Free hand demanded by spellhook?

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Blindhamsterman
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Blindhamsterman »

So, why not allow casting all tanked up, but strip away shield AC for a turn if you did so. Preferably for the 6secs casting itself takes. (You lose your ability to effectively use your shield because you use that hand for materials/focus/somatics.) It's not 100% turn-wise rules, but takes to the right direction (clerics use light shields, not tower shields) without being a horrible tech quaqmire. Hopefully
id be in favour of the above... so long as shield effects from spells are not removed as that'd just be hillariously stupid.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by t-ice »

Blindhamsterman wrote: so long as shield effects from spells are not removed as that'd just be hillariously stupid.
Might prove a challenge for the oddball cases when a shield overlaps with a spell that causes a AC(shield) bonus. But given that this should be figured into the whole Shield spell and physical shield overlap thing, I am hopefully our tech wizard is squarly on this ball. (Is there even any other spell except Shield that gives a AC(shield) bonus?)
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Blindhamsterman »

shield of faith i believe does?
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Ithildur »

Blindhamsterman wrote:shield of faith i believe does?
Shield of faith is Deflection AC, not Shield.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Blindhamsterman »

heh, seems backward, but probably as it's intended to stack with shields i guess.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Zelknolf »

Why are we assuming that the shield is the thing being put away, and not the weapon? Putting a shield away takes longer, restricts mobility more, and is far far more disadvantageous-- mechanically and logically-- than sheathing a sword. Discussing canonical restrictions is fine, sure, but let's not force people to do the stupid things to satisfy them.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Brokenbone »

Huh, gauntlet shield. I skipped most of the armor in there, Mountain Plate AC10 or whatever is WTF turf.

Well, NWN2 weapons (not just due to ALFA) have always been double the price of SRD weapons anyhow, right? SRD longbow 75, NWN/ALFA one, 150, SRD longsword 15, NWN/ALFA, 30, etc.

Guess that more or less covers the cost of a gauntlet-y modification to shield pretty much. In fact that description strongly suggests to me that this is only an issue with Heavy or Tower anyhow (including our goofy, no-concealment percent version of towers), Light hand is just a forearm strap with hand free.

Or you could use your weapon-hand (as I said above and as Zelk points out again), notionally dropping a weapon, drawing a new one, retrieving the old one, whatever. Whether actually asked to punch hotkeys to do this or not.

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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by t-ice »

Zelknolf wrote:Why are we assuming that the shield is the thing being put away, and not the weapon?
I thought because forcing an actual nwn2 engine weapon unequip is full of glitch.

Giving -10 to AB for 12seconds upon casting start, assuming both hands full, might also do, instead of the shield losing AC. (1 turn that the casting takes, plus 2 move actions to sheat and re-draw weapon, so you'd be ready to swing in two turns.) We'd be very generous compared to the rules in that you can still move around and you don't draw an AoO like you should upon sheating.

And "gauntlet shield" pretty much equal the sillyness of 10AC armors, yes. If that's the way we go, I totally want to play abjurant champion. It's just dumbly the best of light and heavy shields put to one. But the difference of 1AC between heavy and light shields isn't much. It's between light and tower where enough PG territory exist.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Zelknolf »

And then we're back to the question I've already answered:
Zelknolf wrote:Eh... if you went attack penalty, you'd penalize the wrong attack-- which would be better than forcing a hot-swap of the equip slot (free swipe n' all), but less than ideal. Unless we can demonstrate some fundamental need for the sort-- rather than a misguided attempt to bring clerics closer to canon (instead of, say, offering to actually help with cleric domains?)-- or a reliable way to blast the extra attacks on the round following a hands-full spellcasting (as it's a move-equivalent to get a weapon back out, and a move-equivalent before to put it away for easy access later-- herego sheathe-cast-draw leaves only a standard action, not a full one).
With the added bit that the AoO is moot: one must take Combat Reflexes to get more than one AoO per round, and sheathe/cast would happen in the same round. I know that ALFA has no implementation for such, and some people would take it if it was possible to implement, but that also means that everyone has spent the feat that would have been combat reflexes on something else.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Ronan »

Zelknolf wrote:Eh... if you went attack penalty, you'd penalize the wrong attack-- which would be better than forcing a hot-swap of the equip slot (free swipe n' all), but less than ideal. Unless we can demonstrate some fundamental need for the sort-- rather than a misguided attempt to bring clerics closer to canon (instead of, say, offering to actually help with cleric domains?)-- or a reliable way to blast the extra attacks on the round following a hands-full spellcasting (as it's a move-equivalent to get a weapon back out, and a move-equivalent before to put it away for easy access later-- herego sheathe-cast-draw leaves only a standard action, not a full one).
So if I understand the SRD correctly, its:
Round 1: Move action: sheath, standard action: cast
Round 2: Move action: draw, standard action: get one attack.

NWN2 already makes casting a full-round action. Then all we'd have to do is make an AB-decreasing effect last from the spellhook through the next round, with an AB-increasing effect timed to only affect the first flurry and offset the decrease. In the case of people with 4+ attacks per round it'd allow two full-bonus attacks on the first flurry instead of one, so not perfect. We can't DelayCommand the applying of those effects because DelayCommands don't seem reliable on that small of a timescale.

I am not trying to suggest this idea is any more important than sane domains, but just that it is probably do-able in some fashion. If people want to get admin approval for a change that tech isn't willing to tackle (yet?), that seems perfectly fine to me. Obviously trying to perfectly duplice SRD rules exactly in this scenario is doomed to failure, as it is in many other things.

We'd definitely keep the shield and lose the weapon, though. Dropping your shield to cast a divine spell is all kinds of dumb.

Giving people a reason to use small shields is kinda cool, IMO. What craziness might come next - a reason to use pole-arms!?
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Zelknolf »

Well, close. Casting a spell takes 3.6-3.8 seconds, with spell impact at about 2.0*-- you're allowed to move in the remaining 2.2-2.4, but can't attack unless you equip a weapon before the round's final flurry resolves.

Swapping your weapon is an exploit, by the way. Don't do that.

In any case, the draw v. sheathe thing, by SRD, can happen while moving. Long Attack penalty + short attack bonus might work; I guess we can experiment with that, though I don't know where the caps on stacking effects for those are. Compatibility with likely buffs (especially low-level stuff like inspire courage or bless) is a concern. 4+ attacks do indeed come up, usually from two weapon fighting or flurry of blows, but meh. We're already in the corner of a corner case for that handling (flurry of blows likely being a non-issue; standard route for monk/caster is Sacred Fist, which demands unarmed combat).

Have we experimented much with the ModifyAttacks effect in NWN2? Or whatever in the world Divine Power uses? We'd have to make sure it doesn't crash or anything when operating outside of its expected parameters, but we used that one to great effect for a True Strike fix in NWN1, and that would be my preferred route for development.

// edit
* This bit will vary by 2da settings-- you specify when the projectile for the spell is generated, in miliseconds. The spell impact script fires immediately if there is none, or when the projectile reaches the spell target object / location otherwise.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Ronan »

For our "oh shit I'm being attacked - I should un-stealth and start running" script I tested OnPhysicalAttacked to work with misses as well as hits. So instead of all this timing nonsense we could just apply the AB decrease after that event has fired.

Finding the number of attacks a PC has in order to use EffectModifyAttacks() to reduce that to 1 would be annoying and not perfect but obviously doable. I haven't tested the function with negative values though.

Again I'm not itching to do it, but it could be cool to see some more kit variety instead of every cleric and druid with a one-hander and large shield.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by t-ice »

Zelknolf wrote: Swapping your weapon is an exploit, by the way. Don't do that.
For what it's worth, I would put higher priority on a script for reasonable swapping, as opposed to this casting hands thing. No player can accurately assess just when swapping is exploiting and when ok, just how long you have to retrict yourself to wait on-engine, doubly so when their PC is in mortal danger. I'd wager most players will just swap to max effect anything NWN2 lets them.
Round 1: Move action: sheath, standard action: cast
Round 2: Move action: draw, standard action: get one attack.

the [sheat] AoO is moot: one must take Combat Reflexes to get more than one AoO per round, and sheathe/cast would happen in the same round
Yes, but anyone presuming to cast in melee would very likely be prepared to use defensive casting, anyway. That casting AoO could disrupt your spell, which the sheat AoO does not. So the sheat/cast cycle does suck in an AoO that you would almost surely not get when using a light shield.

Representing the caster's extra vulnerability during sheat/cast, that is taking AoOs in SRD rules, by lowering shield AC in NWN2 doesn't sound all that unreasonable, does it? If in frontline combat, you suck in AoO from every enemy around you, versus your AC being lowered against all attacks for a round. Assuming you have friends around you, your dropped AC doesn't matter if enemies are attacking those friends (that you, for example, want to heal). But that AoO would jeopardize the healing cleric. Healing is the most common use case for cast in combat, anyway.

Of course there are cases where you'd be better off keeping your shield AC and taking the AoO, but there are also cases on the opposite. I would think I'd prefer losing the AC over taking AoOs in a tough fight, whereas in fighting lesser mooks I'd probably prefer the AoOs, since mooks would likely miss my tanked AC anyway. Bottom line is I don't think we'd be screwing clerics over compared to SRD by lowering their shield AC when they cast fully tanked up.

One consequence of losing shield AC, as opposed to taking AoOs, is that defensive casting becomes even more important when casting in melee. Due to increased chances for spell failure if AC is lowered during casting. Considering this makes the abuse of Combat Expertise while casting less attractive (Def Cast and CE are mutually exclusive), it would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Anyways, vulnerability of the caster when in melee with a shield heavier than light is the main point I think. However it's addressed. Simply penalizing the caster's attacks the next turn is rather poor substitute, I'd say, even though that does happen as secondary effect by the rules.
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by Zelknolf »

It is, in fact, quite unreasonable-- being that a cleric's shield bonus is going to be 2 + CL/4, removing it will increase the success of incoming attacks by as much as eight times (in the context that, unlike pen and paper, standard attacks can disrupt spells in NWN2).
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Re: Free hand demanded by spellhook?

Post by t-ice »

Zelknolf wrote:being that a cleric's shield bonus is going to be 2 + CL/4
Magic vestment on a shield is certainly the worse case on the other side. I've never seen a cleric buffed with double magic vestment (for armor and shield both), and that was in Exodus that was even lower in magic tanking gear than ALFA is (and thus better for magic vestments). Besides, the cleric can still swap the weapon away in NWN2 before cast, and risk AoOs.

Just as well the AoOs would murder a cleric who rushes in to heal his tanking friend who is fighting some hard hitters. Whereas losing shield AC will hurt the cleric zero. Divided by zero times better to lose shield AC than AoO.

As use case, the latter is certainly much much more usual than the former magic vestment.

But if there's a better way to make towershielded clerics vulnerable while casting, then certainly. Penalizing attacks for a turn instead is rather pointless.

Guess we're running around in circles, poking for jabs rather than being creative... Probably time to stop this "brainstorm".
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