What's the idea of the summoning limit?

[temnix]

Once, there wasn't any. Then - around the time of Throne of Bhaal, I hear - it was implemented. Must have been by Bioware, though it doesn't make any difference whether it was them or Beamdog. I ask, what's the point? They just wanted to limit players' power, is it as banal as that? I see no other purpose for it. Granted, there could be some spell or event that would summon a crazy throng of creatures that would bog down the engine, but that's the problem with that spell or event. I know there are mods that do away with the limit, but just the fact that it's there is making me pause and ponder and burn incense to the gods asking whether I should include a removal in my mod, which uses invisible minions (blocked too, when the limit for SUMMONED has been reached). Just that stupid feature alone, by virtue of being there. Why, it's traditional now! Somebody might become unhappy if their game were suddenly liberated in this unforeseen way! Maybe people have gotten used to relying on that limit instead of observing a limitation to a sensible number of creatures. Maybe their installations will explode if the limit goes away. What this order of things reminds me of is running with handicaps hanged about one's knees and ears. Or phoning police instead of solving your own problems.

Sure, I'm probably overreacting. But there are already so many roadblocks to making what I want for these games, it's infuriating that there is some stupid crap like this installed by default on every machine.

 

[Vlan]

Well, BG2 around ToB got some pretty nifty high lvl summon spells. Could be that they wanted to tone down the Planetar / Cacofiend / <insert Tanari demon here>-cheese.

Edited June 18, 2019 by Vlan

[Jarno Mikkola]

11 hours ago, temnix said:

I know there are mods that do away with the limit, but just the fact that it's there is making me pause and ponder and burn incense to the gods asking whether I should include a removal in my mod, which uses invisible minions (blocked too, when the limit for SUMMONED has been reached). Just that stupid feature alone,

 

Or you could just do the bare minimum, and not summon Summoned -gendered creatures, but why bother really... being a bad mod maker is essentially all you got.

Good point Vlan, too bad Cacofiends nor the Pit Fiends are Summoned... aka they aren't limited.

Well, I remember playing the game with 2001 -age computer, and let me tell you, not having enough hard disk space to install the game fully, kinda sucked. Having the game scan and run the commands with say ... anything with todays measures *100, yeah... not going to happen. Besides, I bet the limit was something along the lines of; "Do we rather make player get 16 creatures with 128 effects ... or 128 creatures with 16 effects ?" We got kits baby...

Edited June 18, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[temnix]

Imp, I'm long used to the fact that you don't know what you are talking about at least half the time. And a third of the time you just ramble. So I'm not offended. But I must point out that this reply of yours falls into the first half. Pit Fiends and Cacofiends are also subject to the summonning limit, as are all other creatures, SUMMONED or not. It works like this: if the limit for SUMMONED has being reached, no other creatures can come in. This is something that was only just now brought to my attention. I had no idea, and I had made many spells and abilities that used invisible minions, because there is no other way to do a number of things. So I was dismayed to find out that, if the player just happens to have gotten his max of SUMMONED (a whopping 5 by default), all these spells and abilities will fail.

By itself it's remarkable and telling how people have gotten used to these built-in, unjustified limitations, and others. Searching about this topic on the Beamdog forum, I came across someone's question whether there is a maximum of minions in the AD&D game. The man was asking about Pen and Paper. Now, why would a role-playing game, conducted in the imagination, have an arbitrary built-in limit on anything? The racial level advancement limits at least were explained by the nature of the races and it was an attempt to present "unlimited human potential." But why would a rulebook say that you can only have 5 goblins under your control, max? The guy never played Pen and Paper, clearly, and didn't know the rules, but what a question like that shows is how habituated players have become over the years and decades to lousy adaptations of role-playing for the computer screen, to primitive out-of-the-blue mechanics, flat process - and other things, monty hauling, power gaming, min-maxing. There was a time when those were considered the Three Bad Habits of D&D, and staying in character was praised. But now we're deep in the world of numbers, rule lawyership and imposed restrictions in place of self-restraint.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Did you test this ? Cause it sure the shit sounds like you have N O T. Known facts:

In BG2: ToB the limit is 5 Summoned -gendered creatures.  A mod exists that makes the summons others ... gender 20 or was it 21 if memory serves... it might not... anyways, that was to keep the kill summons effect in some spells(Death Fog) ... that were then to be edited to contain the effect. 

In BG2EE, you could just edit the SUMMLIMT.2da -file with Near Infinity.*

 

*It's for summoned gendered creatures(or so the assumption goes... not an EE expert). PS, the "Summoned" gender is there Near Infinity's default description... it's just the number 6 in the actual .cre -files offset 0x273.

Besides, if you read the spell descriptions, they( Cacofiend and Gate -spells specifically) say the creature is gated in, rather than summoned, and so are not subject to the summon limit. But being hostile to all, to balance the things.

The other summon spells were also changed from BG1 days to BG2:ToB days, by making the single summon more powerful, as in BG1, a single skeleton was a set amount of hit points and that was it, be there 1 or 20, they had the same stats, each individually of course ... just the amount of them changed. While in BG2, the Animate Dead now summons higher powered creatures based on the summoners level. So now, you don't need 20 skeletons, cause the Skeleton Knight can handle things single-handedly ... most of the time.

Also you can request a community created effect creature to be uploaded that's by default not subject to things... such as among: summon limit, area of effect things nor killed by damage.

Edited June 19, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[temnix]

Again you don't know what you are talking about. Enough from you. For others I will say: yes, I've tested this and you can test it for yourselves. Reach the summoning limit, then try casting Gate (where the gender is SUMMONED_DEMON) and see what happens.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Actually, I didn't... but only because you didn't legitimately provide a list of test contains, until the last post. The one is not the EE game engine that I first assumed to be the case here, but the fact that the Gate spell is casted as a "summon ally", which it then reverts into a hostile creature, that then allows more friendly castings of summons, at least in the non-EE game. I tested this with a (ToB)cleric, summoned 4 skeletons, Protection from Evil *10, a gate, then one more skeleton and then another gated demon and all were successful... cause apparently one of the non-protected skeletons turned hostile on me.

And yes, if I try with 5 skeletons and then Gate, it will not appear.

PS, the gate uses the opcode177 without a given target(summoner), which uses the spgate.eff, which uses the opcode67 to summon the demon, that then won't be allied to the caster, cause it takes its alliance from the .cre file, which is hostile. Aka, this could easily be fixed.

Edited June 23, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Guest Minsc The Great]

Necropost for anyone interested in: summon limit, invisible creatures, opcode 324.

Temnix, I understand your points and stumbled across this myself playing with SCS and SR.

Spell Revisions' Gust of Wind sppr318 uses an invisible creature and the spell fails when I have 5 summons present. Specifically it uses EFF file DW#SWEET.EFF (opcode 177), which then summons creature DW#SWEET.CRE (opcode 67). The creature is not gender SUMMON. None of Imp's suggestions make a difference (changing target, or allegiance, etc.).

The solution that does work is to add a new effect immediately before sppr318's opcode 177:

Opcode 324: Immunity to Spell & Message, Target: self, parameter 1=5, parameter 2=134, duration=1

This formulation is immunity to (# of summoned creatures >= 5) for a duration of 1 second'.

Now casting sppr318 when I have 5 summons present, the spell works properly while showing the message "Unaffected by effects from Gust of Wind". I haven't bothered to see if there's an easy way to suppress that confusing (to anyone else) feedback message.

Casting sppr318 when I have <5 summons present, the spell works properly and there is no message.

Hope this helps someone.

[Guest Minsc The Great]

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP GLOB ~sppr318.spl~ ~override~  
    LPF ADD_SPELL_EFFECT INT_VAR opcode=324    target=1 duration=1 parameter1=5 parameter2=134 insert_point=0 END

[subtledoctor]

Simply using opcode 318 instead of 324 should eliminate the message. 

[Endarire]

@temnix
Likely, the summoning limit was added for technical reasons.  The BG1 and BG2 (pre-EE) engines were vastly different in their technical specs.  I also assume that BG2 has more small spaces/corridors than BG1 or players are intended to visit them notably more often, meaning summons just got in the way.

The power of summons is also a consideration, though I'm unsure how much credibility that has.