What features do DMs want?

[gedweyignasia]

What sort of things do DMs want for their convenience for events and to generally reduce your workload? Features like toggling encounters on/off in a certain area, enabling/disabling rules like the arms/mask check outside FAI for DM events, etc.

[Passiflora]

A faction system, being able to spawn creatures allied with certain PCs and enemy to another group of PCs, being able to toggle someone criminal, which means guards would attack them and only them, not random passer-by.

Such thing is seemingly insanely headachy to script though. Ask Ivan.

[gedweyignasia]

A faction system is reasonable to script if there's a library for NWScript that includes 2-dimensional arrays. Without it, things would be too ugly to maintain or too slow to run on every creature.

[gedweyignasia]

being able to toggle someone criminal, which means guards would attack them and only them, not random passer-by

This should be very doable! Would it be sufficient to have a pair of self-use items for the job? With one item, you select the NPC whose faction's opinion you're tinkering with. With the other, you set the reputation to either liked or disliked on the targeted PC.

being able to spawn creatures allied with certain PCs and enemy to another group of PCs

This one will be more difficult, and could take some time. Give me a bit to come up with an elegant approach. Spawning creatures which are neutral towards certain PCs and enemy to another group of PCs would be much easier, if that would also be acceptable.

[c2k]

being able to toggle someone criminal, which means guards would attack them and only them, not random passer-by

This should be very doable! Would it be sufficient to have a pair of self-use items for the job? With one item, you select the NPC whose faction's opinion you're tinkering with. With the other, you set the reputation to either liked or disliked on the targeted PC.

Considering you have items you can't be rid of like the Server Rules and the DMFI, you can just create an items that places a variable on one of those objects. And the Guards will check for that variable before they react. I think the server rules item might be the best for this, since I believe there is a lot of action on the DMFI item already.

I suppose you could also use the pc_skin, but that is also a messy situation. Setting a variable on an item is permanent as long as the inventory gets saved.

being able to spawn creatures allied with certain PCs and enemy to another group of PCs

This one will be more difficult, and could take some time. Give me a bit to come up with an elegant approach. Spawning creatures which are neutral towards certain PCs and enemy to another group of PCs would be much easier, if that would also be acceptable.[/quote]

The problem here is that messing with factions can be extremely buggy. You would also have to create more factions so that you can have the effect you desire. I've seen it done, but it can be tricky to do.

You can also try to override the AI to have certain creatures never target certain players based on circumstance (such as if they have a guild key, since that is unique of a faction), but that could limit the scope of the creature in terms of battle behavior.

[gedweyignasia]

The plan for the guards would be to work on an item they've got, yeah.

As far as having creatures neutral towards one group of players and hostile to another, you can use personal reputation instead of faction reputation.

[NegInfinity]

Setting a variable on an item is permanent as long as the inventory gets saved.

You're talking about SetLocalInt/String/Whatever family of functions, right? Because I suspect those aren't saved to bic automatically. Or was it some other category of functions?