Cheating death (like a boss)
gunman
Member Posts: 215
Yeah, this just happened while playing the original BG1
My character, a level 1 mage with a measly 4 HP (of which 3 remaining) was about to receive a lightning bolt to the face:
He gulped a potion of healing kept at the ready and at the same time rolled a critical save vs spell (while Silke rolled the minimum damage of 6 for the bolt)
Then he walked away as the lightning bolt was hurling back and forth near the dead body of Silke (no bystanders were injured):
My character, a level 1 mage with a measly 4 HP (of which 3 remaining) was about to receive a lightning bolt to the face:
He gulped a potion of healing kept at the ready and at the same time rolled a critical save vs spell (while Silke rolled the minimum damage of 6 for the bolt)
Then he walked away as the lightning bolt was hurling back and forth near the dead body of Silke (no bystanders were injured):
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Comments
Even if Silke, who is a level 10 Bard, rolled the minimum damage on her Lightining Bolt spell, it would have dealt you 5 damage on a successful save (10d6 damage, minimum 10, half on a save).
You can easily test this yourself by creating a character and editing his Str to 25, giving him +14 damage and he still won't be able to kill Imoen in one hit if she is level 1, he will only do 7 damage on the first hit.
Interesting, I didn't know that was in the original too. So how does it work, do you have to have full hitpoints to survive the hit, or you only need to have more than 1 HP ?
-Be level 1
-Have all of your HP
-Your maximum HP is 13 or lower
And it looks like this was implemented in the original game aswell considering that your character didn't die, or maybe you were playing in Normal or Easy difficulty I don't know, but Silke being a level 10 Bard, the minimum damage of a Lightning Bolt spell on a successful save is still 5 in Core Rules.
Plus to be able to cast a Ligthning Bolt spell, a Bard must be atleast level 7 if he/she isn't using a scroll, which means that the minimum damage would be 4 I think.
Another thought was that drinking the potion of healing and the lightning bolt damage were added and subtracted from the HP at the same tick, and the damage of 3 was the difference between them (3 starting HP + 9 HP potion - 11 lightning bold damage = 1 remaining HP)
So the mechanic is indeed in BG1 and "having more than 1 maximum HP" is also a condition. My curiosity is now satisfied
A spell that allows a save will see you survive if you make the save as a lvl 1 character at full hp. If a full hp lvl 1 Xzar gets blasted by a fireball, he will receive 3 damage in the first damage line, and if he makes a save, he will survive. If he doesn't, the second damage line will be huge and possibly chunk a 1 hp remaining Xzar.
The worst is elite black talons, their arrows do normal plus cold damage, thus the normal piercing damage can drop a character to 1 hp, and the extra bit of cold damage will then kill a lvl 1 character. (unless they happen to wear the belt of antipode in ee, which grants immunity to cold)
If you want to test yourself, just cheat or import a character with Lightning Bolt, start the prologue in Candlekeep and Ctrl+Q Imoen in your party. She's almost guaranteed for fail her save and therefore will die.
If the save is succesful, the first line is seen (first half of the damage) and the second line is omitted by the save vs spells line. If the save fails, the spell does two lines of full damage, each line representing the half of the full spell damage. This may be erronously interpreted as the spell hitting twice by some.
The curious mechanic that protects a lvl 1 full hp character also comes to effect in such spells, so level 1 4 hp Cormyus in the screenshot can survive a 10d6 lightning hit if he makes a save. (Silke is not level 6, she is level 9 or 10, IIRC) Since he has 4 hp, he can take no more than 3 hp damage in a single hit if he has full health. The first half of the lightning (5d6 damage) counts as a seperate hit, and the second seperate hit is blocked by a save. Ofcourse lightning is a bad spell to try this, since it ricochets like wild and can sometimes really hit a character twice. Cormyus was really lucky there.
Max 1 hp character is kinda impossible, though. Con 2 or 3 gives -2 hp, thus an elven mage with 2 con will have 2 hp at the very least. A mage needs to have 1 con to get -3 hp and have max 1 hp. Familiar death can drop con down to 1, but in all likelihood, such a loss will most likely kill the level 1 character outright from backlash damage. Hmm gotta check if level 1 rule protects against the backlash damage kill. But familiar death first reduces max hp and then deals extra damage, so how the engine interprets this is kinda tricky to guess. I vaguely remember my lvl 1 mage dying from familiar death, but I am not sure if he was wounded prior.
@Artemius_I I imagine the reason spells sometimes killed you was when they did 2 lots of damage, e.g. you failed a save against a fireball - thus resisting the first lot of damage, but being killed by the second.