Disarming traps adding XP to the thief

lujo

I was wondering what would happen if disarming traps gave some exeprience to the Thief. I'm kind of sure that there are some self-resetting traps out there that would cause an infinite XP exploit of some kind, but that can be fixed.

The thing is that traps are kind of banal, and healing is kind of pleniful and the game would be a much better experience if you had a reason to care about traps. There's quite a bunch of them around, but there's no real motivation to pay attetntion to finding them and disarming them. A fixed non-shared 100XP to the thief who disarms them would totally motivate a person to explore certain areas as a thief (or save them for XP with Annah).

I'm thinking about suggesting it officially, and I suspect it might be trivial to implement, except I'd need to know if there are any obvious roadblocks. If Beamdog don't implement it it'd still make a great mod, I think.

So, did anyone knowledgeable consider this? Any obvious snags? Anyone know how to do this?

argent77

The game behaves similar to BG:EE or IWD:EE in that regard. There are traps that may trigger every time they are touched, but that doesn't (or shouldn't) affect the disarming behavior. I've played my last run with a fully defined XPBONUS.2DA (which controls the XP bonus for various thieving actions) without issues. Only XP for scribing spells doesn't appear to work in PST:EE.

I don't think it's really needed in PSTEE though. There are many other ways to earn XP. It could be an option for a tweak mod however.

bob_veng

i think it would be good for PS:TEE, for roleplaying because there are a lot of ways to avoid conflict in PS:TEE which would be an intuitive way to play as a thief, and that necessarily means less experience, and less frequent experience rewards so gaining experience from some other source as a thief would make you feel like you're still playing the "correct way", even if it's not a lot of experience.
i remember that this was a concern for me the very first time i played PS:T

lujo

The experience itself isn't the point, although it is in a small way. The point is that just being able to "collect" the trap gives more incentive to playing certain areas as a thief AND to even pay attention to traps at all.

I mean, you're imortal, you really can just walk through all of them.

The XP would be very nice, in a small way, to help Annah catch up to the rest of the guys. If you follow any guide, and many people do when they play Torment, you'll do a billion quests and possibly even farm a bunch of Abishai by the time you get her. Scoring some nice roleplay / class exclusive XP just for her from actually interacting with your environment would be great.

Right, so, I'm not looking to suggest implementing anything but a fixed 100 XP for trap disarms formally, apart from maybe some form of auto-detect for traps. It'd probably be easier to talk them into implementing it if we had the whole thing ready.

Could you share the fully defined XPBONUS.2DA? @argent77 Or rather just the relevant part?

argent77

I agree, from a role-playing standpoint it would make sense to gain some experience from picking locks or disarming traps.

I've used a slightly modified version of BG2EE's XPBONUS.2DA.

2DA V1.0
0
              1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40
DISARM_TRAP   250  250  250  250  400  400  400  750  750  750  1000 1000 1000 1000 1500 1500 1500 1500 2500 2500 2500 2500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500 3500
PICK_LOCK     100  100  150  150  250  250  250  400  400  400  750  750  750  750  1000 1000 1000 1000 1500 1500 1500 1500 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000 3000
LEARN_SPELL   500  1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0
WISDOM        0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0     0   0    0    2    5    8    10   13   15   18   20   23   25   27   30   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35   35

lujo

Not to mention that with this sort of thing implemented you'd have two option for intial Thief: the money route focusing on pickpocket (which everyone now takes) and the trap route focusing on pick-lock which would suddenly become a thing.

Also opens up room for modders to make traps and such. And, well, general-purpose-game-apart-takers like myself to bloody well look at traps and see what's there

How do you implement this thing?

lujo

I've playtested this, it's a giant leap towards making thieves properly playable (they're playable but there's otherwise barely any incentive to actually use their skills).

I've formally suggested/requested an implementation. The game would be much better off for it.

jaklumen

I've actually rather enjoyed playing TNO as a Thief lately, having installed @mirandir's Auto-Detect Traps mod. Could this idea be integrated into that mod? I was going to suggest making this a mod itself, but it seems like it would be more appealing to have auto-detecting traps and XP for disarming them together.