My new "Made in Heaven" mods

[Quester]

21 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I once suggested gibberlings get an aura that applies a combat bonus for every other one within 20'. Could work for any otherwise-weak enemy that  favors horde tactics.

If it's doable, that would be perfect for both gibberlings and xvarts.

[Angel]

1 hour ago, Quester said:

Definitely a few spellcaster xvarts. I also don't think it's unreasonable to give some of the regular xvarts slings in addition to short swords. Like, maybe 1/5th of them? And make those favor ranged attacks as far as possible. If it's possible to somehow simulate some of them using nets to hinder enemies, that's cool as well (no net animation unfortunately).

The xvart village is actually quite far away, so I doubt anyone reaches it at lvl 1...I know I don't. It would be a very deliberate destination in that case.

https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2022/06/dd-monster-spotlight-who-xvartd.html

Good read there.

Maybe give some of them maces or flails instead of short swords?

Giving them weapons other than short swords doesn't work quite right, they don't have the animations for anything else.  @CamDawg already explored that avenue for one of his mods, and I found it out myself when I tried to give Nexlit the flail +1 that was rusting in the nearby cave.  (Which is why I opted for +1 short sword instead.)

1 hour ago, Quester said:

If it's doable, that would be perfect for both gibberlings and xvarts.

Doable?  Yes.   But it's going to be tricky to keep it from getting out of hand when there are many of them on screen.  I have considered a similar approach for my hairy spiders.

Edited October 15, 2022 by Angel

[CamDawg]

Yep, Angel's specifically talking about IWDification's equipment randomizer; if you want the gory details check out the spoiler text in this post.

The tl;dr is that very few creature animations--specifically, the ones available for party members and basic skeletons--support all forms of weapon animations, and the rest are limited to a handful or none at all. Xvarts specifically have a hardcoded short sword animation, so no matter what weapon they actually wield they'll be running around swinging a short sword onscreen. If you give them a sling, they'll swing their sword and a bullet will magically project out of their chest, which is... suboptimal.

Edited October 15, 2022 by CamDawg

[subtledoctor]

Give them throwing daggers!

[Jarno Mikkola]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

Give them throwing daggers!

You do know that a throwing dagger and even a short swords has quite a size difference. In-game, and out of game.
Hmm, is this topic a bit mislabled. Being it 'new' in the year 2022, ... while it's from 2019 originally ? Just though I would throw that as an idea.

Edited October 16, 2022 by Jarno Mikkola

[Quester]

Most things (like mods or forum threads) begin as new, and eventually end up as not quite as new anymore. That's okay.

More on topic: a shame that they (xvarts) don't have other animations than for short swords. 

7 hours ago, Angel said:

Doable?  Yes.   But it's going to be tricky to keep it from getting out of hand when there are many of them on screen.  I have considered a similar approach for my hairy spiders.

Well, if it's a small radius aura, so each xvart can only get a bonus from a few of his friends? The ones that are right next to him.

That way it shouldn't lead to crazy stacking of bonuses and subsequent super-powered xvarts, right?

[polytope]

49 minutes ago, Quester said:

Well, if it's a small radius aura, so each xvart can only get a bonus from a few of his friends? The ones that are right next to him.

That way it shouldn't lead to crazy stacking of bonuses and subsequent super-powered xvarts, right?

Small areas of effect are inherently buggy and unreliable, if you want to go that route it would be better to use non stacking attack/damage bonuses through (i.e.) opcodes #178/179.

It changes little though, because by the time all but one of the gibberlings/xvarts are down the battle is as good as won. It would make more sense for their pack leader to project a +2 aura, and stackable with his lieutenant who gives a +1, which actually alters the tactical nature of the fight where there are now a couple you need to identify and take out to weaken the rest.

6 hours ago, CamDawg said:

The tl;dr is that very few creature animations--specifically, the ones available for party members and basic skeletons--support all forms of weapon animations, and the rest are limited to a handful or none at all. Xvarts specifically have a hardcoded short sword animation

Yeah, the even more unfortunate thing is that the devs made unique animations for a variety of functionally equivalent humanoids (tasloi, xvarts, goblins... ok tasloi have 1 more hp and a slightly better AC) but didn't distinguish glabrezu from other demons until ToB, and brown dragons have wings because they're just a recolored red. Similarly they put a lot of effort into unique outdoor areas in BG1 but just reused a lot of maps in the latter game. Graphic designer burnout.

Anyway, to distinguish these guys:

• Tasloi : jungle dwellers reputed to use nets and attack by treetop ambush. Hide in the shadows and throw projectiles that can entangle.
• Xvarts : the description mentions giant rats, leader types could summon a few, just don't go overboard with the disease on hit
• Gibberlings : see my comments above about auras

[Chitown Willie]

<Delete>

Edited October 20, 2022 by Chitown Willie

[DMF]

This is the P&P description for Spell Invulnerability. From Forgotten Realms Adventures (1990).

Seems underwhelming for a 9th level spell.

Edited October 21, 2022 by DMF

[Angel]

21 hours ago, DMF said:

This is the P&P description for Spell Invulnerability. From Forgotten Realms Adventures (1990).

Seems underwhelming for a 9th level spell.

Yes, I have the P&P description in the Wizard's Spell Compendium.  I wish I knew what the BG2 devs intended to have it do in-game though.  But unfortunately, the strings related to it in dialog.tlk are incomplete and give no clue.

The options I have been pondering so far are:

• 100% MR and immunity to having it lowered, essentially making the caster immune to any spell that is affected by MR.
• Protection similar to a Scroll of Protection from Magic.  (Current version.)
• Protection similar to a Globe of Invulnerability, but for higher-level spells.

 

[polytope]

22 hours ago, DMF said:

Seems underwhelming for a 9th level spell.

I don't think there's a need to stick too closely to the concept of spells published in these kind of splatbooks because a lot of them are packed with useless stuff as filler and were only published to sell books to fans of the setting. I doubt the new spells and such in them were really playtested.

55 minutes ago, Angel said:

The options I have been pondering so far are:

• 100% MR and immunity to having it lowered, essentially making the caster immune to any spell that is affected by MR.
• Protection similar to a Scroll of Protection from Magic.  (Current version.)
• Protection similar to a Globe of Invulnerability, but for higher-level spells.

 

Not to be a pest but 100% MR and immunity to Lower Resistance messes with AI scripts that will fail to realize they can't lower it and waste rounds casting LR. A globe of invulnerability protecting against 5th level spells has a similar issue, AI will try and obviously fail to breach the character.

Replicating the Protection from Magic scroll should be fine, SCS checks for Stat:500 DO_NOT_TARGET_SPELLS and also stat 413 to check if a character has Protection from Magic. My own AI scripts simply check for the combination of >90% in Stat:52 SPELLFAILUREPRIEST and a globe overlay (of course that could potentially be set in other ways llike Creeping Doom on someone with Minor Globe, but meh, it works well enough for me).

Edited October 22, 2022 by polytope

[Quester]

On 4/16/2022 at 7:56 PM, Angel said:

As the readme describes, this actually enables an unused engine feature that allows weapons to have a different base damage (bytes 0x0003, 0x0011 and 0x0013 in the ability header) against creatures with BIT13 set.

You can actually see it for yourself or even adjust it if you're so inclined, the data is in the tables mih_tweaks/items/tables/_alt_dam.2da (item types) and mih_tweaks/items/tables/alt_item.2da (exceptions for individual items).

Currently the alternative base damage dice against large creatures are:

• two-handed sword: 3d6
• bastard sword: 2d8
• sling bullet: 1d6+1
• club: 1d3
• dagger: 1d3
• dart: 1d2
• flail: 2d4
• halberd: 2d6
• hammer: 1d4
• long sword: 1d12
• mace: 1d6
• morning star: 1d6+1
• short sword: 1d8
• spear: 1d8

These are directly from the 2e PHB.

Creatures with the following races are marked as large: ankheg basilisk bear carrioncrawler gnoll ogre spider wyvern demonic beholder otyugh troll umberhulk giant golem elemental dragon minotaur drider shambling_mound chimera yeti treant ettin

It might be more accurate to actually check the animation used, but that is still a to-do.

I have edited my local file to increase spears to 1d12, as I think that makes more sense. They should be pretty good against large creatures.

How would I go about adding katanas and scimitars to this? I want to give them a small boost as well.

[Angel]

1 hour ago, Quester said:

I have edited my local file to increase spears to 1d12, as I think that makes more sense. They should be pretty good against large creatures.

How would I go about adding katanas and scimitars to this? I want to give them a small boost as well.

For katana, item type is 0x14 (large sword) and proficiency 0x5e (katana), for scimitar its 0x14 and 0x5f (scimitar/wakishasi/ninja-to) respectively.  Come to think of it, you should probably install this tweak before any of Tweak Anthology's proficiency system changes.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Angel

[Quester]

Thanks!

[subtledoctor]

On 4/16/2022 at 1:56 PM, Angel said:

Currently the alternative base damage dice against large creatures are:

• two-handed sword: 3d6
• bastard sword: 2d8
• sling bullet: 1d6+1
• club: 1d3
• dagger: 1d3
• dart: 1d2
• flail: 2d4
• halberd: 2d6
• hammer: 1d4
• long sword: 1d12
• mace: 1d6
• morning star: 1d6+1
• short sword: 1d8
• spear: 1d8

These are directly from the 2e PHB.

  

3 hours ago, Quester said:

I have edited my local file to increase spears to 1d12, as I think that makes more sense. They should be pretty good against large creatures.

Actually, per PnP rules, two-handed spears like the ones in BG should do 2d6 damage against large creatures. (I strangely don't have the PHB handy but I'm looking at DMGR3 "Arms and Equipment Guide" which I think has the same data.)

Edited October 26, 2022 by subtledoctor