Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General [Mod] Vampirism [WIP]

Hey guys. I'm starting this thread here as a way to show what I'm working on, and get some ideas from the community.

What is Vampirism?

Vampirism is a mod that adds a hidden skillset and permanent condition. Becoming a vampire will alter your playstyle, as it grants you both benefits and challenges.

Planned Features:

â—˜ Vampiric abilities, with an emphasis on blood, lifesteal, and checking all the boxes that make vampires interesting.
â—˜ A collection of passive statuses that provides bonuses and detriments, changing the way you approach combat.
â—˜ A feeding system that rewards you for keeping your bloodthirst sated.
â—˜ A way to make CON actually useful as a stat.

Ideas:
Abilities:
â—˜ Passive damage bonuses against targets who are bleeding.
â—˜ Bleeds that have a chance to bypass armor.
â—˜ A mist form that lasts for 1(?) turn. Makes you immune to physical damage.
â—˜ An actual bat form. Something like Transform: Bat that would swap the player model for a bat while active. May require some scripting witchery.

Blood System:
â—˜ A total blood amount that scales with CON. This is basically your hunger amount. Gradually degrades as time goes on.
â—˜ A bloodthirst condition, based on your blood pool, that goes: Well Fed, Peckish, Hungry, Starved. Well Fed provides the most bonuses, while Starved incurs the most penalties. I'm considering adding a positive side to Starved, in the spirit of a "last act of desperation" sort of state.

Progression:
â—˜ I'm debating whether to use combat points, or my own sort of accumated points for improving your ability as a vampire. Both are possible.
â—˜ Since the enemies available in the main campaign are finite, sacrificing blood as a mean to increase your own abilities could be interesting, as doing so could put you in a more vulnerable state for the next fight.

Visuals:
â—˜ A way to visually look more vampiric would be cool. Currently, I'm trying some special overlays that could provide a way to tint the skin color a bit, but actually swapping the skin color and making the eyes look red would be ideal.
â—˜ Possibly a special sword, in the spirit of the Legacy of Kain series.
â—˜ Customized visual effects for all the new abilities.

So with that, I have some things to ask of the community:

Questions:
â—˜ What would you like to see in a vampire mod for DOS2?
â—˜ What do you like about being a vampire in other games/mods?
â—˜ How do you feel about the vampire feeding systems in other games? Too annoying, or not hardcore enough?
â—˜ What are some vampire abilities you'd like to see?
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That's it for now. Thanks for reading!

Cool idea for a mod.

Some ideas:
-Give the vampire a bonus to movement speed, the bonus should increase the more hungry he gets.
-Add a charm skill (once per combat), the chance to set it should decrease the more hungry the vampire is. After all a frothing starving bestial vampire desperately craving blood is not very charming.
-(Wacky idea) a vampire can't use the bedroll, but can use a coffin.
-Should not get any bonuses from food and healing potions only heals 50% of their normal value.
-Can't have the rested status

Should he be considered an undead, meaning the effects of healing and poisons are reversed?

Should the engine support it, make lighting play a part of concealment.

Hey MAHak. Thanks for the ideas!


I like this idea. Gives you a bit of a boost for getting to your next bite.


I was considering adding a charm skill. I'll have to see if I can modify the hit chance by script, and if not, I may be able to link the charm status to a spell effect. If all else fails, charm could be tied to the Well Fed hunger status, so once you lose that, you lose the spell until you feed again.


I like it, haha. Perhaps the first game has a hint as how to do that, as I remember one of the mods I was using had a coffin for a bed, for healing when undead.


Currently, you gain the "Zombie" talent when you turn (it's the talent Undead have that makes healing harm you, and poison heal you). I went with this due to the fact that making healing harm you may be hardcoded in. I may be able to get around it by applying a decaying touch status permanently, but I'll have to do some testing to see if I can remove the visual effects of decaying touch.

I'm using DND5e's Vampire race as a bit of a baseline to work from, and the undead effect may fit in well with that vision for vampires:

On top of that, I've made Vampires immune to bleeding and suffocation, like the non-player Undead in the game.

Also, when your vitality takes a hit, you don't spill blood.

You do heal from blood surfaces though, and it works better than Leech - You gain some passive regeneration in blood, and you don't remove the blood surface by standing in it. If that ends of being too strong, I may have the surface get cleared after a couple of turns.

Ah yes. This may be tricky. I'll have to dig into scripting, but I have a feeling it may be tough to get what kind of light level you're standing in. The best I may be able to do is check if you have armor on, like they do for Undead characters.

I see that you got inspired by my idea of a vampire lol.

Use undead talent and set the poison resitance for the "race" to -100. This may set the poison resistance to 100

Make them immunite do charm, disease, suffocating and drunk

Set their fire resistance to -25

Hey Martius. Great minds, right?

The thing about using the Undead talent, and setting poison resistance negative, is that it doesn't work. The Undead talent forces your poison resistance to 200%, regardless of negative influences.

With that said, I just did some tests and it seems I can apply a decaying touch status effect that causes healing to damage you, which is great. So now you're immune to poison, but you only heal from blood surfaces and drinking blood.

Healing from poison may fit in terms of vampires being undead, but I like simply negating poison and requiring the player to use blood or coffins to heal, as that changes the gameplay in a significant way.

My plans right now are implementing a "blood pool", which is basically an invisible bar you fill up by drinking blood. You'll be able to store blood in bottles as a quick way to heal/feed, and you can sacrifice the blood you've drank directly to trigger immediate regeneration (sort of a self-heal spell).

I think that your "Blood pool" should be visible (EDIT: It doesn't really matter actually but I'm leaving the idea here).

I can think of one way of doing that :

As soon as a character becomes a vampire, give him a new item such as a Heart (it could be his own, it might fit the vampire lore and he would have to keep it at all times otherwise he'd die).

This heart has 100 charges max when the blood pool is full. Then, through scripting, you can probably set the number of charges the heart has when the character consumes or gets blood and apply the according status.

Being really new to modding, I'm not 100% sure it's doable but that's an idea.

Yep! Already one step ahead of ya. Currently you get a "Vampiric Artifice", which looks like a gross heart right now. To that I'll be attaching an ability that lets you examine how much blood you currently have, and you can combine it with empty bottles to create blood potions (I'll have to test this and see if I can disable crafting with it when you run out of blood. If not, I'll figure out another way). Also, interacting with it will allow you to upgrade yourself (possibly with ability points, or a different limited currency).



The blood pool code right now works like this:


So you have a base value for your max pool, and a bonus gets added to that. I'm thinking the bonus will come from your CON, and possibly a talent and a "Vampire combat ability" you can increase.

You mentioned that the amount of enemies, and their blood reserves, in the game are finite.
So I came up with another argument for having vampires using a coffin. Once a vampire is in the coffin his 'hunger-meter' stops. This way you can go to a town, put your vampire on a coffin and the rest of the party can go shopping, ponder over some crafting, read the journal and other town-stuff, without worrying that your vampire will soon be a ticking starve-bomb.
Instead of a coffin you could also give him some meditation skill.

That's actually a really great idea. Perhaps I could also make a way to enthrall someone, to gain a party member with "mini" vampire bonuses.

It's worth mentioning that townspeople/civilians are potential blood sources too. I could tinker with making bite possible from stealth, or maybe it applies a "dazed" debuff that gives you time to get away before they go hostile. Or, using an unnatural charm ability to increase their attitude to friendly, and taking a bite then would prevent combat until you've drank too much.

Today I got a few foundational gameplay mechanics working:

â—˜ The basic hunger / blood pool mechanics are working.
â—˜ Starving will slowly reduce your health to 1 point, but won't kill you.
â—˜ When you initially hit the Starving status, you gain a brief "Blood Frenzy" buff. This increases your movement speed, initiative, and makes you immune to slow.
â—˜ Your presence "Spooks" non-allied characters, and "Bolsters" allies. This is a small debuff to enemies, and a small buff to allies. The main purpose of this will be for doing some interesting interactions when a vampire gets near a non-vampire/undead character.
â—˜ It turns out, you can create a new DECAYING_TOUCH status, and it works as a "hurt when healed" debuff! This is great, as it means I can now make Vampires immune to poison, while only being healed through blood.

Here's some screenshots of the different statuses currently in. (Warning: Initial buffs/debuffs. Not balanced):

Will the Vampirism passive have multiple stages similar to ES:O (Elder Scrolls: Online)?

If yes, and you might had that already planned out. At higher stages, the affected player should be treated as an Undead aka fully clothed and not seen by NPC's.

As an additional challenge I personally think that random encounter with Vampire Hunters seems pretty nice. Don't know if it possible with the Divine Engine 2. I believe the enemies have to be on the map, regardless. That probably answers itself.

Looks pretty nice so far.

Noice stuff. The Supernatural status seems a bit loaded. Fewer, more pronounced effects would be better, I think. Like, 5% movement speed just seems like clutter right next to 1.5m movement bonus. A mere 5% lifesteal? I'm not sure why Vampires would have maluses to weapon skills. The AP bonuses seem pretty huge.

I'd probably simplify it to:

+30% lifesteal
+Movement (percent or integer, not both)
+Con
Resist Changes
Immunities

I also agree that the issue of slowly starving while shopping and what not could get annoying. The Coffin idea doesn't sound very fun though. I suppose as long as its not too tedious or quick of starvation, it's not so bad.

Hey Baardvark! Thanks for the feedback. I agree. That's why I prefaced it with "Not balanced", haha. Most of those are from initial testing to see how certain changes feel. The tooltip is way too bloated, for sure.



Right. I'm not a fan of hunger mechanics in games, so my goal isn't to create an annoying mechanic, but rather one that makes the gameplay more interesting. My thought is that instead of it being a binary effect (Well Fed - good, Starving - bad), managing your hunger state will take considering the risk vs. what you need in the moment. Certain spells may require blood, and triggering Starvation may be desired in combat for the initial damage boost and speed. Furthermore, the degradation of blood between stages will take a while - possibly 20 minutes or more, depending on how things feel. It'll require some playtesting to get it to feel good.


I'm not sure yet if characters can be spawned dynamically, but if so, that would be an interesting thing to add. Especially if I tie it in with a sort of "vampire crime" system that is affected by how many civilians you bite.

Also wanted to add that maybe instead of straight bless immunity, being blessed damages you and then is immediately removed.

Ooh, I like that. I mainly added the bless immunity because I wanted to see how it worked. Haven't gotten around to that yet, haha.

you could use the vampiric voidwoken model for the bat form.maybe it gives you access to some new skills while locking you out of others but increasing your lifesteal?

Ooh, great idea! Thanks.

I have to test it all first of course, but my idea is that transforming into a bat will basically lock/make your real body invisible, and you control the bat "summon". Then when you turn back ("dismiss" the bat), your real body is teleported to the bat's location and made visible. The transformation will all be hidden by smoke of course, to hide the teleporting.

As far as bat abilities go - much faster movespeed is a given, as well as a "swoop" jump ability to use as a self-teleport. Maybe some stealth abilities as well. Bat form will basically be a travel/recon form, as I don't imagine fighting as a bat would be superior to your vampire form. I may balance it a bit by giving the bat a smaller health pool.

The good thing about using a summon for this is that when it dies, you won't actually die. It'll just "kick" you out of bat form.

that reminds me of the methods used by oblivion modders to replicate shapeshifting:they would summon a mount and make your character invisible while riding it.It would attack anything you collided with.