Future tweak ideas - post 'em here

[Sarge945]

15 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I would assume you want to look at the .STO file for this… though I haven’t looked myself, I’m not sure if it can be changed. I agree it would make sense if the healing was doubled or tripled. In a world of magic, wouldn’t any competitive inn have a deal with the local temple to provide basic low-level healing to all paying occupants? Only makes sense. 

I have looked at the STO files. They store the room prices, but not the room effectiveness. That's why I assumed it was in some 2DA somewhere. It may be hardcoded into the engine, though, which would suck. I could always add the HP manually via script, but it seems that the infinity engine only has a way to detect if the party rested, not in what way they rested. I can use the area flags to determine if they are camping (OUTSIDE, DUNGEON etc) vs at an inn, however I cannot differentiate between what room types they chose.

15 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I would apply low-level healing at inns and reserve paid temple healing for Heal, Restoration, Cure Disease etc. 

The issue with this approach is that resting is generally more valuable than healing directly, because clerics get a huge healing boon by resting, so the moment you have a cleric in your party, you will get more value out of resting than you will out of healing. Compare 20 gold for 1 cure minor wounds vs 3 gold for a rest for the night which completely refreshes a clerics healing spells so they can heal 100+ health points.

As for why I want to change the rest heal amounts, I don't really care much about the world of magic thing (although I guess that is important). I see it as more of a gameplay thing. It's more of an issue with the resting system in general.

The design in AD&D seems to be based on the following 3 points:

- Inns are good for mages/clerics, because they can heal themselves and then rest to recover their spells. It's also designed around party healing - everyone benefits.
- Temples are good for warriors, because they can get healing directly since they won't get much healing from resting. They are more focused on individual services.
- Resting in the wild is supposed to be dangerous, unreliable, and something to be used sparingly. It does benefit the group as well but comes at a (high) cost.

I feel like in the context of AD&D itself, this is mostly fine, since it gives warrior classes and magic classes different and mostly equal ways to recover health safely during downtime. However, I also feel like most Dungeon Masters and players would use these services in a reasonable fashion, DM's would make sure everything is fairly priced, and from my experience in most campaigns, once people leave town they don't return until after the task is done. There's usually not much chance to abuse the resting system since most DMs will tailor the experience to their players or add some time constraints that make resting constantly impossible. Even a strict "by the book" DM may find it frustrating having the party rest constantly, so they would likely add some restrictions to it to prevent abuse.

The action economy design of AD&D relies on resting in the wild being used sparingly. Spells are limited by slots, and slots are supposed to only refresh once per day, which in a typical campaign will mean you will have to use them sparingly, especially higher level spells.

How this manifests in the IE games, though, is a different story. Resting is extremely overpowered in these games, especially in dungeons, because it can be done repeatedly for little effort, and the chances of being ambushed are relatively low. Even if you do get ambushed, it's usually worth repeatedly trying to rest in order to heal, since it's absolutely worth it even if you have to kill a few more area enemies (which, for the most part, aren't a big deal and are usually far easier than the actual tailored encounters in those areas). The only time resting becomes remotely dangerous is if your party is weak and near death. Even then, the encounters are usually quite easy compared to what you've already fought, so it's usually worth it to take the risk. Unless one of your characters dies and you need to go back to town to revive them, the games usually become a repeated case of "complete encounter, rest, recuperate, do next encounter, rest recuperate" etc. It's similar to savescumming but it's more like restscumming. If done right, you will always have all of your most powerful abilities available for every encounter and will never have to ration them. Resting is a constant and as such, there really is no action economy, since recharging everything and healing is effectively free, just with a small element of risk involved. I have no doubt that if someone tried to do this in a real AD&D campaign, they would be punished by the DM for trying to game the system, but because it's a legal way to play, the IE games don't really punish you for it. Tweaks tries to fix this by allowing you to increase the ambush chance while resting, however I feel this is a very clunky solution, as it usually goes one of two ways. Either, you fight a couple more easy ambushes, then rest, so it's just more busywork in order to refresh your abilities, or you end up in a situation (especially with the Quadruple setting) where it's virtually impossible to rest, as you will get ambush after ambush, which tilts the action economy way too far in the other direction, effectively forcing you to constantly travel back to town repeatedly when you inevitably run out of spells and get closer to death, because there's no way to realistically rest in a dungeon at all.

This core IE design also has a knock on effect. Because it's so easy to rest in the wilderness, it makes sense that inns, in order to compete, have to be super cheap. It therefore punishes warriors quite a lot. If I have a party of 6 warriors, and they all get brought down to 1 HP, I may have to spend upwards of 100-200 gold per party member to heal them at the temple, since cure minor wounds is usually around 20 gold per cast and I have to pay for it repeatedly (not to mention the more expensive healing isn't worth the cost because of diminishing returns, but that's a separate issue). That's roughly 600-1200 gold. Meanwhile, with even 1 cleric in my party, I can rest at an inn for 3-15 gold, and even if I have to rest 6-7 times to heal the whole party, that's still only a total of about 100 gold to get everyone to full health. Worse, the warriors, even after being healed at the temple, will still have to additionally pay the 3-15 gold on top to rest to recharge their abilities and remove fatigue. Or they can just rest again in the wilderness for free and maybe have to kill a few goblins. Neither option is all that great.

I feel like the way resting in the wild is supposed to work is that you can get assistance when you need it, can strategize around refreshing your spells and healing, and can recuperate when you need to, but you can't abuse it or do it repeatedly or infinitely regenerate spell uses and undermine the "uses per day" mechanic. It's a mechanic that makes a lot of sense and adds a lot of depth when used properly. The way it's implemented in the IE games, it's mostly brainless and stupid. A button you click when you've finished with a fight to magically get all your spells back for no effort or thought. Maybe it will annoy you with a fight, but most of the time it's worth it to press the button.

As a result of this, I redesigned it using some of the clever and positive design changes from Pillars of Eternity and my own game design philosophy, in an effort to increase depth and make resting as a mechanic more interesting. Namely:

- Resting now requires Camping Supplies, which cost 100 gold each (which, factoring in store prices, is usually around 150 gold realistically) and are single-use items. Resting no longer has any chance for ambush, it will always be successful. This gives you a reliable way to rest in dungeons and strategize around when you want to refresh spells and heal, but with a cost involved, so you cannot spam resting between each encounter without paying severely for it.
- I am also thinking of making resting in the wild heal you for some amount, so that warrior parties can benefit from it as well as parties with clerics. Warriors really do get the short end of the stick in the IE games the way this is implemented by default. This should additionally make it so that you don't need to rest multiple times with any party (as that could get very expensive)
- Inns now cost about 70 gold per night, so they are a little cheaper than camping supplies, you're paying less because they are less convenient, but resting still has a cost associated with it.
- Temple healing remains the cheapest still, at 20 gold per minor heal, but is still largely only suited for warriors. It has a niche, even for parties with clerics, since if you only need to heal a small amount on one or two people and don't need to rest it will be much cheaper than an inn.

I'm still tweaking the numbers, and would appreciate suggestions. The general issue I have is that the prices, while making sense gameplay wise, don't fit into the world. I can buy a working war hammer for 5 gold, but some wood and a few tents, costs 20-40 times as much. And I can't reuse it. That makes no sense. I am personally willing to suspend my disbelief there if it results in better gameplay, as I will enjoy it more overall, but I can see how some "RPG's are all about world and story" types might not like that. While they are free to enjoy the much worse gameplay of the original system, I would hope there's a way to fix it while also remaining more true to the internal consistency of the world, for the benefit of everyone. The other big issue with this system is that it still leaves the different room types largely not worthwhile. A peasant room is about 70 gold, a noble room about 100 and a royal room about 200 (I am just multiplying the existing room prices by about 50). There's no good reason to ever buy anything other than a peasant room, the extra 1-3 HP increase is not worth it at all. I was hoping that by being able to modify the room healing amounts, I could make it worthwhile for a party (especially a party of warriors) to spend more on the larger room, as they would be able to recuperate a lot of health in a more efficient fashion than the temple. I feel like this way, every rest option would still have a niche, the temple would still be useful (right now buying temple healing is completely useless the moment you find a cleric) for healing individuals for cheap, and there would be valid reasons to buy the bigger rooms.

I hope that all makes sense. I have tried to explain clearly what my issues with the systems are and how I went about trying to resolve them. I don't meant to turn this entire thread into a balance discussion or a critique of AD&D mechanics. I just find it very interesting to talk about and it's nice seeing people engage with what I am doing. I'll be honest, in a lot of discussions about both the IE games and AD&D in general, I have found a lot of elitism from people who feel like the games are perfect and any criticism of them is just some sort of toxic jealousy from a D&D 5e player (or something). It's refreshing that forumgoers here largely have open minds, because these games do very much have design problems. That's okay, no game is perfect, and we are all lucky that the issues are with the gameplay - something that's relatively easy to fix - vs the story and setting. It's why the IE games are fixable, but something like Fallout 4 which has structural lore, world and story problems is not fixable no matter how many tens of thousands of mods people make for it.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Sarge945

[jmerry]

Temple healing versus resting ... it's a matter of time. Get healed instantly, or recuperate over a potentially long period of time?

But in these games, in-game time hardly matters. A few quests are timed (better get Samuel to the temple before he expires - no time for excursions or more than one or two rests), but most of the time you're not operating under any pressure whatsoever. Your character can go straight back to the city or take a boat trip that last weeks, and you'll arrive at the ducal palace just in time for Sarevok's big play either way.

Under that paradigm, it's no wonder that resting is usually gameplay-optimal.

In my own play, I try to limit excess resting, and only go through with it when someone in the party is tired or I've genuinely exhausted daily abilities. I've also done a run (BGEE+BG2EE) in which none of my characters were allowed to cast arcane or divine spells. And in that run ... I think I only actually used temple healing to regain HP once. Two instances of Bhaalspawn CLW, Ajantis' LOH, and Kagain's slow regeneration got me through BG1 just fine. Only the return to Candlekeep had me spend gold at a temple rather than just drinking potions, and I certainly had enough potions.

On your proposal ... the Camping Supplies system strikes me as a very bad idea. Especially on something like the BG1 map with lots of wilderness areas and long travel times, resting in the wilderness is practically mandatory if only to clear fatigue and its nasty luck penalties. And you would impose a massive tax on that? Making exploration feel bad isn't the vibe we want here.

[Sarge945]

3 hours ago, jmerry said:

Temple healing versus resting ... it's a matter of time. Get healed instantly, or recuperate over a potentially long period of time?

But in these games, in-game time hardly matters. A few quests are timed (better get Samuel to the temple before he expires - no time for excursions or more than one or two rests), but most of the time you're not operating under any pressure whatsoever. Your character can go straight back to the city or take a boat trip that last weeks, and you'll arrive at the ducal palace just in time for Sarevok's big play either way.

Under that paradigm, it's no wonder that resting is usually gameplay-optimal.

This is the core of the problem. It also affects plenty of other games too that have time-based healing or travel systems (TES, The Witcher, etc). Resources are effectively infinite because the time-tradeoff is essentially meaningless.

If BG, IWD etc had more time-based quests it might matter. But even then, it's not a good solution, because there's still plenty of non-time based quests, which would still exhibit the same issue.

3 hours ago, jmerry said:

In my own play, I try to limit excess resting, and only go through with it when someone in the party is tired or I've genuinely exhausted daily abilities. I've also done a run (BGEE+BG2EE) in which none of my characters were allowed to cast arcane or divine spells. And in that run ... I think I only actually used temple healing to regain HP once. Two instances of Bhaalspawn CLW, Ajantis' LOH, and Kagain's slow regeneration got me through BG1 just fine. Only the return to Candlekeep had me spend gold at a temple rather than just drinking potions, and I certainly had enough potions.

Interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have to artificially limit themselves in order to make the resting mechanics fun. Unfortunately, having people play suboptimally on purpose to make up for shortcomings in game design really isn't a good way of fixing game design problems. It's why I am trying to fix it more fundamentally.

3 hours ago, jmerry said:

On your proposal ... the Camping Supplies system strikes me as a very bad idea. Especially on something like the BG1 map with lots of wilderness areas and long travel times, resting in the wilderness is practically mandatory if only to clear fatigue and its nasty luck penalties. And you would impose a massive tax on that? Making exploration feel bad isn't the vibe we want here.

A few comments on this. First, I appreciate your feedback. Secondly, this isn't really a proposal for tweaks. While it may have started as one, It's now well beyond the scope of tweaks, and it's also mostly done (the mechanics are in, just needs some art and balancing) as a separate, standalone mod. You're welcome to try it if you want, however it sounds like your're not super interested, which is totally okay. I appreciate talking through these ideas with skeptical people who will question them, it forces me to really come to terms with the implications of my design.

I appreciate your concerns about fatigue. Just so you know, this mod was originally created with IWD in mind, since it (IMO) exhibits some of the worst abuse of the mechanic, since it's mostly dungeon-crawling, lots of tough fights one after the other, resulting in lots of rest abuse. Fatigue is also not really much of an issue in IWD because there's not much travel involved, usually each location is only 8 or so hours out of town. I haven't really tested it thoroughly in BG (am only doing a runthrough now), so I appreciate you pointing out how the different structure of the game matters.

Perhaps if I added fatigue potions, which were super cheap (5 gold each or so), and would mitigate the fatigue penalties but not refresh your spells or heal you. I am not really concerned about being able to avoid fatigue constantly, the real core of the issue is the action economy around spell slots. Adding a fatigue potion wouldn't upset that balance, and would make long treks of exploration more interesting. Also keep in mind there's nothing stopping you taking multiple camping supplies with you, just prepare for the trip ahead of time.

Sorry, I should stop talking about non-tweaks related things in the tweaks thread. I would be happy to continue this in PM's if necessary, or create a new thread for it.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Sarge945

[Chitown Willie]

"Interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have to artificially limit themselves in order to make the resting mechanics fun."

That exactly what I do - one rest per map area (or boss battle):

• 1 rest for High Hedge,
• 1 rest for The Mines,
• 1 rest for Mulahey, etc.

Needless to say, there are exceptions (e.g., Beregost - each of the named characters (Silke, Karlat) are given their own "rest), but for the most part, this strategy works well.

"As a result of this, I redesigned it using some of the clever and positive design changes from Pillars of Eternity and my own game design philosophy, in an effort to increase depth and make resting as a mechanic more interesting."

I love love love all your suggestions and couldn't agree more with your reasonings. If you port your mod to BG:EE, I'd install in an instant.

[mickabouille]

Talking about rest, I'm not sure about the fact that you can travel between two maps for 48 hours and never have rested when you arrive!

[Sarge945]

23 minutes ago, Chitown Willie said:

I love love love all your suggestions and couldn't agree more with your reasonings. If you port your mod to BG:EE, I'd install in an instant.

I already ported it to BG:EE. I have sent you a PM

[Graion Dilach]

I... don't understand.

You make a point of showcasing that rest encounters are problematic because they are too easy and the frequency multipliers just turn them into a chore. And you propose a solution... which is basically convoluting everything related to rest and all the alternative options, instead of focusing on the issue itself, even after a fairly solid inspection.

Then you even berate the original system because people headcanon the shortcomings. On the other hand you do acknowledge the issues within your own proposal, but this still gives me the vibes that you came up with your idea first then retroactively did the inspection to justify and defend it. 

A simpler "resting encounters would lead to bigger amount of enemy mobs spawned" tweak would also do the job. Sure, it would be a bit convoluted in terms of code since it would need to clone the creatures set up in the rest encounter to artificially decrease their creature power (or someone going through all the basemaps at least to handcraft rest encounters appropriately with this method being used as a starting point, this is needed because both the spawn point spawning and the rest encounters use the creature power variable). You can make this more interesting if you use dummy creatures which spawn groups like the MiH small spider spawner or the DSotSC-SCS kobold commando spawning it's group of kobolds. This can also be immersive, because the rest encounter could be played out as if a scout of the enemy went back and called in their reinforcements and gave themselves time to prepare for the ambush outright (ofc this doesn't work with animals and the like). Sure, again, this would also be convoluted in code (especially with handcrafted encounters and shim creatures used for blobspawning/introducing variety in the spawned enemies) but it would be more respectful to the core game design.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[Quester]

11 hours ago, Sarge945 said:

stuff

I for one love your proposed changes, and will definitely include this new mod in my next playthrough.

In my current heavily modded EET playthrough I found that by lvl 5 or so I had waaay too much gold to spend. I could basically buy anything I wanted from all the magic item merchants, including the stuff added by mods.

Needing to buy camping supplies does at least something to alleviate this. But I was also looking for a way to decrease the amounts of gold and gems dropped by most regular creatures. There must be a mod for this, but I can't remember having seen it.

I do hope you also find a way to make the more expensive inn rooms worth it for those who can afford them, as well as generally expand upon these ideas further. It's much needed.

[Sarge945]

1 hour ago, Graion Dilach said:

A simpler "resting encounters would lead to bigger amount of enemy mobs spawned" tweak would also do the job. Sure, it would be a bit convoluted in terms of code since it would need to clone the creatures set up in the rest encounter to artificially decrease their creature power (or someone going through all the basemaps at least to handcraft rest encounters appropriately with this method being used as a starting point, this is needed because both the spawn point spawning and the rest encounters use the creature power variable). You can make this more interesting if you use dummy creatures which spawn groups like the MiH small spider spawner or the DSotSC-SCS kobold commando spawning it's group of kobolds. This can also be immersive, because the rest encounter could be played out as if a scout of the enemy went back and called in their reinforcements and gave themselves time to prepare for the ambush outright (ofc this doesn't work with animals and the like). Sure, again, this would also be convoluted in code (especially with handcrafted encounters and shim creatures used for blobspawning/introducing variety in the spawned enemies) but it would be more respectful to the core game design.

I originally wanted to do this, but as you say it requires tremendous work. It's also extremely prone to breakage and generally not a good solution.

If the encounters are too easy, resting becomes inherently worth it at all times, not solving the issues

If the encounters are too hard, resting becomes virtually impossible (like with the quadruple spawning component that already exists).

Even if you were to meticulously balance everything perfectly (a monumantal task), you're still creating a system that's inherently an RNGfest. Which means instead of spam resting, people will spam quicksave instead.

My solution isn't exactly convoluted. You have to buy an extra item at stores occasionally, the same way you might need to occasionally buy arrows, potions, etc.

You're free to not like it, I get that it's not for everyone, but I don't think any RNG solution is really going to work all that well, unless quicksaving was also curbed.

(For the record, I also made a save-disable mod that only lets you save at inns. Specifically to remove the save scum aspect as well. But disallowing saving also disallows resting, so it wasn't viable since there was no way to reliably refresh your abilities in a dungeon, and no amount of enabling/disabling resting with camping supplies etc could fix it).

On an unrelated note, if anyone is interested in trying out the resting changes, I have attached an early PRE-ALPHA version. It uses placeholder graphics. It's only for feedback, do NOT use it on a real game with a character that you care about!

BalanceModALPHA.zip

Edited November 29, 2022 by Sarge945

[Chitown Willie]

1 hour ago, Quester said:

Needing to buy camping supplies does at least something to alleviate this. But I was also looking for a way to decrease the amounts of gold and gems dropped by most regular creatures. There must be a mod for this, but I can't remember having seen it.

I used to use "Aurora's Shoes & Boots" to do just that:

~AURORA/SETUP-AURORA.TP2~ #0 #470 // Change creature gold carried -> Reduce to 50% (recommended): v5.2.1
~AURORA/SETUP-AURORA.TP2~ #0 #420 // Realistic random treasures -> Both 1 and 2 (no treasures lost): v5.2.1

But unfortunately it doesn't work with the EE's, as far as I know.

[Jarno Mikkola]

50 minutes ago, Chitown Willie said:

But unfortunately it doesn't work with the EE's, as far as I know.

The reason being that the mod has not been updates since for ever. A few tweaks to the first 400 lines here, and it's all golden:
https://github.com/Sampsca/Auroras-Shoes-and-Boots/blob/master/aurora/setup-aurora.tp2

Also technically there's an EE version link available here.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Jarno Mikkola

[JediMindTrix]

Things I do to my games I'd like to learn how to automate:

Clerics and Mages can use light crossbows and put a prof point into them.

All warrior classes and their kits (where applicable) can put 3 pips into their proficiencies

All multi-class fighters and cleric/ranger can put 3 pips into their proficiencies

Edited December 1, 2022 by JediMindTrix

[Sarge945]

For the sake of adding depth to the gameplay and making things more interesting, I have ported over the bard songs from IWD:EE into BG:EE, so now you can choose between 6 different songs as you level up.

Fun fact: The IWD song "The Tale of Curran Strongheart" has the same morale reducing effect as the default BG1 bard song, despite morale not really being a thing in IWD.

[Sarge945]

2 suggestions:

1. IWDEE contains a lot of the large hand-drawn item images from Baldurs Gate (which you normally see when inspecting an item), but the game never displays them because it uses a single-column layout and only shows text. I wonder if it's worth modifying the UI to make these visible, since they look very nice in BGEE

2. Apparently the EE's don't really display item icons properly, at least according to this thread. Someone has made a mod to replace the BGEE item icons with the original zoomed in ones, but It's just BAM replacements, and was done manually. This should be automated with weidu, since it only covers BGEE items (not BG2EE or IWDEE) etc. Also please note SOD adds it's own items which don't have the zoomed-in version, so they may look out of place. I would recommend someone create some nice inventory icons for them so they can be included too (and any others from other games that make sense). I think a module like this would be excellent for tweaks. Especially if it could be used in other games too (IWDEE and PSTEE) and contained more icons for the new items added in the newer expansions.

UPDATE: Okay, turns out bambatcher already does this

Edited December 1, 2022 by Sarge945

[Chitown Willie]

9 hours ago, JediMindTrix said:

Things I do to my games I'd like to learn how to automate:

Clerics and Mages can use light crossbows and put a prof point into them.

All warrior classes and their kits (where applicable) can put 3 pips into their proficiencies

All multi-class fighters and cleric/ranger can put 3 pips into their proficiencies

Check out "Scales of Balance" mod, specifically the "Weapon Proficiency Overhaul (WPO): Overall Overhaul" component:

• Crossbows are usable by everyone except druids and Beastmasters."
• Trueclass fighters and Kensai can attain Mastery (+++) at 6th level, and High Mastery (++++) at 9th level, in any weapons they focus on.
• Other kitted fighters plus barbarians, paladins, rangers, and multiclass fighters can attain Mastery (+++) at 6th level.
• Multiclass fighter/mages can attain Mastery (+++) in any weapon but the only available styles are Single-Weapon and Two-Handed Weapon.