[BGEE] Feedback on thAC0 and revised stats bonus components regarding difficulty

[RoyalProtector]

9 minutes ago, polytope said:

most characters didn't get an inherent improvement to their base AC in those rules (beyond that from dexterity) as they increase in level, and all other "survivability" is instead represented by hit points gained

True. I don't particularly like that system, it's limited, "gamey" and too passive. But hey, this isn't The Witcher 3. It's not player skill at play here (for the most part). It's one of those things you have to give some suspension of disbelief.

For example, consider how at level 1, you die by 2 or 3 arrows at most, but at level 13, you can take 10 times more, obviously it can't realistically mean that your character suddenly is capable of being impaled with many sharp pointy metal projectiles.

Edited March 26 by RoyalProtector

[Dorothy_Dorothy_]

2nd edition D&D kind of has "gotcha" and "puzzle monster" mechanics as a core conceit. Bosses with low enough THAC0 to guarantee they hit against AC every time aren't really any more problematic than player characters who can become invincible for a turn or two at a time. Or dozens of Drow and Mindflayers who have like 90% chance of ignoring any spell cast at them. Or players who've played the game so many times and have access to Near Infinity so they know exactly what's around that corner already.

While learning Near Infinity, I've spent hundreds of hours and many playthroughs manually tweaking .cre files and whatnot to make BG2 conform closer to more modern design philosophy specifically to remove those kinds of obnoxious agency / counterplay -denial mechanics. But more seriously to the point, the design of puzzle bosses and gotcha gimmicks being problematic for gameplay / "fun" is more an argument for modifying those creatures first before rescaling the way ability scores work.

Personally I don't think a +4 in any particular number is gonna break anything. So I think the 3e style of Ability Scores is a superior design overall because it standardizes them. And one of the major benefits of standardized ability scores is exactly that it forms a more manageable, stable basis of comparison against which to balance encounters.

[subtledoctor]

4 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

2nd edition D&D kind of has "gotcha" and "puzzle monster" mechanics as a core conceit. Bosses with low enough THAC0 to guarantee they hit against AC every time aren't really any more problematic than player characters who can become invincible for a turn or two at a time. Or dozens of Drow and Mindflayers who have like 90% chance of ignoring any spell cast at them.

I think you are mixing up "2nd Edition D&D" with "Baldur's Gate 2." BG2 is great in a lot of ways, but 2E AD&D is very much NOT designed to be played this way at the tabletop. In 2E AD&D a single mind flayer could mean party wipe. In BG2 you slaughter them by the dozen. A lot of your criticism, IMHO, is relevant to this computer game but not necessarily relevant to the core ruleset. That's neither here nor there, just an observation.

4 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

I think the 3e style of Ability Scores is a superior design overall because it standardizes them. And one of the major benefits of standardized ability scores is exactly that it forms a more manageable, stable basis of comparison against which to balance encounters.

The counterpoint being, of course, that the encounters in BG2 have already been balanced, and they have been balanced against this particular idiosyncratic every-encounter-on-steroids house-ruled implementation of 2E. So standardizing things, at this late date, may not help anything.

Personally I think the great benefit of 3E stats, and implementing something like them here, is just how much it simplifies things for players. There is utility in that all on its own.

[polytope]

21 hours ago, RoyalProtector said:

For example, consider how at level 1, you die by 2 or 3 arrows at most, but at level 13, you can take 10 times more, obviously it can't realistically mean that your character suddenly is capable of being impaled with many sharp pointy metal projectiles.

Yes, in the abstract a character's stock of hp sometimes represents a close call survived with some exertion, hitting the floor, ducking behind cover, flinching backward in time to only take a graze etc.

That abstraction breaks down when you look at things like poisoned arrows/daggers though, you could argue that high level characters survive both the physical injury and the poison better because a mere graze injects less poison, and less deeply into the tissue, but I'd struggle to believe it. It's probably the reason poison wasn't counted in hp damage in the earliest editions and was instead save or die (or incapacitated) with varying bonuses/onset times.

18 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

2nd edition D&D kind of has "gotcha" and "puzzle monster" mechanics as a core conceit. Bosses with low enough THAC0 to guarantee they hit against AC every time aren't really any more problematic than player characters who can become invincible for a turn or two at a time.

 The latter part is not a 2e thing, really, it's a ToB thing.

13 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

The counterpoint being, of course, that the encounters in BG2 have already been balanced, and they have been balanced against this particular idiosyncratic every-encounter-on-steroids house-ruled implementation of 2E. So standardizing things, at this late date, may not help anything.

In most instances, throughout this series, it was simply easier for the designers to overpower the encounters than to restrict the player character's frequency of resting in a way that's plausible and not immersion breaking. This means both random monster groupings and set encounters in IE games are scaled on the assumption of encountering a party near or at full strength in terms of their hp pool, memorized spells, x-uses per day items. Very few areas that you have to complete without leaving or resting.

[Dorothy_Dorothy_]

3 hours ago, polytope said:

In most instances, throughout this series, it was simply easier for the designers to overpower the encounters than to restrict the player character's frequency of resting in a way that's plausible and not immersion breaking. This means both random monster groupings and set encounters in IE games are scaled on the assumption of encountering a party near or at full strength in terms of their hp pool, memorized spells, x-uses per day items. Very few areas that you have to complete without leaving or resting.

I used to play on super hard modes because the random encounters triggered by resting in a dungeon were hard enough to be extremely dangerous especially if you needed the rest. But that was obnoxious because what it really did was just make me run back to town to sleep in an inn and then spend ten seconds walking back through the dungeon to get to where I was (the Planar Sphere and Spellhold to Underdark sequence is really the only time you can't do this), but with the added tedium of dealing with companions getting chunked sometimes and having to quickload if it chunks the Bhaalspawn. So then I just started playing on Core and just... stocking up on potions and scrolls because by then I had modded scrolls to use the user's caster level and things like that. It really flowed a lot better in some ways but it's not strictly a fair analysis since a veteran player knows the whole dungeon and just plans resources accordingly.

Isn't there a mod somewhere that actually removes resting outside taverns?

[polytope]

8 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

that was obnoxious because what it really did was just make me run back to town to sleep in an inn and then spend ten seconds walking back through the dungeon to get to where I was (the Planar Sphere and Spellhold to Underdark sequence is really the only time you can't do this)

Planar prison also, but like the planar sphere (1st floor) that's actually a safe place to rest. So is most of Spellhold/underwater city and there's a gnome inn in the underdark. Mostly you're missing out on temples for that portion of the game which behooves you to keep a cleric alive at all times unless you've found a Rod of Resurrection (let's face it, most parties have). It varies by area, but I'm pretty sure the most dangerous creature you can see as a rest spawn in BG2 is a (single) gauth, most others being nuisances. Worse things might spawn in Watcher's Keep but in every level except the 3rd one it's simple to backtrack and find an exit. Similarly backtracking through the map along path's you've already taken is usually safe because the devs didn't implement wandering monsters (there are a few exceptions like the Firewine ruins in BG1).

8 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

Isn't there a mod somewhere that actually removes resting outside taverns?

Well, that would make it harder as the entirety of Spellhold and I guess parts of Siege of Dragonspear would need to be done without rest. SCS currently has an option to disable resting in the Illithid city of the underdark.

Edited March 28 by polytope

[RoyalProtector]

19 hours ago, polytope said:

Yes, in the abstract a character's stock of hp sometimes represents a close call survived with some exertion, hitting the floor, ducking behind cover, flinching backward in time to only take a graze etc.

That's right. Like I mentioned, it isn't like The Witcher 3, where being hit or not being hit depends exclusively on what the player does. So the mix of AC and Hitpoints is an abstraction about the resilience of the character.

19 hours ago, polytope said:

That abstraction breaks down when you look at things like poisoned arrows/daggers though, you could argue that high level characters survive both the physical injury and the poison better because a mere graze injects less poison, and less deeply into the tissue, but I'd struggle to believe it. It's probably the reason poison wasn't counted in hp damage in the earliest editions and was instead save or die (or incapacitated) with varying bonuses/onset times

Good point. In the third edition, they changed poison so it progressively damages your stats. I don't think it can kill you, at least in NWN/NWN2, it just can make you extremely weak. I had mixed feelings about this, because I'm used to poison being an added source of HP damage, though I can see why they changed it.

I know that for example The Artisan changed poison-dealing classes such that when applied, enemies take damage every round and lose 1 point of constitution. Losing constitution seems a bit more realistic, I guess, because it's a way of damaging that is agnostic about the amount of hitpoints the enemy has -- which has some synergy with mods that tie saving throws to stats, now that I think of it. (Leaving behind the fact that some creatures in the game AFAIK don't have a change in HP when their constitution changes -- I don't know how that works).

[Dorothy_Dorothy_]

On 3/27/2024 at 10:31 PM, polytope said:

Planar prison also, but like the planar sphere (1st floor) that's actually a safe place to rest. So is most of Spellhold/underwater city and there's a gnome inn in the underdark. Mostly you're missing out on temples for that portion of the game which behooves you to keep a cleric alive at all times unless you've found a Rod of Resurrection (let's face it, most parties have). It varies by area, but I'm pretty sure the most dangerous creature you can see as a rest spawn in BG2 is a (single) gauth, most others being nuisances. Worse things might spawn in Watcher's Keep but in every level except the 3rd one it's simple to backtrack and find an exit. Similarly backtracking through the map along path's you've already taken is usually safe because the devs didn't implement wandering monsters (there are a few exceptions like the Firewine ruins in BG1).

Well, that would make it harder as the entirety of Spellhold and I guess parts of Siege of Dragonspear would need to be done without rest. SCS currently has an option to disable resting in the Illithid city of the underdark.

mmmmm I think wraiths and liches can spawn on random rest encounters on harder modes in the shadow temple ruins, for example. It's also level-dependent I think, but it's been a long time since I looked into how that's done. IIRC it's a table that compares your current level and current chapter of the plot. If you're high level because you've cleared a lot of content before finally going to Spellhold, or if you're medium level and you're coming back from the Underdark, the encounters can get pretty nasty (like liches).

And don't forget that they're extra dangerous because you're resting - so you're probably injured or running low on spells or both.

[Dorothy_Dorothy_]

On 3/28/2024 at 6:00 AM, RoyalProtector said:

In the third edition, they changed poison so it progressively damages your stats. I don't think it can kill you, at least in NWN/NWN2, it just can make you extremely weak. I had mixed feelings about this, because I'm used to poison being an added source of HP damage, though I can see why they changed it.

The 3.5 / Pathfinder 1e method of applying Ability Score Damage does have its problems. Mostly just that if it doesn't do Con damage it can't kill you (if your Con hits zero it kills you), and because Lesser Restoration is a fairly trivial spell and it almost completely negates the impact of most poisons.

That's why I run my PF1e games using the alternative Afflictions rules that Paizo put out in Unchained. It'd be a real PITA to implement in the Infinity Engine, but probably possible by putting delays with separate saves on the periodic effects, each failed save stacking up some penalty. You'd need to add some functionality to various restorative spells to cleanse those penalties if the spell could have cured poison, though.

[polytope]

10 hours ago, Dorothy_Dorothy_ said:

mmmmm I think wraiths and liches can spawn on random rest encounters on harder modes in the shadow temple ruins, for example. It's also level-dependent I think, but it's been a long time since I looked into how that's done. IIRC it's a table that compares your current level and current chapter of the plot.

There are actually three separate things here.

In the majority of maps there are rest-interrupt spawns coded into the .are file, often more than one possible monster, and with variable chance of it turning up, but never dependent on your character's xp. There are also spawned groups from SPAWNGRP.2da encountered at various points in most dungeon/outdoor maps, again, a variety of possibilities, i.e. the same spawn point could have RDUndead (mummies and ghasts) or RDUndea2 (shadows and wraiths), you won't know until you get close.

However there are also "trap" areas in many maps, which function much like an undetectable and undisarmable floor trap and run a script which does check your characters xp (not your level, so multiclass characters get equally difficult spawns) when deciding to add creatures, those scripts like SPWNDEAD.bcs are the scaled ones that can confront you with liches etc., however these are only triggered when advancing through the map and only once for each such scripted spawning, unlike other spawnpoints which may reset over time.

[Dorothy_Dorothy_]

13 hours ago, polytope said:

There are actually three separate things here.

In the majority of maps there are rest-interrupt spawns coded into the .are file, often more than one possible monster, and with variable chance of it turning up, but never dependent on your character's xp. There are also spawned groups from SPAWNGRP.2da encountered at various points in most dungeon/outdoor maps, again, a variety of possibilities, i.e. the same spawn point could have RDUndead (mummies and ghasts) or RDUndea2 (shadows and wraiths), you won't know until you get close.

However there are also "trap" areas in many maps, which function much like an undetectable and undisarmable floor trap and run a script which does check your characters xp (not your level, so multiclass characters get equally difficult spawns) when deciding to add creatures, those scripts like SPWNDEAD.bcs are the scaled ones that can confront you with liches etc., however these are only triggered when advancing through the map and only once for each such scripted spawning, unlike other spawnpoints which may reset over time.

mmmmm.

I think there's a fight right before Dace in Spellhold that strongly depends on your level, because if you do all the dungeons available before going to Spellhold you'll fight a lich and some mummies with some accompanying trash undead there. If you go early, it's a much easier fight. It's not triggered by rest, but when you come down that hallway they kind of pop up there right around the corner. Might be because they're crowded up into the corner so you can't see them until you're properly in the room.

I don't remember if SCS adjusted the spawns in either of these methods, but I'm too lazy to go look through the changelog over there at the moment! heheh

As far as THAC0 goes, there's definitely a jump from shadows to mummy lords. It's more of a pain inherent in "open world" environments. Hard to fine tune encounters when the player's THAC0 could swing 10 points while only gaining like four levels.