SubtleMods: Will to Power, a 2E-inspired psionics mod

[mickabouille]

16 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

it pushes people away every second, and it only affects people who are fairly nearby and it only pushes them a tiny bit away. But the effect is noticeable. In my quick test in Caandlekeep, an angry guard was successfully kept away from me for most of the time he was attacking me, which gave me noticeable room to breath. But he also got close sometimes, and conveniently for him he uses a long-reach weapon. So he still managed to hit me some of the time. The incidence of hits was less than usual, but it has nothing to do with thac0 or AC.

I like that very much. At least the idea. Will have to test, but that seems really interesting to play.

[subtledoctor]

Well, I've got everything coded up, added the five new sciences, modified the rate at which you learn powers and PSPs, modified a few existing powers and added a slight bit of visual flair. Also, importantly, I've made huge additions to the Readme, which now actually gives you complete information about all of the mod. (It was missing a bunch of stuff before.)

This seems big enough for a point update, so I'll call this version 2.0. You can get it here if you want to try it out.

It is not tested for balance, though - I will soon play a game with it, at least through BG1 and maybe SoD. So for now I'm marking it as a pre-release. Feel free to play around with it and let me know what you think. Some of this stuff has become slightly bonkers - the Avoid Fate power giving you a min1hp effect means you can just let enemies whale on you and you never die. (Until the power runs out, of course, at which time... "buh-bye.") But I guess the point is not to be more or less powerful than existing magic effects, but to have the nature and tempo of these abilities let you play the character in a different way than you would a standard magic-user. We'll see how it goes.

------

I have a thought about that Magnify ability, maybe it could be an HLA-level metapsionic high science, combining the disciplines of Pyrokinesis and Clairsentience. Maybe have it take the place of Dimensional Anchor, since that is super situational. You spend 20 PSPs and then, for a full turn, all your other psi powers become supercharged - no saving throw to resist Psychic Crush, Kinetic Control can protect the whole party, Mass Hysteria becomes mass Feeblemind instead of Confusion, Project Force can throw someone all the way cross the map. Et cetera.

But, my idea to implement that was to temporarily increase your caster level and add new ability headers to all the powers. That would be fairly simple, except these abilities are innates, and there is no way to increase your innate caster level. I would have to make major structural changes to make it work, and I just don't have the time or energy right now. Maybe someday...

[Enigmajazz]

@subtledoctor just noticed an issue with hla tables for Psypher and social. These both give d5_rf1 and d5_rf5, which should be d5urd1 and d5urd5 from might and guile feats. However don't think they should be given in will to power of might and guille might not be installed afterwards. They won't exist in the game so can't be used but in addition it will be up anything that parses through all of the hlas, such as stratagems changing wizard and priest hlas to innate, stopping that component getting installed.

[Endarire]

I do like Magnify the HLA as proposed.

[subtledoctor]

17 hours ago, Endarire said:

I do like Magnify the HLA as proposed.

It would be cool. Unfortunately the idea was to inflate the caster level to use a more powerful ability header... but these abilities are technically "innate," and you cannot inflate innate caster level. So the only ways to do it are

1. change every ability into a cleric spell and tuck them behind op146/148 effects, then inflate the cleric caster level
2. do it the same way as the method for giving them infinite range - create a clone of every psi power with different header characteristics, and swap them in for the regular versions while the Magnify ability is in effect

Both of those involve substantial structural changes which will be a ton of work, and could likely introduce bugs. So unfortunately not something that will happen anytime soon.

[Ebonslayer]

Ok, I've found a bit of an issue in testing conditions. When I get any of the High Sciences they don't appear in my spellbook or in my casting list. The ones I have tested are Seismic Vibration, Energy Storm, Bestial Metamorphosis, Ultrablast and Atomic Disruption but I assume the other High Sciences will act similarly. I have tested this in both SoA and ToB with new characters, for the SoA character I used console commands to grant enough xp to reach Cleric level 13 (this was on a Psionicist so my Thief level was much higher) and in ToB I had enough starting powers to grab a multitude of High Sciences from the get-go. The only mods I have installed are EEex, AionZ's Warlock Kit, this and Bubb's Spell Menu Extended, all on the latest version and in that exact order of installation.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Ebonslayer

[mickabouille]

That's probably not a blocker, and wouldn't probably be easy to fix, but maybe that may be mentioned somewhere.

I was surprised to discover that my psionicist (uh, actually... Imoen) was restricted from using some "poisoned arrows" from stratagems.

Because they "can't be used by cleric/thieves

 

I must say I've found the trip refreshing but I think I didn't use the class the way I should have. At least at low level, the psion part seems focused on self buff, which would probably meld better with a melee character... I think ? So I should probably have tried the ranger/psion first maybe.

[mickabouille]

Another funny event, Grey (the dog) got a wild talent (molecular agitation) but... no complaint there

[subtledoctor]

On 8/21/2022 at 3:02 PM, mickabouille said:

Another funny event, Grey (the dog) got a wild talent (molecular agitation) but... no complaint there

Love it! A dog with a fiery bite. Trollkiller pup.

EDIT - also, do bite damage through Stoneskins! This could actually be extremely useful for a melee-only NPC like Grey.

Edited August 27, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Endarire]

Hell hound, go!

[Quester]

I noticed in my last game that when an NPC temporarily leaves, and then rejoins the party, they will once again be able to check for a Wild Talent, even if they have already done so upon joining the first time. I'm guessing that's not intentional?

Haven't really had time to test out much of this mod yet, but in my last game my PC ended up being a Wild Talent, and got access to the Immobilize power. Very useful, that. Some day I really should play as one of the proper psionic kits.

Hmm, I wonder if there are any NPCs that would fit as Psions?

[subtledoctor]

27 minutes ago, Quester said:

they will once again be able to check for a Wild Talent,

Everything in a kit table is applied again every time an NPC joins the party. This can be awkward for some stuff that is intended to only occur once, and it can be slightly tricky to prevent that. But in this case, even if you get the "check for wild talent" ability again, the first time you used it you became immune to its effects. So using the ability again should not actually give you a second chance for a wild talent. You can use it just for the sake of clearing it from the UI.

29 minutes ago, Quester said:

I wonder if there are any NPCs that would fit as Psions?

I've played with Nalia as a psion/thief, which was fun and I think fit her character (the idea that the wealthy could pay for their kids to train in psionic abilities, like Agis of Asticles). She focused on traditional telepathy/telekinesis stuff. I also played with Valygar as a ranger/psion and I think that fit his character very well too, using innate nonmagical abilities since he hates magic so much. He focused on biokinesis & clairsentience abilities, which was cool, although it didn't give him many tools to deal with hostile mages.

[Guest Cerebrius]

Amazing mod but Im encountering a game breaking issue: game crashes on rest after a certain point if I have too many PSPs or psionic talents. With EEKeeper I can see my number of memorizable innates is abnormally high (470+) and tuning it down to 10 manually allows to rest until I try resting with low health, which seems to trigger the refilling of memorizables.

 

By using EEKeeper to lower my number of known talents, I seem to be able to play again, though Cerebrius the Great, my cerebromancer LE gnome would miss the variety. Gameplay was amazing until now.

 

Thinking it was some mod incompatibility, I reinstalled the game (BGEE 2.5.17.0) with only modmerge and Will to Power and the issue persists. I also get multiple error messages on EEKeeper about missing resources if I try to use it to manually add the psionicist kit's effects on a character, though other kits don't have that issue. Not sure it matters but might as well be thorough.

 

Am I missing something?

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, Guest Cerebrius said:

game crashes on rest... number of memorizable innates is abnormally high (470+)

If you have more than 255 memorized spells and you try to sleep while a party member is injured, the game scans all memorized spells to see if any can be used for healing. Scanning more than 255 spells reliably causes a crash. Workaround: manually heal your party members before sleeping.

That doesn't stop it being annoying, though. I haven't see this issue related to this mod... but yeah anything that gives you more than 255 memorized spells can trigger this.

[Guest Cerebrius]

Thanks Subtledoctor! It seems to be that indeed. I've found two workarounds besides healing before rest, if anyone encounters the issue:

1-doing away with the class, using powers as eekeeper resources for classic innates (though limited to 10 per day total)

2-spending most psionic points before sleeping (though forgetting to do so would mean crash)

But I was wondering, how hard would it be for a noob like me to modify the PSP economy to reduce numbers definitively?