Eyes of Eilistraee: Go Henchmen!

After some messing around I've sorted out the levelling up of the henchmen as they join the party. This functionality is available in SOU scripts but I've abandoned those, due to bugs when trying to do stuff with more than one henchman. I had to start from scratch and recreate each henchman with a "pure" legal build so the LevelUpHenchman function would work. Now everyone levels up as they should so I have a party of 4 (3 henchies and one player) ready to kick ass. Now that the party is at the right level I can do a lot more in the way of combat balancing.

Most of this weeks work has been on creating more dialogue for the henchmen story arcs. Xanthea has had the most attention so far. Hopefully she'll be finished up soon and I can move onto completing the others.

I've also spent a lot of time reading up on the nature of CRPGs. Being a builder I'm always interested on how players feel about "what makes a good RPG". One key aspect that keeps cropping up is roleplaying through skill use. This is something that is implemented in EOE already, but reading about player choice and skill use in an article on the RPG Codex (sorry no link - easily googleable though) has given me a few more ideas on how to allow for skill use. I've now got plans to allow players with certain skills to discover hints about a puzzle and to allow other players to see the hints via another method - cryptic I know but it'll all become clear in time ; )

One screenshot before I go - some early dialogue whilst questing in Barrow Vale:

eR