The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

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Ronan
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The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Ronan »

Problem:
Tech rezes suck and eat up DM time, in and out of session.

What:
A system designed to keep PCs from being brought from positive hit-points to below -10 in a single blow, allowing others time to heal the PC. It is complimented by a system stopping mobs from targeting dying PCs. The result is that most PCs hit for enough damage to drop below -9 are instead set at -6, with any mobs that were attacking them switching targets (or going idle if there are no more targets).

When it fails:
1) When multiple attack rolls occur before damage is applied. Causes of this can be Furry of Blows, Two Weapon Fighting, and multiple creatures firing spells and/or missile weapons.

2) When a single attack applies multiple damage effects. Examples include Ice Storm and Flamestrike.

3) When a PC is knocked out, healed, then taken below -9 within a round of his healing.
I'm not 100% sure of this one since I found it in a brief code review.
See: https://github.com/ALandFarAway/ALFA-Ba ... i.NSS#L317
And: https://github.com/ALandFarAway/ALFA-Ba ... .NSS#L1368

4) ??

The bad:
If the system worked 'perfectly', we'd have very few PC deaths as long as a healer was standing by. Even huge amounts of damage could not kill a PC outright. This effect can make PCs much braver than they should be.

The ugly:
Failure mode #3 promotes stabilization over healing when there aren't AoOs flying about. If the PC pops up again its possible they'll be immediately killed, while a stabilized PC will not be attacked.

Request:
Admin either approve a change to the script, or provide some ruling about what sort of failure of this system is considered grounds for a tech rez, and what is not. I'd like any ruling to be implementable without undo effort - I don't think there's a reason to do anything complex.

Recommendation:
A simple solution would be to make the -6 floor work once every IC day (meaning its 'use' is recovered when the PC rests). It could also be made to work again after X seconds have passed. The floor could absorb all damage done within Y seconds of the first hit that might have killed the PC.

There are likely more elegant solutions but I am really tired and can't think of them at the moment.
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Basilica
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Basilica »

I don't really like the once per IC day thing. Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me in terms of why we would do it like that (appears rather arbitrary) and just provides extra impetus to abandon a session.

I don't think I have really seen a situation where someone is being kept alive by being constantly healed from death over and over other than a scenario that's a fluke. It seems that if that is really happening, you're about to get hosed when you run out of heals (and you're probably not doing any damage while continually either healing or being damaged to death). So I am not sure what the real concern here originates from.

Let's investigate how difficult it is to identify the scenario that caused this from the script-side code.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Zelknolf »

The bad:
If the system worked 'perfectly', we'd have very few PC deaths as long as a healer was standing by. Even huge amounts of damage could not kill a PC outright. This effect can make PCs much braver than they should be.
I know you're going to beat me with a shoe for saying this but: that's not a bug; that's a feature. As I understand it, the precise goal of the system was to make PC deaths infrequent, as we ran into some significant problems in ALFA1 wherein servers were either boring and empty or meat grinders (because of the difficulties of CR in a peristent world setting). We seemed to get amiable responses to a "Make it hard to die when you're part of a party, but just as easy to die when you're soloing" sort of policy, and so that's where we are.

I would think that if we wanted to fix the three points of failure, we'd make the act of dropping from "standing" to "down" result in a flurry (that is, your Y would be 2 seconds) of being unkillable, to account for generic battle-related chaos, which produces things that don't settle well with people (kills from TWF), things that are actually bugs (kills from ice storm), and things that are pretty ambiguous, but have prompted tech rezzes in the past (kills from magic missile), and then hook from the healing event in our spells include to flag a healed PC brought to 1 more more hit points as "standing" again: provided that #3 still happens. We should probably test that.

If we do want to pursue making the damage cap only "kick in" infrequently, I would rather that the notion have support from the community at large. It's one of our major house rules here, and not a change I would take lightly. However, I would note that the proposed solution only really fixes #3.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by t-ice »

I've never seen a death by #1, but several confusions have been caused by #2 and #3. Particularly because players feel entitled to not die without friends having a chance to heal, which this system provides flawlessly against big-hitting melee types, like say giants. It justifyably feels glidgy how the negative hp system works in relation to spells. And #3 is just a bug, the PC getting killed by a healing spell. Furthermore the system makes things like giants much less dangerous than they should, compared to spellcasting enemies of supposedly similar threat.

In my opinion, a system where a PC is invulnerable when out cold would be a welcome clarification to the system. (Whether it should apply to area effects, like a fireball, I'm ambivalent, but it should apply to all targeted effects like it does to melee attacks.) To not make dying trivial to avoid then, perhaps we should decrease the time from dying in 4 turns (floor at -6) to dying in 3 (floor at -7) turns?

To avoid the rather silly "near-death-and-back-to-full-going-again bouncy ball", I would suggest a penalty effect for getting floored. One that lasts until next rest. Call it shock or something. Like, say, -2 to all attributes, cumulatively increasing if you get floored over and over. This should also lead to some good RP that PCs aren't invulnerable, but they don't have to die to prove it. They can't shrug off near mortal wounds and keep on going whack-a-mole long as there's a cleric with a mountain of CLW scrolls in the party. "Too hard for me, I barely managed to retreat with my life" is often a better story than do or die.
(Note that DMs can always circumvent the penalty if desired by allowing PCs ICly to rest, giving a forced rest)
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Ronan »

Basilica wrote:I don't think I have really seen a situation where someone is being kept alive by being constantly healed from death over and over other than a scenario that's a fluke. It seems that if that is really happening, you're about to get hosed when you run out of heals (and you're probably not doing any damage while continually either healing or being damaged to death). So I am not sure what the real concern here originates from.
I've seen it reasonably often. Piggy's Spirit Shaman was extremely good at keeping PCs alive with lesser vigors to catch them after hitting the soft cap (although he was also using CE with spellcasting and a tower shield, casting in CE is now ruled an exploit). At one point I think I had every PC in his party KO'd twice in a single fight. It was amusing, but silly.

It also happens fairly often with Elenaril when he gets dispelled. I'd say mobs play wack-a-mole with him every other viigas session, roughly. Its also happened to my PC at least three times, but Elenaril is by far the worst.

It also happened tonight with JLM.
Zelknolf wrote:I know you're going to beat me with a shoe for saying this but: that's not a bug; that's a feature. As I understand it, the precise goal of the system was to make PC deaths infrequent...
Oh, no arguments the system is good. It reduces deaths from random rolls, without helping a party that bites off more than it can chew too much, or soloers (like me). Thats great, given ALFA's advancement rate.

The question is: how much more infrequent do we want to make PC deaths? Currently, the answer is: whatever the script allows, plus whatever that particular (H)DM considers tech-rez worthy. I'd rather have a real standard. Today we a PC die to #3, and I had to tell the DM "well it was caused by a bug in the system as it was designed; I don't know if its still considered a bug or not because we allow lots of stuff past the floor".

FWIW I don't agree that kills from Ice Storm are any more buggy than TWF or FoB. Sure they're from two attacks, but the engine just decides to carry them out at the same time for some reason (as opposed to just multiple attacks per round, where the pause allows the OnDying script to make the creature re-target in between swings).

Note that mobs with multiple attacks per round don't generally bypass the floor because the OnDying event actively makes them switch targets mid-round.

DMs and builders will, over time, adjust difficulty to fit the ACR. Give players more power and they'll increase their challenges. We probably don't want to drastically alter mob lethality though, because this transition takes time, and I don't think its wrong how we have it now. But if we make the damage floor work against all the things it doesn't now, we will decrease lethality over all, and that is something admin should consider when ruling how the floor system should work.
Zelknolf wrote:However, I would note that the proposed solution only really fixes #3.
Yeah, I didn't word that well (I meant both would function up to Y seconds at a time after a KO), though the second option I think is better regardless. In any case I'm not proposing any real change without admin's approval (Curm asked me to post in here, so I did, he can of course move it wherever he wants). However I also don't think we can fix the 'bugs' without knowing what the 'bugs' are. Deaths by FoB or TWF seem just as 'buggy' to me as a mob who continues to attack after a PC is downed (which doesn't happen, its just an example).
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Ronan »

t-ice wrote:In my opinion, a system where a PC is invulnerable when out cold would be a welcome clarification to the system. (Whether it should apply to area effects, like a fireball, I'm ambivalent, but it should apply to all targeted effects like it does to melee attacks.) To not make dying trivial to avoid then, perhaps we should decrease the time from dying in 4 turns (floor at -6) to dying in 3 (floor at -7) turns?

To avoid the rather silly "near-death-and-back-to-full-going-again bouncy ball", I would suggest a penalty effect for getting floored. One that lasts until next rest. Call it shock or something. Like, say, -2 to all attributes, cumulatively increasing if you get floored over and over. This should also lead to some good RP that PCs aren't invulnerable, but they don't have to die to prove it. They can't shrug off near mortal wounds and keep on going whack-a-mole long as there's a cleric with a mountain of CLW scrolls in the party. "Too hard for me, I barely managed to retreat with my life" is often a better story than do or die.
(Note that DMs can always circumvent the penalty if desired by allowing PCs ICly to rest, giving a forced rest)
I likes these ideas. We can also effectively increase the number of negative hitpoints a character can have. Its hard-coded at -10 = death, but we could 'stretch' that out to whatever we wanted (say, some function of the PC's hitpoints).

Anyhow, are there any canon-y variant rules on this?
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by I-KP »

t-ice wrote:To avoid the rather silly "near-death-and-back-to-full-going-again bouncy ball", I would suggest a penalty effect for getting floored. One that lasts until next rest. Call it shock or something. Like, say, -2 to all attributes, cumulatively increasing if you get floored over and over. This should also lead to some good RP that PCs aren't invulnerable, but they don't have to die to prove it. They can't shrug off near mortal wounds and keep on going whack-a-mole long as there's a cleric with a mountain of CLW scrolls in the party. "Too hard for me, I barely managed to retreat with my life" is often a better story than do or die.
(Note that DMs can always circumvent the penalty if desired by allowing PCs ICly to rest, giving a forced rest)
I like the sound of this part, but not reducing the floor - not all players are skilled NWN2 interface ninjas. Be aware that a flat -2 trait penalty will affect low Strength characters more severely (encumbrance - inability to run without fumbling in the inventory to dump gear). If the ability to 'get away' after being picked up is to be roughly equal among all character types whilst still enforcing a serious reduction in capacity to carry on, then perhaps just a cumulative CON penalty would be more sensible.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by rorax »

Question :


As most of the people around like sticking to table top rules as close as possible, why not not just die when you suppose to to die? like from massive damage or death spells to their kinds? what is the history of the -6 and not die straight rule?
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by hollyfant »

Hollyfant's post is an interesting and complex enough scenario that it likely needs its own handling. This isn't a moderation-- just a branching.

The new post can be found here:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/forums/view ... 68&t=46936

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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Zelknolf »

Ronan wrote:I likes these ideas. We can also effectively increase the number of negative hitpoints a character can have. Its hard-coded at -10 = death, but we could 'stretch' that out to whatever we wanted (say, some function of the PC's hitpoints).

Anyhow, are there any canon-y variant rules on this?
When I had to design around this quandry from scratch, my rule was: Whenever you would have, ICly, died, you have a X% of actually going to the morgue. If you do not, you get a negative level (and negative levels were on pen and paper rules: negative level goes on with no save, and if you don't get it treated it requires a save to come off. Successful save equals healing with no troubles; unsuccessful save equals real XP loss. And, of course, if you run out of HD you're dead.) However, restoration is also an expensive spell canonically, so there was a real financial burden to getting floored all the time, and it's nowhere near the sorts of costs you expect to shoulder for a raise dead and lower rates of crushing experience loss (see also, slow advancement rate). This system also used a workaround effect to create Death Ward, so as to prevent the spell from protecting against poison or such, so getting it exact would be a significant upgrade. Perhaps a thought to add to the pile, that.

As most of the people around like sticking to table top rules as close as possible, why not not just die when you suppose to to die? like from massive damage or death spells to their kinds? what is the history of the -6 and not die straight rule?
The ruling comes from the early days of NWN2. The original design specification was as you suggest: -10 hit points means dead, but there was sufficient pressure to deviate from pen and paper that we changed it. I'm having trouble finding the thread where it was discussed; I recall it being a lengthy discussion and originally intended to be about the need for challenge to have fun vs. the incredibly slow recovery from freak occurrences of misfortune, but that isn't helping my search any.

It should be noted that the original specification was posted about a year before we released ACR v0.01, and there is a brief discussion around then which references a pruned thread, so it may be lost to the sands of time. At the time, I was still working on ALFA1, so I wasn't terribly close to that project: Acadius is, I think, the only one we have who was part of that and continues to play here.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by HEEGZ »

rorax wrote:As most of the people around like sticking to table top rules as close as possible, why not not just die when you suppose to to die? like from massive damage or death spells to their kinds? what is the history of the -6 and not die straight rule?
I'm with rorax here. I don't have an issue with the -6 floor, I like it. I would prefer to leave everything as-is, with the enforcement clarification Ronan is seeking. My preference:

Even if the -6 floor does not kick in, as we would like it to, the death stands as valid. I had to deal with these as an HDM a couple of times and I would really like it if we did not treat the feature as a bug when it doesn't work. My preference always had been, and still is, that we not give tech rezzes if the -6 floor does not kick in as designed.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by maxcell »

+1
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Basilica »

Ronan wrote:I've seen it reasonably often. Piggy's Spirit Shaman was extremely good at keeping PCs alive with lesser vigors to catch them after hitting the soft cap (although he was also using CE with spellcasting and a tower shield, casting in CE is now ruled an exploit). At one point I think I had every PC in his party KO'd twice in a single fight. It was amusing, but silly.

It also happens fairly often with Elenaril when he gets dispelled. I'd say mobs play wack-a-mole with him every other viigas session, roughly. Its also happened to my PC at least three times, but Elenaril is by far the worst.

It also happened tonight with JLM.
So there were rounds and rounds of combat in a row which were only winnable because someone was being continually healed from -6? Or just that someone got lucky and didn't get wiped out?

I can't imagine many people would be too comfortable continually risking their characters dipping into -6 land to 'tank' that way. That leaves me a little bit skeptical as to whether this is really happening in the wild in an outright abusive way.
Ronan wrote:[...] DMs and builders will, over time, adjust difficulty to fit the ACR. Give players more power and they'll increase their challenges. We probably don't want to drastically alter mob lethality though, because this transition takes time, and I don't think its wrong how we have it now. But if we make the damage floor work against all the things it doesn't now, we will decrease lethality over all, and that is something admin should consider when ruling how the floor system should work.
And changing how this works to once per day would be a major shift impacting all play across ALFA. Let's not pull the trigger on this without a pretty ironclad reason as to why that should be done. I just don't see that right now.
Ronan wrote:[...] However I also don't think we can fix the 'bugs' without knowing what the 'bugs' are. Deaths by FoB or TWF seem just as 'buggy' to me as a mob who continues to attack after a PC is downed (which doesn't happen, its just an example).
I'm reasonably confident that we can resolve the issues if we spend the time to investigate a comprehensive approach here.
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Ronan »

Basilica wrote:So there were rounds and rounds of combat in a row which were only winnable because someone was being continually healed from -6? Or just that someone got lucky and didn't get wiped out?
Sometimes yes to the first question (a definite yes in the case of piggy's PC), although mostly those combats were made much easier (fewer potions expended, etc) by the downed PC coming back up to fight again. In some cases the fights were not even winnable without the floor, due to both the number and frequency of PCs popping back up from the negatives.

If the tank goes down, you want him back up and fighting ASAP, because everyone else is generally going to take more damage from mobs. Having the floor reduce a 30hp hit to 20hp is a net gain too, at least in terms of evaded damage (though it might lose you more in other areas, obviously).
Basilica wrote:I can't imagine many people would be too comfortable continually risking their characters dipping into -6 land to 'tank' that way. That leaves me a little bit skeptical as to whether this is really happening in the wild in an outright abusive way.
Again the risk depends on the types of attacks used. Against some mobs and with decent party-mates, its very low. With our viigas party against direct-damaging mobs the risk of Elenaril bleeding out is zero unless there is lag or a very restrictive walkmesh. So there's no risk to playing whack-a-mole in some circumstances.

Of course, the cap mostly makes repeated encounters much easier, because an otherwise-dead PC is able to fight again.
Basilica wrote:And changing how this works to once per day would be a major shift impacting all play across ALFA. Let's not pull the trigger on this without a pretty ironclad reason as to why that should be done. I just don't see that right now.
It was just an off-the-cuff suggestion; I was playing while posting. We've plenty of others. Whatever we do should probably continue to work with instant-death spells.
Basilica wrote:I'm reasonably confident that we can resolve the issues if we spend the time to investigate a comprehensive approach here.
Yeah, but its something admin has to rule on.

I'm pretty sure we're all in agreement that we want a system which reduces deaths from very-random circumstances (high damage crits, insta-death spells, all mobs aggroing on a single poor sap, etc.) and promotes partying while not affecting the party's ability to defeat a single encounter? And hopefully not affect their ability to defeat multiple encounters too much?
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Re: The -6 floor: Desired behavior & tech rezes.

Post by Brokenbone »

This -6 business, I know my PC's been saved by it many times... but I do sometimes wonder if it's a little bit too much of a cushion.

Maybe if people are treating any combination of bad luck, tactics, timing, etc. as violating their "RIGHT" to that extra couple rounds for healing / stabilization, we're ending up in a bad place.

It makes death magic into KO-magic as well which is a little odd. Bodak "bleedout gaze"? Cleric 5 spell "inconvenience living"? Oh well.

If the thing was just advertised as "often... it will arrest at -6", but "in some battles with a lot of magic blowing off at the same time or dual wielders or whatever, getting pushed to full death will happen before the very generous "losing interest" stuff kicks in." Losing interest is OOC for plenty of beasts anyhow right? Hungry monster or intelligent monster knocks out a guy who is either tasty looking or wealthy looking, why would they just stand around like idiots and not eat / kill for loots? Folks get lucky, merciful treatment plenty of the time, but sometimes you do end up having the chips fall where they may.

Still, maybe some adjustments to the taste of decision makers will come in, whatever. More "nice and merciful" stuff could come hand in hand with some home-grown temporary penalties. This -6 arrest thing is completely house-rule, so having something like "oh, you're fatigued til next rest" or "you're shaken til next rest" or whatever, could be a fair thing to consider slapping on, whether 100% of the time, 20% of the time, % of the time based on CON or something, don't know. Some mild inconvenience might prevent what I'm gathering are pretty out there yo-yo type situations where a whole party of surprisingly regenerate-y guys keep bouncing back to make their objectives. Could mean "lucky to have escaped with lives, it is time to withdraw to somewhere safe and lick our wounds."
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