Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

This may not be a bug, but intended and I just dont know how to use it?

When I right click, appraise creature on someone it will (sometimes) come back and tell me the race and gender of the targeted creature. It doesn't work every time though, or at least it doesn't work for every target.

Is there a mechanic that I am failing at behind the scenes (I see no rolls). Is it buggy? Am I using it incorrectly?

My thought was it was used to validate what we saw on screen in case of disguises, etc.

Bumping to see if anyone knows how this should work, and/or if it is presently working as intended.

What you described is what it should do but there may be bugs.

Hey Planehopper, must have missed this question. I am not sure I can answer fully, Rasael or Valefort could probably give a better description, but I'll give her the old college try!

So essentially it has to do with the disguise mechanic. In order to protect from meta gaming we did our best to come up with something fair to allow those with spot to be able to notice a disguise while protecting the disguised individual from being outed with no RP. So there are several bits to appraise creature in play.

1. Yes there are hidden rolls going on between spot and disguise. This is so that if you fail the check you don't know meta info that the PC in question is, in fact disguised or not. You are only provided feedback when successful.
2. If you are too far away it simply doesn't work. You cannot see them clearly enough to warrant feedback.
3. You cannot spam appraise creature. I forget what the cooldown is, but I recall discussing 15 minutes and 1 hour. This is to protect from the spotter just spamming appraise creature until they get a favorable outcome.

So if you are more than 15 meters or so from the other PC, if you previously used appraise creature on them, if you fail the check, or if they simply are not disguised then you won't get any feedback, but if you do, it might be they have disguised their PC's name, gender, race or any combination thereof!

Hope this helps, I think that is all the pieces that might be impacting your feedback, but again, Valefort or Rasael can probably provide more specifics.

Thanks guys, and thanks for the detailed help Chad!

I think it was probably a combination of being too far away, failing rolls, AND spamming the ability trying to test it out.

Sounds like a beast to QC!