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Proposals for further spell tweaks


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While Demi is gone and kreso is only intermittently around, SR is still being worked on by several people. We can work on fixing bugs to the extent we are made aware of them; but I'm not convinced we should limit ourselves to just bugfixing. I think there might still be room for adjustment  

So I'm making this thread as a place to suggest and discuss ideas. SR has a history of a very deliberative approach to the way it changes things; Demi always tended to discuss things extensively with players before coding them. 

So here's my first idea: a further tweak to the way Melf's Minute Meteors work. 

Currently, SR nerfs these to +2 weapons and might tweak the damage a tiny bit. But I want to propose something more daring. The meteors are described as kind of small Fireballs, so why are they functionally so different from Fireball?

My proposal: make the meteors a +5 weapon again. But, eliminate their damage, and instead give each one a 146 effect that casts a 3rd-level mini-Fireball spell on the target. This will have several effects:

- Creatures immune to 3rd-level magic will be immune to these projectiles that are from a 3rd-level spell (which I think is appropriate)

- Spell Deflection will block MMM...

- BUT, repeated MMM projectiles will be very effective at quickly burning away Spell Deflection levels

- Throwing MMMs at people in Athkatla will be an "unsanctioned use of magical abilities" and alert the Cowled Wizards (which I think is appropriate)

It should be a pretty simple and easy change, and I think it's more or less consistent with SR's philosophy.

Thoughts? Any ideas of your own? 

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7 minutes ago, DavidW said:

I have a meta-suggestion: release an official v4 before adding any new content. SR badly needs a proper, official baseline.

I could not have said it in a better way. ;)

You can't image how painful it is to provide older mods IR and SR compatibility as those mods are still beta releases if not patched every couple of weeks...

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Well, we did some work to get v4 into the best shape it's been in, which gave us 4b16 a.k.a. the closest thing to a real v4 release it's had. If I could snap my fingers and make 4b16 an "official" release, I would, but it's not up to me. 

But I'm not sure that matters; v4 may be a "beta" but it is changed very rarely, it is stable, and it is feature-complete. I'm not talking about making substantive changes to v4; it is fully baked. Maybe this cake needs a bit of icing before going in the shop window, but as far cross-mod compatibility, just target b4 as it is now and it should be fine... My mods have a TON of special handling for SR, they have targeted "SRv4" for 3-4 years and have never needed to be changed due to any SR update. 

For purposes of this thread I just want to discuss things. They can be proposals for 4.1, or v5, or v7, whatever. 

 

EDIT - is there any way to make "paste as rich text" NOT be the default behavior? For that matter, if I cut and paste text to a different place in the same post, how does that change the formatting??

Edited by subtledoctor
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5 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

EDIT - is there any way to make "paste as rich text" NOT be the default behavior? For that matter, if I cut and paste text to a different place in the same post, how does that change the formatting??

Yes, but then nobody would be able to paste any formatted text.  It's up to you to either paste it unformatted or click the button that removes the formatting.

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2 hours ago, Mike1072 said:

Yes, but then nobody would be able to paste any formatted text.  It's up to you to either paste it unformatted or click the button that removes the formatting.

Off topic... But which button is the remove formation ? In the current posting system, I can see none.

There is the add/remove the single style... like bold, italics etc... but no: remove the cheese and the milk, and everything in between. Other than the delete the text as well. 

 

On topic. It's not a +5 weapon if it automatically hits if it's an area of effect, like proposed. And mini fireball is as mini as a mini nuke is. it's still as long lasting as the other. I would like to read your comment as, make it smaller area of effect than fireball... perhaps it needs to hit the player char... but you need to re-say/define what you mean. And why would a 3rd level spell cast 3rd level effects ? Yes, the MMM's might be classified as 2nd level spells and so it reduces the Spell Deflection removal effect by a bit.. so from 30 to 20, instead of it being just a regular 3.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola
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Off-topic: The option to change pasted text to unformatted goes away if you hit another key, so if you are in the flow of typing you can miss it; and I don't think a button to generally remove formatting exists in mobile browsers. 

On-topic: Jarno, I would leave the projectile itself exactly as it in in vanilla: a +5 thrown weapon with +5 to hit and you have to make an attack roll, at 5 APR. But instead of doing 1d4+3 missile damage in the projectile and including an extra opcode 12 effect for fire damage, I would have the weapon do 0d0 damage and give it an opcode 146 effect that casts a wizard subspell which handles all the damage. 

The main point being to change how MMM interacts with MR and spell protections. I mean, I can't come up with a reasonable explanation for why MR should block Fireball damage but not MMMs...

Edited by subtledoctor
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I think it's an arbitrarily drawn line between types of force delivery, I suppose. You have to physically throw a Minute Meteor, just like you'd have to throw a dart. Yes, the Minute Meteor is magically conjured, but so are the weapons of Monster Summonings and Enchanted Weapons, and I'm surely not in favor of .spl-izing all of their attacks to make sure everything passes a magic resistance check every time they do something. I'd be more open to adding magic resistance checks for magically created traditional energy attacks coming even from items (e.g. elemental effects like fire as well as stuff like vampiric or even fear et. al. effects), but it's a big no from me for physical damage that is delivered by physical force (there is more of a grey area on physical force delivered by magical means, though, such as Melf's Acid Arrow, and of course, there are specific and arbitrary exceptions in general such as the Cause Wounds series that are mysteriously exempt from MR where similar attacks are not). I'm not exactly clear on whether you still wanted the Minute Meteor to still do any kind of physical damage, though, which definitely affects whether you need to argue about this - if the idea was to eliminate all physical damage, there are already other limited use spell weapons e.g. Shocking Grasp that do have to pass MR checks, so yeah, go crazy (although I must admit that don't I particularly favor this Melf Meteors redesign to begin with and would probably revert it for at least myself). In a broader sense, though, I'm not sure whether I'd want every instance of magical effects coming from e.g. IR weapons to really necessarily have MR checks...I'm leaning towards no because there's no way I'd want to actually implement it and also it's just how it's always been and I'm kind of loathe to change it just because of that...but I am open to it at least being a novel idea.

Big no from me on it triggering Spell Deflections, though - for the same reason we're not allowing stationary effects like Cloudkill to trigger Spell Deflection: a single Y level spell should never take up more than Y levels of Spell Deflection. Either it protects against it fully in the proper way (which we cannot implement in this case), or it shouldn't at all - at best, a note should maybe be made of it (probably unnecessary in this case, since this is already how the item has always functioned and what people already expect).

Edited by Bartimaeus
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3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I think it's an arbitrarily drawn line between types of force delivery, I suppose. You have to physically throw a Minute Meteor, just like you'd have to throw a dart. Yes, the Minute Meteor is magically conjured, but so are the weapons of Monster Summonings and Enchanted Weapons, and I'm surely not in favor of .spl-izing all of their attacks to make sure everything passes a magic resistance check every time they do something.

With respect, I think you're assuming the conclusion here.  Consideration of MR is a big part of what led me to this idea; think about the argument that e.g. Fireball and other point-targeted spells should bypass MR: 1) the spell simply creates a fireball; 2) MR doesn't protect you from heat; 3) therefore, MR should not help you if you are in the radius of the hot and fiery blast of a Fireball that doesn't actually target you.  I sympathize a lot with that argument.  But it would entail a major renovation of the MR system, and if we're not going to do that, then you have to accept some version of the counter-argument "no no, the entirety of the Fireball, even the heat and flames that result from it, are part of the spell itself."  And that's fine.

But if you accept that, then how do you consider MMM?  "They are not part of the spell itself, they are real meteors."  Wait, what?  Real meteors, that explode on contact, that you carry around in a pouch?  That makes no sense.  They are entirely magical in nature; even their basic missile damage - and frankly I'm not clear on why they do missile damage in the first place, but if we accept that they do, what is the mechanism for causing that damage?  Throwing a small rock?  That doesn't do 1d4+3 damage.  The base damage must necessarily be created, or at least boosted, by the magic of the spell.  The fire damage is clearly part of the spell itself.

Contrast with, say, the pre-2.0 Enchanted Weapon spell: it creates an actual sword in your hand.  That sword doesn't hurt people because the spell creates wounds where the weapon strikes - it's not an illusion.  It cuts because it is a physical thing that is sharp.  A summoned ogre carries a physical morning star that can physically bash your head in.  It doesn't require magic to do that; the only magic there is in summoning it in the first place.  Whereas, these little mini meteor grenades are clearly magically in origin, use, and effect.  The whole stack, if you will, relies on the magic of the spell (unlike things like the Flame Tongue sword or arrows of fire).  Obviously this involves line-drawing; I guess the point is, the way the lines are currently is pretty bad.

And to be clear, the aim is to change the behavior in the margins.  Against an ogre, the spell would be identical to how it works currently.  The point would be to bring it in line with spells like Acid Arrow and (especially) SR Flame Arrow.  MMM will still allow you to time-shift your delivery of the attacks, like a TiVo; that alone makes it interesting and tactically different from Flame Arrow.  I don't see why it requires charactistics to further differentiate and that IMHO don't make sense.

Quote

Big no from me on it triggering Spell Deflections, though - for the same reason we're not allowing stationary effects like Cloudkill to trigger Spell Deflection: a single Y level spell should never take up more than Y levels of Spell Deflection. Either it protects against it fully in the proper way (which we cannot implement in this case), or it shouldn't at all - at best, a note should maybe be made of it (probably unnecessary in this case, since this is already how the item has always functioned and what people already expect).

I don't follow.  Why is 'all or nothing' a rule?  There are plenty of instances where a single spell has more than a single spell's worth of effect.  A single Magic Missile can eliminate 5 mirror images; I haven't tested it, but SR Flame Arrow might eliminate 5 stoneskins.  It doesn't really bother me if MMM can burn through a Deflection quickly; the Deflection still gives you more protection than in the current system, where the MMM completely bypasses it and can interrupt and/or kill you!

That said, you could probably set it up such that it could only burn through a max of x spell levels per y seconds - an obvious default chocie would be 3 spell levels per round.  This way the super APR bonus for attacking with it wouldn't translate into a multiplier for defeating magical defenses.

Edited by subtledoctor
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3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

for the same reason we're not allowing stationary effects like Cloudkill to trigger Spell Deflection

I assume you mean with the AoE Deflection component?  That could also probably be coded with an added subspell to burn through a limited amount of Deflection levels, too...

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Part of what you're arguing against something I already accepted as being a novel idea. Traditional magical energies, like fire or magic damage, I already said am open to making them check magic resistance even if originating from an item, whether summoned via SR spells or through IR weapons. But since they're not already like that and I'm not sure that anyone actually wants them to be like that, I have no real desire to effect that change, and it is a pretty big change.

What I said I was less open to was physical force not magically enacted being resistable - e.g. a rock thrown by somebody's hand that hits someone in the face. While the object may have been magically conjured, the force that threw it was not, and I think that should be respected (and I think it generally is within both vanilla BG and SR, and I am curious to know if that's the case within D&D 2.0 as a whole). If you go down that route that that should also be magically resistable, then it opens a whole bag of worms that I just have no interest in even thinking about just because of the mess it'd create. You say that "[the meteors] are entirely magical in nature" in contrast to a magically conjured sword, but in point of fact, I do not know that. It is a conjuration spell, same as Monster Summoning spells, same as the Enchanted Weapon weapon - where in the universe am I pulling real magical +3 weapons from repeatedly? Where in the universe am I pulling real umber hulks, hobgoblins, slimes, basilisks, ogres, werewolves, etc. from? Is conjuration the act of teleporting all these different real things from real points in the universe, or is it the act of converting energy to create and/or arrange specific patterns of atoms to effectively create them? Personally, I think it's creating them, because they're spells that are cast the same exact way every single time with the intent of creating (or grabbing if you insist that they're being pulled from somewhere else) the same exact creature or weapon every single time, and therefore it follows that if you make the physical damage of Magical Stone or Minute Meteors require an MR check for every attack, you have to do the same for conjured creatures and Enchanted Weapons. I think gated creatures are the ones that are magically grabbed from their home plane and potentially bound, not normally summoned creatures, no?

As for Spell Deflection, it just seems fundamentally wrong to have a 3rd level spell potentially count as 30 spells against Spell Deflection. It is not a 30th level spell. I have less of a problem with Magic Missiles or Flame Arrow breaking multiple Mirror Images because they're literally fundamentally supposed to be multiple projectiles, so it makes sense they might hit different images or hit Stoneskin multiple times (although I'm pretty sure Stoneskin doesn't help at all against Flame/Acid Arrow), and less of a problem with stationary effects penetrating Spell Deflection entirely because it's a game engine limitation (as far as I know) that we would correct if we could. Additionally, stationary spells don't generally do massive damage since their effects are supposed to spread out 5+ rounds, so they don't tend to kill in of themselves, which makes it a flaw with the system that's a little easier to accept.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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The MMMs do 1d4+3 missile damage... that's a phenomenal amount of damage from a weapon you throw at someone - more than a bullet hurled via a sling, more than an arrow fired from a bow, more than a dagger or a dart.  It seems wrong to assume that damage is simply from the throwing.  A thrown rock should only do like 1d2 damage in this game.  So if we're going to draw lines, there is evidence to support the contention that even the physical damage of MMMs comes from, or is boosted by, some in-the-moment magical mechanism.  That said, it would be quite simple to have physical damage done by the projectile and fire damage done by a subspell.

RE: the summoned ogre or the pre-2.0 enchanted weapon: if you go back to the 2E source and nerd out on this stuff, you will find that within the school of "conjuration/summoning," there is actually a major difference between a conjuration and a summoning.  (Ditto invocation vs. evocation, illusion vs. phantasm, enchantment vs. charm, etc.)  So the fact that the summoned ogre's club is born of the same school of magic as a conjured meteor does not mean much.  (And if it did, you would have to explain how Acid Arrow and Flame Arrow, equally Conjurations, are subject to different rules.)

3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

As for Spell Deflection, it just seems fundamentally wrong to have a 3rd level spell potentially count as 30 spells against Spell Deflection.

... less of a problem with stationary effects penetrating Spell Deflection entirely because it's a game engine limitation (as far as I know) that we would correct if we could.

Like I say, I think it would be possible to correct this, in at least an approximate way.  Just burn off deflection levels via a custom subspell, and have the subspell provide 206 protection against itself for x seconds.

But here too, I'm not deaf to the objection, using one spell to burn off lots of deflection levels is of course something to be avoided if possible.

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Let's assume there are no conceptual problems with what you're suggesting. Do you think it makes for a better game? For me, the answer would be "maybe, sounds like it might be neat to try out at least to see how it affects the power of magic resistance and the need to spam Lower Resistance...but it probably won't be really better or worse, just different", but I say that as someone who's decently familiar with how things currently work.

Kind of a janky solution, since multiple uses of the spell can overlap and the player can still exploit them to simply throw one at an SD-ed character then throw the rest at someone else for the same amount of SD charges wasted as if you had used them all on the SD character, but I suppose it would at least semi-work. Now if you have any ideas for stationary spells...

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