A Land Far Away

I love character customisation. And NWN2 is..limited in some respects.

So what would I like for my character.


1) He's cursed with colour inversion and i want his skin to be black...and i mean pitch black (selectable by tieflings and drow?) rather than hunman 'black' (human option). Why? becasue it's what it should be...well it SHOULD be a bit blue/black given you dont have pure white skin, but people mistake him for desert people using the current pallette which is inconsistent wiht the cannon description of the curse.

Note: Can this be done through leto? DM changes?

At some piont i HPOE to have the curse lifted and his colouration shange back to normal skin etc.

2) He's a towering northman, tall even for the uthgardt. I want him to be taller than the sliding scale at character selection..justa little bit. Why? Because server builders have made these uthgardt NPCs/spawns taller than the sliding scale. Why have they done this? I'd say becasue offical 'lore' states that the tribesmen are huge/taller people.

Why do i want a special change? Because many people have their chars at the top of the sliding scale already and even if not the difference in height is not discernable undermining the char desciption and background, whereas when you're on TSM server and see the uthgard NPCs you're like 'wow they're big just like in the stories' and my chars supposed to be tall...even for them.

Note: Can this be done thorugh leto? DM changes?


Now i'd like the above to be allowed because: it can be done, there's no mechanic benefit, the basis for the changes are reasonable, and people know (I hope) that i'm not some wierd nutbag who's going to act like a tool becasue he's PCs got some customisation.

But i know there will be the arguments of 'opening the floodgates'.

So, as part of brainstorming, and to hopefully have people spend 3 seconds thinking before they say 'NO!' anyway ...i offer:

a) The above could be considered extraordinary as per several other things and/or
b) The above could be paid for in char exp for the priviledge and the RP enjoyment

Thoughts?

Sounds like a good motivation to build a tool for DMs to use on PCs wanting extra customization - pending extraordinary approval? Make it and give everyone a chance to use it, and then you using it is only very fair.

Taken further the tool might even provide chances for disguises and such.

Everyone wants their PC to be special in some way and the most common way of achieving that is through appearance. I like that the NWN2 appearance set is limited to the loosely mundane (with one or two edge cases); it helps to keep things believable.

If a tool existed that allowed DMs to quickly and easily edit an appearance then that might be okay, but I do fear that a freely available one just may end up ushering in the neon freak show. However, this will introduce a bias: some people don’t have access to a DM who is prepared to sit down with that player for ~30 minutes whilst incremental changes are made until the player is satisfied. (I don't know about others but I can burn up hours faffing around with appearance changes until I'm happy, but such time expenditure simply wouldn't be practical when there's a DM involved.)

Generally speaking, I support the position that character concepts should keep what’s commonly representable in mind. Can’t have an avatar with a badger’s head? Don’t play a character with a badger’s head.

You know dorn, you could have just dropped the Universal Colours Override in, and made him pitch black with red eyes when he was created.

ElCadaver wrote:You know dorn, you could have just dropped the Universal Colours Override in, and made him pitch black with red eyes when he was created.

Is that this thing: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=nw ... tail&id=43

Q. Does this work in multiplayer/PW sessions? Do my peers/server need to install this package on their end?
A. The modified color palettes will only appear on the client with the package installed, but color information on your character will appear correctly for all other players even if they do not have United Colors installed. So, yes this works in multiplayer/PW sessions. And no, your peers/server do not need to install United Colors if they do not want to.
....

Ugh. Paging TA! Typically overrides of this sort are discouraged, aren't they? Maybe past discussion of overrides at char creation have only been for the "cheaty" stats enhancing or race adjusting or whatever type of thing, based on NWN1 experience... not "aesthetic", but they might all be in the same discouraged type bucket.

As far as I know, there is a flag availaible on the server that disallows all client side overrides. I was under the impression we are using it.

I don't know what happens if you actually go poking to the core installation of your client, ie. instead of using the override folder you actually replace the original files of your nwn2 client with your overrides.

Certainly should not be allowed as it obviously undermines our joint gaming if every player involved doesn't see the same thing on their engine. To lead the game as a DM I need to be sure my players see the same thing on their screens as I see on mine.

Make such customization require "extraordinary PC" approval and I have no problem with it. But Dorn I hope you are prepared to pay 20% extra for all clothing and armor due to your toon's XXXL size

My pc needs a badger head so I can RP him effectively.

I-KP wrote: If a tool existed that allowed DMs to quickly and easily edit an appearance then that might be okay, but I do fear that a freely available one just may end up ushering in the neon freak show.

Well on a general level I agree, but on the other hand extraordinary characters are pretty much that neon circus already, and that's why it comes with DM oversight. The level of high/low fantasy clearly varies within ALFA, with different DMs, players and perhaps even servers. In my view if players start to focus on their PCs navels with extreme visual tweaks it primarily says "DMage fail". They just don't have enough interesting content if that's what captures their central attention.

Further if the DMs play a game where non-neon-freakshow PCs take central stage, we can expect PC freakiness to remain a fringe phenomenon. And if DMs want to play on the neon show side (aka. high fantasy), then they should have tools to let PCs follow. FR can easily be played on either the low or high fantasy side, as the DMG makes clear. Personally I strongly prefer the low side, but I suppose ALFA has room for both.

However we're not exactly looking at supreme high fantasy here, just an extension of skin colors and visual sizes. Would be nice if the size range available depended on stats, too, with the high end depending on str and con. AND, and this is crucial, CHA needs to equal visual boob size for females.

Is boob size customizable?

oldgrayrogue wrote:Is boob size customizable?

I rest my breasts- CASE! I rest my case.

These tools already exist, and we already have them, without broadly adopting an implausible base palette at character creation.

We also have the start of a disguise system through hair dyes-- that being the reason that people who are bad at disguise just end up looking dumb after they use hair dyes, but people who are good at it just look different.

//edit--
Except OGR's. Breast size is defined by your choice of clothing, funny enough.

Zelknolf wrote:These tools already exist, and we already have them, without broadly adopting an implausible base palette at character creation.

Nice. So is there instructions for DMs on how to use it, and what does it do and does not? I presume the "stylist" interface available to PCs uses a limited subset of all possibilities, and more could be done by DM?

Breast size is defined by your choice of clothing, funny enough.

Yeah, I recall this from someone wanting a fat (male) PC.

Paazin already made a NPC that changes appearance and skin color that BG Dms can spawn.

AND

If you want height changes you can as for someone to edit your bic and add .05 to all your ratios in the Properties bar.