Shattered Kingdoms

This is a great skill in theory, but not so good a skill in practice, especially not for 'the bard's ulimate skill'.

I've been trying a few things with this skill, such as persuading npcs to cast nice spells on me. Here are examples of the skill NOT working.



Here we see that the npc in question a rosy-cheeked gnome CAN cast the spell 'sleep'



This is later on, another combat round. Ensuring the gnome has the concentration to cast the spell. As you can see, I have a successful persuade. Simply typing out cast sleep when in combat SHOULD make you cast sleep on the first opponent. Having played a caster and used sleep many times in that way, I know it works. In this example we see the persaude claims to succeed and then the gnome goes ahead and doesn't do what it in theory was just persuaded to do.


We then at the end see another succesful persuade, this time simply asking the damned thing to do a social which is has no problem what so ever doing. Conclusion? I think persuade is bugged. So far I have not been able to persuade any npc to cast any spell, reguardless of if it has the int, mana and concentration to do it, they just won't cast. This isn't listed as something you can't use persuade to do and I'm pretty sure you can persuade pcs to cast, so why not npcs?

Bards have successfully used persuade to ask NPCs to cast spells thousands of times. In your log, you successfully persuaded the gnome to cast sleep. However, for whatever reason (probably because she didn't have enough concentration due to now being in combat) the gnome was not able to cast it at that instant. Persuade doesn't linger. Once she failed to be able to start casting, she went on with her own AI decision making about what spells to cast in combat, which DOES take into account how much concentration she has available.

As far as your judgement on the power of the persuade skill, you are just inexperienced with what it can do. I think most experienced bards will tell you that persuade is probably the bards most powerful ability and that it is extremely useful.

I havent played a bard or know much about persuade, but could it be what you are typing in that is wrong. persuade rosy cast sleep is what you typed it looks like, did you need to type persuade rosy cast 'sleep' instead?.

You only need to use the ' ' around the name of a spell if it is more than one word.

cast 'cure light', for instance.

Having played two GM bards, I can tell you that persuade can be used to very effectively ruin opposing players. Search three_sixteen's website for some of the logs of Dalryn persuading necromancers to zap their group members with wands, or mercenary leaders to quaff their word of recall potions and ruin group formation completely.

It's a terrific skill, when you put some serious thought into it. Try using plant with the skill, as well.

Persuade has definatly got its uses, have I ever managed to use it in PK .. nope.. is that persuades fault, nope.

It took quite a while of playing around with it to see what you could do with it, it takes longer to be prepared to go into PK with the intent on useing it. There is another bard skill that i would call much more nifty then persuade is, however persuade coupled with that skill is probably one of the niftiest tricks ive seen in SK unfortunatly Ive never pulled it off outside of expermintation.

Would it be nice to persuade people to drop/give away things, sure it would but then your thinking to much like its charm, and its not... well not really. Is it more usefull vs npc's then pc's probably, an npc will sit there as you persuade him to strip naked in front of you, most pc's wont do that. But used properly there should be alot of possibility with it, altho with the changeing of a certain spell recently, persuade took a hit but oh well there are plenty of other things to make people do.

Now it would be nice to look into if someone was persuade to cast sleep, if they were actually trying to do it at their current combat target (if not then perhaps that should be changed) but more then likely if you want to persuade someone to cast sleep, your going to try to put one of their party members to sleep with it not the person they are fighting.

If your refering to planting flasks of WoR, you can't plant them anymore for some reason. I tried that tactic with Hevron and got a 'you can't bare to part with that' message.

The original difficulty had when trying to persuade the NPC in combat to cast was either:

1- Said NPC could not concentrate enough, OR
2- NPC's cannot cast at things they cannot target. Dont ask me why, but as soon as you dirt kick or blind any NPC, their spell ensemble is reduced ONLY to that which they can cast upon themselves. Also, NPC's will not auto-target spells just because they are in combat. You HAVE to order it to cast with a target, otherwise the spell will never work.

On a side note, you were unable to plant the flask becuase it is flagged un-stealable (kinda semi-cursed). You couldnt bear to part with it just as someone would be completely unable to steal it from you.

Certain items are un-stealable? Man, that ruins a pretty nifty tactic.

Planting a narcissus plant and making them eat it is even better. They would actually have to be attacked for it not to work..