Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum News
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 18:23 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's official Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Tim Cain, Lead Designer

Variable spell areas: Hi everyone,

Something came up in a design meeting about spells with varying size of effects. We want to support spells like Wall of Fire, which allow a wall to be created of variable size. Unfortunately, with the end of month milestone looming, no one has time to carefully sift through the hundreds of spells to see which ones have variable areas. So we cannot estimate the time to implement this feature.

Want to help us?

We need a list of every spell in 3rd edition that is castable by a character up to level 10 (i.e. all 0 through 5 spells) that have variable area of effects, usually varying by caster level. This is harder than it seems, since spells like Cone of Cold appear to have a fixed area of effect, but they really do damage up to their range, which is variable.

If someone here has or could point me to an existing list of such spells, that would be great. I can't guarantee we can get all such spells in the game, but without a list, we can't estimate the time involved and we may have to skip such spells or make them with a fixed area of effect. And we don't want to do that.

Manual: Me rite manual! Me rite gud. Full of stuff. Stuff you do. Happy words make it.

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Quote: How in depth is it going to be regarding 3e rules? Will it be assumed that players know at least a little about them, or will there be a ton of info?

I think Tim will be writing our manual in the upcoming months. It is going to be a difficult write because the 3rd Ed. Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's guide combined have about 550 pages of text and are much larger in WxH than our manual can be.

I think it will focus on what is specifically important and pertinant to the module and how our interface explains 3rd edition rules. We are also hoping to include a lot of in-depth in game help. I personally feel that if you don't care or know anything about 3rd edition you can still play the game, but if you are a D&D junkie you'll love all the attention to detail.