NWN Adventure Creation Guide

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Another chapter in the guide by Abbot Fenthick Moss is up at GameSpy. Part 5 of this series deals with the concept of rewards and challenges.

A wise approach to your storytelling can actually be to disguise the best possible or most obvious path, while holding out the more difficult or unpopular one in plain sight. By so doing, you encourage your heroes to dig a little deeper into your tale and invest themselves in it more fully. I recently caught another storyteller using this trick to wondrous effect, as follows.

In his story, the heroes were to infiltrate an enemy camp. However, if any of them approached too closely to the main entrance of the camp, two eagle-eyed scouts fled through the camp, alerting their brethren to the disturbance. Once alerted, the camp became a flurry of movements, creating a more difficult environment in which the heroes would have to operate, though things would quickly calm down again once the scouts noticed no further activity.

Realizing the set-up, the heroes thought it might be helpful to circle around the camp, looking for any clues or hints to help them out. What they ended up finding was an alternative path into the camp. It forced them to fight through a series of small encounters but allowed them to eliminate the scouts without a chance of the camp being alerted. So what initially looked to be an impossible challenge ended up becoming quite enjoyable, and the heroes ended the day feeling well-rewarded for their thoughtful actions.

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