Party incentive: challenging & rewarding level based que

[Metavirulent]

I think we all agree that playing in a party is so much more fun than playing alone and is also in the spirit of RPGs. This is also true for us more hack&slash oriented players, not only the true RPGers. That being said, it is also true that - party synergy bonus or not - playing in a party is not the most efficient way to level your character. Reasons are the downtime due to coordination and lack of leadership (à la: where are we going next?) and downtime due to having to run from one mob spot to the next because mobs die so fast.

I think a good idea would be to make quests that are based on your level. The quests shall have the following properties to encourage partying:
- they are not necessarily RP-quests but can be mere really simple hack&slash quests (go there kill that one, go there destroy that killing everybody who tries to prevent you from doing so); hack&slash oriented players will be more than happy with a challenging fight and a good experience reward
- quests are designed for a certain character level (range)
- encounters during a quest shall be really challenging for the level the quest was designed for: solo players on that level would not opt to fight that kind of mob; this way, you need to be in a group to complete the quest; however, the challenge shall not be frustrating: not too much instant death
- PCs who are too high in level for a particular quest shall not be able to enter the quest area: this is to prevent higher level solo chars from camping there due to the harder monsters being present or it prevents higher level chars from leveling a lower level char by completing the quest for him
- completing a quest gives you nice experience based on your character level and the quest level: this is to outweigh the fact that you get less experience for kills in a party in the same time and especially as an incentive to even go there at your level and try to complete it
- quests are redoable: redoable quests means that you don't have to implement hundreds of quests and people will not quickly run out of quests; the level based experience and lock out of too high level chars will ensure that chars don't do the same quests all over again because they found out which one is the most rewarding, similar to the CR system.
- the quest giver shall be real easy to find: having to run around looking for a quest is frustrating
- the quest area shall be easy to find or people will not bother with quests
- the quests shall have a wide variety of possible monsters so scouting gets an issue
- the quests shall be so you can employ different routes to the same quest goal: one spiked with traps or locked doors but easier monsters, one with tougher monsters; this way you can and shall pick your fights and use strategic thinking (stealth char scouts ahead, helps making right decision, etc.); the quest reward ensures that you can do that without feeling that the lack of heads-on-fighting and kills-per-minute will cut into your experience/t rate
- the quests shall encourage the presence of different classes (rogue for picking locks, cleric for healing/resurrection since monsters are hard and you may easily die, fighter for tanking, mages for some damage).

I always felt the biggest thrill when I was in an area I shouldn't be in at my level. The fights were challenging and you needed a strategy to survive, you were looking around the corner and not running heads on into the next fight, the risk of death was imminent and if you were in a group, you were really happy that the other group members were there so you had a chance to make it out alive. Still, I had the odd feeling that if I wanted to level my char, I should've gone somewhere else, to an easier (boring) area and alone. Level based hack&slash quests with the above properties should be able to combine both things: the fun and thrill of facing a challenge and the joy of not wasting your time but doing the right thing to bring your char up a level and become more powerful.

I hope this makes sense to you.
Please give me your thoughts.

[QuickLightning]

IMO a better solution is to make the classes all useful together...chests that hold random (but good) gear only openable by rogues. Walls that must be climbed (by high dex players) to open a door to a fort or something that the party must get through. Buff up animal companions to make em useful in higher levels (I dunno 'bout familiars, mages don't really seem to need them)

Weaken cleric some so he cant go out and solo (I heard a great idea where only a limited ammount of buffs could be on character at a single time, that would not only stop a cleric from soloing so easily, but would also increase their party potential, more buffs to use on their allies .) Monsters increased in strength a bit so soloing would not be an option might also be a good idea.

[Wakboth]

Couple issues here. Not singling you out. Just using your ideas to make my own observations:

IMO a better solution is to make the classes all useful together...chests that hold random (but good) gear only openable by rogues. Walls that must be climbed (by high dex players) to open a door to a fort or something that the party must get through. Buff up animal companions to make em useful in higher levels (I dunno 'bout familiars, mages don't really seem to need them)

I agree completely that we should be encouraging parties of adventureres rather then soloists. But I'd stop short of requiring specific classes (abilities) to be able to progress. That's a sure way to make a mod unenjoyable. In a classic RPG, you'd be more correct, but in that situation, you'd have a DM that could make sure that the dungeon was just the right amount of challenging for the party, and required that they make use of all their talents. In a persistent world, you don't have that luxury, and in NWN in general, the classes are balanced for their ability to defeat monsters. Adding additional "requirements" in your dungeons in NWN will create inbalance rather then remove it.

Weaken cleric some so he cant go out and solo (I heard a great idea where only a limited ammount of buffs could be on character at a single time, that would not only stop a cleric from soloing so easily, but would also increase their party potential, more buffs to use on their allies .) Monsters increased in strength a bit so soloing would not be an option might also be a good idea.

I kinda see the approach, but how does this encourage group play? If I can have only X amount of buffs on me as a cleric, and I can fill that number up all by myself, each person in the group is still limited to X buffs each. That means "fewer" buffs per person, or at best, the exact same number of buffs per person in the group. If we're just adding up people+buffs, I start with 1 person with X buffs. If there are 8 people in the group, we'd need to end up with 8 people, all with X buffs for the group to be exactly 8 times as powerful as the one person alone (which we'd kinda need since exp will be split 8 ways, right?). Odds are, we wont have enough buffs in the group to do that, so while the fighter may have more buffs then he'd have solo, the cleric has fewer. The group is benefiting one class more then the other. In this case, why should the cleric group? He'd be better off by himself.


Yeah. I know that this applies whether you have limited buffs slots or not. Just pointing out that creating a buff limit doesn't help the problem.


For the most part, I think the NS folks have done a pretty good job addressing this. The synergy and party bonuses to exp are good ideas and work reasonably well. The inclusion of groups of "social" mobs in NS works well also. You just can't run around killing one or two mobs at a time in NS4. You generally are dealing with clumps of 5+, which can be hard for a solo player to deal with (forcing them to fight lower level mobs then otherwise). A party gives the players the ability to fight larger numbers of higher level mobs and survive.


The only real problem with parties in NS is the same problem that has always existed in NWN mods. Mobs spawn at a set rate. Heck. Solo, I can clear many zones as fast as the mobs can spawn. In some cases, faster. Exp can be expressed as exp gained over time. Per kill is not as important as the rate of the kills. So while a party does make tackling some high density spots easier, once they area all killed (which happens really fast!), the party is standing around dong nothing. They have to travel to a new area and clear that now. Some places this works, but in many, even with high density, the rate of movement of a group of people and the time spent running from one area to another, means that the overall kill rate often is not high enough to justify the group. Not enough higher to justify doing it for exp purposes alone. Even with the bonuses, you just can't kill enoiugh more mobs in X amount of time to account for the exp division.


You could get around this by making really high density mob areas and very fast respawn rates. But that would kill server performance, and would make those areas deathtraps for anyone not in a group. Presumably, we want to give people the option to choose what they want to do, so a balance works best. Right now, that balance seems to be that groups of 2 or 3 players work well, but anything larger then that should only be formed if you need that many to accomplish your goal (hitting a really tough area for loot not exp). Personally, I haven't had too much trouble with the balance. You can't always assume you can get people to join a group, so the ability to solo to some extent must be there. I think they've got it about right.

[rkanodia]

About summons, I was actually going to suggest that they be made weaker, not stronger... perhaps at epic levels they are too weak; I haven't quite made it to level 21 yet. But what I can say is that, having played a pure caster and now a druid/shifter (shifters are weak pre-epic, so I'm currently pretending to be a druid and getting by with 5th level spells at level 18 ) I think that summons - if you have full caster level - are simply far too strong and largely eliminate the need for casters to party.

Let me put it this way: my druid/shifter has 3 flame strikes and 4 call lightnings memorized at any given time. If I can get someone to hold the mobs in place, I can inflict quite a bit of ownage in 42 seconds, despite my status as a split caster. If I can't, I'm in trouble. For that character, partying isn't a waste of time. It's more or less a necessity if I want decent experience. Soloing means resting, resummoning (my 5th-level summon which goes down quick even with stoneskin), and rebuffing after pretty much every battle, assuming it doesn't end with me fleeing from a pack of Tree Smashers or Spirit Stealers. The whole rest-summon-buff process takes about 90 seconds, and I've got to do it whether I killed five monsters or one, since either way uses up all of my blasting magic. Partying means all I have to do is rest and maybe cast a spell or two after every big battle - for small ones, (1-2 mobs), I just join the fight as a kobold commando and help the tank kill stuff. Also, if there are a few tanks/high level summons to hide behind, I can shift into wyrmling form (solo this is suicide, as my buffed AC for wyrmling for is 22 BEFORE shifter bug kicks in) and unload fiery death every round once my druid magic is expended. Thus, in a party, I can avoid resting after solo mobs, and generally don't have to do as much buffing after big fights, keeping my downtime very low. I gain experience at least twice as fast in a party with 1-2 other players as I do solo, yet no one has ever complained that I don't pull my weight in the group.

For my pure cleric, a summoned monster with stoneskin (magic domain) and an elemental resist buff seems like it's practically immortal. Even if he weren't an uber melee warrior (which he is, since buffed clerics are gods at toe-to-toe, but that's a separate issue), he could (and often does, versus big crowds) sit behind his summon forever casting spells,. On solo mobs, I just fire my bow (Zen Archery, tho there's no reason I couldn't go toe-to-toe with them) and avoid resting. I don't really need other party members. I party with them because I enjoy playing with them, but honestly, it's not really helpful for my exp. If I didn't have a summoned monster, this would be fairly different: I'd have to spend a lot more time in melee against crowds of mobs, and that's slower than killing them from a distance with magic.

As far as the buffing issue goes, I think the problem could be better solved by simply reducing the number of redundant - yet stacking - buffs that clerics have. For instance, as far as offensive buffs go, clerics get (in level order):
Bless
Divine Favor
Bull's Strength
Prayer
Darkfire
Divine Power
Greater Magic Weapon

there are others, but these are the low-level ones, which thus don't occupy any high-level blasting slots. It's not uncommon for a cleric to be going around with most of those spells going at any given time. Defensively, they get
Shield of Faith
Protection from Alignment
Greater Magic Vestment
Death Ward
Spell Resistance
Negative Energy Protection
various elemental resist buffs

and more. That doesn't even factor in domain spells like Stoneskin. In pen-and-paper, these spells are all balanced a combination of relatively long rest times, as compared to the spell durations. In Neverwinter Nights, that's just not happening, so I think it's hardly unfair to reduce the number of spells that have similar functions but all work at the same time.

edit: corrected a smileyzation that I didn't want

[AndrewCarr]

I think i have a reasonable solution to the lack of mobs.

In the Ultima Online-influenced NWN module i played awhile back there was a nice script that spawned varying difficulties and numbers of mobs in areas. For example, a common place for starting lvls to gain lvls was at the graveyard, just north of the starting town. At lvl1 i got owned there because i was an archer, and unfortunately bought a rapier right away instead of say a club :/ and this didn't help when everything was a mob of skeletons.

But, besides that stupidity of mine, i liked this area, and others, because as more players got into the area, more mobs would spawn, and as they were higher lvl, higher lvl mobs would spawn, where skeletons would lead to some zombies, then some zombie warriors, then ghouls, ghasts, and stuff like that. All that way up actually to vampire mages and rogues, which were pretty heinous for a lvl1 to accidently wander into(there were also many crypts, which housed slightly higher lvl mobs, say skeleton mages to a lich and two skeletal devs).

But anyway, this area was amazing. I actually lvl'd there from about 1-16 or so, and did so in a group a lot of the time, because it meant a similar amount of mob killing, but just with more intense action because it was on a larger scale. So making Neversummer's areas like this would be a good start i'd think, but capping them out would also be a good idea. I mean, i liked walking thru the graveyard and spawning vampires and stuff like that, which let me get better xp and loot(which was also scaled up), but i did hear several complaints from newbies about this, and even if sometimes i tried to visit the graveyard later to help out newbs who'd been slaughtered(b/c a lvl20 simply passing thru could affect the next wave), me walking thru would then again mess up the next spawn, until it was killed, and this hurt low lvls.

So this would be a pretty good way i think of scaling areas, keeping things interesting, but still letting there be lvl caps on certain areas. Also, having mixed spawns up, so maybe there'd be one vamp mage, and a few in between mobs, with their regular group of skeletons, zombies, and ghouls, would be a good way to stagger the rise up from say ghoul lords to multiple vampires. This could keep things interesting for higher lvls who happen to be visiting, but it could also keep them from spawning pure high lvl things by passing thru.