Ability to view NPCs full stats in toolset.

Feardain

SO, we can see all of an NPCs, str,dex,con,int,wis,cha, their ac, and their move speed, what ever else have you.

Until you start throwing, equipment on an NPC.

Then your AC doesnt reflect their total at all, not to mention you cannot view how much Attack Bonus an NPC has?

How much AB does a level 46 undead with a 28 Str modifier have?

Unless I have missed something, this doesnt exist in the current toolset, and I havent seen it mentioned before.

ActionReplay

I am very much in favour of this. Its a pain creating new mobs and having no way to see their complete stats such as AB or AC directly in the Creature Wizard editor. You always have to boot up the game to test this which is a pain and a slow process.

There is a lot to consider for this such as the equipped items and feats applied for the creature. Having full access to the total stat and seeing what affects the stat would be a great addition for builders.

DerpCity

I would love to see this feature in the NWN toolset. Despite the horrible nightmare of trying to get NWN2's toolset to work, the engine did all the math for you and displayed the creature's AB for both ranged and melee attacks, as well as their attacks per round, and IIRC it listed AC from equipment when calculating the total. It was a wonderful addition that would cut a lot of time doing math and testing that could be spent working elsewhere.

Feardain said:

How much AB does a level 46 undead with a 28 Str modifier have?.

Levels in Undead grant 0.5 AB/level, and Epic levels do the same without increasing your number of attacks, meaning in 46 levels they'll have +23/+18 AB from their levels. Adding the +28 from their strength modifier grants them +51/+46 AB.

Feardain

After talking with a few different people about nwn2, I believe the best course of action, to bring something to this effect into the toolset, would probably be to add a new option on the right click drop down, thats titled Preview, which will allow you to look at all the NPCs stats with their given equipment.

Balkoth

DerpCity said:

Levels in Undead grant 0.5 AB/level, and Epic levels do the same without increasing your number of attacks, meaning in 46 levels they'll have +23/+18 AB from their levels.

Now make it a Fighter 20/Undead 20. What's the AB?

If it goes Fighter 20 -> Undead 20 then you have 30/25/20/15.

If it goes Undead 20 -> Fighter 20 then it goes 20/15.

Or Fighter 10 -> Undead 10 -> Fighter 10 -> Undead 10 is 25/20/15.

For people not aware of how they need to carefully add on levels in a certain order, figuring out what's going wrong can be a nightmare.

DerpCity

@Balkoth The way AB is calculated for an Epic Level NPC is based on the position on their levels, so how they leveled up only matters to a Player. So for your initial classes of Fighter 20/Undead 20, it'd have an AB 30/25/20/15.

As a brief test before I responded, I made 2 NPC's. I ordered the first's levels as Fighter 15/Bard 10/Wizard 15, and the second's as Wizard 15/Bard 10/Fighter 15. They both are featless and have 2 discipline 2 parry (neither of which should matter), and my assumption is that the game goes down the NPC's levels when determining AB pre-epic levels (As in, only NPC 1's 15 fighter levels and 5 of their bard levels should affect AB, and only NPC 2's 15 wizard levels and 5 bard levels should affect their's). This would mean NPC 1 should have 4 attacks per round at, unless my epic level knowledge is lacking, 28/23/18/13, and NPC 2 should have 2 attacks per round at 20/15. They both had the intended progression.

I then decided to test it out using the level up wizard. I made NPC 3 and gave him 1 animal level, used the level up wizard to give him 20 outsider levels, and then used it to give him his remaining 19 animal levels, making him Animal 20/Outsider 20. Based on his level up history, he should have 4 attacks per round at 29/24/19. He didn't - instead, he had had 3 attacks per round at 25/20/15.

What this means is that the engine, at least for standard NPC's, treats an NPC's levels as taking each class one at a time in the order they are listed in the creature's classes tab, so it would assume it went 20 F -> 20 U or 20 U -> 20 F depending on the order and calculate its AB accordingly.

However, something that makes me wonder is Henchmen. SoU and HotU's henchmen system (and Infinite Dungeon's random monster system) seem to employ an in-game NPC level up feature based on packages. Multiclassed leveling henchmen are a foreign concept to me, so I'd like it if someone tested out what a henchman who leveled up in a manner such as Fighter 15 -> Bard 5 -> Fighter 20. If they were treated as normal NPC's, they'd have 30/25/20/15 AB, but if they are treated as having a level history in the same way a player is they would have 28/23/18/13.

I hope I was helpful, and this experiment has led me to asking if Beamdog could give us the ability to directly edit the creature's level history.

fot1

While I'm sure there is a logic since it a software, I feel that the way we have to tweak monsters to get the AB we want is just way unpractical.

Probably would be better to have a BAB box next to the ac box, which can default to the current logic, but allowing us to directly override it would be great. From a builder pespective, sometimes you just don't care if a monster has levels on undead or fighter classes, you just want him to hit a precisa AB. More than once I had to tweak this with fighter levels and then increase/decrease the CR of a creature.

DerpCity

I think the addition of a BAB override would be a good addition. If that's on the table, I also a field to determine their number of attacks per round could be included (though I'm pretty sure there's a scripting solution to that issue).

fot1 said:

More than once I had to tweak this with fighter levels and then increase/decrease the CR of a creature.

Another thing NWN2 did well was let you directly set the CR of a creature. While I'm fine with NWN calculating the CR for you, being able to completely override it with your own values would be nice, as sometimes the CR calculator isn't very accurate to how strong (or weak) a creature is. Also, since you can only increase or decrease CR by a whole number, you can't set a creature to have 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8 CR very easily, which is a bummer.

HousePet

Fully support a better final stat screen for the toolset.
Having to run the game to check the AB/AC is a pain in the arse.

Feardain

The problem with viewing even AC, in the properties of a creature, as it is currently, is that it doesnt take into account the creatures equipped items that add AC. so the number given there is wrong to begin with.

And after a bit of testing, apparently its true that the game doesn't give two trucks what order you give an NPC its levels. Near as I can tell, what ever class ID comes first gets counted first.


The ability to directly determine an NPCs BAB, instead of it relying on the numbers coming from a class, would be phenomenal, as long as the final result also states what the total AB of the creature is, with stats, and equipment.