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polytope

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  1. Planar prison also, but like the planar sphere (1st floor) that's actually a safe place to rest. So is most of Spellhold/underwater city and there's a gnome inn in the underdark. Mostly you're missing out on temples for that portion of the game which behooves you to keep a cleric alive at all times unless you've found a Rod of Resurrection (let's face it, most parties have). It varies by area, but I'm pretty sure the most dangerous creature you can see as a rest spawn in BG2 is a (single) gauth, most others being nuisances. Worse things might spawn in Watcher's Keep but in every level except the 3rd one it's simple to backtrack and find an exit. Similarly backtracking through the map along path's you've already taken is usually safe because the devs didn't implement wandering monsters (there are a few exceptions like the Firewine ruins in BG1). Well, that would make it harder as the entirety of Spellhold and I guess parts of Siege of Dragonspear would need to be done without rest. SCS currently has an option to disable resting in the Illithid city of the underdark.
  2. Yes, in the abstract a character's stock of hp sometimes represents a close call survived with some exertion, hitting the floor, ducking behind cover, flinching backward in time to only take a graze etc. That abstraction breaks down when you look at things like poisoned arrows/daggers though, you could argue that high level characters survive both the physical injury and the poison better because a mere graze injects less poison, and less deeply into the tissue, but I'd struggle to believe it. It's probably the reason poison wasn't counted in hp damage in the earliest editions and was instead save or die (or incapacitated) with varying bonuses/onset times. The latter part is not a 2e thing, really, it's a ToB thing. In most instances, throughout this series, it was simply easier for the designers to overpower the encounters than to restrict the player character's frequency of resting in a way that's plausible and not immersion breaking. This means both random monster groupings and set encounters in IE games are scaled on the assumption of encountering a party near or at full strength in terms of their hp pool, memorized spells, x-uses per day items. Very few areas that you have to complete without leaving or resting.
  3. That's a problem ultimately caused (mostly) by kit/class tables extended to levels above 20 (above 30...) along with HLAs so that certain builds like swashbucklers (and monks and kensai->thieves) can get AC much better than even Drizzt, thus, to keep up with this power creep the big enemies in ToB need even lower THAC0 than they should "legitimately" have. Also, it is a problem, but one not really resolved by any edition of D&D, that AC is an abstraction of both physical armor and capacity to avoid blows, checked with a single die roll... yet most characters didn't get an inherent improvement to their base AC in those rules (beyond that from dexterity) as they increase in level, and all other "survivability" is instead represented by hit points gained. Several other systems split "defense" from actual armor, with weapon type usually mattering more for armor penetration purposes and respective levels for bypassing defenses.
  4. Nothing's simpler than THAC0/AC, subtract the targets AC from the attacker's THAC0 and that's the number needed on d20 for a successful hit (if <1 is a guaranteed hit except on critical, if >20 is guaranteed miss except on critical), it works when both THAC0 and AC are negative too (as if often the case in ToB), since only the difference matters. Prior to THAC0 in AD&D the charts for what creatures attacked as were a lot more obscure and difficult to remember. Unless you mean that AC becomes useless in ToB? Not quite, there are bosses that will hit any AC, but they're rarely alone, and the attacks from their minions (who can be foiled by AC) add up quickly. Likewise only warrior classes and priests at full buffs have THAC0 in the auto-hitting range. THAC0 seamlessly converts to base attack bonus btw. as in 3e, so in my view it's cosmetic which system is used (except for a few unusual rulings for unimplemented monsters/abilities where for instance target's AC is added to the damage, or chance of infection is a % = 10 times the armor class, so that it's worse for it to be a high number).
  5. Well, yes, the only real reason to chart in game bonuses to an arbitrary numerical threshold was if you're randomly rolling stats for your character (rather than using a point-buy system that's become more common and something like this is basically assumed for BG2 players given rerolls and moving points around in chargen) which permits uncertainty as to whether you'd have any stats in the bonus range. Without a base score it's a bit more complicated to keep track of things like the possibility of dying to a stat drain, but the systems that do that have their own rules for "draining" monsters. I wasn't specifically attacking your mod for borrowing from recent rule sets btw., just my opinion that it's easy to break balance when overhauling mechanics, particularly with assumptions made by other modders about creatures/items they've added to the game and how effective those will be.
  6. Mace for Devas would be comparably easy as we've already got a sword overlay to work with. That said, it looks like too much work for me, I'd prefer to just pretend they're using a sort of bar-mace: OTOH Balors with Ascension/SCS/aTweaks have vorpal weapons, but no sword overlay at all, and it's a lot more jarring for them to just apparently yank somebody's head off. Meh, it's been like that for so long I doubt anyone will change it, especially when you have to work around wings for the weapon animations; big creatures with wings etc. always looked bad with most graphical overlays...
  7. This topic has come up before as I remember with aTweaks fiends. Before I waste any more time on this, can someone tell me if they know of a mod/modder/tool that they used which does something like this? Cornugons with clubs, it will take me time to get the frames properly aligned and edited:
  8. Several attempts have been made over the years to revise stat bonuses (for IE games and by 2e players as a whole), almost invariably, something goes wrong, the already tenuous game balance falls apart. Personally, I think one of the main reasons for dissatisfaction and attempts at reworking it is the "dead zone" for most ability scores taking up the larger part of the bell curve of a 3d6 die roll, so that there's too little chance of generating a character with useful bonuses raw, and you have to start moving ability points around. Besides, it makes little sense that a character with 15 strength is no better in hand to hand combat that one with 8 strength, despite being able to carry more than twice as much weight. Similarly, because ability checks weren't implemented in the IE a character with 14 dexterity is no more likely to avoid physical damage than one with 7 dexterity (and their basic AC wouldn't be better anyway, dex checks only applies to a handful of monster attacks and a larger number of traps/hazards). FWIW, this is the table in OD&D: Strength Hit Probability Damage 3-4 -2 -1 5-6 -1 Normal 7-12 Normal Normal 13-15 +1 Normal 16 +1 +1 17 +2 +2 18 +2 +3 Exceptional strength Dice Score Hit Probability Damage 01-50 +2 +3 51-75 +3 +3 76-90 +3 +4 91-99 +3 +5 100 +4 +6 Something to note is that an exceptional strength roll in the 1-50 range (originally) gives no bonuses over plain 18, which I doubt would be popular, and 18/100 ends up one point ahead of vanilla values for THAC0 bonus. Arguably, 17 str should grant only a +1 to damage and 18 (unexceptional) would increase that to +2. Also, 13-15 share the same bonus, whereas 16, 17 and 18 all grant improvements. I'm also not a fan of 3e intrusions into BG trilogy, particularly because so many of the mechanics were hardcoded under the assumption of a 2e ruleset, which isn't easily changeable, besides 3e not being an improvement anyway. Ability scores increments that give no immediate mechanical improvement are still useful as a protection against stat draining creatures/diseases and for ability checks that compare the result of a die roll or multiple dice to the score, failing if the rolled number is higher (in 2ed that was usually a d20, but occasionally something like 2d12, or with a -X penalty applied, that ensured success wasn't always guaranteed in every instance no matter stat enhancers).
  9. In my impression, generally speaking, the more niche the topic, the more technical and specific the question the less likely the language learning model (or machine learning in general) can produce anything that applies the body of knowledge appropriately, let alone specifically delivers the answer you were looking for. A fan's interface for modding an old computer game is definitely not something it's likely to be able to work with. This applies more generally, remember last month's story about the AI illustrated article in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology? People were laughing at how it attempted to depict the rat's testicles, but in fact the depiction of the JAK-STAT signalling pathway is also a total mess, because it's a little known subject except to immunologists and hasn't been described and illustrated enough times for an artistic AI to train on it, so the AI produces a lot of nonsensical filler instead of a useful diagram.
  10. My recollection is that equipped/inventory items with negative weight actually work, can't do it smoothly for a kit though, unless you add some sort of undroppable and (relatively) unobtrusive item, in the style of a carried familiar, called something like harness or webbing I guess.
  11. Local variables set on party members cannot be easily checked by other creature's scripts. Opcode #268 and associated stat #148 also appear harmless to set upon player characters, possibly also opcode #293 and stat #183. These can be used without ToBEx's expanded functionality of #318.
  12. Seems I misremembered and mixed up change critical effect #341 with change bard song effect #251. Is there a simple way to choose only one such at a time though? Besides the obvious i.e. removal of the resource that grants the effect by #321 or similar?
  13. My own efforts to make single class thieves a bit more useful in straight combat were similar, but not the same: A repeating ability under the special abilities tab with a four round cooldown which gives the equivalent of Assassination via #303 backstab every hit and a +2 bonus to THAC0 but sets attacks per round to zero for one round after a hit connects (to ensure it isn't disproportionately powerful for dual and multi-class thieves who've ways to maximize their attacks per round), called skirmishing, to distinguish from swashbuckling (swashbucklers obviously don't get it). Also, allowing the Assassination HLA to be chosen multiple times, but the backstab multiplier during an assassination reduced to X3 for normal thieves/multiclass thieves and stalkers (extended as a HLA choice for them), X4 for assassin kit (making it in someways better, someways worse than warrior Critical Strike which guarantees hits and doubles the strength bonus). Balancing thieves in combat also means balancing traps though, which get more than a bit silly in the late game, that's one of the mechanics which most modders leave alone, like priestly turning of undead because it's unbalanced but also substantially hardcoded.
  14. If I want to use a new innocuous detectable stat that will work in scripts between the original engine/ToBex/EE can anyone advise if opcode #308 and corollary #195 is a poor or good choice? It doesn't seem to be stored in save games but this won't matter if it's used to keep track of things in combat (where you shouldn't really be able to save the game anyway), likewise, although it does protect from the "Tracking" HLA (which no one takes...) that's an ability that's used to discover creature's locations before a combat starts.
  15. Here's another solution (involving shell spells) that will work on the "old" engine, since you want the creature to heal damage specifically every round regardless of disabling effects, use opcode #232 to cast a spell aaaa.spl on condition #11: took damage. aaaa.spl has the following effects in its feature block: Opcode #146: Cast spell bbbb.spl (Instant/permanent) Opcode #206: Protection from spell aaaa.spl (duration 6) bbbb.spl has the effect of healing all damage via opcode #17 with a delay of 6 seconds, making sure the mode is healing normally rather than resurrecting from death, this should work even when the creature is disabled i.e. feebleminded. Then again, if the party has successfully used Feeblemind (or even Hold Monster) on the creature that heals every round it really won't matter if it regains all its hp... up to you if you want the secondary spell to also remove disabling effects/level drains etc.
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