More Common Mistakes

There's three subtle, yet common, mistakes I'm seeing over and over in the
user-designed scenarios. Perhaps you could put a note in your scenario
workshop so people can avoid them?

a) The Escaping Shopkeeper: Upon opening the door to a shop, I frequently
find that with time, a randomly-walking shopkeeper (or otherwise mobile
important NPC) will head out the door and wander around town. Evenutually
the town is full of wondering shopkeepers, and you have to run all over
town just to find somebody. One solution, of course, is to make the NPC
stationary. Another is to use the "blocking" floors which prevent monsters
from stepping on them. Sometime I put these up to keep the shopkeeper
behind the counter. If it's more natural (such as in a blacksmith's shop)
to have the shopkeeper wandering the full extent of the store, I put some
blocking spaces in front of the door on the inside. (You have to make sure
diagonal accesses to the door are also blocked.)

b) Trapped by Friends in a Tight Space: I've noticed that in the three
scenarios which come with the editor, anywhere a friendly NPC may be
wondering around, corridors are always at least two spaces wide, so there's
space to move around the NPC. The long one-space-wide corridors I'm finding
in some user-designed towns make it easy to get trapped by friendly folks.
One time I had to go into combat mode and hack up otherwise happy
townspeople just to get out of the fort. Lesson: In friendly areas, make
corridors at least two spaces wide (unless, of course, you specifically
want to block a space, for instance someone guarding the treasury).

c) Leaving Town and Getting Stuck in a Mountainside: By far the most
dangerous of the three bugs I mention here, this occurs when an author
doesn't test the effect of leaving town from every possible direction. It's
easy to get stuck in a mountain or thick tree. Similar difficulties occur
when you try to enter a town from a direction the author does not expect.
You can get stuck in a mass of pure cave wall. In these cases the only way
to escape is to go back to an earlier saved game, or use the scenario
editor.
- Aaron Lanterman (adl@essrl.wustl.edu) 