Substitute scrolls

chimeric

I'm thinking of making a spell that would be based on Dictation from Spells&Magic. The version to appear here would replicate spell scrolls from the inventory - useful for making extras of certain rare spells of which only a single copy might exist in my mod. I don't want to encourage players to reload if they fail to learn a spell, so I want to let them make inferior copies of real scrolls. The original would need to be read out loud for the words to lay on paper, triggering its effects on the caster, it would be expended, and several copies would appear. I see two possibilities for these scrolls: a) they would only be useful for learning the spell, but not for casting it, b) the spell could be cast from them, but at some chance of failure.

I guess for the second option I would only need the regular Cast Spell at some probability lower than 100? But what I'm really interested is lowering the chance to learn. How can I achieve that? Can I do this with duplicate spells to learn, ones that would work the same as regulars but belong to another school, "foreign" to all specialists (but what about mages?)? But in that case the spells would end up neither Alteration nor Necromancy nor Illusion but something else in the spellbook, which on a wide scale would be badly balanced vis-a-vis various protections. I could apply this idea in a special case to a few select Invocation/Evocation scrolls and call the spell that lets the wizard obtain these out-of-school spells for his spellbook Shadow Magic, an adaptation of that spell from the Player's Handbook. But more generally, for Dictation, I need some other solution to lower the learning chance. Is it possible to bundle an Intelligence penalty with the Learn Spell effect for the button?

kjeron

chimeric said:

Is it possible to bundle an Intelligence penalty with the Learn Spell effect for the button?

Possible but not practical.
Opcode 147(Learn Spell) must be the first effect in an item ability for the Scribe button to exist.

You can:
* 147 effect with dummy spell to trigger the scribe button
* set Intelligence(19) to alter success chance
* 147 effect for the actual spell
* 321 to remove the Intelligence mod
* Remove(172) the dummy spell
But doing so will generate inaccurate feedback for success/failure of the intended spell.
You would need a dummy spell for every school of every level, with appropriate specialist restrictions set.

chimeric

Too complicated. I think an option of doing Dictation through dialogue would be better. Or how about just patching all scrolls so that they have a second item ability called "Copy"? Is it possible to do that en masse, with Weidu? But no, no, I see that it's not... Well, I could still go through all of the scrolls and add that power that would cast the spell on the caster and create three inferior scrolls in the inventory.