SubtleMods: Magic Battles Revised - streamlined rules for mage duels

[Chosen]

23 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

What game are you playing?

The mod uses the BG2EE string refs for the spell names, which I thought (in these cases) held for other games as well. If not, I can have the mod replace the strings, at the cost of everyone getting the English strings since the mod is only in English so far. 

I am playing EET. In English so no problems there. I would do an weidu uninstall then install 1.2 this mod is nearly at the end of the install order so it should be fine. I think beholder change is good it is more coherent that way but to be fair I don't like antimagic ray at all since it is pretty cheesy and hard to balance. In a unrelated bug Viconia didn't get dispel/remove magic at 3rd level spells so i had to change a spl file so clerics aren't excluded, it is probably due to my unconventional ini selection(party_friendly_dispel =    1,mini_breach_dispel                =    1, mini_breach_remove = 1). Maybe I should set one of these to 0? I would prefer clerics with party friendly breach-dispel, distinction between dispel and remove magic is lost this way but clerics don't get remove magic.

[subtledoctor]

Ah, the cloning of the altered RM to replace the cleric DM might have disrupted clerics actually getting it. Sounds easily fixable, I’ll take a look when I can

[subtledoctor]

@mickabouille I have added about 90% of a French translation,  just copying over the .tra strings from Random Tweaks and adjusting the @ refs to works in this mod. Only about 5 spells have been added, and thus remain to be translated. Also I can't promise I didn't make small adjustments to the other spells, so you might want to quickly proofread to make sure the SDRT translations are still accurate for the MBR descriptions.

 

[mickabouille]

In fact, with the addition of (d5_random_tweaks) 1.4 i saw you added a tweak for prismatic spray and started reviewing what I submitted last time (for 1.3.1) and found it... unsatisfying (many typos). I'll look at the mbr one much faster.

Also, I'll send a fix for some encoding issue with prismatic spray in this that one (I *assume* you copied from spell_rev, which has a translation in ISO-8859-1.. maybe for a reason? and it ends up funky in the d5_random_tweaks translation file which is utf-8).

 

EDIT: I mixed the mbr and d5_r_t threads

Edited February 16, 2022 by mickabouille

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, mickabouille said:

Also, I'll send a fix for some encoding issue with prismatic spray in this that one (I *assume* you copied from spell_rev, which has a translation in ISO-8859-1

Yes - thanks

[mickabouille]

There it is https://github.com/UnearthedArcana/magic_battles_revised/pull/4

[Guest BooChew]

Hello.

Is this the same as component 5000 (your revised magic system) in your d5_Random_Tweaks mod? I was going to install many of your tweaks from d5 as well as your revised magic system, but now I am not sure if I should be installing this instead. I was also going to install Better Spell Visuals, but it appears that this includes a version of that as well, modified to your taste (seemingly quite reliable, given your opinion on the ioun stone silliness). What would you recommend? 

Also, if this mod is the best to install instead of the revised magic system from d5, what should my install order be? Should I install the non-revised magic system tweaks at one point, and the separate Magic Battles Revised mod at some other point? You recommended me this order in another thread:

• IR
• SR
• Random Tweaks
• RR
• SCS
• aTweaks

Should this mod take the place of random tweaks?
Thank you for your time and patience.

[subtledoctor]

On 2/24/2022 at 10:07 PM, Guest BooChew said:

Is this the same as component 5000 (your revised magic system) in your d5_Random_Tweaks mod?

This no longer exists in the Random Tweaks mod, it was removed and moved here mostly so that install ordering would be easier. This should be installed very late, even after SCS.

There have been some updates/bug fixes so use the independent version from here. (Also, Random Tweaks has had some updates as well, you probably want to grab an updated version of that one.)

Edited March 2, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Chosen]

You may want to look at breach subspell spwi513c.spl, It removed wrong spell type in my setup(24 instead of 23). Anti-magic rays have the same problem. Entropy shield has wrong secondary type probably because the same reason. I don't know if it effects anything else.

[subtledoctor]

16 hours ago, Chosen said:

You may want to look at breach subspell spwi513c.spl, It removed wrong spell type in my setup(24 instead of 23). Anti-magic rays have the same problem. Entropy shield has wrong secondary type probably because the same reason. I don't know if it effects anything else.

Quite so.  How odd.  Fixed in version 1.4.

For games in progress, here is a hotfix you can install.

[Chosen]

Thanks for the quick fix. I would check by doing some mage fights.

[Chosen]

I found a big problem with beach type dispels. I am using SRR. They never dispel some common spells like shield or non-detection. dispel works quite good for spells protection from arrows and stoneskin. I am not sure of the reason but it is probably due to "power" value of spells. Power value of 0 is useful for casting friendly spells on targets with deflection but probably breaks dispel somehow. Breach works fine.

Hopefully there is a workaround because other than this problem mini-breach idea is very very good. I vastly prefer it to all-or-nothing dispel check.

Edit: I confirmed it is due power level. Opcode 230 doesn't remove powerlvl=0 effects. I don't know which spells have 0 and for what reason though.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Chosen

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, Chosen said:

I am using SRR. They never dispel some common spells like shield or non-detection. dispel works quite good for spells protection from arrows and stoneskin. I am not sure of the reason but it is probably due to "power" value of spells. Power value of 0 is useful for casting friendly spells on targets with deflection but probably breaks dispel somehow. Breach works fine.

Huh... that's weird. Hang on... ah, poop. From the IESDP:

Quote

Effects with a Power Level of 0 are ignored when this opcode [230] checks for effects, but will still be removed if another effect from its Parent Resource triggers removal.

So my own mod sets the power level to zero in a bunch of spells that I want to bypass Deflections, but they are all instant-duration spells - Cure Wounds, Slow Poison, Break Enchantment, stuff like that. SRR sets a ton of buff spells to have power level 0, which means that those spells are always going to interact badly with anything that uses opcode 230.

And using opcode 230 is kind of the whole point of DM/RM being a "mini Breach." I agree with you that it works really well as far as gameplay goes; but I don't think there's any other way to make a mini Breach of this sort, than using opcode 230.

I don't want to jump to saying it's a hard incompatibility, though... calling in @Bartimaeus to explore options. Could those buff spells use power level 10 or 11 or something, instead? Would that be otherwise the same?

[Bartimaeus]

7 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I don't want to jump to saying it's a hard incompatibility, though... calling in @Bartimaeus to explore options. Could those buff spells use power level 10 or 11 or something, instead? Would that be otherwise the same?

I actually have no idea. That particular setting is optional and defaulted to off, but if you think 10 works just as well as 0, I'll set it to that instead. Don't have the capability to be testing stuff right now, though.

Edited April 8, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[subtledoctor]

12 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I actually have no idea. That particular setting is optional and defaulted to off, but if you think 10 works just as well as 0, I'll set it to that instead. Don't have the capability to be testing stuff right now, though.

I've never tested it. The Deflection opcode in the IESDP says this:

Quote

The targeted creature(s) will absorb a number of effects (specified by the Total Amount field) whose Power attribute is equal to the one specified by the Power Level field (range: 0 – 9).

So it sounds like a power level 10 will work fine with regard to deflections... but I don't know how it would interact with other parts of the game. Probably it would be fine...?

I wouldn't suggest you change the whole mod for this, not if it has the slimmest possibility to cause problems. But maybe instead of a binary decision (power=0 or power=spell level) you could have the .ini option allow the user to specify it, and use that variable in the code. (That's what I do with Cure spells.) Assuming of course that is fairly convenient. That way players could specify 0 or 10 at their own discretion, and they could test it.

Speaking of which, maybe we could write up a hotfix for @Chosen here. I don't know what the code is that you use to do this... is there a list of spells specified somewhere in the SRR package? If so I could write something up quickly for Chosen to try out.