subtledoctor

Okay with my latest idea I keep jotting down more and more notes and... I am really liking where it is going? Basically it is like an alternate-universe version of TOB - much of the same content and places and people are there, but they may have different names and different contexts from what you know. The idea does away with the Five, with Faerun itself, and instead strands Charname on the outer planes. Existing content, art, and scenarios will be repurposed as locations on the Great Wheel, and Charname will be given a fairly linear series of tasks and travels (maybe with some open-ended/non-linear stuff in the middle, like chapter 2 of SoA) and it will all be given some weird planar flavor a là PS:T. The end will be familiar, and could maybe even be compatible with some mods, notably Crucible. Depending on how far we want to take it, it could really bring the story full-circle as far as Alaundo's prophecy - something the existing game does not really do at all. The beginning of the idea is: After Charname, mortal and soulless but god-touched, is dragged into hell by the death of (basically) a demigod in possession of your soul, then where are you? What are you? I don’t think we can take it for granted that you just magically get your soul back just because you beat Irenicus in combat. There is no mechanism for that; you have no machine like the one in Spellhold, or anything like that. So after the combat, you get spat out, alone and unarmed and yet-un-souled, in the wastes of Gehenna. Bereft of the protection of Bhaal’s realm, you are exposed to both evil creatures and the apocalyptic skies. Guided by a mysterious apparition that may be no more than evidence of your fractured sanity, you head to a nearby settlement, which is in dire straits. From there you will have to figure out what happened to your friends, and how to get home. BUT: 1) I really cannot tell if this is an idea that only appeals to me, or is something that other people would like as well and would actually install in their games. (Especially considering it would NOT be at all compatible with Ascension/Wheels of Prophecy/Longer Road/etc.) 2) I can envision what is necessary to make this idea happen, and there are parts that I would need help with. Stuff like setting up some set-piece battles with cool new enemies. People like @morpheus562 might be good at this sort of thing. Also designing some cool bespoke Planewalker NPCs to recruit - I have a couple sketched out but I welcome ideas from other people. SO: I don't want to spoil the idea in a public thread like this, on the off chance it ever does get made. If anyone wants to hear the full sketched-out plan, DM me and I could use feedback on it. If anyone with modding experience finds this to be an interesting idea and is interested in collaborating, also DM me and maybe we can get a team together. (Or maybe you won't like the ideas and we won't get a team together, that's fine too.)

Right, and that's fine... but it would be nice to give players the option to stretch themselves thinner if they want the challenge. Especially since in my scenario you can go to the Pits with a bunch of nice equipment. You can pretty easily blow through a bunch of battles without resting. I'm on fight #13 in my current game, two more fights and then I can check my xp totals before and after. If I recall correctly from my playthrough last year, I think it is about 20K xp for each party member. A decent chunk, but it's not going to change much as far as your experience in late BG1 and beyond. EDIT - just finished it, was worth about 18,000 xp, with monster xp tweaked to 1/2 normal. Probably about 24,000 without that tweak.

I have not given this very much attention in a long time, but my recent run has identified some bugs. I will be looking at these soon: — On EET and with Neera in your party, Baeloth’s initial dialogue breaks, preventing you from recruiting him or going to the BP — Prices of a lot of gear is a bit wacky. To some extent this is due to mod interactions: tipun’s IWD mod, Argent77’s TotLM mod, Angel’s MiH mod, and my own Item Tweaks mod can all overwrite and/or patch these items in ways that unbalances their price relative to the other BP store inventory. Probably there are other mods that affect this as well. I’ll see what, if anything, I can do. — I’m going to adjust the script for the penultimate battle to level-gate the earthquake effect. If you go to the BP at relatively low level that fight can be all but impossible. (I think the unmodded BP campaign gets you up to level 9/10 by the end; in my current game I am tackling those fights at level 7.) — I might actually level-gate Baeloth’s appearance in Larwood? To level 6 or so? This would limit Baeloth to being a Tiax/Alora/Skie late-game NPC. But it would prevent low-level parties being taken to the BP at a time when they won’t be able to escape. — I will probably script the special BP geas rings to be removed when you go into the final fight. It’s the end of the campaign after all, and story-wise, Baeloth at that point has literally lifted the restriction on attacking him. It gives you a slight advantage going into the final fight (two ring slots!) but it also removes the minHP/pseudodeath effect, so anyone who dies in that fight dies for real, and depending on the state of your party they might not make it back to the surface. EDIT - this already happens! Nice, one less item on the list. — I forget how things work in the unmodded BP game, but in my game I can use the Rest button when I am in the waiting area. This makes me question why the game applies pseudo-rest by script after every fight. The fights are a bit unsatisfying when I can go nova every time; there is no resource management required here. So I may remove the scripted auto-rest and instead let the player rest manually to restore spells. If you rest after every fight there will be no difference; but this would allow players to give themselves challenge parameters, like only resting once in each ‘tier’ of fights.

I’m not sure what you are doing, but you are probably overthinking things. When you use the Tome, it drops you to level 0 but also notes how many XP you have, to calculate what level you will be restored to in your new class, a process related to how many proficiencies you will get, necessary due to a UI bug. When the process is complete, you should level up from zero. Then, once you have your desired class, feel free to add more XP via the console or do whatever you want. Put another way, you are doing two things - using this mod’s procedure, and making further manual changes - and you are mixing those processes together. Keep them separate for best results. However, that does not sound like what you are describing. My best guess is, you have installed my Stat Overhaul mod, which includes a running process that increases you XP if you have high Charisma. If your CHA score is giving you an 8% XP boost, then when you manually give yourself an XP value within 7% of the next level, a few seconds later the bonus will kick in and you will see the level-up indicator. Final possibility: there is some script in my game that increases the XP total of some NPCs to get near that of Charname. This might be something in the 2.6 patch, or it might be related to CDTweaks’ “TOB-Style NPCs.” I’m not sure. In any event, I advise patience. When you recruit an NPC, wait a few seconds for script to recognize them and do what needs doing. Then use the NPC_EE Tome, and let its processes play out. Then wait a few seconds, and then make any further manual changes you want. This will pretty much guarantee things turn out as you expect, and it only requires about 6-12 seconds for each one.

No worries! It’s reasonable. But this mod is very (very) new and there is not yet compatibility with FnP’s sphere system. DavidW can add it here or I can code it into FnP (quite easy, all of these deities are already represented there) once I figure out how these kits work.

I distinctly recall discussion of this on the forums like… fifteen years ago. Maybe more. But I don’t recall the specific outcome. That said, I have a bunch of files in my current game with the “A!” prefix. I believe it belonged to Andyr from back when.

ToF has new cleric kits, multiclass kits, and a sphere system. FnP has new cleric kits, multiclass kits, and a spheres system. (Plus a couple other goodies like paladin archetypes, spontaneous casting for all clerics, and multiclass shamans.) Also, there is Deities of Faerun which has… new cleric kits, multiclass clerics, and a sphere system. Divine Remix has some of that too These are all largely incompatible with each other. ToF in particular seems to use proprietary systems involving the UI instead of things like ADD_KIT_EX, QDMulti, etc. (Though admittedly I only installed ToF once and didn’t explore too much. EDIT - this may not be true, it just may be down to the particular components I installed.) I would expect some pretty hard incompatibilities. Pick one of the divine kit/sphere mods for your install and leave the others. You can always switch up to a different one for the next game. The only parts of FnP that probably play nicely here are the paladin kits and archetypes, the revised paladin spell table, and the multiclass shamans.

Just want to note that I haven’t given up on this. I have reluctantly let go of the idea of using ToB as a bridge toward suggesting that Charname might one day become TNO from PST. I think that idea was cool, in that a divine-touched, soulless Charname stuck on the outer planes could convincingly eventually become TNO. Which I would only hint at, giving a few adventures and inserting a resurrection that comes with an indelible level drain effect, getting as I say, Sam Becketted, lost on the planes and ever further from home. A tragic ending. However I found a genius essay on Reddit arguing that in fact, NWN2/MotB is the prologue for TNO. And I was convinced that works much better. However, the core of that idea, of getting stuck in hell - literally in the afterlife - with no soul, and the core motivation of Charname to get home, still makes a ton of sense. And I have sketched out an idea that continues the adventure after the Tree of Life fight, and uses 85% of the existing ToB content, and stays consistent with Alaundo’s prophecy, but unmoors it (literally) from Tethyr and the Highlander nonsense. The only areas that don’t fit into the idea are Abazigal’s… dungeon, or whatever that is, and Sendai’s stronghold. And of course if you are no longer on Faerun it complicates the status of Watcher’s Keep, which would have to be done before Suldenesselar or else be reserved for the post-Tree of Life portion. The beginning of the idea is: After Charname, mortal and soulless but god-touched, is dragged into hell by the death of a demigod in possession of your soul, then where are you? What are you? I don’t think we can take it for granted that you just magically get your soul back just because you beat Irenicus in combat. You have no machine like the one in Spellhold. So after that combat, you get spat out, alone and unarmed and yet-un-souled, in the wastes of Gehenna. Bereft of the protection of Bhaal’s realm, you are exposed to both evil creatures and the apocalyptic skies. Guided by a mysterious apparition that may be just evidence of fractured sanity, you head to a nearby settlement, which is in dire straits. From there you will have to figure out what happened to your friends, and how to get home. I don’t know if this will actually get made. But that’s the idea; make your way home, through more challenging circumstances than you have ever faced. Or die trying…

Was not compatible when I made this install, and to be honest I don’t really like it anyway - I don’t want Eldoth that early, and the idea of nipping into BG to get Skie, and then being unable to go back until chapter 5, is just weird. If you don’t mind the fundamental timing of getting access to Eldoth & Skie, then the most minimal change with the best effect is to simply move him from the Cloakwood to the main road, while keeping it tied to having access to BG City. Heck, I could even see moving him to the NW part of the bridge area. That would be fine, and even easier. Meantime, slight hiccup: every time I kill Llyrk in the Black Pits, my game freezes up. I can’t tell why. There’s nothing odd about his .CRE file. No lingering effects or anything. Maybe it’s something in the arena area script? Also the prices of some IWD-derived gear is a bit wonky. Need to adjust those, but it might be an interaction with the IWD mods, which get installed later than BP-in-BG. So maybe not much I can do about it.

Meanwhile, I had totally forgotten that I wrote a little additional scene in the Cloakwood druid grove. Amarande the Archdruid tries to intimidate you, and a druid Charname can throw it right back in his face: I love it! The idea is that when you are pushed to the edge and give in to despair and death and violently attack the Archdruid, you change kits and become a Lost Druid, which is unique among druids in having access to spells from the sphere of Death and can summon a dread wolf or vampiric wolf. That's the idea. In reality the kit-change did not take place. Note to self, look into that - something in Faiths & Powers seems bugged. Or maybe it is gated behind a druid class check, and my class is logged as fighter/druid because I am an incomplete dual-class? We'll see. So anyway I proceeded on to kick Davaeorn's butt, and flooded the mine. Breagar had a visitation. I spied Eldoth but didn't want to take him on, because I would have to drop Coran, but I didn't want to drop Coran until we complete his quest in Beregost. What the heck is Eldoth doing way out in the Cloakwood anyway?? He is supposed to be planning a kidnapping in Baldur's Gate. I ended up doing it this way: I took Coran back to Beregost and complete his wyvern head quest. I let Sirene go from the party. And I spawned Eldoth at the Friendly Arm Inn, which is a much more sensible place for someone on their way to BG City. Next time I think I will actually make a little mod that removes Eldoth and spawns him at the FAI only after the Cloakwood Mine is flooded - it makes sense that someone on their way to the city would stop at the FAI once the bridge and gates are open to travelers. I specced Eldoth out as a fighter/mage Hexblade bard, and went into BG City. We stopped off at the Elfsong Tavern to speak with Illasera, who gave me a task out in the Wood of Sharp Teeth. I spoke to Shilo Chen who also gave me a task in the Wood of Sharp Teeth. I was asked to clear a hideout for the Cult of the Dragon west of Beregost. I visited Balduran's Sea Tower and was asked by a criminal to rescue his brother from smugglers near Nashkel. And I stopped by Ulgoth's Beard. There I went to ice Island and picked up some Everice for a fellow in Nashkel, and met a ghost yearning for perfume to remind her of her life, and obtained some octopus ink for Brandock's business in Beregost. Unrelated to city business, I was made aware of an evil giant in the Cloudpeak mountains. With a Bevy of things to do south of the city, I put put Scar's task of investigating the Seven Suns Coster on hold and headed out. Dracolilch cultists: terminated. Brandock's book: leveled up?? Super Ice: delivered. Giant: brought low. Perfume: purchased. Smugglers: negotiated. Illasera's information: obtained. Ogre mages: dispatched. All going well, and then Baeloth appeared before me in Larswood. Hello! Time to be abducted and to have a jaunt through the Black Pits - or so I thought. But apparently when I made Baeloth's dialogue for the BP-IN-BG mod, the EET version was screwy. It looks like I had some mods installed? There are references to Aura, who is not installed in this game, and some triggers for Neera's presence that break the dialogue. Maybe I had the Neera Expansion mod installed then. So, I need to figure out how to fix this dialogue, and then it is time for Charname's first, but sure not last, trip to the Underdark. I have the oddest feeling that Eldoth is not going to make it out alive...

Nice! Congrats! This will go in my next install. Love to see more content still being made for these games.

For that case, I recommend installing Rogue Rebalancing thief HLAs, and when installing Refinements, choose “install by class” and install every class except thieves. This way you keep UAI. If you have access to Github feel free to make a pull request, rather than trying to communicate the exact changes. I trust your judgment The Sword Saint is not something I ever looked at, as my only goal has been to make the HLAs work on EE games and work better with Rogue Rebalancing (see above). So I have never looked at the kit’s code (or any other components) and I have no idea how to change thing without breaking things.

Ah, thanks for letting me know. In the meantime you can grab that file from BG2 and drop it in your override folder before installing.

Yeah but I can run Weidu on IWD2, to poll creature stats and spit out a big chart. Then I can take that chart and run some math (convert positive AC to negative AC, BAB to thac0, 3E saves to 2E save, etc.) and apply those values to the creatures in the IWD2 mod. The question for NWN is, how can I get the original game’s creature stats? If I can find an automated way to create a chart, then it is easy. But if it means manually look up each creature in a wiki, or something… forget it.

I don’t know how easy it would be. With IWD2, even though it is in 3E, the file formats have been mapped out and I could access the game files in NI. Then I could get Weidu to read the relevant data and convert it to 2E stats. Whereas, I have zero idea if NWN stats are similarly accessible for an automatic conversion. If it had to be done manually, it would be a lot more work.

If he knows which components were installed, he can manually add them to Weidu.log, and then fire up the CDTweaks installer, and uninstall them. Which, admittedly, will be a lot of work and super annoying. @Morgoth it bears repeating: never ever hard-close the Weidu installer window. Even when it isn’t doing anything, it is an open ongoing process and interrupting that process will corrupt whatever it was doing. And with BG mods, one corrupted mod will screw up everything that comes after it. The crazy thing is, at that moment the window clearly offered an option to press ‘Q’ to properly end the process. That’s all you had to do.

I think they were asking what you are meant to do with the BG2 NPCs while in Neverwinter, if the NWN areas have their own NPCs.

I agree with you there; and I put some work into making those mods compatible with tipun’s version of IWD. I got the NPC mods from Kulyok, Artemius, and Sinaherib working… but Lava won’t let me adapt his. I agree the campaign suffers for their absence. Of course, I use a modified version of tipun’s mods that begin at level 1; I suppose it would not make much sense to have these NPCs if playing the default versions where it is expected that you will take your BG1 party there…

I don’t even know if PLAT08 is the Plate of Balduran, but “carried icon does not exist” sounds pretty crash-worthy. I have no idea where “COLAT08.bam” comes from, what other mods are installed, etc Honestly the quickest fix is not to actually troubleshoot this, but to just grab a copy of the armor from an unmodded game and drop it in /override.

When I first did it, I chose a dialogue line for infiltration, the bandits got made at Teven for bringing me, Tazok challenged me to combat and when I got him to ‘near death’ he was satisfied and I was treated like a fellow bandit. I snuck into Tazok’s tent, maybe fought the bosses there? And then fought everyone else outside the tent. The second time, I chose a different dialogue line for infiltration, Teven took me to the camp, Tazok got angry and set out to kill me, when I got him to ‘near death’ he left and the whole camp came at me. Nothing in particular gave away that the dialogue choice would lead to a different outcome. I also had Ajantis the second time, with the BG1NPCProject - I wouldn’t put it past that mod to do something like that. At any rate it is of little consequence, it was fun either way, I just thought the difference was interesting. I guess? Note, Angel specifically says not to do that. IIRC there was one particular component I wanted that wasn’t in v5… maybe the winter wolf armor? I forget. I manually added a few things to his kit in this game. But I also created a replacement kit for him in the latest version of Might & Guile, so you can use that mod if you are interested in giving Breagar a few more bonuses. No, it seems like it was still too alpha-quality when I made this install. Looks very interesting though! I don’t love that it uses an entire game’s campaign as a quest mod in the middle of BG2, though. Seems a lot like what tipun did with IWD2 - so, eventually I might give it similar treatment, make a mod that makes NWN a distinct campaign playable from level 1. Once it is in stable condition, I’ll inspect it and see how much work it would be. Alternatively… if it is too much work to downconvert for low-level play, given it is currently designed for a PC with 1.5 million XP… it might be interesting to set it up as a continuation of the IWD1 campaign. Maybe I could stitch together tipun’s IWD1 and paladin84’s NWN, to make a single campaign that’s longer and meatier than either one on its own. And TBH it kind of makes sense - what else would the protagonist of IWD1 do after freeing Easthaven, but travel south and look for more adventures? And since in this universe Waterdeep basically doesn’t exist, Neverwinter would be an obvious place to arrive at. We’ll see. Probably a project for later this year.

Already works. All joinable NPCs get a Tome that you can use to change them. Any NPCs you don’t want to change, just throw their Tome away.

Huh, that’s weird. Did you try installing Refinements after TnB? That’s the order I use anyway…

A few somewhat random observations on a re-play after more than a year: 1) There are no good scimitars. My Charname specialized in scimitars as a 1-handed weapon before dual-classing to druid, but as yet I have only seen a single magical scimitar - Rashad’s Talon, a sad example that with Item Revisions has a Cleave effect that… makes it less than one fifth of a Belm. And without Item Revisions is an even bigger nothing-burger, a plus-two enchantment with absolutely no bonus effects. Meanwhile, I’ve seen gobs and gobs of katanas, for which I have no use. The katana fetish is truly strong in the modding community. 2) The mobs in the Cloakwood Mine are oddly weak? I waded through a ton of Black Talon Elites on the way, with magical arrows and decent thac0 and hit points. But in the mine itself, Davaeorn has surrounded himself with guards and hobgoblins who go down in 1-2 hits. It’s a bit weird. 2-a) Hobgoblins in general could stand to be buffed in this game. 3) I had forgotten that at the end of the Cloakwood Mine, there only way forward is through a secret door. Even with Coran standing next to it with Find Traps on, it took like 30 seconds to appear. What happens if you come here with no thieves/elves/dwarves in your party? Does the door just appear automatically after a while? What an idd design choice. I mean I totally get it from Davaeorn’s perspective, but from a narrative or game-design standpoint… like, gamify it! Have a guard drop a verbal hint, maje it require a special sigil, something like that. It’s especially odd in contrast with all the useless fake dwarven runestones for Durlag’s that just litter your inventory - which are so confusing that after 25 years I’ve still never fully grasped which are supposed to be useful and which are garbage.

SCS Improved NPC Customization (I think that’s what it is called) or NPC_EE. Both do basically the same thing, both have been actively updated recently. If you only care about changing Imoen, NPC_EE might be a bit more targeted. It will put a Tome in every NPC’s inventory but you can simply discard them. I think the SCS component might make make more changes to more NPCs. (But, I may well be mistaken about that.)

Yes - point 1 is that the BP mechanism is designed for BP itself, and it operates at last in part by character and area scripts. Those character scripts are problematic outside the context of BP. My mod adjusts the mechanism to rely less on those scripts, since the intent is for BG characters with no such scripts to venture into and back out of BP. So the technique in the mod is a step toward generalizing the proposed “no real death unless TPK” mechanic. Point 2: even with my mod though, the BP behavior still relies on other scripts, e.g. any party members who pseudo-died are “resurrected” via an area script when they return to the waiting area between fights. This would have to be generalized, as I say probably into BALDUR.bcs. But that would be touchy. Point 3: if you get that right, there is still the question of how to protect everyone and make then subject to the pseudo-death mechanism. BP does this via undroppable rings, and my mod expands on their use for this purpose. But that fits the lore of being captured and sent to the fighting pits. You can’t use an equipment slot for this in a non-BP game. Very theoretically you could apply a permanent effect to all joinable NPCs’ .cre files, and to Charname via script in certain select starting areas. This, again, would be touchy. And the consequences of it going awry would be severe, as dying is one of the most fundamental game mechanics. So, there is a path to get there from here. And what I’ve done might serve as a shortcut for one step on that path. But it would still be a major undertaking, for which I have neither time nor enthusiasm. (I really disliked the “take a knee” mechanic in NWN2 for example.)