Having predetermined templates is (really only a little bit) more work for you now, but is saved time on every single mob creation. That said, if the vast majority of your mobs are indeed humanoid, and it's easy to set that, then you have basically already solved the template problem for your common cases.

Listen to David. He will make you strong.

Well, until the world starts getting made, I don't really know what kind of templates would be desired. I suppose one could presume that a quadraped would be useful to cover wolves and lions and…I dunno, stuff. Aside from that, I just don't know what folks will want to add to their areas, so I think this is something I'll have to add in as it becomes necessary. On the bright side, I got into a fight with a mindflayer-spider that I made and successfully cut a bleeding gash in one of his tentacles and lopped off two of his legs :biggrin:

That's the way I do it - I created a basic handful of shapes to start with, then just add more as needed. I use a customisable shape for the more exotic one-off monsters, but most creatures fall into one of the existing shapes (note that while lion and wolf can share a template, you'll probably want a different one for horses, another for elephants, etc).

I do need to make changes from time to time, either because I've made a mistake with a body part, overlooked something, or added support for a new body part. Fortunately I only need to update the shape itself, and the changes are then automatically reflected in all the creatures that use that shape. As the number of mobs has grown, I'm really glad I decided to take this approach - I know it seems a lot of work for little return now, but it's definitely an investment that pays off in the long term.

Well, horses would be the same as lions and wolves for me - I'm not making the limbs have attributes for things like attacks, so horses wouldn't get gypped out of a hoof kick or anything - elephants would have four leg limbs and a miscellaneous for their trunk.

I was thinking more about severed hands/feet - a severed paw vs a severed hoof. You might also decide to give lions and wolves fangs instead of teeth, but you wouldn't want that for horses.

Obviously it'll depend on your design, it's just an example of why someone might decide to break quadraped up into separate templates.

Ah, you're perfectly correct there. I currently don't have that level of detail - if a limb is defined to be a humanoid leg or arm, then you can break/cut hands, fingers, feet and toes - otherwise, the only thing that can happen is the limb itself gets broken, cut or severed. I did consider adding some sort of layered properties to the limbs, wherein layer 3 is attached to layer 2 is attached to layer 1 - fingers on a hand on an arm, or suckers on tendrils on a tentacle, or just using two of the layers to have a paw on a leg. Right now I'm content with what I've done, as it prevents nonsensical cosmetics during combat and provides some realism, but I might go back and enhance it with the layers thing later.

But you've said you're running a GodWars - do you still have the shapechanging power for vampires? If so, what will happen if a vampire with a missing hand shapechanges into a wolf?

Eh…hehe…well, I suppose the long and short of that would be no :redface: I don't have much of the original classing system left, and there are currently no player powers that would allow them to shapeshift into a non-humanoid form. You make a good point, though, and it's something for me to keep a brain cell on as I progress - right now, if there were a wolf shapeshifting power I'd go by how badly their arm is damaged. If it's hurt at the hand or finger level, it doesn't matter to the new limb, but injuries at the arm level would translate. Or I could go through and add the layers concept I mentioned above - I made sure that everything dealing with injuring a builder-defined limb is out in its own function, so I can simply add new functionality in there as necessary.

The trick, of course, is the more I go down that route, the more I go toward having to replace all references to body parts with these structures and rewriting the equipment-handling code and then I cry. Actual tears.