Encounter Trigger Painting and Spawn Points Placement []

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====== Encounter Trigger Painting and Spawn Points Placement ======

Never pinpoint paint the rectangles on the floor to copy the walkable terrain.

{{:en:modulebuilding:spawnbad.png?400|{{:en:modulebuilding:spawnbad1.png?400|NOT THIS WAY!!!}}

Not only this won't be 100% and smart players moving via mouse might be able to move through and not spawn your encounter, it is needless. The encounters and triggers do work regardless of their Z positions, so pain it from top down to include non-walkable parts.

Additionally, when painting spawn points, you need to understand that there is no randomization. The encounter always selects the farthest spawn point from the spot where some player activated it. In the case above, only the last spawn point will be ever selected to spawn creates at. So those two spawn points are useless there. The good encounter should look like this:

{{:en:modulebuilding:spawngood1.png?400|}}

This is however still not optimal. And that is because unless the encounter is Single Shot (spawns just once ever) then if the player tries to return back in the way he came from and the encounter respawn timer passed, then the creatures will spawn behind his back. And that is wrong.

Note that simply painting spawn point from the other side won't work. It won't work because the rectangle is too thin and you can't really precisely place the spawn point in a way so that it would work the way we want. You need to make the rectangle bigger. So the optimal encounter should look like this:

{{:en:modulebuilding:spawngood2.png?400|}}

Now, encounter settings. A common mistake is to set maximum creatures larger than minimum. This is because yet again there is no randomization! Vanilla encounters will always spawn same number of creatures which they calculate based on the creatures' power (Challenge Rating) and player's party power related to encounter's difficulty setting value.

{{:en:modulebuilding:spawnsettings1.png?400|}}

So if you set 4 min and 6 max what will happen is that if low level player enters the encounter it will spawn 4 creatures and if high level player enters the encounter a 6 creatures are spawned. Why this is wrong?

Because in multiplayer environment this can be exploited and abused. A high level character can be helping low level characters by spawning the encounters to force it to spawn more creatures than it would spawn for low levels. Or the high level party could bring a low level noob just to exploit a badly setup encounter and force it to spawn just 2 uber boss guardians instead of 5. Additionally, whenever a high level player runs through area with such encounters and ignores the monsters, then unless they despawn it can cause a "death trap" for the low levels that comes into this area later. This is especially true if you make another settings mistake I will explain below:

{{:en:modulebuilding:spawnsettings2.png?400|}}

Never add multiple creatures of different CR (Challenge Rating) into one encounter. Again, there is no randomization. Encounter will select creatures based on entering player's party power. This means that if a level 40 spawns this encounter it will always spawn Shadow Fiend and in this exact case Zombie Warriors (1 and 5). And that can be exploited and abused again. You just don't have control over what vanilla encounter actually spawns.

Therefore, use either one creature per encounter or make sure that the CR of the creatures inside encounter is identical. If it is not then it might always spawn two creatures A or two creatures B. Note that even if all creatures have same CR, it might still not spawn all of them. If they have same CR then it is random and the encounter can spawn either 2x creature A or 2x creature B or both once.

The Unique flag doesn't help much. Flagging a creature by this flag should enforce a maximum limit of 1 copy of this creature in spawn. However, it doesn't mean that the creature will be always spawned. That is still random (if all creatures have same CR) or based on player's party power. So the badly setup encounter on images above would ever spawn Shadow Fiend if a level 5+ enters the encounter. Roughly.

I think that this can even lead to issue where a spawn that is supposed to spawn two creatures spawns only one because it randomly selected that it will spawn twice creatureB but then the Unique flag prevented the second copy to be spawned.

Flagging multiple creatures as Unique just leads to more complications and confusions. So I recommend to avoid that.

If you want to ensure that players runs into creatureA+creatureB then use two encounters painted on top of each other which will spawn //"one of a kind"//. Or use my custom [[https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/script/trigger-based-spawn-system-shadooow|Trigger-Based Spawn System]].
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