Future tweak ideas - post 'em here

[subtledoctor]

I never understood this idea that undead should be immune to crits and “backstabs.” Just because they don’t have a beating heart doesn’t mean there aren’t weak points in their physical structure to be exploited by a canny attacker who is hidden and thus able to clearly evaluate/optimize the next strike. Heck, some undead like skeletons have their structural weak points more obviously exposed than normal humanoids do. In some stories decapitation is the signature method for taking out vampires. Et cetera.

It always seemed to me the only ones who should be exempted from crits/backstabs are those with no body at all, like mists and spectral undead, and those with completely undifferentiated body structures, like slimes and elementals and (arguably) golems.

[Luke]

23 hours ago, Guest Morgoth said:

Is

  Reveal hidden contents

Adalon [

in human form immune to backstab? 

Guess you meant

Spoiler

Abazigal and Draconis

...?

The former is, whereas the latter is not (since it's not coded as a dragon...)

Now that I think of it, the former should not be coded as a dragon while in human form...

[jmerry]

ToB is kind of bad about spreading backstab immunity to a bunch of random stuff. For example, Aesgareth's entire party of mostly tieflings is immune to backstabs for no good reason. They're all fleshy with perfectly understandable anatomy on a standard plan; they should be vulnerable.

On the flipside, BGEE lets you backstab oozes. That's too far in the other direction.

The SoA campaign gets it pretty close to right; you can't backstab oozes, golems, beholders, or dragons, but most everything else is fair game. If you can distract the ones that see through invisibility, anyway.

Exactly what's right ... that'll require some thought, and different people will have different ideas.

[subtledoctor]

I feel like if you backstab a beholder it should pop like a balloon and go “wheeeeee!” all around the dungeon. 

[Sam.]

52 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I feel like if you backstab a beholder it should pop like a balloon and go “wheeeeee!” all around the dungeon. 

+1

[Guest Morgoth]

@Luke No, I meant Adalon in human form when escorting charname to the drow gates after you gave Adalon what she asks you.

I'm interested in a backstab mod, because I would like to play a thief but the feeling that I'm going to be useless in ToB for the lack of backstab denies me the pleasure.

I have a question for Camdawg_g3: there is a component named Make Bags of Holding Bottomless: I am wondering - wasn't there a consensus that this component was risky for lag and other stuff and that it was made redundant by Atweak setting the bags to (a maximum of) 999 storage capacity?

 

[Guest Graion@Work]

I'd presume that's a classic vs EE thing. The "bottomless" is also finite and I accidentally managed to fill up a "bottomless" bag half a year ago on the EEs without any other negative gameplay effect.

[jastey]

On 7/6/2022 at 2:22 AM, subtledoctor said:

I feel like if you backstab a beholder it should pop like a balloon and go “wheeeeee!” all around the dungeon. 

I just imagined that and think it's very funny.

[Guest Morgoth]

Tweak idea: would it be possible to disable spawning out of air on maps? If you've explored a certain area, coming back to it, shouldn't make X skeletons or X gnolls appear out of thin air.

[jmerry]

"Spawn points" are all over the place. Most monsters in the game are spawned in from them. And it's a complicated scheme that you shouldn't mess with lightly.

Though ... respawning is a thing. And that's a property of the spawn points; there's a flag you can set to have them only spawn once, or the "spawn frequency" interval to control how often they can respawn. There might be something there.

[Guest Morgo]

I meant respawning with my "spawning out of thin air" after you have explored a certain place

[Trouveur80]

It would be nice if the Bracers of Archery were usable by anyone able to use a bow.

[Graion Dilach]

On 7/17/2022 at 9:43 AM, Guest Morgoth said:

Tweak idea: would it be possible to disable spawning out of air on maps? If you've explored a certain area, coming back to it, shouldn't make X skeletons or X gnolls appear out of thin air.

EET_Tweaks has a one-time area spawn component already which works with everything onwards from BG2 AFAICT.

Edited July 18, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[Thels]

There's an unfortunate side effect of using "Commoners use Drab Colors" and Xan's quest in BG1 NPC Project. David Jansen performs an illusion act where he displays six gnomes in six different colors, requests you to focus on one of them, and then claims to know which one you were focused on. He makes them disappear, and then makes five of them reappear, except for the one you were focused on.

If this module is installed, then all of them wear outfits in two shades of gray, breaking the illusion. Would it be possible to ignore these gnomes?

To get this event:

- Recruit Xan and keep him in the party.

- Travel to the Nashkel Carnival, and in the armor tent (the rectangular one), buy a bag of grain and a bag of turnips.

- Travel to the North Nashkel Road, and follow the road. You should run into David Jansen and two Ogres.

- Give the Ogres some diet tips, and they'll eventually wander off. As a thanks, David gives you the show.

[HunterZ]

Would love a tweak to clean up the whole ankheg shell situation in original BG1/BGT:

• Fuiruim in Beregost takes all your shells for 500gp, forcing you to do a ridiculous dance of picking one up, selling it, picking up another, etc.
• Fuiruim stops buying them at all after you commission a set of armor, which makes no sense.
• In my bg2 fixpack + BGT-Weidu game, Fuirium seems to buy only one shell and then sets the MAKEARMOR global to prevent selling additional shells?

BGEE apparently changes all of this, such that you can simply always sell shells at 500gp regardless of armor crafting status, and only 1 is taken from your inventory each time. Would be great to get a BG1+BGT tweak to replicate this in the non-EE games.

In the meantime I'm getting around it by repeatedly setting the MAKEARMOR global to 0 (and a one-time reset of SHELLROTTING to 0) using console commands and/or Near Infinity.