Prebuffing and NPC spell slots

[Guest toolazytoregister]

It's my understanding from a few playthroughs BG1&2 with SCS that NPCs who cast prebuffs do not expend spell slots in order to do so (at least ctrl-qing an NPC after it fires off its prebuffs doesn't seem to show expended slots). Neither do they ever have spell slots dedicated to triggers or contingencies; they always managed to have them all ready before hand and have since rested to prepare optimal combat spells. If I'm wrong on this, please do correct me. But if I'm right, what are the chances that the mod could have additional options regarding prebuffing and contingency/sequencer use put in place to make NPC mages play more like 95% of PC mages?

I understand that the mod is trying to make NPC casters behave more like PC casters. Of course my mages walk around with stoneskin and contingencies and whatever else up whenever possible, and of course I fire off some short-term buffs before walking into an obvious fight (though I do limit this to when I've used stealth/invis/wizard eye/farsight/in-character reasoning to do so). But even if we ignore that NPCs will cast 5 rounds of short-term prebuffs when they're about to be ambushed by a stealthed, non-detected assassin or a solo mage who has been invisible for the last 15 hours, couldn't they at least have the spell slots they needed to cast those buffs gone for the fight? Fighting an NPC mage with 1, 4th-level spell slot currently means he will always, 24/7, have "(previously cast)" stoneskin (and have his minor sequencer ready) and then he still has his 1, 4th-level slot (and all the others, too) ready for the fight. That's not how PC casters behave the vast, vast majority of the time.

It'd be absolutely fantastic, imo, if options could be available in the install to toggle whether prebuffing expends NPC caster spell slots and to give a 3/4 1/2 1/4 type selection as there is with potion drop chances and reputation gains for whether an NPC has any given sequencer/trigger/contingency he possibly could have ready when you start the fight. Lord knows not many players spend 1-3 rests after every single fight just to make sure they have all their sequencers and such ready to go, their 9+-hour buffs up, AND all the possible spell slots still ready to go.

 

 

But all that aside, I really enjoy playing SCS and am just another one of the people who say "I can't imagine playing with the vanilla game anymore," even if I do occasionally curse at my monitor and mutter things about "my suspension of disbelief is ruined" when after a minute-long chat with Bassilus, I suddenly see that he has somehow cast half a dozen <60-second buffs that I didn't when I stepped into view. Thanks for the mod

[DavidW]

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

It's my understanding from a few playthroughs BG1&2 with SCS that NPCs who cast prebuffs do not expend spell slots in order to do so (at least ctrl-qing an NPC after it fires off its prebuffs doesn't seem to show expended slots).

That understanding is wrong: with the exception of spells with a 24-hour duration (notably Stoneskin and Melf's Minute Meteors), all prebuff spells are memorized and expended legally. I've just checked this via CTRL-Q on v32 RC10: it's working correctly.

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

Neither do they ever have spell slots dedicated to triggers or contingencies; they always managed to have them all ready before hand and have since rested to prepare optimal combat spells.

This bit is correct: sequencers and contingencies last indefinitely, I assume they were renewed days or weeks ago.

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

what are the chances that the mod could have additional options regarding prebuffing and contingency/sequencer use put in place to make NPC mages play more like 95% of PC mages?

Zero.

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

I understand that the mod is trying to make NPC casters behave more like PC casters. […]Fighting an NPC mage with 1, 4th-level spell slot currently means he will always, 24/7, have "(previously cast)" stoneskin (and have his minor sequencer ready) and then he still has his 1, 4th-level slot (and all the others, too) ready for the fight. That's not how PC casters behave the vast, vast majority of the time. […] Lord knows not many players spend 1-3 rests after every single fight just to make sure they have all their sequencers and such ready to go, their 9+-hour buffs up, AND all the possible spell slots still ready to go.

It's not exactly trying to make NPCs behave 'more like PC casters'; it's trying to make them behave realistically. NPC mages face a different tactical situation from PC mages. The PCs fight pretty much every day, many times per day; for them even an encounter with a mage is often just one of many battles; most of the battles they face are against less effective foes (proof: they usually win). The vast, vast majority of NPCs don't get into fights nearly that often, and when they fight the PCs, they have good reason to expect the battle is life-threateningly dangerous and they need to pull out all the stops to survive (and they're right to think that, since the PCs usually win!) So I don't think it's unrealistic that most of them have their sequencers etc unused after being prepared ages ago - indeed, since mages are intelligent, it would be unrealistic if they didn't. In principle there are probably a few mages - say, a drow mage you run into in the middle of the fight with the elves - where that's not true, and they've probably expended some spells and used some resources, but it's just not worth it to isolate and give special treatment to those few cases - the coding hassle greatly outweighs the benefit in verisimilitude and visibility to the player.

As for 24-hour-duration spells like Stoneskin, any SCS mage of 9th level or higher has a Stoneskin memorized, and (see above) probably won't have used it the previous day; there's no reason not to cast that Stoneskin just before going to bed. So it's realistic that these mages will have stoneskin running all the time without it having cost them a slot. (Again, there's an edge case: 7th and 8th level wizards have to juggle their spells a bit more carefully to achieve the effect. Again, it's not time-effective to carefully handle that edge case, and it's not as if those wizards can't juggle their spells that way if they want to.)

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

I do occasionally curse at my monitor and mutter things about "my suspension of disbelief is ruined" when after a minute-long chat with Bassilus, I suddenly see that he has somehow cast half a dozen <60-second buffs that I didn't when I stepped into view.

Remember that level of prebuffing is customizable (and that different people have very different preferences). If you find there's too much going on, just dial it down (at install time if you're on v31, via the difficulty fine-tuner in v32).

 

1 hour ago, Guest toolazytoregister said:

Thanks for the mod

You're welcome!

[Guest toolazytoregister]

I guess that's a reasonable-enough way to look at things. I think I always just assumed all these other very-powerful spellcasters I run into in the course of a playthrough have other things requiring their attention from day to day than sitting in their house watching their door, waiting on charname to bust in. Especially since that's often the ingame story. Thayan wizards involved in their own intrigues camped out in a hostile forest, druegar clerics defending irenicus dungeon against attacking shadow thieves, a whole adventuring party who just fought through the thief maze but not so long ago that they saw Sarevok pass by, etc. Those sorts of guys being full power whenever I meet them when I'm in the middle of a grueling dungeon crawl didn't seem to make any more sense than me setting up camp for 8 hours between every encounter. But I see where you're coming from, too.

 

Maybe my next play I'll just feel less bad about resting more frequently and having my whole adventure take more than a couple months. Lol.

[DavidW]

Well, we were specifically discussing sequencers. So the question is really: did anything come up in the last few days that was so critically dangerous that it's worth using up one of your most powerful weapons? To play with your examples: if you're the Thayan wizards, you've indeed been camped out there for a while, and nothing in the vicinity can really threaten you. Maybe once in a while a spider wanders along and has to be fireballed, but before long the local animals and monsters are going to know to give you a wide berth. If you're a duergar cleric, it's not implausible that you've not yet run into such an existentially difficult fight that you need to use your sequencer rather than save it. If you're the Iron Throne adventuring party in the Undercity, nothing you've encountered so far is all that dangerous for you and you know you're about to have the fight of your life against Sarevok, so of course you'll save the big guns for that fight. 

In each case there's some argument that these guys should be missing the odd low-level spell, but it's just not worth the hassle to allow for that, especially since they probably won't survive long enough to use all their low-level spells anyway. (And there are always scrolls - I don't have enemies use scrolls because it messes up the game's spell-distribution logic, but realistically they'd have some.)