Idea: Fix Fragarach/Scather

To further complicate things, you'd need to omit the spiked chain....

 

And one of the foes in a late game quest uses a spiked chain.

 

As long as spiked chains are properly implemented, at least the AI won't need to do anything different than it does already for that case.

I guess since this thread is now discussing all sorts of enhancement ideas, I was reading about the nodes, and I'm also interested in taking a crack at some of the weird effects they have. The simplest one is that they damage you unless you're protected, and might interrupt spells with that damage (side note: 1E is really harsh, and this just makes you lose the spell outright ).

But also, various spells are enhanced/inhibited according to elemental matching. Some of these effects are like automatic metamagic on certain nodes (positive if the spell matches the node, negative if they are opposed). Some spells just don't work on some/all nodes. Some spells allow you to learn element substituted versions by casting them enough times on nodes. I'm not sure how feasible that last one is, but overall I think it's a cool idea.

 

Mentioning the nodes reminded me about Ashrem oddities. Air node.

He's a decent cleric for an evil party and it is fun to let him kill his brother for revenge, but....

His cleric diety is Zuggtmoy - which he has no problem fighting and sees no detrimental effect in fighting his own patron!
You'd think he'd lose all cleric abilities in that act or even turn on you, because Zuggy is certain to not like that.

So I eventually decided that it was better RP to leave him at the node before that battle and pick him up after.

Turko and co. turn on you for some small intrigue, but this is a whole level above that!

Thoughts on fixing this, if you get dirty with the nodes?

 

No worries.

Oh really? Maybe only a portion? I thought I'd seen someone say recently that e.g. teleport works in the nodes, but the book says it shouldn't. There are a lot of examples like that.

Also, I wonder if the full node effects were implemented. They're actually quite wild. The book says e.g. casting fire spell on the fire node would be Extended, Widened/Enlarged, 2xEmpowered, 4xHeightened, using a 3.5 metamagic approach. And casting it on the water node is a sort of inverse of that (1/2 duration, 1/2 range/AoE, 1/2 damage, -4 save DC). In particular, I'm not sure how you'd do the AoE adjustments without metamagic.

Being a bit frank, it's not very fleshed out like that. It mentions two countermeasures besides being (magically) resistant. One is wearing fur coats in the "chilly air node" (not sure that fits with the flavor in this game), and the other is taking off your armor in the fire node.

However, it's also not a huge threat. Being unprotected and taking no steps to mitigate the damage, you take 1d4/minute (technically it was 1d4 per 10 minutes in 1e, but time scales got shifted in 3rd edition; and the nodes in this game are not as big as described in the book). Taking the above mentioned countermeasures reduces it to 1d2. So you wouldn't be likely to die just from environmental damage unless you tried passing time in the nodes.

Anyhow, my thought was to make it a thematically appropriate type of energy damage. Then even ToEE's Endure Elements spell (which is better than it's supposed to be) is able to negate it. Some of the modified spells given are ways of negating the damage, like the characters can learn to cast Water Breathing for any element to negate the damage. A couple spells will trickily increase the damage, though.

 

I only did damage the mods for fire/water spells IIRC. It did make the salamanders and ice tyrants much more difficult.

 

I guess on the topic of Widen, I've read on here that it's kind of broken. Fiddling with it, I noticed three aspects:

1. Persistent effects (like web) seem to generally not take it into account; their radius is hard coded
2. The particle effects are misleading in any case
   
3. It seems to increase the angle rather than the length of cone spells (I suspect enlarge might lengthen cones, but this is really widen's job despite how ToEE specifies this information)

Is that the extent, or is there more? I wonder how feasible it is to address #2 somehow. I guess it's not very clear what aspects of the particles need to be scaled (barring just implementing separate particle systems for the widened spell by hand).

Edit: scratch the cone thing. I'm not sure what I was doing earlier to have the weird effects I saw, but neither widen nor enlarge actually affect cones at all.

 

I thought of another 'strict rules' thing I'd like to tackle. Possibly the most broken spell in the game if you ask me.

Invisibility sphere acts like an area effect that makes anyone inside it Greater Invisible. Instead it should make people starting in the area of effect regular Invisible until they leave the area or break invisibility (entering the area doesn't make you invisible). It should also be possible to target a person to make the effect mobile (for stealth, I guess).

Not sure how the people complaining about Charm Person forgot about that one. Unlimited sneak attacks for your whole party at one spell level earlier than Greater Invisibility.

 

I think Invisibility Sphere has some (other) bugs, such as a permanent invisibility bug under certain conditions. I forgot about it but you reminded me of why I stopped using the spell after a few tests quite some time ago.

The effect carries through transitions and travel, iirc. And I couldn't get rid of it. It's possible that it may have been only a lingering particle effect issue in conflict with another spell - like what is sometimes seen with the protection from element spells. Idk.

 

Another difference between editions is the wealth of options for boosting damage: power attack, greater bonuses for strength, double damage for attacking two-handed. Even a level 10 character in TOEE is looking at around +30 to damage with each automatic hit just from BAB and Strength.

 

Yeah, power attack with auto hit is a pretty ridiculous combination.

I did find a reference to a 3.5 statting of the swords outside of this game. They got rid of the automatic hits. Their final stats were something like: +3 keen bastard sword that does 2d6 extra damage on a critical, and lets you make AoO counter attacks within your per round limit.

So that's another possibility, and it means you can't just put power attack to maximum, and need combat reflexes probably. Maybe something along those lines is a better fit for 3rd edition.

Incidentally, I did a little more reading, and apparently in 1st edition, there was no core rule for extra damage on a 20. At best it would be an automatic hit, and I'm not even sure that was guaranteed. So, 'critical hits' were a house rule, except for certain specific cases, like monsters and Fragarach.

 

It wasn't; the Combat Tables for AD&D had 6 '20s' between ......17,18,19 and 21,22,23..... without some addition bonuses d20 rolls >20 were not achievable even with a natural 20.