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Thieving Skills for Bards


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PLEASE NOTE: This mod is being deprecated and replaced with my Skills and Abilities mod.

Introduction - This Mod is going to be retired and roll into my new Skills and Abilities mod which will offer vastly more content.

This mod is allows Bards and Bard Kits (including those from mods) to use Pick Locks, Find/Disarm Traps, and Pick Pockets in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, the Enhanced Edition Trilogy. I created this mod to give players an alternative to having to shoehorn a Thief into every party. Most classes can cover down on similar/shared abilities, but only Thieves had access to certain (highly important) abilities that no other class could quite perform: pick locks and disarm traps. Yes, Knock could act as a makeshift Pick Lock costing valuable spell slots and you could bash the lock, but these options came at the expense of lost experience. Now, you have the option to choose an alternative to Thieves and change up your gameplay a little bit.

From level 1 to level 5, the Bard will receive 10 skill points in Pick Locks, 10 skill points in Find/Disarm Traps, and 5 skill points in Pick Pockets. From level 6 to level 20, the Bard will receive 5 skills points each in Pick Locks, Find/Disarm Traps, and Pick Pockets. The Action Bar is updated via EEex to allow Bards to Sing, Detect Traps, and Use Thieving Abilities at the loss of the quickspell.

You can download the latest version of the mod here.

You can view the readme for the mod here.

Compatibility

This mod requires EEex created by Bubb to work. This means you will need to launch your game with InfinityLoader.exe instead of the standard Baldur.exe file. Additionally, please install this after any other mods that add Bard kits or alter bard spells/abilities. Being this requires EEex to run, Windows is required at this time.

Special Thanks

Special thank you to @Bubb for all of his work on EEex as well as providing the .lua file required to alter the actionbar.

Edited by morpheus562
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1 hour ago, morpheus562 said:

Rangers, ...Monks... were all physical damage;

I would argue against these bits. Erhm, could a mod be made to tackle also those classes ? As Rangers have hide, and Shamans have detect illusion, and Monks could do somethings.

Yes, this is off topic, unless you want to take a holistic approach and bring in more classess.

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I'm not exactly sure what the deficit is that you would want to tackle with those classes you listed? Rangers and thieves both offer hide in shadows and backstabs, and multiple classes have the ability to detect illusions. The only one that didn't have a true alternative is disarming traps (outside of brute forcing and hope you don't die which really shouldn't be an option).

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I haven't tested this yet, but how does this mod affect bard kits which slow down vanilia pickpocket progression? I think I will use this in the longterm though, although I prolly would have preferred 15 distributable points over the fixed 5-5-5 progression, because this still makes thieves required in BG1.

Good job nonetheless.

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Honestly, I would prefer to allow bards to get 15 skill point distribution to whichever of the three skills they wanted, and it is what I initially attempted to implement; however, I kept running into issues where it would start assigning negative amounts of skill points to the bard instead of the 15 skill points. I will keep looking into it to determine a root cause, but the 5-5-5 distribution was a quick fix to resolve the issue.

To your initial question about reduced pick pocket progression for certain kits: at this time with v1.0, all bards and bard kits will get the 5-5-5 progression. I will look at implementing the 15 skill point distribution in a future release and then adjusting for how other mods may assign skill points.

At the BGEE exp cap, it will allow a Half-Elf bard with 18 DEX to have 75 in open locks, 60 in find traps, and 85 in pick pockets. Then add in the dex tome, Kiels Buckler, DUHM, and other items to boost dex, and those numbers start to rise. Add in potions of master thievery and you should be able to get through most of BGEE.

Edited by morpheus562
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6 hours ago, morpheus562 said:

Honestly, I would prefer to allow bards to get 15 skill point distribution to whichever of the three skills they wanted, and it is what I initially attempted to implement; however, I kept running into issues where it would start assigning negative amounts of skill points to the bard instead of the 15 skill points. I will keep looking into it to determine a root cause, but the 5-5-5 distribution was a quick fix to resolve the issue.

...

I'm certain that this was working fine before the most recent update...

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2 hours ago, Grammarsalad said:

I'm certain that this was working fine before the most recent update...

It is probably the more recent update with v2.6.6 then. When testing the blade, I set it to have 15 points initial distribution then 15 points per level to distribute. Initial level showed the character received 15 points, then on level up would receive 10, then 5, then -5 which would basically freeze the level up screen preventing any further updates.

The game does appear to auto-add 100 skill points to bards for traps in the back end which may be the cause. I plan on playing around with it a little bit more to see if I can get the desired results.

Edited by morpheus562
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@Grammarsalad I reached out to @Bubb who has been immensely helpful in looking into it from his end. For everyone's awareness of what is going on in the backed, I will quote Bubb:
 

Quote

 

Yes, there's weird things going on in Bard thieving skills handling

(pSprite->m_baseStats).m_setTrapsBase = 100;

Always forced to 100 every level up. Per-levelup skill points are turned negative?
 

unspentSkillPoints = CRuleTables::GetThiefSkillsLevelUp(&this_03->m_ruleTables,pSprite);

unspentSkillPoints = -(unspentSkillPoints * bardLevel);


 

As time allows, we can get a hook into EEex from Bubb. From there it will be easy coding on my end to allow Bards to assign skill points as they choose, similar to Thieves, instead of being a set add that it currently is. Again, big thanks to Bubb for all of his great work with EEex and for putting up with my questions/queries regarding this.

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6 minutes ago, Endarire said:

In a near term release, may we get an install option for Bards to get skill points at all level ups?  What about an option to make the thieving skills button a F12 innate ability like with Cleric/Rogues?

 

Thankee!

Current setup allows for over 100 skill points to be reached, and having over 100 in any of them doesn't offer any improvement. Next step will be to allow the player to sign skill points themselves; however, some more work needs to be done before that becomes a possibility. 

Not looking to map to key buttons.

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