Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General Request: preventing statuses and damage in story

For story scripting please add following capabilities

Please allow us to prevent status being applied to a target if we intercept it via CharacterStatusAttempt event

Please also add similar capabilities to damage. Something like a CharacterDamageAttempt event and a way to prevent it (healing it afterwards is a bad idea because this damage can simply kill a target)

A big problem with this would be that using it would completely break the combat AI, because it would have no knowledge whatsoever about when this scripting code would kick in or what it would do. The combat AI can reason about skills, equipment stats and statuses, but it cannot parse arbitrary story code, let alone figure out all the possible cases that may set certain databases or flags from all of story, behaviour scripts and dialogs combined.

I absolutely agree that this is a problem but I'm not asking for anything entirely new. Story scripts already exist and they already break AI when used in skills. What I ask for is merely an extension for story scripts, which will allow us to create skills, that are impossible to create right now

Also I strongly suggest that as long as skill can be built with STATS alone it should stay there. But the problem is that STATS capabilities are extremely limited and currently many skill ideas require scripting. Unfortunately sometimes even scripting is not enough to create proper skills.

So this request by default comes into the area, which is already not covered by AI (not covered by STATS)

The fact that you can already break the system if you want to is not necessarily an argument in favour of adding extra routines whose main or only purpose is to break the system (then you only encourage breaking things, which makes no sense from a tool/engine point-of-view, and people who are not aware of this will be rightfully annoyed if they discover that using those routines by definition breaks things).

The proper solution is to extend the stats/skill system so it supports more use cases. It is less easy and will probably take more time, but it is the only viable approach in the long term. Since resources are not unlimited, it also seems like a better use of them.

Agreed but adding something to stats is not a matter of just a new function there. It's also a matter of teaching AI to deal with these extra STATS capabilities.

So I'd say it's better to start with little steps and have something working NOW rather then wait for perfection FOREVER.

And one more thing. Even now I can easily create scriptless (STATS-only) skills that AI won't be able to use properly. It's really not hard to do.