Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Game Master - D:OS2 GM Mode - Ideas!

I'm also a novice when it comes to creation tools hope you don't need to know scripting and its just change the land to a hill add trees make a road add buildings change things about the buildings

I also hope theirs some way to create huge maps my campaign does take place on a map about roughly the size of Europe plus Russia (map scale)
So hopefully theirs a way to do that then desiegn a world map player's would see
I have big hope's and ideas for the gm mode

Advice. The plans on whatever GM'ing will be in this game should be pretty solid since we are looking at EOY releases. Don't over sell the feature to the public, you will pay a steep price from user feedback if you do. GM'ing brings them in and everyone has their own wants and to me if a game really wants to be about GM'ing the base game should be that and then you add stories from there, official to user created stories. It would be more a GM'ing Engine Game as the base game. DOS:2 isn't coming from that angle and unless you've guys totally knocked it out of the park, it won't be what everyone wants out of GM'ing or wanted out of SCL and the games word of mouth will pay dearly for under delivering here, the NWN curse. So do not oversell this feature and be clear what it can and cannot do.

Ohh here is a suggestion

Have someone create a campaign of decent length (like... somewhat short, but make it feel like it is complete and not a demo) whether it is a developer or someone from the fanbase... and include it in the game.

Let people open it up in the GM mode and look at how it was made.

Include some creative trigger work and basics but don't blow the potential creator away with complex scripts. Better yet attach notes in it for GM mode to look at for hints, tricks, advice, and tutorials on how to use GM mode.

You don't have to follow this exactly... but a example is invaluable.

That's actually a good one. Like perhaps "The King of Rattsburgh", where you play the roles of exterminators out to save the town of Rattsburgh from the wicket Rat King. One small town, one small dungeon, but enough content to show off the GM mode.

For the GM mode, I would like to have different layers of visualization in which you can see, at a glance, what the dependencies between objects on the map are and you can interact with them right away. I would imagine a quest layer in which you see all the npcs giving quests and all the objects related to them. Another could be the npcs, the monsters and their factions. Another, the unseen world, like ghosts and hidden objects.

We could imagine as well an abstract layer in which interactive objects are seen as polygons and you can access to their stats and description by clicking on them.

It should be very iconic rather than swarming with text so it would be easy to distinguish a scene as a GM and interact rapidly to improve it for the players.

I have this idea of a 'hybrid GM mode'. All the players would be playing characters, but one would be the 'hybrid GM'. That player would still be playing, but perhaps while playing against, or with the other players depending on possible map types, he would have access to certain triggers on the map already predefined.

I think it could open up a strong type of storytelling. There would be this one character in the game who is an important figure to the story that the game wants to tell. By giving that power to the one special character, I think it would allow for some interesting gameplay. Letting a single bad guy act like the crazy summoner, that triggers a bunch of spawns while still in complete control of a character, aiming to kill off the heroes that wants to invade.

Or escort a VIP through hordes of enemies. The VIP character would have access to certain triggers that shows the power of this legendary person, something that will show and tell why this person was so powerful in the first place.

Maybe this idea in my head can be done if there is a possibility to make custom abilities instead, which I'm not sure will be in the game. Either way, being able to whack up the game is something I think it needs, more creative freedom when it comes to multiplayer and custom content.

Hello!!

I assume that the "GM" will be able to load custom modules or vanilla game to play
so I'll focus on what I think should be able to do in-game

 while playing:

- Lock or unlock (doors and chests

- Spawn (items, books, treasure chests, rocks, boats, objects to interact or assets like dead bodys or blood in the floor)
I imagined it would be something like this:
I write in chat "/ spawn (ID)" and the object appears under the pointer
It is quite easy to use and do not forget to remove the object with a command: "/ delete" or "/ remove" also under the pointer

- Teleport players to another map
        from Act 1 to Act 4

- GM disable players (take away control of the character)
       more than anything to place a dialogue as they fight or make an NPC escape

- A list of "IDs" of objects and creatures

- Throwing dice, as WOW (/ roll 20)

- Interactions with NPC
    switches (Hostile to Neutral / Neutral to Hostile)
    NPC Commands:
            Spawn NPC (obviously)
            NPC learn "x" spell
            NPC resize
            NPC immortal
            NPC follow a player
            1 npc or more, following a "NPC" operating as a leader
            NPC (dog) is now playable for "x" player
                         the NPC can not level up and can not learn new skills

I think these are the things I would use more, do not get me wrong I think much of the game will be in combat but on occasion you want to let the player explore alternative routes that are not necessarily combat or even join a faction and these commands were created to make this possible in-gmae manually if the "GM" is willing to take the job he can do many things also it will be easier to tell a story with this and create new Quests

Hey there, first post here, played D:OS and enjoying the alpha of D:OS 2 these days. I'd love to share some random thoughts about the current topic:

I tried to read all the posts of this thread, and i see a general consensus about making the editor similar to Aurora toolset.

I played myself for years with NWN 1, been a DM and a scripter, joined RP, PVP, powerplay servers with MMO/instance behaviour and admin'd a full roleplay one.
Handling people is not easy, the deeper you go into roleplay, the more attention you must pay to every player's step.

I want you guys to remember one thing though, since NWN pops up every other post: the combat system here is full queued turn based, not asymmetric delay on actions.

Why is this important? because when DMing in divinity, you can take care of everything in a sorted line of work, without fearing that a faster player could meteoshower your face.
But also because having >4 people playing can become boring and frustrating so i see the constraint of max players a necessity.

Another point that i see often is that people want a realtime ingame editor,.
The power of Aurora was that you could take your time building your world in a separate tool, then when joining the game as a DM you should have a skillbar with every need you could possibly have at runtime:

- controlling units, making them talk by simply using the chat system.
This allowed real roleplay from the players who would type in the chat the answers, so no need for branching dialogue trees.

- spawning / despawning creatures, items.
An intuitive interface for tuning the stats of the spawned item/ creature, like naming, stats tuning, switching
talents on/off, AI templates (ranged, melee, healer, etc.)

- teleporting every unit at will.
- Change weather / time of the day if the lighting is dynamic, so you can have your very own eclipse of Doom and making it worse by turning on rain.

I'm personally against editing the landscape in realtime, but that's just me and minor changes may not be problematic, like placing furnitures around, but that shouldn't be the focus of the runtime part, since you have players to entertain.

So, all this to say that i'd love an external tool to create the map, placing npcs and whatnot like you do for the main story, and at runtime having the power to possess npc and making players role by simply chatting.

A toolset, on fly event creation is not a must for most DMs. Certainly it is useful, allowing easy on the fly event to be done truly on the fly. However, I would say the ability to fully prepare and create areas is far more valuable.

A few things I would like to see for the GM mode, perhaps they already have been mentioned or confirmed. But I shall throw them in nevertheless!

*The ability to change character names IG, both players and NPCs - A most useful tool
*The ability to speak as an NPC without possessing it - This allows multi tasking during events
*DM spy gear, aka being able to listen as a player speak whilst not being in the same area. - This allows you to run off and do other things whilst they think you are there!
*Full power of player inventories - Adding/removing/Naming/Nerfing/Boosting items IG at will

Greetings and well met to everybody, it's my first post here, but considering that 40% of the reasons behind my backing of D:OS2 on kickstarter was GM mode (the other 60% was that the first title was very enjoyable), I feel it is fitting to begin my activities on this forum with this thread. I am (or rather, was) a very affectionate fan of NWN1 and 2, spent years playing on roleplay servers, did a lot of mapping on NWN1's toolset and some scripting. As an avid fan of everything roleplay, AD&D and NWN1/2 related, well, as much as I hate parroting other people's ideas, I do agree that the ability of creating persistent worlds would not only allow genre aficionados such as myself to unleash their creativity and passion for online roleplay once more, thus making the game a lot more enjoyable (admittedly than it already is), but also substantially extend the lifespawn of D:OS2. I mean, there are still fully functional NWN1 servers after almost 17 years since the game's release (even if those servers are slowly dying out), and both games gave life to a very solid, active and skilled modding community.

Without adding much else, I'm just gonna enunciate what I feel would not only be awesome, but also draw even more players to this masterpiece of a game in making:

1 - Easy-to-use (or RELATIVELY easy to use) toolset so that you won't need a degree in quantum physics to learn its ropes, as it sadly happened to NWN2.
2 - Ability to support mid-to-high player count, if at all possible (I'd say between 30 and 60 players online at the same time. 40 would already be a lot).
3 - Differentiated channels. Before somebody tells me "we already have them!", I mean a chat channel dedicated to normal talk (in a system similar to interactions between npcs in the single player campaign thus far: text floating over their heads for a few secs and such) which supports:
Talk (intended as a "talking at normal volume"), audible in X radius.
YELL (Intended as "shouting"), audible in X * Y radius
[i]whisper[/i] (you guess it), autible in X / Y radius, for very shady stuff.
4 - Chat log. That way you don't need to have an eidetic memory to remember what was told to you 5 minutes before the GM got angry with everyone's forgetfulness and decided to solve things his own way - by spawning Chuck Norris in front of the party and having Him roundhouse-kick the unfortunate, forgetful players into oblivion.
5 - Ability to write a short description of one's character, that will pop up the moment someone will right-click on said character and click on "examine". I swear that some descriptions I've had the honor of reading in the past years spent playing NWN1 and 2 were beautiful. Others... not so much, true, but still!
6 - Ability to hide things like resistances, hit points, magic armor and magic shield to avoid metagaming (it's a pet peeve of mine, I admit)
7 - Ability to control monsters/characters, it'd be great for final-boss-style battles or adding a more immersive touch to a session.
8 - Ability to create items, as well as their description, on the spot. Saves time by avoiding the need to create them via toolset and then add them to the game, and is also a gold mine when it comes to quest creativity.
9 - Ability to change names of npcs and monsters, and even their skills and equipment. I've lost track of all the times I had to deal with Linu La'neral while pretending that she was someone else because she was the only appropriately-geared elven cleric available to the dm's spawner.
10 - Quality over time: GM mode doesn't have to be released alongside the "main" portion of the game if that would compromise the final result. I'm sure the single player campaign will be of enough quality as to keep ourselves rather busy for a long while until you've got it completely in shape and running.

As for the (rather concrete) concerns I've heard about too many players attending to the same event being at great risk of causing a big, bogged mess: it's true, but it's not that heavily-attended dm events on nwn1 and 2 weren't clean or easy to understand, either: a pvp between 2 groups of 10 peoples each always resulted in a massive framerate drop and nobody actually understanding what was going on, same for a fight between 6 players and 20+ dm spawns. I believe that simply allowing a server to enforce a time limit for each player to plan their moves and act on those plans before their turn is automatically forfeit, akin to the already present option in arena mode, would already solve a lot of issues.

Well, that's it for now. I do recognize that I'm suggesting a lot of things so don't worry, my feet are still solidly grounded and I won't take it badly if not all of them will be implemented, but hey, if even half of these points I (and many others before me) suggested are ever going to be implemented, with the other half having the possibility of being done via user-generated scripts and modding, I can safely say that I won't be playing anything else past GM mode's release for a loooooong time.

In the meantime, you guys keep on the good work with single player, I'm really enjoying it so far. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my 7th playthrough of the first chapter. :horsey:

Basically has almost everything i feel is important.
To add a few:

-Customize/Create own items, NPCs, monsters including stats, skill, description and such.
-Speech Bubbles(private chat channels are good, but speech bubbles are the go to for RP).
-Able to create character bio and view other player's bio.
-Support more players, i'm not greedy, maybe around 10-12 players. Of course NWN kinda scale is the best.

I am so excited about this feature. I used to help DM an old NWN server, City of Arabel. Myself and some old members of the team from back then have decided that if Larian gives us the tools - we will totally start up a persistent world RP focused server using D:OS2.

Keeping fingers crossed. Looks absolutely amazing.

Temper enthusiasm NWN'ers... you'd think you've all learned by now. It's been deadly silent on what this is going to be, we'd think at this point a lot has to have been decided, unless the game is still over a year out.

I hope, if it doesn't live up to very lofty expectations as recent suggestions to me are, that we don't once again try to destroy the whole game by word of mouth because it isn't your dream game of Table Top 2 PC. Perhaps by D:OS 5 we'll get there, but accept baby steps towards that goal. As we can see no one is going all out to make a NWN replacement from the start, most likely they scared shit-less to try, due to fan expectations.

Their first attempt at modding in D:OS1 we have to look at as a failure, I'd go in very guarded and set the bar low.

Dreaming doesn't hurt.

Besides, even if we don't end up with the tools to set up persistent worlds (fingers crossed!) the base game is already quite good and very, very enjoyable. Can't speak for the others, but I'm not at risk of perceiving the game as "ruined" or "spoiled" if its GM mode isn't what I hoped it to be

Hi all I'm new here so first of all great job so far!

I'm a great fan of the series.

So I would like to be able to Change NPC's name's abilities appearance's name's on the fly or in a editor before starting or whilst playing a Scenario.
(please don't make that preset stuff only like they did with SCL)

Good luck and keep up the great effort and work!

Won't ruin the game for me at all. But I am hopeful. I'm far to old to get the pitchforks out over a video game.

Based on the interview with Swen in PC Gamer, it looks to me like GM mode is one of the major reasons they are doing the Early Access (I guess they call it Early Access rather than Open Beta because you have to pay for the game to get Access?).

At any rate, here's the quote from the article:

"The super-secret Game Master mode is going to hit in Early Access also. That’s a very new thing, so we need to do a lot of testing with it. We’re really trying things there."

Most of the other features he describes as "tweaks" or "changes" -- game balance appears to be the other major item they're looking at, based on the article -- but this he outright says needs a lot of testing.

There are some really fantastic ideas in the game already, and given how good the Early Access looks, I think there's a lot of reason to be hopeful that a GM mode will be equally awesomesauce. It will doubtless require a lot of iteration to hit the sweet spot, but Larian has done a pretty brilliant job finding innovative and interesting ways to improve their games with every version, so it's something they're good at.

He specifically mentions forums as a source for feedback, so...

Full text of the article here:

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-divinity-original-sin-2-will-evolve-in-early-access/

Hey there! Again, loving Divinity: Original Sin 2. Larian Studios is doing a fantastic job, and I expect that with player support, this game really could take on other GM-supportive RPGs. Horrorscope is rightly hesitant, but I think NWN1/2 veterans (like myself) understand that this is no small task, and certainly much testing, patience, and community encouragement will be needed.

On that note, many people have mentioned some items they would like for a Game Master's (and consequently, their fellow players') experience, so here are some other basic things:

IN-GAME GAME MASTER TOOLS:
Selection Tools

• Hotkey + Mouse to select individual (Click) or select multiple (Click-Drag) Player Characters
• Hotkey + Mouse to select individual (Click) or select multiple (Click-Drag) NPCs
• Hotkey + Mouse to select individual (Click) or select multiple (Click-Drag) characters (any)
• Hotkey + Mouse to deselect individual (Click) or deselect multiple (Click-Drag) characters (any)
• Ability to Assign a Hotkey to current character selection, for easy selection and commanding
• Ability to set camera to follow a specific character
• Ability to toggle NPC AI on/off
• Ability to toggle NPC immortality (can't die)
• Ability to toggle NPC immunity (can't take damage)
• Ability to "puppeteer" any character (assume full control)
• Ability to "limbo" selected NPC or object (removing it from map, but available to GM via "limbo" menu)
  ------ Ability to spawn limboed NPCs/Objects back in at any time, any place

Communication

• Ability to answer player "help" tickets
• Ability to broadcast a message server-wide
• Ability to format/change color of current message text

Movement (that overrides Player and AI control)

• Ability to move currently selected characters
• Ability to temporarily freeze selected characters in place (still animated, but can't move)
• Ability to instantly teleport selected characters to any other location
  ------ Option to Right-Click + "Teleport Characters" to any surface (with enough walkable space)
  ------ Option to teleport to area or "waypoint" via server menu selection
• Ability to arrange currently selected characters into a "formation"

Player Management

• Ability to Mute/Unmute Player Character or Player Account
  ------ Option for a temporary mute period, or to make permanent
• Ability to ban/unban Player Character or Player Account off of campaign/server
  ------ Option for a temporary ban period, or make permanent
• Ability to "Boot" Player Character off of campaign/server
• Ability to "Look Up" offline characters and set

Combat Controls

• Ability to observe combat for selected combat group
• Ability to pause combat for selected combat group
• Ability to end combat & impose immediate 60-second disengagement for selected combat group
• Ability to control NPCs in combat, but still have an option to let the AI play combat on specific turn
• Ability to "delay" currently selected character's turn to occur after a # of turns or # of rounds
• Ability to add self to combat (good for introducing environmental effects in rounds, etc.)

MULTIPLAYER CAMPAIGN SETTINGS (for Campaign Host/Admin):
Connection Management

• Automatic Reconnection Attempt Options (in case server/campaign host loses connection)
• Ability to set recurring campaign reset (daily, weekly, etc)

NPC Management

• Ability to set specific NPCs to be "immortal"
• Ability to set specific NPCs/encounters to respawn after a certain time if killed

Player Account Management

• Option to force all character files to load from and save to Server (not Client)
• Option to force all Players to update account credentials on next login
• Option to enforce automatic IP Banning based on:
  ------ Number of login/logout attempts within 5 minutes

Combat Options

• Ability to set availability of PvP Combat and/or Actions on targeted area, map, or campaign-wide
• Ability to Limit Player Character turn times (to avoid problems with idle players) based on:
  ------ Time (i.e. seconds, minutes, etc.)
  ------ AP
  --------- Ability to pick minimum turn time (default: 15 realtime seconds?)
  --------- Ability to pick time allotted per AP (default: 5 realtime seconds?)

Thievery/Pickpocketing Options

• Option to disable pickpocketing of Player Characters by other Player Characters
• If Pickpocketing of Player Characters is enabled, have option to limit pickpocketing by:
  ------ Weight of items (i.e., cannot collectively pickpocket items heavier than [x] grams/lbs)
  ------ Value of items (i.e., cannot collectively pickpocket items worth more than [x] gold at base)
  ------ Character & Time (i.e., cannot pickpocket character [x] more than [y] times per [z] realtime hours)

Player Character Death Options

• Permadeath (only respawns if resurrected by other player or GM)
• Respawn (one, several, or all of the below options should be available)
  ------ At Last Logged Saved Respawn Point
  ------ At Nearest Respawn Point
  ------ At Corpse
  ------ (Each option above should have additional options, below, if selected:)
  --------- Only available if Resurrected by other Player
  --------- Only available [time frame, i.e., 1h, 12h, 24h, 1w] in [realtime or game time]

PLAYER CHARACTER TOOLS
Autofollow Option

• If Autofollowing NPC, autofollow is automatically allowed
• If attempting to autofollow a Player Character, that character should be prompted with options to:
  ------ Allow Autofollow
  --------- If accepted, either autofollow participants should have option to break autofollow at any time
  ------ Deny Autofollow
  --------- Additional option to deny autofollow requests from this character for [x] time or permanently
• Autofollow should "stop" if followed character is removed, becomes invisible, etc
• Player should also have menu option to "auto-deny" all autofollow requests (to prevent abuse)

Self-Management

• Option to set character to "AFK"
• Option to set character to "DND" (aka, autorespond to any new personal messages)
• Option to ignore other characters/players (aka, mute that character's personal messages or chats)
  --- Cannot ignore GM
• Ability to create queued "GM Ticket" to request help or ask a game-related question to the GM privately
  --- Can only post one ticket at a time

That's all I have for now. Cheers!

Any news on Game Master/Creation tools???

They first need to care about the game itself, before they can concentrate on the modding stuff, my guess.