Who should monsters/NPCs talk to? Your opinions please.

Thanks to Blue, an amendment has been made to Lubash. I'd like to get some community feedback on whether it should be implemented elsewhere too (and also whether it's ok to do this for Lubash I guess ).

Ok, in the initial game scripts when you approach an NPC or monster, the closest PC is chosen as the one with whom dialogue starts. Now this presents a problem because it's not always the closest who has the dialogue skills.

Now you can try and rig your party set up and juggle about how your party moves but eventually this will happen to you at least once during the game.

Sometimes this isn't a problem. Talking to Elmo with a character with 5 INT and no dialogue skills doesn't disadvantage your party unfairly. But when you run into Lubash this does become a problem as without dialogue skills, you'll see a one line reply and then he'll try to kick your backside which makes having the right item meaningless.

What the Lubash amendment does is to have it so that if your party leader is within 15 feet Lubash will automatically start talking to him in preference to any other PC. If the party leader is not within 15 feet, Lubash will talk to any PC but if combat should start and the party leader subsequently comes within 20 feet then Lubash will stop fighting on his next turn and commence dialogue with the Party Leader.

Give it a go and you'll see what I mean

This does give a party 2 bites at the cherry. Which may or may not be a good thing. And I'd like to know how the community feels about it being implemented both here and elsewhere (eg the gnoll leader).

For my part, playing PnP meant that should, say, the scout bump into an ogre then it would be quite possible for the charismatic character in the group to come running up and try to stop the fight. All the scout has to do is survive until the cavalry arrive. If the whole group bump into an ogre, then the charismatic character is going to be the one doing the talking.
Which is what I was trying to do with Lubash and which Blue helped me to achieve.

Thoughts please people

 

Sounds okay. Sometimes, the guards would stop & talk even if hostilities have broken out. But there are situations where combatants wouldn't stop fighting & begin a conversation. This might give an unfair advantage to the pc party. It lets them gather their forces & plan an attack rather than having to slug it out with no plan & 1 or 2 members dying or on their way to dying. Obviously, testing is in order; where abuses are more likely, I suggest less talk be the order of things. Lubash is fine for this; being an Ogre, he's not overly bright. However, his orders would include smashing persons not wearing the eye of flame cloaks, regardless of what they said, or who said it. Just something to think about.

 

I can see where you're coming from Spike. I don't think it's suitable for every encounter. But for most (all?) where the NPC/monster is not just going to kill everybody no matter what is said and is also pro-active in initiating dialogue, then I'm not certain how else to resolve it other than staying with a system which is pot-luck and can lead to you never, ever realising that eg Lubash does actually say more than "Lubash smash you".

Can I just check about Lubash - his dialogue says that he wants a password and the cloak which is why he's proactive in starting the dialogue when he sees the cloak. Is this different from the module?

 

Sorry, I rechecked the dialogue. It's a 'sign' and the bluff comes in where the player can bluff Lubash that he doesn't need the sign really, honestly.

 

I like the idea, but is possible to make it a player assigned charachter rather than the party leady? I never make my rogue the party leader, so with this implemented my charismatic charachter would never be able to speak. Would also worked if it just picked the PC with the highest charisma.

Cuchulainn.

 

It is possible to make it the character with the highest charisma, but then who is to say that the character with the highest charisma is going to be the party "face".

It is possible to even check which character has the highest skill level in a certain skill, or even devise a routine that determines which character has the highest cumulative levels in the social skills, but this is still no guarentee that it will be the party "face".

The only way it is possible to let the player decide which character will talk in these situations is to make it the party leader. The player can choose which character they want to be the party leader. Why wouldn't anyone want the party leader to be the party "face"? Since you can control the party formation to make the party leader not be the first person in the marching order, and due to game mechanics the party leader usually ends up in the middle of the party formation on map change, I can't imagine why.

We can do these other things, but they seem to me a needless complication when all the player has to do is change the party roster and formation.

 

i like it myself it would make it easier in the game. i find myself trying to save before each encounter in case they talk to the wrong person.

 

I don't see why it shouldn't be the party leader. If you initiate dialog with a critter and the whole party is selected this is what happens. But in the cases of scripted dialogs in the past there has been no reason to it. In a Pnp game the players would choose which person spoke for the party.

I don't know about across the board but certainly each instance could be evaluated and changed, based on need.

Nice work Zeb, how does it feel to be a modder?

@everyone Zeb deserves a rousing cheer and a pat on the back for all the effort he has been putting in to learning this lately. Another active Modder hooray.

 

Hmmm, fair enough. Just a matter of changing the way I think when I put together my party. We might want to add something to the charachter generation screen to let less experienced players (like me ;-) ) know to always set their "face" as the leftmost player. Could make for a pretty frustrating game otherwise.

Let me add congratulations to Zebedee, :hug: always wonderful to have another modder enter the fold.

Cuchulainn.

 

It might be worthwhile, like CtB said, to check for who has the highest of a certain skill--if you've built your fighter's intimidation up, you may want him/her talking to oolghrist instead of your bard, for example.

otherwise, my quiet 2 cents says "yay!"

 

Just to clarify - if you've already got to the point where you know that eg Oohlgrist can be intimidated and your party leader has no intimidation, you can just run your intimidating fighter ahead and using this script Oohlgrist would still talk to the fighter first. It's what you're having to do now to ensure the same result so no change there. (NB: I don't think Oohlgrist is proactive in any case, at least I don't remember him being so, so this script wouldn't be used on him - proactive = NPC who responds when the group/PC comes within range without the party having to initiate dialogue. So we're talking about encounters like Lubash, the gnoll leader, the watchman outside the temple tower etc etc).

I think it's a horses for courses thing but without assuming some kind of prior knowledge of an NPC/monster I don't think targetting for a specific skill is going to work in very many cases without introducing far more logical loopholes and flaws. The other issue is that there is often many ways to handle a situation and so you're going to be searching for an aggregate of skills which, to me, would indicate the party face in any case.