So, another set of updates to the ACR, mostly centered around movement:
- Ridable horses, restricted only to warhorses (as we didn't have the people to really invest in untrained mounts in combat). Modules will have to add merchants to deal in them, they will cost 150 gold each.
- Horses behave similarly to ALFA1 horses, in that they may not be targeted while mounted and provide the mounted PC with a walking movement rate of 2.4m/s and a running movement rate of 4.8m/s (default unencumbered PC is 2.0 and 4.0)
- A new feat that all PCs acquire allows them to mount horses. The feat may be used on any horse owned by the PC to climb onto it, and may be used again to dismount.
- A PC may also dismount a horse by removing their cloak (a related restriction to this-- due to the nature of models available, we had to link the appearance of horseback riding to cloaks. Mounting a horse will create a plot-item cloak on your PC, which will copy all properties of the currently-worn cloak if there is one. I am recommending to HDMs to allow exchanges of items that boost charisma, due to the NWN2-level problem of drained spells when swapping spellcasting ability score items on spontaneous spellcasters, to rings).
- A horse may be instructed to follow its owner by speaking to it, provided that owner is in the same area.
- A horse may be instructed to cease to follow its owner by speaking to it again. (anyone can do this, mind, though abusing your abilty to "grab" another PC's horse might be CvC or griefing; such distinctions would belong to the PA if necessary)
- Slain horses are permanently dead. You have to buy another one. Precedent says that stealing or destroying another PC's property is absolutely CvC, and players should be aware.
- Horses spawn when you log in, and despawn when you log out. Error cases fail over to the horse spawning next to you, instead of where you left it. We have some outstanding issues with persistent location which currently results in often waking to an affectionate horse nuzzling its owner awake-- this will hopefully be resolved in time.
- Related, movement rates that are not damaged by movement-altering spells (like haste or expeditious retreat) and are not thwarted by Freedom of Movement are available for use on overland maps. These rates are 0.2m/s (on foot) or 0.4m/s (on horseback).
- Barbarians in heavy armor, or barbarians who are heavily encumbered, do not receive their 0.2-0.4m/s bonus to walk/run speed.
- Legacy clerics with the travel domain no longer receive a 0.2-0.4m/s bonus to walk/run speed. (they, of course, still get the freedom of movement spell-like)
- All non-magical bonuses to base movement rate stack. (magical bonuses still do not)
- Paladins get warhorses at level 5, with stats per the SRD.
- Some bad heads we released in ACR v1.92 base are removed
- Bastard swords may now be used one-handed with the Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Bastard Sword) feat. Dwarven Waraxes may also be used one-handed with their exotic feat. PCs who have not yet replaced their exotic weapon proficiency with a weapon-specific one are still shockingly broken, and should get that replaced.
- Prefacing a request with #dm now sends the text of the statement to a request queue, separate from the sometimes-spammy chat window. Players should only make use of this with the permission of the DM (and something that will probably be more-commonly used in large parties when a DM can't follow all of the conversation and manage the encounters).
Download size is 158.66 MB; if you have any schedules to keep, be sure to account for download times.
As of this post, servers are mid-update, though some might only acquire functional horses once HDMs get their mitts on them, as we haven't really had very hard requirements on the state/availability of the script compiler on the hosts. However, any delays won't prevent you from portaling as it has in previous updates; there should be no risk of data loss when moving between different-versioned servers.
