Scalable Encounters – Can We Make Our Own?

Gamer asks about easily creating ‘scalable encounters’:

Simple question – I understand that scalable encounters will be supported in the story that ships with NWN – but will their be support for easily creating scalable encounters in our own modules/worlds?

Yes, you just plug in your own monster hierarchies to your encounters and off you go.

Cord Grimwinder

Cord has it again.

You just create the type of monster you wish to place at each level of the hierarchy. When the encounter is triggered it spawns in the appropriate mix of creatures from the supplied hierarchy.

For example:
an Orc themed encounter has regular orcs in the bottom level. Let’s say each Orc has a challenge rating of 1. This means 1 orc is a reasonable challenge for 1 first level character.
Next up in the hierarchy we place an orc archer who has a challenge rating of 2. so two first level characters should be challenged by one Orc archer.
Next we have an Orc shaman. Let’s say the orc shaman has a challenge rating of 5.

If two first level characters trigger our encounter. The encounter could spawn two regular orcs, or one orc archer. It randomly decides what to spawn based on criteria we specified when we set up the encounter.

If a party of three third level characters trigger the encounter they have a challenge rating of 9. We could have a shaman, an archer and two basic orcs.

In short, the system allows you to customize encounters for the creatures you want.

Trent Oster