The Sanctum

I’m happy to announce that the Sanctum v3.2 Beta Test 1 is Ready to go! As soon as I finish packaging the beta test files, I’ll contact those of you who’ve offered to help out.

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I finished my playtest run a couple of days ago, and I’m making the rest of the required changes now. Unfortunately, though, the list is too long (and in some cases the fixes are too substantive) for me to just finish them and upload the beta test. Some of the new changes (such as the new shopping system and modifications to some of the items) also have the potential to alter the play balance, so I’ll need to make one more playtest pass through the modules after finishing to make sure nothing serious is broken. Unfortunately, that’ll take at least a few more days.

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I took a detour from playtesting today to add something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time: a complete re-write of the merchant appraisal system. I’m a big fan of shopping and of using the appraise skill, but the NWN1 implementation of it was really awful. Here are my criticisms of it:

• Appraise rolls encourage players to save and re-try to get better shopping statistics, especially since they are remembered from visit to visit until your appraise skill improves.
• An unlucky second roll can actually cause your shopping adjustment to get worse when your appraise skill improves, which makes no sense.
• Characters with a very high appraise skill can actually sell items back to the merchant for more than they paid for it.
• Characters don’t get a charisma-based shopping adustment, which I always thought would have been appropriate.

I’ve just finished testing the changes that I’ve made to Sanctum v3.2 to address these issues, and I think you’ll like the results.

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