Sick familiarity

[temnix]

I was twining dough braids out of the toolset, trying to figure out how to make a creature a familiar of another, and it turns out that this is possible. I don't know if this is a discovery or not, but no one has made anything of this, at any rate. It takes applying opcode 195, "Drain Con and HP on death," directly to a creature, and a party member needs to be in the "Master ID" field (parameter 3). The numbers there go beyond 5, corresponding to Player6, and cycle - 6 is Player1 again, and so on. The "slave" doesn't give any bonus hit points to the "master" right away, but, strangely enough, does when he dies, just before the Constitution loss and damage equal to the "slave"'s maximum hp whip back. The bonus maximum hit points from the EFF file controlling the link are permanent, if the timing for the EFF (where it is applied, not inside the EFF) is Instant/Permanent, otherwise none of this works at all. The guide here was right about the timing, but wrong that familiars can't be had beyond FAMILIAR.2DA.

The hit points bonus can be negative, too, in that case they are permanently lost in addition to the Constitution loss and damage a second later. If the hit points were negative but an equal number were added through a "Maximum hit points bonus," this would be the same as the familiar familiar bonus, gained on summoning but lost on death.

I can think of some uses for this, but this would work much better if the effect could somehow be channeled through to a particular "master" instead of subjugating everyone to some one party member. Is that possible? With invisible minions, probably. Any other way?

[Grammarsalad]

Interesting. According to the iesdp, a master id value of -1 sets the master to "Not Party Member" whatever that means...

[temnix]

It doesn't mean anything. It's an empty value.