When Livonya released her (admittedly spectacular mod) she nerfed the levels on all the recruitable NPCs in the Welcome Wench, under the assumption they made the game too easy. As I'm going through the protos to bring things into rules compliance, there's certainly leftovers from the characters being their previous levels. Extra feats, skillpoints, etc. One of the most notable is Furnock and his thief skills, which are still at their original level, despite him being dropped down to level 1. So my question is, what would you all like me to do with these NPCs?
Restore them to original level please. I really dislike the idea of a level 1 rogue being able to amazingly open Lareth's diary while my level 3 rogue has no chance of being able to do that. It does become silly to have high level NPCs available for free (which is what humble NPCs does) but it's a shame to throw away that part of the game without having another look at workarounds to the NPC looting problems.
I agree. I look at it more from a RP point of view: it is suspiciously unusual for every person in Hommlet looking to join a group of aventurers to be straight out of the rogue's/fighter's/wizard's/ranger's academy with exactly 0 XP and not a single creditable accomplishment under their belts. Quite the opposite would be true, I would think. Nothing against Liv, but every time I see that I suffer the violent suspension-of-disbelief-cold-turkey-withdrawl bends. :blegh: (In her defense, every other aspect of her work helps to keep the bends at bay.)
spugnor seems to be just out of school, and in his gap year decided to do some adventuring, but the others seem to have a back story and have traveled a long way - just think of all the random encounters they would've had (unless they kept dieing and losing all that XP).
Workaround to the Humble NPCs issue: why don't (once the NPCs are set at their new levels, if thats what Kalshane does, which it seems from the poll he will) we introduce a simple script so that NPCs WILL hand over their equipment, but only if they are a goodly level or 2 higher than when they joined. Ie they WON'T give up their gear straight away to total strangers (ie those dodgy players who sign them up just to strip them, then murder / dismiss them) but will give it up for crafting / replacing etc to people they have adventured with long enough to get another level under their belt. The achievement could be done easily (I imagine) with a quick script to switch off the no_drop flag on starting items, the script being accessed by a once-only variation of the "I wanna talk to you about your equipment" dlg line. The "sell stuff as soon as u give it to em" problem would remain, and indeed be exacerbated (they could now sell their starting gear if not equipped - "Ok Elmo lets make that axe +3and shocking... whaddya mean you sold it for a handful of magic beans???") so Liv's "don't sell anything" would also have to be used, and you should only tell em to give up their gear when you are ready to replace it. Good idea, or needless complication?
Agreed. I'm using some of them this time through, and am glad they keep what I issue to them; selling their gear doesn't matter, except as it relates to encumberance. I solved that by crafting belts, though, and now it only affects space.
