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Every so often, a question comes up, either through the mailing list, or through the message boards, or private email, or whatever, that asks the best way to perform some sort of significant change on a town in the midst of a scenario. The almost inevitable progression is for the question to be answered by, “Variable Town Entry”, to be followed shortly by, “How exactly do you do that?” Variable Town Entry is a powerful tool that allows you to alter the town # the party will enter from outdoor sections. While you may have initially designated a certain villa/tower/cave to place the party in town #7 when they enter, through the use of variable town entry, you can shift the party to another town # entirely midway through the scenario. The Variable Town Entry node, however, can appear very intimidating at first. It’s not — Spiderweb just chose some very bizarre (and poor) language for detailing how to use the node, and once you’ve figured it out, it becomes one of the easier tasks to accomplish. For our hypothetical example, let’s say you had a town full of nice people as town #7. Let’s also say that at some point during the scenario, evil, mean, vicious Sliths (because, as we all know, all Slith societies are and forever will be at war with all Human societies) attack the town, and destroy it. You have a copy of the destroyed town as town #18. Finally, let’s say you’ll devote Stuff Done Flag 4,2 to help accomplish this result. Step 1 — Locate the Variable Town Entry function. It’s found under the Scenario Tab, at the top of the screen. Step 2 — Select the town you want affected. The town you select must be a town accessible in the outdoor sections of your scenario. Place the number of the town you want to change (not the number you want the town to change to) in the first column — “Town Entered”. Step 3 — Pick a Stuff Done Flag you want to use. Make sure the Stuff Done Flag is ONLY used for this one purpose, but beyond that, any Stuff Done Flag will do. For our example, we’ve chosen to use Stuff Done Flag 4,2. Enter the first number -4- in the “Stuff Done Flag to add X” category, and enter the second number -2- in the “Stuff Done Flag to add Y” category. Why Spiderweb chose to name these categories the way they did is beyond me, but don’t let their titles confuse you. Step 4 — Modify the Stuff Done Flag. At some point in the scenario, you’ll want the town you’ve specified to change. It might be after a certain amount of time has passed, it might be after the party has completed some quest, or it might be if the party fails to take a certain action. Whatever it is, once that action occurs, call a special that changes the relevant Stuff Done Flag — in our example Stuff Done Flag 4,2. The Number you need to change the Stuff Done Flag to is equal to the number that, when added the to value of the original town, will give you the value of the new town. In our example, we want to change town #7 into town #18, so we’ll need to change the Stuff Done Flag 4,2 to have a value of 11, like so. Voila! You’re finished. Once the party triggers the special that changes the flag value, then whenever they try to enter what was town #7, they’ll instead enter town #18. Of course — you can always alter this value again, simply by changing the value of Stuff Done Flag 4,2, allowing you to keep changing which town the party enters. One final note — The Variable Town Entry node will fail if used on towns numbered 0 (the first town of every scenario), so plan accordingly. |
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