KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
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Regalis
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Regalis »

t-ice,

That's your opinion. If you were the DMA or TA, that might give me cause for pause; however, you're just some dude, who's arguing against straw men. I'm pretty sure that, as long as you know how to open the toolset and use google, you could have implemented your preferred solution by now. Instead, you've been telling other people what they should and shouldn't do and I've been doing. Results:

Odds you get your way = ~0.
Odds I get my way >0.

Here is the order of precedence:
People who do things
People elected to make decisions
People who complain on forums
Everyone else

It might not be as bad as you think.

Cheers.
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Regalis
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Regalis »

That may have been a little bit harsh, but the wellspring of constructive ideas tends to dry up quickly when a thread is dominated by repetitive negativity.

To provide some perspective on the things that may be possible:

I don't think it's necessary to assume that people have their healing pots in a convenient position. I haven't fully quality controlled it, but I'd say it's 3:1 that I can extract specifically what items the unconscious player has in their hotbar and prioritize those very items in the results.

That is to say, I've already given this a bit of thought. Things like spellcraft and lore have already been taken care of and were among the first things I thought of. No need to worry about loot tables, as you can check the droppable and pickpocketable flags on the items in an NPC's inventory. As far as not knowing who has taken things, the unconscious character shouldn't know, but I use animations that make it pretty obvious. I will also use a library file with toggles and provide and call empty prototypes for things like AFLA big brother logging. That allows for things like setting whether only party members have access to this functionality. And so forth.

Regarding use cases, I'll grant that the 95% is probably going to be at least 80%+, if mugging is disallowed. There are some hypotheticals that led me to the implementation I chose:

Party of 5 is exploring sewers. Only boyscout has a silver backup weapon. They are jumped by lycanthropes, and boyscout goes down. Oh noes! Unless someone can grab the silver short sword off of boyscout, it won't matter if they can grab his CLW pot.

Now consider similar with trolls and acid/fire wands/arrows. What about a raise dead scroll and/or diamonds?

There are conceivable reasons why players might wish to have access to other items that go beyond griefing. Why cater to the minority? Pascal's Wager--also it's more immersive. ALFA technically allows for many things but then provides further restrictions via copious rules. There is no reason that this functionality couldn't be subject to same, at the discretion of the DMA or individual HDMs. You can use rules as precision weapons rather than carpet bombing at the technical level.

If anyone has any ideas that might make such a feature cooler or more useful, you can either post them now or simply PM them to me.

Concerns will be welcome later on. Generally speaking, it's easier to pare things back, and I'd like the most flexible system possible to put on the vault.

Now can we please focus on :mrgreen: and :chin: rather than :evil: for awhile?
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Zelknolf »

To be fair, that raise dead scroll would be available if it was necessary: corpses do drop all inventory, and a raise dead doesn't happen during a fight anyway (1 hour cast time).


I would also note that Tech has been trying to make things run themselves, rather than implementing special rules for players to abide by -- at least when we can afford the time and effort for it. If such a system would come with a PA restriction about what can be taken / used / seen, I would rather just write that in at the technical level. No disputes come from things that can't happen and no player need worry about remembering a rule that they can't violate.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by t-ice »

I'll just brush aside all the ad hominem and assumed lists on who has the biggest dick on this joint project of ours. Those are not very productive. The point, which I would not think is a surpise to people here, remains:

DnD rules don't do picking up magic items from the battlefield and just firing them away. IDing items is a mini-game of its own, and the spirit of the rules is that what you pick up in this battle/adventure you can use in the next. IDing almost always takes longer than the time available in combat. And you can't use most items without IDing them. Cure potions are the obvious and ubiquitous exception: you can use potions without IDing them, and it makes sense the owner would have clearly labeled and made handy the potions that someone might use to save his life.

On the :chin: side, the utopian design might be something that only gives access to cure potions and equipped weapons from a KO'd PC's inventory? (Perhaps also non-magical items one could assume to be at hand on a PC's belt or such, like acid and alc fire. But going through all items to see which are non-magical could be a biggie?) IDing items can wait until, and if, the PC dies. And make all magical items on a corpse fall back to un-ID'd status when a PC dies, too? Though if the PC is then resurrected, ID flags need correcting. Even with all this, having to sort through several inventory screens while a PC is bleeding is hardly ideal - the PC might be able to act faster than the player can panic-click a rarely used UI. So subverting the "first aid" functionality to use cure potions on the KO'd PC might still be a good addition - even if a UI to access more of the inventory is there. (I don't think I've ever seen first aid used as-is in my time at ALFA.)

I'd be happy to look into conding that in to our first aid scripts, probably isn't hard. But currently my time preference at toolsetting is getting the Amn server up and running.

For reference, here's a WoC article about IDing items, and suggested house rules around it:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/sg/20051125a
Here's a quote from it about the general intent and spirit of such rulings:
characters still can't identify most items in the middle of a battle, but they can do so as soon as the battle is over and then move on
There's a ton of circumstacial things on what an allied PC might know about the gear of a downed PC. But these are a mountain of complexity, and depend on history of the two PCs. If I have a powerful contingency item on my quickbar, I wouldn't necessarily want my party to have access to it if I go KO, as they might then clear the floor with the item, and then loot the enemies and me. Whereas otherwise they'd need to cure me back to the fight to win.

Thinking on the most common use case, consider your PC carrying several types of potions, among them cure and invisibility. And then your PC and mine battling an enemy and yours going KO. If my PC then has access to your inventory, I could either help you with your cure - or drink your invis and run bravely away. But my PC shouldn't know which of your potions is the invis. Whereas it makes perfect sense your PC would have made it amply clear which potion is the cure. And using spellcraft to ID the potions takes 1 minute apiece.

NWN2 doesn't do the ID minigame very well, and corpse inventories subverts it already (Far as I know). As does many loots found on enemies when DMs and scripts don't use the ID flag. So maybe we want to extend that to KOd PCs in the name of simplicity. But it certainly beckons a pause and think. If we follow the KISS philosophy (or the "first, do no harm" one), seems to me like the cure potions only is the obvious route.

Anyways, def going TLDR territory here. If you're coding it, all the power to you. These are suggestions, and that's what brainstorming is about, isn't it. One would presume mullings on what would follow dnd rules, and what is the spirit of the rules if our engine can't follow them exactly or we prefer not to, are relevant too. Even if that unfortunately can sound like anti-cheerleading.

Here's a cheer to counterbalance! :party1: :wtg:
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Regalis »

I agree that much of my posts weren't constructive.

I thought your opinion had enough merit that I decided it should be a possible implementation of my system. My problem isn't really with the idea but how it's being expressed.

Here is where I think we are

Brokenbones think: It would be neat if we added new functionality to the game.

You think: Any such new feature should be consistent with PnP rules.

I think: I need to try to inherit the current practices of ALFA in adding any new feature. When feature threads become rule change threads, they die a tortuous death.

We might agree to disagree there and move on.

The issue I have is that you haven't left your position to stand on its merits. You seem intent on reiterating it until everyone else gives up. It replaces a brainstorm phase, where all ideas are equally good ideas, with a contest to prove who's idea is best or, when people try to play the rules trump card, "right." It goes from collaborative to combative. (Yeah, I know. Do as I say. :P) Brainstorming threads should be about spawning ideas, not crushing them. That's what the standard's team and forum is for! (<3u Veilan, even though your LA now.)

The second problem is: You're not right according to the rules, objectively speaking. At best, you're "more right," subjectively speaking. Understanding where facts end and opinions begin is very important for successful collaboration. When facts are in dispute, bad things happen.

Let's go back to the beginning (of the DMG). They sagely say that the rules are not intended to be followed with blind obedience and that common sense should prevail. Then they provide a caveat that deviating from the rules risks creating impressions of biases, inconsistency, and highhanded outcomes.

Now back to the present, you want to follow the letter of the law, except for healing potions. They should (clearly in your view) be an exception. You give a few quick reasons why.

One of your reasons relates to balance vis-a-vis scrolls and rings. I find this to be the only valid argument in support of your preference, in all of your posts. Unfortunately, it represents like 2% of the text. The funny thing is that issues of balance are of critical importance in video games, making it along the strongest potential lines of argumentation. You could be right about what ALFA should do for this reason, but you're shouting down your own good argument.

The other fundamental argument stems from the "it is reasonable to assume that..." line of argumentation. And this brings us immediately to the warning in the DMG. As soon as you veer from the letter of the law in favor of a personal common sense perspective, everyone else is going to expect to be able to do the same. You're trying to have it both ways, where you get to have your subjective druthers, while fending off other opinions by repeatedly throwing the book (or hyperlink) at them. "I'm just trying to follow the rules!*" The asterisk is kind of a thing. There's an implicit message that your judgment call is OK, but for everyone else it's gotta be semper 3.five b/c the rules come first.

So a few things:

Is the point of how features get added to try to force players into reviving one another when they go down? That would be nice from a meta-gamed perspective (character death can be :cry: ), but it definitely comes at the expense of chaotic and evil roleplaying. It's an appeal to pathos, I guess?

I think this inconsistency is a bigger problem than you give it credit. ALFA is a complex project, done over a long period, that changes hands over time. Haphazard application of rules risks more confusion and documentation issues than uniform unorthodoxy. If you really feel as you say about identification, then perhaps a more correct venue is a new thread targeting the issue project wide. Selective interpretation for selective implementation is meh.

Lastly, I don't think the principal reason potions would be labeled is because adventurers only want their peers to only know how to heal them if they fall. Labeling and symbol use is a prerequisite to systems of account, practical storage, and trade. The idea that everyone performs minute long spellcraft checks on all potions (other than healing potions) at most ever encounter during their normal lifecycle's is a stretch. Standards would spread for the same reasons they did in the real world. Your characters might have scratched them off, with the dagger kept under pillow, out of paranoia about his "friends." (Sounds very Amnish.) Mine would have kept them on or added them so that in that "oh sh!t" moment he quaffed a potion of invisibility rather than alchemist's fire. Neither memorization nor grace on fire were his strong suits. Whereas a dwarf might still belch fireballs and win the day, mine didn't have the constitution to survive that sort of heartburn.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Ithildur »

It replaces a brainstorm phase, where all ideas are equally good ideas, with a contest to prove who's idea is best or, when people try to play the rules trump card, "right." It goes from collaborative to combative. (Yeah, I know. Do as I say. :P) Brainstorming threads should be about spawning ideas, not crushing them. That's what the standard's team and forum is for! (<3u Veilan, even though your LA now.)
+1 on this. The rest I've no strong opinions on; some implementation of these features would be quite nice, but I'm not holding my breath until more urgently broken stuff gets fixed someday.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by t-ice »

Good analysis and agreeable thoughts, regalis. "Just" two notes:

The exception about cure potions is because that's the need on the ground the whole thing stems from, as per OP. Not so arbitary as I read you making it. If other PCs don't have quick access to use cure potions on a KO'd PC, the system misses at least 90% of its point in my opinion. They can wait for the PC to die before looting. (Or even contribute by delivering the killing blow.)

For the general "arbitary deviations from canon rules" part, let's make the assumption that a player doesn't know all the places where our implementation deviates from canon and/or stock nwn2 (I'd be surprised if anyone does). Then it's not so bad if our mechanics suddenly gives a PC an unexpected break. But if our deviations suddenly cause them to die under questionable circumstance, that's quite bad and unfair. Precisely that feeling of unfairness is behind the "all healing is on the KO'd PC" problem given in the OP.

That's why I'm not trying to "force PCs to help each other", but I would prefer to "force PCs to not harm each other (directly or indirectly) in ways that are questionable". And that's why I brought up the case of you using my invis potion or contingency bomb, instead of healing me with my cure potion, if you had access to my full inventory when I am KO'd. It's equally unfair to die because you had access to things you shouldn't have, than it is to die because you didn't have access to things you should. (And yes, I know that "should" always has two parts: personal interpretation of what's reasonable, and cold (dnd) rules. Those flames are what standards is for, I suppose.)
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Zelknolf »

Has anyone asked the PA or an AR about what things in such a system would generate disputes, and which complaints they'd find valid?

Would narrow this discussion pretty quickly, I think.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by t-ice »

Reading the OP again, the core of the "wtf, this shouldn't be?" is the inconsistency between full and fast access to the inventory of a corpse, whereas having no access to the inventory of a KO'd PC. Could be that it's the first that needs fixing: You shouldn't be able to loot a corpse during combat, but due to technical limitations, this is what we have. Still better than NWN2 stock.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Regalis »

t-ice, I apologize for my short fuse.
Zelknolf wrote:Has anyone asked the PA or an AR about what things in such a system would generate disputes, and which complaints they'd find valid?

Would narrow this discussion pretty quickly, I think.
I intend to do that shortly. I wanted to make sure that I could actually do everything I wanted to first.

I have everything nearly put together. I'll be ready for a tester or two by next week.
t-ice wrote:Reading the OP again, the core of the "wtf, this shouldn't be?" is the inconsistency between full and fast access to the inventory of a corpse, whereas having no access to the inventory of a KO'd PC. Could be that it's the first that needs fixing: You shouldn't be able to loot a corpse during combat, but due to technical limitations, this is what we have. Still better than NWN2 stock.
I have attempted to address that by not going with the other suggestions of cloning the full inventory and providing access to that. I don't know if my screenshot is visible to everyone else or not.

Basically what happens is that on the context menu (the right click drop-down) there is a "Search Pack" option. If the target satisfies the prerequisites (1) and no one else is actively rummaging, then it brings up a GUI. The GUI consists of a progress bar, button with the target's name, 6 buttons to filter desired items, and 3x6 inventory grid. The icons are shrunk down from 40x40 to 24x24 so that it doesn't take up terribly much of the screen. (2) Anyway, when the button is clicked it starts a 3 second animation. (3) After which the grid will fill with a certain number of items, reflecting what, per the filters, items the rummager was actually able to put their hands on. It should be noted that the outcome will generally be less than 18 even if there are more than 18 qualifying items in the inventory. (4)

Using a stochastic process like this was, I felt, the happy middle ground between all, instantly or none until death. If someone doesn't find what they're looking for the first time, they can simply rummage around again after a couple seconds. You never get to look at the entire inventory all at once because it IS impractical to imagine they have time to lay it all out.

1. By default being unconscious, but could be extended to things like paralysis effects.

2. I haven't bothered implementing tooltips yet. That will need to be done.

3. This is the default setting and can be adjusted. I realize a round is supposed to be 6 seconds and it generally is for spell durations. I'm less certain it's 6 seconds in terms of frequency of events. Will need to check.

4. The mechanics aren't fully in place because it's a fairly tedious task, but basically each item will be assigned a priority based upon my estimation of how obvious it should be. In other words, dire maces and long bows are very easy to find, whereas scrolls and daggers are not necessarily. There are other considerations, chiefly the relative proportion of certain types of items in the inventory. If the inventory is 300 items, 90% of which are potions, then a search will probably produce 18 potions. If an inventory is 300 items, 3 of which are potions, then it will probably produce 0-1 potions, unless the searcher has epic skill. (Not accounting for things like bias towards hotbarred items/healing potions.)
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Zelknolf »

Regalis wrote:4. The mechanics aren't fully in place because it's a fairly tedious task, but basically each item will be assigned a priority based upon my estimation of how obvious it should be. In other words, dire maces and long bows are very easy to find, whereas scrolls and daggers are not necessarily. There are other considerations, chiefly the relative proportion of certain types of items in the inventory. If the inventory is 300 items, 90% of which are potions, then a search will probably produce 18 potions. If an inventory is 300 items, 3 of which are potions, then it will probably produce 0-1 potions, unless the searcher has epic skill. (Not accounting for things like bias towards hotbarred items/healing potions.)
Perhaps consumables which aren't in containers?

The chances of those being on quickslots (and thus, presumably, in an in-character obvious place) seems pretty high-- and I imagine that if we need to search an unconscious person quickly, ibecause we don't want him/her to die, we want healing potions. If we want phat lewt and to pocket all of their goodies, we probably have a little bit more time to do so-- or the searcher doesn't care if the downed character dies. In either case, they can afford to click (un)filtering buttons to bring everything else up.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by t-ice »

Impressive stuff. :)

I apologise for my words which I think made you feel your efforts at building us all new stuff to play with is unappreciated, regalis.

Passing over from the item ID thing, to keep on storming:

There's reason people keep healing potions on the quickbar... So would you consider a couple-mouse-click shortcut to tell my PC to search your KO'd behind for specifically a healing potion and feed it to you if one is found? If normal rummage takes 3secs, that action should probably take a longer wait, like 6secs. But hopefully the time wouldn't be determined by mad mouseclick skillz. As I read it the healing, what we agree to be the most common action, would now take a lot of clicks through the UIs.

Those of us who are old geezers with clumsy fingers would thank you.

Presumably there are also items a PC would take lot of care not be found on a search. So if putting on a quickbar makes an item easier to find, ideally there'd be a way to make one a harder find, too. (That invis potion would likely be both on the hotbar for quick emergency use, as well as tried to be concealed, for both bonus and penalty.) By the rules hiding a small item on you is a sleight of hand check.

Perhaps a sleight-of-hand dependent penalty on finding anything except healing potions and items too large to SoH (and equipped items?) could do it? As I read it the system already uses search checks, so the opposing checks would then be there, allowing sneaky dudes to utilize their subterfuge skills.

We would be defaulting to everyone with (trained) SoH skill concealing everything they can but heals, but trying to actively flag items is maybe too much complexity for such a rare occasion. (The player going "oh, my PC would totally meant to have concealed that but I forgot to click...")
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by oldgrayrogue »

Regalis how you actually make stuff like this mystifies me =D

I like the idea of "any item you put on your quickbar" will be available to other PCs if you are dropped in combat. You could even do a post on this to the playerbase so they can decide what items to place there or not. One, it's simple to understand. Two, I hope it would be simple to implement. Three, it kind of makes sense. For the most part I would guess players keep things like consumables (potions, scrolls, wands, grenade type items), their main weapons, maybe rings and amulets?, on their quickbar and it is not a stretch to think ICly these items would be easy to find of a downed PC. I know in a recent sojourn to the UD my PC had several party members who were the "Party healers," that he knew had potions and wands of CLW on them, get dropped and he could not access a potion to aid them until they were dead. Potioons are usually on a belt or bandolier? Scrolls in a case? Weapons (except those that might be hidden) readily observable? Just my 2 cents.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Regalis »

It's definitely possible to extract that info. My one reservation is that sometimes altering the default GUIs cause them to flicker or update erratically. This is because OEI only added in functionality for us as an afterthought in 1.06. They hardcoded everything they do into the engine. I didn't observe any issue with the hotbars, but it would need to be checked carefully by multiple people if we went this route.

As an alternative approach, it may be best to create a small gui that allows users to define what X generally non-equipped items are on their belt and what Y (small) items are concealed? These numbers would have to be hardcoded.

X = 6, Y = 3? 5/5?

I think trying to hide too many items would necessarily make them impractical to access and more likely to be discovered.

So this would mean that:

Equipped items and items on the belt would always show up first without consideration of the search roll. Concealed items would only potentially be discovered on the initial search on a critical success. Subsequent searches would provide for a contested SoH check. Each successive search might give a +1 bonus to discovering concealed items?

PS: It should generally take 4 or 5 clicks to apply a healing potion to the target. (The toggle settings are remembered for the session.) That's definitely a part of my choice of 3 seconds over 6. Also, I intend for items not in the inventory (ie equipped or on the belt) to be available immediately without the search delay.

As far as a shortcut, the biggest reservation I have about that--aside from doing a decent amount of work to save only 1 or 2 clicks--is that I would have to choose to have it start with cure critical potions and work down or cure light and work up. I'd rather it be up to the player to decide.
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Re: KO'd, Accessible Inventory?

Post by Zelknolf »

Of note that a few clicks will be meaningful in this situation; keep in mind that the time from hitting the HP floor to death is 18 seconds, and a few of them are going to be spent getting the context menu up in the first place and selecting the offered option, followed (presumably) by pathing to the character. I'll admit that it's an act of desparation to be rummaging through your pal's stuff for healing supplies, but we're really wasting time if it can never be done in time to save a life.


Also, re quickslots: my suggestion wasn't to adjust the GUI to actually get the quickslots. It was to look for consumables which weren't in containers (as ones in containers can't be quickslotted) as a reasonable guess: a fair starting point and default, as it were, because we're most likely to be most interested in this particular class of items. I don't think that actually reading the quickbar would work, given that we'd only have a sure way of knowing what's ready for use if the player uses the secondary quickbars-- otherwise we're trying to carve data out of a grid with constantly-changing contents (which wouldn't be the best representation of what's in character. Hitting '[ 1' isn't terribly difficult, after all.)


Unless we want to try to extract that from the .bic, but that has its own fun bits of problems.
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