Salamanders and Giants and Gnolls (Oh My!)

Lol yes half moon .. lol sorry see this is why typing is a pain ..was already thinking about six different things and free associating like crazy..

of course i do firmly maintain that the hawkmoons would be close to the surfer culture.. in many respects



as for ritalin yuck.. i was a beta test for that .. about 35 yrs.. ago..but only for a week .. looked like a heroin addict in need of a methadone.. clinic

 

So, I got the Air Temple bugbears done tonight. Took me a lot longer than I expected, but I've got things organized now, I know I absolutely need to disable Norton IS before launching ToEE even "for a quick test" because otherwise ToEE doesn't want to close, and I'm comfortable enough that I'm not going to seriously hose something that I'm not going to keep testing after every single creature is changed and test them in batches instead.

One weird thing I did discover, was my Fighter bugbear had a lot crappier Spot score than I expected. The Fighter/Rogue, on the other hand, had Spot and Tumble at full values. I'm going to have to test a classless bugbear to be sure, but it looks like if a creature just has raw hitdice, the game reads the skills as total ranks. If the creature has a class, it treats them as skill points spent by that class. Which means the bugbear I gave 1 fighter level to suddenly had his Spot score cut in half because it counted all those points as being "cross class". That's going to be a calculation nightmare.

That said, the armor is being applied correctly and effecting the skills as expected, so that's good, at least. Some of the bugbears are going to see a one or two point AC drop because of the way Troika seemed to arbitrarily assign the AC values. The tumbling Air Temple bugbears had an AC bonus of 8 plus Dex. Best armor you can tumble in is a chain shirt, AC +4, which coupled with their natural armor bonus of +3 is a +7. On the other hand, the additional HP, feats, etc they're getting from replacing their bonus hit die with character classes should more than make up for it.

 

Yup. Ah Fong is where you said he'd be.

The black half-plate was interesting. (It looks very cool, whoever built it, BTW.) Since it calls itself half-plate, but functions like masterwork fullplate. I don't have any objections to the latter, since the fullplate options are currently very limited, but the name is a little confusing. I bought it just to see what it looked like, rather than because I wanted it. (I never use half-plate normally.) Maybe the name should be changed to black plate or some such to avoid confusion.

 

Modding status: Going through the creatures in alphabetical order, I finished the Black Widow tonight. I'm skipping any NPCs I don't recognize, figuring they're some modder or another's creation. I'm also not fiddling with skills if I don't think they're important. (Does anyone really care how many ranks a black bear has in swim, or about the fact it even has ranks in a non-ToEE-existant skill to begin with, as long as its Spot and Listen scores are correct?)

Points of Interest:

Noticed the Balor and the Balor Guardian were both calling the Guardian's Inventory entry. Changed the regular Balor to his proper entry and he doesn't drop the fire gem anymore. Fixed the stats for both Balors per 3.5, though I left the Gaurdian with a couple of minor bonuses. I didn't bother giving them the TWF feats they're supposed to have, since there's no Balor Whip entry in the protos, so it'd be pointless.

Kobort has race_drow in his race entry. WTF? He also had Cleave and Combat Reflexes as his feats. I replaced Combat Reflexes with Power Attack (since it's required for Cleave.)

I completely redid the Behemoth King Frog, using the monster advancement rules from the 3.5 MM and a toad as the base. It was all kinds of messed up. I left it a little tougher than baseline, but it's not as monstrous as it was before. It also had Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot for some unknown reason, but I left them, figuring it uses them for its tongue attack. (The only other explanation is Troika was on crack.) Don't know how to read the code for special abilities, otherwise I'd double-check.

Gave the black pudding two levels of uncanny dodge to reflect the fact it's unflankable (and unsneakattackable, but Monster Plant already covers that) though with an AC of 3, I'm not sure it really matters that much if people get +2 bonus to hit from flanking it.

Also gave two ranks of Uncanny Dodge to the Assassin, because the game didn't seem to applying it from his Rogue levels. (My own rogue was able to beat him on intiative and sneak attack him last time I encountered him. Not right.) I also removed his CR penalty.

That's about it for now. Will do some more work tomorrow, but Turkey Day is going to be spent with the family, so I probably won't be able to pick it back up again until Friday.

 

Kobort has been a drow for ages, I use him as a lab rat and forgot to change him back, but as it just gives him an elfs skin it doesn't matter - doesn't effect how he plays, I was wondering how long it would take someone to notice. I didn't change anything else of his tho only his race.

[EDIT] speaking of drow, I've done it - a little work around that doesn't break anything. only as non-hireable NPCs tho

 

Holy shit, man! That's amazingly cool! Cujo, my hat goes off to you. I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into this one. You totally rock.

 

Any objections to me changing him back?

That's awesome!

Okay. Thanks.

After I signed off last night, I dug out my 3.0 MM II on a whim and it has a dire toad inside with abilities similar to the giant frogs in ToEE, but it's smaller. Looks like I'm going to rework the behemoth king frog again, since it's a much better point of reference. (I've got the 3.5 conversion for the MM II on my hard drive somewhere, so that's not a concern.)

So here's another question for the group. The dire toad has poison. Should I add that ability to the behemoth king frog (I wouldn't for the other giant frogs or the PCs first visit to the moathouse would be entirely too deadly.) and if so, what file lists the monster poison types so I can apply the correct one? (And will also be useful for the other poisonous monsters so I can double-check what they're doing.)

 

Well, the king frog as written just broke the rules on a bunch of levels. (Two bite attacks but only one mouth, saving throws off the charts, huge creature with an 18 Dex, strength bonus not applied to his to hit rolls, etc, etc) He wasn't weird programming-wise (other than the archery feats which have been explained) but he had no relation to the actual rules of the game. I don't want to make him too easy, since you get a bunch of cool stuff when you kill him, but I do want him to make logical sense within the rules. Like I said, I'm going to overhaul him again tonight now that I have a better creature to use as a point of reference.

I'm liking the poison idea (keeping with the dire toad base) since it makes up for his loss of an attack, but I'm not sure which poison does 1d6 Con (I think that's what the dire toad has. The book is at home) damage.

Who would have thought I'd be devoting so much time to a giant friggin' frog?

 

Does the in-game help list the poisons by number? Because that's what the protos calls for each poison. I'll look into it.

Edit: Got it. Tried some stuff out when I was home for lunch. Poisons are listed in the combat.mes, numbered 300-3xx. If you ignore the first 3 (and the 0 for single-digit entries) that number corresponds to the poison number in the protos.tab. In the case of vipers (and our now poisonous froggie) it's number 8, Black Adder venom. The poison save DCs should be 10+Con Mod of the venomous creature, but unfortunately they seem to be set by poison type, in this case 14.

I tested the BKF out and so far it seems pretty good. He has a lot of hp and the poison is a nasty bonus but he's about on-par with the original version, only now he's rules-compliant. My party of 5 5th level characters took him down with some injuries (and my main fighter got both poisoned and swallowed) but not a whole lot of trouble, which fits his current CR of 6.