Dungeon Master Forum

Is there a way of making monsters not block the party?

I'd like to have some ambient critters wandering about, such as little rats or spiders -- things that aren't threatening to the party. The party should be able to walk on the same tile as the wandering critter without it getting in their way.

Investigating Monster options doesn't yield anything useful. It seems all monsters stop the party, regardless of how big/small they are?

My first thought would be animated floor items, or have the critters teleport away.

Gambit37 wrote:It seems all monsters stop the party, regardless of how big/small they are?

The second thought would be to make them Non-material. Ghosts don't block the party do they!? If so I never realised.

Immaterial monsters do block the party. I am pretty sure this is hardcoded, and that such a non-blocking monster won't be doable without divine GG intervention.

@Trego: I want to use standard monster AI so that they can do their own thing... flooritems are too much background work

Trantor's right -- ghosts block the party and I don't think we can override this in any way.

Bum. Had a really cool plan for something clever too...

Uff, I'd seen a no_bump flag on the DSB monsters and had assumed it was set to false for the ghost. Wrong!...

LOL, Gambit, you're really moving on the edges of the engine's abilities!

And what about the materialisers in their non-material state? Erm, they probably block the way too... I don't remember, I always kill them too fast...

A creature in the form of an animated floor item would probably look and "behave" weirdly.

This seem to be unsolvable. Your only hope lies in another Beowuuf's smart solution. Let's hope he's got his day today.

It might be possible to have an action associated with the party's tile that is constantly looking ahead and moves any creature on that tile to behind the party. Hmmm.....

couldnt you use a room with a giggler and floor triggers? have them move an animated floor item around. i dont have rtc in front of me, but im sure you can detect what direction the giggler is facing and have that flip the item. i think the key to making it convincing would be the placement of the floor item on the floor tile.



EDIT: floor triggers that activate fear?

You would double the number of levels, but can't you have your real monsters one floor up moving around in a copycat level, and as said then have that generate your floor items (like rats, harmless spectres, etc)

Not sure if you can have the party trigger below a 'move to this place' pad if you want your creatures to intelligently move around with the party?

I totally forgot about this feature and was thinking about it again. Lo and behold, I find this thread and see Beo's last reply -- a genius idea. I will test it out

Though Beowuuf's reply contains ideas from previous post.
I did not really figure that RTC do not have proper non blocking monsters?
I would add this in the todo list of features to fix, more over because it is a feature in DM2 and as it is included in the RTC release, I was thinking it was working - but I never tested RTC DM2 that far apparently; and I don't think it would be that difficult to add.

What is the 'soft-body' flag in the monster stats?

Soft-body determines if the monster stores thrown missiles or not. (Ie, do they drop to the floor instantly, or do they embed in the creatures skin?)

Thanx for the info on soft-body Gambit. I didn't know what it did. That's actually quite useful... hehehe

As for the main topic, I'm gonna see if I can do something like this...