Closed Discussion: Auto Failure on a nat 1

[wilkins1952]

Thoughts on turning off auto failure on a nat 1, Personally given how NWN is different from PNP and there are a lot more rolls in combat. I'd prefer to turn off failure on a nat 1 and just have it be a flat "If you make the save you make the save." Otherwise a lot of things just become "Lets fish for that one roll." Or you end up getting taken out be that one instant death effect and having zero time to react.

[Maiyannah]

On one hand, having 1s always fails saves means that anything with spells or spell-like abilities is always a threat, which keeps the danger of the setting.

On the other hand, we know that NWN completely bullshits some of its rolls and the RNG is cooked, so I would not really trust it to not make this a headache.

I am on the side of disabling it myself, and just adjusting DCs that don't seem to be high enough to be a threat to PCs they should be threatening to. A lot of vanilla DCs are far too low to ever really be effective and they often are lower than TT ends up being (once you consider buffs, average equipment, etc.)

[wilkins1952]

Yeah I think rebalancing some of the saves/DCs on spells and spell like abilities to make them a threat to at level PCs is good. There are a few I know of in the game just from default content that are laughably low at level 40 even. But relying on NWN to do Nat 1s seems as you say a bad idea given how much it struggles with just basic RNG.

[Maiyannah]

I do genuinely wonder if it's possible for me to reimplement the RNG for the dice. I'll ask on NWVault. It wouldn't be so bad if we have a truely pseudo-random distribution and not the baked affair that is NWN's vanilla stuff.

[wilkins1952]

From what I recall of my own looking into this. The combat system is so hardcoded into the game engine that it's pretty much impossible to do any meaningful changes. I recall that even things like Jasperre's AI had some hard limitations with it that straight up were just down to the game not wanting to budge. But if possible it would be a huge improvement over the default NWN

[Maiyannah]

It wouldn't surprise me, but it feels worth at least asking the folks down at NWVault and knowing for sure.

[Ouroboros]

If further iterating on what a nat 1 does isn't possible, I'm in favour of disabling nat 1 fishing. 5% of the time you just eat shit is complete nonsense, especially if it's something like a DC 5 disease check and you have +20 Fortitude.

If iterating is possible, I'd suggest looking into scripting in 'weaker' results for a nat 1. Maybe instead of Phantasmal Killer killing you outright on a nat 1, instead all nat 1'd spell checks hit you with a stacking malus representing battle fatigue or something. Which is really just disabling nat 1s anyway and adding an additional system ontop.

[Maiyannah]

It is possible to replace the RNG. It uses the system entropy on the server, on Linux (which is what we are on)

Ref: https://forum.neverwintervault.org/t/re ... rng/6499/9

I suggest before we reinvent the wheel, I use a cryptographically-secure rand() function. If we still are unhappy with nat 1s after that we can reexamine it. Sound plan-ish?

[wilkins1952]

This sounds like a fair idea. At the very least if it does end up being annoying then something that can be addressed later.

[Maiyannah]

If it's still obnoxious with better RNG under the hood it can always be turned off, of course.
I just think at least half the problem is the default RNG is pretty cooked, as we've seen.