Protection from Normal Missile Change

[Guest TGCyrus]

Hi,

I have been greatly enjoying SCS thus far during my first time replaying the game. I am noticing a lot of the changes are designed to increase difficulty for difficulty's sake. 

For example, I ran into Kahrk, the Ogre mage, who came pre-buffed with stoneskin, spell turning, protection from normal missiles and globe of invulnerability. He went on to slaughter my level 5 party quite quickly. This means he was at least a level 7 mage, as stoneskin is a level 4 spell. No problem I thought, I went to buy lightning bolts and the crossbow from Beregost. 

However, I then discovered that PFNM now includes quite magical missiles! Arrows that do elemental damage are now considered "normal". This is a classic case of a hardcore player wanting to increase difficult at the expense of D&D rule accuracy. Elemental damage has never been considered "normal". 

To have this turned on by default actually causes the item and spell descriptions in the game to become inaccurate. There is no reasonable explanation or justification for this change aside from a desire to increase the difficulty of the game. Unfortunately, the masochism of hardcore players chasing an increased challenge at the expense of accuracy leads to an overall reduction in the experience.

I am currently reinstalling the SCS mod with the ini setting changed to undo this change, but I would highly recommend this be off by default in future releases, at is an utterly illogical change. 

 

 

[Guest TGCyrus]

So after inquiring into the history of PFNM, it appears that this SCS change actually reverses the update in BG2 EE which changed this spell to be consistent with its description. I find it  hilarious that SCS reverts a patch that was made by beamdog from BG1EE to BG2EE specifically to clarify and fix the functioning of this spell 

https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Protection_From_Normal_Missiles

[DavidW]

SCS got there first: it's been doing this for about fifteen years, long before the Enhanced Editions.

I'd say that over those 15 years the strong majority of players prefer the current default - and SCS AI is optimized around it - so I won't be changing it. It is easy enough to disable if you don't want it.

I'm not very moved by strict fidelity to D&D rules. BG2's system is obviously based on AD&D second edition but it's a different system, and makes lots of changes to better fit a CRPG setting (as well as many changes inspired by D&D 3e).