Improving in-game spells descriptions

Alonso

I find the wordiness of the spells descriptions annoying. Most of the information provided in the descriptions is redundant. For instance, the description of the Bless spell takes five lines to say that it adds 1 to the morale, attack rolls and damage rolls of friendly creatures. Is there any way to modify the descriptions to remove all the blather? Even better, has anyone done it already?

Gallowglass

It's called flavour. It's for immersion and role-playing. It's part of what makes these games so popular.

lunar

Gallowglass said:

It's called flavour. It's for immersion and role-playing. It's part of what makes these games so popular.

I agree. I would hate if spell descriptions were short and to the point, like:

Fireball: 1d6/level fire damage in a 30'radius, save for half
Cure light wounds:heals 8 hp.

The current descriptions add a bit of flavour and makes the game more enjoyable, to me. Like knowing magic missile is one of the most popular spells for its level, or a priest laying his hands on a creature while casting a cure spell, a chill touch making caster's hands glow blue, or imagining a fireball victim dodging and rolling away when he saves, etc. all according to spell descriptions.

elminster

Plus there are like 400+ spell descriptions in the series. It is a huge amount of tedious work to go through all that for any modder. The enhanced editions though have largely fixed up the existing issues, though there are probably going to still be cases where they are not perfect.

If you do encounter errors in the text you can report them in these threads.

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/17044/please-report-bg-ee-game-text-errors-here/p1

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/37851/report-bgii-ee-game-text-errors-here/p1

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/36147/please-report-iwd-ee-game-text-errors-here

Mortianna

On the contrary, I'd prefer longer spell descriptions, especially on the unique histories and authors of certain spells. For example, without being steeped in Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk lore, how is a player going to know about Larloch, Agannazar, or Otiluke?

Richly described spells and items are all part of the text-based (A)D&D experience in the BG and IWD series. I've always felt these nuances add to the games' RP elements and help steer them away from simple "hack and slash."

Alonso

I do love colourful spell descriptions (and colourful everything else) myself. I didn't explain very well what I mean by "wordiness". I'm talking about sentences like "The target of this spell must make a saving throw vs. spell or come under its effects". These kind of sentences are everywhere in the descriptions and they don't improve the game in any way. They are just a wordy repetition of what was stated two lines above ("Saving Throw: Neg."). No colourfulness here.

Apart from that, colourful descriptions are great... The first ten times you read them. Personally, I keep checking the descriptions of the spells I use often over and over, so a concise description (in addition to the "colorful" one) would be very useful and time saving.

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JuliusBorisov

And I just can't wait to read those new descriptions for new spells in SoD.