Bard song out of combat?

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Is there any use to playing the bardsong when you're not in combat?

Various sources of documentation list a "luck" bonus that may or may not apply to all die rolls, not just hit and damage. That implies wild surges, hit points on level up, Wish options, hit points healed with Mass Cure and tons of other things.

I'm working on a script with a dedicated bard song setting that continually plays the bardsong, but it leads to a lot of text spam; one line every 6 seconds, more if the bard stops and restarts (because he opened a door or whatever). I'd like to avoid as much of this spam as possible by not playing the bardsong unless it is actually useful.

An important corner case is running into monsters and already having the bardsong operational. If you don't start singing before combat starts, it might take a few seconds for the bardsong to kick in. The exact time seems to vary, just like with Turn Undead. In the case of Turn Undead it doesn't really matter, since you cannot "turn in advance". The bardsong, however, seems to linger for another round or so.

I don't usually bother with bards myself, so I have trouble estimating just how important a first-round bardsong is.

 

I'm wondering where you get the text spam from.

Have you tried this?

Code:

IF
  ActionListEmpty()
  Class(Myself,BARD_ALL)
  !ModalState(BATTLESONG)
THEN
  RESPONSE #100
  BattleSong()
END

 

You mean the plain Bard/Blade's bard song?
Luck wasn't implemented into bard songs in the BG series. The only thing the bard song does is raise the party's morale, i.e. make the party immune to fear. Not very useful in BG2. Only the Jester/Skald's songs are of any value pre-ToB.

 

Something not unlike it, yes. But it doesn't matter whether it's on automatic or manual; every 6 seconds a line reading "Haer'Dalis- Singing Battlesong" appears.

Immunity to fear sounds rather good. A bunch of failed saves can get people killed. Either way, it's an optional setting. If you don't think it's worth it, you can just not tell the script to keep the bard singing.

The Skald or Enhanced Bard Song don't do anything too useful outside of combat either, do they? I'll just limit "bard song mode" to combat, then. For the rare occasions where you want some immunity or that 5% magic resistance bonus outside combat, you can just manually order your bard to sing.

 

i don't know what language it is in, and i have never scripted for any IE games.

if you direct me to some sources i might be able to better help.

do you have access to the bardsong() function? the write to console might be in there, changing it there SHOULD be easy.

are you able to change the output? it writes out to CONSOLE(or whatever it's called) so change that to something else for the function call.

have you tried something like Shadow Keeper? i think you are able to change the spell from there.

 

I don't know what you're talking about, and I can't tell if you know either.

Anyway... that's not how it works. The scripting language is very limited and can do very little other than make other objects perform certain actions. I don't have access to the engine source code.

Shadow Keeper can modify character files and saved games only, as far as I'm aware.

Near Infinity could modify the spell, but I'm not interested in modding the spell. I want my modding contained to just the script.