Petrified and hostile? Thanks, Neera.

lunar

Okay, Neera managed to petrify Immy with a wild surge, and Imoen's stone statue is hostile to my party! I have a scroll to cure her but I fear she will be hostile again and attack, and there is no way to subdue her. Aww. I play on no reload game so she is gone for good, then? At least she is not dead dead, and will stay as an angry statue in Beregost :-( Any idea if this is a bug or is there a way to win her back?

I've never had my party without Imoen before :-( I had to travel to Sword coast and recruit Safana for the first time. While there cleared the area with Khalid (and potions, check my other thread) and profitted a lot from the massive xp and loot. I sure do miss Immy, though. Neera, this was not cool, not cool at all.

Malicron

Sounds buggy to me. If you have a previous save, you might bend your rules and back-track a little if this is the result of a bug. Otherwise, Shadowkeeper.

franco

@lunar. It never ceases to surprise me all the unusual events that can occur when all the different rules of this game collide in ways that are unexpected. I imagine since she's petrified she's been automatically removed from the party by the game mechanics. Possible things to try. If you first removed Neera from party, then cast stone to flesh on Imoen. Chance she might not be hostile and you could talk and have her rejoin. Also, it may be possible to cast charm before stone to flesh to remove the hostile circle, then cast stone to flesh and speak to her about joining you? Worth a try.

lunar

IIRC if you cast flesh to stone on a party member and petrify him/her, he/she will be hostile to you. That's because he is kicked out of the party the moment he is petrified, I guess. However, you can kill your party npcs in other ways, even repeatedly, and they won't turn hostile. At all.

Can you charm a petrified statue back? If you can, does it wear off? If you unpetrify the npc before charm wears off, will she be able to talk her neutral dialogue and join back in? So many questions..

elminster

Its brave of you to be playing a no reload challenge with Neera.

Hows it going? Has she turned anyone else in your party to stone yet?

lunar

@elminster

No I dumped her. I was a wild mage too! It was going okay until lvl 5, I casted a lightning bolt normally, it turned wild surge: caster becomes target and that was it. An electrifying exit, if there was one.
Now playing random (mutant) sorcerer at lvl 6, still no reload. I avoid Neera, though.

BelgarathMTH

I've always said that Neera and wild magic are bad for no- or minimal- reloading. I think wild magic is just asking for a reload or two, or twenty.

atcDave

belgarathmth said:

I've always said that Neera and wild magic are bad for no- or minimal- reloading. I think wild magic is just asking for a reload or two, or twenty.

But at least its usually good for a laugh!

the_spyder

I kind of think whoever came up with the Wild Surge table must have been a big Roadrunner (and more specifically Wile E Coyote) fan. Stuff randomly dropping out of the sky just feels like that. Only instead of Acme Anvils, you get cows. It would be funny if an extremely rare effect was all of the sudden a pit opened up under the caster. They blink three times and then fall to their death.

ajwz

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

atcDave

ajwz said:

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

No there's not, its funny!

BelgarathMTH

@atcDave, so, the point of Neera and wild mages is comedy and lighthearted rp?

LOL, I can totally see that if one wants to use save/reload as a means to a comedy of errors in their rp'ing.

However, for anyone like me, who is trying to get a sense of total immersion, as though every consequence had actually happened to him or her, wild magic is anathema. So much so, that I honestly think my lawful good avatar in BG might actually kill wild mages who risk the lives of everyone around them by deliberately keeping at it.

I wouldn't kill Neera if she expressed repentance for burning horribly her mentors and her fellow magic students, and promised never to attempt magic again. I'd send her to a temple, and encourage her to choose a god and retrain as a cleric. Only god can save her from the destruction, suffering, and death she will cause as an unrepentant wild mage.

If she remained unrepentant, and told me she was going to keep practicing wild magic and to hell with anybody who got hurt, I would seriously consider killing her.

I tend to be a paladin whether I'm playing an actual "paladin", or not.

the_spyder

ajwz said:

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

Sometimes the point of the game isn't to play the game with brutally hard self imposed limitations, but to enjoy and have fun with the game. Wild Magic can be funny and sometimes challenging. If I want that aspect but realize that certain catastrophic events might mean I have to reload that is how I have fun. Otherwise it is like saying "I don't see why the game comes out in anything other than Ironman difficulty setting."

atcDave

belgarathmth said:

@atcDave, so, the point of Neera and wild mages is comedy and lighthearted rp?

LOL, I can totally see that if one wants to use save/reload as a means to a comedy of errors in their rp'ing.

However, for anyone like me, who is trying to get a sense of total immersion, as though every consequence had actually happened to him or her, wild magic is anathema. So much so, that I honestly think my lawful good avatar in BG might actually kill wild mages who risk the lives of everyone around them by deliberately keeping at it.

I wouldn't kill Neera if she expressed repentance for burning horribly her mentors and her fellow magic students, and promised never to attempt magic again. I'd send her to a temple, and encourage her to choose a god and retrain as a cleric. Only god can save her from the destruction, suffering, and death she will cause as an unrepentant wild mage.

If she remained unrepentant, and told me she was going to keep practicing wild magic and to hell with anybody who got hurt, I would seriously consider killing her.

I tend to be a paladin whether I'm playing an actual "paladin", or not.

Well, she is chaotic-neutral! I do think Wild Mages are sort of immersion breaking. Sort of like the young adventurers you meet at Abazigale's lair, I really think they're all about the laughs. I would play a party with a Wild Mage completely differently from one with a more conventional mage. It's like comparing Get Smart to 24. Gee, they're both spy stories, but uh, not really the same thing!

Maybe though you could have a paladin who keeps the Wild Mage around to protect the world from them. You could pay for damage they cause, even having the occasional peasant resurrected. All while trying to get the Wild Mage to take more responsibility for their actions. Even if it means not casting so many spells. That might make an interesting role playing challenge ("Neera use your sling. No Fireballs. No Horror. No Monster Summoning. Sling. Good girl...")

Montresor_SP

the_spyder said:

I kind of think whoever came up with the Wild Surge table must have been a big Roadrunner (and more specifically Wile E Coyote) fan. Stuff randomly dropping out of the sky just feels like that. Only instead of Acme Anvils, you get cows. It would be funny if an extremely rare effect was all of the sudden a pit opened up under the caster. They blink three times and then fall to their death.

The falling cow makes me think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 2:10-2:25:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yjNbcKkNY

ajwz

the_spyder said:

ajwz said:

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

Sometimes the point of the game isn't to play the game with brutally hard self imposed limitations, but to enjoy and have fun with the game. Wild Magic can be funny and sometimes challenging. If I want that aspect but realize that certain catastrophic events might mean I have to reload that is how I have fun. Otherwise it is like saying "I don't see why the game comes out in anything other than Ironman difficulty setting."

That's fair enough - but I don't see the point of using a wild mage if you don't embrace their only unique class feature.
Obviously if you experience a total party wipe due to a horrible miscast then by all means reload - I'm not suggesting a mandatory iron man challenge. But having a wild mage in the party should create unpredicatable combats, both good and bad, and I think it's a little silly to effectively make wild surges strictly neutral or positive.

It is similarly pointless as reloading the game whenever an npc dies.

Malicron

ajwz said:

It is similarly pointless as reloading the game whenever an npc dies.

Unless you're in a relationship with them, as that has a nasty tendency to glitch the game out and end the romance. But that's more working around bugs than save scumming.

the_spyder

ajwz said:

It is similarly pointless as reloading the game whenever an npc dies.

To your playing style.

elminster

ajwz said:

the_spyder said:

ajwz said:

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

Sometimes the point of the game isn't to play the game with brutally hard self imposed limitations, but to enjoy and have fun with the game. Wild Magic can be funny and sometimes challenging. If I want that aspect but realize that certain catastrophic events might mean I have to reload that is how I have fun. Otherwise it is like saying "I don't see why the game comes out in anything other than Ironman difficulty setting."

That's fair enough - but I don't see the point of using a wild mage if you don't embrace their only unique class feature.
Obviously if you experience a total party wipe due to a horrible miscast then by all means reload - I'm not suggesting a mandatory iron man challenge. But having a wild mage in the party should create unpredicatable combats, both good and bad, and I think it's a little silly to effectively make wild surges strictly neutral or positive.

It is similarly pointless as reloading the game whenever an npc dies.

I don't know if its pointless. Its one thing if they just get killed, its another if they get criticaled and are blown to chunks, and its another if they get petrified. In the latter case people may just reload not just because they wanted that NPC but especially if they had good items on them that they were holding onto.

kamuizin

There's a way to go over this. I had a similar problem in BG, when i played Saerileth mod (a second problem in fact, the first was endure the mod).

1° - do you have an auto-save previous to the area you are atm? If you have just reload, you found a bug, that's not cheating against the no-reload.

2° - If you don't or if you managed to auto-save with imoen hostile then your problem is more serious but not too hard to solve.

Load the auto-save and try to make a manual save (if you can't do that due to imoen hostility, just copy your auto-save, rename it to something other than auto-save/quick-save and paste it again in the save game directory).

Download EE keeper.

Open the saved game with EE-keeper.

In the 2° tab (characteristics), in the enemy/ally option, change it from whatever is set there to "PC". Save the change and load the game from it.


By the way, you're brave to make a no-reload game with an wild mage, not much people that would take this challenge.

the_spyder

elminster said:

ajwz said:

the_spyder said:

ajwz said:

There is something so utterly pointless about the behavior of those people who choose to have a wild mage in thier party yet reload the game every time they get a non positive wild surge.

Sometimes the point of the game isn't to play the game with brutally hard self imposed limitations, but to enjoy and have fun with the game. Wild Magic can be funny and sometimes challenging. If I want that aspect but realize that certain catastrophic events might mean I have to reload that is how I have fun. Otherwise it is like saying "I don't see why the game comes out in anything other than Ironman difficulty setting."

That's fair enough - but I don't see the point of using a wild mage if you don't embrace their only unique class feature.
Obviously if you experience a total party wipe due to a horrible miscast then by all means reload - I'm not suggesting a mandatory iron man challenge. But having a wild mage in the party should create unpredicatable combats, both good and bad, and I think it's a little silly to effectively make wild surges strictly neutral or positive.

It is similarly pointless as reloading the game whenever an npc dies.

I don't know if its pointless. Its one thing if they just get killed, its another if they get criticaled and are blown to chunks, and its another if they get petrified. In the latter case people may just reload not just because they wanted that NPC but especially if they had good items on them that they were holding onto.

For me, I am the first to admit that I am not a great player. Quite frankly I am OK with that. But I do play and enjoy the entire series. In order to complete the game, I will often times encounter situations that require me to replay several times to complete. For instance, I just finished up the battle in Spellhold with the big "I". it took me 3 tries to do it right and have all of my people survive. I am quite OK with that as well and don't consider it cheating in the slightest. Nor do I consider it a detraction from the way the game was "Intended". That is WHY there are auto-saves, because not every combat is intended to be an easy cake walk.

But I do intend to finish the game. I enjoy it and it is fun to me. I am playing solo and so I am not competing with anyone else. That is the way that I play the game. I get to experience (and ultimately defeat) every combat in the game. And I don't see any problem at all with my playing style. it doesn't impact anyone else and I don't see the need to look down my nose at anyone else's playing style. They enjoy the way they enjoy. And so do I. Nuff said...