First ToEE Rants

What could have been

My new mod is almost up, and one of the parts I am slightly more impressed with is a sub-quest involving Sunom. (She is the weaver's daughter who freaks out if a female character talks to her husband). I have added a subquest whereby she only gives you the item you need to fulfill the main quest if you take care of her noisy upstairs neighbours.

The idea came to me when I noticed that her, daddy and hubby all had beds downstairs, but upstairs had 4 more beds. So I wrote in a thing where they rented the upstairs out as a loft.

However, I was recently checking the module and it seems those 4 beds were designed for the 4 assistant weavers who (according to the module) were employed there. (They are even mentioned in the game by the Ploceus the weaver himself). Someone - the designers, or artists, or someone - had read the module that closely and apparently had intended these 4 apprentices to make it into the game, a la the brewery apprentices: so much so, they had sleeping quarters drawn up.

One more thing that never made it to the final release...

Web

Liv has done a great job getting monsters to break free of the web spell, but to me it really highlights the inadequacies still there. I play the Deklo Grove encounter a lot to test new characters (with new voices etc) - it and the moathouse are where I did all the voice-testing to try to isolate the problems involving combat voices - and so I get webbed frequently. Lemme tell u, if you get ONE chance to break free in the whole encounter, its a lot. Otherwise you are reduced to using missile weapons at -2 for being webbed, as well as -4 for the melee the spider you are shooting at will be in and possibly another -4 for shooting over one of your comrades (because of course you can't relocate to get a better shot when you are webbed). And if you DO break free, and are near the middle of the web, you may not even make it out without getting webbed again.

Its completely different for the monsters of course if you cast Web on them. On some occasions the monster you cast on will fail the saving throw, but still get some sort of pity move and just run straight out. Happened to me in the Imeryds Run last night, I had to redo that abomination of an encounter due to a corrupt save (probably related to Agetian's issues with the ToEEWB, same character was present), I webbed the Lizardmen and SeaHag while I dealt with the toads. The Seahag broke free and ran out. Spugnoir webbed again, and she failed the saving throw but just ran on out anyways.

I hate that encounter. I finally finished it, and the save corrupted again . Can't wait til the mod is finished and I can start with a completely fresh install.