Can I mod an existing mod?

Icikus

I am brand spanking new to the mod scene, and I am beginning a passion project of making a whole new game of my own, just for myself to enjoy,, using the NWN engine (1 of my all time fav games).

To save myself some time, i was wondering if it is possible to take an existing mod made by someone else, or even the normal campaign, and adjust it so I don't have to start completely from scratch with all new areas and such.

Also, is it possible to add a percentage chance for a certain monster to drop a certain piece of gear. So I could make a GOD weapon and make a huge dragon have a 10% chance to drop it, so I would have to farm said dragon to aquire the GOD weapon?

Tresset

I would say you can do whatever you want on your own machine as long as it is just for your own use. If you want to redistribute mods based on other peoples' work, however, you had better get their permission first.

WarChiefZeke

Of all the DnD games to mod, NWN1 is by far the easiest. I daresay you don't even need to take apart someone else's creation to see how it works, with or without documentation everything is more or less self-explanatory. If you have any questions, I am sure there are people here and in other forums who will help you.

A really easy way to create luck-based drops is to make multiple creatures of the same type within the leveled spawn list. Have some of those creatures be holding the droppable item in their inventory and have some of them not. There are other methods, of course, but this is the easiest and fastest method.

You could make these spawns repeatable, so that the items can be farmed for, or not, so that you either get it or you don't.

Proleric

Most of the mods are on Neverwinter Vault, where you generally don't need permission to adapt works, even for publication, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

See guidelines for nuances.

This is by design. Building on D&D traditions, the Neverwinter Nights community has always encouraged sharing, learning by example and consensual borrowing, because more gets done that way.

However, it isn't a formal open source community like, say, Open Office or Thunderbird mail. A few contributors explicitly place restrictions on how you can use their stuff, for good reasons, and in those cases you must ask permission.

The freedom to use stuff is especially important and empowering when it comes to fan-made components like tilesets, creatures, portraits or scripts. You can normally just grab them without a mountain of paperwork.

Having said that, while adapting an entire module is usually permissible, it's often unwise. You may learn more by building something small and simple than by trying to fathom a large existing complex offering. If the author is still actively developing the module, they might well be annoyed by another version, whatever the rules say. Above all, players generally welcome something original, rather than a redux (unless it's vastly superior).

I appreciate that the OP refers to personal use only, where everything is permissible.

TarotRedhand

What @Proleric said but if you plan on releasing your update/upgrade it is good etiquette to at least try to contact the original creator before proceeding. The creators of a lot of the earlier stuff have sinced moved on to other things. A smallish number now actually work in the gaming industry while others have sadly died in the intervening years (it is nearly 20 years since the initial launch of NwN). So it may not be easy to contact them but at least try.

TR