Changing the -6 Safety Net

[Zelknolf]

It might be done by healing them when they're damaged. Healing doesn't work if you're dead according to NWN2, whether or not that's dead according to ACR.

Complicates the crap out of the math.


But yeah-- consider the stuff you'd be taking effort away from to have this:
-- if we put the same effort into DM tools, we get a search bar on the creator and a chooser that lets you interact with any non-static object.
-- Or the ability to spawn things in formations and sorting on other columns.
-- If we put the same effort into items, we get a realistic shot at self-correcting item prices.
-- If we put the same effort into creatures, we get deep and complex control over populations and the ability to let player actions meaningfully control territory in game.
-- If we put the same effort into developing web services on our hosts, we get self-updating server maps and cheaper cross-server tells.
-- If we put the same effort into areas and area instancing, we get the ability to dramatically stretch our hosts' resources into more adventure.

[Castano]

I like this list much better ^

so I will vote against any changes to the negative HP floor system unless a coder steps forth to redo all of it.

[Ronan]

Many changes can be made without re-doing all of it. Its a matter of how much Zelk wants to keep polishing a turd. Sounds like not so much.

Yes the penalties could be quickly removable by high magic but it should not be simple hp healing spells, no matter the level. That kind of magic is the likes of (greater) restoration or regenerate, not 5 CLWs, a CCW or even a heal.

This partially why I liked the damage idea (other than how it easy it'd be compared to other suggestions). It:
-Works within existing 3.5 rules.
-Lesser restoration heals d4 stat damage (at least per the rules, I can't recall if our lesser restoration works this way).
-Resting heals 1.
-Restoration, greater restoration and heal heal all damage.
-Can lead to permanent death (at least per the rules, not our current floor handling).

[t-ice]

Many changes can be made without re-doing all of it. Its a matter of how much Zelk wants to keep polishing a turd. Sounds like not so much.

Yes the penalties could be quickly removable by high magic but it should not be simple hp healing spells, no matter the level. That kind of magic is the likes of (greater) restoration or regenerate, not 5 CLWs, a CCW or even a heal.

This partially why I liked the damage idea (other than how it easy it'd be compared to other suggestions). It:
-Works within existing 3.5 rules.
-Lesser restoration heals d4 stat damage (at least per the rules, I can't recall if our lesser restoration works this way).
-Resting heals 1.
-Restoration, greater restoration and heal heal all damage.
-Can lead to permanent death (at least per the rules, not our current floor handling).

Except that, far as I know:
- NWN2 Lesser restoration heals all ability damage to every stat in one shot. Also NWN2 doesn't make the distinction between temporary ability damage and more permanent drain.
- NWN2 Lesser restoration casts like any spell (akin to standard action), by SRD it takes 3 full rounds, which is a HUGE difference mid-combat.
- Not sure about death on 0 stat, but at least CON damage can kill indirectly. I'm also not sure dying by stat damage is a very good idea, since I wouldn't like to much increase mortality.

If lesser restoration was fixed, just so that it correctly heals 1d4 of ability damage to one damaged ability score (which would be good regardless of the death system), then say, 4 ability damage to all stats except CON could work very nicely. STR could be a real hassle, though. Anyway you'd want to hit casting stats as well as physical, so not sure what's left for melee-ers if you don't do STR damage. Probably don't want to do CON because of uncontrolled effects on hp and bleeding, either.

All of which is why I rather suggested a couple of (temporary) negative levels upon the floor save (like enervation), ideally to a maximum of something like (PC level -2) negative levels. (Don't want to murdar lowbies). Compared to stat damage, negative levels are:
- Not outright trivial to fix (Needs restoration or rest, which ideally also should have 100gp casting cost)
- Don't have the inventory weight issue STR damage does
- Affect casters and melee-ers roughly equally
- Don't know if hitting with a negative level causes issues with hp upon flooring, akin to CON damage? (According to NWN2 wiki desription seems not, but...)

Regardless, getting either ability damage or negative levels would be an improvement. To my limited tech understanding one shouldn't be that much harder to implement than the other?

[oldgrayrogue]

Temporary Level Drain -- brilliant!

But what if you rejoin combat and get dropped a second time -- do the neg levels stack?

I got an idea -- how about the "subdued" effect that you get from subdual mode, with a similar timer? You can RP "recovering" while "subdued" I believe. So if you hit -6 you are "subdued" for however many rounds on a timer and can't get back into the fight. You can still be healed by your party mates though, can still RP the effect of that crit, and (hopefully) won't be targeted by hostiles. Not sure about that last one. I think that you have to stop attacking a subdued opponent in subdual mode.

No clue if it would be a coding nightmare.

[Ronan]

Level drain and ability score damage effects are both naturally cumulative. They also probably wouldn't have any side-effects on the floor system (current or probably future), provided they're applied before we resurrect and set HP to -6. So for instance if a PC's CON or level dropped to 0, they wouldn't die, just like they wouldn't die if floored from CON poison or repeated enervations.

Level drain does sound like a good idea in principle. I did think the ability to eventually kill the PC was a feature, not a bug though. In any case I've seen some definite weirdness with negative levels; at one point I think Merrin's character sheet said he had -3 rogue levels. I'm also not sure they work as per 3.5, though I suppose thats moot here as nothing about the -6 floor is in RAW. I am not sure what happens when negative levels exceed character levels, or if this is even possible. In the base game this causes instant death, so the engine may not handle this how we'd want.

I do think it is a good idea to use known mechanics to apply these sort of penalties instead of making up our own, as it is less complexity to deal with all around.

I didn't realize lesser restoration takes 3 rounds to cast in 3.5. Thats something that can be changed very simply if someone wants to experiment with it. I had spells with different casting times in NWN1 and they worked ok as long as the casting times were kept reasonable. Above a certain value (can't remember what, might've been 32 seconds if its a signed 16-bit number) they'd bug out and never finish casting. To test this, modify ConjTime in a spell in spells.2da, and put it in your override folder. Then start up the OC or something. The ConjTime value is in milliseconds.

It is possible to fix lesser restoration to heal ability score damage properly. This would be done similarly to how the Shield and Mage Armor spells were handled: strip the effect, modify it, and re-apply. I found writing the code which handles the above spells to be incredibly annoying, because of how unpredictably the engine seems to react with regards to a few details, especially dispels on the effects. The result was a lot of trial-and-error trying to figure out why all this undocumented stuff wasn't working how you'd like it to.

I suppose if we only wanted to deal with permanent (in the NWN2 sense), no-longer-magical ability score damage it'd be easier. Anyway my point is that I wouldn't count on a 3.5 version of lesser restoration as it could be a lot of work.

[t-ice]

Level drain does sound like a good idea in principle. I did think the ability to eventually kill the PC was a feature, not a bug though. In any case I've seen some definite weirdness with negative levels; at one point I think Merrin's character sheet said he had -3 rogue levels. I'm also not sure they work as per 3.5, though I suppose thats moot here as nothing about the -6 floor is in RAW. I am not sure what happens when negative levels exceed character levels, or if this is even possible. In the base game this causes instant death, so the engine may not handle this how we'd want.

Negative levels would need a check on the "already low on levels" limit of how many neg levels gets applied. Because you don't want to apply 2 negative levels on a level 1 PC, even if it isn't insta-death. Dunno if the "get PC level" function takes already applied negatives into account? Also I don't think CON drained to 0 outright kills in our game currently, so level drained to 0 probably doesn't, either?

At least you can get PC's level by GetHitDice() and deduce it from GetXP(). The latter would presumably not take negatives into accout, maybe the former does? (Could be why you can get Rogue -3, if level 0 isn't killed and negs just keep on piling up without dropping maxHP to negatives, either.)

Ability damage is better in the sense that you could just do a fixed amount of damage and be done with it. Low levels don't have that much lower ability scores than high levels. But lesser restoration is a rather trivial fix for it, so all the change then manages to do is that every PC carries half a dozen lesser restoration potions. Which becomes trivial by level 5 or so. Still, taking two actions to bounce back fully fighting instead of one is an improvement. However, it remains that STR damage has nasty implications on carry weight, and dropping stuff takes forever in nwn2. And if you don't hit STR for getting floored

Finally both "stock" abilities of negative levels and ability damage are counterable by Death Ward, which we probably don't want to be quite so literally just that.

I did think the ability to eventually kill the PC was a feature, not a bug though.

Yeah, but then it'd all depend on just how the CON damage (or neg level) and the implied hp loss gets applied, so that it might kill "eventually", but also randomly punch though the safety net? If random holes in the net can be avoided, then "floored 5 times = death" is fine. But "floored 2 or 3 times = death" appears too harsh as the AI can unexpectly gang up and hate on a low-level party member.

Fixed spell casting time appears a staple fixture of nwn2, so I wasn't expecting that to change On the other hand, was expecting a relatively easier a change on how much ability damage is fixed by a single casting, but apparently not

(Ab)using the KO'd part of the subdual system could work, too. A timer, or some other "now you get back to consciousness" -handle would be something else that might or might not work with the KO system. Assuming we are ok with leaving the floored PC without the option to flee in the meantime, that is. (E.g. for 10 rounds, until no hostiles around, until healing spells in list [X] is cast on him, etc) This might in the end even be simpler as it doesn't tie to how NWN2 handles a myriad others things (like death ward, restoration, 0 STAT / 0 effective level)

[Zelknolf]

Though... I do note that you're still proposing changing max (and thus current) hit points in an environment when we're likely to be applying healing to manage the character's current hit points in a region when such changes have a high (but not certain) chance of causing the PC to not longer be responsive to those OOCly heals we use to make the system operate.

I don't think we can polish this turd without a total redesign and rewrite. We'll just smear it around and make a mess.

[SwordSaintMusashi]

Though... I do note that you're still proposing changing max (and thus current) hit points in an environment when we're likely to be applying healing to manage the character's current hit points in a region when such changes have a high (but not certain) chance of causing the PC to not longer be responsive to those OOCly heals we use to make the system operate.

I don't think we can polish this turd without a total redesign and rewrite. We'll just smear it around and make a mess.

All this thread has really done is create a multitude of innuendos and metaphors for why it is bad to try and change this system.

[t-ice]

I don't think we can polish this turd without a total redesign and rewrite. We'll just smear it around and make a mess.

Well,
(Edit: See, the Forums polish turd just fine!)

[Galadorn]

don't even care if this does not fit here... but can we make it so we cannot know the exact hit points of even party members? Just perhaps a health bar... which would show a PC is half dead or near dead? Knowing the exact hit point total is huge OOC. And while it may be IC to know "almost how much healing" a hurt PC needs... using a CMW instead of a CLW could make the difference and seems more realistic. Oh how this post will be hammered hard eh?

Just maybe a health-progress-bar that also turns "Green" "Yellow" and "Red" and keep the floating cursor information when panning over a PC: "Barely Injured" (yellow), "Injured" (orange), "Near Death" (red).

This would also make it important to pay attention to descriptions more... which we should , especially since descriptions are dynamic. As long as people bloody use it. I have never cringed moar then seeing a blank description! arrgh

But when first meeting a PC, and RPing then partying up, seeing 20 hps OR 120hps most times does make a difference how further RP can go (admitting it is entirely different ). But if a description is detailed enough, it can give more "RP" indications of reactions... *shrugs*

have at me

[Adanu]

don't even care if this does not fit here... but can we make it so we cannot know the exact hit points of even party members? Just perhaps a health bar... which would show a PC is half dead or near dead? Knowing the exact hit point total is huge OOC. And while it may be IC to know "almost how much healing" a hurt PC needs... using a CMW instead of a CLW could make the difference and seems more realistic. Oh how this post will be hammered hard eh?

Just maybe a health-progress-bar that also turns "Green" "Yellow" and "Red" and keep the floating cursor information when panning over a PC: "Barely Injured" (yellow), "Injured" (orange), "Near Death" (red).

This would also make it important to pay attention to descriptions more... which we should , especially since descriptions are dynamic. As long as people bloody use it. I have never cringed moar then seeing a blank description! arrgh

But when first meeting a PC, and RPing then partying up, seeing 20 hps OR 120hps most times does make a difference how further RP can go (admitting it is entirely different ). But if a description is detailed enough, it can give more "RP" indications of reactions... *shrugs*

have at me

ROleplaying does not replace stats. Would you be roleplaying Bu as a druid if he were a bard?

[Galadorn]

Of course it doesn't.

But roleplaying is quite often altered based on the OOC knowledge that the stranger you're speaking to has 150 hit points, I garantee you, than if the same PC has only 12. ...and anyone who says they've never done that, I will never believe.

That's what I was talking about, and making the "exact" number of hitpoints a PC has, ...known just by partying up, since they are listed next to the PC image, is what would be good to change I think.

And having a good description (which may or may not, but usually would), which would give "some indications" of age/experience/power(?), to try and gauge the stranger is more fun/realistic.


...What are you talking about?

[Rumple C]

People are rp'd as people.

Not many folks introduce them self as "Tarquin, 5th level fighter".

Possibly "Tarquin the warrior". But that could mean fighter, barbarian, ranger, swashbuckler, cleric of tempus, boasting rogue.

Whatever.

[Galadorn]

Would you be roleplaying Bu as a druid if he were a bard?

Also no idea what this has to do with what I was talking about.

How does a druid "RP as a druid"?

I also don't think a "Druid PC must RP "like a druid"" (at ALL), or every Monk like a Monk, or (especially) in ALFA, every Rogue like a Rogue?... what's that all about? To me that's BAD Role-playing in fact. Do you think PCs must RP their class?

If Bu played a musical instrument, and put skills in it, and was playing it a new PC walked by, should that player automatically assume he's a Bard? he might! But that's not "RPing a Bard".

And if I did that, would you think i'm not RP'ing my PC "correctly"?

eek