Changing the -6 Safety Net

[Ronan]

If memory serves, Pu'Q was still well within a single axe crit at Wiz9, thus I played him as the wussy mage he was.

Pu'Q was a statistical anomaly; I don't know any other way to describe him (and really, 30 hp is probably an overstatement!). If he was your idea of a wuss then I would like to see you play a brave man! I will follow behind and collect my 300gp worth of loot.

As you state the system is primarily needed for low-levels, though I find death magic highly lame at all levels. Getting started with a new PC was really hard in NWN1, because you played tag-along on higher-level adventures where everything could splatter you with a sneeze. I lost a few level 1s following Aszune around; it kind of sucked. D&D's absurd differences in PC power level are at the core of a lot of our problems.

We aren't just talking about removing the safety floor for highbies; there are a multitude of options on the table. I'm currently in favor of ability score damage. Seems easy and non-controversial (grievous injury is grievous! gasp).

[Fionn]

More importantly than this whole thread, nice to see you back, get in game

Glad to see somebody's paying attention to the important stuff I slew the enormous bunneh already. I'm pretty sure I once terrified Magile with that euphemism...

W00t - Hey Ronan! yea, the idea of handicap parking for all the PC10 makes a great poster, but I'm rather a fan of high fantasy. Also, that's a slightly cheaper tax on high levels with Restoration IIRC. A non-curable ailment that recovers 1 stat point per week might be workable. I'd still rather find data to show there's a problem before we fix it

[Wild Wombat]

I lost a few level 1s following Aszune around; it kind of sucked.

Somewhere Croaker is laughing his ass off. Azune followed him around like a puppy dog for freaking months. It was a running joke on NWN1 Silvy and Waterdeep.

(Sorry, huge hijack, but that statement just made me laugh my ass off at differences in perspective.)

[Ronan]

W00t - Hey Ronan! yea, the idea of handicap parking for all the PC10 makes a great poster, but I'm rather a fan of high fantasy. Also, that's a slightly cheaper tax on high levels with Restoration IIRC. A non-curable ailment that recovers 1 stat point per week might be workable. I'd still rather find data to show there's a problem before we fix it

I'm not sure what you mean by 'handicap parking' in this context. I would love it if a PC10 wasn't capable of splattering ~32 newbies, but that ship sailed before NWN was even made.

Anyway I added logging to the floor a while (year?) ago for this reason. I know in my games it can be a problem, and evidently in Rumple's. This does not mean it is so in everyone's, though adding a cost associated with 'using' the cap is naturally going to more effect games where multiple uses of it are more common (which is where we have issue with it). Really I think the bigger deal is having the system make some IC sense and promote the sort of RP we want.

Agreed with the Restoration Tax. Stat damage roughly per 3.5 is just already implemented and so is easy. Week-long recovery stuff is not in the code.

Edit: Pu'Q retired at 10? I'm not sure if you quit playing before I did. Last we met IC we were in a dungeon crawl in DD. You had to run so Pu'Q teleported away.

[vergin_sacrifice]

ALFA doesn't need to remove the -6 safety net - that invention was one of ALFA's best. It encourages and rewards group play. Please don't remove it.

M.

This.

+1 from me and alzzz m'peeps.

I think alfa is plenty deadly. Trust me when I say, I FEERZ.. i do I do. Don't need to lose the cap. Because frankly, without that cap, there is no way for people to react in combat except to piss themselves and run. And investment of self into the characters might become as throwaways. I like people to play like it matters, not as crash test dummies.

[Fionn]

Handicap - as in the 18 deaths by level 10 results in 18 points of permanent damage. While very IC, it results in retirement homes full of cranky old adventurers. Next, we'll move on to the fashion sense that results from wearing artifacts from 8 different centuries.

I don't remember making 10th, but maybe I did. I was the worst deer-hunter ever

[Zelknolf]

I dunno. In Forgotten Realms, spells like Heal, Regeneration, Greater Restoration, and Miracle exist. I'm not sure that the world has a concept of "permanent injury" -- only "injury I can't afford to have fixed."

[orangetree]

I dunno. In Forgotten Realms, spells like Heal, Regeneration, Greater Restoration, and Miracle exist. I'm not sure that the world has a concept of "permanent injury" -- only "injury I can't afford to have fixed."

Well, they might have been cursed by the gods too.

But yes, this has been a great mystery to me as well...

[Ronan]

VS, that ain't even on the table.

I realized an example might help people understand where the haters are coming from:

I log in, and see EV adventuring around. I'd recently added Riot's campaign blueprints and updated some of my vampire blueprints. EV are some undead-haters, so I thought I'd use them. They'd also pissed off a mad lich in the past, so I figured I'd have him send some minions after them. Six of the new curst (never-minding the requirements to create them per canon), and one vampire leader. The curst were a bunch of adventurers who'd been killed by the lich, remade as undead, and tasked to find EV. They were (wrongly) told that only their creator can free them from their undeath, and he'd only do so after they'd located EV.

The challenge was pretty simple: The entire force was far too much for EV to handle. They needed to convince the curst to help them against the vampire if they hoped to win. The vampire model chosen was a cleric/tank without a high DPS, so they'd have plenty of time to flee if it came to that. Of course I didn't know if they would flee or not, and I didn't know how EV would feel about teaming up with undead (didn't seem like they had an issue with; I suppose they're not the type to hate unwilling undead).

EV hears some rumors of not-quite-living people snooping around for them. Mikhail rolls a 20 on Know: Religion and believes the snoopers are possibly curst. He prepares some Remove Curse spells and heads off in the direction the curst were last spotted.

Some time later, some curst are found, though without their vampire leader. Words are exchanged, diplo rolls are made, the vampire master is mentioned, and EV convinces the curst they can free them. Mikhail demonstrates with a good caster level roll and destroys a curst. The others are eager to follow, and Mikhail is too eager to oblige. It isn't until only one is left that he says wait, we need to destroy the vampire to free the rest of my comrades. EV agrees and enters the cave the vampire is sleeping in.

Vamp is there with the three remaining curst. A brief battle of words ensues, in which Mikhail (finally) rolls poorly. One curst turns againts his master, so its two curst plus EV vs. the vampire and two curst. Since the vampire was tooled by me, its a complete PGing jerk and hides behind massive AC and regeneration, wearing EV down over time. It isn't until Bevan tosses Matti his undead-killing (but not usable by him) sword and Deva continually blasts it with a wand (roughly negating the regeneration) that the thing is defeated (with two wand-charges remaining). They follow its mist back to its coffin and destroy it, then loot it.

This all sounds great, but the vampire was MASSIVELY overpowering to the party, and it had to be so in order to take the -6 floor into account. The vamp essentially played wack-a-mole with them for a many minutes. The fight might've even been longer than SE's battle against redjool (which lasted the entire duration of a polymorph self spell at CL 10 or so), and so was the longest or second-longest battle I've experienced in NWN2. Anyway, as a direct-damage-dealer, there was no other way to put the party in a threatening combat. Either you KO them multiple times or there's no real danger. I find it pretty silly.

And so it goes with direct-damage bosses; this is just one example of many. Its really frustrating to make a dangerous boss fight with the floor as-is. If using the floor carried a penalty I could really dial the CR back (closer to sanity) on these sorts of encounters. With a balanced party like EV I could make better combats if the floor didn't exist at all, but of course this would create big problems for many other mixed-level parties.

[Adanu]

Is it possible to code it so DMs can toggle the safety on and off themselves when the situation requires?

[Zelknolf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness

[Ronan]

Yes Adanu, though it would be difficult, and I don't think its a good idea to change core mechanics on players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness

An example is by definition an anecdote, yes. Its intention was to illustrate some of the effects of disallowing direct-damage from causing PC death when healers are present. I'm sorry that all we have here is anecdote and a priori reasoning, but we don't have anywhere near the detail in our logs (or schema) to mine out the different sorts of encounters, and round-by-round logs of what happens in combat. Nor do I keep a journal of all such fights to be able to describe them all.

I really don't think its all that complicated. The -6 floor is a nerf to direct-damage mobs, especially ones which only concentrate on one PC at a time (which generally means smaller groups of mobs or single 'bosses'). To compensate for this, some DMs make these mobs more powerful than they'd otherwise be. These DMs wish they didn't have to do this so much, partially because we think it leads to silly combat mechanics.

Edit: Perhaps a better approach to gathering meaningful data would be to interview DMs and find out how they believe the floor impacts their ELs. If they don't bump PCs up against the floor then of course the proposed change would have no effect.

[Zelknolf]

My point, however, is that your anecdotes are already in the statistics we're taking. The data shows this to be a much less severe problem than you portray it to be, but your answers continue to be suggesting policy by generalization of vivid (and rare) anecdote. If we wanted to write policies based on stories, we should also have the (vastly-more-common) stories of people who hit the floor and die anyway, the people who only hit the floor once ever, people who never hit the floor-- and the presentation of those stories should be in proportion to their frequency of occurence.

[Ronan]

The proposed policy only affects a specific case: when a PC is floored, healed, and gets up to continue fighting/adventuring. It doesn't affect anyone who hits the floor and dies, anyone who never hits the floor at all, or anyone who is healed from the floor after the session's challenges have been overcome*. Including those datas, no matter how common, just decreases signal:noise.

As to the rarity of the above, I would imagine certain individuals encounter it far more often than others, due to play/DM style. The result is that perception of the issue varies greatly. Obviously I encounter it more than many others.

I suppose I'll have to take your word on the data, as I don't have access to it and a meaningful sample has not been posted (though the bit you posted did indicate floor-saves are 2:1 more common than deaths in-party). I also don't understand how you can extract the meaningful fidelity from it (without undue effort) given all the things we don't log, such as the above cases or tech rezes. I am certainly all for number-crunching over hand-waving, but you have to have numbers before you can do any crunching, and I don't have any.

* unless their party has been affected by floor-wounds, but of course those sorts of multi-KO combats are exactly the sort of thing I'd like to get away from.

[Fionn]

The proposed policy only affects a specific case: when a PC is floored, healed, and gets up to continue fighting/adventuring.

How hard would it be to disable the PC for 60 seconds (or more) as they come off the cap? This should enable after-combat saves freely, but avoid the whack-a-mole adventure party. Blind/slowed/feebleminded should keep them from jumping right back in without a TR.