Music and Henchmen

[Silverleaf]

Two good ideas I thought about over the past week while on holidays.

Firstly, henchmen. Would it be possible to hire henchmen at different cities or something? For example, you can go to Rhun to hire a Silversword Mercenary, or perhaps after you complete an evil quest you can hire out rogue Urak-hai. Prices could vary depending on the level of the henchman you wish to hire. I think this would be a wonderful feature. Very useful if there is noone else to party with. DMs could even possess the henchman after. :P

Second idea is custom music. I for one love the music in NWN, but after listening to it day after day after day it gets quite old. There are some wonderful music hak packs you can download. I even saw some LOTR music you can put into a module. Although the download for the hak would be 100mb+ I am sure, it would be worth it in the end. It would definetely help with the atmosphere. :)

[sneppah]

I like the sound of the henchmen, on my other server, that is dead now, they also had henchmen, it was pretty cool, you could level him as you wish, in different classes and he would be 2 levels under you, you could give him every item you want to, so he could use it, you could even raise dead him.
You could have 3 henchmen there, but 1 is allready enough.

[DM_Olórin]

The henchman would be a considerable burden on the server, much moreso than the animal companions we already have, for the henchmen would have all their gear and weapons, effectively an additional character present with the player at all times. DMs would not be able to possess a henchmen while it was under control of a player. :P

Sneppah, I dont know what server you came from but that policy of allowing you to have a controllable henchmen almost as powerful as youself seems a bit daft IMO. I can think of a few parties who would happily exploit that.

The LOTR music hak pack should frankly be illegal as its a pretty obvious breach of music copyright law. Nice if it was ok to use it, but i fear it would get us closed down.

[ULF]

if you could have henchmen, I think most of the players will running around solo and have a henchmen.
This server stands for party and tactics.

[Guyror]

Wha taktiks?

[ULF]

aye

[clone number 3]

Aren't they those little mints that freshen your breath?

[ULF]

I dont know, Im not so good at english. Im trying.

[Argon Balros]

why not just play the lotr sound track on your cd player while you play nwn

[ULF]

haha thats one idea

[Silverleaf]

Because what if you don't have the LOTR sound track? About the henchmen, perhaps you could only have one henchman maximum and cannot change his inventory, as well as he only lasts a limited time, like after your 3rd rest.

[Argon Balros]

i have one thing to say about henchmen LAG!

and as for not having the lotr sound track i'd sujest getting it if you want to listen to it, seems simple to me

[wyrmwrath]

"What tactics?"

You know...start buffing the orcs so that they can run in half way through, get beat down and drag the boss back to where the mage was buffing the group so that he kills the mage and cleric and everyone loses 200 GP/level and 50% of thier coin....those tactics! Geesh...

:)

[ULF]

but some times it can work :)

[dsan1]

hello everybody! i'm back from my little break! even though the sun still shines i can't wait to check out the new hardware...

i don't think using the ltr-motion picture music would be a good idea. besides copyright issues already mentioned above i must say that - although i do like the movies very much because they stick to the books and there are no kunf-fu-ninja-sinda-elves and hours of "arwen thinks aragorn's soooo cuuute" (that's what i feared before their launch...) in it - i do think that utt2 does in no way refer to peter jackson's idea of middle earth. the sources for the server are the numerous books of j.r.r. tolkien himself and the imagination of the dev team. using the ost would suggest that the server is ment to be a copy of p. jackson's middle earth which is in no way achievable nor desirable with the possibilities nwn gives...

[DM_Olórin]

to be honest the dev team are all big Tolkien fans and i think we are all pretty happy with PJs movies. It was a damn good effort given the challenge :) and many of the nice additions (OK not the elves at helms deep which was fun but a bit daft) were very worthy of the work. in a similar way we are doing what we can with the tools (toolsets) to hand. It wont ever be exactly what we would like but so long as we can live with the result and feel that we have at least tried to do justice to JRRTs work and the neccessary level of entertainment required for our players, then we feel satisfied. If any of Mr Jacksons ideas creep in so be it.... look at some of the weapons in the CEP and the Uruks of isengard for instance those models are all inspired by the design work of WETA...

*wishes he had been hammering out orc swords night and day in new zealand*

*slaps himself* --- Gandalf you old fool.... youre getting off topic again...

[DM_Kev]

eah, if I could name three things we have kept up from the film, it would be those hooked swords the Uruks have, Gothmog who was the commander of the orc ground forces in ROTK (he wasn't named in the film, but if you watch the extended edition extra content, you learn his name. My reason for adding him was because i felt Mordor needed more bosses present. Finally, the green glow around Minas Morgul. The book made small reference to it, the film took it further, with a spooky, green hue.

[dsan1]

don't get me wrong, i do like the movies very much. it's just some fear of mine people might loose their "own images" of middle-earth after watching it. before the movies everybody had an other idea of how e.g. gandalf's face might look like, now everybody sees Ian McKellen's face...

there is little way to prevent this, as the power of the images is simply too great, especially when you're watching the movies over and over again as i do.

of course some of p.j.'s ideas will slip into every middle earth based module and even p&p sessions now. there's no way back. all i wanted to suggest is not to claim a utt2-reference to the films. if it happens it happens, just don't let people think that this is wanted.

i never played on stormplay but i once visited their homepage. when i saw the various references to the movies i was not only sure that they will get in big bad trouble someday but also certain that i would never be playing there as most of the middle-earth references on the site were made through movie-images.
get my point?

edited for orthography...

[DM_Kev]

You'll find with the film that a lot of people who watched it did not read the books at all. To many it may well have been just a film with fighting in it, so they decided to watch.

But thats not to say that some people watching were not big Tolkien fans. I recall watching The Two Towers, and there were 3 lads in front of me and my friend all wearing hobbit like wigs and belts with swords. Unfortunately the cinema attendants had to confiscate those :P They kept the wigs though.

I was very cautious not to do a Stormplay, as you mentioned above and 'remake the film'. I feared that if we did that, we get a very narrow minded outlook of middle earth, where everything defers to the story told in the film. I thought it best that more freedom be given and to focus on the individuals more than a character being a cog in a war machine. Each character is different and has their own story to tell and fate to unfold.

[Eorhona Morwen]

Just to get the thread vaguely back on topic, I wonder what everyone's favorite track(s) from the soundtracks is/ are... Mine's obviously the Rohan signature tune and Billy Boyd's part in The Steward of Gondor :)

[ghost81]

Now Billy Boyd singing as Faramir leads his mean to their deaths - that is great cinema.

[clone number 3]

Don't mate, you'll set me off *wipes away a tear* ;(

[morez]

i would like a quest where you get a npc as a henchman who also fights with you but the main task should be that this npc has to survive..

so make him a very aggressive henchman with no possibility to tell him he should stay in the back - that would be some stress i like...

if you finishing the quest the npc shouldnt be your henchman anymore of course.. - maybe he will say something like: "be lucky i was with you" after you got into big troubles to protect him...:)