Hey all. I'm the guy who wrote Sorcery's Toll; I just wanted to drop in and give my two cents on AM and the discussion here so far.
Statttis: AM sounds excellent. Everything ST should have been. You seem to have done a much better job making the mod reconfigurable and robust than I did with ST, and it's unlikely I'll do much maintenance of ST now that AM is up and running. I've replaced ST in my current game with AM, and while I haven't been casting a lot of spells, I hope to try that soon and gather some thoughts on the mod in practice.
I do have a few comments:
I'll stick with Sorcery's toll for now, for one because I actually like the "predictability" and how all the diseases you can get are related to the school you backfired in...
Two glitches with Sorcery's toll which I wonder if they exist in this?:
1:Rarely with summons there'd be this odd "ST: calling scamp" thing which would turn my summon into a non summon scamp. So if I killed it it's body would remain, other times it'd just make my summon a dead scamp body :/
2: also http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=884533&view=findpost&p=14483275
While I didn't do an awesome job of giving "flavour" to the ST backlash, it was a part of the mod that I thought had promise: I had a justification for why each school of magick damaged a specific attribute (and why Destruction and Conjuration were particularly dangerous), and the diseases (which weren't implemented all that well) had evocative names and effects linked to the type of spell that created them. Does AM aim for the same kind of specificity? If not, do you have plans to add something like this?
In response to phoenix's ST bug reports, 1) The summoned corpse sounds like a stupid bug that I should fix right away, and 2) I suppose I should probably tweak the variable types in ST to handle the unusually high magicka levels phoenix seems to be using.
Secondly, I loved ST's system of casting anything, and that seemed to carry onto spellmaking, too. Here, I can't make spells beyond my mastery level in that school, which is somewhat of a bummer
I actually prefer statttis' system here. I hadn't anticipated the effects of ST on spellmaking; I never wanted it to be a "cheat" mod, and I prefer the idea that a novice can only obtain spells out of his league by acquiring them from elsewhere: buying them getting them from spell tomes, etc.
It turns out that GetSpellMasteryLevel doesn't work correctly for player created spells. Problem fixed and new version is up.
I too encountered problems with GetSpellMasteryLevel. It's a bit of a useless function. Better to just do the math by hand.
I know that it causes at least one incompatibility problem between ST and at least one old version of SM: SM uses this function to set the power levels for its "Jump" spells, which creates problems if you're tweaking mastery levels. I think SM has since been updated to fix this.
This mod sounds great! A nice alternative to Sorcery's Toll, which I stopped using because my poor 17 Willpower woodelf kept harming herself using lesser and greater powers with costs, or when removing a plus-magicka ring.
This shouldn't have been happening; powers aren't supposed to cause backlash in ST. Were you using an early version?
Odd, it was always recommended to me that I switch to a power whenever I do something that will result in a loss of significant magicka.... because when you had a power selected Sorcery's toll wouldn't hurt you. Maybe you were using an earlier version than me.
Yes, this should be true of all but the first couple of releases.
This is working as intended. If bonuses from spells counted toward your skill level it would be easy to exploit the system. You could just create a "fortify destruction skill 200 for 1 second" spell then cast your Megadeathbomb spell without any worries. Though you still will get some penalty reductions by artificially increasing your skill, since it lowers the magicka cost of your spells. Also, the reductions from Willpower, Intelligence, and Personality will use bonuses from spells/enchants (balanced since they have a much smaller effect than skill level).
I actually kind of liked the idea that ST might lead players to take all sorts of ritual precautions in order to cast powerful spells. Fortify skill, fortify magicka, then cast your mega-spell... I liked the idea that magic might begin to take on complexity and require preparation. But I also understand why you deem it too much of a potential loophole.
I started off doing it because I'd read about how Sorcery's Toll changed the levels permanently, but later testing showed that scripted edits are not saved.
Interesting. So I was wrong to warn people about that, I guess. Still, if it led you to make AM, then all's well that ends well. The world of magical backlash is in better hands with statttis than with me, I'm sure.
One more question for statttis: I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but can you tell me whether you use base magicka cost or actual magicka cost for calculating the threshold for mastery/backlash/whatever? It seems to me that if you're using actual magicka cost, 1.7 is a pretty generous multiplier. But if you're using base magicka cost, it's pretty stingy at the high end... unless that's what you intend.
Anyway, thanks for the many improvements over ST, and keep up the good work. Let me know if I can be of any service.