Writing ACR Quests/The Challenge

This guide is written by our own Zelknolf, on the forums.

Firstly, let's remember tooling creatures: [1]

The drunk mercenary that we want the PCs to talk to is a creature, though we don't expect him to fight, so we can be less concerned with the exact precision of all of his stats. As long as he could plausibly be some drunk dude behind an inn (e.g. doesn't cast hellball), we're in good territory. I do want to call out something that doesn't usually matter on drooling bitey monsters, though-- a quest NPC is going to need a conversation on it.

So copy an existing one (this will spare you fussing over stuff like "is this conversation a cutscene?" "do I want to annoy my entire party with that cutscene?" "should I make it a cutscene anyway?" and "should my NPC rapidly blink while narrating?") and rename it to something useful. Then it goes onto the NPC here:

Secondly, I want to reference back to conditions:

[2]

I'm going to assume that you know how to do those from here, so if it's rusty or you didn't quite get the hook to work, head back there, refresh your memory, and send some questions at me if necessary.

That said, let's look back at what we wanted to roll: ◦Knowledge: Nature (DC 11) -- Identify the creature (a 0.25 HD vermin) by its description. ◦Heal (DC 15) -- Identify the wound, determining that it's a monstrous centipede. ◦Survival (DC 15) -- Identify likely candidates based on the tale and the surroundings. ◦Search (DC 15) -- Find a bit of chitin left behind from the scuffle

So we have four skill checks, each one more-or-less prompted by the mercenary's retelling. That being the case, we're going to put our conversation together like this:

In red This is a condition that is almost exactly like the one we set up earlier, but now, we're on quest step 1. We set it to quest step 1 during the conversation with the inn keeper, so we want to set nState on this conversation's acr_quest_progress to 1, so that the PC can only do it after having talked to the inn keeper.

In green These are the nodes where we're going to place the skill checks. Note that they are NPC responses to an action. We want them here, because if they appear on a PC line, then all of the skill checks are rolled before the PC attempts anything, and the player knows what will work before trying.

In blue The action scripts are going on the same nodes as the skill checks. That is telling the system, "If this is what the NPC ends up saying, I want you to do this." -- in this case, set the quest to step 2 (and, if you're doing it because they passed a skill check, give them a little XP cookie).

The new bits of script look like so:

I went and did a naughty thing there, referencing a resource that I didn't introduce to you-- skills.2da is part of the haks, which isn't usually something a builder has to look at. Unfortunately, nSkill has to be an integer, so you have to look up which skill you're going to use here:

[3]

The lines marked with "DEL_" are either skills that OE deleted in the NWN1 to NWN2 transition (like discipline) or skills that ALFA deleted because we split it into its subskills (like perform or lore). The other ones are fair game for you to use, and the number for the skill is right next to the name of the skill on that table. Unfortunately, they are on that list in the order they were added, instead of anything like alphabetical-- but, Ctrl+F is "find" in almost every browser, so you can quickly find the skill you're looking for. -- not to sound too teachery, but probably in your best interest to try to identify which skill check is being rolled in the screenshot.

Also, calling out a second time that I put a number which is not 0 into the nXP of the quest update line. So, in this particular search check, if the PC makes it, they get 10 xp (minus dimrets, of course; if a level 20 comes up to beat up some centipedes, they'll get something more like 1 xp).

Once that's done, we have a quest NPC who we just made and made integral to the quest, so he needs a spawn point just like the centipedes did. Anywhere is fine, but I just put him in a heap behind the inn. Presumably smelling like whatever he was trying to drink a couple hours ago (also, smelling of what he successfully drank).

Bonus Skill Challenge

In our example above, there's a skill-check-looking conversation option. This is the kind that I told you not to use before, because it would roll everything and tell the PC what will work-- but in this case, we have a knowledge check (which is a passive skill-- the PC wouldn't know that they're missing an opportunity if they failed the check), so I've put it inside the conversation, as a way to let PCs who would just "know" this stuff get away from the extra walking.

So to do this, let's reference back to those steps, as we now have two new steps to be concerned with: Step 0: The PC hasn't heard of the job Step 1: The PC has been told to talk to the mercenary Step 2: The PC has talked to the mercenary, and has information to report Step 3: The PC has reported back to the inn keeper with information from the mercenary. Step 4: The PC has found the centipede den Step 5: The PC has reported back and been given the next task in the quest

These two.

Then, what we'll do is put a skill check on the PC conversation option:

If the PC makes this skill check, then the results of the knowledge check appear as the first option to pick. If they fail, they only get an accept/decline to go scouting for a centipede den.

But, also, we need to take an action on that same node:

If the PC has made this check, they know where centipedes lair, and are thus on step 4. But the NPC asks about the next piece, so we also have to take an action if the PC accepts the next part of the quest, to bring us up to centipede butchery.

If the PCs follow the path of the next post, then they will actually get to step 4 by walking up next to the centipede den, and will get to step 5 by bringing that information back and taking the next step.

Trigger Challenges ("Scouting" quests)

Back to the sketch of how the quest is coming together, we've a fairly-straightforward bit of tooling to do to cover the transition between these two steps, should the PC not have fancy knowledge skills (or if, perhaps, the PC had angered the dice gods and rolled a 3.) Step 0: The PC hasn't heard of the job Step 1: The PC has been told to talk to the mercenary Step 2: The PC has talked to the mercenary, and has information to report Step 3: The PC has reported back to the inn keeper with information from the mercenary. Step 4: The PC has found the centipede den Step 5: The PC has reported back and been given the next task in the quest

We provide some standard triggers for the task, so grabbing one of those...

And drawing it around the centipede lair...

Gets us started. Then, upon checking the properties of that trigger, you can get into its local variables.

We're only getting into quest numbers and states here, because all we're asking the PC to do is find a thing. But an interested person might look at the other (currently-empty) variables on this trigger to get an idea of how one does the bounty type challenge (usually "raids" or "assaults" in NPC conversations).

But with that, we make another simple conversation edit to Eldata, just like the one we did for the last turnin, and everyone has a chance to get up to quest state 5.

Clearing / Slaughter Challenges

If you'll recall a little ways back here:

viewtopic.php?f=223&t=51054&start=15#p615704

I mentioned a second action inside of our conversation that I said to not pay attention to. In my infinite sneakiness, I started a second quest in that second line.

This is like starting the arc, which we did here:

viewtopic.php?f=223&t=51054&start=15#p615561

but we're calling this 010_sel_centipede_kill this time, to keep the mass slaughter of centipedes separate from the quest arc. Doing it like this (as two quests, instead of 1) has an advantage: it will mean that we'll be able to re-use the killing of centipedes elsewhere if we want (and we do-- that will show up at the end).

Then, to make this quest work, we need to set on the centipedes that they're appropriate creatures to kill to advance this quest.

The lower state is the quest step that you're on when you want to start having killing things increase the quest step by 1, and the upper state is when you want it to stop. So killing centipedes can bring a character's state of 010_sel_centipede_kill from 1 to 11. It's important to note that you can put the same quest on many different creatures if you want-- the effect, then, is that you need to kill a total of ten things, and that any of the creatures you set these variables on will count as part of it.

Then at the turnin, we need to check both quests in our conversation nodes to make sure that the right options appear at the right time.

And then on completion and accepting the next step, we need to update both quests again.

It's just like we covered here:

viewtopic.php?f=223&t=51054&start=15#p615561

Setting _arc to 6 and _kill to 12.

So our quest looks like so:

• Arc Step 0: The PC hasn't heard of the job
• Arc Step 1: The PC has been told to talk to the mercenary
• Arc Step 2: The PC has talked to the mercenary, and has information to report
• Arc Step 3: The PC has reported back to the inn keeper with information from the mercenary.
• Arc Step 4: The PC has found the centipede den
• Arc Step 5: The PC has reported back and been asked to kill a handful of centipedes to reduce the threat
• Kill Step 1: Has Killed 0 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 2: Has Killed 1 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 3: Has Killed 2 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 4: Has Killed 3 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 5: Has Killed 4 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 6: Has Killed 5 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 7: Has Killed 6 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 8: Has Killed 7 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 9: Has Killed 8 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 10: Has Killed 9 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 11: Has Killed 10 of 10 Centipedes
• Kill Step 12: Has turned in the centipede murder
• Arc Step 6: Eldata tells the PCs that the killing of a few centipedes made everything worse, and asks them to contain the threat.