Party members unable to permanently die?

Taugosz

Hello all,

Brand new to the EE games and these forums, so I apologize if I am unaware of something obvious here. I searched these forums, the release notes, Reddit, and elsewhere, but couldn't find anything.

When I have played the original BG games in the past, I played with minimal reloads, and would move on if a character was permanently killed (portrait removed from sidebar, such as when petrified, disintegrated, "chunked", etc.). However, after having started in BG:EE I became suspicious that this feature has been removed. With some casual testing, I've noticed that it is seemingly impossible for this situation to occur in regular combat, whereas I believe in the original it could be triggered by having a blow reduce your character to -10 HP or lower. With ogres and flesh golems, I've noticed that having Xzan at 1 HP receive critical hits from these foes will not cause permanent death - with expanded battle information turned on, I can see that he is seemingly blocked from reaching -10HP, with any such damage that would have been received being negated by an out-of-the-blue and behind-the-scenes increase in damage resistance.

I was playing on Insane, but this occurs when I lower the difficulty to Core Rules as well. Looking at the Baldur.lua and in-game configuration options, I don't see any indication of a way to re-enable this feature. Without this "option", I find it very difficult to role-play choices in the game where the PC would abandon long-time party members in exchange for unfamiliar NPCs encountered very late in the game, whereas before these characters would neatly fill in slots used by characters that met untimely fates.

Does anyone have any information about this?
Cheers,
Taugosz

lolien

I think that turning out gore animations have this side effect, but i dig this just out from my memory, didn't have the time to check it.

Taugosz

Hi lolien,

Thanks for the tip - but I definitely have the gore effects enabled. All the typical creatures and monsters in the game can be chunked by my characters.

Having done a bit more extensive testing just now, I was able to use the console to create flesh golems and use my party as punching bags repeatedly. This revealed some interesting things:

My party members have the following HP totals: Xzar (8), Khalid (13), Montaron (12), Imoen/Jaheira (24 each). What I noticed is that on Core Rules (didn't test Insane this time, but the pattern seems to fit from what I recall), my characters were unable to receive blows greater than (HP TOTAL - 1). That is, no matter how many times I repeated the scenario, Montaron could at most receive a blow of 11, Khalid of 12, and Xzar of 7. This explains why it was impossible for me in my earlier tests to permanently kill Xzar, since he was the only one I tested with. Any damage in excess of those numbers is absorbed by the damage resistance I mentioned before. Interestingly, this affected them even when not a killing blow; Montaron was always reduced to 1 HP before being killed on the next hit, for example, whereas Khalid (who has 12 of 13 HP in my save) was always killed by a precise blow of 12 damage.

Imoen and Jaheira could be killed by blows that reduced them to -24 or lower, but not -19. Unfortunately, I didn't get any damage rolls within that range, but I am assuming the threshold is -20 or -21. Thus, it would be impossible to permanently kill a character that has less than 21 or 22 HP by combat damage. Unfortunately, I lack a copy of the original BG at the moment to see if this was the case there as well and I have just forgotten. The effect does not apply to other creatures, as Kobolds only have something like 4 HP but can definitely be chunked.

The other effect I noticed was that this seemingly disappears when they are above whatever HP threshold is present - Imoen and Jaheira both received hits critical and regular that were 40+ damage.

At this point, I am purely curious as to what the nature of these "training wheels" is: what are the thresholds, were they in regular BG, do they change by difficulty, etc. Is there anyone familiar with the underlying code that can expand on my observations?

Thanks to all,
Taugosz

Gate70

There was another thread about this recently, indicating EE is doing the same as vanilla. The specifics mentioned (subject to my memory) were that level 1 characters at full health and with 13hp or less could not be killed by the first hit.

Will see if I can find the post.

lolien

Gate70 said:

There was another thread about this recently, indicating EE is doing the same as vanilla. The specifics mentioned (subject to my memory) were that level 1 characters at full health and with 13hp or less could not be killed by the first hit.

Will see if I can find the post.

I read this in the did you know thread.

Gate70

Nice spot. I meant this one (which @JuliusBorisov re-found for me)
http://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/810422/#Comment_810422

Taugosz

Thank you both - those were very interesting threads to examine!

It appears that being level 1 is not a requirement though, as in my tests Xzar was a level 2 mage with 8 health, but was still subject to the damage limiting effect. For what it's worth for later reference, Montaron was a level 1 fighter / level 2 thief. Khalid had the most HP of my party while still benefiting from the effect, at 13, so I will assume that the threshold is 13 as was earlier reported.

It seems then that with a couple more level-ups I will be seeing characters explode into gory chunks as I am accustomed, and on a regular basis thanks to Insane difficulty.

Cheers to all,
Taugosz