If I understand the Lexicon remarks correctly, this is just a simple check of a character’s total level. As a player, I’m wondering if there’s anything that I can do on my end to give my characters the appearance of having more levels than they actually do? This would, hopefully, make some of the encounters that use this script more challenging. I’ve been playing around with different theories, but, outside of actually giving my character levels, I haven’t had anything work yet. So far, I’ve only tested the first chest found in the Prelude of the Original Campaign. Just buffing my character’s experience (without going through the leveling process) didn’t do anything. I haven’t been able to get Leto to work yet, but I’m doubtful that temporarily boosting my character with any amount of extra Hit Dice worth of Hit Points would work, either. Any suggestions, please?
OCs and most singleplayer modules are using vanilla encounters which uses CR and not HD. CR calculation is hardcoded so we don’t know exactly what contributes to that, most feats have CR 0.5 or 1.0 so changing some feat to have higher CR value in feat.2da could do the trick.
Other than that, having summons/companions will boost your CR and game will start spawning harder npcs, but only if there are any. In vanilla OC there are multiple npcs prepared so the game can feel challenging even if you start with lvl 15 maybe, but only npcs up to level ~15 are there because original NWN didn’t have epic levels and thus didn’t have epic monsters.Likewise HotU has no other npcs in spawns because there simply aren’t enough npcs above level 20 it could throw at you
I suspect most fanmade SP module will have this problem as well.
So if you want bigger challenge, use higher difficulty. If difficulty for some reason doesn’t cut it for you, then try modifying diffsettings.2da. Alternatively download custom AI or Community Patch both are making npcs smarter thus stronger.
There is also a possibility for extra difficulty by automatically boosting npcs with random bonuses when they spawn, but I don’t have a script prepared for that to share.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I’m clearly very mistaken in how those encounters in the OC work. I’ve only tested the undead encounters in the Docks Tomb OC Chapter One, so far, but I had completely different encounters for my 1st level solo paladin, 1st level paladin grouped with 14th level Boddyknock, and a 20th level character.
The first chest in the Prelude is the first example that I could find (in OCs) that does use the GetHitDice(oAdventurer) check to trigger a variety of weapons for different character levels. I had assumed that the encounters used the same check, but I was mistaken. Just for the extra challenge, I’ll likely just end up using a wand of summoning, if that would work. But now I’m curious how the script for that chest works and if that’d be something that I could tweak on my end. Is it even possible to make my character appear higher level for these Hit Dice checks?
Oh I see, well no if there are GetHitDice checks inside scripts like treasure loot, then there is no “soft” way to modify them. The only solution would be to rewrite&recompile all scripts using that and replace GetHitDice with custom function MyGetHitDice which would add bonus for game difficulty and other factors that you want.
Not easy to do and nobody did this before mainly because OCs are viewed as a “tutorial” into NWN fanmade content or multiplayer and because unlike other games in NWN we can create brand new campaigns or multiplayer servers, unlike other games where it is not possible or is it so hard that fan-made content basically only involves modifying OC.