subtledoctor

Well you could 'conjure' a fireball or 'conjure' a spell shield or 'conjure' an illusion... but for purposes of spell schools I adopt a narrower definition of the word. To me it just means creating or summoning matter or beings. Talking about spell schools, starting from first principles, I had these thoughts:

 

- Abjuration = manipulation of magical energy in a cohesive fashion; binding it into the form of shields, barriers, and protections.

- Invocation = manipulation of magical energy in a 'de-cohesive' fashion (if you will), directing it with explosive force. Invocation causes energetic releases of 'normal' energies, like Fireballs or Lightning Bolts.

- Necromancy = manipulation of life energy, generally to cause damage or to control the state of death. To the extent these spells cause direct damage, to me they should cause cold damage, since cold is literally sapping something of vital energy.

- Transmutation = manipulation of matter, which could sometimes generate damaging energy. Shapechange, telekinesis, levitation... and some energy effects. Transmutation spells could conceivable cause almost any kind of elemental damage, though perhaps not as efficiently as invocation spells. ADHW, sucking moisture out of an area, should be a Transmutation spell, along with other 'fog' spells.

- Conjuration = calling forth something that wasn't there before. Conjuration should be about 1) summoning monsters, and 2) summoning matter that goes beyond what Transmutation can do (e.g. spells that cause acid damage).

- Enchantment = manipulation of people or items to express magical effects. Charms, enchanted weapons, etc.

- Illusion = visual, auditory, and psychological effects.

- Divination = well, Divination. My only gripe here is I'd like to see it used more creatively. You could use Divination magic for self-awareness, to achieve mind-over-body effects. How about a spell that turns a wizard into an equivalent-level monk for a few rounds? You could even say Blur should go here, to represent the wizard using foreknowledge to move ahead of his attacker. I'd put spells with temporal effects - maybe even Timestop! - into the Divination school. Well maybe not Timestop, but the ability to influence outcomes, like Luck and Malison.

Applying those principles, I came up with a much more balanced distribution of the vanilla spells:

 

Arranged by level:

 

 

Arranged by school:

 

 

 

Look, every school has useful spells! And it actually makes sense conceptually! I'm considering whether to code that up in a mod... but I generally use SR, and Demi has gone to such great lengths to balance the schools in SR that it's really not necessary.

 

 

The general idea for Flesh to Stone is to make it work more like Aec'Letec's Death Gaze. (which is also a special ability of all aTweaks' Nabassus)

Silverstar suggested something like this more than 2 years ago.

Isn't it more or less how it's already working within V4? Death Gaze instantly paralize, and then kills you on 5th round unless dispelled in the meanwhile. With SR's FtS you get instantly slowed and then petrified on the following round. I do said I'm open to tweak it (e.g. petrified on 3rd round? save vs death after petrification or die? etc.) but I think we are pretty much doing what you are asking for.

Stone to Flesh definitely should remove Stoneskin (no save) on any target not immune to petrification/polymorph, whether hostile, neutral or friendly.

There aren't many creatures immune to one but not both, are there?

Kinda pointless imo. If you can target a mage or druid (aka they don't have spell protections up) then using a 6th lvl spell to remove Stoneskin is likely the least efficient move possible. Just cast Disintegrate and obliterate it, even Hold Person is better then your suggested Stone to Flesh.

I think an important part of his suggestion is collapsing StF and FtS into s single spell, which gives it great utility. Maybe you memorize for its vanilla use, to insta-kill an enemy. But then maybe one of your allies gets tagged by a basilisk gaze - you're prepared. Or maybe an enemy mage Contingency's a Stoneskin and you're fresh out of Breaches - Again, you're prepared. It really has the ring of "I am a powerful Transmuter, my power over matter prepares me for many dangers."

 

If it could also be used to weaken golems, that would be icing on the cake.

Those are all fantastic ideas.

A quick note: this has been updated to v1.6, fixing some bugs and improving compatibility with IWDEE. Also all file names have been made lower-case, making it Linux-friendly. Cheers!

5 times 6 seconds = five ROUNDS. Five TURNS should be 5 times 60 seconds, or 300 seconds.

 

Of course maybe the intended duration is indeed five rounds - I haven't looked at it. So this is either a bug, mixing up turns and rounds, or not a bug at all. But Demi is a PnP fanatic, he doesn't need me pointing this out...

Right - there are a couple different ways to do it, each of which is bugged in its own special way. But I'm just interested in specifically how DR approaches it, so that I know precisely what else I have to do (if anything) to make mod kits compatible with sphere system.

So, I want to make sure I understand things here. Please correct me if any of the following is inaccurate:

 

As of DR v8, the sphere system is optional. Installing that component essentially makes the mod run like DR v7, in that:

 

1) Spells are stripped away from all divine casters and granted to each kit according to the sphere system. Mod kits can hook into this system via the macro described in the first post.

 

2) Kits have more innate abilities, as they did in v7, and have special weapons they can summon once per day, which grow in power as the cleric levels up. Mod kits can emulate this by creating some fun/cool innate abilities and creating special summonable weapons. Nothing a few hours in NI can't take care of.

 

3) Kitted clerics cast one fewer spell per day of each level compared to the trueclass cleric - essentially, all of those innate abilities take the place of casting one normal spell per level. Mod kits can...

 

And that's where I trail off. How is the reduced spellcasting implemented? Is it even still implemented in v8? Do modders have to do anything special to work right? Does DR mess with the base spellcasting table? Or just grant an extra spell to trueclass clerics?

 

Inquiring minds want to know! Thanks in advance.

I have no idea what to use on Feywarden of Corellon instead of the weapon and fighting style specialization though. A magical longsword with a dispell on hit would make sense again. Or a passive hold and stun immunity.

This made me think about the whole concept of spiritual weapons. Check out my thread on them, I'd be curious to know what you think.

THIS MOD IS DEPRECATED REVIVED!!

EDIT - it is deprecated again. Forever this time.

For my tweaks related to weapons, armor, and other items, now you should use SubtleD’s Item Tweaks.

For my revisions to the weapon proficiency system, and a feat system tied into proficiency points, now you should use Combat Skills & Proficiencies. 

For my tweaks related to ability scores, hit dice, XP, etc. now you should use SubtleD’s Stat Overhauls.

Those three mods should be installed in that order. Generally, Item Tweaks goes after kits but before SCS; Combat Skills and Stat Overhauls go after SCS.

 

—————————————

 

DESCRIPTION OF THE OLD MOD:

This has some overhaul and tweak components:

- Item/Weapon Overhaul (in 4 parts)
- Weapon Proficiency Overhaul (in 5 parts)
- Magic Resistance Overhaul
- Stat tweaks
- Hit dice tweaks
- XP table tweaks

That's it!

If you like the SoB cleric and druid kits, you can still find those at the link for v4.3:

https://github.com/subtledoctor/Scales_of_Balance/releases/tag/4.3.2

But really, those are totally old and busted. Instead of using them, you should ask me for a copy of the Faiths & Powers beta. Even now, in beta form, it's miles better!

Btw, part of the reason for breaking things up this way has to do with load order. Might 'n' Guile as usual should be installed after other kits but before SCS. This new version of Scales of Balance should be installed very very late: especially if you use the MRO, that should be installed after all mods that add creatures and items. So after SCS, and after aTweaks.

Cheers!

Again, to recap what's happened since v3: my single old mod got too big and unwieldy, and I also got better at this stuff and wanted to do more. So the old Scales of Balance has been broken up into a number of other mods:

Faiths & Powers (cleric & druid tweaks and kits, by Grammarsalad):
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/43174/faiths-and-powers-gods-of-the-realms-kitpack-and-divine-caster-spell-tweaks#latest

Tome & Blood (wizard & sorcerer tweaks and kits, by Aquadrizzt):
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/31274/mod-beta-tome-and-blood-more-options-for-wizards-and-sorcerers#latest

Might & Guile (warrior & rogue tweaks and kits, by me!):
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/43878/might-and-guile-a-tweak-mod-and-kit-pack-for-warriors-and-rogues

NPC_EE (customize NPCs)
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/43305/npc-ee-non-player-characters-enhanced-for-everyone

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Just want to introduce people to my new mod, Scales of Balance (or SoB for short).

What is this?
This started out as my own personal set of tweaks that I did on top of a fully modded game. It includes some basic mechanical tweaks (e.g. modified stat bonuses and an overhaul of the proficiency system), some cosmetic changes (e.g. FR-themed paladin kit names, and magic items that don't break immersion by putting '+2's and '+5's in your face), and more than 25 new kits.

This is all about improving gameplay.
I love mods that bring the game closer to PnP, like Rogue Rebalancing and aTweaks. But 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. Consider this mod as a collection of 'house rules' specific to the BG campaign. Every choice has been made with an eye to the particular gameplay mechanics of BG2 and the EEs.

I try to make this as compatible as possible with other mods.
Notwithstanding the above paragraphs, this mod is 100% compatible with RR and aTweaks. This is meant to be applied alongside those mods - not instead of them.

Everything is completely optional.
You can use as many or as few of the mod components as you like. None of them rely on each other, there is no 'core' component. Use what you like, ignore what you don't.

I'd much rather have Erg active and critical than have him made to feel unwelcome or wrong. I value his input.

Hear, hear. I must say I don't think Erg is *unduly* critical (and I hope I am not). I think (and judging from his activity on the Beamdog forums I think Erg agrees) that the EE games are fantastic, superior to the originals in countless ways. IWD:EE's state at launch seems to be really impressive. Erg and I have specific, targeted criticisms, which all basically stem from ToBEx capabilities that were not carried over to the EE engine, and which have all been explained in tempered, realistic feature requests over on Beamdog's forums.

 

My main requests of Beamdog were 1) externalizing the applicability of proficiency-based APR for warriors vs. non-warriors; 2) enabling the player to control the direction the party faces in tablet versions of the games; and 3) enabling/externalizing a method for modders to apply ToBEx's concentration check for spell disruption.

 

In the last few patches Beamdog has made 2 of those 3 things happen. This gives me hope that they are listening and maybe the 3rd will appear in v1.4. If so, I'll probably switch to playing the EEs exclusively (and buy more, non-tablet copies of them as well). But until it happens, that feature of vanilla is more important to me than the various advantages of EE. I suspect Erg (not to mention many others who aren't as vocal about this stuff) feels similarly. I mean, he and I have both released EE-only mods!

Man - DR compatible with EEs and (presumably, without the sphere system) SR?? I never would have made the effort to create my own cleric kits if I thought this was going to happen!

 

Oh well, always nice to see progress on great mods like this - good work!

Now then, conjuration is summoning forth an object, and in the case of ____ arrow, it's got nothing to do with the element of ____, but the creation of an object that has the capacity to damage the target with ____.

____ball is good _______ spell cause it's about bringing forth an object from the plane of ____ that can damage the surroundings.

Right, you've just convinced me that Fireball should be a conjuration spell.

didn't ToBEx and/or EE fixed Magic Cold dmg type to not cause crashes?

I believe EE fixed that, dunno about vanilla BG2 mods.

Wait...you think Evocations should not use elemental dmg? o.O

If I'm building an 8-school Magic system from the ground up? Yes, evocation spells would be manipulations of pure magical energy (magic missile). Conjurations could create elemental effects (acid arrow), and transmutations could also, by heating things up, cooling them down, etc. (beltyn's burning blood). Necromancy spells should cause life-draining, flesh-aging, and necrotic damage as you say.

 

But as I said we're stuck with 2e, with its gazillion contradictory sourcebooks. It's not worth trying to reinvent the wheel with a Revisions mod.

What dmg type should I then use for stuff like Holy weapons, Holy Smite, Sunray, Magic Missile, Disintegration, etc?

 

Overall, I just pretend magic dmg is a more generic dmg type, which includes stuff like holy dmg, necrotic dmg, light-based dmg and force dmg.

All quite reasonable, I would probably use "magic damage" for all of those spells *except* the one which claims to do "dryness" damage. Bioware's version is a Horrid spell ( ) that's been twisted into something ridiculous that isn't the PnP spell and doesn't even match its in-game description. And can't be changed because SCS. :/

 

Perhaps at least a description edit.

 

"Dark bursts of violent energy course through the area of effect, swirling around the caster's enemies and causing grave damage to all, whether alive or dead."

 

*That's* something I would cast "Protection from Energy" to prevent...

On a side note, Necromancy spells dealing magic dmg do makes sense as it represents Negative Energy dmg (e.g. Cause Wound spells, Skull Trap, Unholy Blight, etc.), what the most recent D&D editions call Necrotic dmg.

We we can agree to disagree about that one: because Skull Trap and ADHW are not actually meant to cause energy damage, that was a Bioware decision; and Unholy Blight (imo) does energy damage via divine energy (albeit evil divine energy), not a necromantic process. The only one left is Cause Wounds, but I think that is simply a sapping of life force/health, not some kind of magic energy overload damage.

 

Negative Energy is the lack of energy; a drain, an enervating force. Necromancy spells should harm in that fashion: level draining, health draining, aging, wilting (PnP wilting), etc. Invication spells should do damage via positive energy, a.k.a. "magic energy." And, Conjuration and Transmutation spells should do damage via elemental effects.

 

But the 2e specialty schools are a hodgepodge of oddness that we have to work with, and while I disagree with your take on it, I also understand your logic. (I will at least say, if that is your position on necromantic damage, at least "Protection from Energy" should be renamed "Protection from Negative Energy" and should not protect against Magic Missile.)

Nope. By average it is, but we are not talking about average but a dice that has 14 sides that all have equal chance of being landed to, so 1 is as possible as the 14 unlike in the 1d10+2, and so you know, the game rules have an exception that allows you to gain full 10 out of every 1d10 if you like by setting the Difficulty to Easy, and 2/3's of max if it's less than hardcore. Cause the system is rigged.

What?? I'm fairly certain that's not true. My understanding is, on Core Rules difficulty you get normal dice rolls, on Normal difficulty you get max hp every roll.

 

As for the average, well the average is what matters. A mythical 14-equal-sided die has equal chances to land on any of 14 possible results, ranging from 1 to 14. A 10-sided die with +2 added has equal chances to land on any of 10 possible results, ranging from 3 to 12. The range of the latter will of course tend to skew toward the middle, but over time, added up, the results from both methods will be roughly equal.

 

If you're avoiding any dice rolls by playing with max hp then yes there will be a difference, but I'm not assuming a player will inevitably choose to fix the outcome of dice rolls, in a game where almost all of the rules are literally defined by dice rolls. Why not just play in Story Mode?

 

In sum, if you want to simulate a 1d12 roll as best you can with a d10 die, the best way is to roll 1d10+1. If you want 12hp/level that's a different question.

I feel it's worth mentioning that adding +2 hp per level is way different, and way better, than rolling 1d12 for hp. The solutions is quite easy: mathematically, the average over time of rolling 1d10+1 works out to be precisely the same as rolling 1d12. So if you really want this to work as intended, you should be adding +1 per level, not +2.

 

1d10+2 hp per level is the same as rolling 1d14.

don't worry. Magic missile is still great, so is ADHW.

Incidentally, I've mentioned before how terrible ADHW is - it uses weird damage, it doesn't wilt, it's a purple/brown energy thing, it is blocked by ProEnergy, it's party friendly... all of that is just straight-up *wrong.*

 

But I've been told the spell can't be Revised (even though that's what this mod does) because SCS.

 

And fine. I hate that, but I accept it. So here's an alternative suggestion: just change the spell's name. SR changes spell names a bunch, sometimes for no reason other than that Demi thinks it's logical. And in every instance I can think of, I agree 100% with Demi's judgment.

 

So let's apply the same logic here: ADHW, the PnP spell, has *zero* resemblance to the BG2 spell, except that they both happen to use d8 dice for damage. That's literally the only similarity. So let's give this spell a name that correctly describes what it actually does: selectively damage enemies with violent magical energy. Energy Surge. Magic Miasma. Something. Anything other than Wilting.

 

And for Pete's sake make it an invocation or conjugrtion spell. A necromancer killing something by a surge or energy is absurd. Necromancy is about enervation, drain, chill... the absence of energy, not an abundance of it.

Well, please do try that with monk, I'm farily curious if it may work.

Sigh. You had to say that didn't you. I spent 2 hours doing this last night, I now have a rough draft of a mod backporting the two EE kits to the OG. (EDIT: tested it out, it seems to work!)

 

[removed because it's not something that should be distributed. let me know if you want to take a look though.]

 

It copies three spells (spcl236, spcl239, and spcl822) for which I didn't check animations, so that may not work. And there is no alignment check for switching to Sun Soul/Dark Moon - if there should be, it would have to be added to the scripts. But anyway this is really just a proof-of-concept... I'm pretty sure it is illegal to distribute those three spells, so don't publish this or distribute it or sell it or anything. But feel free to check it out for now...

 

Now back to your regularly scheduled KR discussion programming.

Careful with that quote-editing knife, sir, you might cut yourself!

 

Hey I don't advocate doing any of that - just giving a proof-of-concept (concept-of-concept?) of an improvement on Jarno's idea of starting with a fighter(!). It's not for KR - KR isn't doing added kits, and Demi would hate doing kits for one class differently from another class.

 

BUT it's not a bad method, I use it for my kensai, which is loads better than the vanilla kensai - and, I daresay, even better than KR's kensai (though I admit being biased) for at least accurately reflecting the kit description.

I don't understand the question? Read from?

 

I meant, if Jarno is to be believed, you can make new monk kits with their own CLAB files to read, you just can't make them selectable via K_M_x files. So once you switch to the kit it's fine and should function normally with whatever CLAB abilities you want to give it.

 

If that was a typo and you meant how would you *remove* an innate ability from a CLAB, I figure you would GA_ the ability at first level, and AP_ a spell at second level that uses opcode 146 to remove the 1st-level ability. So you could choose at 1st level to specialize as a certain style of monk; or you could ignore it and stick to the vanilla kit.

 

And of course all that jiggery-pokery would all be OG-only; on EE games you would just choose the kits at CharGen. In fact this could be a method to backport the two EE kits to the OG.

Well, just like sorcerer kits in BG2 you can't make a direct kit selectable from the character creation, but you can make a fighter kit that turns it into a Monk that then has a unique kit. It's simple really.

Or you could give all monk kits the same abilities at level 1, and include an innate ability (which is removed at level 2) that lets you switch from the basic kit and chose from a few different specialty kits. That would take care of the animation issue.

He can't be hasted. That's a huge drawback, given how Haste works.

I'm not concerned about a list of benefits and drawbacks; I'm not suggesting this to balance things, in fact I think it's kind of a suggestion to *unbalance* things - at least that aspect (DPS) - to account for various other things that are unbalanced, like the ability to use stunning blow and slow time and stealth and X Y & Z other mystical abilities that can't be added up as numbers in a calculation.

 

Also, I must say that there are some incredibly creative ideas in this thread, it's really impressive. But larger picture, implementing all those ideas just because it is possible and they are really cool can just lead to a class that is all about those "toys to play with."

 

Rather than give the one vanilla monk all of these abilities, why not add a few kits and give them each some overlapping but also some different abilities - that would increase variety and flavor and push people into playing different ways in different runs.

 

Crap, don't tell me monk kits are hard-coded. Like I say, I haven't looked into monks much, but that wouldn't surprise me.

 

And to clarify, I hope I don't sound critical, I'm not saying it ought to be this way or that way I have very little experience playing monks, so I'm least qualified to give advice on specifics. Just looking at the bigger picture.

In the above vein (but in a separate post because it's a different, more specific point), someone above asked about monks' weapon proficiencies. I have to infer why do they have any in the first place? If the theme of the class is that they gone their bodies to become weapons, why use any other?

 

I mean think about it: in BG1 people find fists underwhelming so they use a weapon instead. Then after a few levels, their fists become more powerful - even though they haven't been practicing with them in daily use!

 

So why not just give monks zero weapon proficiencies? Doubling APR with fists seems like a pretty good trade-off for that in the early going.

you know I never liked Monk's fist doing absurd damage (I already reduced it from 1d20 to 1d12), but to be fair you should at least count Fighter's grand mastery bonus imo, and in that case even a mere dagger +3 (1d4 +3, +5 from GM means 10.5 on average) is going to be more damaging than Monk's Fist +3 (1d12 +3 means 9.5 on average). Try to imagine a dual wielding Berserker or Kensai and even without heavy weapons (bastard swords, flails, katanas) there's really no match.

So I am investigating this class a bit, both with and without KR. It's new to me, I've never once played a monk in a BG game.

 

I think it's worth chiming in on the issue above: comparing a monk's fist damage with a fighter's weapon damage is not really a great comparison because a) just thinking about it, even with focused chi behind the attack, it's still a fist versus a 5-20 pound weapon wielded by a grandmaster. And b) monks have a gazillion other magical powers and immunities that fighters lack. So even saying "it's only 9.5 average, versus 10.5 for a dagger" - to me that still looks like way too much for the fists. (Especially since any given party will most likely only have one monk, meaning the pkayer is basically guaranteed to be using the Gauntlets of Crushing.)

 

So instead of/in addition to reducing the damage, is there any thought to maybe, (I hate to suggest this but...) actually reign in some of those gazillion superpowers and immunities? Like just straight-up have fewer "toys to play with" as you say. Follow the KISS principle (which Bioware clearly did not).

Well acid is really basically high-ph water right? And lightning is electrified air.

 

Close enough to be considered "elemental," I figure. I mean we are talking about a game where lightning bounces off walls instead of being grounded. (If any part of the BG magic system needs fixing, it's that.)