Back to Work

I finally got in a good solid day of work on the module this weekend, although the pace is still agonizingly slow and I've accepted that there's no way this will be done by the end of the year, as I intended. I spent most of the time working on two specific, complex conversations. Mapping them out as very tricky, as I had to account for a variety of possibilities: the PC could talk to Jocen and agree to find Crissa, or they could talk to Crissa and agree to find Jocen. They could refuse to help Jocen, then later find Crissa and change their mind, and vice versa. This required a lot of juggling of variables to make sure that the right conversation node comes up where it's supposed to. I also had to make sure the right sounds, animations, and alignment shifts were in the right places.

The next step is to figure out how to actually make them follow the PC. I've seen some things on the forum, but I'm finding them too complex to understand. As such, I'll most likely make both of them into henchmen. This has its own set of complexities, but since they aren't "real" henchmen, it should be a lot simpler than it would be if I was creating a real henchman, since I don't have to worry about them leveling up, nor do I have to give them a bunch of conversation options and scripts that a real henchman would have.

I also painted down a bunch of triggers that'll incrementally increase a variable on the PC, and a bunch of encounters that will trigger based on the number of that variable, the idea being that the longer the PC explores the village, the more likely he or she is to run into more monsters. I also did the usual tweaking, including fixing the scene with Crissa so that both hobgoblins taunt her (I forgot to give one the correct script), and also changing it so that Crissa will react appropriately - her script was set to trigger if there were enemies nearby, but since I didn't want the hobgoblins to attack her, I changed her faction to be non-hostle to them, with the result that she didn't see them as enemies and thus didn't react to them.

Finally, I got information on how to disable respawning, so that's one more problem solved. However, I still can't figure out how to set up a user-defined event to make the music change after the hobgoblins are killed. If I can't get clarification on this, I'll probably script the music change in the conversation with Crissa. This isn't ideal, and it irks me that I can't figure out how to make the user-defined event work, but such is life.