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Welcome to my thought exercise that might someday turn into an actual mod! Here I will infodump my organized thoughts and maybe promote useful discussion. The Hypothesis KOTOR II is a great story attached to an otherwise broken-mess of bad mechanics that lead to a game experience that feels like a 'Story Mode' switch was accidentally flipped on & forgotten about in the source code before the game shipped. I hypothesize that the tools exist now to remediate most of this mess, and am engaging in this thought experiment to mentally workthrough what such a mod might look like and tackle, while promoting discussion in the same vein. This is not a promissory note that I'll do anything, even if I am motivated to make my next playthrough less of a drag, mechanically. Where To Begin? The first step is to identify what is broken and how/why. During my last playthrough I started taking notes and came up with the following: 1) XP is dumped on the player and you do not go for very long between levels ups. At a certain point, they feel tedious and unrewarding. This is partially because of the class progression and what's available for feat selection, but also because level-ups exist 'in abundance' and thus it's difficult to get excited about them. 2) No class will have ever have to struggle over which feat to take in their build, and will only ever struggle about when to take it. Eventually, you run out of 'must-haves' and start picking random feats that have marginal effects on the character sheet simply to get rid of the 'level up character' screen. 3) Jedi classes - Jedi Guardian is skill-starved in a game where having skills is directly correlated to the amount of content you'll see in a playthru, Jedi Sentinel is essentially a Jedi Guardian w/one less feat and a lot more skill points, and I see this to be a problem. Consular's are probably okay but I think all classes should have slower power progression. Jedi Prestige classes need love as well, especially the dedicated caster prestige classes. 4) Items, Upgrades, and Cybernetic Implants - all dump tons of ability score bonuses/skill point bonuses onto the wearer in obscene amounts. For humanoids, skill point bonuses on equipment are less of a problem, but thanks to Droid Upgrade's I was able to craft endgame upgrades with T3 before leaving my first non-Telos planet. All of these stat bonuses means that it doesn't really matter which class you take because you will end up with the fighting ability of a Guardian and comparable Power DC's of a Consular without hardly trying and the meta leans heavily towards putting your points in CON to use implants to further rocket your player character's attributes into the stratosphere. 5) Lightsabers - they're OP. Their current implementation means they basically trivialize the game even moreso once you obtain them. They should certainly feel strong, but being able to pump out 400dmg in a single flurry is insanity. Lightsabers are a sort of barometer for the state of the game's mechanics as many other systems tie into how effective they are: enemy AI and whether or not they use items and powers that mitigate lightsaber damage, Master Critical Strike & Master Flurry providing potentially gamebreaking power every six seconds, excessively powerful lightsaber crystals and upgrades 6) Force Powers - they're also OP...or useless, or somewhere in between. When a force powerful is powerful, it's *powerful*. When it's weak, it's weak. I believe the issue within the scope of what already exists within the game is fourfold: npc's do not have saves that have hope of resisting force powers, crowd control force powers are limitless in the # of individuals it'll effect within an AoE, NPC Jedi do not cast Force Resist (or Force Breach). 7) Immunities - Although I haven't really seen any enemies use attacks of any kind that'd cause fear/horror/stun, if they did then the immunities found on several items and automatically supplied to Jedi would be an issue Eight) Artificial Intelligence - We all know it sucks, even with the Enhanced AI mod. Even so, I will list some of what I've observed - NPC's won't activate their shields (if they're even spawning with them), NPC Jedi aren't specc'd/don't use force resisting or crowd control powers... or from what I can tell, buff's of any kind. AI doesn't use stims either. They don't make intelligent targeting or movement choices either; Calls for Help need a boost (can snipe Ubese in a room, one at a time, as long as only one can see you), etc etc droids don't use their cannons/shields 9) Battle Precognition - I think either the highest WIS or DEX score should be used when calculating AC, not both; that said however, this might possibly be hardcoded 10) Feats - My main issue with feats, aside from their rapid acquisition, is that there are clear winning choices and clear losing choices. Honestly, even if all the loot drops didn't blown Gear Head out of the water, would you ever pick it over the saving throw or flurry line? 11) Combat Feats - Suffer from Winner/Loser Syndrome as well as offering a lot w/out much, if any, drawback. Master Flurry worst offender12) Broken economy - Too many credits and not enough options to sink them into 12) NPC Character Sheets - though I haven't peeked about I'd be willing to bet that the builds of various enemies are equally in need of attention So Everything's Busted? Pretty much, yea What do? When faced with a potentially large project it's best to keep one's goals small and reachable to avoid the feeling of drowning/"insurmountable mountain" burnout. For this, I feel it's best to take a look at how other modding communities have handled similar projects. For our purposes, we'll take a peek at peak mechanics modding: Item & Spell Revisions + Sword Coast Stratagems for the Baldur's Gate Trilogy. These mods operated under a design paradigm of 'no resource unwasted', 'do not cheat', 'spells and items must be interesting/useful/occupy a niche', with 'balance' the foremost objective of these mods. More importantly, they all have a determined scope, all of which synergized w/each other but could also stand on their own. Also important to note is their modularity in installation: if you don't like the part of the Item Revisions mod that imposed a movement rate penalty on full plate armor, you didn't have to install it. Something like this is imperative for a mod that would make potentially controversial changes to the mechanics such as a rebalancing mod. So now we pick an issue to tackle. For purposes of this experiment, I've decided to 'rework' KOTOR II's items. The Process First, we'll want to sort through the items that exist in the game into a list (possibly a workforum thread somewhere) that allows us to easily identify which items need rebalancing and which don't. We'll use a tool like Kotor Tool to populate the list with information such as tag/resref/name, description, and the items effects. Then, we'll want to establish the general criteria with which we'll be rebalancing most our items under. Ideally, a loot system is designed around tiers which correspond to certain level ranges. Each tier has a lower and upper bound to how much power an item possesses. They can occasionally bleed into the tier above or below them in terms of usefulness. Sample Criteria: Tier III (levels 13 - 18) Max bonus for an individual skill is half the skill bonus cap. Max Item Value: x Max Ability Score Bonus (total): 2 Max Skill Point Bonus (total): 6 Max Attack Modifier: 2 Max Damage Bonus : 1d4 Max Defense Bonus: 2 Max Saving Throw Bonus: 2 Specific, 1 Universal Tier V (levels 25 - 30) Max Item value: x Max Ability Score Bonus (total): 4 Max Skill Point Bonus (total): 10 Max Attack Modifier: 4 Max Damage Bonus : 1d8 Max Defense Bonus: 4 Max Saving Throw Bonus: 5 Specific, 2 Universal Max item value in this criteria determines what combinations of bonuses items can have. For ex, there might be a tier V item that grants +2 to WIS and CHA and +5 Persuade and +5 Treat Injury, +1 Uni save. There might be a Tier III item that grants +2 CON & +3 Demolitions. There are exceptions to every rule, and in order to keep it fun and novel some items should break the mold of our established criteria. These would be the game's S-tier items held by powerful bosses (lol) and locked behind Tower of Hanoi puzzles. Other ways to keep it interesting would be for weapons to have custom on-hit scripted effects, granting custom feats or usuable abilities, etc -------- If we follow the paradigm used in the BG2 mod, Item Revisions, then we'll first want to decide what 'theme' an item holds based off it's description, name and bonuses before we apply our criteria to it. Some items will have a very obvious theme, and others you'll have to pick your own for. Once you've sorted out what changes you want to make to the item's stats and description, we'll make sure we record the changes to the item's worklist entry before actually committing/testing them. The End Well, that's all the thoughts I have for y'all on this topic. Now it's off to bed. If you've thoughts on anything I've written here, feel free to comment.