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The World of Aventia

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

The World of Aventia

A huge world of vastly powerful characters, nefarious villains, and hideous creatures. Aventia does things on a big scale. Great features like PvP battlegrounds, PvP Clans, Tournament Arenas, Guilds for Classes, Infinite Casting Nerf, Pick Pocketing Nerf, Disarm Nerf, Tenser's Nerf, Timestop Nerf, Area Binding, Server Portals, Loot Dividers, Player Housing, player account based bank and Loot Vault.... Yet you are still looking for more? Players are invited to submit material to a central DM committee to decide on new features, areas, and creatures. We spoke with founding organizer Jason de Cordoba, aka Oclair Monanari, on how this all got started, and with PinkFuzz on the plans for the future.

Can I get a website for more information?

Jason: The BioWare guild is by far the most important page for Aventia (alternately reachable via http://aventia.vvi.at). There is also a web page, which is quite neglected but does have some interesting information.

How does the 'player contributed content' work?

Jason: Player contributed content is fairly simple. It is based on an API, which is a set of rules providing contributors with a framework that permits them to fabricate creative work compatible with the enormous body that compromises Aventia. To have submitted content accepted it must be compliant with the API. Many times, the API guide creates more questions than it answers, which might be good because it is intended to help ensure what gets submitted is created competently. I am certain that you will find the basis of it to be very interesting and perhaps indeed be something BioWare might consider in the future.

You mention role playing not required. What do mean by that?

Jason: Many worlds enforce role playing. I always felt it was ridiculous since NWN displays so much diagnostic data to players. In fact, I feel it should definitely be chosen by the DM what information a player may have. For example, players should not really know the exact details of the results of their attacks as in the real world there is no statistical data showing up above your opponent when you are fighting them to death. Therefore, I feel the enforcement of role playing is not only futile but going against the hard-coded statistical nature of the NWN game engine.

What are some of the features of Aventia that you are most proud of?

Jason: What I am most proud about is definitely a tough question. I must say that probably a great moment was the point where we were consistently having 74 simultaneous logins, which provoked the establishment of multiple servers, which of course lead to the splitting up of the module into 5 different servers. Also, the player contributed content that, back in 2003, made the Aventia servers one of the most active NWN-based persistent worlds online for over a year. Unfortunately, when we did split up the world into separate servers we lost our player population, who for one reason or another did not feel it was as comfortable as it was before.

PinkFuzz, what are your responsibilities with regard to Aventia?

PinkFuzz: The list of duties ranges from simple everyday tasks, such as fixing corrupted characters, to larger scale issues, such as incorporating new user submitted content into the realm or balancing scripts, mobs, and items.

As the 'new guy' what are the biggest challenges right now?

PinkFuzz: The biggest challenge for the Aventia right now is maintaining interest for all the veteran players while still drawing in new players.

The DMs help to inject interest by holding PvP tournaments every Saturday for various levels of players, with the winner receiving rewards that can be collected to exchange for high end items. Other ideas in the works are random puzzle treasures that have a random area name jumbled up that has to be solved in order to find the real treasure, elite level items that are made by collecting pieces of items and combining them in different combinations, and dynamically generated in-game PvP quests (i.e. Paladins get tasked to slay evil players, assassins/rogues get orders from their guild to kill other PCs). Additionally, we have a "Welcome to Aventia Day" upcoming on June 11 & 12 when many of the veterans will be playing new characters to party up with new players and introduce them to Aventia.

There are also technical challenges in managing a persistent world that is spread out over 5 servers. A lot of work has been put into procedures for sharing the common monsters, items, scripts, and placeables across all the servers while keeping each server's areas and custom content distinct and separate. A plethora of tools from the NWN public community are being used, such as modpacker, NWNX, and DMFI, just to mention a few.

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