Animal "Loot" Drops

[ç i p h é r]

Figured I'd start a thread here to discuss a suitable implementation that would work with the loot scripts. I think it would be easiest to simply place the appropriate items in animal inventories (wolf pelts, venison, hides, beetle bellies, etc), and nothing else, so they are automatically associated with the right creatures. I can adjust the loot scripts to drop items in animal inventories as well ~25% of the time. We'd need to make sure nothing "unusual" winds up in there though.

Thoughts?

Also, will these items generally have value > 0gp?

[Wynna]

Pardon my thickness, but if we put them in inventory, why would we need a 25% loot table drop? Unless you're talking about other items? *imagines a wolf dropping a nice dagger and a CLW

I think having meat and hide and horns and such is great. Can we make them worth <1? Maybe takes 5 hides to make a gp? Just asking. Don't look at me like that!

[darrenhfx]

I think this would be a great feature for out woodsy types. It woudl be nice to have the chance of getting a pelt higher based on the skill of the hunter... but I won't push my luck.

[Rusty]

A proper hunting system is a rather different beast (heh) to a simple creature loot-drop system. There have been one or two implementations tested in ALFA over the years (iirc, Lasu's last attempt was around on BG up until it closed), altho' nothing was every rolled out across the board. Simply adding loot eqv. items to creature inventories is a far cry from a system that involves actual hunting; tracking, MS, hide, fleeing AI, etc. It just becomes a "kill all the animals, get 12 gp exercise". Risk-free constantly/repeatedly available GP rapidly becomes a problem, as we saw in NWN1.

An actual hunting system involving skill, risk, and time - A Good Thing. Walking up to a deer and butchering it with a Battleaxe, thus magically obtaining 'pelt, 10gp' - A Bad Thing.

[Rick7475]

On Daggerford hunting was extremely successful.

When you hunt animals, you can get skins.

However, instead of always the same skin, you can have several types.

For example, if you kill a wolf, its pelt can be poor (basically unsellable) fair (worth a little bit), good (worth more) and excellent (worth a good price).

That way, the hunters have a chance at making some good money, but often need to hunt quite a bit.

Also, adding in rare beasts sparked interest. On Daggerford, we had an albino deer whose skin was worth a lot of gold (however, like above, the skin could be poor, fair, good, execellent) The Albino deer was a rare spawn and although even the poor skin was worth good gold, getting an excellent skin was a real prize.

I can implement this.

[Rusty]

The problem is that this isn't really hunting: it's just killing stuff for loot, and no different from [hostile critter] farming, except that there is a feeling of more IC justification. A genuine hunting system - as opposed to simply having a different type of creature to farm - needs to go beyond the basic see/kill/loot dynamic to be worth implementing, e.g. the 'tracks' generated by the BG implementatio. One of the significant benefits of the desired population system would be allowing a properly responsive hunting system to operate. Hiding the pay-off simply creates a situation in which more slaughter is justified.

Any implementation would probably want to make use of appropriately AId creatures that flee from hunters if they spot them (meaning that the full plate option is no longer valid), as well as Survival (and Track) skill references.

[darrenhfx]

Would we be able to track hunting of this sort on the log?

If we make a range of drop types available with the more valuable ones occuring less fequently and in more dangerous areas... you could also make the hides and meat weigh an amount that would make it very difficult to farm animals in any great number. Amazing what dragging a 100+lb carcass will do your desire to run though the woods looking for more.

[Rusty]

A basic method might be scatted triggers in wilderness areas; survival check rolled, DC 15, say; if passed, [deer] will spawn just outside of visual range, possible message to PC about noticing deer tracks; if failed, no spawn; [deer] would also spawn in stealth; could up DCs with different [deer].

Worth noting the prices for Wealth Other Than Coins, e.g. a whole pig costs 3 gp.

This is probably better off being discussed in a broader venue; any objection to so moving it?

[darrenhfx]

Sure go ahead and open it up.

[Rusty]

Moved for a broader discussion.

[bartleby]

I think the Moonshaes has a scripting system that pits hunter move silently and hide against deer move silently and hide if the hunter beats the deers MS and hide he can see him and has a chance at a shot or two if the deer notices the hunter either becasue the hunter shoots at him or he beats his MS or hide he bolts and the hunter gets i think 1 to 2 rounds untill the deer runs away and disapears the deer has very low hp so most of the time a one hit will kill. I havent looked at the system in a while but if anyone would like the scripts to work on theyre welcome to them.

[Brokenbone]

Scattering invisible skillcheck triggers around a woodsy area, as Rusty mentioned 4 posts above, is a possibly nice way to simulate hunting.

Stomp a trigger, hidden roll takes place, if you hit the DC, a nearby waypoint causes a game animal to spawn, possibly in stealth mode so as not to shock the player (i.e., they still have to spot / listen for it, as opposed to it popping up in their face). If you don't hit the DC, nothing happens. Look at the tried & true NWN1 Old Man Whistler skillcheck scripts for a starting point (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Sc ... ail&id=441), though you'd need to port over to NWN2 and add some more than just popup text of "You think game animals may be nearby", i.e., some kind of spawn related scripting would need stuffing in.

Since we don't have a dimrets system, might want to artificially set huntable game animals at CR0, so the XP coming off them is minimal.

***

As to a separate point of <1gp type "bits and pieces" of animals (could be food, could be hides, could be exotic spell components), NPCs who are not shopkeepers could always be agreeing to pay "Xgp for every Y sets of antlers ye bring me!", or more scary, "XXXgp if ye bring me the tentacles of a displacer beastie!" That is, treat it like any other sort of static, where you need to give multiple items to get a reward. Tanner NPCs, butcher NPCs, mage guild NPCs, whatever.

[Avaz]

I think having some sort of background system in place for hunting would be absolutely spectacular! I would also like to take it a step further (as a tangent of what was said before) like so:

Once the hunting system hits and the game is killed, skinning it should be an option, wherein a survival skill check should be made against several tiers of arbitrary DCs, and if it passes a certain DC, the pelt(or whatever) becomes a higher quality.

Kill deer and attempt to skin it against DC 5 = tattered pelt
DC 10 = fair quality pelt
DC 15 = good quality pelt
DC 20+ = excellent quality pelt


..Or something to that effect. Would this be at all doable - considering how killed critters vanish after a few seconds?

[Brokenbone]

I guess in the vein Avaz is suggesting, a generic pelt object could be dropped, with a Unique Power Self Only, Single Use. Use the unique power (which in the background is running a skill check or something vs. a table of various DCs), which destroys the generic pelt object and replaces it with a ruined/poor/medium/good/amazing/omg pelt, in the "user's" inventory.

If one's smart, they might give the generic pelt to a skilled ranger or something who has the best chance of working with it for a good result. I.e., reward teamwork.

...

I guess a different way to go about it could be to just randomly spawn a pelt of varying qualities on death. Going to show you the "OnDeath" event of some rocks I had in an NWN1 Daggerdale mine, for cheap uncut emeralds. The local hobgoblin miners and associated seemed never to get any PC visitors, despite my trying to lure some a long while, oh well. I guess you'd replace "flecks to OMG size stone" with "terrible to OMG quality pelt." I guess you could also get how many Survival ranks a killer had and jack up the d20 rolls you'll see below, accordingly, or otherwise fuss with the probabilities.

Code: Select all

/*   Script generated by
Lilac Soul's NWN Script Generator, v. 2.3

For download info, please visit:
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Other.Detail&id=4683&id=625    */

//Put this script OnDeath
void main()
{
object oPC = GetLastKiller();
while (GetIsObjectValid(GetMaster(oPC)))
   {
   oPC=GetMaster(oPC);
   }
if (!GetIsPC(oPC)) return;
                {
                int iGems = d20(1);
                if(iGems <= 10)
                {
                    FloatingTextStringOnCreature("*sorting through the rubble, mildly valuable bits of emerald are revealed*", oPC);
                    CreateItemOnObject("alfa_gem_123", oPC); //creates "Uncut Emerald Flecks"
                }
                else if(10 < iGems <= 15)
                {
                    FloatingTextStringOnCreature("*sorting through the rubble, a small specimen of emerald is revealed*", oPC);
                    CreateItemOnObject("alfa_gem_026", oPC); //creates "Small Uncut Emerald"

                }
                else if(15 < iGems <= 19)
                {
                   FloatingTextStringOnCreature("*sorting through the rubble, a respectable specimen of emerald is revealed*", oPC);
                    CreateItemOnObject("alfa_gem_121", oPC); //creates "Medium Uncut Emerald"

                }
                else if(19 < iGems <= 20)
                {
                   FloatingTextStringOnCreature("*sorting through the rubble, an impressively large specimen of emerald is revealed*", oPC);
                   CreateItemOnObject("alfa_gem_124", oPC); //creates "Large Uncut Emerald"
                }
 }
 }

Note I have no idea how inefficient / laggy OnDeath scripts can be. It's just ONE sample implementation, it's a brainstorming forum after all, may be a trash idea, ha ha.

[Mayhem]

I would like to see a lot of this type of thing, done with skill-checks (the survival skill, specifically) so that only somebody who spends time learning about the wilderness can get a good pay-off from hunting/foraging.

This applies equally to "go find me a dozen berries" as it does to hunting.