Selecting thief traps

Jarrakul

So, I don't do much modding (I think you're all brilliant and great and frankly I'm a little intimidated by the whole thing), but I had an idea, and I'd love input on how feasible it is. Thief traps vary by level, but the higher-level ones aren't straight upgrades. There are many circumstances in which I'd prefer the 11th level damage over time trap to the later traps, and the 11th level bounty hunter Hold trap is almost always better than the 16th level Resilient Sphere trap. So my question is, how feasible would it be to allow thieves to choose which trap to set? I'm thinking of something that functions like sorcerer spells, where there's a separate special ability for each trap, but they all draw on the same pool of uses per day.

Does that sound like something that can be done? Any pointers on how to do it, since I'm kind of a modding noob?

elminster

Well my only suggestion would be to look at how the Totemic Druid handles its spirit animals. From a lookover in Near Infinity it looks like uses a "Select Spell" opcode (214) which uses a 2DA file as a resource.

So with the exception of editing the new spells text I think you could do all of this in Near Infinity.

So all you'd need to do is make a new 2DA file that lists out the SPL files of the thief traps you want selectable (check out spcl621.2DA to get an idea of what it would look like), make a copy of the totemic druid spell (spcl621.spl), change the icons of the new spell (so that it is using something that looks more trap like) and change the resource it uses to be the new 2DA file. You'd also need to modify the thieves clab 2da files (clabth01 is one example) so that they had access to this new spell (and remove the lines in them that normally give them additional traps). So instead of them gaining a trap from SPCL412 and (in the case of bounty hunters) SPCL414 they'd instead have a listing for say SPCLTRAP (the file name of your new spell).

You'd also want to make another spell specific for bounty hunter traps (unless you are looking to just have all the various thief traps selectable).

Anyways it is doable.