Out of Commission (mod)
chimeric
Member Posts: 1,163
Games:
Made and tested on BG:EE, but should work with all Enhanced Edition games.
Description:
The Infinity Engine games approach rest with a severe ellipsis: the player clicks the "Rest" button, a movie plays, and the next moment 8 hours have rolled by, everyone has healed up and spells have been memorized. The game will even cast healing magic for you, all to shorten the downtime and get the characters on the road ASAP. If one rest session is not enough, you can just repeat it. While this approach has its merits, I suggest a different dynamic to make time matter and place adventures in time instead of redacting it.
Out of Commission does nothing to the "Rest" button or inn rooms, which still work as before, but suggests refraining from their use. Instead characters can rest with a special ability all party members get. They can rest severally - at different times and away from each other. When the special ability button is clicked, the character needing rest will leave the party (without bothersome dialogue) and lie down. There is no sleeping in the presence of enemies or on city streets, otherwise you can recline anywhere. In 8 hours the character will get up, refreshed, with magic at the ready and 3 hit points healed, and rejoin the party automatically. While he sleeps, the rest of the group is free to leave the area to explore, fight, trade or take on other members. They can stay away for any length of time - when they return to the area with the sleeper, he will step in.
Example:
Dorn the half-orc has been hurt, and Branwen the cleric has run out of spells to heal him. Both settle down to rest, leaving just 4 characters in the party. These are relatively fresh and head out to explore the rest of the area, getting a better split of the experience for the greater risk. Had the player wanted to keep character progress equal, he could have hazarded Dorn and Branwen.
When rest happens in real time, several things change: you only want to have rest those characters who require it and you are likely to be more frugal with spells, because depleted casters will need their full recuperation. A sleeping character can be roused - just move another party member immediately next to the sleeper for a few seconds (longer if the character is sleeping drunk or fatigued). In a pinch you can hurt sleepers to wake them up quickly, and enemies wandering into the vicinity tend to get through after a while. A roused character will be groggy for a short time and must restart his 8 hours to get the benefits of resting, so camp in a quiet corner.
Having laid down a few people, if there is no dungeon nearby or not enough manpower for it, you do not have to pace around the room the whole 8 hours. The special ability works differently for the main character: he will recline but stay in the party, the screen will fade out, the "Rest" movie will play, and time will advance by 8 hours.
A technical note: resting with Out of Commission uses an effect, not the Rest() action, so the PartyRested() trigger will not check true. I am not aware of official scripts of BG:EE relying on that trigger anywhere but in one case where it seems to be for convenience, but mods might use it. In BG2:EE romances and dreams with Irenicus are tied to this trigger. Therefore, the old "Rest" button should still be clicked for special moments in storylines, such as the dream sequences that give you special abilities - after the death of Mulahey, after the Cloakwood Mines etc. These moments are well-known to those who have played the games extensively, which at this point is almost everyone. You should also periodically click it in the second game if you want romances to advance.
Download below
Made and tested on BG:EE, but should work with all Enhanced Edition games.
Description:
The Infinity Engine games approach rest with a severe ellipsis: the player clicks the "Rest" button, a movie plays, and the next moment 8 hours have rolled by, everyone has healed up and spells have been memorized. The game will even cast healing magic for you, all to shorten the downtime and get the characters on the road ASAP. If one rest session is not enough, you can just repeat it. While this approach has its merits, I suggest a different dynamic to make time matter and place adventures in time instead of redacting it.
Out of Commission does nothing to the "Rest" button or inn rooms, which still work as before, but suggests refraining from their use. Instead characters can rest with a special ability all party members get. They can rest severally - at different times and away from each other. When the special ability button is clicked, the character needing rest will leave the party (without bothersome dialogue) and lie down. There is no sleeping in the presence of enemies or on city streets, otherwise you can recline anywhere. In 8 hours the character will get up, refreshed, with magic at the ready and 3 hit points healed, and rejoin the party automatically. While he sleeps, the rest of the group is free to leave the area to explore, fight, trade or take on other members. They can stay away for any length of time - when they return to the area with the sleeper, he will step in.
Example:
Dorn the half-orc has been hurt, and Branwen the cleric has run out of spells to heal him. Both settle down to rest, leaving just 4 characters in the party. These are relatively fresh and head out to explore the rest of the area, getting a better split of the experience for the greater risk. Had the player wanted to keep character progress equal, he could have hazarded Dorn and Branwen.
When rest happens in real time, several things change: you only want to have rest those characters who require it and you are likely to be more frugal with spells, because depleted casters will need their full recuperation. A sleeping character can be roused - just move another party member immediately next to the sleeper for a few seconds (longer if the character is sleeping drunk or fatigued). In a pinch you can hurt sleepers to wake them up quickly, and enemies wandering into the vicinity tend to get through after a while. A roused character will be groggy for a short time and must restart his 8 hours to get the benefits of resting, so camp in a quiet corner.
Having laid down a few people, if there is no dungeon nearby or not enough manpower for it, you do not have to pace around the room the whole 8 hours. The special ability works differently for the main character: he will recline but stay in the party, the screen will fade out, the "Rest" movie will play, and time will advance by 8 hours.
A technical note: resting with Out of Commission uses an effect, not the Rest() action, so the PartyRested() trigger will not check true. I am not aware of official scripts of BG:EE relying on that trigger anywhere but in one case where it seems to be for convenience, but mods might use it. In BG2:EE romances and dreams with Irenicus are tied to this trigger. Therefore, the old "Rest" button should still be clicked for special moments in storylines, such as the dream sequences that give you special abilities - after the death of Mulahey, after the Cloakwood Mines etc. These moments are well-known to those who have played the games extensively, which at this point is almost everyone. You should also periodically click it in the second game if you want romances to advance.
Download below
Post edited by chimeric on
6
Comments
Just an idea: why don't you try to recreate the AD&D spell "Nap"?
The description follows: This will hit your mod's idea without enforcing the player to wait eight long hours before going into an adventure. In 8 hours a player can do every Baldur's Gate quest, so I think it is a long time.
Cheers!
Seems to be a prob with the download link and had to type the following in manually to get it to download...
www.shsforums.net/files/download/1186-out-of-commision
Your link returns me to the current page, possibly just a copy / paste prob.
Gus
Edit: Tried to hyperlink it for others to grab it but ended with the same prob, link came back to the page. Might be a server side prob. For others: until it is sorted, if you want the mod just copy the link above and paste into a browser address field.
To @Raduziel: I think that spell is overpowered even for the pen-and-paper game. Skipping almost an entire night with just a 2nd level spell, well, someone who did that constantly would boost his conscious lifetime by one-third. Napoleon slept for just 4 hours, if I'm not mistaken, but this... Even so, in the pen-and-paper game sleep is one thing and memorization is separate. A spell takes ten minutes per spell level, I believe, to memorize. One fireball is 30 minutes' worth of sitting over a book, so wizards and priests can't very well go around expending their whole arsenal. In the computer adaptations it's all taken care of, wrapped up and put out of sight, and I was kind of unhappy about time not mattering. That is why rest takes quite long in my mod, to change the gameplay. This won't be more "convenient" than the current streamlined system. It's less convenient, because you have to order characters individually. But this should make people consider carefully when to use up spells and especially not expect easy abundant healing.
Part of the idea was to recreate this experience from the pen-and-paper game: when a party pulls up at an inn, some of the characters will hit the sheets, some will chat with the innkeeper, some will get into books and some, not tired, will go out to explore. This mod is going to play well only if you think of resting as something a character really "has to" do - when exhausted, out of spells, wounded etc. Those are the characters who will "want" to lay down. Others, thinking in-character, have no wish and can't stand around the sleepers for 8 hours, so they go and do something else.
I think you're making a good point that 8 hours is a long time in the time scale of the games, though this really depends on the situation. If a character or two were left to rest and the others think they have time for a whole big quest, well, consider that they may get wounded and require rest themselves. And then time will catch up much more quickly. Remember, the main character can rest anytime and "fast forward." Also the current mindset, with a large party together and tons of healing spells, is always to press forward - going in a dungeon, even in a party of 5, to just keep saving the game and pushing on. But if you have no choice but to lay down some of the party, leave half of the strength behind, then the tougher battles are going to be just too hard, or you may have to be really devious. So as loss of manpower slows you down, breezing ahead while some people are snoozing and missing XP shouldn't be a major concern. But I'm going to wait for feedback on how the mod plays vis-a-vis the length of the "night."
Also everyone please note that resting the usual way is needed in BG2:EE for romances and Irenicus dreams, so do that to advance them. I was not aware of this, but now I've put it in the file description.