DavidW

Thanks, that's a helpfully precise description. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

Improved Invisibility gives a nontrivial bonus to AC and saves, but much more importantly, spells can't be targeted on improved-invisible creatures. That's an enormous bonus.

Incidentally, in support of my view that fans and fan sites aren't actually confused on this: baldursgate.fandom.com's entry on the lich says But then in the very next sentence it goes on to say (My emphasis.)

The developers of a CRPG based on a pen-and-paper tabletop RPG have an obligation to explicitly document every point at which they deviate from the pen-and-paper rules??! I... don't know where to begin with that.

You should be able to uninstall SCS, uninstall SR, and reinstall SCS. Don't do it partway through exploring a map; it may also make a bit of a mess of spellbooks of your party members; there are other possible bad consequences; all in all I don't really recommend it.

I've split this discussion off from the 'Jarno confusions' thread, since it's become an interesting (if a little heated) discussion in its own right.

Admittedly that is not as good as I remember (better to say something like "any type of spell may be cast within the sphere"), but at least it includes a "however" implying exceptions. I don't think it does, really. That's just the difference between 'this spell makes you immune to L1-4 spells' and 'this spell makes you immune to L1-4 spells and shuts down your spellcasting.' The description is pretty much straight out of the 2nd ed Players' Handbook, and the PnP version does make the caster immune even to their own L1-4 spells, at least on my reading. I don't understand how a house rule can be 'spurious' (and, at the risk of repetition, I don't see how that can be squared with your own statement, in the readme for Might and Guile, that the criterion for tweaks is game quality, not PnP fidelity). But notwithstanding that: sure, I guess BG2 would have been marginally improved by some bit of lore in the game about lich immunity, but it's really low down my list of things I wish the developers had time for. (And since lore implies .tlk entries implies translations implies a long lead time, I'm super-unsurprised they didn't.) Why would I say that? People can make whatever mods they like. I haven't said a word as to whether it's good that liches have L1-5 immunity or whether the game would be better without it. If someone doesn't like it - whether for PnP fidelity reasons or something else - absolutely they should make that mod. Of course, they'll need to put up with somewhat suboptimal AI, or else write their own - lich immunity to L1-5 spells is fairly firmly baked into SCS's mage scripting.

@subtledoctor: as I’ve said, I’m not convinced there’s a misconception: I think people on forums mostly understand they’re speaking in shorthand, and in reading dozens (hundreds?) of new-player-confronts-SCS threads over the years, I’ve never come across the confusion you mention. And the same could be said (mutatis mutandis) about Globe of Invulnerability, where again there is no hint In in-game descriptions or PnP lore about this, but where people seem to understand. But: for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that wikis and forums contain a widespread misconception about liches. Are you seriously saying that the way to respond to that is to mod the game so that the misconception comes out correct, rather than to edit the wikis? @Jarno Mikkola: in the original game you just can’t breach liches: it doesn’t work on them. SCS makes Breach into a special case, trading increased complexity for better gameplay. Until recently I wasn’t worried about this causing confusion because the component name explicitly calls out the change. But as of v32 the breach change is included by default and you need to study the readme carefully to find out about it, so I should probably note it in in-game documentation. Thanks.

But what do you mean by "quirk" here, if you don't mean something like a bug? The "rules" are not AD&D, they are the developer-intended rules for BG2. Those rules quite clearly include an ability to be immune to spells of a certain level, excluding your own self-targeted spells. As you said yourself in that quote I gave above, this is a CRPG, not a PnP campaign. The opcode represents those rules fine. But all that means would be that people are misdescribing the game. The "Immune to L1-5 spells" is, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere stated in in-game text. If (some) players make a mistake in describing the way the game works, that's on them. (I don't concede that they are making a mistake, though. I think most people have a tacit 'except your own spells' clause in mind. Certainly in many years of dealing with SCS feedback this is the first time I've come across the 'why can liches self-buff with L1-5 spells' complaint. I'll concede that they might be surprised that friendly spells don't affect protected creatures.) Don't make it, then. SCS wipes memorized spells and reconstructs them from scratch. It pays a bit of attention to how many there are, but not reliably enough to be worth your time. Edit mage/override/bg2/level.2da, if you want to change things for your personal playthrough. It's perfectly consistent. The consistent description - as you well know - is exactly that implemented by the opcode: you are immune to spells that you don't cast on yourself, and not to spells that you do cast on yourself. That's perfectly clear. I'm not sure what it means to ask for 'reasons' beyond that - it's not as if there's an underlying physics to derive the rules of magic from. Take it up with Mystra if you don't like it.

Noted in each case - thanks.

I'm not sure I see the distinction between "actual game rules" and "a quirk of the engine". The game has lots of creatures and powers which have, or grant, immunity to spells of certain levels, but excluding self-applied spells. They have an opcode specifically designed for doing it! You could, sure, ask whether it's a bug that the opcode works that way. It seems pretty unlikely: the opcode is used in Globe of Invulnerability, and so playtesting would surely have shown it up. But even more persuasively: various creatures, notably liches and rakshasas, are scripted to use self-buffing spells at levels that they are immune to. So it is intentional that the opcode works that way, and that creatures are protected in that way. I like option (3): just recognize that liches in Baldur's gate have a special ability similar to, but not identical to, Globe of Invulnerability that protects them from externally-applied spells of level 5 or below, and call it a day. I don't see what makes it "not legit". It wouldn't be legit in an AD&D campaign with no house rules, but BG2 isn't that. To quote a modder whose work I think you know well: "BG is a single-player computer game. If tweaking a rule makes this specific game more fun, then it's a good tweak, PnP be damned." If you mean 'what would happen if someone wrote that mod and then installed SCS v33 on top of it', it depends how it's coded. SCS handcrafts most Rakshasa levels, iirc, so a reduction in their spellcasting would probably be overridden. (Unless they replaced the default Rakshasa scripts with their own scripts, in which case SCS would ignore Rakshasas entirely.) If you mean 'would I actively support it by adjusting SCS', it depends on the details. Maybe, if I liked the implementation; probably not, as it would be quite a lot of work for a fairly edge-case situation.

It thinks, "hell, I have a phylactery, and none of these BG2 dumbasses know it. Let's live a little!"

Incidentally (apologies for double posting) as regards Skull Trap vs. Fireball for enemy AI, I don't use Skull Trap except for necromancers. Purely mechanically, invokers and conjurers ought to be using it instead of Fireball, but they don't. At least as of v32, I try quite hard to be a bit thematic as regards who uses which spells, even at some cost in tactical efficacy.

Look in stratagems/caster_shared/triggers. All the SCS contingencies/triggers/etc are listed there, in a fairly human-readable format. I probably don't pay enough attention to range. If you think it is viable for Infinity Engine AI to use Skull Trap as a trap rather than as a fireball, I would really, really like to see your code. (I'm serious - I'm always happy to learn, and lots has improved in scripting since EE came along. But in general it is really difficult for enemy scripting to show any signs of spatial awareness.) Guilty as charged. Hey, it's a legal choice! If you're thinking of SCS, then mostly not, actually (I'm not sure about vanilla). Summons are mostly offensive weapons, it makes sense to summon them near squishy enemies.

Sure... but that's from your starting point. From my starting point, I don't see any reason why liches should be immune to L1-L5 buffing spells, and no in-game evidence that the designers thought they should either. So - absent any good argument to the contrary - I'm going to carry on using them in SCS.

Prebuffing: no, ApplySpell() doesn't require the spell to be memorized. But the idea of prebuffing is to simulate spells cast before battle. SCS actually checks if they're memorised and deletes them before prebuffing, but the vanilla game doesn't. On the broader point: we have different starting points. Yours (I think) is something like: of course liches must be immune to L1-5 self-buffing, because they're immune to L1-5 offensive spells. OK, there might be specific exceptions, but we have to justify them on their merits. Use of a L1-5 prebuff in a vanilla script is, at most, evidence that that particular spell is allowed. Mine is: there's no obvious reason to think liches are immune to self-buffing spells of L1-5 in the first place. Yes, they're immune to L1-5 attack spells, but there's lots of precedent in the game for protection from hostile spells that doesn't extend to friendly spells of the same type: think Globe of Invulnerability; think Spell Immunity. The L1-5 immunity isn't traceable to anything about liches in AD&D core rules, so there's no origin to find there, and the opcode is quite specifically set up to apply only to spell protections. I guess, though, maybe that's what the designers had in mind - if so, they'll refrain from using self-buffing L1-5 spells in lich scripts. Let's check...oh look, they don't. OK, the original idea looks right: liches can use L1-5 buffing spells just fine.

Vongoethe's Blur is in a Minor Sequencer. (The relevant level for your theory is presumably the level of the spell, not of the sequencer, but even if not: Minor Sequencer is fourth level.) The various ApplySpells are just how vanilla BG2 does prebuffing. And some late-game enemies (Vongoethe, for instance) do most of their vanilla-scripted casting through ForceCast as a (somewhat cheap) way to make the battles more challenging, so their spell list isn't informative of their actual spells. Even if those don't count (and there's no reason they shouldn't count) there are plenty of examples of conventionally-memorized, conventionally-cast L1-5 spells on the list I gave you: most uses of Vocalize and Shadow Door, for instance.

I'm not going to bother with this at length, but in brief: Your original argument was that liches can't and don't use L1-5 self-buffing spells because they are immune to L1-5 spells. That argument can be refuted by giving examples of L1-5 self-buffing spells that vanilla liches use. If they use some L1-5 self-buffing spells, it's false that they can't and don't use L1-5 self-buffing spells. There are lots of examples of such spells. The vanilla lich01.cre is scripted to use Vocalize (L2), Stoneskin (L4) and Shadow Door (L5).The lich in the Crooked Crane uses Mirror Image, Stoneskin (L4), Protection from Fire (L3), Fire Shield (L4), and Vocalize (L2). Vongoethe uses Shadow Door (L5), Mirror Image (L2), Blur (L2), and Stoneskin (L4). Azamantes uses Stoneskin (L4), Mirror Image (L2), Protection from Fire (L3), Vocalize (L2), Protection from Evil (L1). And so on. (Note that Vongoethe and Azamantes have bespoke scripts, so in those cases someone has intentionally scripted a lich, specifically, to use those spells.) Therefore liches can buff fine with L1-5 spells. There is no residual argument as to why any particular L1-5 spells that liches don't use, they can't use.

No, definitely not.

Try it and find out...

You have replaced all line breaks with spaces, but there is a line break in the line you are matching on.

Yes, I can see how that could come about. (And my IWD DS testing is mostly with SCS's own version of the IWD spells, and mostly on EE.) I agree that matching oBG2 usage to the EE versions of IWD spells is probably best.

Ok, that makes sense (and sounds vaguely familiar, actually.)

It's not quite that bad - the uninstaller doesn't just back up the whole of dialog.tlk. It's about 900kB for a SET_STRING component, I think. But agreed, there's no point doing that unless you actually are modifying an in-game string. (I do this on occasion - it's a convenient way to change a string that's multiply referenced, like a spell or class description.)

ds.tph contains the actual detectable_spells function and its helper functions, but also the inlined data that the function uses (so that we can distribute a single file). In this version of DS, that data comes in a bunch of tables - for instance: - the table in lines 63-147 is spells for which DS clones the portrait (142) effect block (to get durations etc) and sets the appropriate stat to 1. (spells in column 1, stat in column 2). These should work on SR without changes. - the table in lines 152-209 is spells for which DS clones the portrait effect block and sets the appropriate stat to some other number. (Spells in column 1, stat in column 2, value in column 3.) Again these should work fine on SR. - the table in lines 223-242 is spells where cloning the portrait effect block doesn't work and we need to clone another effect block. (Spells in column 1, stat in column 2, opcode to clone in column 4). These are the main ones where I suspect DS may struggle with SR.