More Common Mistakes There's three subtle, yet common, mistakes I'm seeing over and over in the user-designed scenarios. Perhaps you could put a note in your scenario workshop so people can avoid them? a) The Escaping Shopkeeper: Upon opening the door to a shop, I frequently find that with time, a randomly-walking shopkeeper (or otherwise mobile important NPC) will head out the door and wander around town. Evenutually the town is full of wondering shopkeepers, and you have to run all over town just to find somebody. One solution, of course, is to make the NPC stationary. Another is to use the "blocking" floors which prevent monsters from stepping on them. Sometime I put these up to keep the shopkeeper behind the counter. If it's more natural (such as in a blacksmith's shop) to have the shopkeeper wandering the full extent of the store, I put some blocking spaces in front of the door on the inside. (You have to make sure diagonal accesses to the door are also blocked.) b) Trapped by Friends in a Tight Space: I've noticed that in the three scenarios which come with the editor, anywhere a friendly NPC may be wondering around, corridors are always at least two spaces wide, so there's space to move around the NPC. The long one-space-wide corridors I'm finding in some user-designed towns make it easy to get trapped by friendly folks. One time I had to go into combat mode and hack up otherwise happy townspeople just to get out of the fort. Lesson: In friendly areas, make corridors at least two spaces wide (unless, of course, you specifically want to block a space, for instance someone guarding the treasury). c) Leaving Town and Getting Stuck in a Mountainside: By far the most dangerous of the three bugs I mention here, this occurs when an author doesn't test the effect of leaving town from every possible direction. It's easy to get stuck in a mountain or thick tree. Similar difficulties occur when you try to enter a town from a direction the author does not expect. You can get stuck in a mass of pure cave wall. In these cases the only way to escape is to go back to an earlier saved game, or use the scenario editor. - Aaron Lanterman (adl@essrl.wustl.edu)