"Fair Play" Mod

[temnix]

@subtledoctorWell, I don't read demotivators or online comics either, and I don't listen to hip-hop and rap. The loss...

Edited March 1, 2021 by temnix

[InKal]

On 2/28/2021 at 7:52 AM, Jabberwock said:

Hi everyone, I am an experienced SCS BG1/BG2 player (~500 hours) and am thinking about creating a mod that adjusts some of the squishier areas of game difficulty. I thought I would post about it here and see if there was any interest or feedback. I'm planning on calling the mod "Fair Play", because the intent is to force the player to play fair and to not use certain types of "cheese" that exist in current high level play, particularly high level no-reload play.

I'd like to tackle one modification each time I do a run (which happens every few months) and just chip away at the list over time. 

Modifications:

1. BG2: change "on recruit" experience caps for NPCs to 500k XP, except for Imoen in Spellhold dungeon who stays the same at 1.25mm XP cap
   • Purpose: Remove cheesy solo / small party play in Chapter 2-3 that allows the player to recruit NPCs at high level and then be over-leveled for the rest of a run. 500k matches the SoD cap and allows some benefit for XP gaming, but keeps the benefit to a reasonable level.
   • Questions/Concerns: Are the experience caps actually moddable or are they hardcoded?
2. No stealing from most merchants
   • Purpose: stealing some low level items is fine, but robbing Athkatla blind is a little egregious and removes a lot of the interesting economic decision making. The intent isn't to remove all useful stealing, but to make it more reasonable and make gold management more important. In addition, reduce the prices fences purchase at, and make them "no-steal".
3. No item recharging
   • Purpose: make limited resources limited. The 1 charge cloud kill from Jon's dungeon would no longer be possible to immediately convert into a 50 charge "infinite cloud kill" wand that gives the party nearly unlimited use of one of the strongest spells in the game! Green amulet charges have to be used a little more carefully, resurrection rod heals are a limited resource, etc.
   • Questions/Concerns: not sure if anyone has figured out how to do this. Possibly making any item with charges unsellable would work, but I'm not sure if that would make them unpurchaseable, which would mess with shops like SS. I'm also not sure how easily tunable the "unsellable" status is. Another potential solution I thought about is to raise the charges cap to something gigantic, like 99999, to make them charge expensive to repurchase (not sure if this is possible either). Maybe someone else has already figured out a solution to this modification. 
4. No Project Image / Mislead spells
   • Purpose: I have never seen anyone use either of these spells for anything other than egregious cheese
   • Questions/Concerns: is it possible to remove player access only? I know some mage scripts use mislead. I think if all scrolls were removed, and NPC starting spellbooks were adjusted (Jan starts with mislead I believe), that would mostly get rid of it, although it wouldn't stop sorcerers. Not sure if the player sorcerer book is easy to modify, although presumably it is possible given that there are custom spells that I presume sorcerers can choose on level up. I'm sure there is a well established way to remove player access to a spell.
5. Reduce the power of Chain-contingency
   • Purpose: Remove the ability to use any attack spells, which are generally too strong / cheesy (e.g. the notorious 3x ADHW on spot enemy). Alternatively, remove ability to target enemies. Worst case, remove player access to spell.
   • Questions/Concerns: the contingency / sequencer spells are sui generis and I'm not sure how easy they are too modify in any way (e.g. preventing certain spells from being used). Might be easier to just remove, although that hurts the player a little more than I would like.
6. Rest restrictions
   • Purpose: Optional modification. Don't allow the player to rest in unreasonable locations, or give them limited numbers of rests. Makes spell resource management more interesting, whereas right now it generally is not. Not sure if I really like this idea, but thinking about it.
   • Questions/Concerns: I'm sure this is possible, given that Jon's dungeon and the MFs in the UD have this restriction. Might be too much work to adjust more than a few areas, however.
7. Time limits
   • Purpose: Another optional feature I'm not sure about. Similar to rest restrictions, force more player resource management. E.g. 48 hours in Bodhi's dungeon, possibly some other areas. 30 days to leave for Spellhold (perhaps a customizable time period). Needs a mechanism for the player to explicitly know how much time they have left.
   • Questions/Concerns: this feature may be too irritating to players in practice, or may not make the game more difficult in an interesting or enjoyable way. 
8. Remove or reduce the effectiveness of kiting
   • Purpose: a HUGE percentage of dangerous enemies in the game can be defeated by kiting. So many "high skill" solo games are just kiting every enemy to death, with the monsters unable to force the player into melee range. No offense to those players, but I would like to make this impossible or at least very difficult :). I think removing the player's ability to get movement speed upgrades (e.g. haste, cheetah boots), while increasing enemy movement speed and reducing weapon speed would work.
   • Questions/Concerns: I don't know if modifications along these lines have been tried before. Lots of potential problems and tradeoffs here to think through.
9. Adjust power of protection from undead scroll
   • Purpose: Some adjustments have already been made by SCS. Adjust: allow high level undead to ignore the effect with a minor thac0 penalty. Perhaps mid-level undead get a larger thac0 penalty, so it has some use against vampires without being unreasonable strong
   • Questions/Concerns: Not sure whether spell effects can depend on enemy level. May need to just check monster type, or give certain monsters immunity. This might be a lot of work for a relatively small benefit.
10. Prevent casting pfM on enemies
    • Purpose: I think the ability to cast pfM exists in either some installation or some version; would just make it consistently self-only to remove the cheesy dispel effect
11. Reduce thief xp (lock/trap) and mage xp (spell learning)
    • Purpose: Remove the ability to generate huge amounts of xp for doing nothing. Particularly egregious when combined with scroll theft, small parties, and NPC level up on recruit. Probably reduce BG2 xp by ~90%
    • Questions/Concerns: Not sure if this is adjustable via mod
12. Remove potion stacking
    • I know this has been done by other mods; I think it's a good change and would include
13. Prevent enemy spellbook draining
    • Purpose: no cheesing enemy fights by removing all their spells via area changes or summons. I think this can be solved by creating more movement barriers (like certain lich fights receive in SCS) and possibly more aggressive teleport-to-player behavior from the AI.
    • Questions/Concerns: not sure how tedious this is to deal with across a large number of encounters. This feels like something that might be too much work to do for many encounters, but perhaps some additional fights could prevent the player from area changing or hiding out of LoS and sending a stream of summons. Maybe enemy casters could check if they haven't seen a party member in a few rounds and refresh all spells if so.
14. Consider reducing the power of player thief traps
    • Purpose: reduce the power of spike traps in particular. I know some mods have already made adjustments.

 

OK! Some of those I think are not too difficult, some are probably beyond my abilities. But hopefully over time I will chip away at this list and end up with an interesting challenge mod that removes cheese from current high level play for those players that are interested to do so.

If anyone has any comments I would love to hear them!

 

Agree on almost everything exept 5, 6 and 7. Chain contingency is high level spell and should stay as it is. High level caster should be able to just nuke stuff because it is fun. Rest actually is spell management and what can you change?? Imagine that you can not rest in Firkraag dungeon because "unreasonable location". Lets say that you can win every battle there without resting, you are just like that, tactical genius. Can you also beat the dragon without rest?? well, I must run all the way back to the exit and rest? Nope! also "unreasonable" location! So, I must go to the Garren house and rest? Nope! I was attacked there before - unreasonable location! Fuuuuu... where can I rest?? Travel to Amn and find the inn, eat some cheese (hehe) drink some ale and rest. Thats fun, no? No, not really. 

Time limits - no! just NO! Worst idea ever.

[subtledoctor]

3 hours ago, Morgoth said:

the game is being enhanced so well that player's agency is going to be removed soon

Congratulations, you win the prize for Hyperbolic Statement of the Day! Your prize is, uh, to continue living with the delusion that your experience playing a 20-year-old video game is indicative of your "willpower." Good luck with that!

3 hours ago, Morgoth said:

Why if people meet an exploit, or think a mechanic can be abusable, rather than not using it, they propose to delete it from the game?

...

The patch should have fixed other things, not this kind of stuff.

I don't know who said that stuff, but it sure wasn't anyone in this thread.  Go rant on the Beamdog forums. This is a thread about a VOLUNTARY MOD that you only install VOLUNTARILY if you VOLUNTARILY think it would make the game fun for you. This guy has some good ideas! And here people come saying "stop having ideas." "Just use willpower." Don't install SCS, just stand around for three rounds to let the enemy spellcasters get off a few protective spells before you start engage in combat. Don't make scrolls more expensive (thereby increasing the value and wonder of the hard-to-find spells), instead open the console and delete some of your gold whenever you buy one. Because that sounds fun.

Christ.

See @Bartimaeus  you were indeed reasonable compared to tripe like this. But this is the kind of nonsense that starts to pile on when it becomes a debate about challenge-oriented rules modifications versus "just using willpower." It's bullshit and completely irrelevant to the thread topic, which looked for feedback on modding ideas. "I reject the very premise of your ideas" is shitty feedback.

[Bartimaeus]

Yes...and @subtledoctor's point is that this is a thread for a proposed optional mod for people who do like these sorts of changes, so what's the relevancy? This isn't for you: that's perfectly okay.

I am starting to see why subtledoctor had a viscerally negative reaction to my post, especially seeing how that post started in contrast to how it ended. Everyone that isn't actually interested in the sorts of changes proposed by the OP, could you please vacate the thread - this is not the appropriate place to dump your axe-grinding.

[temnix]

Just so I'm not all doom and gloom, here is how you can limit the power of wands without screwing them up and out of gameplay: make the maximum number of charges decrease with every use. This would be in the style of Diablo I's item recharging power. To implement this make it so that the original, "brand-new" wand has, say, 20 charges in theory. When its power is used, it is replaced with a "Used up" with 19-charges, a wand that looks the same but on use replaces itself with an 18-charge wand etc. When the 1-charge wand is used, it disappears altogether. This sub-item creation could be automated with Weidu simply enough. The count of charges is just for overall durability, every item will actually be single-charge, so there will be no recharging them. This will make it possible to eliminate the distracting and over-informing indication of charges, too. A real D&D player didn't know how long a wand would last, and here the number can be different for wands of sleep, wands of fire etc. The number can also be made different for every particular wand using something like SET randcharge = RANDOM (1 5) to patch containers. If 1, the wand is replaced with a version that starts at 18 charges instead of 20, if 2, then 22 and so on.

[The_Baffled_King]

I just wanted to say that while I think that many of these ideas make for good gameplay, some of them seem more worthwhile to mod than others.

For example, while I agree that stealing from stores is ridiculous, it's easy for me to manage that by either (a) not stealing at all, or; (b) stealing a few items before deciding that my thief has done all that they "should" get away with that game. On that basis, I think that the time spent on adjusting the stealing mechanic is probably better spent elsewhere. My position changes if you're able to introduce critical failures for stealing, and some kind of consequence upon failure, as that's the kind of thing a player can't easily duplicate by their choices.

In contrast, I think that a global change to reduce the effectiveness of kiting would be brilliant, and if you modded the game to make all enemies move slightly faster (with their animations changed to match) then I would bite your hand off to install that mod. While this obviously wouldn't eliminate kiting as an option (as Bartimaeus pointed out), it would make it a little clearer to the player when they are kiting. And, to me at least, that is important, because dispersing and retreating from melee-users in order to wear them down with ranged weapons is a legitimate tactic that should still be open to players. But if those melee-users have been modded to move faster than you, and they still aren't landing a blow, then that tells a player who wants to play fair that it's time to say "oops, you caught me", and to make at least one party member engage in melee.

I think that the use of timers for specific quests could also be a good idea, so long as you're up-front about what is happening before people install (and the journal and/or other characters are used to clearly inform the player about what is going on during the game). But one thing you have to be careful about is that introducing timers doesn't accidentally make it easier for the player.

Take for example Chapter 7 in BG1. Let's say you add a timer by fixing the date and time of Sarevok's attempt to assasinate Grand Dukes Belt and Liia, with the consequence being that the player loses the game if they don't get to the coronation on time without the necessary invitations and proof. You can inform the player of this via specific in-game dialogue about Sarevok's impending coronation, and you can enforce your timer by having Flaming Fist Bill "know" when the coronation is due to take place (and therefore when he should and should not let the player into the Ducal Palace).

But what happens if the player is running ahead of your timer by at least 8 hours? If the timer is fixed, then the player is going to have to rest. And if the player rests, then they will heal and memorise spells. And if the player was observing their own timer, and going through Chapter 7 without resting in order to increase the difficulty, then your mod will have messed that up, and accidentally made things easier for the player. So it isn't entirely straightforward. I hope that offers some food for thought, anyway.

Maybe I should add that I read the discussion between subtledoctor and Bartimaeus, and I understand the former's point. I'm absolutely not saying that there is no reason to tweak stealing from stores because I can use willpower; I'm saying that it seems less of a priority, as it is easier for the player to self-manage their own limitations on the mechanic.