Dungeon Master Forum

Hi George,

Hopefully, this won't be too hard to do. Can we have a "no light" square that can be placed in the dungeon. When stepped on, it would extinguish all light except that cast by the new ambient light squares in 0.39 and the base light of the level - in other words, it would remove the amount of light being cast by light spells and magic items. If the user tries to cast "torch", or "light" while on a no light square, the spell won't work.

This would allow me to design a level with atmosphere where the only light cast is that from light sources I place on the level such as fireplaces and braziers and would stop the player from overriding that atmosphere.

Also, while I'm on the subject of squares that stop things working - could you possibly add a user defined message to the "no save", "no sleep" and "no spells" squares (and "no light") so that trying to do these things displays a customised message rather than just the default "you can't save here" to which the obvious answer by the player is "er, why?"

Hmm... I wonder what the best way of implementing this kind of thing would be. I think that this would work much better as an ACTION than as a square, in most ways that designers would want to use it.

However, I think that it is mostly already doable, and may actually be completely already doable, I'm not sure how strong the "fudge factor" is:

You can already stop torches (SWAP them for non-light-giving clones) and light spells (trap the spell by having it trigger a counter-querying relay instead)-- the only trick is now banishing any light or darkness spells currently in effect. You could try setting the level of ambient darkness to a high level, and see if that does what you want...

Otherwise you may actually need an action that banishes any magical light currently in effect.

I think the simplest way would be if George implemented a command that sets the light level on a tile to a fixed value.

That would be nearly useless. You'd have to cover a level with them.

Better to have an ACTION, and use floor triggers to do it yourself if that's what you want!

Set ambiant already sets the light to a set value - as sophia said, it's then making sure other efects can be cancelled. Multiple darkness spells might do it if you can swap the torhces - really, try it for yourself and tell us how it goes!

Yes, I think this can now all be done in V0.39.

Don't forget that you can route the "light" spells through a conditional relay that checks for party position in the dungeon before deciding whether or not to actually let the light level is altered.