A Land Far Away

Recently it dawned on me that even though my character has a negative Survival skill and no Track feat, most creatures would appear on the radar after a few seconds in an area. Animals, Monstrous Humanoids, the Undead... all are represented by those little brown dots on the map long before they ever become visible or targetable.

Does everyone share this observation? Is it normal? Can it be countered (apart from simply not using the Track button)? Do the monsters have a counter-strategy available to them and if so, why aren't they using it?

It's hard not to use Track as a "monster radar", when that is exactly what it does.

I have a reasonable survival skill and I'm not getting that. On TSM, I couldn't track critters unless they were already in my character's view. On BG I think I can track them slightly outside of my view range. And it's limited to orcs, goblinoids, animals and vermin (not humans or gnolls).

Which reminds me... what I think would be really cool would be if the Track feat let you mouse over the brown dots to tell you what the critters are like you can do with the blue arrows representing your party members. Or at least whether it's a vermin or a monstrous humanoid or whatever.

Oftentimes the engine treats a negative value as a value of 255, only treating as valid the numbers 0-255 so it wraps around. The same sort of thing happens in NWN on weapons that are -1 to hit. They are treated as +255 to hit for purposes of damage reduction, so they cut right through stoneskin and premonition. A certain DM used to drive me nuts with that, frequently having monsters armed with "crude" weapons that in fact nullified our stoneskins.

RP wise you'll just have to ignore all of those little brown dots. If you want them to go away, just invest a single pick in the survival skill to bring it's value to zero next time you level up. This should only affect PC's with a wisdom of 8 or less and no skill picks invested or feats that add to survival skill.

Well that makes sense. I don't like it, but it makes sense. We'll have to tool up a weightless, undroppable +1 Survival item to counter my (and any other PGer with low Wisdom (you know who you are )) "cheating".

Or +2 for those that really went all out min-maxing...

...

Or just don't use tracking mode.

Does anyone know if search mode is equally affected? Traps are a bit more rare than monsters of course, but still...

You can allways turn off the mini map too.

Undead should also never show on tracking, if they're showing, it should be reported as a bug for the server on which it happened, most likely explanation is an improperly set field in the creature blueprint properties (ie: a zombie with zombie appearance, one level of class "Undead", but Race: Dwarf). This sort of thing happens from time to time, and can often go unnoticed until someone's "favored enemy: undead" bonus fails to work, or positive energy attack ends up healing the beastie instead of hurting it (or other undead-focused spell failures, etc).

The "-1 = 255" thing is an interesting phenomenon, and one which I hadn't heard of before. It could certainly explain a lot of strange behaviours in the engine.

AcadiusLost wrote:Undead should also never show on tracking, if they're showing, it should be reported as a bug for the server on which it happened

I'm sure some did, but I can't replicate the situation. I'll keep an eye on it.

The "-1 = 255" thing is an interesting phenomenon, and one which I hadn't heard of before. It could certainly explain a lot of strange behaviours in the engine.

Given the fact that my character spotted traps too, I'm inclined to believe it's a common bug in the engine.