15 réponses à ce sujet

[lofgren]

Hello,

Ages and ages ago I hung out on the Neverwinter Nights 2 boards, but I have been long absent.  During that time, one of my pasttimes has been a pretty elaborate hak to the base classes in NWN2.  At this point phase 1 is virtually complete, but I have little sense of the NWN2 community (if there even is one at this point) and what kind of niche is available for new class mods.  Following is a brief description of the mod.  I'd love to hear if anybody gives a damn and, if so, would you be willing to answer a couple of more specific questions at the end of the post?

The Altered Mods

The goals of this hak (which is actually an override) have been, in this order:

• To enable character styles that were previously impossible to create, very difficult to use due to imbalanced mechanics, or only achievable via elaborate multiclassing and therefore not playable except at very high levels.
• To maximize compatibility by not touching the files most often changed
  by player-made modules and campaigns such as feat.2da, spells.2da, and
  race.2da.
• To differentiate between classes that are very similar in playstyle, such as shaman/druids, favored soul/clerics, and fighter/barbarians.
• To foster teamwork and tactics by making positioning more important, increasing mechanical balance between classes, and giving classes complementary abilities.

Following is a short list of sample features:

• Several classes have been altered considerably.  Shaman, barbarians, and swashbucklers have been nearly rewritten.
• New playstyles have been introduced: a melee warlock (via a rewritten Hideous Blow), a druid who functions primarily as mobile support for his powerful animal companion (with up to three summoned creatures at a time, 2 of them permanent), and a ranged paladin amongst others.
• All animal companions are completely controllable.  Each animal companion receives a small bonus so that playing them effectively means playing them each differently.
• classes have been rebalanced, some with reduced power and some with increased power.  Overall, a careful player can make a more powerful party but will be hard-pressed to make individual characters as powerful as they used to.
• Several spells that either did not work at all or were very limited in their utility have been rewritten, including all cantrips (to make them more useful throughout the character's life), all polymorph spells (including wildshape), and all weapon enchantment spells (so that they can be cast on ranged weapons and creatures/monks).
• Fighters and paladins are no longer the PC equivalent of a cannonball.  You'll want to keep them close and check in on them frequently rather than putting on the AI and forgetting about them while you spend all your time playing a wizard.
• All spellcasters except rangers and paladins receive fewer spells.  FAR fewer in the case of divine casters, who can only gain the highest level spells in epic levels.  (Healing is now a major concern.)
• Wizards have been merged with the Red Wizard PrC.  Sorcerers have been merged with Arcane Scholars.
• Rogues and rangers each have at least three viable paths: ranged, melee, or traps.  Traps have been completely rewritten so that each of these classes can use them almost like spells.
• Many skills are now more available to several classes.  No more feeling forced to have a rogue in every party.
• Concepts from several editions of Dungeons and Dragons (including AD&D and 4e), as well as Pathfinder and other d20 games, have been merged, hopefully creating a best-of-all-worlds gaming experience.
• Spells and abilities (and in one case, an entire class) that were too narrowly focused have been broadened slightly in their effects (example: Spirit Shaman, Daze).  Spells and abilities that relied on too many meta-concepts have been simplified (example: Turn Undead).  Spells and abilities that were too easy to use have been made more dependent on character attributes (examples: Hide in Plain Sight, "Word…" spells).

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, please let me know!  Basically am looking for a kick in the pants to wrap up this project so that I can move on to rewriting the prestige classes to fit my own twisted vision.  If this does sound cool to you, I'd appreciate a few answers to some more specific questions below:

• Compatibility has been a major concern for me while creating this mod, because it was a personal project and therefore I could not assume that any new modules I wanted to play would play nice with it.  How important is compatibility to you?  Do you play player-made modules or just OC/MotB/SoZ/MoW?  Would you rather see a more thoroughly rewritten game or be able to play in more modules?
• At the moment there is virtually no documentation for any of the new abilities, class alterations, or spell tweaks.  Would you be interested in playing the mod without documentation (imagine stumbling around in complete drow-induced darkness, with one false step possibly leading to a fiery, painful death)?  I have begun editing the .tlk file but due to the breadth of changes and my availability, this will likely take at least a month.  I would consider you a beta tester and take seriously any feedback you wish to give me.  (In fact one of the reasons I am posting this is because I don't want to bother editing the .tlk if nobody cares about these kinds of mods anymore.)
• It seems as thought the dynamic has changed, and modules on the vault now often have compatibility patches for Kaedrin's class pack.  Would you be more likely to play a class rewrite if it was compatible with Kaedrin's?  Is compatibility with Kaedrin's pack very important to you?

Finally, if there has ever been a character archetype you were disappointed to discover you could not build using NWN2, please let me know so that I can consider implementing it!

Thank you and I hope to hear from all of you.

Modifié par lofgren, 25 mars 2011 - 03:57 .

[painofdungeoneternal]

Sounds very good. No this community is still active and not dead in any way.

I am mostly concerned that you are recreating a lot of things which already have been done. Most of us do a lot of communication, are aware of different projects and try to do things to prevent too much duplication. Lot of this happens in IRC. Kaedrins addresses a lot of these same issues. And my own projects seem like they are addressing a lot of the same issues as well ( hideous blow for example, not to mention kaedrin doing eldritch spear i think it was ). It seems like it would be hard to merge what you've done with the other content which already has taken things to the next level soas to be better all around instead of just another choice for players between which option they prefer. Kaedrins content is so well done it is just not reasonable to expect other content to be able to compete with it.

I am still eyeing reerons content which had similar goals and is not really being used since it would be so many things to merge from code which is extremely old and prior to all of rpgplayer1s fixes. I have been trying to implement my fixes as i go as preferences ( via a pretty efficient option system you control via 2da but which caches in such a way as to remove any issues caused by using a 2da )

I think if it's released in smaller pieces ( class by class perhaps ) it might be easier to merge into kaedrins which controls spells and feats. Kaedrin was also talking about doing a pathfinder version, and i am already using that ruleset to deal with many issues i am running into. Really we need to have ladydesire come back and merge everyones content.

Even then i am facing the cap of 255 classes, and adding more classes is only going to go so far. Right now i much prefer those who take a given class, let you pick a feat at first level and use it in different ways like the ranger who can be an archer or a dual wielder. Or how they changed champion of torm from NWN1 into the divine champion. It's like adding to paladins of sune a feature called "embrace of courage" instead of turn undead. It extends the current classes so they are more appropriate.

I also think that if it's not documented it's not usable. That just makes all your changes seem like errors.

Modifié par painofdungeoneternal, 24 mars 2011 - 09:19 .

[lofgren]

I should clarify that the difference between my approach and Kaedrin's, unless he has changed since the last time I really looked at his mods, is that Kaedrin (as well as most other class packs I am familiar with) attempt to recreate PnP classes as faithfully as possible.  My approach was to eschew PnP, as in my experience the styleof NWN2 are quite different from those of a PnP game, and anyway there were some choices in PnP 3.5 edition that I did not like.

For example the typical patch for Hideous Blow allows the warlock to pre-cast it, or makes the attack part of the casting.  My change is to allow the warlock to infuse a weapon he holds with 1/2 the power of his eldritch blast (plus any invocations) for 10 rounds.  This one change allows a player to create a character whose magical power is delivered through his physical attacks, a character type which previously wasn't really possible except using workarounds like wizard/eldritch knight with Bladeweave memorized a bunch of times.  So while this does address the issue of Hideous Blow being a lacklustre spell, the real goal was to enable this neglected archetype.

Sadly, a class-by-class version of this project is not really possible.  Because of the way classes were designed, and because of the particular changes I made and the constraints I placed myself under in order to maximize compatibility, there are too many resources shared between classes.  For example, the druid, shaman, and ranger can't really be decoupled.  The changes to the sorcerer cannot be made without also changing the shaman and the favored soul, and the changes to the cleric would overpower the ranger.  Crazy?  Yes.

It's also far too late to go back and make those changes optional, and in most cases I don't think I would want to as it would probably result in the balance I have been trying to create being totally overthrown.  Really there are many things I would have done differently if I had originally embarked on this project with an intent to share it, but for some reason I just found it a lot of fun to tweak this game and now that I am nearly done I feel like I should at least find out if anybody else out there would care to try this.  Honestly, at the time I began work it seemed like the majority of people on the forums were PnP purists and I got several discouraging comments that made me think most people would not be interested in a homebrew like mine.

[painofdungeoneternal]

Your hideous blow sounds like what i did on my version, would have to look at the rounds and i give it the full power ( since it ends up similar to sneak attack except you can only do it every other round ). But most of it sounds the same. If i were you i'd take a good look at what has been done in the last few years, quite a bit of it is very good, kaedrins wildshaping for example is a must have.

Sounds like something some folks would like. I think you will see quite a few folks do prefer the D&D rules, but everything that adds options is good.

I'd release it. Ideally some PW adopts it, which is probably the only way your balance tweaks could be really used. ( balance just is not as important in SP, and unless you do a complete module, what is on the vault are designed for how the classes are now ). Regardless once it's out there folks can use portions of it, merge it with kaedrins, or just change their own stuff, or perhaps it becomes widely adopted. Regardless it's much better if it can be looked at.

[lofgren]

I found that requiring the warlock to recast hideous blow every other round made it just annoying to use, so I increased it to 10 rounds and halved the damage since unlike sneak attack the magical damage bypasses physical damage reduction/resistance, affects undead, does not require combat advantage, and comes with powerful magical effects like daze, slow, or blindness.  Making it deal as much damage as sneak attack seemed like a slap in the face to rogue players.

Can you provide a link to Kaedrin's wildshaping?  I didn't see anything on the vault, and from Kaedrin's own site it doesn't look like he has changed wildshape that much other than adding panther.  I also have not seen a lot of class packs on the vault (http://nwvault.ign.c...les.Detail&id=1).  Is there another hub for downloadable content of which I am not aware?

I guess the big question is really, what is the etiquette between modulemakers and class editors these days?  When I began, modulemakers were likely to use feat.2da or spells.2da to implement custom content for their campaigns, but now it looks like modulemakers are more likely to leave those files alone so that players can use Kaedrin's or some other custom class pack.  If the expectations have shifted, then the niche I thought I might serve (offering more variety to players who wanted their classes to be compatible with player-made modules) has probably been obviated by Kaedrin's pack which by its nature offers more choice since he freely alters 2da files that I would not touch.  At most I could offer more gameplay options to players of modules that take place at levels before the PC qualifies for the prestige classes of the other class packs out there.

Looking at the vault, every other class pack I could find was basically a straight PnP conversion, which leads me to think players are just not interested in homebrew, especially if it would require them to give up the PrCs and additional feats they use now.  I generally see very little about Kaedrin's or LadyDesire's packs that interest me, which is why I started editing to begin with.  They and I have just gone in radically different directions.  It's hard for me to get up the will to document something that nobody is really interested in.

[dethia]

Sounds like a huge project and I am a bit sad you didn't work with some pw on this. Implementing it would be a nightmare since most pw's have modified almost everything. From what you wrote not all changes sound good to me, some on the other hands sound ok while others great. I guess it is a matter of how much more time you wish to put into this, you should definitely release the project so others can use it or use parts of it. At the same time if you wish to continue working with it or nwn2 in general there are plenty of pw's looking for devs, just make a post in the dev section offering some aid.

[The Fred]

The issue is that NWN2's override system is quite frankly terrible, and outdated by, for example, it's predecessor Baldur's Gate (thanks to some amazing work from the BG community). Basically the long and short of it is that it's almost impossible to make class packs which do not conflict - even if you avoid modifying key 2das - since you only need one area of overlap (usually the tlk is to crux of the problem, meaning you can't combine a lot of overrides which normally wouldn't overlap). This is the reason that there are generally only a very small number of big class packs, because if a random person makes a random extra class, however good, people won't use it because then they have to forgo the dozens of classes in, say, Kaedrin's.

Of course, the style of this sounds very different to Kaedrin's etc. - as you say, it's a non-PnP rebalancing of the game to fit your vision, and there's no reason it couldn't fill a different niche. I should warn you though that if you end up with a competing class pack to Kaedrin's you will probably have an uphill struggle getting people interested in it.

I actually plan on making (or persuading someone more competent than myself to make) a program for installing overrides - people may have seen me talking about this in the past, and I did indeed make a beta which could patch the TLK file dynamically etc. whilst making backups and so on so it's more than possible for anyone with an actual level of skill. Now that it looks like I have a little free time (since, like, yesterday) I might re-open this, but that's another story - I'm not sure it would even help large projects like this since the changes are so vast and sweeping that there's no way that they will ever be compatible with each other (i.e. they do mutually exclusive things, like a mod which nerfs an aspect and a mod which buffs it).

That said, this sounds very interesting, and the community is far from dead enough that you won't get any interest. As Dethia was hinting at, there are a lot of potential nightmares in trying to make this play nice with other things, but on the other hand, there's no reason you couldn't release it as a stand-alone mod (for Single Player, I expect) and if it's good, maybe PWs would be interested in taking it up.

[The Fred]

lofgren wrote...
When I began, modulemakers were likely to use feat.2da or spells.2da to implement custom content for their campaigns, but now it looks like modulemakers are more likely to leave those files alone so that players can use Kaedrin's or some other custom class pack.

This does generally seem to be the case, though mostly because Kaedrin's has monopolised the market at bit, so to speak, and because mod-builders who do things their own way are essentially telling people they can't use Kaedrin's with it, a lot of Kaedrin's fans will simply not go near their module (in essence, they end up competing with it almost as another class pack would). I for one, however, am doing things my own way, but I'm setting my module in a very custom, non-D&D setting. So whilst I am implementing tweaks which make things more like PnP, I'm also making other tweaks which make things more how I want them to be. However, if I were building a Forgotten Realms module, I'd seriously consider making it Kaedrin-compatible.

lofgren wrote...
Looking at the vault, every other class pack I could find was basically a straight PnP conversion, which leads me to think players are just not interested in homebrew, especially if it would require them to give up the PrCs and additional feats they use now.

As you mentioned, there is the niche of low levels and players who want a base class balanced but don't care so much about PrCs. However, I think some it is down to the fact that making a balanced PnP conversion is easier than a balanced homebrew. PnP has already been balanced, and tried and tested for a long time, so any imbalances are well known. Obviously more are introduced when moving it to NWN, but with homebrew it's just so much easier to miss the mark because you don't have these guidelines to follow. Also, the PnP rules are things which other people know - others will not have ever encountered your homebrew rules before, so they will have to decide whether they actually like them, and most likely they'll like some bits and dislike others. PnP conversions pull in all the PnP-players and purists right off the bat without any of this worry. It doesn't mean there's no interest for homebrew, though.

EDIT: Sorry for writing so much, you get used to the verbosity of some of the posters on this forum after a bit. ;-)

Modifié par The Fred, 27 mars 2011 - 12:18 .

[painofdungeoneternal]

I would just post it.

The work is done.

Let folks make up their own minds. I won't use it as is, but i will review it for good ideas. Which will end up to a degree either being liked or not liked, and i think others will do the same.

If i add something i will document it. Same with others. Documenting is really needed to make it easy enough to use.

Not everything is for end users. Some is just good for the community.

[NWN DM]

If you want interest, then what you put out needs to play nice with all the other stuff that's been created.

IMO obviously.

The questions you're asking now would have been better asked before you dumped a lot of time/effort into this.

[lofgren]

Meh, I am not so concerned about the time and effort as this was really just a hobby.  I enjoy coming up with new playstyles and I always felt like there was way too much overlap in the existing classes.  Sorcerers/wizards, clerics/favored souls, and druids/shaman are obvious examples of classes which differed so slightly there was really no need for both.  Even druids and clerics were so similar that a druid often felt like just a cleric with a nature theme, which was already easily possible by taking plant and animal domains with a cleric.  Creating greater variety has finally gotten this game to a point where every single base class is interesting to me and offers a few different build approaches, each with a unique advantage over other thematically similar classes.  If nobody else is interested, I simply won't bother to document my changes and continue to play and edit as I see fit.  If other folks are interested, then I will go ahead and post it.

It sounds like the best thing to do is to maybe break it up into chunks, some of which will be intuitive but others probably won't.  For example I'll bet there are plenty of players who would be interested in more elaborate traps or the ability to cast flame weapon on their animal companion or wildshape form, but don't care for a paladin whose aura reflects damage done to his allies back onto his enemies.  Those changes can easily be separated.  I'm really proud of my improved cantrips as well so I'll post those.  I think I can safely post these changes without a .tlk file and instead just a thorough readme since there is a good chance that the players using them will be using somebody else's custom .tlk anyway.  Other bits and pieces might make more sense to release as pure code on the wiki or vault so that modders can make use of them without having to pick through the chaffe to find the wheat.

I'm not really interested in making this a competition between me and Kaedrin.  Folks should play what they like or edit the game to reflect their tastes in my opinion.  But some of my changes would definitely be compatible with Kaedrin's work, so I thought I would throw the possibility out there.  While I created this mod for my own enjoyment, I would like to get it into the hands of anybody who might appreciate the changes.  If Kaedrin's is such a dominating force, I would rather hop on the bandwagon than reinvent the wheel.

Long aside:

Personally I never thought the vanilla classes were very well balanced, like, at all.  Some classes seem basically pointless, others are obviated by a single spell, and some start out strong but become useless by double digits, or have powerful class features whose kryptonite factors are so common that it becomes a big deal when you actually get to use them, rather than a big deal when you encounter an enemy who is immune.  Playing a rogue is damn irritating when not only is one of the most common enemies in the system (undead) completely immune to your primary class feature, but every other bad guy can basically make you pointless by simply turning around.  Nine times out of ten you're better off with two two-handed weapon fighters than you are taking a rogue and a fighter, even though you would think a rogue and a fighter would be an obvious team-up.  And more often than that, you're better off just taking two clerics.  So I added the "Ruin" feats to the rogue's feat options, gave him an extra bonus feat at level 2 so that his first bonus feat would be more defining for the character, and increased the feasibility of traps so that it might actually be worthwhile to use them once in a while.  I also brought back the ability to bluff-to-hide (3x per day, using "smoke pellets"), and added a feat to improvise a few traps each day using scavenged materials so you don't have to choose amongst running out, weighing yourself down, spending all your gold, or dumping a ton of skill points into Craft Trap only to discover that the necessary components are simply not available in the mod you want to play.

Rage seems like it ought to be a pretty cool ability, but when I look at barbarians all I see are drawbacks: lower HP than a fighter, lower AC, lower saves, no access to weapon-improving feats, fewer feats overall, token DR, MAD, alignment restrictions that make otherwise attractive PrCs inaccessible, etc.  +2 to hit and +2 to damage once a day (+fatigue, as if you needed another reason not to use it) could never overcome all of those weaknesses.  A fighter/berzerker is already better than a barbarian at level 7 and only gets better from there.  So I rewrote the class to be less about dealing massive damage, drawing inspiration from the berserkers of the eddas whose role was as much to whip their allies into a frenzy as themselves, as well as classic "barbarians" like Boudica, Hannibal, or Ghengis Khan.  Now the class is more about inspiring your allies to shrug off their pain and fight like mad than it is about charging into the fray and hitting things wantonly – something the class was basically outdone in by clerics, druids, fighters, favoured souls, paladins, etc., etc.  In my opinion designing a class to be ≈6th banana at the thing that it is best at can't be called balanced in any way.  (And in my opinion omitting the inspiring commander archetype entirely in order to make yet another "charge into battle and hit things randomly" class is just negligent.)

Anyway hopefully you can see how my philosophy just doesn't jibe with Kaedrin or others.  I think every class should offer an opportunity to be the best at something and a unique playstyle, but that no party should feel compelled to bring along any particular class because it is the only one with access to something like trapfinding or lockpicking, which you only need maybe two or three times in the entire course of a campaign but might result in instant death or failure if you don't have them when you need them.  Everytime I sat down to make a new SoZ party, the first thing I would have to decide is which one was going to take a level of rogue.  That's just silly – if a single level of rogue is so important, it ought to be a gimme.  Instead I made a single level of rogue less important by giving more classes access to open lock (wizards, bards, swashbucklers, warlocks) and disable device (barbarians, bards, rangers, wizards), as well as making trapfinding a selectable feat for each of those classes.

[MokahTGS]

If you make something, post it.  Let the community decide if they like it.  Compitition is only a good thing.  Other class packs are just that..other.  You can never have too much custom content for NWN2.  Never.

Just release it if it is done.

[painofdungeoneternal]

What mokah said. Release it. Working on it more to split it up, well if there are parts folks like that will happen.

Regardless i think a lot of the issue here is you tried NWN2 classes, they had flaws, and you go you need to completely redo them. From what you are describing, well i totally agree, but it also seems like you have not tried kaedrins content. Barbarians for example use variant rules for rage, wizards have special spells as long as they have feats in reserve, and there are a LOT of classes and core changes. I would suggest actually taking a close look at what he offers since he also does change things from PNP rules if it makes sense - he actually gets a bit irritated by folks whose sole criteria is how close to PNP things are.

Nothing wrong with new things. I just get the impression the more i read that you have recreated a lot of things that already have been worked on. Which is not hard to do, i've done quite a few things myself and am at the point i could not describe or even remember them all. I would really have to look at the code and how it works to judge if it's good, if it works well on pw's and performs well, folks will use it.

I would release it all as is. Then listen to what folks say.

[lofgren]

It's true I have not tried Kaedrin's content for several years but I am familiar with some of the PnP variants he has implemented.

[The Fred]

Chunks are probably harder work, but definately sound like the way to go. Certain "chunks", for example, might be compatible with Kaedrin's, others not etc. Basically it gives people more freedom to mix and match, so even if they don't like a lot of what you've done, they can still get benefit from what they do. Regardless, even if you just posted up what you have in a big mess, there'll probably be one or two people who'll still look over it and maybe rip out bits they find interesting, so it won't be wasted.

[manageri]

I really like lotsa things you posted about, the ruin feats and controllable animal companions for example. I propably wouldn't wanna use everything in your pack since it's more about changing than adding things unlike other class packs, but in smaller chunks it'd be great.