Dragonlance Mod: Discussion (part 2) The "Scripted" Living World

Random location for quests/objects is very important, imho. I tend to stick to one or two factions (Advent in SoaSE, Spain in Civ IV, Altarians and Tigran Alliance in Gal Civ II,...) so such randomization is good. No need to be huge but it should be there (random dungeons would be sweet).

One kind of stories that people likes a lot (and with good reason) are alternate worlds. "What if...?" scenarios are just too tempting to ignore because of the potential fun they offer (and replayability). If the mod allows to recreate the canon storyline or to alter it to acomodate to the players' actions (to some degree), that would be awesome.

The "Story Objectives" sound good to me. Surely you will spend lots of time with that part, specially if you want to allow deviations from the canon. Sticking to the canon at first would be logical choice though?

Close. Sticking to Cannon will be a "Possible Logical Outcome", but only one of many if I do it right. Being able to change Cannon by player action during the game is what's important. Like say when Tanis and friends get sent to Istar when they are sucked into the Maelstrom. In game, perhaps the player chooses Not to go through the Maelstrom? At as many places as possible I need to provide the player with the freedoms to change the outcome of the story. In the Mod, if you're playing as a Evil faction, what Fun would the "Game" be if you knew you were fated to Lose No Matter What? No fun at all!!!

Sticking to cannon will be the Primary Logical Outcome if you play one of the Good Factions and do what they did in the books in the same way. "I.E. Go to Pax Tharkas, Find Tablets, Raistlin later Finds Dragon Orb, Tanis finds Hammer Of Khar*whatever*, Makes Dragonlances< etc etc. If you follow the natural progression and do well at it you'll experience the story-line from the books, basically getting to play through the books.

Alternate Endings are a MUST in the Mod or playing as the forces of Takhisis won't be any fun at all.

Note: I didn't feel like spell checking or looking up the names I don't remember exactly. When I do the Mod I will though, no worries.

You and your "Goodness"...*sigh* Doesn't it get old loosing in life all the time?

hehe J/K my friend You gotta admit though, evil is cooler  

In Dragonlance the only "evil" I liked was that of Takishis' Knights, when she went from Chaotic Evil to Legal Evil and started using dark counterparts to Solamnia Knights. Evil saving the day is cool too.

Ahh yes, the Knights of Takhisis. I loved that order. Even though they were "Evil" they still fought with Valor and Honor. Also as we all know, they did save the day at the end of the Chaos Wars.

If the DL Mod proves to be very popular I'll make a sequel that centers on the "Twins Trilogy" and then after that one that follows the events that take place in the Chaos War many years later. What I'll do when the time comes, probably about 2 or 3 months after I release the DL Mod, will be to put up a Poll asking the players if they'd like to see a Sequel. I can even go advertise over at Dragonlance.com. If all them see what I'll be doing I'm POSITIVE that it would boost Elemental's sales, at least by a little. Why? Because the Dragonlance Community is STARVED for Dragonlance games. There hasn't been a "Decent" Dragonlance game in a long, Looooong, time. Hard Core DL Fans will FLOCK to Elemental in Droves.

Do you have any other interesting ideas my friend? How is that random dungeon generator coming along? I would love to use it in the DL Mod, with your permission of course, and of course you'll get Credit as a contributer and maker of the "dungeon system". What do you say? The only extra bit I'd need you to add would be a way for me to randomize where the "Quest Loot" would appear in the dungeon. That the way the players have to actually search the whole dungeon to find the Dragon Orb, or Lance, or the Hammer needed to make the Lances.

Edit Note: It's called "Lawful Evil", not "Legal Evil" .

I have been (still am) busy lately to the point that Elemental games played since beginning of Beta 3 has been just two (and unfinished), so the dungeon generator has been in the fridge for a while*. I wonder if when I get back to it (random dungeon generator is a must!), I'll be able to try to do something using Phyton during Beta 4. In any case, if I end as the creator of such thing (randon dungeon generator), it'd not be just for my personal use. Sharing can be good.

I don't remember any Dragonlance game since... MS-Dos times?

Legal Evil... so what? Spanglish ftw! Lawful Malvado!!

* I have scavenged some free time to try to get some baseline for my mod but that's all serious work related to Elemental.

My friend, if you're making a Rule-Set based on D&D then you need the Actual Alignments used in D&D. These are as follows:

Good Alignments:

Chaotic Good

Lawful Good

Neutral Good

Neutral Alignments:

Neutral Good

True Neutral

Neutral Evil

Evil Alignments:

Lawful Evil

Neutral Evil

Chaotic Evil

If you don't stick with those you'll probably have a lot of annoyed D&D fans on your case about it. If you need help with any D&D source material just let me know and I can dig up all the info you need. There are even some places that give away virtual copies of some of the older handbooks for free, Legally, I might add. Wizards of the Coast is pretty cool like that. They don't mind giving away online copies of old books. But they DO want you to pay for copies of the Newer Ones, either virtual or physical.

Actually, my books are in english*. But the language when playing is not. Therefore, weird situations when naming things happen, so take it just a mistake and not as "Mod feature". Also, how could I annoy more some D&D players than using 4th Edition?

* not those of 4th Ed though

LoL True. Most D&D players (that I know anyway) aren't too fond of the Newer Rule sets having grown up on AD&D 2 and 2.5 .

So ok, back on topic. Anyone have input on things that they would like to see in the DL Mod?

Will the entire mod be scripted, or will there be campaign / random map versions?  Replaying the storyline would definitely be cool, but it would also be cool to just have a randomized 'Dragonlance World' where pretty much anything can happen, like Tanis & Caramon being recruited by the evil factions, or Flint being recruited by gully dwarves (I'm sure he'd love that).

Will healing be rare, as in the original story?  IIRC, the only healing in the entire storyline was the blue crystal staff and followers of... Mishakal, was that her name?  I'm trying not to google this, that'd be cheating.  Man that's going back years, surprised I still remember this stuff.  Actually I'm not, those were great stories, esp. the Legend of the Twins series, where they went time-travelling.  Awesome stuff.

Oh and don't forget the kender!

oh no, cant forget the kender lol.

which brings me to my question whos gonna be the kender sov? (mostly joking) but seriously, how do you plan on handling sovs? will all the companions be sovs? or recruit-able npcs? not sure what you were thinking on that. seems like it would fit for some of them but not all of them. im thinking the golden general (Laurana sp?) should be a sov. as she seemed to be the signifigant military leader of the group though thats debatable. ok, ok i just think shes awsome! still is one of my favorite characters from the books, she showed so much character growth from the beginning to the end. i wonder how youll show this in game as she was just a spoiled runaway to begin with, she certainly shouldnt start with an army of her own or even the ability to recruit one. though i realize there have to be breaks with cannon, i dont mind that. would be kind of cool if there were factions from all though out the time line. (i liked the knights of takhisis too!)

How could I forget Tas? hehe

I do plan on releasing the Map of Krynn as a Stand Alone Map which can be played just like any other game of Elemental, with normal Elemental Rules and Sovereigns or Sovereigns you make which can be randomized. I will release the Map when it's done as a "Sneak Peak" into the full Mod.

When talking about the scripting, only certain timed "Events" will be scripted. The player will be free within the world to do as he or she pleases. If we remember correctly there was a time even in the story where Tanis was with Kitiara and he was technically a member (though reluctantly) of the Blue Dragon Army. If all goes accord to plan the player will be able to align the heros with whomever they want, though that might not be as easily done as said when it comes to being in game.

There won't be "Sovereigns" per say. When you think about it, a "Sovereign" is nothing but a word that Elemental uses for it's "Kings" or powerful "Wizards". The factions will have leaders or kings, while the Companions will be in game as Champions under the players control. They will have to get cities or countries to align with them before they can take control of that cities/countries armies. Or the player can start as one of those cities/countries and Not have direct control over the Companions. At that point the Companions will be scripted to do their own thing and the player will have to either help them (as a good faction) or try to stop them (as a Evil faction). If you go back and read my first post about the DL Mod I did indeed plan on making Laurana a Sov at first, but for now I'm un-decided on the matter.

To answer both of you though, yes, the player will be free to make choices as to what the companions do if they are playing as one (or all) of them.

Since part 1 of this topic has been getting so much interest lately I thought I'd bump part 2. *shameless plug*

Raven X,

Out of curiosity, are you familiar with the old DOS game Dragonlance: War of the Lance.  It was quite an underrated TBS game based upon Dragonlance (obviously).  I often thought that Elemental shared many qualities with that game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Lance_(video_game)

Hello fellow Libra. I find it interesting that we both share the same perspective on this. It probably isn't due to our Librahood, but it was specifically brought up.

As for the OP, I think it's a pretty easy choice to add slightly random elements and have a separate scenario that is completely true to canon, maybe.

That was the first Dragonlance computer game I ever saw. Not too long after that I played a RPG of Dragonlance on the original Nintendo but it wasn't a war game. Honestly, I don't think there's been a real "Good" Dragonlance video game made yet, and I'm hoping to remedy that situation with Elemental. The Dos game there you mention wasn't that bad though out of all of them. There's a lot from that game I'll be using as inspiration as far as game-play mechanics go. In that game though IIRC you couldn't directly control the heroes. You would "assign" them to go on quests and they would have a certain chance of either finding something, like a Dragonlance or a Dragon Orb or one of the Good Dragons, or they'd come back empty handed and then they'd have to rest for a certain amount of time before they could go questing again. That feature Won't be part of the DL Mod. In the Mod the players will be able to use the heroes for what-ever they want, and even split them up to do different things if they wish.

Correct, you would send your hero (or party of heroes) out to quest for items, and eventually the epic items (a la a Dragonlance).  But yeah, my friend and I would hotseat that game for hours, and we had always wished that you could take the heroes on the actual quests.  I figured you had heard of it.  But yeah, other than this, there really hasn't been a good DL strategy game.  The gold box DL games were great, but they were RPG's.  There really hasn't been much of anything since, particularly anything noteworthy.

Anyhow, I'll be keeping an eye out on this.  If I can get decent enough with the toolset, I may offer you a hand.  I am an amateur coder, but I don't know enough about the proprietary information in Elemental to know if I will be worth a damn or not.

Love the Gold Box games.   Also played  WotL for many many hours.  

Even in WotL, even though some things were scripted, you could still FAIL to get allies. Allies hat were traditionally your allies even.  I especially couldn't win it if the AI toasted the elves before I could get them allied.   So yeah I'd be for making the Evil guys/ Takhisis' forces have an advantage at start.  One that could diminish (due to other side's successes and/or their failures ) or increase (due to their own successes and other side's failures) . 

Maybe like implement something where if one side gets x dragonorbs then one color of dragons goes bye-bye. (This is my stab at being specific. Rather than just being a fan and agreeing with everything. ).

What about questing for the gods/goddesses. Yes, there are 2 Major powers.  There's plenty of others right below that.  You do something noteworthy for them, you get nifty items/rewards/bonuses in return.  Some of them can be good/evil only and neutrals up for grabs.  Whomever floats their boat first, etc.

Also I vaguely remember, because my exposure was the Gold Box Games and haven't read the books.  Anyways, they put a whole lot of emphasis on Goldy (Goldmoon) getting access to Clerical magic and making it a big deal.  One thing you could do to make sure only certain ones get these spells would be to make a clerical spellbook.  Maybe make TWO, one for each side.  Commanding undead vs. destroying. etc.  Also, you could control your wizards by making a spellbook for each of the orders. 

Back to the champions again.  I totally believe in them having their own gear just for them too.  I don't want to see padded armor and clubs.   Well padded armor and a hoopak might suit Tas.  Anyways. 

Just throwing out some ideas.  Good luck with the mod. 

I'd recommend leaving this out of the release version of the DL mod. It is an interesting idea, but would be more suitable for a mod mod.

It seems like it has potential to cause gating and other frustrations for the player and comes with some design challenges. I can expand on this if you like, but didn't want to come across as finding the idea (of random quest object placement) objectionable.

It comes down to it's objectives in the stories really, and the specific situation. The goal of the game-play concepts will be to recreate the storyline, while allowing the player freedom within it or to change the outcome. When I say "random quest object placement" I mean for example: When a player enters a dungeon to find a Dragon Orb, while the dungeon would be in the same spot on the world map every time as it should be in the story, as it's a story location, the dragon orb within the dungeon won't be in the same spot within that dungeon. Not that the orb would change places and not be where it's supposed to be within the context of the story.

This avoids the player going "Oh, this dungeon again, I know right where the orb is", and provides re-playability.

I can see where you'd object to random story objective placement, as that wouldn't follow the storyline. I wouldn't like that either

I hope that clears that up more.

Lol.. That bring back memories... I remembered the despair of being the good guys and seeing cities after cities razed..until the companions found the dragonlance!

It would be good if there is a randomizer for the quest to turn out to be a wild goose chase...just for kicks.

Not all quests yield good result.