Kobold daggers

[Luke]

1) Dark-Side-based kobold upgrade:

Kobold Guards are equipped with a special droppable dagger that can poison them or their target ----> this dagger should probably be undroppable since SCS is not supposed to add new items......

 

2) I read somewhere that this mod *biffs* some content: @subtledoctor Is this something we should be aware of when playing on iOS (i.e., is this something that should be removed on EE games)?

Edited September 11, 2018 by Luke

[mercurier]

1) Dark-Side-based kobold upgrade:

Kobold Guards are equipped with a special droppable dagger that can poison them or their target ----> this dagger should probably be undroppable since SCS is not supposed to add new items......

This. I suppose it is the same story as the special flame arrow added to Kobolds by SCS. In my last game experience the party was getting rich really fast by just selling these daggers... IMO the poison should be coming from some venom applied by kobolds, which vaporize soon after battle. Not sure if it is possible to have kobolds still use the poisonous dagger but drop the normal version.

Edited September 11, 2018 by mercurier

[subtledoctor]

The kobold .CRE files could simply have an on-hit melee effect, rather than using a poisonous weapon...

 

2) I read somewhere that this mod *biffs* some content: @subtledoctor Is this something we should be aware of when playing on iOS (i.e., is this something that should be removed on EE games)?

 

I don't think SCS biffs anything. I've played SCS v30 with BGEE 2.4 on iOS and didn't have any problems...

Edited September 11, 2018 by subtledoctor

[Bartimaeus]

I've always hated those daggers, and so prevented them from being installed. Would prefer it to be an on-hit melee effect, since I have no problem with the effect themselves.

[DavidW]

Droppable daggers is intentional, not a bug. I'm fairly confident the 5% self-poison chance makes them sufficiently unattractive to PCs that it doesn't unbalance anything (and I find undroppable gear immersion-breaking in general).

 

Contra Luke, there is no systematic "SCS doesn't add items" rule. It doesn't add *many* items, to be sure, because I don't want to unbalance the game's economy, but I put them in from time to time for flavor reasons. (The armor you can make from Anadramatis's skin, and the amulet he gives you if you defeat him without killing him, are the other examples that come to mind.)

[AstroBryGuy]

 

 

1) Dark-Side-based kobold upgrade:

Kobold Guards are equipped with a special droppable dagger that can poison them or their target ----> this dagger should probably be undroppable since SCS is not supposed to add new items......

This. I suppose it is the same story as the special flame arrow added to Kobolds by SCS. In my last game experience the party was getting rich really fast by just selling these daggers... IMO the poison should be coming from some venom applied by kobolds, which vaporize soon after battle. Not sure if it is possible to have kobolds still use the poisonous dagger but drop the normal version.

Sure. Make the poisonous dagger undroppable and put a normal dagger in the kobolds inventory. The game does that quite often (e.g., flinds).

[Luke]

@DavidW

 

I have two questions:

 

1) Can you confirm SCS does not biff its own content?

 

2) I should have clarified myself better about that dagger: if SCS adds new items (in particular weapons/armors/shields), then that's bad. As you know, one of the components of IR is meant to alter the base stats of those items and this component is usually installed *before* SCS -----> this means that all those weapons/armors/shields introduced by your mod will be skipped......

Edited September 12, 2018 by Luke

[DavidW]

@DavidW

 

I have two questions:

 

1) Can you confirm SCS does not biff its own content?

Mostly not. I biff some animation files at one point; it's not viable to leave unbiffed animations in the override.

 

2) I should have clarified myself better about that dagger: if SCS adds new items (in particular weapons/armors/shields), then that's bad. As you know, one of the components of IR is meant to alter the base stats of those items and this component is usually installed *before* SCS -----> this means that all those weapons/armors/shields introduced by your mod will be skipped......

Tough. It's not reasonable for a mod to enforce a rule that no other mod may add items. (And, historically, that component of SCS predates IR by several years.) If you want to make global changes to items, separate them off from general "item revisions" and lobby to include it in a late-install mod.

[mercurier]

Not want to be rude, but I am personally against about the current implementation of the poisonous dagger, because:

 

1. Tactical-wise, If the purpose was to bring more tactical challenge by beefing up kobolds, the undroppable version should do it well. Making it droppable empowers players with increased combat power and/or monetary gain, therefore reducing the tactical challenge.

 

2. RP-wise, I think a permanent enchantment like secondary damage is not trivial task, and the kobold tribe has to mass-produce it, which looks unrealistic to me. The "normal dagger plus applied venom" rationale looks more natural and achievable.

 

3. Undroppable items are indeed immersion-breaking, because it is just a shortcut for implementing a combat ability (in this case, it mimics Assassin's poison weapon skill. We can surely use an alternate but more complex approach, say, create a SPL that do the trick, and set their script to use the trick, yet I am not sure if it really worth all the hassle.

Edited September 12, 2018 by mercurier

[Bartimaeus]

#2: That's the weird thing about those daggers - no enchantment, so they're not magical, yet they have a never-ending supply of venom. Other non-magical items with poison on them are one-time use throwables.

[Luke]

Tough. It's not reasonable for a mod to enforce a rule that no other mod may add items. (And, historically, that component of SCS predates IR by several years.) If you want to make global changes to items, separate them off from general "item revisions" and lobby to include it in a late-install mod.

So, are you saying it's safe to install IR (but the main component) *after* SCS?

 

Alternatively, could you provide a list of those items so that they can be patched right after SCS?

Edited September 12, 2018 by Luke

[Bartimaeus]

IR should absolutely not be installed after SCS. As DavidW said, it's not reasonable to expect every mod to conform to IR - if an item doesn't exactly match IR's standards, it's IR's own fault for changing the standards, and it's also not that huge of a deal.

 

(e): I seem to be getting a number of "tried to set nonexistent animate entry" errors with Improved Fiends on RC3 (ignore that it says RC2, because I'm pretty sure the version number just wasn't incremented). weidu log + debug. Should I be concerned? From what I Googled, someone else had this back in 2014, but no explanation as to why it was happening was given, though it was apparently fixed.

Edited September 12, 2018 by Bartimaeus

[subtledoctor]

I think in this very specific instance, making them droppable is not immersion-breaking, becsuse it is functionally equivalent to giving them regular daggers and applying permanent opcode 248 poison-on-hit effects.

 

That would not be immersion breaking, because that is functionally equivalent to giving them a single use 'Poison Weapon' ability. Equivalent because the kobolds will generally only stay on the screen for the length of a single encounter. So making it permanent just saves you the effort of coding their AI to use an actual Poison Weapon ability.

 

Or you could automate it from the weapon itself: give each dagger an on-hit poison effect that only fires once ever; and also triggers a 248 effect on the wielder, doing poison damage on successful hits for the next 5 or 10 rounds.

 

Lots of ways to skin a cat like this.

 

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Luke, definitely do NOT install IR after SCS. (Unless they are your only two mods, I guess.)

 

Just accept that there's all different kinds pf weapons in the world, with all different levels of quality and craftsmanship and wear, and some will be slightly different from others. I mean, which weapons are you specifically talking about here? Are you actually seeing a problem that has an impact on gameplay?

 

Scales of Balance weapon tweaks can be installed after SCS. If there's something that's really glaring, I can maybe address it in SoB.

 

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I don't know which component biffs files. It's possible I didn't install that one.

 

David, I think it's worth mentioning in the readme (or a thread at least) which components do biffing, as that will cause problems - maybe crashes - for players on certain platforms.

Edited September 12, 2018 by subtledoctor

[DavidW]

So my reluctance to change anything here is partly because that component (which dates back to the first release of SCS) is based on a tiny fragment of the ancient "dark side of the sword coast" mod, and so on nostalgia grounds I don't want to make arbitrary changes to it. That doesn't mean changing things that flatly don't work, but it does mean I won't remove the daggers unless there's a significant problem with them.

 

Here's the list of worries people have mentioned:

 

1) "They're tactically unbalancing." I find that really implausible in practice. They're nonmagical daggers; they do one point of damage per second for six seconds; they have a 5% chance of poisoning the user. That is not going to be competitive as a combat option for most characters. (And if there's an occasional niche build that gets mileage out of the dagger for a level or two, great: that's the sort of emergent behavior that makes the game more interesting.

 

2) "They unbalance the economy." I'd again be pretty surprised if that's true: they cost 75gp and I can't imagine you end up with more than a dozen or so over the course of Nashkel. Still, 75gp is probably a little on the high side; it could be toned down.

 

 

3) "It's unrealistic that kobolds can mass-produce magical daggers." They're not magical.

 

4) "If they're not magical, it's unrealistic that they produce poison indefinitely." Fair enough. It wouldn't be too hard to give them a 10% chance per use of running out, or something similar.

 

 

5) "SCS shouldn't be adding items at all, because IR should be doing that." See Bartimaeus's reply to Luke.

[DavidW]

Luke, definitely do NOT install IR after SCS. (Unless they are your only two mods, I guess.)

Even if they are, you will confuse SCS's targeting if you install new or modified magical items after it's done its detectable-spells runthrough.