One of the most irritating things in a DnD game of any sort is loosing control of your PC to a Fear effect. Worse is when said PC is above level 10 and has at that point presumably seen enough that he's not going to run ****less to a corner gibbering like he just saw the Far Realm. While I am certainly not saying that PC's are all fearless supertroopers (i'm pretty sure most of us have played our PC's thus far as having very real fears that do matter), I do wish for it to be less arbitrary and forced than a fear spell that basically makes you to play the part of a frightened cat regardless of the circumstances.
So with that in mind, is there any way we could either
A) Make the Fear Spell and Fear effects only dominate PC's of level 10 or under.
or
B) Change the spell so it just adds penalties to certain modifiers when in effect instead of outright wrenching control of the PC
But if fear only effected things of level 10 or below, you couldn't get that wonderful feeling of striking fear into the heart of your enemies with a sword that has a fear effect!
I'm pretty sure in standard 3.5 (not that I really care about anything needing to be standard, mind you) there is a lesser condition called Shaken. Not sure if that's normally implemented anywhere in NWN 2 or nt.
You have to go into individual spell scripts to fix this issue with each fear causing spell or ability. Hoooray for spellhooks if you've got em! Yes you can define the shaken status in a script and define the penalties accordingly. You can define tons of neat little things. I was writing scripts for the in game drugs on sigil (before a certain someone there gave me a reason to say screw it and I stopped what I was doing). Basically you can define conditions and triggers in the scripts cause any number of weird automated behaviors.
The effect that they most commonly use with fear auras and spells is not shaken its panicked which does remove your control more or less.
I want to stress that we can create effects in a script by simply defining them and then setting their properties so we could implement things that are not or were not originally in the game engine.
Not to derail the topic, but you can script it to trigger emotes and then set a time delay for all sorts of things. Scripting and seeing your scripts come to life and work. That's the fun in this. Basically we just need to be sure that all fear effects apply shaken unless certain conditions are met (The conditions met to induce panic). That will stop the loss of control and make it so you get a few penalties. I think you get like -1 or -2 to attacks, skills , and maybe saving throws while shaken. Anyone have the core rules handy to quote the actual penalties?
d20srd.org claims that the rules for shaken are: "A shaken character takes a -2 penalty on attack rolls, saving throws, skill checks, and ability checks."
