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Unearthed Arcana presents Might & Guile: tweaks and kits for warriors and rogues


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When dealing with enemy NPCs, some of this can be abstracted. Bioware, for example, coded most enemies with 9/9/9/9/9/9 stats, rather than give them real stats. If they wanted the enemies to have combat bonuses that might simulate high STR, they just tacked on combat bonuses. If they wanted the enemies to be harder to hit, they just changed their base AC. So, the difficulty level of the game more or less is what it is - only in a few cases does it faithfully represent pitting you against enemies playing by the same rules as the player.

 

I don't feel the need to do it differently. What will the player care whether some no-name enemy thief about to be slaughtered has chosen these feats or those feats? Instead, I apply these in a very simple and uniform way:

- All enemy fighters get one of the combat stances. They might knock you back, or they might knock you down, or they might have "Parry Slashing" and be unusually difficult to hit with your longsword. This is applied randomly, and in my playtesting it works great - enemy mobs randomly do very annoying things that can disrupt the flow of my slaughtering them. ;)

- All enemy thieves have the 'Fighting Dirty" feat... I think almost all of them use bladed weapons so this means they can Slow you briefly. And all enemy thieves (as of the upcoming version) also have the Spell Evasion feat, meaning they will have an uncanny knack for surviving your fireballs and skull traps.

 

Most of the feats are actually passive bonuses, so when I get around to it I can look into applying more to thieves - maybe do it randomly like I do fighters. Some will have higher backstab bonuses, some might have AC or thac0 or saving throw or Luck bonuses, some might have flaming weapons, or some kind of poison. (Does the game ever have thieves try to poison you?) Again, I don't feel the need to be too rigorous about this... something like, every thief will randomly get 2 out of 6 passive feats, plus Evasion and Fighting Dirty.

 

EDIT - also, this is not quite the same thing, but my other mod adds a stunning effect for shield bashing when you are specialized in S&S style. SCS gives some enemies style specializations, which means some enemies carrying shields have a chance to stun you just for standing near them.

 

Put all this together and even lowly trash mobs can hit you with Stun, Slow, Sleep, or Wing Buffet effects. It's just a little bit extra to keep you on your toes, which I find very fun.

 

Oooh, maybe I should also give some called shots to enemies with bows... :devlook:

Edited by subtledoctor
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There is CTD with Quickstride component from this mod, when you try to revert to normal walking speed with Normal stride this is what happen:

Quote

ASSERTION FAILED! Return Address: 0x4FF726 File: CGameEffect.cpp Line: 1536 Expression: FALSE Message: (null)

Ideally you can choose to not use this option, but it tweaks classes and kits which get bonus movement speed ( barbarian, monk and some custom kits ) to normal walking speed. I discovered this on easy Tutu. Strange, I think there was no problem with this on my last BWS BGT game. But that was a long time ago when warrior feats were standalone component. Most probably EE effect strayed here hmm? 

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On 8/20/2019 at 4:49 AM, Greenhorn said:

There is CTD with Quickstride component from this mod, when you try to revert to normal walking speed

Most probably EE effect strayed here hmm? 

More likely an EE effect was added on purpose. Sorry bud, I just can’t be hamstrung by the limits of the original engine anymore...

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Gosh, this thread is out of date.  I'll update the first post when I can to give a full run-down on what the mod includes.  For people who haven't been following, the biggest change for the v4 series is spreading bards among the fighter/mage, mage/thief, and fighter/thief classes (there's a Halfling Whistler demibard kit!) and allowing them to use a funky new kind of spontaneous spellcasting.  (tl;dr: you learn spells from scrolls, memorize a few of them each night, and the next day you can cast those memorized spells like a sorcerer.)

The current update, to v4.4 doesn't involve many substantive changes (except to restore the Meistersinger's "summon rats" ability).  The main thing is that the mod is now compatible with versions 4b17 and higher of Spell Revisions.  And it has a few bits of compatibility code designed specifically for Tome & Blood v0.8sd42 and Faiths & Powers v0.78sd9.

Edited by subtledoctor
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With 4.4 Revised Archery finally installs for me (it wouldn't the past several releases) but the Elven Archer I tested doesn't actually receive the new archery feats. At first level she had the feat selection option, but then the archery feats weren't present and no others could be selected. Subsequent levels allowed for selection of the other available feats, but still no called shot ones. EDIT - Strike that, the feats are all there they just don't have icons in the IWDEE feat selection menu. A bigger issue for the Elven Archer is that they don't appear to get any spells in the FnP sphere system (for which this is the wrong forum, I suppose. I can post it there as well if you'd like).

Also, as far as I can tell the Tomb Runner doesn't actually get Use Any Item.

I don't think the Slinger is a demi-bard? At least in my install, elves can select the Herald Fighter/Thief which is a demibard, but the Halfling Slinger is just an Archer-like kit.

Edited by IvanKaramazov
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1 hour ago, IvanKaramazov said:

With 4.4 Revised Archery finally installs for me (it wouldn't the past several releases) but the Elven Archer I tested doesn't actually receive the new archery feats. At first level she had the feat selection option, but then the archery feats weren't present and no others could be selected. Subsequent levels allowed for selection of the other available feats, but still no called shot ones. EDIT - Strike that, the feats are all there they just don't have icons in the IWDEE feat selection menu. A bigger issue for the Elven Archer is that they don't appear to get any spells in the FnP sphere system (for which this is the wrong forum, I suppose. I can post it there as well if you'd like).

Also, as far as I can tell the Tomb Runner doesn't actually get Use Any Item.

I don't think the Slinger is a demi-bard? At least in my install, elves can select the Herald Fighter/Thief which is a demibard, but the Halfling Slinger is just an Archer-like kit.

The IWDEE UI is problematic for Kjeron's spell-learning system.  It works, but it isn't intuitive.  And it only shows 10 spells per level, with no ability to scroll, and you have to click a spell into the "memorize" slot and then click it again just to see the description.  (And then remove it from the "memorize" slot to try to read another spell's description.). I'm surprised about the missing icons... but not super surprised.  In the BG games' UI even if the icon is missing you can still click on the spell name... but in IWDEE the icons are all you see, so if they are invisible... yeah, that's problematic.

In QD_MCT12.spl, there should be a 177 effect targeting the Tomb Runner kit, which applies d5lorm1#.eff, which has an opcode 146 effect casting d5LORM1.spl on you, which applies a permanent (timing 9) opcode 302 effect (UAI). 

Yeah sorry, the Slinger is just a fighter/thief who uses slings.  The demibard I meant is the Whistler kit, which is altogether more interesting.

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On 11/27/2019 at 7:50 PM, Guest Catapultam_Habeo said:

Fighters get access to Rogue Feats as of v4.4.

Not sure if this is a bug or not.

Well, fighters are supposed to get access to some feats, and some fighters are supposed to get access to some rogue feats.  So it depends on precisely which feats you are seeing that you don't think you are supposed to be seeing.

I don’t think the feats component has been touched recently, except for dome very very small adjustments. Nothing like the kind of changes that would alter which kits get which feats.

Edited by subtledoctor
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Guest Gwaihir

There's a recurring issue in my installs that involves the mods 'Eilistraee's song' and 'Yvette'. Those mods add one kit each, and for some reason one of your mods (i think it's faiths and powers because one of those kits gets sphere access and the errors happen almost always while installing MnG) messes up with them. Specifically, the values for 'ESxKit' and 'YxKit' in the KITIDS column of the 'kitlist.2da' are erased. After fixing this issue, If I uninstall and reinstall FnP and MnG, the error comes back.

This is the error I get every time:

#ERROR: cannot convert kitids_num or %kitids_num% to an integer
#ERROR: [kitlist.2da] -> [override] Patching Failed (COPY) (Not_found)

I've been able to fix this by typing the correct ID for those kits, which is listed in the KIT.IDS file; since I've read about at least another user having this same problem I guess it's not just in my install, so I hope this information can be useful.

Cheers

 

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3 hours ago, Guest Gwaihir said:

There's a recurring issue in my installs that involves the mods 'Eilistraee's song' and 'Yvette'. Those mods add one kit each, and for some reason one of your mods (i think it's faiths and powers because one of those kits gets sphere access and the errors happen almost always while installing MnG) messes up with them. Specifically, the values for 'ESxKit' and 'YxKit' in the KITIDS column of the 'kitlist.2da' are erased.

#ERROR: cannot convert kitids_num or %kitids_num% to an integer
#ERROR: [kitlist.2da] -> [override] Patching Failed (COPY) (Not_found)

I've been able to fix this by typing the correct ID for those kits, which is listed in the KIT.IDS file;

I’ll take a look, but I find it highly improbable that any of my mods would delete an entry in kitlist.2da. More likely, those mods leave that field blank - some NPC mods have been known to do that, for some reason I cannot fathom. Even the Beamdog devs did the sane thing with the Wilson kit.

(I sort of get why those mods do it: in general gameplay, an NPC-only kit that is unavailable to the player does not really need that field to be filled. But, given that it can cause problems for other mods reading that file and given that the amount of work required for the original mod to populate the field with a value is truly, literally trivial, I think leaving it blank is indefensible.)

I recently, experimentally, started adding the 2DA_MISSING_COLS function by @K4thos, to prevent errors caused by other mods which omit 2da entries. It seems that function causes its own problems, though, in adding a non-integer value to a column that expects integers. 

I should be able to adapt that function to create a workaround for both problems. 

Edited by subtledoctor
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Guest Gwaihir

Here's how it went: I was going through a full EET install with near infinity, just installed your mods and fixed that issue manually with nearinfinity. Then I saw TnB 0.8.43 and FnP 0.78sd9.2 came out, so i decided to uninstall them (only TnB, DR, FnP, and MnG, using the exe installer in the game folder), download the new verions, and reinstall. The issue came out again, this time while installing the feat system. So those KITIDS entries were deleted during the uninstall process, not by your mods... is this a regular weidu behavior? Sorry for bothering you with this, I'm just trying to be helpful XD

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If those entries were blank to begin with, and a mod filled them in, and then you uninstall that mod, then yes the uninstall process could ‘delete’ the entries. That’s why I suspect they are left blank by the original mods. (That, and I’ve seen other mods do that.)

Edited by subtledoctor
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Guest Gwaihir
4 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

If those entries were blank to begin with, and a mod filled them in

Actually no mod does that, I've always had to fill them manually whenever a component from Mng and FnP failed to install. The only other kit mod i have in my install is Divine Remix, but it's a recent addition and i had the same problem without it.

Oh well, thank you anyway for your quick answers.

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