Character got ability damage right in intro (-1 Con) and I cannot dispel it
MarkusBR
Member Posts: 8
Hey there,
In the PC version, my Fighter/Cleric/Mage somehow got her Constitution dropped from 18 to 17 (red in character screen). I tried resting for days, casting Remove Curse and Dispel Magic on her... Nothing seems to work.
It seems bugged. Specially that I certainly got the ability damage somehow in the intro (goblins, orc cave, shaman).
Can someone please help me? This is very disturbing, to know I can get ability damage without even noticing it and not being able to remove it. :- ((
Thank you!
In the PC version, my Fighter/Cleric/Mage somehow got her Constitution dropped from 18 to 17 (red in character screen). I tried resting for days, casting Remove Curse and Dispel Magic on her... Nothing seems to work.
It seems bugged. Specially that I certainly got the ability damage somehow in the intro (goblins, orc cave, shaman).
Can someone please help me? This is very disturbing, to know I can get ability damage without even noticing it and not being able to remove it. :- ((
Thank you!
0
Comments
Is there a way to fix it?
the spell description says clearly that if your familiar dies you get a permanent stat penalty to con.
In the future you have to be very careful with your familiar.
For reference material, check out the Humunculous from the old Sinbad classic "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad", or read the Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust. Familiars are precious and intended to be protected, not thrown around willy-nilly in combat.
It is possible to USE the familiar, but they are very fragile, it's true. I personally, if I were to change anything at all, I would prefer if familiars scale leveled up with the caster. But I think the CON penalty is perfectly fine the way it is.
IT EXPLAINS SO MUCH!
NPC death and resurrection => no penalty
NPC petrification and stone to flesh => no penalty
Character (or NPC) level drain and restoration => no penalty
Arcane magic user or Divine magic user casting very high level spell => no penalty
I don't think it's fair!!!
The point is the rule discourages the use of the familiar as familiar by penalizing the death of this very frail thing by something harder than any other penalty except for permanent death. As I said, while it's very easy to avoid this, it transforms this spell to another, much less interesting spell and therefore I really can't see any wisdom in this design decision.
- From a RP perspective = BIG penalty. The loss of a friend
- From a Game play perspective = Loss of companion until you can get to temple or other method of resurrection, often involving the loss of a one time use magic item and/or significant gold
Not really sure what the rest of those entrants have any relevance to the topic at hand.
At the end of the day, if you saved the game prior to putting your familiar in jeopardy, merely reload. This is the definition of no penalty.
Considering that a level 1 spell gives a wizard a permanent gain of 2-3X their starting hit points AND a companion that at early levels can take out wolves and gibberlings and other minor creatures. AND can pick pockets/remove traps and scout the area, I think that SOME kind of penalty is warranted for a 1st level spell THAT powerful. Compare that to sleep or magic missile? No contest.
edited for tone.
First of all; I'm not very confident with my English, so usually I don't write long posts, that's why sometimes the may look cryptic.
But this time I'll try my best to explain.
I'm talking about the decision they made long time ago, when they put familiars into bg2.
At that time you couldn't cast them in bg1, so, even if it's a first level spell, it's not so powerful.
When you start bg2 you are already very close to being able to cast spell like raise dead. And you can decide to use someone like Minsc as an expendable, very powerful and reckless scout. Even if he dies every few hours, who cares if you are able to resurrect him without any penalties?
In pnp raise dead gives -1 con. I'm quite sure there's a penalty for stone to flash. I don't remember about level drain, but when it happened to my character, I've never recivered everything (maybe it was my DM).
Many high level spell are tough for the caster. He will lose something when he casts one of them (speed makes you loose one year of life, raise dead or restoration make him unable to do anything for a long time), you don't simply ask someone how much gold they cost.
About roleplaying, the same loss you feel when your friend dies, you feel when your pet dies.
I'm not saying they should change that penalty, again I'm only saying it's weird they implemented permanent penalties only when your familiar dies.
The original reason it was implemented the way it was in BG2 was because that was the way it was in PnP. In PnP, if your familiar died, you lost a point of CON, had to make a save versus death and couldn't summon another one for a year. Since the other two conditions were not practical to implement (since only the protagonist could summon one and a save vs death would end the game), they stuck with the only condition that they could.
Holistically, I personally feel that it is a small loss for a midsize gain. As indicated, most players keep their pets in their backpacks most of the time so they gain 10hp (or whatever it is these days) for free essentially. Throw in very careful use of their abilities (and one of them casts AOE invisibility), and you get some limited use for a spell that you only ever have to cast once. Pretty nice in my view.
More importantly, I've seen other posters who use familiars as perm-summonables. I saw one poster who didn't notice the CON drain until they were down to like 2 or 3 or some such and then complained. More than anything, I think that the CON drain makes sense just to deal with those types of players.
Would it break the game to remove the limitation? No. Is it crippling in it's current implementation? Only if you don't respect your familiar.
But again, I respect your point of view as well.
And even if you go by the more lenient 3rd edition version you still permanently lose a level when raised (unless lvl 1, which loses 1 Con).
It's more the player/npc rez options are too lenient rather then Find familiar being too hard.
But, you get 2 levels or so worth of bonus hp and access to extra abilities/spells (depending on the familiar in question), so they're well worth the bag slot, IMO.
And keep in mind......the evil and good familiars aren't even supposed to be choices until like lvl 6 or 8, depending. And you're supposed to be able to choose your familiar, not be arbitrarily given one. Common animal familiars can be used by any alignment (and have no level requirement), while demons and lesser dragons do have alignment restrictions but also require minimum lvls of like 6 or as high as 9 before you should be able to get one. Mephits are just elemental spirits and require min 6 but have no alignment restriction because they're neutral.
Subsequent editions may have changed this to what was described, but for us old fogies, it was a die roll.
But yes, thanks very much @ZanathKariashi for pointing out what the resurrection penalties were. And if you played an Elf, you couldn't get brought back at all.
And you need a cleric high enough and wise enough to cast 7th level spells, AND one willing to eat the 10 years of life lost* per cast in addition to being to tired to cast for a week afterward.
*spells that reduce life span do so for every 100 years of average life span of the race in question, with a minimum of 100.
A lot of the 'costs' of higher level spells simply didn't make it into BG. I seem to remember reading that certain spells required sacrificing of 1000 gp gems every time you cast and others required specifically prepared components. I guess for a video game, it did it's best. And at least they didn't implement food. it took months for my wizard to condition the dwarf in the party to carry his rations. Good old 'Baggage Carrier'. I miss him.
I do remember Resurrection worked on Elves, but the common wisdom was you would NEVER find an NPC cleric or temple willing to cast it for you. The cost (years of life) was just too great. So until your party had its own 14+ level cleric, the elves needed to play it safe! And as Spyder suggests, 14 is a very high level. In 30+ years of gaming I've only ever been a part of two parties tha got ANY characters up to those sort of levels (not included characters or parties that were designed to be high level from the start).
Restoration and Haste both had aging penalties too, which meant neither spell was used much. And there are many other spells with VERY expensive material components that will only be cast in very special circumstances.
And even one of the quests gave you a feeling of what it was like in play in a PnP setting, when you needed to track down a Heal spell, for a quest. The local priest wasn't powerful enough to cast it, so you had to seek out one else where to get the spell you required, and they required you to do a rather difficult favor in exchange for it since you weren't a member of their faithful. (to be honest it's a small miracle in itself that you can find any priests willing to heal you for gold, especially for things above 2nd or 3rd level, given that they normally reserve their spells for their own faithful first and with a few exceptions, generally won't even sell their power to others).
Even the humble identify spell had a costly component (and reduced your Constitution by like 8 for 24 hours), depending on how accurate you wanted the spell to be. A bardic lore equivalent check (would reveal one property of the item, if successful (had a 10% success chance per level to a maximum of 90%)) cost 100 gold, where as a BG style identify cost like 500 gold to reveal all properties. (which is part of why the ease of identifying items is ridiculous, even if you had multiple castings of identify, the con penalty would still restrict you to one or two per day, and glasses of identification only worked at the 1 property setting and still take give you the con penalty).
yeah, that's why level drain was such a big deal in PnP. It wasn't a minor annoyance like in BG, it was difficult to protect against and extremely difficult to remove to the point most people just said %^&$ it and gained the level back through adventuring rather then trying to find someone willing to fix it.