A Land Far Away

There's a somewhat obscure but critical element to our permadeath experience in ALFA under the current ACR setting. I'm assuming most veteran players know, but from what I've seen in documentation and ingame action, I do not think a lot of newer players are aware of some vital details. I would suggest making the below unquivocally clear in new player documentation and the rules that explain our permadeath policy.

Two things that new players must be aware of regarding death:

1. Bleeding rule and using potions/heal check on a fallen mate to revive. I've seen newer players going into combat with apparently no awareness that they could revive someone in negative HPs. Fortunately I've not had this happen to me, but I'd be a bit irritated if I were a veteran player whose higher lvl pc bit the dust playing meatshield for new guys, and the new guys stood around doing nothing while my pc bled to death (not a good time to type out a detailed set of instructions ooc teaching them how to do this while bleeding).

2. There is no massive dmg death (instant death spells I assume are not effected) currently in alfa. You cannot die instantly from dmg (say a 80 dmg greataxe/scyth crit) if I understand this correctly; there is no fort save required, and the lowest you can drop to is -6 HPs, giving you minimum 3 rounds of chance of survival if you're with companions. This is a very significant factor as far as the permadeath experience; what this effectively means is that the chance of losing your pc is vastly, VASTLY lower if you are in a group vs soloing (barring being in a group with noobs or folks who are handicapped with targetting/using nwn2's interface). We all knew that from alfa1, but with current ACR settings, it's exponentially more so - you could die from a 80 dmg crit in alfa1 even with companions, but that's FAR less likely in alfa2.

New players, especially prospective players who might be fine RPers but are leerly about the thought of losing well thought out PCs, need to have the above drilled into their heads; they need to know that soloing absolutely is the the equivalent of agreeing to play russian roulette, and in contrast that adventuring with a group is exponentially safer even if you hit negative HPs once in a while.

While this is, of course, a brilliant idea, until the AI gets sorted it may a wasted effort. Unless one has a high level PC in the party who can immediately get a massive hit on the monster, thus drawing it off the fallen PC, the monster is going to ignore surrounding PC's and continue to chop up the downed PC until it is in the fugue.

That being said I still have trouble with healing and aid deployment (paticularly in battle), so I applaud the idea and will study the thread myself if it's done. I just thought I should warn everyone who doesn't already know, it's not a good time to get dropped, because the chance of effective aid beiing rendered is extremely unlikely whether partied or not.

The most effective means of aid just now is to work hard to keep PC's out of negative HP's entirely, and this in itself is difficult and could do with a comprehansive explaination. My PC has probably used 10 or more potions on herself in the last several weeks trying to pour them into wounded companions and only last night did HATEFACE tell me what the matter was. One must go into the behaviour tab and turn off some behaviours to prevent this distressing phenomena (and I remain a bit confused as to which {I just turned everything off }).

So I give this a big oversized +1. I only wish I was competent enough to type up a submission on the subject that could be stickied. Do we have a NWN2 mechanics buff who is willing to tackle this?

Where is this still happening? That bug was supposed to have been fixed ages back, but I keep hearing sporadic reports of continued attacking of downed PCs. In my testing (when using the fixed AI), it was extremely rare to see additional attacks hitting a downed PC, usually only when many creatures were attacking at once, and even then usually only one attack (coming in essentially simultaneously with the one that knocked the PC down).

AcadiusLost wrote:Where is this still happening? That bug was supposed to have been fixed ages back, but I keep hearing sporadic reports of continued attacking of downed PCs. In my testing (when using the fixed AI), it was extremely rare to see additional attacks hitting a downed PC, usually only when many creatures were attacking at once, and even then usually only one attack (coming in essentially simultaneously with the one that knocked the PC down).

If this has been fixed, my apologies for tossing in a red herring. It's been well over a month since I've personally lost a PC to it. I did lose three to it in quick succession shortly after it began, and haven't seen a post declaring it fixed since then. Now I work very, very hard trying to keep party members from falling at all, so I can't really confirm or deny that it's still happening.

I'm not sure how to test this, of course, without sacrificing another. Can anyone verify it's been fixed on BG?

I do see that the APM has information regarding death/bleeding etc, including mention of the -6HP feature (kudos Zic). This *should* be enough info to let a new player have some understanding of the situation.

Apparently however, some are either not reading/seeing this info or it hasn't quite registered mentally what it's talking about, based on what I saw recently ig... Perhaps this info can be highlighted via code or a bit of expansive text, etc? Something that lets people know beyond a shadow of doubt what the implications of our death/bleeding features mean, ie solo vs group play, being prepared to help a fallen companion, etc. I'd be happy to submit something if needed.

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Ithildur wrote:I do see that the APM has information regarding death/bleeding etc, including mention of the -6HP feature (kudos Zic). This *should* be enough info to let a new player have some understanding of the situation.

Apparently however, some are either not reading/seeing this info or it hasn't quite registered mentally what it's talking about, based on what I saw recently ig... Perhaps this info can be highlighted via code or a bit of expansive text, etc? Something that lets people know beyond a shadow of doubt what the implications of our death/bleeding features mean, ie solo vs group play, being prepared to help a fallen companion, etc. I'd be happy to submit something if needed.

I'm writing up a new APM at the moment, and plan to have a section all about DYING! If you want to type something up, I'd be over the moon with joy.