In both Morrowind and Oblivion, I've found that I never use greater powers. I tend to just forget about them after a while. (Especially since time at 1/3 of normal speed in the game.) So, this mod is aims to make them more available.
Intall in usual way. Effects will become available immediately. You'll find that all of the Vanilla Oblivion Greater Powers are now Lesser Powers, but their names now start with a '+' and they have a "Power Exhaustion" script effect attached.
Using a greater power will draw from your well of power. If this well is completely (100%) exhausted, it will take 30 minutes to refill. However, almost all powers only consume 70% of the power, so they'll refill in about 20 minutes. You'll receive update messages as your power recovers until it reaches the normal filled state.
You can recast any greater power at any time. But if the cast drives your power exhaustion over 100% you'll receive a penalty. It will hurt. It very well may kill you. (This is especially true for lower level players.) The effects vary, and it's possible to be hit by several penalties in a row – you'll receive one penalty for each 50% over 100% of power exhaustion.
The hit on on power exhaustion from a spell won't happen immediately, but rather when the initial scripted "Power Exhaustion" effect times out. Moreover, the hit will be proportional to the duration of the script effect. E.g., a seven second duration hit will use 70% of your power reserve.
Note that with this approach it can be safe to cast a second power before fully recovering fromt he first – so long as the power exhaustion cost + plus the players current power exhaustion level is less than or equal to 100%
I may modify these later, but for how you'll randomly receive one of:
• Health drain 75 pts for 300 seconds + Health Damage 3 pots for 100 seconds.
• Fatigue drain 75 pts for 300 seconds + Fatigue Damage 3 pots for 100 seconds.
• Damage Intelligence 5 pts for 5 seconds.
• Damage Endurance 5 pts for 5 seconds.
All of these also have a Drain Fatigue of 800 pts for 5 seconds.
• The reset period is independent of timescale and of sleeping/resting. What matters is gameplay minutes, nothing else. For most (70%) using spells, it will take 20 minutes of gameplay to fully recover.
• Note that twenty minutes is about half the vanilla time to recover (not counting waiting). However, this is offset by the fact that power exhaustion applies to ALL greater powers not just one you cast. If you cast one greater power, and then cast that power or any other too soon, you'll be hit by power exhaustion.
• Since this converts greater powers to lesser powers, it's possible that there might be a problem if you (or an NPC) has cast a great power recently. I haven't noticed a problem, but if you have problems starting up, you might want to go somewhere and wait for little over a day to make sure that all great power effects have reset.
• Conversion of great powers to lesser powers means that NPCs with those great powers will be able to cast them repeatedly. If you want to check on this, open the console and enter set wrPowersQ.showNpcUsage to 1 – this will generate a short message whenever an NPC uses a (modified) greater power. Mostly that will only be racial powers (NPCs don't have birthsigns). Some creatures have powers too (e.g., Spriggan's have self heal) – I have not converted these.
• Notably absent are powers from Shivering Isles and the Orrery. I plan on adding support for these through a Bashed Patch.
• The bashed patch feature will also allow user mods to signal the patch that they can be modified. I haven't decided how to to this yet – Probably something like fortify useless stat by 1 point for range 1 to 15 seconds.
• Note that a duration of over 10 seconds would guarantee power exhaustion. Obviously, these would have to be used strategically. Use them, and you've got N seconds to continue your attack, after which you'd better be well buffed to handle the consequences (or just take the gamble that you won't be hit by a fatal penalty).
• I'll probably add a spell that allows you to swap between the Doomstone powers that you've learned in a later version.
• I'd like to vary the power exhaustion somewhat by greater power – some of the greater powers aren't that great, and so should allow quicker recovery.
Standard mod installation.
• You are free to redistribute this work in unmodified form.
• You are free to modify and re-distribute this work, so long as you: 1) give the author(s) credit proportional to their contribution to the final work, 2) distribute the final work under the same terms, and 3) make artistic resources included with the final work available under the same terms as below.
• Artistic resources (meshes, textures, sounds, etc.) included with this work may be included in unmodified form with modified versions of this work, so long as their authors are given credit proportional to their contribution to the final work. Note that artistic resources may not be modified, or extracted from this work, unless permission is given elsewhere.
While the license above allows modification and redistribution, I'd prefer to keep it under my control for now. So, please try to contact me before modifying or redistributing it.
• Wrye, Monkey God of Modding!
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