Alternatives to ToF

[Connelly]

The rest of components aside, Tome & Blood's Innate Find Familiar and Bonuses for memorization/casting slots seem compatible, I think?

I imagine the half of House Rules that only tweaks characters, items, and quests seem to be be fine, like Improved Dialogues or Give Stat Bonuses to EENPCs. The other half that does touch rules instead would be straight out: Expanded Racials, Rebalanced Attacks Per Round, Monk Use Quarterstaves, ability bonuses...

Re: the revised Proficiency System. It reads to me like it doesn't change the proficiency groups, only how they progress. I see S&A and TA are already preventing their proficiencies to be installed after ToF, but could their groups and new proficiencies still work as expected? Or would the game shortcircuit and start giving everyone starting proficiency points in groups they shouldn't, or in new proficiency groups unrelated to weapons like M&F and S&A do (it would be odd for mages to start by receiving free training in armor or long/bastard/2handed swords, and fighters in spellcasting).

Cleric kits aside, would later ToF components like the multi/dual classes (or SCS) expect class and kits to be one particular way? The class and kit revisions in ToF here seem somewhat conservative, while Artisan's overhauls do provide more benefits to classes, but also trying to be serviceable at low levels (which I understand is one of worries of ToF). At face value, seems like using Artisan's on top of ToF' would be fine, unless there's any weirdness to be expected. The Dragon Disciple overhaul is the one that looks would probably clash the most due to the new variants.
Edit: Seems ToF abilities and HLA's try to cover part of the same ground that some of Artisan's additions to classes do, so there might be some conceptual clash.

13 hours ago, DavidW said:

I don't recall how destructively ToF installs itself. (There are almost certainly lots of places where I can tweak things to improve compatibility; this was a complicated enough project as it was that I wanted to prioritize getting a beta out that worked in its own right and with SCS, and then address other compatibility issues through iteration.)

Would there any reason against installing whole new kits after ToF, or wait until compatibility is improved? Besides kitpack mods like Morpheus', there are kits added by quest and NPC mods, usually fixed early in an install order. The more I think about this, the less relevant I realize it sounds. The only thing here could be adapting quests and NPCs to ToF in the future like it does for the Bioware characters. Some that come to mind are Dave and Tenya being treated as priests of Talos and Umberlee, so they could get the proper cleric kits. Or Artemius' NPCs; Sirene's Martyr kit is Ilmater themed, but ToF don't seem to do anything with paladins and deities so it can probably be ignored; and Kahiri's Pyromancer tries to do the same your Elemental Specialists do, so she could get the ToF specialization for consistency.

Passive Warrior HLAs : except for the Warcry component, I think it plays nice with ToF? It makes the game search in different tables for the HLA's available to the player, while leaving the vanilla HLAs available to enemies vanilla, so that seems fine. Their Warcry granting bigger buffs than your Greater Warcry would look weird, but that's easy to avoid by not installing that.

Reddbane's 3.5e mods (Weapon styles and Thac0, CON, and hit dice). Probably safe adding to the list, under rules and proficiencies tweaks (even if it wasn't because of their age).

Edited December 14, 2023 by Connelly

[morpheus562]

3 hours ago, Connelly said:

Re: the revised Proficiency System. It reads to me like it doesn't change the proficiency groups, only how they progress. I see S&A and TA are already preventing their proficiencies to be installed after ToF, but could their groups and new proficiencies still work as expected? Or would the game shortcircuit and start giving everyone starting proficiency points in groups they shouldn't, or in new proficiency groups unrelated to weapons like M&F and S&A do (it would be odd for mages to start by receiving free training in armor or long/bastard/2handed swords, and fighters in spellcasting).

Speaking on behalf of S&A, and it will need to be installed after ToF. With regards to attempting to combine both mods prof overhauls, ToF I suspect will attempt to put profs into the wrong prof slots. To make compatible, I would either 1) have to figure out where and how @DavidW does these assignments and then change them on S&A install or 2) @DavidW does a check on his end asking the player if they plan to use S&A revised profs and then installs it on his end where it will point correctly once S&A is installed. Option 1 makes the most sense to me, but not sure when I can get around to digging in deep enough to see how this is being done.

The races and subraces component throws a slight curve ball as humans now get +1 prof at level 1 and it alters the profs.2da files. As such, if wanting to use both the ToF races and S&A profs, you will be restricted to the vanilla proficiency progression.

Tonight I plan on updating S&A revised 2h weapon damage (1.5x STR dmg) to update based off the two versions of ToF's revised abilities.

Edited December 14, 2023 by morpheus562

[CamDawg]

3 hours ago, Connelly said:

Re: the revised Proficiency System. It reads to me like it doesn't change the proficiency groups, only how they progress. I see S&A and TA are already preventing their proficiencies to be installed after ToF, but could their groups and new proficiencies still work as expected?

For Tweaks, at least, the various restrictions I committed are from a quick readme pass as far as what I think will be incompatible. While I've had access to the ToF repo for a bit prior to release, I haven't been able to dig in yet and see what specifically it's doing and how. Depending on the implementation, these may be able to work together, but both David and I will need to take a closer look and make some adjustments.

[Trouveur80]

9 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I think the idea of the list is specifically to identify conflicting mods that cover the same ground. So you would use DR or FnP or DoF or ToF for priest spheres; S&A or CSP or ToF for revised proficiencies; etc. But, like, AKP and MnG and ToF might all coexist just fine.

Yes I went a little too far. ^^

There is definitely some overlap between ToF and AKP, notably the vanilla kits overhauls : berserker, wizard slayer, kensai, barbarian, shapeshifter, assassin, cavalier, inquisitor, undead hunter...

12 hours ago, DavidW said:

Not all of these actually overlap with ToF, but I’ll add those that do.

Yes sorry, I somehow misunderstood the overlap focus.

[paladin84]

Subraces from tipun are used in IWD2-EET mod heavily. How one would check on the speaker's subrace (from ToF) in the dialog?

[DavidW]

It's doable but a little subtle, and at present not very user-friendly; I'll postpone explaining till the mod has stabilized a bit.