[Feedback/Bugs] Thaumaturge and summons.

[Calen]

Some feedback/bug report Thaumaturge/summons in general.
The team did such a great job on adding new summons.
I'm also really looking forward to the 'find familiar' spell once it works.

Anyway after doing some tests I found a few 'bugs' or odd changes.



Thaumaturge:

The description of the Thaumaturge states the class evolves around a long term contract with a planar.
Thus the planar will become a cohort and for what ever reason they are working together.


The nature of a cohort is by default different than summoning/conjuring a random elemental so to say.
There is no negotiating or long term relationship or a contract, in fact the summon has no choice.
That aside you can't summon the same creature again.


Now Thaumaturge requires 8 in diplomacy, now diplomacy is indeed what you need to form a contract with a planar.
How ever for summoning an elemental or what not diplomacy is not requires, as free will does not exists there.



Thaumaturge class progression:


Augmenting summoning: ((The same goes for beacon of frozen))

- Does not work for planar ally (never worked)
- Does not work for summon undead spells from palemaster (Used to work pre patch)

- Does work for all conjuration summon spells including gate (as it should)
- Does work for necromancy spell army of the death. (not a conjuration spell,thus shouldn't work)


Issues 1: It should work for palemasters conjuration spell summon greater undead.
It should not work for army of the death.
This just doesn't make sense, especially since it worked pre patch.

Issue 2: Thaumaturge is about having a contract with a planar.
Augmenting summoning doesn't work for any spell involving the planar with whom you can make this contract with.
The planar binding spells, basically put the essence of the class.



Suggestion: Make Augmenting summoning work for all summons,planar bindings,summon like abilities and what not.
The same goes for beacon of frozen.
It's the easiest fix and the most logical one.



Extended summoning:

- Doesn't work for shadowpack/army of the death/summon shadow demons/ call elements.

- Works for all other summoning spells, including gate.


Suggestion: Extra summon spells could benefit from extended summoning



Contingent summoning:

- Doesn't work for Palemaster

- Works for the rest

Suggestion: Could consider giving players the option to pick a spell to summon.
For one I prefer gate/epic great or summon greater planar ally.



Planar cohort:

A planar cohort is basically what a Thaumaturge is all about.
The cohort is a creature that you made a contract with.
In terms of gameplay it can be put in the group of familiar/animal companion and such.
It's the devil that works for you while you bargained with your soul, a crazy mephit sidekick and what not.


Note: Source book states palemaster actually has a cohort and not a conjuration summon undead spell.



Issue 1: Planar cohort feat works for summoning spells, how ever these aren't cohorts and you can't form contracts with them.
Next to that they don't work for gate spells, which they should since it is a conjuration spell.
Though for balance sake I understand, than again we have dragon druids with dragon pets.


Issue 2: The planar spells (which would be your cohort) take up a summon slot and cannot be named.
Which removes a bit of the identity of the planar.


Issue 3: With extended summoning the summon/planar spells stay very long as it is.
Making them permanent isn't exactly doing much if they aren't treated as animal companion.



Suggestion: Planar cohort now allows you to pick a planar companion, which is treated as animal companion.
It remains permanently at your side and benefits from all Thaumaturge feats.


As it stands now the Thaumaturge class just doesn't make any sense.
The rules how the feat work aren't consistent either lore wise or gameplay wise.



My question would be:

Are any of these things going to be fixed,changed or looked into?
Or is a Thaumaturge just 'the guy with a permanent balanced summon' and we can just ignore the whole class description since the patch.
RP wise you might as well use one slot for extended summoning for a planar ally and RP the character.



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Palemaster and summons:

Issue 1: You can only summon vampires with summon greater undead, vampires don't exactly like light.
Next to that every vampire you summon is CE and a woman.
Lore wise it is like winning the lottery over and over again.


Issue 2: Vampire has combat insight, but has no weapon.
Thus the damage gained through intellect does not work.


Suggestion: Maybe add some more undead to palemasters summoning, few different alignments as well.
While a Palemaster is questionable it doesn't mean every one of them down right summons the worst of the worst.

Suggestion 2: Change the summon greater undead vampire, at this point it's inferior to a wizard summon greater undead.
A Swashbuckler strength summon with no weapons is a bit odd.

Suggestion 3: Make the undead a cohort/ animalcompanion and no longer allow Thaumaturge/palemaster to cross class.
This would be lore wise the most accurate.


Edit:

Decided to test a few things:

Thaumaturge/cleric:

Revenance works with Thaumaturge abilities.
How ever even though it is a conjuration spell it will not work with planar cohort.
It did ended up lasting for 10 min or so.

Planar ally: Doesn't scale past level 13, but I assume it isn't suppose to.
Cleric do not have greater summon ally though.

[Blackman D]

Palemaster and summons:

Issue 1: You can only summon vampires with summon greater undead, vampires don't exactly like light.
Next to that every vampire you summon is CE and a woman.
Lore wise it is like winning the lottery over and over again.

how is this an issue? of course vampires dont like light
PM CGU has a male at PM 9 and the female at PM 10, PM summons are not random they are progressive

PM CU has 3 summons and caps with the mummy

animate dead is actually not exclusive, that one is universal and PM just gets it as an ability

Issue 2: Vampire has combat insight, but has no weapon.
Thus the damage gained through intellect does not work.

just an auto feat from swash levels that wasnt manually removed

Suggestion: Maybe add some more undead to palemasters summoning, few different alignments as well.
While a Palemaster is questionable it doesn't mean every one of them down right summons the worst of the worst.

undead are evil, the alignments are not going to change (they are not liches there is no debate on their alignment)

Suggestion 2: Change the summon greater undead vampire, at this point it's inferior to a wizard summon greater undead.
A Swashbuckler strength summon with no weapons is a bit odd.

they do need to be updated yes bc they do not work with the new system that gave summons more levels, so it has to be done manually

and the lack of a weapon was a balance for the fact that she is designed to have stacking stat decreases, she was originally suppose to be 17 and have both the strength and con one from swash as well as racial strength and level drain from creature claw, also why there are no weapons

the new system was suppose to make her 18 or 20, but it doesnt work with PM

Suggestion 3: Make the undead a cohort/ animalcompanion and no longer allow Thaumaturge/palemaster to cross class.
This would be lore wise the most accurate.

while valid yes, this one idk, i wouldnt mind it but its not like replacing 3 summons with 1 cohort makes up for the rest of the stuff PM doesnt have that they are suppose to

unless you really want to give them a cohort and keep the summons... cant say i wouldnt mind rolling with two undead

[Calen]

Thanks for clearing some things up, when it comes to PM I see it like this.


If you stay strictly IC your vampire should never be out in the sun, it will die.
This pretty much cuts you off from some of the hot spot leveling places.

Source book wise the palemaster chooses/negotiates with an undead over service.
For example your PM could negotiate with a ghost to work for the PM and after it the PM will set the ghost free/banish.
Now in BGC we have a homebrew palemaster, so he/she summons a greater undead.
Which is in the source book an evil conjuration spell.


Basically by giving options you keep it more RP like.
It doesn't make sense that a palemaster summon greater undead can only summon female vampires, that will die in the light.
If it isn't a problem I would think just adding 3-4 options to greater undead will make it more dynamic.


Alignment wise:

Actually there are good/neutral aligned undead, even LE (like mummy).
Since our palemasters here are homebrew it wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Though most undead are just evil.

That aside is still a world of difference between summoning a LE creature and a CE one.
CE is pretty much as bad as it can get, you went for the worst type of undead.


Palemaster summon:

I figured out it was a balance issue.
The DC on her stat decrease is very low, about 15 or so.
Most monsters need to roll a 1 to get a decrease.

Maybe they will adjust her levels or rework her.
Swashbuckler doesn't really seem to fit either.
The horned devil kind of blows her out of the water as well.



Cohort:

The reason I suggested them not being able to cross class is indeed you'll have a vampire/horned devil and gate/earth elemental running around.
While it sounds incredibly fun it might be a tat too much.
Than again as mage you have to pick 2x conjuration focus which isn't all that great.

I still think both the undead from PM and planar cohort should be given an identity, and should be able to function next to a normal summon.



Either way an answer would be very welcome, even if it is 'we are not going to touch it'.

[Steve]

The OP is a good perspective. Informative. Thanks Calen.

The Thaumaturge PrC can only be so powerful, and this idea of having a Planar as a Companion is great, really, but it might be interpreted as being too powerful for the mechanics of the Server, and balance.

Mages should be stupid powerful in Lore, but not all possibilities make sense when gaining mechanical power is rather cheap & easy on BGTSCC.

Though, there are still some purely technical aspects to the Thaumaturge PrC to be corrected, as you point out, as implemented on BGTSCC.

[Blackman D]

If you stay strictly IC your vampire should never be out in the sun, it will die.
This pretty much cuts you off from some of the hot spot leveling places.

well even if someone was gonna rp it to that extent, there is a day/night cycle so its not like its daylight 24/7 and there are caves and other interiors

if you need something during the day, switch to the mummy

Now in BGC we have a homebrew palemaster, so he/she summons a greater undead.
Which is in the source book an evil conjuration spell.

its not server homebrewed its nwn standard, however i was allowed to beef up the summons so they werent totally crap like the OC ones, all i did was increase their HD really and even then they were nerfed before being thrown in bc people were pissing off luna about summons

and the spell is irrelevant, the MM itself has them as usually evil or always evil depending on which one we are talking about, like the mummy is usually LE and vampires are always evil (any), ours just so happened to be CE bc i didnt touch their alignments since there was no need

It doesn't make sense that a palemaster summon greater undead can only summon female vampires, that will die in the light.

you do know that PM CGU and normal CGU both only summon vampires right

granted yes CU and CGU have way more undead they are capable of making however that doesnt mean there is a model for it to even use, not to mention since the ones i was working on were cut off the current ones are still missing stuff that they should have anyway

new things are nice but adding more without fixing whats already there is not exactly good either

If it isn't a problem I would think just adding 3-4 options to greater undead will make it more dynamic.

again PM summons are how the OC set them up, giving how hard to was just to get the ok to make them not suck i didnt touch the actual spells (feats), but this was mostly because i wanted PM and normal undead creations to stay different

nothing stops a PM from using the normal ones if they want different summons

That aside is still a world of difference between summoning a LE creature and a CE one.

well there is a mummy with PM CU if you really dont want a CE summon that badly

The DC on her stat decrease is very low, about 15 or so.

yea something broke/changed with that idk what it was

its 15 and 18 atm but it use to be 18 and 20, you could also give her eagles and bump it to 20 and 22 since undead DCs are CHA based, but even eagles doesnt work on it anyone either so yea that one annoyed me but not sure what caused it

might have something to do with her creature claw, i noticed that was lower also so it might have flat DCs attached to it

the mummy's frightful presence is also broken or something, the AI never tries to use it and its really the first thing thats suppose to trigger when he enters combat

either way, PM summons will apparently have to be updated manually since they dont work with the new system and who knows if/when that will happen

[Blackman D]

I still think both the undead from PM and planar cohort should be given an identity,

you know the bad part about giving a summon a name is that then everyone will still have the same summon AND they are all named Bob

and should be able to function next to a normal summon.

if i remember right something got changed with the slot it takes and was being looked at

[NegInfinity]

bad part about giving a summon a name is that then everyone will still have the same summon AND they are all named Bob

You could actually have uniquely named summon prior to the update. It used the name of your familiar.

And if you don't like that, then nwnscript has "SetName" function. Basically, just (try to) change the name of the creature right after summoning.

[Calen]

Cheers for explaining how they are designed, I never knew you could up the DC with charisma.
I agree with fixing what is broken now before adding new stuff.
Personally I'm just very fond of both Thaumaturge and Palemasters in general, so I would love to see them fixed/changed a bit.

But it is more from a RP perspective.
I tried name changing with the tool but it doesn't allow it.


That said I could settle for Bob the female vampire.

[Blackman D]

changing names with the tool was disabled bc people were trolling/grieving others a lot since you could change the name of your familiar and then possess it to send tells and people cant reply

[Tsidkenu]

All these suggestions and references to 'source material', yet not a single note that Thaumaturge is supposed to be a Cleric PRC and Planar Cohort should only work with the exact divine spell named Summon Planar Ally? Nevertheless it was probably permitted to expand the usefulness of the class.

That said, the QC team is discussing moving the Planar cohort back to the animal companion slot.

No discussion has taken place regarding how this should impact on Pale Master SLAs and should form its own discussion, I believe.

[NegInfinity]

changing names with the tool was disabled bc people

I was not talking about changing names by tool.

Somewhere within dfmi tool, set up variable for cohort's name, setup its content upon gaining first thaumaturge level, then use that for cohort name upon summoning cohorts. You won't be able to rename it.

[Blackman D]

was replying about calen's comment about it not working, but some sort of option to name a cohort when you get them wouldnt be bad

[Calen]

Recall reading some where that a Thaumaturge could also be related to arcane casting.
However that was not straight out of the source book.
That aside I can see how that works on P&P, on BGC not so much.


As for the palemaster discussion.
A part of my post was about the RP aspect, and a part was about NWN2 mechanics.
That's why I put it under this, and if you narrow it down.

- Should the palemasters undead scale like the other summons?

-Should the palemasters summon spells benefit from spells that enhance summons, like augmented summoning?

- Should the palemasters summon be treated like a planar cohort? ((which means you can't have both up at the same time)).

Emphasize is on the word summon/ conjuration.


I don't mean to nitpick every bit , I just enjoy discussing these kind of things and testing mechanics out.



Going slightly off topic here.

Mechanic wise: An evil act no matter the intention behind it will still remain an evil act, thus your alignment will shift towards evil.
D&D is quite arbitrarily when it comes to good and evil.
The best example is bloodwalk, if you use it your alignment will shift towards evil.


Looking at summons:


Thaumaturge: Forming a contract with an evil outsider (horned devil for example) is an evil act.
When a mage pulls out a Balor for what ever reason he might just be evil.

Palemaster: Summon greater undead is an evil conjuration spell, no matter how you twist or turn it.
Summoning a CE vampire is an evil act.
You could argue that summoning any type of undead is evil but there are some exceptions.


Question would be: Should your alignment shift if your character chooses to summon an evil creature?



Edit:

As for grieving people.
The server is quite small, would you honestly risk doing that?

[Blackman D]

As for grieving people.
The server is quite small, would you honestly risk doing that?

well its already been done so im sure if it was reenabled someone would do it again at some point

Should your alignment shift if your character chooses to summon an evil creature?

the problem with alignment shifting is it can allow for build combinations that otherwise shouldnt be possible, thats why most all quests dont have them anymore

if bloodwalk is shifting alignments then it probably shouldnt

Should the palemasters undead scale like the other summons?

would be easiest yea, tho i think there was an issue with the PrC half of the system, but i havent checked BG recently so idk if its still an issue (BG definitely had an issue and PM wasnt affected)

*checked BG, they are using the default summons also so guessin the PrC side was pulled

Should the palemasters summon spells benefit from spells that enhance summons, like augmented summoning?

probably, tho if it doesnt work with CU or CGU then its probably because they are technically creations and not summons, made from scratch and not called

Should the palemasters summon be treated like a planar cohort?

i still dont know about this one, would really be against it but if PM got cohorts then you would need to make cohorts for the leadership feat also

[Rhifox]

On alignment shifts,

Yes, summoning or creating any undead is an evil act. But something being an evil act is different from something that causes an alignment shift. Evil spells are evil, but using them should not on their own lead to alignment shifts. The same goes for bloodseeking (not bloodwalk, afaik), which should really not force an alignment shift.

The reason? Because if you're going to be causing alignment shifts for every act then you need to actually provide alignment shifts for every act. Including a shift for some acts but not others heavily skews the system. A character who raises the undead is himself not necessarily evil, and such a character could be doing many other good acts that make up for it. Raising undead is always an evil act, but if raising undead always prompts an alignment shift while doing good deeds doesn't, then suddenly a character who might otherwise be neutral or even good aligned becomes evil by merit that only one of his actions is actually causing shifts. Alignment dictates the average majority of your actions. A little evil/good hit here or a chaotic/lawful hit there does not change your alignment, because it is compared against all the rest of your activities. Alignment is a full range of character, not a narrow one.

The second reason, is that there comes a point where a character should have already achieved all the possible alignment hits they can from repeating the same activity. Pale masters and blood mages cannot be good, because their typical activities are evil enough to not permit a good alignment. But the fact that they can be neutral, demonstrates that their typical activities are also not evil enough that they should be required to be evil. Alignment pre-reqs are not just there for show. An alignment pre-req shows what alignment a class can top out as based on that class's manner of activity. No properly good person would be a pale master, because it involves raising of undead and summoning of negative energy into the world; evil acts. But a neutral person can be, because while those acts are evil, they are not so evil as to dictate that only evil people can ever be a pale master. A good person cannot maintain their good alignment while being a pale master. A neutral person can. Purely mechanical shifts, where they don't take into account a character's full range of activities, prevents that.

The "100-point scale" alignment system is unique and was created specifically for the video game environment of NWN. In pnp, alignment shifts amount to 'your whole alignment is adjusted to another step', and thus only typically applies for very severe violations or repeated major violations, not this '1 evil point here, 1 good point there' tracking nonsense. So, frankly, there should be no mechanical alignment shifts, because alignment is not something that's so easily determined by simple binary. All alignment shifts should require DM supervision, IMO, except for where it is very obvious (like the epic spells Vampiric Feast and Damnation and such, spells which directly destroy souls or indirectly destroy them by sending them to the hells. Those spells should cause major alignment shifts of 20-30 points per cast, or better, require Evil alignment just to be able to select them). While yes, intention is not always a factor in alignment, it is a factor often enough that shifts should not be happening without a DM to verify that "yes, this character has done something so horrible and without remorse that their alignment has shifted towards evil". An evil act is an evil act, always, but the intention of that act, the guilt felt from that act, and the results of that act are all factors into whether it causes an alignment shift, and how much that shift is.