Writing ACR Quests/The Challenge

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

Firstly, let's remember tooling creatures:

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:

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:

Github Skill link: [1]

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).