Shapechange

more of wishful thinking than a burning need for an improvement.... but thats mainly because i dont find the spell useful at all at current...

any way to make the shapechange spell, or even polymorph spells actually grant some of the creatures special attacks?

i think troll actually does regen.... but like.... beholder.... sure... you look like a beholder.... and you fight like a baby kobold... no eyerays.... kinda leaves you going.... what was the point? i now have to redo all my spell slots, and for what? so that i could bite for 1d6?

the polymorph thing is a problem too, cuz of the spell slots mainly.... but also losing all other gear effects...
if you have resistances, immunities, etc... they all go bye bye.... which means that casting such a spell will often make you *weaker*... and having to clean up your spell book, or in the case of sorcs losing several castings of each spell level.... it means the effect is basically not worth the cost and inconvenience.

And sure, I am aware that there are technical hurdles involved... I wish I knew enough to suggest effective work-arounds...

I do think it would be a huge benefit to have these spells simply change the PC's skin/model like the hat of disguise does.... so they keep their gear, etc... but that still leaves the other issues.

I like the idea - and as a way to implement the abilities of the creaturesmight there be a widget that allows for the use of the abilities of the creature you then "polymoph" into? or "activates" the passive abilities of each creature? (Regen for trolls etc.)
As for the "step by step" method here as the way I'd go about doing this (assuming I knew how to do it in the first place )

Spoiler:

Not the most conveinent nor neat method here, but it certainly beats the current loss of spell slots, loss of equipment boosts and all the other penalties for the lack of benefits that the spells provide.

How does that sound to everyone else? And how feasible is it scripting and resource wise?

Why spell failure though? It's not tensors transformation. In the PnP versions of the spells, spell casting was still possible baring any physical barrier (no limbs, no somatic spells, no mouth, no verbal spells, ect).

I just figured that instead of taking all of your spells away, you just can't cast them. Besides, you can't cast while polymorphed anyways. I'm not trying to change the spell, just how it works so that the penalties aren't as high as they are currently.

That's in NWN's default butchered version of shapechanging. The PnP version not only allowed spell casting, but it also wasn't limited to just four or five forms. You could shapechange into creature you've encountered (and provided you met the HD requirements... no lowbie mages turning into ancient dragons, iow).

It can be scripted to equip creature weapons and so on...but it requires a HUGE script to make all the weapon/gear changes. When i worked on our white wolf server...to work the shapechange into the 5 forms... we had to have a script for each...unequip everything...then equip the skin..and the creature weapons and the stat bonuses.

Then when they change back...another script had to remove all the creature stuff then put all the player stuff back on. Our crinos shift was like a 500 line script.

Im not sure theres another way to do it but i know that ad has a limit on resources due to the cap bioware put in so huge weapon/shapechange scripts would prob be very low priority.

Theres a way of kittens thinking of doin it with widgets....but you still gotta have a script to add/remove all the widgets thru the shapeshifting. Different forms would have different widgets....and were back on the resources/script wagon again. Thats the problem with the nwn/bioware polymorph/shapechange coding, they didnt plan on any form of expanding it.

I did have a thought though...what prevents players from equiping creature weapons is the 2da...if that was altered it would i think then allow it. It would still require smaller scripts to ready/unready it each time.

Unless it was one widget that did a check for the form you're in and then activated the appropraite ability. One widget, one script. (at least in theory)

I think though each line of a script counts as a resource if not mistaken...not sure on that one though.

Kefrem wrote:I think though each line of a script counts as a resource if not mistaken...not sure on that one though.

Nope. Each script counts as 2, each creature, item, placeable, encounter, trigger, and waypoint counts as 1.

However, ach option in a conversation takes a script (or two), so adding options can add up to more resources.

I play on a server where they have the shifters able to shift into dragon form, aura and all. (20 level cap) But the aura and breath are a monster spell instead of ability, but it acts like ana bility, no casting.