Cracking into NPC files of TOEE

I am playing through as an evil party, and finding a few things disturbing. I am dismayed that the number of critical hits I get as an evil party is not NEARLY as frequent as a good party, of which I have played through many times. I have also noticed that the enemies I fight seem to get better rolls and deal out more damage than I remember my GOOD counterparts getting. I am not sure why, but it only makes me more resolute.

I am very preturbed that the decision to attack Calmert and Terjon, a central part of my quest and central to me being an assassin, is being hampered. For one thing, Terjon has a rediculous amount of hit points, far more than a Cleric should have and Terjon is no Avatar. More to the point, his armour class is ridiculous. AC 30? Give me a break. With an attack bonus of +10 (strength, magic, feats etc..) I need a NATURAL 20 roll just to hit him. Not very good.

I am wondering where in the game files you can go to "adjust" the NPC stats. Now, I am not cheating in the sense I want to lower his HP, or reduce his damage, but making his AC more real (say, 25) would allow me the chance to hit him at least. My party is all level 6/7 and even my best fighter cannot hit him. Makes completing tasks hard.

There are those who would say this is a quest to be made after everything else, when you are at level 10, say, but I feel getting to be an assassin crucial for my evil party survival, and given Terjon has a SR of 22, well, only melee will do it. I do not want to make him weak, but to give the scenario a little chance.

 

Firstly it sounds like you're on the wrong end of the mersenne twister.
Secondly, to mod your NPCs just download one of the modding tools from the downloads section either Phalzyr's Proto Editor or ToEE World Builder. All you have to do is find the NPCs you want to change in the protos.tab

 

Agreed. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar...

 

i did the neutral evil path up till level 8 or so and managed to kill terjon. unfortunately i had talked with him about redemption earlier and cleared moathouse, so he had no interest to hear about the burning of his church anymore. so attacking him meant you got the butcher reputation, and the vignette turned up unfinished. anyhow, it was possible to kill him without any cheating around level 8-9. you can forget about tashas hideous laughter or hold person with his saves, but i never tried trip attack. the room is set up so that you only get 2 melee chars close to him. so give your guys bless and prayer, protection from evil, haste, all the stat boosts werent necessary. set your weapon up with +3, unholy, shock/frost, burst, and try to get some guy with a reach weapon behind him. you should hit him about 50% of the time with haste. one guy can go handle his buddy, which shouldnt be too hard with the souped up weapons and boosts. you will take off about 30 hp a hit from him, maybe getting a few criticals if you use cleavers. he will spend his time casting cures instead of stuff that kills you, and by the time hes around 50-60 hp cures is all he will cast, and by then he should be easy. dont bother with summons because they wont hit jack, wizard can cast magic missiles, because 1 out of 4-5 should hit for a measly 5 hp, but hey.

 

Yeh. But what about getting an assassin? By the time I get around to the level able to kill him being an assassin may not matter.

I am only asking in that I think it is unfair a priest like Terjon can be "unhittable" to lower level characters.

Why, if you go to Verb you can kill the Priest of Hextor more easily. Why the bias towards good, yet again?

 

well some vignettes are just bunko. like chaotic neutral, where you absolutely must have a thief in the party to get past the initial dungeon. but there are quite a few vignettes where you have to wait a long time to see the mob(s) in question, like paida and thrommel. anyway, most big mobs if not all got revamped in the mod i read, its not just terjon, altho i agree that it makes no sense why a guy like terjon couldnt be a cakewalk ala lareth.

kill terjon, and he might have a note on him that reveals otis' and elmos involvement. so you go to lareth by picking up the cloaks, bribe the gnolls, no fighting involved. lareth says, oh hi you, go knock otis and elmo unconscious and plant these bottles of poison on them so they will die a most horrible death lawl. and oh look, otis has a note on him that says - suspecting some dude at the waterside inn is working for the temple. shazam, you get the earth temple missions. and then hedrack finally says - gee, scorpp is such a nice groupmate that i think killing him would be a bad idea, so you go recruit scorpp and go kill this y'dey person in nulb. welcome to the temple, here is my armor and warhammer, they are not quite scather, but i am certain that they will make you look most evil sir, and please accept this senshock mage robe also because its a nice piece and you dont want that guy teleporting when he chickens out.

 

When chaos and evil rule, terrible things happen. Like war and holocausts and people like Hitler and Iuz. My favorite part in ToEE is when Fruella critical hits Lareth in his beautiful face and he's a goner. I don't like evil.

 

I am fully fluent in Gary Gygax's work. In fact, the only D+D I collect is the original vintage stuff, and it is a considerable collection.

Gary did not point out that D+D is good biased, but is humanocentic biased, and he mentioned this to point out why the PC would never succeed as a monster, most notably a dragon or demon.

This makes no logic. If good was the only path for PC's then the evil alignments should not be offered or available to NPC's and monsters only. After all, evil priests, fighters and thieves ARE characters too, so why not have fun playing them too.

I myself am sick and tired of always being fed the usual BS in society, movies, games etc... that good wins out in the end. Frankly, the fun sometimes is having good LOSE, and I want to be a big part of that.

I still notice that my evil party is definitely got a hill to climb. I have been careful to note the attack rolls the characters get and my evil party gets FAR fewer criticals than my CG party, and far more critical misses. I cannot understand why. Moreover (and I do not like to cheat on stats) it is far harder to get better rolls when you choose the evil option. It seems the game is hardwired to be biased towards good.

I mean, for modders, the good options are not nearly as available as evil ones. You can make Lareth more involved, the Priest of Hextor more important....... how many take the CG path KNOWING Frag and Scather are available. Not really choice, is it.

I am loving the evil party I have. I am especially pleased the Unholy Orc Double axe is around. Excellent weapon and I love using it.

Holy weapons get boring after a while. At least in D+D you can play both good and evil, unlike others.

 

Wow. This is only a game, you know. Should get out more.

 

No rush. I will be around. My point is that by fleshing out good and evil it gives more options AND reasons to play. CG, LG and NG are really all the same. But evil people are different. CE: reckless. NE: just evil. LE: methodical.

Variety is what makes this game so good. I have gone through many times, and how much fun is it to get the same over and over?

 

Before slaughtering Terjon and Jaroo(and indeed all of Hommlet and most of Nulb) I usually do all the Hommlet and Nulb quests plus killing the guards in the watchtower, the will o' wisps and lamia on the 3rd level and a couple of trolls on level 4 of the temple(I only did the latter three Temple encounters once the "Desperate Housewives" quest was introduced(or at least when I found out about it). Once I've done all that, I'm usually at level 6 or 7 which is enough to kill Terjon(often after 2 or 3 tries), PROVIDED that you have one fighter-character with the "Improved Trip" feat tripping Terjon as much as possible - any damage to the fighter gets healed by the cleric and druid in my party who are not prone to Terjon's melee attacks and all have protection from energy(fire)/haste/prayer etc. cast on them - having an additional thief character fighting Terjon next to the fighter, with the two-handed/ambidexterity feats also helps greatly once Terjon gets tripped by the fighter.

Personally, I like the fact that evil-aligned players have a more difficult time of it - this increases the challenge which is all I want. I've never bothered to play a good-aligned party, as there's much less potential XP available(after all, as a good-aligned, you can't very well wipe out Hommlet etc., if you wish to stick to roleplaying.

 

Nah, it's completely random. I used an evil party (lawful evil) just once. I didn't finished the game, but that party seemed extremely lucky, particularly the party's spokeman, a lawful evil cleric of Nerull, he scored criticals with the scythe more than my evil ranger with dual wielding and two scimitars.

I never use Scather or Fragarach. In fact, before i ended up here i didn't know even the existance of them.
Many many players don't use them(while other seem to create characters specifically for that).
In any case, the game isn't easier for a good party just because of Frag or Scath; after all, in the fire node, one of the most difficult level (and boss!) of the game, they're useless.

Remember Hedrack's hammer cool looking AND powerful.
And if you play Desperate Housewives, there are a powerful unholy sword as a reward too...and it really hurts!