Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Dungeon Master Mod

Anyone have any plans/ideas for how to implement something like NWN used to have? One player can play as a Dungeon Master with unlimited abilities like say Stay Invisible without time limit, spawn monsters, control those spawns against the players along with the AI, move really fast and be able to teleport players to specific maps, also maybe have some kinda chat window that pops up in the regular dialogue window for the DM to convey the story dynamically?
This would really be great for having dynamic play sessions with a small group of friends.

That would be awesome. NWN was great at this, but it was ready for these capabilities on launch. This game only officially supports two players at the moment. Judging at a glance that someone has already got a 4 player mod working I would guess that this game will be the target of heavy modding and I do hope something like this will be possible eventually.

The main game would certainly be a lot more replayable if people could play as the monsters. Greater power for DMs would be nice too, though I think it would be harder to pull off in Divinity than in NWN because Divinity is turn-based and NWN was sort of real-time turns. I don't think there's any way as of now to have players in separate parties, so that's functionality that Larian needs to add for that to be possible unless some genius modder can really figure something clever out. Someone at Larian said the game could theoretically support lots of players, probably at least 7 or 8, but that wasn't really tested so there could be issues there.

Honestly, everything takes so much time right now in editting that I can't even imagine someone being able to design combat scenarios and stuff on the fly. But Larian should be making the editor a bit easier to use, so maybe that will change.

Edit: I start thinking about it. And i could see something like.. Having a spell for different monsters and summoning them. Tweaking it for unlimited range.. I don't know how you'd do the invisible player.

Infinite Invisibility for the DM is easily doable (by just setting their Invisible duration to -1). Summoning monsters should be somewhat straightforward as well, if you just give the DM a ton of "summon custom monster" spells (that may or may not be able to summon additional monsters at the same time, like how Boreas' summons work). Such summons could have nearly infinite range as well (range could be bigger than the map-size), although Line of Sight might be an issue. I don't think there's a good way to set their AI (unless you delve into the summons' charScripts), especially not mid-game.

Most likely the DM would be a "member" of the adventuring party. I'm not sure what happens if a Player-controlled character is removed from the party via a Story script (which should prob. be a good experiment). There could be different items added to the DM's inventory at the start that teleport the party to different triggers when used.

I didn't mean exactly what i said. Yeah invisibility is easy but. You will still be centered on the terrain. It wouldn't be like you're just a camera. And the spell circle will still be centered around you.

And when they removed it causes a black screen on whoevers controlling it i believe. Or just causes them to lose visibility of everything. The main point is that you dont retain control of the character.

A better experiment is setting the alignment to evil npc and seeing if two player control characters can fight.

Regarding Rhidian's question/experiment: We tested this a while ago. If you remove a char from the party in any way, the char is no longer playable. The player that controled the char gets unasigned from it and is left with his other playable chars if he has any. Every playable char has to be in the party. Kinda sad, as it makes a lot of fun mod ideas impossible.

So it would be quite easy to create a DM mod that allows a player to spawn monsters, take control of characters and place items etc. on the fly. Just the other players will see which character the DM is currently controling, will see him on the mini map and will share vision with the DM etc. So it's kind of pointless for now.

Speaking of which, since the game doesn't identify players, only the host can assign specific players to characters and every playable character is always asigned to a player, there is no way to remember who was the DM and make the DM character unplayable when the DM is not in the server.

And regarding Demonata08's question/experiment: You can set two players hostile. Actually we do this in the divine arena mod. The debug log will go rampage if you do so, first stating "this should never be done" and then spams errors for like 15 seconds - but it recovers from it and works after. Anyways, hostile players again still will be in the same party, see each other on the minimap, share vision etcetc.

I really hope larian will make a patch to allow for multiple parties anytime soon - amongst a lot of other things. Anyways for me that there's only one party and every player has to be in it is one of the biggest issues. That and that we cannot assign players to chars scriptingwise and prevent the host from assigning players makes it really hard to create anything but main-campaign-style stories with the editor.

Wow great responses from everyone! Its really great to see many like minded people wanting to do this. The way DOS allows different chars to be in different places at once and each can be in their own Turn-Based combat session tells me lots can be done with having multiple parties in time. Is there a way now to allow characters to PVP? Like say if I created a storyline where one of the main characters has to fight the other in an arena? Or maybe if the main characters sit down to watch an Arena battle and can each take control of one of the fighters to battle each other? I'll have to look up your Divine Arena mod, Eamid and see how that functions. Setting the players to Hostile.
Have you guys seen any old NwN moders around the community here yet? Like from Neverwintervault? Just curious how it's catching on with them. Perhaps I should look for a thread on that here.

Yeah it's definitively possible. To safe you from digging through my scripts, it's this command I use to set the players hostile: CharacterSetFaction(_Player, _Faction). Set one to "Good", the other to "Evil NPC" and they start to fight instantly.

There's several issues tho. As I already said initialy there's a ton of warning and error messages in the message window. After it recovers it works just fine tho and the issues aren't really noticable in game. Usualy one char will run away without the player controling him being able to do something about it. After like 3 or 4 seconds the char stops running tho and can participate in the fight.

Besides that since the games prevent you from attacking allies, you need to force attack, means ctrl-click to actually attack other players.