ray-firing ruby skeletons in a beginner scenario will make anyone but the best players give up in frustration. A more appropriate combat would be a few ghouls (disablers) along with a ruby skeleton or two - slowing the party so that they can't respond to the barrage of fire unless they quickly cast Repel Spirit. As a player, I'd rather face a few interesting monsters used in combination than slogging through tons of the same monster. -- Drakefyre -------------------- "At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool." - Menander ==== Drakefyre's Demesne - Happy Happy Joy Joy Encyclopedia Ermariana - Trapped in the Closet ==== You can take my Mac when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the mouse! Posts: 9436 | Registered: Wednesday, September 19 2001 07:00 |
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Apprentice
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written Monday, March 22 2004 08:23
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Thanks that info will be very helpful :D :D ;) -------------------- Row!!! Posts: 35 | Registered: Thursday, August 21 2003 07:00 |
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Warrior
Member # 126
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written Monday, March 22 2004 10:46
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Would there be any way to tie one monster's effectiveness to another monster? Say you've got this huge, beefed-up magical bodyguard critter that protects a physically frail spellcaster. Would there be any way to suddenly cripple such bodyguard creature(s) if the spellcaster is killed before they are? (the spellcaster is the source of their power- would be explained in plot/dialogue) -------------------- Fly beyond the ocean, over the mountains, past the moon and across the face of the sun, never to come home again. Posts: 161 | Registered: Monday, October 8 2001 07:00 |
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Board Administrator
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written Monday, March 22 2004 13:59
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Excellent article. A few suggestions I would add. Even the strongest creature is weak if it's by itself. The best way to spice up an encounter or make it more challenging is to add friends. If a creature isn't doing enough damage to affect players, increase the strength or melee weapons skill. The damage from innate attacks (like clawing and biting) is increased by melee weapons skill. Finally, an advanced trick. You can give a creature special abilities or defenses by giving it an item. If you don't want the get that item, you can erase it by using the destroy_char_item call in the DEAD_STATE state. (Note there is a bug with this call. You can't use ME for which_char. Get the creature's number using my_number.) -------------------- Official Board Admin spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com Posts: 960 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Board Administrator
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written Monday, March 22 2004 14:01
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"Would there be any way to tie one monster's effectiveness to another monster? Say you've got this huge, beefed-up magical bodyguard critter that protects a physically frail spellcaster. Would there be any way to suddenly cripple such bodyguard creature(s) if the spellcaster is killed before they are? (the spellcaster is the source of their power- would be explained in plot/dialogue)" Absolutely. For an example of this, look at the room with the 10 golems in it in Khoth's fortress in Za-Khazi run. The demon golem heals itself constantly until all of its golems are dead. -------------------- Official Board Admin spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com Posts: 960 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Triad Mage
Member # 7
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written Monday, March 22 2004 14:52
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Another trick would be to make the creature a species that will pick up items on the ground, and lay some scrolls or potions on the ground for when they've exhausted the ones they're carrying. -------------------- "At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool." - Menander ==== Drakefyre's Demesne - Happy Happy Joy Joy Encyclopedia Ermariana - Trapped in the Closet ==== You can take my Mac when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the mouse! Posts: 9436 | Registered: Wednesday, September 19 2001 07:00 |
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Apprentice
Member # 4145
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written Wednesday, March 24 2004 14:17
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"Would there be any way to tie one monster's effectiveness to another monster? Say you've got this huge, beefed-up magical bodyguard critter that protects a physically frail spellcaster. Would there be any way to suddenly cripple such bodyguard creature(s) if the spellcaster is killed before they are? (the spellcaster is the source of their power- would be explained in plot/dialogue)" Yes sure. One idea is to use the "kill_char(...)" [p. 24 in BoA Editor Appendix] script call, in the DEAD_STATE of the scriptfile for the spellcaster. The easisest way is to: 1. open the basicnpc.txt 2. add the line "kill_char( get_memory_cell(4) , 2 , 0 );" below the "beginstate DEAD_STATE" line. 3. save the file as something like "masternpc.txt" (or whatever) in your scenario folder. 4. add the monsters to the world and change the script that is bound to the master (spellcaster) from "Default" to "masternpc" (or what you saved it as, no .txt in the end). 5. change the value of memory cell 4 for the master (spellcaster) to the character id of the slave (bodyguard). Note that this script now may be used for many other monsters and the binding is changed by setting the value of memory cell #4. Have fun! Posts: 1 | Registered: Wednesday, March 24 2004 08:00 |
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Apprentice
Member # 4127
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written Thursday, March 25 2004 08:37
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quote:That can be done with messaging capabilities, but you have to make a script for each. In the DEAD_STATE of the spellcaster, just send a message to the bodyguard, calling a state that drops the bodyguard's stats. Posts: 48 | Registered: Saturday, March 20 2004 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 2984
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written Friday, March 26 2004 08:25
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Is it possible to set an AI for charmed PCs as well? It was really pathetic, when fighting a gang of gremlins, to have this walking tank of a melee fighter get charmed and keep using up candles or looking at the various maps he was carrying - not to mention the annoying waste of time closing the map window that popped up literally dozens of times... If there can be an AI set for various types of characters (maybe checking strength and intelligence to get an idea of what the character does best, and then using the appropriate script), so the PC can fight his/her own party effectively... well it'd just rock. Too bad it's too late to add it if it's not there already. :D -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |