SR V3

[Icendoan]

OTOH, I may not have played the game in too long, but I cannot actually think of a place where the other side of a door is plot-critical and doesn't go to another area.

 

Icen

[Demivrgvs]

Dimension Door

.g. teleporting on the other side of the door where you normally need a Mind Flyer to open it

IIRC it doesn't cause bugs, only a mild inconsistency. My concern is that even with 0 casting speed it still takes a round before one cast another spell, so even as a mean of escape it won't help too much, especially with SCS's AI which loves to target the weakest party members like wizards, even if they do nothing offensive. And given it also makes a good use of Haste, either via spell or potion, 15 feets isn't really a safe distance.

Well, it's 30 feet not 15, and usually enough to escape AoE spells if you're quick enough at casting it (I've tried to disappear in front of a Fireball, or jsut a second before an Horrid Wilting affected the area...and it's extremely fulfilling to say the least ).

 

Maybe an optional component then?

You know what, let's do this as most of you, if not all of you, prefer (no LOS, very long range, even up to the entire area then). Newbies are not likely going to use SR and even less likely they're going to choose this spell. Should I add a note in the spell just to remember everyone its "game-breaking" potential or would it be to "immersion-breaking"?

 

What do you mean by increasing its radius?

In the ability header. So that it's possible to DD two screens worth of space away, out of enemies' sight range. Of course, it won't work like that without the 'no LoS' flag on.

I'm having a lot of fun right now with Farsight + Dimension Door (no LOS and 1000 feet range). This combo has some potential imo, and as much potential to break a trigger or two.

 

OTOH, I may not have played the game in too long, but I cannot actually think of a place where the other side of a door is plot-critical and doesn't go to another area.

Locked doors in De' Arnise Keep (though it shouldn't litteraly break the game), the unlockable doors in the Mind Flyer City (actually you'd be able to completely escape the city while in jail with this spell ), the door which must be open by the golem in the Plana Sphere, ...

 

Most of these issues should be somewhat limited if we consider this spell currently don't have a PnP feature which would make this THE "travel spell" par excellence. In PnP the caster would be able to bring with him the party.

 

I'd say to see how much this spell can break the game, by letting experienced players like you try it, and then we'll see if we have to work on it again.

 

 

Power Word Sleep

I've just finished implementing it, but I have a little doubt, should this kind of sleep be "curable"? What I mean is, should I make an affected creature wake up when hit or we should consider this a more powerful version of sleep?

I would say the latter, so no waking up.

Ok, fine with me.

 

Haste

Please confirm also that Haste won't be changing to become a single targeted spell.

I'm not going to do it, as I generally don't do anything unless there's a general consensus.

[Ardanis]

Dimension Door

You know what, let's do this as most of you, if not all of you, prefer (no LOS, very long range, even up to the entire area then). Newbies are not likely going to use SR and even less likely they're going to choose this spell. Should I add a note in the spell just to remember everyone its "game-breaking" potential or would it be to "immersion-breaking"?

Immersion is more important. If one breaks a game he can always reload and try again. Hmm, now that I think of it, isn't that even more immersion-breaking than adding notes into the spell's description?..

 

I'd say to see how much this spell can break the game, by letting experienced players like you try it, and then we'll see if we have to work on it again.

Rest assured, we'll break our games in pieces with such a DD, then will blame you for that happening

 

Well, enough with jokes, I think you're probably right about closed doors - Bodhi's lair, when allying with STs, does sound important (if still not convincing, but that's me).

[Demivrgvs]

I hate myself...everytime I say "good, I've finished" I check the whole spell list again and somehow I always find something else I'd like to work on!

 

For example... (it's going to be a long list of small possible refinements)

 

 

Chill Touch

If I'm not wrong most of you don't like its uber +6 enchantment level (a vanilla inheritance), and I agree, it's there only for "user friendliness". I'd probably reduce it to +1.

 

Speaking of improving with caster level...does the spell need to be improved to be appealing? For example every 6 levels an additional +1 cold damage on hit, and/or -1 penalty to opponent save against strength loss.

 

And speaking of strength loss, do you prefer it or something similar to vanilla's effect? For example -1 to hit and damage rolls. I ask this because we all know how broken characteristc tables are in AD&D, and reducing STR under 16 is completely useless in BG. Otherwise, from a conceptual point of view I prefer the STR loss.

 

 

Color Spray

What about replacing the "stun" effect with a "daze" one? If I'm not wrong many players complained that the effect which more easily takes place seems the most powerful, and this may reduce this feeling somewhat. Daze in theory should still last a round, and disable both physical attack and spellcasting ability. Feel free to discard this, it would mean much less work for me!

 

 

Blindness

I'm probably not going to replace this spell for V3, but I'm quite convinced this spell is way too powerful for a 1st level slot. In PnP it's a 2nd level spell, and it wouldn't disable an opponent the way it does in BG (spellcasters are almost completely out of the fight once blinded).

 

 

Spook

Shouldn't a character under True Seeing being immune to it?

 

 

Reflected Image

Yarpen, have you tried Arcane Remix Improved Mirror Image? As I've tried to make this spell create an illusionary clone a la Mislead but the opcode seems hardcoded and the result is that I can only have the mislead clone (which means permanent invisibility!), or the simulacrum clone.

 

 

Ghoul Touch

Same as Chill Touch, does it needs refinements? Its enchantment bonus imo should be either +1 or +2 (the former would be consistent with summoned ghasts' touch).

 

 

Spell Shield

Despite my various attempts at saving it this spell won't exist anymore within V3 for various reasons. The original one was bugged and couldn't be fixed, SR revise Spell Shield (caster always successfully save for 5 rounds) has been considered too powerful for its level, and last but not least we've discovered that because of hardcoded limitations I had to discard one 5th level spell (sorcerers spell selection allows only 25 spells). Thus considering RR and SCS AI don't use it, this spell is clearly the best candidate to be disabled.

 

Now, this also means we may use its scroll slot and bams for another spell. There's not a single spell protection spell at 8th level for example, and at that level we're quite free to make it very powerful. Looking at PnP I've found few suggestions and the 8th level Protection from Spells in the PHB (+8 to saves against spells and spell-like abilities, affects up to 5 creatures) does seem very similar to V2.9 Spell Shield,

 

Any suggestion?

 

We have one or two days to discuss the last few things as to consider V3 closed I'm only waiting a few bams and a some code from Yarpen and Mike.

 

 

P.S

 

Dimension Door

I think you're probably right about closed doors - Bodhi's lair, when allying with STs, does sound important (if still not convincing, but that's me).

Oh my...that is way worse than the issue in the mind flyer city. Are we really sure we want to remove the line-of-sight limitation? I'm very worried if you haven't noticed.

 

 

P.P.S Do you like Forgotten Realms lore or not? For example Minor Spell Sequencer and Spell Sequencer within FR world are known as Simbul's Spell Matrix and Simbul's Spell Sequencer. This is a very small thing, but we have many spells within BG which follow the lore (e.g. Scorching Ray - Agannazar's Scorcher; Transformation - Tenser's Transformation; and so on). I personally like it, but I can live without it.

[yarpen]

Chill touch

As far as I remember there is one nice effect of this spell in PnP which could make it extremaly useful especially in BG1. Every undead strucked with this spell have to make save vs. spells or is in PANIC for next 5 rounds. It would be a nice option for wizards to scare some ghouls.

 

Blindness

I think that this spell should be completely rebuilded. In polish BG2 this spell isn't "Oślepienie" which means complete blindness and seeing nuttin' - but "Ociemniałość" translatable to "partial blindness" - so some parts of vision are blurred or even black. And instead of -10 to thaco, reducing vision sight to minimum, better options would be just a combat penalties, which are f.e. larger than in Doom spell, but lasts short and are easily curable. Something like a -2 to Thaco/AC and additional -2 to Thaco using missle weapons/AC vs. missles and maybe also 20% chance for disrupting spell because wizard isn't sure what he's actually doing.

 

FR naming

Yup, FR names are cool and they give to game a lot of atmosphere. As I hated fact that my wizard is wearing VEKNA's cloak who don't exist in FR, am gonna be proud when I will cast spells signed by Simbul ;-)

 

And in the end, Mike The WeiDU Ninja gave me his ancestrial and near-to-gods lore about transforming ugly without-background BAMs into sweet-jesus-this-stone-bam-rock

[Jarno Mikkola]

Chill Touch

If I'm not wrong most of you don't like its uber +6 enchantment level (a vanilla inheritance), and I agree, it's there only for "user friendliness". I'd probably reduce it to +1.

 

Speaking of improving with caster level...does the spell need to be improved to be appealing? For example every 6 levels an additional +1 cold damage on hit, and/or -1 penalty to opponent save against strength loss.

 

And speaking of strength loss, do you prefer it or something similar to vanilla's effect? For example -1 to hit and damage rolls. I ask this because we all know how broken characteristc tables are in AD&D, and reducing STR under 16 is completely useless in BG. Otherwise, from a conceptual point of view I prefer the STR loss.

The enchantment level should stay in +1 at most, but the bonus factor(Thac0) might go up, up and up. As well the cold damage might, and a standard +1 to target Thac0 is a nicer than the -1 STR penalty, and if you like the damage penalty...

 

Reflected Image& Mirror Image.

... I can only have the mislead clone (which means permanent invisibility!), or the simulacrum clone.

Don't know about the AR, but you could create your own clone creature with 1 hit point and immunity to most spells, and then use the BG2 scripting opcode 250 to recreate the "cloned" appearance. And then give them fireballs.

[Shaitan]

Dimension Door

 

For the record: Has anyone with codingskills taken a look at how SimDing incorporated DD into the game via his tweakpack?

 

 

Spook

 

Sounds like a good idea. Perhaps it can even prevent some misuse of this spell?

 

Spell Shield

 

I like that protectionspell, I don't remember it BTW. Also: removing Spell shield is just fine with me.

 

Cheers

[yarpen]

Uhm, I've played a bit with Arcane Remixes, but I cannot see these new spells

They're only dummies at TRA files. That's sad. Maybe there are solutions for few SR's current problems - I'm not sure am I allowed to post it but

 

Improved Slow (Alteration)

Level: 6

Range: 90 yards + 10 yards/level

Duration: 1 round/level

Casting Time: 6

Area of Effect: 300-foot cube

 

An improved slow spell causes creatures to move and attack at a ninth of their normal rate, unless a save vs. spells is made. It negates It negates haste and improved haste, but does not otherwise affect magically speeded or slowed creatures. Creatures affect by the spell also have an armor class penalty of +8, and an attack penalty of -8.

[Guest Guest]

BG1 NPCs innate abilities

You can find a list of them over at http://www.forgottenwars.com/bg1/good.htm

 

Here are the NPCs with innate abilities:

 

AJANTIS

DYNAHEIR

MINSC

YESLICK

BRANWEN

FALDORN

QUAYLE

SAFANA

ELDOTH

TIAX

 

Monster Summoning III

I'll leave it up to you to decide what's best. All I ask is that, if possible, the spells be effective when cast by the ogre mage without any user intervention.

 

Spiritual Hammer

If possible, making spiritual weapons deal magic damage but have them be affected by magic resistance sounds like the best and easiest option to me. However, your "damage is applied via spell on hit, rather than directly by the weapon" idea sounds very good as well. I think either of these would be good.

 

Kit Revisions

Do you plan to implement divine kits just like Divine Remix e.g. Battleguard of Tempus, Nightcloak of Shar, Strifeleader of Cyric etc? I've been wondering for a while if a sort of "abilities-only" version of the DR kits could be made i.e. including everything in the Abilities section, but without any of the Sphere Access nonsense that sees Viconia get access to only 3 level 6 spells.

[Icendoan]

I agree with pretty much everything here.

 

Also, the Color Spray alternative sounds really, really good as a compromise.

 

Icen

[Ardanis]

Spell Shield

Uh-oh, I'd certainly like to keep it at 5th level, but whatever. Protection from Spells then.

 

 

Dimension Door

For the record: Has anyone with codingskills taken a look at how SimDing incorporated DD into the game via his tweakpack?

Nothing exceptional there, the spell is already in the game data, Sim only activated it, sort of.

 

 

Trap-like projectiles

My post #124. Are there plans to include that feature?

 

Spell Immunity

Again, it's from my own 'tweak pack'. As we all know, a caster protected with SI:Evocation is still vulnerable to his own fireballs and clouds and so on. Fixing it manually is time consuming indeed, so during my last play I made a code to assign '206 - protection from spell' effects to SI. Again, if there're plans to finally fix SI once and for all, I'll be more than happy to post the code.

[Demivrgvs]

Chill touch

As far as I remember there is one nice effect of this spell in PnP which could make it extremaly useful especially in BG1. Every undead strucked with this spell have to make save vs. spells or is in PANIC for next 5 rounds. It would be a nice option for wizards to scare some ghouls.

Yeah, but within BG it's impossible to implement this because there's only one "fear/panic" opcode and undead creatures are immune to it.

 

The enchantment level should stay in +1 at most, but the bonus factor(Thac0) might go up, up and up. As well the cold damage might, and a standard +1 to target Thac0 is a nicer than the -1 STR penalty, and if you like the damage penalty...

Now that I think about it, the penalty to damage may be dangerous if it can bring the target to "negative values", which would cause it to deal outstanding damage if I'm not wrong (a player recently reported something like this).

 

 

Reflected Image

Don't know about the AR, but you could create your own clone creature with 1 hit point and immunity to most spells, and then use the BG2 scripting opcode 250 to recreate the "cloned" appearance. And then give them fireballs.

I already looked into it, as I did some research to implement a cool 9th level spell or HLA for Illusionists, something like Mirrored Clones (Spellhold Irenicus uses a similar spell creating clones of your entire party). Anyway this involves using scripts, and probably things like invisible creatures or worse. I may look into it but surely I wouldn't embark myself on something like that for V3.

 

 

Blindness

I think that this spell should be completely rebuilded. In polish BG2 this spell isn't "Oślepienie" which means complete blindness and seeing nuttin' - but "Ociemniałość" translatable to "partial blindness" - so some parts of vision are blurred or even black. ...

The problem is that Blindness opcode is hardcoded, and to be "curable" we must use that opcode. We can replace the 1st level version of Blindness with a less overpowered spell, but I'm quite sure I'd simply have to move vanilla's Blindness to 2nd level together with its cousin Deafness.

 

 

Spell Immunity

Again, it's from my own 'tweak pack'. As we all know, a caster protected with SI:Evocation is still vulnerable to his own fireballs and clouds and so on. Fixing it manually is time consuming indeed, so during my last play I made a code to assign '206 - protection from spell' effects to SI. Again, if there're plans to finally fix SI once and for all, I'll be more than happy to post the code.

You all know how much I hate this spell (Improved Anvil handles this spell much better than SCS imo), it's probably the most broken and worst implemented spell ever. I'd welcome your help/code, and now that you mention it, I should change its description because despite its intended behaviour "all spells of x school will be unable to harm or aid the caster" it doesn't prevent a caster under SI:Abj to cast PfMW on himself. If I'm not wrong spells cast by others won't affect the caster (e.g. a cleric can't cure an allied mage under SI:Necromancy), but this don't apply to spell cast by himsel (e.g. cleric/mage could cure himself under SI:Ncr).

 

 

FR naming

Yup, FR names are cool and they give to game a lot of atmosphere. As I hated fact that my wizard is wearing VEKNA's cloak who don't exist in FR, am gonna be proud when I will cast spells signed by Simbul ;-)

In fact I renamed it Robe of Larloch for IR.

 

 

Bams

And in the end, Mike The WeiDU Ninja gave me his ancestrial and near-to-gods lore about transforming ugly without-background BAMs into sweet-jesus-this-stone-bam-rock

As soon as you're satisfyied with your work post it in the relative topic so that anyone can see it, or send your work to me.

 

 

BG1 NPCs innate abilities

You can find a list of them over at http://www.forgottenwars.com/bg1/good.htm

 

 

Kit Revisions

Do you plan to implement divine kits just like Divine Remix e.g. Battleguard of Tempus, Nightcloak of Shar, Strifeleader of Cyric etc? I've been wondering for a while if a sort of "abilities-only" version of the DR kits could be made i.e. including everything in the Abilities section, but without any of the Sphere Access nonsense that sees Viconia get access to only 3 level 6 spells.

It's not the right place/moment for this but I may spend few words on this matter anyway as I've already planned these kits.

 

The answer is yes, KR clerics will be extremely similar to DR ones, but I will not use the sphere system as it's too much restrictive imo. As a general guideline KR kitted clerics will have one spell slot less at each spell level compared to true clerics (finally the true cleric will have something valuable, and true classes should shine in versatility imo), but in exchange they will have one domain spell per level (from 1st to 7th) as innate ability chosen from the domain of his deity (DR does something similiar though to a lesser extent). These innates can be spells normally available only to druids (e.g. Morninglords may cast Sunscorch as 1st level domain spell) or mages (Stormlord may cast Shocking Grasp as 1st level domain spell), and as 2nd level domain spell all kits will cast a custom version of Spiritual Hammer appropriate for their deity (again, very similar to DR's Spiritual Weapons).

 

 

Trap-like projectiles

My post #124. Are there plans to include that feature?

I'll look into it this evening. Perhaps it's not even necessary to use custom projectiles for Fire Trap and Glyph of Warding as patching trapglyp.pro like I did fo Symbols iceglyp.pro should be enough.

[mercurier]

Kit Revisions

but in exchange they will have one domain spell per level (from 1st to 7th)

Uh, maybe not the right time/place... IIRC in IWD2 clerics can select and memorize one domain spell from two candidates from each level. Will KR's cleric have options like this? I guess this can be implemented in two ways:

1. Like sorcerer's spell casting style, two domain spells at the same level share the same "charge" (not sure implementable)

2. Like Spell Immunity, you click a "level x domain spell" icon, and then select from the two candidates (then we need 7 new icons...)

[yarpen]

The answer is yes, KR clerics will be extremely similar to DR ones, but I will not use the sphere system as it's too much restrictive imo. As a general guideline KR kitted clerics will have one spell slot less at each spell level compared to true clerics (finally the true cleric will have something valuable, and true classes should shine in versatility imo), but in exchange they will have one domain spell per level (from 1st to 7th) as innate ability chosen from the domain of his deity (DR does something similiar though to a lesser extent). These innates can be spells normally available only to druids (e.g. Morninglords may cast Sunscorch as 1st level domain spell) or mages (Stormlord may cast Shocking Grasp as 1st level domain spell), and as 2nd level domain spell all kits will cast a custom version of Spiritual Hammer appropriate for their deity (again, very similar to DR's Spiritual Weapons).

I think that lack of this one additional spell for kitted clerics is still not so big disadvantage. You could use additional one which come from original, unreleased IWD cleric kits - lack of abilitity of Turning Undead. In PnP many of specialists had this disadvantage - but there's problem with Lathanderites who should have this ability even stronger.

[Demivrgvs]

Kit Revisions

but in exchange they will have one domain spell per level (from 1st to 7th)

Uh, maybe not the right time/place... IIRC in IWD2 clerics can select and memorize one domain spell from two candidates from each level. Will KR's cleric have options like this? I guess this can be implemented in two ways:

1. Like sorcerer's spell casting style, two domain spells at the same level share the same "charge" (not sure implementable)

2. Like Spell Immunity, you click a "level x domain spell" icon, and then select from the two candidates (then we need 7 new icons...)

Long story short, probably not (unless someone with huge influence like Mike forces me to do it ).

 

1. Not doable.

2. Doable, but it requires 3-4 times the work! Instead of one .spl file per level I'd need three .spl files and one .2da file per level, which means the three original kits alone would need 84 files (instead of 21)! Considering I'd like to implement at least Nightcloak of Shar kit too for Viconia (and only later the other kits if I have the time) I'm not too eager to work on 100+ custom spells.

 

Furthermore, domain spell lists with two spells per level are even more difficult to write down (though actually I already have almost complete such lists for the three original kits) and quite often one of the two spells would simply be a spell already available to the cleric (thus we would be doing a lot of work without adding too much to the gameplay experience imo).

 

Anyway, I'll open a topic on this mattar as soon as SR V3 is "closed".

 

Edit:

 

... As a general guideline KR kitted clerics will have one spell slot less at each spell level compared to true clerics...

I think that lack of this one additional spell for kitted clerics is still not so big disadvantage. You could use additional one which come from original, unreleased IWD cleric kits - lack of abilitity of Turning Undead. In PnP many of specialists had this disadvantage - but there's problem with Lathanderites who should have this ability even stronger.

Ok, it seems it would be better if I start such a topic asap!

 

Anyway, you have anticipated my moves!! Yeah, I've thought about it, and we may work on it if we all agree on such things. Surely if we want to add them any other special feature on top of their domain spells (like Stormlords electricity resistance or ability to add electrical damage to weapons) we have to find additional restrictions. We'll see.