Filth fever[]
Description is not right, there another disease DISEASE_FILTH_FEVER, need to add that -ILKAY
Save[]
It looks like the standard spell script performs only the SR check and not the fortitude one. Kato Yang 19:35, April 27, 2012 (UTC)
- The fortitude save is part of the disease effect. --The Krit 20:27, April 27, 2012 (UTC)
Practicality[]
So here's something that I've wondered for years: How practical is it to prepare and cast Contagion?
With the Poison spell (and with other uses of poison in NWN), you can get some appreciable immediate benefit; barring successful Fortitude Saves, the enemy which you hit with the poison immediately suffers Ability damage (or some other detrimental effect, if the server has scripting for variant poisons), and a short while later, the poison inflicts further harm. Not so with disease. If a creature catches a disease, everything's still okay until the disease is finished incubating several hours later. By that time, the battle is probably going to be over. While disease can be far more persistent than poison is (and is thus nastier to inflict on someone in the long run), it doesn't really have the immediate effects that combat or other swift life-or-death situations demand.
Contagion can be nice to have as far as roleplay, sure. One of my current characters on the Forgotten Realms: Cormyr server is a Cleric of Talona, Goddess of Poison and Disease. That cleric's a Featherlung survivor, so she's pale, shabby, sugary nice and pitiable-looking, and people love her, like her or simply consider her harmless. But when no one's looking, she slinks around Greatgaunt and slaps random cows, chickens and other livestock with Contagion (then runs away before the annoyed, pestilent animals start attacking her); the animals get to live with Filth Fever or Slimy Doom or whatever, the disease has a chance to blossom and spread, Talona's (supposedly) happy and my Talontar's happy.
But as far as non-roleplay purposes, what good is Contagion?
BloodyBay from YouTube (talk) 07:00, November 17, 2016 (UTC)
- Like a few other NWN spells, this one has some use as an NPC spell, but I have not found it very useful for PCs. As you note, PCs (in my experience) rarely sneak up to an opponent, inflict some malady that will have no measurable effect for a game hour or more, and then come back later to finish off the weakened creature. However, NPC casters using contagion may have an impact on game play, since their PC targets will go on to other battles and the disease effects may be important later, even if those effects had little or no impact in the battle with the caster of contagion. This is particularly true in rest-restricted modules.
- IMO, this is one of those areas where certain spells are more effective for NPCs than for PCs. A similar issue is sometimes true of the dispel line of spells, to a lesser degree. Assuming some rest restrictions, it is often marginal to cast a dispel on every NPC who has some sort of buff. Yes, there are some NPCs who are very tough with all of their buffs up. But, for many NPCs, the dispel may not even shorten an enemy's life by one round. But, if every NPC caster tries to dispel the buffed PCs (and associates) in the party, that will have a cumulative effect and can have a large impact going forward. Once again, this is most noticeable in modules with rest restrictions, where it isn't possible to simply re-rest and re-buff after every encounter.
- Good point about the spell being more intended for NPCs and monsters than for PCs. And like you say, disease becomes an even bigger bogey on servers which impose minimum waiting periods between rests; when Cure Disease magic is scarce, I've simply rested over and over until I pass two Fortitude Saves, then fixed the Ability damage with Lesser Restoration. If the server makes me wait a while between rests (like Legacy of the North and Forgotten Realms: Cormyr do), I could be stuck walking around with the disease for a while.
- But at least I've come up with one way for Contagion to be worth preparing and casting, even if it's just for the amusing spectacle of a Cleric running around and annoying cows with Filth Fever. :-D
- (I wouldn't argue that Dispel Magic is useless like Contagion is, though. A few servers (like Thay) have scripting which spawns random encounters fully buffed, so if I'm wandering the wilderness and the server spawns a Half-Dragon Cleric, that cleric might get buffed with Endure Elements, Spell Resistance and whatever else right from the get-go; slap that Half-Dragon Cleric with a Greater Dispelling and you can make the fight a lot easier. And then there are DM events, where a DM might go to some hidden room, create a creature, buff it to the gills, then jump it into the room where the PCs are waiting.
- There's also the oft-neglected feature of Counterspelling (which is more useful in the hands of Sorcerers than Wizards, thanks to the Sorcerer's sheer number of spell-castings). Back on the bygone Andrune server, a long, DM-orchestrated, server-altering story arc came to its climax with our party going up against the Grand Magister of the Imperial Library. The Grand Magister was a pretty powerful gnome archmage, and my character was a Level 18 Sorcerer with all of the spells from the Dispel Magic family. So I relegated her to the role of "Dispel-bot" and chiefly focused her on Counterspelling the Grand Magister and fizzling everything he could throw at us (even burning two of her Mord's Disjunctions to stop him from casting Time Stop and Weird, IIRC...or maybe it was Time Stop and Wail of the Banshee, I forget). The gnome did manage to get off a Gate spell, but the resulting balor got shut down by our Paladin and our two Fighters. So in the end, we won, and the epic battle was considerably easier than it should have been; I like to think that my quasi-Scottish witch and her Counterspelling were the main reason why it was easier. :-)
- So Dispel Magic can be useful...plenty more useful than Contagion is, anyway. ;-)
- BloodyBay from YouTube (talk) 18:44, November 18, 2016 (UTC)
- Agreed, regarding the Dispel line of spells. That's why I mentioned that they were more useful to NPCs than to PCs to a lesser degree (than Contagion). In my experience, the Dispel spells would be worthwhile even if all they did was to dispel negative effects (like some of the Bigby's spells) and area of effect spells. But, regularly dispelling opponents that appear to be buffed is a less effective strategy for PCs than NPCs. For some NPC opponents (e.g. the pre-buffed guys you mentioned), a PC casting dispel will substantially change the battle. For others, it really won't have any effect. For NPCs, every battle is their last, so there is little reason not to empty the arsenal on the PCs every time.
- BloodyBay from YouTube (talk) 18:44, November 18, 2016 (UTC)
- The server on which I play most often uses a variation on TonyK's AI for the NPCs. That AI tends to have casters cast a dispel as one of their first offensive casting actions. Of course, encountering several casters can be murder on PC parties that are depending on buffs to help them out. And, there are 16-minute-minimum rest restrictions, so losing a buff typically means it's gone for a while.