Force Cage suggestions

Two suggestions for tweaking Force Cage

make the "cage" appear faster. There's enough delay between the cast/failed saving throw and the actual cage being spawned in that an enemy on the move doesn't always get trapped inside. While a number of enemies do comply in giving you the 'sitting duck target', particularly caster types, the melee type enemies tend to be on the move (usually making a bee-line for you), and if they fail the save, they should be trapped, no risk of lag or delay giving them an effective save vs it.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum... when blasting a force cage with disintegrate, could all the cage get removed? Currently only part of the cage is destroyed, which is effective for getting out of it, but the "back/inside" of the cage panels are effectively invisible, requiring camera-jockeying to see which panels have actually been zapped and which are still there, and just plays havoc with path-finding with moving via mouse-click instead of the WASD keys.

Best way to handle this, imo... is to make the cage apply a custscene immobilize just like bigby's grasping hand/bigby's crushing hand does, and apply a VFX to the target to simulate the cage being on them. Make the cage immune to dispelling (except for mordenkainen's disjunction, cuz that is supposed to work on it) and make disintegrate dispel it as well.

A good chunk of the code needed for this could be copied right out of those two bigby's hand spells mentioned above.

The forcecage spell may be adjusted for delaying enemies long enough to let the cage form around them.

As far as disintegrate only taking out one side...the cage itself is four different placeables that appear around the target...the only way to hold a target still while still allowing them to act within the cage (casting spells, using missile weapons, etc.).

Going with an effect would mean a disintegrate cast on the "cage" would instead hit the poor person inside.

I'll adjust the pause of enemies that fail the save to make it a bit longer so they get properly trapped.

Excellent, thank you

Any chance in the future then that the placeables used for the cage could be modified so they aren't 'invisible' on the 'inside's of the panels?

The Amethyst Dragon wrote:The forcecage spell may be adjusted for delaying enemies long enough to let the cage form around them.

As far as disintegrate only taking out one side...the cage itself is four different placeables that appear around the target...the only way to hold a target still while still allowing them to act within the cage (casting spells, using missile weapons, etc.).

Going with an effect would mean a disintegrate cast on the "cage" would instead hit the poor person inside.

I'll adjust the pause of enemies that fail the save to make it a bit longer so they get properly trapped.

going with the effect could give the target a one shot "shield" against disintegrate.... meaning if they are trapped in the cage, and targeted by a disintegrate.... they dont have to make the save, and the cage goes away.

also, players who are held in place by bigby's spells can indeed act normally. the cutscene immobilize doesnt stop all actions, just movement. its on the NWNwikki... thats how jay and others have been able to dispel Crid's bigbys after it grappled them.