Salamanders and Giants and Gnolls (Oh My!)

chnage kobort back if you want, it doesn't matter, its just a visual thing.

Once this fixed protos is relased I'll copy stuff over and send it to allyx who can then do what he has to do with it.

 

I sure hope so...And in case anyone didn't realize, this opens the way for the "D" series of modules...in the future, of course!

Nice work, Cujo!

elvicthr

 

So, I finished the rest of the B's tonight. Brigands through Bugbears. But somewhere along the way the protos.tab got corrupted. Argh!!! So 90-something minutes of work down the tubes.

I've been using the ToEE World Builder for protos editing. Should I be using something else? I know Phalzr's editor corrupts the protos if I try to make use of any of the functionality beyond directly editing the entries.

I made some changes to the armor for the Broken Tower Brigand Leader and his Lieutenants. They both had good Dexs and Tumble scores and AI to take advantage of them, but were wearing heavy and medium armor respectively, which meant the game wasn't allowing them to tumble. The Leader was wearing Banded Mail+1. I was going to swap it out with a Chainshirt+1, but there's no protos entry for one. So I gave him Green Elven Chain, since that was the closest thing available. For the Lt, I traded out his breastplate for a chainshirt. They will hopefully start tumbling now when they move to flank people. I'll check it myself after I re-update the protos for them.

 

thats splint mail if I remember correctly, and I'm not sure if he should have elvin armour, just doesn't seem right for a human brigand (unless he stole it off the elf upstairs).

out of interest since when did heavy armour stop you being able to tumble, I never (well once in a blue moon) seem to fail a tumble check (I do max tumble on all my PCs tho). Is it the skill check penalty that takes away from the tumble skill?

 

You're thinking of Lareth's lieutenant in the moathouse. I'm talking about the brigand leader in the broken tower next to the Temple. Elven Chain wouldn't be my first choice for him (especially considering how ugly the stuff is), but it's the closest to what would fit that's actually in the protos. If someone would like, they could add a line to the conversation between the leader and the PCs for good/elven PCs about the brigand leader being a thief and needing to pay for his crimes if people need an explanation for it/want more flavor.

The other option would be to add an entry for a chainshirt+1 to the protos.tab. Since he has magical armor, I'd like to keep him in it, but give him something that will allow him to do what his AI and skillset is geared towards without him taking too big of an AC hit.

In the ToEE manual, it says a character cannot tumble in medium or heavy armor (unless a dwarf). This is consistent with behavior I've witnessed in the game. (Though it's possible if you boost a character's tumble score past his Armor Check bonus they may start tumbling again. I'd have to double check. All I know is neither NPC has ever tumbled during that fight, and my own PCs in medium and heavy armor don't tumble either, despite having the skill.) This is consistent with the 3.5 rules which state you can't tumble if your speed is reduced by armor or encumberance (which medium and heavy armors do.)

Basically, they're both setup to be flippy, flanky guys, but their armor prevents them from doing it, so they just draw a lot of AOOs instead.

Are there magical forms of either of these? See above about trying to keep things consistent.

Exactly. Instead they just get AOOed a bunch for no apparent reason.

 

So the brigand leader and brigand lieutenant totally flip out like mammals now that they have armor they can do it in. The elven chain looks ridiculous with the leader's black cloak, though. Is there an open protos number I can use? I'm willing to give adding in a chain shirt+1 on my own a try.

Secondly, I realized instead of giving every single one the bugbears 500 different weapon focus feats to represent the different available weapons, it might be easier to just change all the bugbear weapons to use "Morningstar" as their proficiency since they can't be looted by PCs anyway. Does anyone see this as a problem? I will of course test this to try to make sure it doesn't break anything, but with something like 30 different flavors of bugbears and many of them being randomly assigned one of a half-dozen weapons, I think this would make my life a whole lot easier.

Edit: Nevermind. Changing everything to Morningstar means all the weapons use the morningstar attack animation and sound effect (though seeing a bugbear swinging a spear vertically by the middle of the haft and having it hit with that funky squeaky door noise is kind of amusing). 500 WF feats per bugbear it is then. Oh well. (I think I am going to at least consolidate the assorted axes to using "battleaxe" though.)

 

Okay. Thanks. 6398 it is.

I finished up the unaffiliated bugbears and with them the Bs last night. And the protos didn't corrupt this time. Thankfully. On to the C's today. After I make that chainshirt+1 and give it to Mr. Brigand Leader.

BTW, any luck testing Combat Expertise in 3.0.4 with Liv and moebius' dll vs Co8 4.0?

ETA:

Okay, further testing has revealed that unless the NPC has a class with the skill in question, it counts all skills as cross-class skills, even for creatures with no character levels. Which means I have to go back and redo the skills for pretty much every NPC that isn't a PC race. :twitch:

ION, I've discovered chickens are the same CR as goblins, which is silly. Does anyone have any objection for me to try removing the CR from chickens (and sheep, for that matter) so they don't grant any XP at all for slaughtering them? It's not like they fight back.

There's some wierdness going on with some of the NPCs, but I don't know how much of that is people's tweaking. (Ted, you realize that Pishella is completely over the top and "illegal", right? I'm assuming that was intentional.) Terjon is powered up through the roof and completely against the rules. I'm going to open up a poll about what to do about him, because making him rules compliant would be a major overhaul. I personally think if people really want to kill him off they should be able to. Especially since that's the goal of the NE opening. I'm not sure why he has to be godlike.

 

Good work so far Kalshane. This is a might task you are taking on, and we all appreciate it.

You mentioned a poll, so I'm going to give you my personal oppinion on this. I think making things rules correct is great, except when it changes the game balance. To me, changing the game balance means making the game easier. Liv powered up the Guardian Demons (and the rest of the demons too, I think) beyond the official rules for a reason, mainly that a fight with a demon being run by a DM is much tougher than a fight with the same demon being run by an AI script. The fact that enemies are run by scripts puts them at a disadvantage, and the only way to restore the balance it to buff them up.

 

I understand trying to keep game balance. And actually, as far as I can tell, all Liv did was boost the demons up to where they should have been in the first place and gave them a bunch of their powers back. She did leave their CRs the same though (a full-powered Balor with a CR of 9?!?) I think the lack of DM is already at least partially compensated for by the lowered XP awards. The game seems to award about 75% or so of what it should across the board. But I do understand that a DMed game is going to be tougher (provided the DM is competent) than one run by AI. My philosophy about this from the beginning though has been a matter of consistency. If a bugbear is CR 2, then something 10 times tougher than the bugbear should be CR20, since both are suffering from the AI limitations. I am taking into account missing powers and the like and reducing CR accordingly if it has a significant effect.

My main issue with Terjon is his ridiculous bonuses are pointless. Why is killing Terjon any worse than killing Jaroo or Burne or even the innkeeper? (And I've since noticed Calmert has a bunch of bonuses as well, just not quite as severe as Terjon's.)

 

So you're saying it's all your fault, then?

Finished up the D's today. Darley was the biggest overhaul. I don't have any stats for an Alu-Demon and the stuff Orion gave her was really powerful, so I used a succubus as the base and worked from there. Dropped the Charisma from 26 to 20 and didn't give her any of the special powers, just the resistances and such. Left her as a level 10 sorcerer. I managed to add Mage Armor, Suggestion and Mind Fog to her spell list, but everything else I try to add doesn't work. I am very confused on this, since she has a lot more spells known per day that she should have.

Changed Paida's hair to match her picture. She was also shy a feat, so I gave her Improved Unarmed Strike.

Elmo was short two feats, so he now has WF and WS in Battle Axe. I fixed his skill points as well.

Jaroo doesn't have quite the crazy bonuses Terjon does, but he's got a ton of extra feats and a few other goodies. I'll go with the poll results for Terjon for him as well.

Per Cujo's permission, the black half-plate is now called simply Black Plate and its masterwork properties have been rolled into the item cost.

I'm getting the hang of things. Still running into some wierdness here and there, but now that I've realized that running ToEE in windowed mode greatly reduces the time it takes to shutdown and that it will run if I have the world builder open, so I don't have to keep closing and re-opening that when I need to test stuff (though the near-instant start-up time for the Net 2.0 version Agetian just released makes that less of an issue) I'm cruising along at a good clip. I'm going to tackle the E's later tonight or tomorrow. But for now I need a break, and I'm out of clean dishes, so I really need to wash them. :blegh:

 

found Lord Spikes post from another thread...

about Darley...

I just get the idea from this that Darley is a genius cos of she's a magic user, and my interprtation is that she gets those enchantment spells for free.