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Ahem. I'm thinking about making a mod based on my method to reproduce IWD's Evasion ability in arbitrary circumstances. The rough idea is to insert saving throws into all sorts of areas of the game. As a general matter, these would replace blanket immunities. So instead of being dumbly immune to an effect, you would be <i>resistant</i> to it... anyone could still succumb with a bad roll. (Specifically, a failed saving throw... but theoretically it could be a simple percentage chance instead. Feel free to discuss the merits of each below.) I think this would really recall the variability of the PnP game.

Here are some f'rinstances:

- Berserk Rage not provide immunity to Charm/Fear/Hold/Stun/Imprisonment/Death/Love/Homework... instead you get a second saving throw to avoid those effects, even if you failed your save against the effect itself.
- Paladins not immune to fear... but they get an extra saving throw to avoid any fear effect that hits them.
- Cavaliers not immune to poison... but the get an extra saving throw to avoid its effects.
- Undead Hunters and Blackguards not immune to level drain... but they get an extra saving throw to escape it.
- Elves not immune to fear/sleep, instead they get an extra save to avoid it.

What else could we apply this to? Think big. Like, changing undead immunities to Hold into an extra chance to save. Maybe Globe of Invulnerability gives an extra save instead of blanket immunities to spells. Items that grant immunities could do the same thing - I'm thinking of stuff like, the Necklace of Form Stability could give you an extra chance to save against all Transmutation effects. Helms of Charm Protection an extra chance to save against Charm/Domination. Etc. I'm even considering trying to make the Gloves of Missile Snaring give you a saving throw to avoid successful missile attacks.

I'm talking big, game-wide changes. No-reloaders would hate this idea. :devlook: So, my questions are, 1) how crazy am I? 2) What other parts of the game could be altered in this way? What haven't I thought of?

So yeah... let me know what you think.

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I don't know, the immunities tied to character classes are what define them and really distinguish them from other classes. Changing those to imitate the "advantage" mechanics kinda screws them up major. At low level when everyone's saves mostly suck, getting another chance doesn't mean much. Whereas at high level, if they are unlucky enough to fail once, mostly likely they'll succeed next time anyway - for a one-time check.

 

In many instances the enemies can spam negative effects over and over, like vampire's on-hit level drain. If the character has to make a save every single time, it probably won't take too long for them to eventually fail. Getting another save every time means at least they won't be level drained to death, I guess.

 

Vanilla game might be forgiving enough for this idea to *possibly* work, decently. But to implement this mechanics in a modded game with stuff like Spell Revisions, SCS, aTweaks, etc.... oof. I mean, in the toughest fights it is always critical that your characters are absolutely immune to stuff..., and one failed save means the whole thing goes south.

 

Just my initial thoughts though.

Edited by ABlake
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Wow, it took starting this thread and reading my own post for me to suddenly realize that what I hace discovered how to do is implement a form of the 5E "advantage" system.

 

I don't know, the immunities tied to character classes are what define them and really distinguish them from other classes. Changing those to imitate the "advantage" mechanics kinda screws them up major.

 

...

 

In many instances the enemies can spam negative effects over and over, like vampire's on-hit level drain. If the character has to make a save every single time, it probably won't take too long for them to eventually fail.

Don't see how that destroys class/kit distinctions. An Undead Hunter with advantage against level drain will still be able to tank vampires way better than a fighter etc. It just means the game nechanic isn't utterly trivialized/removed from the game.

 

Consider it from the opposite direction: in IWD why does Evasion gives thives an extra save? Why not just make them totally immune to Fireballs? Why does the Ring of Fire Resistance not make you totally immune to fire damage?

 

Which is not to say there's no room for full immunity. The way this would work is to define a bunch of categories that could get this treatment, and then let the player choose which ones to apply. It would be very modular.

 

I mean, in the toughest fights it is always critical that your characters are absolutely immune to stuff..., and one failed save means the whole thing goes south.

I mean it might make things more challenging, but lots of people like more challenge. More to the point, the thread title says it all: in D&D, the dice can always go against you and you have to react. Thist would convert some of the more video-gamey mechanisms to be more like PnP, putting the player a bit more firmly inder the sway of the capricious dice gods ;)

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Don't see how that destroys class/kit distinctions. An Undead Hunter with advantage against level drain will still be able to tank vampires way better than a fighter etc. It...

Yeah, but you might as well cast a fucking Negative Plane Protection to both chars and they are equally well protected. You are fucking up the whole system. At this point you might as well set the max resistance to 50% and have less effect than ¤¤&%&/¤%#%(#¤/#¤&%/& the whole world.

 

Now then, if this were to be done in addition to the immunities, as a additional skill/talent for kits for example, I wouldn't have any problems with that.

 

Whereas at high level, if they are unlucky enough to fail once, mostly likely they'll succeed next time anyway - for a one-time check.

Bad effect usually in low or high levels is very much the same. You fail a save, and you are dead/you reload a save. This is because you either need to kill the party member and resurect them, or run the fuck away for 5 real minutes, cause the enemy just charmed one of your chars and you don't want to hurt others. Try to do that in 1000x800 pixel space and you are lucky to not get stuck to your own chars, let alone have enough space to not get hit. Edited by Jarno Mikkola
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Yeah, but you might as well cast a fucking Negative Plane Protection to both chars and they are equally well protected. You are fucking up the whole system. At this point you might as well set the max resistance to 50%

...

Now then, if this were to be done in addition to the immunities, as a additional skill/talent for kits for example, I wouldn't have any problems with that.

Breathe, Imp... breathe. Nobody is going to come into your house and secretly mod your game. :laugh:

 

Again: do you rail against the devs for making IWD's Evasion ability require a saving throw? Why don't thieves get straight immunity to all AoE spells?? It F's up the whole system!!1!!1 ... Or, not. It's actually pretty cool.

 

How about Magic Resistance? Why does it only work some of the time? Why doesn't it confer complete immunity to magic spells?? Every time you fail an MR check and a spell hits you, clearly you must reload! Right?? Or, not.

 

So, another way to think of this is like MR: just like MR, it gives you a chance to avoid an effect. What this mod proposes is to make new, specialized variants of magic resistance: fear MR, charm MR, level drain MR, etc. You name the effect or category of effects, I can create an "evasion" system for it which is analogous to MR. And then that specialized MR can be distributed to various creatures, class, kits, items, etc. There are different ways it can work, but the most obvious are via saving throws (like Evasion) or via a straight percentage (like MR).

 

So one way to apply this might be to simply convert immunity to a 95% chance of immunity. This would simulate the PnP game where you can always roll a natural 1 and fail a check, even if you have a +20 modifier.

 

Another way would be to use saving throws. One of my mods already clear out saves vs. Rod/Staff/Wand, so we could cannibalize that for these kinds of Evasion, and then set the level progression and modifiers to the save as we see fit. Different effects could even detect your class or kit and apply save modifiers on the fly, as they land. So all paladins might have be able to save to avoid level drain and fear, but Undead Hunters would have a +5 modifier to save against level drain.

 

Theoretically, we could even use a stat or proficiency (or multiple stats/proficiencies) to influence each character's chance to evade different effects. This could in turn be affected by your STR, EDX, CON, etc. That would get complicated but it is possible.

 

So, lots of possibilities, and of course it would be totally modular. You could decide you like this for Charm effects (to represent the mental battle against the aggressor) but not for level drain (figure negative plane protection = total protection, end of story). It would be totally up to the player to decide how far to take it.

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You name the effect or category of effects, I can create an "evasion" system for it which is analogous to MR.

K, easy: Fireball.

See, the save throw only saves from the one half.

 

Again: do you rail against the devs for making IWD's Evasion ability require a saving throw? Why don't thieves get straight immunity to all AoE spells??

In portions.

In the 5th edition ruleset, the evasion is a reaction, which means they can use it ones per turn, but that removes other reactions, like extra attack against retreating enemies that don't use their action to disengage(in BG terms, it's 1 per round = 6 real time seconds, and usually there should be only one opponent per char, so usually this is way too hard to code it as a spell as it's really not worth the hassle) to avoid half of the damage in addition to any resistances etc they might have, which are 50% too, so fireball would only do 25%(=0.5*0.5) if the char has fire resistance(=50% damage resistance) and evasion, and also the same char can make the save and take only ~12.5% of the damage.

 

In my view, the rogue could get an immunity to the non save throw-able damage, when they get the Evasion... but that would be a HLA'ish skill, not a low level squash chars ability.

 

Don't talk about Magic Resistance, the game made a big mess out of it by including the non-hostile flag'ed spells to be allowed to pierce it. As unlike in BG1, nearly all the friendly spells have this ability(yes, technically it's a different flag, but the lump sum is the same, as: ). And what's worse, the spell immunities are lumped into the same category, unless specifically allocated, for example the following is worse than bad: Try to find the Lich that casted invisibility & spell trap. And you'll be tripping on the trap a quite lot.

Which is why the original Lich .cre's didn't have spells lower than 4th spell level, cause their AI was thus prevented from casting those spells on themselves.

Edited by Jarno Mikkola
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