Making the GTU not suck

[CamDawg]

I like the second option

Base Damage: 2d4+1
Modifiers: +2 additional damage vs. Shapeshifters
 THAC0: +1
Modifiers: +2 additional THAC0 vs. Shapeshifters

Am I guessing correctly that "Modifiers" is used more for formatting purposes? It could be any word, or none, as long as the formatting is maintained. Yes?

Yes. What I was trying to do is to make it very clear by setting a base damage, and then indicate what extra can be done in special cases. 'Modifiers:' can be dropped, and I like Mike1072's suggestion as well (and it's probably closest to how the descriptions are currently written).

Damage:  2D4 +1, +3 vs. Shapeshifters

Here, though, the +3 is meant to replace the +1, so it actually does 2d4+3 to shapeshifters (not 2d4+1+3).

maybe it is a bug, and it should really be doing additional 3 damage to shapeshifters?

Here's the breakdown of items of this type and their description styles:

• Hammer +1,+4 vs. Giantkin; Bone Club +2, +3 vs. Undead; Dragon's Bane +3; Rod of Smiting; Flametongue; and Daystar all use the same convention as the Bastard Sword +1, +3 vs. Shapeshifters for their description.
  
• Dwarven Thrower uses the Foebane convention. Jerrod's Mace appears to do so--the EFFs (wamacea, wamaceb) that provide the extra damage and THAC0 against demons don't exist in a patched or Baldurdashed game, so it does nothing. Fixpack assigns the unused damacea and damaceb (+5 THACO, damage against demons) since they appear to be the missing EFFs.
  
• A few items already use a variation of the '+x extra damage against y' convention: Skullcrusher, Purifiers, Carsomyrs, and the Flame of the North
  
• Maces of Disruption and Runehammers put special damage on its own line as, essentially, an alternative to the base damage.
  
• The Equalizer has an entire section to try and deal with its damage/THAC0 distribution.
  

So, in shear numbers, it would appear more likely that Foebane has a bug than the Bastard Sword +1/+3 vs. Shapeshifters, though it's certainly not unprecedented. (For the record I don't think the damages of any of these weapons are wrong, just poorly expressed, which is why I'm looking for a GTU type of resolution to the issue.)

 

edit: And in case it's an issue of interest for you BG Fixpackers, Werebane uses the Bastard Sword +1, +3 vs. Shapeshifters convention and Balduran's Sword doesn't list its +4 bonuses against lycanthropes at all. This is based on their BG2 descriptions, of course.

[Salk]

As for the Baldurdash additions, we are making those an OBC in the BG1 Fixpack (aren't we, Salk ).

 

All is up to you and plainab. You are free to accept and/or discard any change I made. You have the .tra file with all that is included. Since you had been far for a long time, I had to take decisions all by myself.

 

It might be that you won't like all of them. Some are just about style, really. Like the decision of formatting everything to single spacing.

 

But there are others that, in my opinion, make the GTU much more elegant.

 

We can discuss this further in the BG1 Fixpack Forum but I do wish the BG2 GTU had a similar kind of formatting so that the two GTUs wouldn't look too different in style.

 

Regards!

[CamDawg]

It might be that you won't like all of them. Some are just about style, really. Like the decision of formatting everything to single spacing.

Do you mean the single or double space following a sentence? This change by itself probably accounts for half of the GTU by itself: the ToB tlk has 34,075 instances of two spaces and 41,792 instances of one. Either way you're looking at a ton of changes for a purely cosmetic issue.

[Salk]

Yes, I meant precisely that. In the GTU revision I provided to Miloch, double spacing after a sentence is gone. Now everything is formatted to single spacing. The unmodded dialog.tlk was pretty inconsistent in this, with several Baldurdash entries that would just convert many single-spaced strrefs to double spacing. I did the opposite.

 

However, since I went through any single line of the BG1 Dialog.tlk I thought to do something about style as well.

 

Perhaps not so many care about it but I personally do.

 

Several decisions that had just a cosmetic impact have been taken and the final layout of the text displayed benefit of it.

[Miloch]

Although I normally double-space things by habit while writing elsewhere, I'm pretty sure I've seen the game do a line break in between two spaces at the end of a sentence so that one space ends up on the next line. It's pretty stupid-looking.

 

But yeah, when you get a chance Cam, you might want to drop by the Proofreading thread in the BG1 Fixpack forum (at least the first post) and point out any differences of opinion or additional things you're doing. It'd be good to have consistency between the two fixpacks.

[Miloch]

Typo in Friends spell description, as here (change "his friends" to "his friend").

 

And I don't know if this qualifies as a typo but, heh... wildly inaccurate:

attacking orcs might spare the caster's life, taking him captive instead

As if . Though I suppose it's theoretically possible, engine-wise...

 

Goes for BG1 too Salk, if you're reading this (I can't be bothered to double-post in the BG1 Fixroom).

 

BTW, I'm looking forward to seeing this non-sucky GTU in the next BG2 Fixpack...

[Salk]

Got it, thanks!

[Mike1072]

Typo in Friends spell description, as here (change "his friends" to "his friend").

Is that actually a typo? Requesting grammar nazis for the sentence:

 

"Those who view the caster tend to be very impressed with the spellcaster and make an effort to be his friends and help him, as appropriate to the situation."

[SimDing0]

It's a horribly constructed sentence, but correct. "Those who view the caster" is plural. Consider: "[They] make an effort to the his friends."

[Miloch]

Yes, as usual, I didn't actually read the full text. It is indeed very poor English. Whoever wrote it should be pantsed. But I suppose there are enough other issues the GTU should address than to rewrite stuff like this.

[Miloch]

For item descriptions, are you keeping the Weight, which seems to be a Baldurdash introduction?

[CamDawg]

For item descriptions, are you keeping the Weight, which seems to be a Baldurdash introduction?

First pass is just to purge spurious changes; I'm not worried about standardizing descriptions yet.

 

Though for equippable items it appears that weight is already listed on pretty much everything.

[Salk]

In the BG1 GTU I have extended weight to pretty much anything that is heavier than 0 and that was missing its weight in the statistics.

[Miloch]

In the BG1 GTU I have extended weight to pretty much anything that is heavier than 0 and that was missing its weight in the statistics.

Maybe this should be up for discussion. I'm not sure it makes sense for everything, like books for example, but for equippable items, yes - especially if it's already the norm. Gems, potions and the like do not list weights though; they're pretty much all the same anyhow (1).

First pass is just to purge spurious changes; I'm not worried about standardizing descriptions yet.

Does that include all the "Usable by: [insert kit here]" Baldurdash stuff? And if so, what's the rule here? I scanned through the un-GTUed game and found a few such references, such as the Drow Chain +3 (dwchan01) being unusable by Kensai. Since this seems to be the exception rather than the rule though, I'd be in favour of losing the kit usabilities.

 

Monk usabilities seem to be an exception though. The vanilla game will mention this specifically in many cases, such as for the Staff Spear +2 (staf07). Do we keep this, or reverse it not just from the GTU but from the vanilla game also?

 

And while we're at it, are we losing the non-descriptive "Usable by: All" and "Not usable by: [EOF]" labels?

[Salk]

Miloch,

 

IIRC gems have always weight 0 so they are not affected. Books have a weight and I have reported it. In particular, the books that enhance the abilities have a superweight that shouldn't be overlooked (I think 25).

 

Really I miss the point of having the weight reported in some cases and not in others. But everything is as usual up to discussion like you say.