A Land Far Away

Besides the ones raised in the NWN2 Team meeting, there are a few other shortcomings we may want to try to address before Live.

1. Healing potions, useable on others. We had this in NWN1-ALFA, though no one seems to have a good idea how it was managed (Ronan, where are you now?) We could just avoid using default potions entirely, and make everything single-use cast spell items, but I believe those are unstackable, different for weight and speed of casting/drinking (like the old 4-square ALFA healing potions). Note that without this, only healing spellcasters and those with scrolls can revive a stabilized PC from negative hitpoints.

2. Logging off while bleeding / stabilized: Currently, time stops for the logged-off PC while logged off. The Logs register the bleed-logging and track it for the character/GSID so we can see patterns of suspicious behavior, but clearly it represents a potential for exploit, in that one could stay logged off until a metagamed rescuer was right at the bleeding site before logging back in. Unsure whether we'd want to autokill, since particularly when waiting hours while stabilized, a timeout, crash, or other disconnect isn't unusual. We have timestamps to work from, but it might mean rolling a number of successive checks at once to work out the PC's fate.

3. Instakill protection: I've heard from some players joining from other PWs, that the HCR has added a system to help mitigate the one-hit instakill, dropping PCs straight to the morgue without bleeding. An arbitrary HP floor is decided upon, and any damage beyond that (say, -6, or -7) is removed, allowing at least a brief window for fellow PCs to try to heal/stabilize the fallen one. Wouldn't be hard to code, but represents something of a break with canon rules (and what we've used before in NWN1-ALFA). Upside is rewarding working in groups, and avoiding a certain level of frustration with the early-PC death rate.

4. Death/Corpse System: I still get reports of PC corpses appearing after mod resets without inventories, or with inventories, but without the "Body" item that allows the corpse to be moved. In these cases, the bodies fail to decay over time as they should, and become a continual frustration ingame as they return every module reset with no way to move them. I suspect something (the preloading of corpse inventory perhaps?) may be disrupting the iteration through the RestoreCorpsesOnModuleLoad call, but I can't be sure.


5. Long Term Care / Disease / Poison treatment via Heal / First Aid Kits. We didn't have a good way to test if someone was really receiving long term care, so so this currently doesn't do anything.

6. Resting outdoors- we'd planned to tie making camp into the resting system, but having it spawn in an exterior rest trigger around the camping supplies- we've got some of the mechanism in PC tools, but they aren't tied to supplies at all (anyone can make tent and fire), nor are they tied into the resting system.

7. Ability damage healing- Though I'd had it working in a previous version of the resting system, a few other bugfixes I did moved some variable initializations around, and there are some reports that ability damage is not being healed by resting at the 1 point / rest level. This should also probably be considered before Live.

8. Subdual system: We still don't have one of these implemented. Ronan left his initial code in the Sourceforge SVN here: http://alfa-bmf.svn.sourceforge.net/vie ... iew=markup
I'm not anticipating any significant amount of time to test this.

AcadiusLost wrote: 1. Healing potions, useable on others. We had this in NWN1-ALFA, though no one seems to have a good idea how it was managed (Ronan, where are you now?) We could just avoid using default potions entirely, and make everything single-use cast spell items, but I believe those are unstackable, different for weight and speed of casting/drinking (like the old 4-square ALFA healing potions). Note that without this, only healing spellcasters and those with scrolls can revive a stabilized PC from negative hitpoints.

Anything we could have that would allow folks to revive others would be better than what we have. If that means trashing default potions and creating single use spell items, then I think people would live with the unstackability and weight/speed issues to get Live. I can make those items.

AcadiusLost wrote: 2. Logging off while bleeding / stabilized: Currently, time stops for the logged-off PC while logged off. The Logs register the bleed-logging and track it for the character/GSID so we can see patterns of suspicious behavior, but clearly it represents a potential for exploit, in that one could stay logged off until a metagamed rescuer was right at the bleeding site before logging back in. Unsure whether we'd want to autokill, since particularly when waiting hours while stabilized, a timeout, crash, or other disconnect isn't unusual. We have timestamps to work from, but it might mean rolling a number of successive checks at once to work out the PC's fate.

I wouldn't autokill on a log in after a bleeding log out. On this, I'd suggest that we treat it as any other exploit: publish it as an exploit and point out that it will incur a metagaming strike if a pattern of suspicious behaviour is logged.

AcadiusLost wrote: 3. Instakill protection: I've heard from some players joining from other PWs, that the HCR has added a system to help mitigate the one-hit instakill, dropping PCs straight to the morgue without bleeding. An arbitrary HP floor is decided upon, and any damage beyond that (say, -6, or -7) is removed, allowing at least a brief window for fellow PCs to try to heal/stabilize the fallen one. Wouldn't be hard to code, but represents something of a break with canon rules (and what we've used before in NWN1-ALFA). Upside is rewarding working in groups, and avoiding a certain level of frustration with the early-PC death rate.

I would support this wholeheartedly and would set the HP floor at -5, setting them halfway to permadeath and giving half the bleeding period to possible recovery.

AcadiusLost wrote: 4. Death/Corpse System: I still get reports of PC corpses appearing after mod resets without inventories, or with inventories, but without the "Body" item that allows the corpse to be moved. In these cases, the bodies fail to decay over time as they should, and become a continual frustration ingame as they return every module reset with no way to move them. I suspect something (the preloading of corpse inventory perhaps?) may be disrupting the iteration through the RestoreCorpsesOnModuleLoad call, but I can't be sure.

I have no suggestions for this except to keep at it. In the short term, we can deal with player needs by use of logs and DM intervention.

AcadiusLost wrote: 5. Long Term Care / Disease / Poison treatment via Heal / First Aid Kits. We didn't have a good way to test if someone was really receiving long term care, so so this currently doesn't do anything.

The only way I can think of to test long term care is to set up certain waypoints/triggers as "first aid areas" and to check the amount of time the PC remains within it. Having said that, I'd prioritize this as an 'After Live' system.

AcadiusLost wrote: 6. Resting outdoors- we'd planned to tie making camp into the resting system, but having it spawn in an exterior rest trigger around the camping supplies- we've got some of the mechanism in PC tools, but they aren't tied to supplies at all (anyone can make tent and fire), nor are they tied into the resting system.

Is this something Cipher or I could do?

AcadiusLost wrote: 7. Ability damage healing- Though I'd had it working in a previous version of the resting system, a few other bugfixes I did moved some variable initializations around, and there are some reports that ability damage is not being healed by resting at the 1 point / rest level. This should also probably be considered before Live.

I'll let Cipher comment on this one. It seems important to me, too.

AcadiusLost wrote: 8. Subdual system: We still don't have one of these implemented. Ronan left his initial code in the Sourceforge SVN here: http://alfa-bmf.svn.sourceforge.net/vie ... iew=markup
I'm not anticipating any significant amount of time to test this.

Very much an "After Live" system. Cool but not necessary at the moment.

1. Use on others a definite boon.

2. Log flag should do.

3. No particular objections to suggestion (although I guess we may have some issues with natural healing at <0 hps). Death needs to be reasonably possible, after all.

6. Can we except Rangers and Druids from outdoor resting restrictions?

Also, if we add 3 we ought to add Massive Damage Death as well. Bit o' high-end balancing.