Ranged Weapons and STR bonus

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Oh, I don't mind if someone is expressing their opinion in an effort to sway my opinion. That's no big deal.

Indeed.

Yes, LOS's items did cater to the Ranger class a fair bit. That was very intentional, probably for a few reasons.

A. People feel that rangers are an underpowered class. Much of the value of the class is of little value in the IWD2 CRPG environment. So there are essentially two ways to make the class better for the CRPG environment... make the class itself "better" or give it some special items. The former is only do-able to a degree, but the latter is much easier to do.


B. I like playing rangers, so I have a certain investment in wanting to see Rangers be better. I haven't played an unmodded Ranger class in something like 5 yrs or so.

I mildly min-max, but not too terribly aggressively, mostly because I feel that IWD2 should really give players 4 more stat points to build more "herioc" characters, but I can't be bothered to use DK2 to give'em those 4 extra points. (It'd be nice if Mindchild's Custom DLL mod could let you create characters with 80 instead of 76 stat points...)

I've level-squatted to a rather small degree. Some might not even think of it as level squatting. In my last party, if I was in the middle of an area, and one of my character's was ready to level up, I often just held off until I cleared the area before levelling up, sort of for role-playing reasons. It didn't feel right to "level up" while I was in the middle of clearing out the Ice Temple, for example.


"Twinking"? That's a new term to me. I refer to it as metagaming. Regardless, I know what you mean... and as a matter of fact, there's another idea that I have for LOS rev 3 to counter this metagaming / twinking for a very specific item in IWD2... Cera Sumat. Regardless of which version of it one uses, the vanilla version, one of the Ease of Use versions, or the LOS version, you're going to know what version is in your game and can act on that knowledge.

What I'm thinking of doing is randomizing the Holy Avenger so that you won't know what type of sword it is. It could be a long sword, a great sword, or maybe even a bastard sword. (Interestingly, the long history of Cera Sumat doesn't say what type of sword it it.) At the moment, I have 3 versions of CS (LS, GS, and BS) which have basically the same special effects, though the sword type differs and the sword's basic damage varies by sword type. But if I wanted to do so, I could create a lot more variation between different versions to really put more mystery into finding CS.

The randomizer would work by simply using random treasure functionality in the RT files, since that's how IWD2 handles doing different versions of weapons for normal mode and HOF mode.

I've never played this mod. IIRC, Wiemur did this mod more as an experiment to see how to mod IWD2.

Regardless, I agree that if things are as you describe, it does sound like a questionable design for something more than an experiment.

Yeah, there is a fine line. While I often spend as much if not more time planning a party as I do playing that party, I tend to spend that time on different concerns... character and party background, creating custom portrait edits that fit a vision for the character, trying to create a mix of characters that feels like it meshes with the party's concept.


One thing that I've been planning to do is add some additional stat point reward opportunities for completing certain regions. However, I don't like the idea of getting a stat point reward simply because a character simply has a single level of the given class. I think that a character should be committed to that class to get such a reward, with "committed" being defined as a certain minimum number of levels.

I don't disagree. I would say that had I been working for Black Isle, I'd have strongly urged that reasonable stat minimums be a part of the game, since the game engine represents a virtual DM, and if a DM wouldn't allow silly minimums, I'd see no reason why the virtual DM shouldn't do the same thing.

That said, I didn't want to do this in my LOS mod. Oh, I suppose that one could do it in a standalone mod, but it doesn't really seem all that necessary, since the people most likely to use it probably already don't ridiculously minmax, while the people who do ridiculously minmax (aka powergamers) would not use the mod. So, really, why bother?



As for "bending the rules", I suppose that in a sense, even I am bending the p&p rules in my LOS mod, particularly starting with rev 2, since I've done some things that are not kosher according to the p&p rules, but feel necessary to make things a bit better for some weaker classes due to the different balances inherent in IWD2 as a C-RPG rather than a p&p RPG.

 

You could implement this? This is a splendid idea!

It's not that different IMO. Any good DM is going to make the rules work in a different, personal way. I don't see that as problematic as long as the rules are fixed and made clear to the players. An RPG ruleset is a model meant to simulate a reality that is different from ours it's not hard science so there should be some room left for creativity and personal expression.

 

It should ... should ... be quite easy to implement.

Right now, all items with Normal and HOF versions are linked to a dummy item file that is listed in the two random treasure files (RT_NORM.2DA and RT_FURY.2DA). These dummy item files are actually legit ITM files, but aren't really "items" as much as placeholders.

For example, if the HA's dummy ITM file was DUMMY1.ITM, and the HA's actual ITM code was SWDN and SWDH (normal and HOF versions).... the line in the RT files would look sort of like this...

In RT_NORM:
DUMMY1 SWDN

In RT_FURY:
DUMMY1 SWDH


To provide for randomizer, all I'd do is this...


In RT_NORM:
DUMMY1 SWDN1 SWDN2 SWDN3

In RT_FURY:
DUMMY1 SWDH1 SWDH2 SWDH3


This way, if you were in Normal mode, when the holy avenger springs forth from the ground, the DUMMY1 item placeholder would be randomly replaced by either SWDN1, SWDN2, or SWDN3. Or SWDH1, SWDH2, or SWDH3 if in HOF mode.

This is how things work for normal random drops. And should work exactly the same way for this, since there's no visibile difference between random drop dummy ITM files and NM/HOF dummy ITM files in the same RT files.