Should Charm make them blue?
chimeric
Member Posts: 1,163
In the original Baldur's Gate Charm Person had a very long duration, I don't remember what it was exactly. It shows that Bioware, interested in recreating pen-and-paper AD&D, was not too concerned with "balance," not afraid that players would move the charmed creature around the map, using it as cannon fodder. And, in truth, since controlled creatures can't leave the area, which is sometimes as small as a room or a floor of a tower, the potential for wide abuse was probably not great. On the other hand, when this spell works, it effectively eliminates a hostile creature, so in the middle of a fight it could be very powerful.
Beamdog nerfed the Charm spells: Charm Person now only lasts 5 rounds. And, as before, it replaces the creature's dialogue with a single friendly response. As for me, I feel that charm was not well-implemented from the beginning. Why does it replace the normal dialogue, when except in a couple of special cases this gives no benefits to the player - instead of creating special, advantageous dialogue options inside the dialogue? And why does it work as mental domination, turning the creature into a puppet, with all its spells and abilities for you to use as you please? And why is it necessarily a hostile spell, turning the creature hostile after the spell expires? Even a waitress turns red after she has had her mind messed with a little by a party of adventurers armed to the teeth! Perhaps they didn't actually abuse her trust, or perhaps she was fooled out of a small item or some gold. The outcome is the same: the NPC flies at the party, ready to kill or be killed.
So what I suggest is changing the Charm spells so that they make creatures blue - GOODBUTBLUE, in fact. Then the spells could be allowed a longer duration, even as long as a day, because you would not be able to directly manipulate the creature, make it attack who you want, order it off the battlefield into the fog of war to kill later or tap into its spells. But it would fight, as its AI directs, on your side. (An especially attractive concept if the AI is improved by Sword Coast Stratagems.) Making a creature blue instead of green is much more appropriate for the power of the charm spells and their level. After the spell expires, the creature need not, I think, necessarily turn hostile, there might be a percentile chance - and with a day-long duration you won't wait around to reload a save, which should make players think twice before they risk charming Taerom the smith or, say, Thalantyr the wizard.
Why? Because if they do turn red, the only way to make them useful again, talk to them and access their stores and quests would be to charm them once more. As things are, this does not help, because you can, of course, order a charmed creature to cease attacking you, but its conversation gets replaced with a single response. Thalantyr, for instance, gives you some advice about adventuring, but his store is forever lost. But if charmed creatures were to retain their normal dialogue, possibly with the friendly text in there, we could add charmed-only response options for the player to click. This would make Charm an actual role-playing aid. (Special cases like Mulahey, Tranzig etc. should be left untouched.)
Of course, turning creatures green and bossing them around, being the puppet master is nice too. But that, I think, is what higher-level magic like Domination and Mental Domination (and Magic Jar, if I get around to that one) is for.
You might notice that this proposal is in line with my idea to make Friends an allegiance-changer in addition to giving those Charisma points. That's because it's part of a plan to make way for more subtle interactions in the game by replacing straight control (green circle) with assistance (blue circle).
So what do you think?
Beamdog nerfed the Charm spells: Charm Person now only lasts 5 rounds. And, as before, it replaces the creature's dialogue with a single friendly response. As for me, I feel that charm was not well-implemented from the beginning. Why does it replace the normal dialogue, when except in a couple of special cases this gives no benefits to the player - instead of creating special, advantageous dialogue options inside the dialogue? And why does it work as mental domination, turning the creature into a puppet, with all its spells and abilities for you to use as you please? And why is it necessarily a hostile spell, turning the creature hostile after the spell expires? Even a waitress turns red after she has had her mind messed with a little by a party of adventurers armed to the teeth! Perhaps they didn't actually abuse her trust, or perhaps she was fooled out of a small item or some gold. The outcome is the same: the NPC flies at the party, ready to kill or be killed.
So what I suggest is changing the Charm spells so that they make creatures blue - GOODBUTBLUE, in fact. Then the spells could be allowed a longer duration, even as long as a day, because you would not be able to directly manipulate the creature, make it attack who you want, order it off the battlefield into the fog of war to kill later or tap into its spells. But it would fight, as its AI directs, on your side. (An especially attractive concept if the AI is improved by Sword Coast Stratagems.) Making a creature blue instead of green is much more appropriate for the power of the charm spells and their level. After the spell expires, the creature need not, I think, necessarily turn hostile, there might be a percentile chance - and with a day-long duration you won't wait around to reload a save, which should make players think twice before they risk charming Taerom the smith or, say, Thalantyr the wizard.
Why? Because if they do turn red, the only way to make them useful again, talk to them and access their stores and quests would be to charm them once more. As things are, this does not help, because you can, of course, order a charmed creature to cease attacking you, but its conversation gets replaced with a single response. Thalantyr, for instance, gives you some advice about adventuring, but his store is forever lost. But if charmed creatures were to retain their normal dialogue, possibly with the friendly text in there, we could add charmed-only response options for the player to click. This would make Charm an actual role-playing aid. (Special cases like Mulahey, Tranzig etc. should be left untouched.)
Of course, turning creatures green and bossing them around, being the puppet master is nice too. But that, I think, is what higher-level magic like Domination and Mental Domination (and Magic Jar, if I get around to that one) is for.
You might notice that this proposal is in line with my idea to make Friends an allegiance-changer in addition to giving those Charisma points. That's because it's part of a plan to make way for more subtle interactions in the game by replacing straight control (green circle) with assistance (blue circle).
So what do you think?
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Dire charm was an enchantment spell that caused one person to go on a murderous rampage.
Similar to charm person, this spell worked on humanoid creatures of medium size or smaller. The spell operated by making the subject believe they really enjoyed killing, whereupon they would immediately attack with berserker fury the nearest person other than the caster, friend or foe. The subject used the quickest and deadliest means available and continued until all potential targets were eliminated. If no targets were available, the subject reverted to normal behavior as if nothing was wrong. If a new target was spotted before the spell expired, the subject again launched an attack with intent to kill.[1]
The subject of this spell would not attack the caster unless the caster attacked the subject, in which case the subject would single-mindedly attempt to kill the caster and no one else.
I couldn't find an actual spell description in the books, but the meaning is clear. I intend to change Dire Charm into a Berserk effect. By the way, Berserk works on NPC, contrary to what the G3 guide says.
GOODBUTBLUE will wreck it for enemy casters. Unless you're prepared to overhaul the general AI system (its implementation being a mess on its own), messing with "enemy-ally" creature field is something you really want to stay away from.
I suppose, you could use a filter to only turn enemies into blue ally, while keeping the effect unchanged for everyone else. But you'll still have to deal with the fact that enemy AI is far from being optimized to work in both directions - lots of old scripts explicitly target PC or GOODCUTOFF objects, instead of NearestEnemyOf() which is relative to script owner's allegiance.
PS Also items/kits with charm immunity may get broken too, although it's possible to mass patch them.
Or is there? I can imagine interesting adventures if someone actually did extend the durations to 24 hours for the AI. Beating a charm with a charm, Dispel Magic would become more important, and ingenuity too... But that's beyond my scope of work for now.
There is nothing I can do with old scripts... I'll see whether they create many problems or not. But scripts for creatures, if you open them, are generally of two types. The first type is for creatures who begin hostile, the monsters, and they attack GOODCUTOFF or PC on sight. The game presumes those will be the only creatures who the monsters will fight, although even now, if I'm not mistaken, summoned creatures and, of course, charmed/controlled ones use different EA values. So that's not really a problem with my proposal, the scripts (the basic scripts, anyway, used by many creatures) should be massively patched to make every baddie attacks GOODBUTBLUE on sight (and maybe those other types too). It just makes sense for monsters to attack friends of the enemy. So this problem can be reduced, I believe, with a couple more lines in the scripts.
The other kind of creature who may cause trouble because of the old scripts are neutrals. But with them it's no problem: since GOODBUTBLUE creatures, like I suggest charmed ones should be, cannot be ordered about directly, and until fighting begins, ignore neutrals, the player will have to attack neutrals personally to start a fight. And then their usual script targets will be appropriate. Updating for GOODBUTBLUE should have been done before, but blue friendlies were just rare, the game expected puppets. If this changes, there needs to be a ripple effect, obviously, affecting other aspects. For now I'm just talking about a demo.
- Edit: had wrong EA values here, confusing. Fixed it to make sense.
As for protections from charm and so on, they can be edited to give Immunity to Effect (AI Change). Elves and half-elves get their percentages against AI Change now. (If you think about it, charm is AI change, it's just a name for magical manipulation. There is no such "thing" called charm. So that's what happens now, they get switched to friendly mode). As for spells that enemies cast, as I said, I don't think they should be touched at this point. What I did is put a 1-second Feeeblemindedness after the AI swap. That way if the creature had been red and attacking you, or doing something else that's not appropriate now, it gets a mind wipe. Scripts stop running, and when they start up again, it's a whole new world. (Again it's interesting how the spell effects actually reflect the way a real change of mind happens, isn't it?) The trick works, that, at least, I can vouch for.
P.S. For dialogues I suggest putting a different condition instead of STATE_CHARMED. You can put the new CHARMED value from Specific that I'm inserting there. What's worrisome is that a whole lot of conversations would have to be edited, even though it's always only a top state in them. If we are getting rid of STATE_CHARMED altogether, then the charm spells can't satisfy that trigger, so... I don't know if there is an automatic way to edit a bunch of states in different conversations.
So, on the whole, is this a big change? Yes, and it has pros and cons. In a way, Bioware should have made Charm blue all those years ago, theirs was not a good solution. Now players have to cover a lot of ground to get more subtlety and role-playing value out of the system. Then again, moving people around with a 1st level spell feels nice. Go here, go there. But I think that having somewhat unpredictable companions and helpers instead would boost the level of sophistication, especially in combination with other effects that now become possible. I mean that there is no way to command a creature running its scripts with ActionOverride. But when a GOODCUTOFF creature is calm and not fighting, you can have an invisible creature issue it orders - call it, send it away and so on. NEUTRAL is useful too, and it can be a transit state. Here is the idea for Suggestion: change AI to NEUTRAL, feeblemind to make it stop in its tracks, set another Specific state on it, then spawn an invisible creature, have it look around for that Specific and make the target drop its weapons or walk off across the map. It's all possible with a neutral.