Just started replaying ToEE with the latest Co8 4.0 patch. Played through once when i first got it and eventually gave up (aug 2004) in the elemental areas near the end due to slowdowns that made play pretty much impossible (am hoping this won't happen again) My party is just finishing the town quests and I discovered another thing that annoyed me last time I played - the often "gimpy" spell descriptions. Now I understand they were probably designed specifically this way to faciltate roleplay but inquiring minds want to know more about how spells really operate in the game as opposed to things like: grease: makes a 10 ft square or one object slippery so how does "slippery" effect those in the area? is there a saving throw to avoid it? does it act like a "slow" spell? etc etc... So my question would be is there a list of these spells with more comprehensive descriptions of exactly how they work in this game someplace? I realize there are probably many places to find additional info on how PnP handles them but I am really only interested in how they were implemented in this game. If such a list is NOT available perhaps someone could tell me the advantages and disadvanteges of the "enlarge person" spell. I could not see any obvious advantage (like boosted str etc) but I did notice there seemed to be a PENALTY added to the characters "to hit" roll???
When in doubt... http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35 You can look up spells here Otherwise, the in-game help is really rather good for a game, though nowhere near good enough for D&D players.
Hmmm.... Well as I mentioned in my original post I was aware that there would be places to look up PnP or D&D rules for spells - what I was actually interested was a listing of how the spells in ToEE were actually implemented in this game rather than a list of how the "official" spells are "supposed" to work which in every game I have played thus far are often two different things - some due to engine restrictions - some to developers wants/needs - some due to the ever present search for "balance" ....
In ToEE, spells which are in the game work as they do in the DnD rules. Same checks and saves, bonuses, maluses etc etc etc. Grease can't be cast on an item, and you'll find cases of things like that. But if you find a spell which doesn't do what it says on the tin then bug report it and the nice modders may well have a peek and make changes if necessary. Unbalanced spells or ones which just didn't work as they should as per the rules didn't make it into the game AFAIK. Or they have since been modded to remove the glitches and problems.
The differences between ToEE and D&D are very small, especially compared to other "D&D" games. If you're curious about a spell, looking up the pnp rules is a good place to start, although I prefer the following site: www.d20srd.org As for enlarge, it increases your size. That fact alone means you have a penalty to hit. That's just the way size works in D&D now. Bigger things have a harder time hitting smaller things, so they pick medium sized things as the baseline and give bonuses to hit and AC for small creatures and penalties to hit and AC for large creatures. However, since your weapons increase in size, you do more damage, and your threat range increases dramatically. These are both very nice things. I believe some of your stats are supposed to change, but I can't recall offhand. As mentioned with grease, there is no way to cast it on a weapon. That's about as extensive as the discrepencies go, though. The fairly obvious departures like this are there, but not much else, unless there's a bug.
Well it appears this will just have to continue to annoy me I guess since I gather from the replies that no one has made a list of how the spells were actually implemented in the game...oop: The fact is that the spells are NOT implemented exactly as D&D since many skills from D&D were not implemented so even the lowly grease spell which according to D&D could be cast on an object (like a weapon or other item to make your foe drop it I assume) and also calls for a "balance" check - a skill that did not make it into the game as far as I can tell must be deciphered and then "guessed at" to figure out how and why it works as it does. Thanks for the linky to d20srd.org tho where at least I can simply read the descriptions I am looking for online rather than d/l material to my 'puter to be able to access information! :thumbsup:
Just in case you're not aware, you can also easily see how well the spells are conforming to 3.5 by using the roll window. Open it up to see a bunch of unhelpful (X misses Y) type reports, but click on the blue text and you'll see a roll breakdown. So, cast grease on the ground and read the report to see how it's working. (I believe it's a straight dex check of some kind.) There's also a report in the back of the manual (if you don't have a paper manual, I think a PDF is on the disc) on where ToEE differs from 3.5. It's not exhaustive, but there are several helpful notes in there. So, yeah, nobody's made a list and likely few will, because the general sentiment is that they're close enough not to warrant the effort, and also several mods have changed some things (e.g., Liv's), so it'd be complicated to make clear which mods do what to which spells. With the roll breakdowns, the places where they're different are relatively easy to figure out. That's my take anyway. :scratchhe
Yeah I do use the roll window to check out stuff it just annoys me when a game appears to rather intentionally be vague about how stuff works - Morrowind does the same thing IMO and its even more difficult to find out any answers about exactly how things work but its even more annoying to me with a D&D based game where the game structure is not some private computer mumbo jumbo designed by the company that might be difficult to be more specific about but a universal set of rules that are already a matter of public information that they just need to explain how they implemented them. I think it boils down to either being too lazy to bother or being unwilling to take the heat from the D&D nerds about how things were done....:shrug: Not that this is the only or even the most annoying factor about this particular game anyway...
mm, maybe it is time to compile such a list... if you are willing to do it wanderon, we could contribute information...
Unfortunately its my lack of time for lengthy research/testing that led me to look for such a list to begin with...not to mention that the compiler should probably have more technical knowledge of the game and how to use tools such as editors and the console and such rather than be pursued by a techless wonder like myself who has never even used a console command in any of his games nor ever d/l an editor...
