Dawnsbury Days - The Four-Leaf Clover · published · build 22548730
This is a large, but mostly technical update which I'm pushing now a bit early because it contains fixes for a couple of visible mage armor bugs where the spell survives a long rest and wants to cast itself every encounter, and since I must release that, I figure I'll upload all the other stuff I've been working on as well.
Full patch notes follow.
Character content:
New elf heritage: Cavern Elf (rebalanced)
New rogue racket: Eldritch Trickster
New rogue feat: Magical Trickster
New features:
Stack consumables. You can now combine consumable items with the same name into a single slot so that they don't occupy too much of your inventory. (This is intended to be especially useful for the alchemist. You still can't stack non-consumable items such as weak low-level weapons. I recommend selling them, but you can also get a bag-of-holding for them or place them into the party inventory.)
Control remapping. You can now remap keyboard controls from Settings->Controls. (This is meant mainly to help with moving the map on keyboard layouts that don't have WASD, such as AZERTY, but other keyboard actions are also configurable now.)
Economy update: Increased the starting wealth by level by about +30% on each level. This is a deviation from tabletop, but is necessary, and so detailed reasoning follows:
Tabletop rules have two tables for wealth: one for starting wealth by level, and one for expected wealth by level. The difference between them is stark, about +90%, which means that characters who go through previous adventures are significantly more wealthy than characters starting at higher level. Even if you consider that some of that wealth is spent on consumables or is not useful to you and so you must sell it at half cost, the difference remains high. If we assume a 30% write-off loss, then the expected wealth by level guideliness still gives you about +40% over starting wealth by level.
Dawnsbury Days is unusually generous with its loot and gives you more loot than what wealth-by-level guidelines would suggest. I did this because acquiring powerful items is fun and allows for interesting choices and meaningful feelings of progress, but it does further increase the difference in power level between characters starting at a higher level and characters who have gone through previous adventures. On average, the difference is about +150% over starting wealth by level, or +110% if you count with a 30% write-off loss.
I understand that there is meaning in rewarding the player for going through previous adventures, and in maintaining tabletop fidelity. However, the difference in wealth that Dawnsbury Days currently has between these two tables is extreme to the point that it's difficult to balance higher-level campaigns. Suppose you start a new campaign of Good Little Children Never Grow Up. If you import your party from The Profane Barrier, it will be markedly more powerful than a party composed of pregens. As a result, playing the same campaign at the same difficulty with a pregen party and an imported party is such a different experience that it's difficult for the player to determine what difficulty they should play at. If encounters are balanced for imported parties, then it will feel bad to play as a pregen party, and vice versa.
For these reasons, I wish to reduce the difference in wealth between parties starting at a higher level and imported parties. Imported parties will still be stronger, due to having more gold and some access to higher-level items obtained as loot, which you cannot buy at character creation, but the difference will not be so high that you're not even able to buy your weapon property runes.
So, this update increases starting wealth by level by about +30% on each level. An imported party, counting for a 30% write-off loss, will still have a +40% wealth advantage over a pregen party, but the harshest differences in power would be lessened.
This will also affect the maximum permissible wealth for gaining trophies in Free encounter mode, so you can now bring more treasure against additional non-story encounters and still earn their trophies.
Pregens' default inventories will be updated to take advantage of this higher wealth in an upcoming patch. Until then, you will simply receive the extra wealth as gold as you start a new campaign.
Character content (beyond the level cap):
New feats: Improved Knockdown, Surging Might, Courageous Assault, Shared Assault, Camouflage, Consecrate Spell, Furious Sprint, Agile Grace, I Wonder Why You Attacked Me, Cascading Ray, Disruptive Stance, Wandering Heart
New items: impactful runestone, greater impactful runestone, greater doubling rings
New spells: Divine Decree, Divine Aura, Energy Aegis, Mind Blank, Spiritual Epidemic, Flame Vortex, Phantasmal Orchestra, Unexpected Transposition, Dragon Form
Classes (Bard): Courageous Opportunity now responds to auditory actions as well.
Classes (Sorcerer): Added level 6, 7 and 8 bloodline spells to all bloodlines.
Balancing:
Encounters (S1E3): Removed the orc necksplitter from combat rewards, as it's largely a trap option, and you already receive too many items from that encounter anyway.
Modding:
Modding: Added QEffect.HideValues. This new Qffect property can be set to hide an effect's value from showing up in the effect's name.
Modding: Documented .WithEffectiveClassFeatures() and deprecated .WithClassFeatures().
Modding: Added Trait.DoNotCreatePlusOneStrikingVariant.
User interface:
User interface: All sorting is now done as per the English alphabet, given that the game is in English, as opposed to under your local system settings.
Rules fidelity:
Archetypes (Wizard): You can now take Hand of the Apprentice if you have the Wizard archetype and don't have a school spell.
Bugfixes:
Animation: Fixed that some effects animated from the wrong source (such as Living Bonfire's flung logs).
Classes (Alchemist): Fixed that you couldn't poison undead creatures even if you had the Bypass Poison Immunity feat.
Classes (Magus, Eldritch Archer): Fixed that if you use a spellstrike or eldritch shot with a focus spell, you would expend two focus points instead of one.
Classes (Monk): Fixed that Ki Strike didn't work with bows when using Monastic Archery.
Classes (Rogue): Fixed that the rogue's class description didn't mention what its key ability is.
Crash: Fixed that the game crashed on launch if your settings file was corrupted. Now, it will instead restore your settings to default values.
Encounters (S9E2, S9E3): Fixed that skill check results sometimes appeared over Talia's or Azor's token instead of over the token of the hero who made the check.
Feats (Overwhelming Energy): Spells that cost a reaction to cast will no longer cause Overwhelming Energy to crash the game.
Free encounter mode: Fixed that cutscenes and noncombat encounters showed as having meaningless threat levels in Free encounter mode.
Items (magical staves): Fixed that a character with Trick Magic Item could not cast spells on the arcane spell list from staves.
Modding: Fixed that the game crashed when combining metamagic with free action spells (such as the modded Witch's Cackle).
Rules (combat maneuvers): Fixed that you could use Trip, Shove and Disarm with a two-handed weapon with the corresponding trait even if you had it gripped in only a single hand.
Rules (space): Fixed various issues regarding increasing and decreasing your size on the fly, such as with battleforms and Enlarge-like spells.
Spells (Mage Armor): Fixed multiple issues with Mage Armor: (1) that it lasted until downtime and not just until long rest; (2) that you got prompted to cast it again even if you already had it active; (3) that it didn't display on the statblock; (4) that it didn't tell you the level at which it was going to be cast.
Spells (Spell Turning): Fixed that you could turn spells and apply them to a target that's immune to the spell.
Story mode: Fixed that if you obtained the ring of wizardry during a short rest and equipped it, you wouldn't be able to proceed until you unequipped it again.
Tactics: Fixed a regression that caused enemies not to take actions with expected value of "1 damage dealt" or less, and they would uselessly step in place instead of taking at least those actions.
Text: Fixed text in some statblocks.
Four-Leaf Clover (spoilers! and very early access players only):
Art: New art throughout.
Encounters (S10E0): Archibald now has a precast level 6 Mage Armor; Dawnstaff is greater striking.
Encounters (S10E0): Ezracoestus now has Attack of Opportunity and Shield Block, and Sunrise is now keen and has true holy and anarchic runes.
Encounters (S10E1): The hezrou now has different dialogue if you kill all his minions first.
Encounters (S10E5): Fixed issues with the Clockwork Monk: Reduced attack bonus, fixed issues with Flurry of Blows.
Encounters (S10E6): Rebalanced the Irivyrn.
Encounters (S10E7): Skeletal Monstrosity now has a 20-foot reach on all attacks, and acts a bit smarter.
System: Increased level cap to 15.
System: Renamed all identifiers from "The Second Grand Tour" to "The Four-Leaf Clover." Existing saves should carry over.