Icewind Dale 2 - so I wonder

Wow, I was just fighting the Remorhaz Queen in the Icewall area (CH2) and she has an amulet on that grants her permanent "invisibility detection". That went right through my invisible deep Gnome who also has innate nondetection. Honestly that seems like a bit of nonsense to me. If some of this can be improved it definitely should be!

 

See Invisible is a level 2 spell and Non-Detection works vs all Divination in 3/3.5 requiring a caster level+d20 roll vs dc15+cl

 

It's been a long time since I've PnP, but you know how DMs can be. If they have an intended behavior for a specific encounter, it takes a lot to work around it without things happening as they wanted.

Older crpg enemy creatures don't typically have much in the way of AI for this and specific encounters are designed and itemized as such. Sometimes you just have to accept some rigidly-designed crpg encounters without too many complaints about how it is not just like PnP.

Both Iwd2 and ToEE are really bad with dealing with invisibility and stealth. There is no detection with the exception of few intended encounters. In PnP there could be many ways to promote detection: spells, innate detection abilities, an aura/cloud of Glitterdust-stuff, noise detection and location, ground that leaves impressions, etc. These would require skills and plans for the characters that just are not practical in a crpg, as well as monster responses.

It's not unthinkable that some AI decision nodes could be introduced in future to ToEE, but I think that could take a while.

 

Thank you for this! Does this mean to you that Non-detection should have had a chance to block Detect Invisibility? In this case it was an innate creature ability, so I don't know if that would be any different.

I think part of this is that IWD2 was a rush job - there's a long video that details the development cycle. They had to get something out the door and plans changed a lot during development.

I actually really like IWD2 and played it a fair amount - I just liked the 3.xe rule system. But there are a lot of ham fisted things in IWD2. Thieving is nearly completely broken. AI is generally not very nuanced - you just get swarmed all the time. "Heart of Fury" mode is barely playable without a very specific type of party (every monster is a damage sponge). Lastly, to make sure there are plenty of hours of play time, they added "battle squares" which any sane person would only play through once (thankfully there's a mod that fast-forwards through it to save you the pain) - it does yield some very necessary items though.

I'm being pretty hard on the game. I'm really glad that people have taken on the idea of improving it (IWD2ee, and some nice older mods). Playing through IWD1 in ToEE would be amazing - but I have a feeling that automatic conversion would be very difficult without a lot of hand crafted parts.