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Illithid Dialog Checks


I don't like that you have to long rest to clear your "tadpoled" counts. I understand the intent was to make the long rest mechanic more rewarding and force camp interactions, but this design choice makes this part of your character's development tedious and consequently undesirable.

• Long resting appears to pass time because some encounters disappear if they're triggered from a distance and you long rest before engaging them (e.g., Edowin.) Maybe those are bugs?
• There's a sense of urgency in Act 1 involving a series of life-or-death consequences. I don't expect things to slow down in later acts. Long resting amid that urgency in order to regain the ability to use Illithid powers feels counterintuitive.
• You don't know when your Illithid powers are available for future conversations. When you unknowingly enter dialogue without your Illithid powers, the choice you're actually forced to make is this: don't embrace your Illithid powers and have fun, or embrace your Illithid powers and save scum to long rest. (Just to be clear, the problem is not the lack of a visual cue; if there was a visual cue indicating when your Illithid powers were available, you'd simply be motivated to long rest after every conversation where they were used. That's also not fun.)

What if Clerics had to pray at an altar at camp to pass Deity checks while adventuring in the world? This is what's happening with Illithid dialog options.

Eliminate the rest checks, penalize Illithid power use in some mechanically inconsequential way that makes narrative sense (e.g., max health reduction until long rest?), and rebalance the rest system so players don't have to game resting.


Party Size Limit

The campaign was designed for a party of four. D&D fans will point to most D&D campaigns having been designed for four and sometimes six characters. I've read all the threads about this.

However, when I play C/J/RPGs where there are companion stories and voice bark interactions, I hate feeling like I'm missing content that could make my current adventure more exciting.

Currently, we can edit saves to increase the party limit (later, we'll do this with mods), but changing the party limit has a few noticeable issues:

1. Combat is tuned for a party of four. When you have greater than four party members, combat becomes trivial.
2. Combat is turn-based. When you increase the party size, you increase the number of turns per combat encounter and thereby increase the amount of time you spend in combat encounters.
3. Cutscenes were designed specifically for a party of four. When you increase the size of the party, there are collision problems in cutscenes. For example, Shadowheart can appear inside Astarion - and not in a fun way.

Here are my suggestions for addressing these issues in both single player and co-op:

• Combat encounters don't need to be retuned for a higher maximum party size. Leave combat tuned for a party of four, but make combat progressively harder for each party member exceeding a party size of four. You can use something like (1 + ((CurrentPartySize > 4 ? CurrentPartySize - 4 : 0) / 2)) as a scaling difficulty multiplier.
• Players can travel with all companions and endure (or not endure) turn-based combat with a large party. Allow the player to travel with up to 8 members but limit the number of combatants by allowing the player to assign up to 8 members to combat roles. This means players can decide for themselves the size of the party they take into combat. (You might ask what noncombat party members would do during combat then. They probably should not be controllable at this time. They could idle, look bored, trash talk, call out enemy actions, fade out, or perform some other action that does not impact combat mechanically.)
• Cutscenes can show parties of any size with additional animations and engineering. First, I would assume that scenes along the critical path are handcrafted but that all other scenes are not; therefore, algorithmically place companions in scenes outside the critical path by their level of involvement in the foreground. Second, implement a behavior that would cause characters to move out of each other's way, assuming they would otherwise occupy the same position, based on the type of performance they will give in a scene (e.g., interjection > emote > idle.)

I think the cutscene issues are probably the most challenging, but if the game's ahead of schedule, they're solvable.