A Land Far Away

I know awhile ago Zelk mentioned it's possible but required changes to our code. Just curious if it's doable, would mean the caster level is used in place of a static level on spells cast from the staff.

Thanks

Wow, nice.
Didn't know staffs work like that.
It would mean a major increase or decrease in staff power? (usually increase I guess?)
I'm not sure how would you calculate the price though.
Currently we use CL*SL, so how would this work now?

Anyway, if possible it's awesome. We'll get wizards walking around with staffs more. which is a win.

Possible? Sure.

Allowed? No. Standards defines no special spell cast property for magic staves, and that'd probably be a hard sell to bring to the forum; it's canonical, but the consensus seems to be that primary casters don't need any help here.

When we first talked about this a few years ago Zelk, you said there would need to be a different spell system in place- did that happen then? Also, just curious, is it something that would require a lot of time and effort to do, setting aside for a moment whether we would do?

I'm not sure it's that hard a sell. Propose away. Even just using d20 pricing the value of staves at min CL 8 ends up pretty high, for a limited group of users who could substitute own higher CL to get extra mileage. Though anyone would enjoy jacking up DC of spells with a save... Even lower level wielders.

Price starts at 375*sl*cl but with assumption people may want 2nd or 3rd powers drawing on a charge pool. Remember the CL being 8 minimum keeps cost of entry high. Even a staff with 50 charges of a cantrip (yay 8 hours of Light?) starts at 1500, where a wand of same (ok 1 hour Light) starts at 375.

Regas wrote:When we first talked about this a few years ago Zelk, you said there would need to be a different spell system in place- did that happen then? Also, just curious, is it something that would require a lot of time and effort to do, setting aside for a moment whether we would do?

We would have to do the same thing that we did in ALFA1-- which isn't a small task. It means replacing all of the standard calls for save DC and caster level with wrappers (realistically, we'd also want to replace all of the standard functions for everything spell related while we're at it; doing it piecemeal would be incredibly stupid in the long term), and provide a way to distinguish between magic staves (as created by the Craft Staff feat) from wands which happen to be staff-shaped (which isn't a very big deal compared to the first part). Overall it means modifying every spell script in play, and then going back to clean up things that NWN2 can get away with because they cache the results of these functions (like calling them inside of loops) which we probably don't want to do. Plus the usual test-fix-test-fix-test-fix-test-cursethegods-fix-test-commit dance.

it's canonical, but the consensus seems to be that primary casters don't need any help here.

(Assuming that we're going with canonical staffs/staves which heavily lean towards useage by arcanes vs divines) Pureclass clerics, druids sure, high lvl gishes, perhaps, but pureclass arcanes? The more I examine spells and mechanics in alfa/nwn2 as well as actual gameplay, the more I question the notion that pureclass wizzies/sorcies are OP in ALFA. The spells and mechanics that potentially could make them so are mostly nonfunctional or missing in NWN2.

How many pureclass wizzies/sorcey's do we have around lvl 10+? Zero currently (Marcus probably comes closest and he's not active), and the last one was a lvl 11 that got pwned hard by midlvel spawns. I have to ask these people where they see these OP wizards/sorcey's that they think are problematic. Same with NPCs; admittedly some of it is the way the AI/spell selection/DMs run them, but NPC wizards consistently get pwned in 2 rounds or so (last few sessions with Ronan was a good example, not a single wizard, including one of lvl 9 or higher, survived longer than 2 rounds).

Not even so much from a PC perspective as much as thinking of high lvl NPC mages with iconic magic items... should instill some awe in people's hearts rather than: PCs easily kill npc, examine his staff of Charming and are underwhelmed by the dc 6/11 (11/16 out of combat), 'eh, sell it, the odds of it actually working are astronomically small, no wonder he was so easy to gank'.

Note: examining the list of staffs in the SRD, almost every single one of them would already be nerfed in ALFA regardless of caster lvl/save DC due to most spells being nerfed, nonexistant, or not working.

This is the trouble with filling up pages and pages with prefabricated samples and then burying the actual rule.

Staves as a type of magic item get their own definition, which is likely what ALFA would use to price them if they were allowed:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/cr ... tingStaffs

(indeed, we'd just need to make some corollary to the effect of "These are the conditions under which a spell-casting item can use the caster level, ability scores, and non-metamagic feats of the caster" to adapt that to ALFA's rules. Of course the scope of the project should be kept in mind-- it would be easy to do it poorly, but when a central mechanic like magic is done poorly we're all unhappy)

// edit-- missed the bit about single-classed wizards, of which we've had a few. We're not in terribly outlandish territory to not have them in play right now, giving the pitifully small numbers we're pulling right now. I have to cede the point on sorcerers, though; none have made it to double-digit levels, even by multiclassing.

In my observation only really high level arcane casters (example Maddy) were OP to the difficulty level of ALFA, but all high levels are OP to ALFA - the game world is challenging to mid levels mostly - and some of that may be AI related. Mid level ALFAns regularly own high CR content due to the NWN2 AI.

As for the labor involved, keep in mind DMA/Standards team will not take up consideration of allowing staffs until Tech Admin says they can and will do the work. This workflow is done so as to not create a laundry list of unstaffed projects, as approval by DMA/Standards of something has often been viewed as a pressure to implement that something.

It's a low-risk low-skill high-workload project, with the ability to even delegate out the more-skill/knowledge-required portions (that is, one person could swap out calls and move calls from loops to before loops and one person could write the logic to actually calculate CL and DC within the new calls). I'm unlikely to be jealously guarding fragile code if someone wants to take it up, but wouldn't volunteer to just tackle it solo.

If this is doable and folks want to take it on - great. I'm not pushing for it by any means as I'm not able to offer time or talent (of which I have none) to make it happen. I was really curious if it was A) doable now (answer seems to be yes), and B) easy (answer seems to be not so much).

Thanks for the feedback in any event.