Morgoth questions

[Morgoth]

So, some questions - I may have left them behind, may have never made them, may have asked but forgot, but I think they are worth a thought.

1) If you use "better calls for help", you cannot rob Winthrop's inn upstairs. Even if you make the bystanders pass out with your fist, the flaming fist gets summoned. Intended? Wouldn't it be better for that to happen if you aren't able to make the bystander pass out on the first hit, or at least, if you aren't able to do that within a certain time frame after the first hit?

2) Any plan on changing the rope section in ToB? My issues are the following: making you go back for the rope is not an elegant solution to face the X dragons; I don't find it realistic the dragons don't try to attack you at once, even with their pride. Also they don't release any loot (at least they should drop their scales, and why not, their blood - the yellow dragon drops his scales). I know that you were of the idea that you don't want to add new weapons, etc, but after the Karkh additional item, this whole encounter doesn't feel satisfying to me.

On the other hand, the yellow dragon interaction is pretty cool. Not exactly sure you shouldn't get both the items (the scale and the amulet?) if you kill him, though.

3) Any plan on making the "Ust nasta defenses" a real component? Something where you add dialogues and actually an item or two, so the players can actually go through and think about it. Provoking a city makes little sense with the current component.

4) Will add more as soon as I remember.
 

[DavidW]

Splitting this into a new topic since it's off-topic for my 'avoiding major bugs' thread., and thanks for the comments.

1) Having had a quick look at the scripting, it's not obvious to me why this would be anything to do with SCS. If it is, it's unintended, but not something I particularly mind either way.

2) In order:

- I agree that going back for the rope is inelegant. (In my defense, the whole rope bit of Abazigal's lair is a bit silly.) I don't at present have a more elegant solution, though. (The fundamental design constraint is that I want to reuse the Draconis area, which is a cool place for fighting dragons.)

-I would say that Forgotten Realms lore generally absolutely supports dragons' pride being a major factor for them, so I don't find it unrealistic myself. On a practical level, scripting dragons of different colors to fight co-operatively is difficult because their breath weapons are not compatible (as the red/green dialog notes).

- Dragon loot: I don't think there's any requirement for dragons to drop their scales. In unmodded ToB only one dragon out of five does so, so presumably in most cases you can't scavenge a sufficiently large sample of scales. And I don't want to reinforce the idea that every time I use a dragon I have to give out scales. (Doubly blood: no dragon drops blood IIRC.) It wouldn't make sense for the dragons to drop any actual treasure: you're not attacking them in their lairs, and they don't carry backpacks. And of course mechanically I want to avoid arms races, as noted elsewhere in SCS's readme.

- comparison with Kahrk: to be honest if whether a fight in chapter 9 of ToB is satisfying depends on whether you picked up a magic item in a fight in the middle of BG, you may be overthinking things. But (i) Kahrk is an optional encounter, whereas the dragon fight is on the critical path (so your reward is just getting to continue); (ii) more importantly, I can get away with very occasionally breaking my no-new-loot rule precisely because it's so occasional and I resist the general temptation to give cool loot whenever I move the challenge level.

- notwithstanding all of the above, there *might* be an argument for putting one lot of scales on one of the four dragons. Will consider.

- the mechanical reason you don't get the amulet and scales if you kill Anadramatis is that it means one choice doesn't dominate the other. In-game, Anadramatis creates the amulet for you (it's described as ''imbued by the dragon Anadramatis with his fury at the dragon Bhaalspawn Abazigal".)

3) No. The main point of the component is to make fleeing the city when you inevitably dget discovered to be more of a challenge. The fact that some people like intentionally winning the whole fight is cool, but it wasn't what it was made for. My advice for most people is: don't provoke the city, and if you're spotted, get the hell out of dodge - as the readme says, it's a drow *city*.

[Lightbringer]

14 hours ago, Morgoth said:

1) If you use "better calls for help", you cannot rob Winthrop's inn upstairs. Even if you make the bystanders pass out with your fist, the flaming fist gets summoned. Intended? Wouldn't it be better for that to happen if you aren't able to make the bystander pass out on the first hit, or at least, if you aren't able to do that within a certain time frame after the first hit?

I can confirm that I was able to rob Winthrop's inn upstairs with SCS's better calls for help.  As usual, I made sure I wasn't in sight of any awake NPCs, I picked the locks, pocketed the goods, and waited for the rest of the round to expire.  I of course didn't rob the one chest that was next to the guy who is awake and talkative.