Burning Hands damage and 14

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Hello.

I'm playing "Baldur's Gate + Tales of the Sword Coast" ("GOG" release with no mods) and got spell Burning Hands. I tried it and have 2 questions.

In description it says damage: 1d3 + 2 per caster level (max 1d3 + 20).
At pihwiki wiki it says: 2d2 + 2 per caster level (max 2d2 +20).
https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur's_Gate:_Arcane_Spells_List#Burning_Hands

My level 1 Conjurer did 8 damage O_o
If we take 1d3 + 2 and max roll, it will be 5 damage.
If we take 2d2 + 2 and max roll, it will be 6 damage.
But I got 8! On other tries Conjurer even did 14! How? What is the real damage of this spell?

Second is its AoE. It says 5 ft. length and 120 degrees. pihwiki says that area is so small, that it's actually single target spell.
I lined up 2 characters next to each other, cast it, and only 1 character was affected. So is it possible to affect at least 2 characters or it's indeed a single target spell?

Screenshots:
https://i.imgur.com/AtxpqqL.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/64itFRw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2P6WRdq.jpg

 

I could swear I remember hiting multiple gibberings with it, but never more than 2-3. Then again, it's been a while since I've used that spell because I didn't find it that useful compared to sleep, color spray, lorlorch's minor drain, or magic missile.
I believe you asked this over on GameFAQs, but I never thought to ask which version of the game you were using.
I think there is some bug where you are using the level 5 or 6 version of the spell because that should be the only one that can inflict 14 damage. Yet the 7 damage makes no sense.
Here is an album with the information I have on how the spell works.
https://sorcerers.net/community/media/albums/burning-hands-tech-data.372/
This was taken with the 5-CD version of the game, using versions of Infinity Explorer and DLTCEP that are at least 10 years old.
I have ease-of-use installed, but that shouldn't affect the spell in question. I did install the level 40 mod in BG2, but this is BG1.

P.S. Let me know if the link is broken, and the correct way to share an album on the boards.

 

It's a "GOG" release. "Baldur's Gate + Tales of the Sword Coast".
Install says "Baldur's Gate - The Original Saga".
Setup file says version is 2.0.0.20
In-game window says version is 1.3.5521

I looked at your album, but honestly couldn't understand much. If I'm not wrong I saw that this spell has 1 target and deals damage 1d2 two times, but what +? per level I don't see/understand. But this doesn't explain why level 1 Conjurer deals with it 8 and 14 damage

 

The classic game versions had no good way of calculating half damage on save, so the way it used to be done is you had effects for one half of the damage that was always inflicted and effects for the other half that you could save against. Since 1d3 is not divisible by 2, I imagine they compromised and said 1d2+1/level for each half of the damage, hence the 2d2+2/level noted on that wiki. I don't have the classic games installed right now to check, but that would be my best guess. As far as the damage goes, it's also affected by the selected difficulty. So if you're not playing on Core, you're probably dealing more damage than usual. If you're using a scroll instead of casting normally, it will also deal damage that's different from your own level. Or maybe it's just a bug.

The original AoE is also fairly small, making it very hard to hit more than one enemy at a time, but not impossible. 5 feet is about the size of the standard circle under your character.

 

I did not think of the possibility of the OP using a scroll, that would explain using the higher level version of the spell. IIRC all scrolls are cast at 10th level in BG1 or BG2.
As far as the range, I do recall a similar issue with Hold Person supposedly being multitarget but never seeming to be able to hit more than one target. I think in all the time I've owned the game, I've only manged to paralyze more than one target twice in BG1 with the clerical version, and I don't use the wizard version much.
It caught me off guard because in P&P the AoE is much larger, that of a 20' cube, and in the Gold Box games you could target up to 3 opponents independently, much like the wand of lightning in BG2.

 

Slider of difficulty rests in the middle, game says "The middle setting is true AD&D".

I indeed tried this spell from the scroll, so this can explain higher damage. I thought spells from scroll follow the same mechanics as memorized spells. Interesting thing to check with other scrolls.
Thank you for explanation.

 

You can download Infinity Explorer from this site. Scrolls are items, spells are .spl files. If you look at SPWI103, that is the "Burning Hands" spell and you can see the same thing I posted earlier.
If you check SCRL68, you'll see that there is no variation for level, but it in fact uses the level 10 version of SPWI103. All scrolls in BG1 are cast as a 10th level caster.
I know that in P&P they are supposed to be cast at the level of the one who made the scroll (not the reader), but in the Infinity Engine games it just does it as a 10th level caster.
I believe that there is a mod for one of the games that can change this (I think the newer G3 Tweaks pack), but I can't recall which one it was and which games supported it.

For a test, I'd recommend scribing the scroll, then memorizing it and repeating your tests. I imagine you'll get results more in line with what you were expecting.

 

I did some tests and damage from memorized spell is indeed looks like "1d2 + 1 per level + 1d2 + 1 per level". Conjurer is level 2 now and he did 3+3, 3+4, 4+3 damage, which nicely fits damage formula.

In case with spell from scroll, he did always 8+8 damage (I tried 10 times). If we take 1d2 + 1 per level, then it seems like 1d2 + 6, which points that spell is cast as level 6. But strange thing that it should vary, like 7+8, 8+7.
I also tried to cast Magic Missile from scroll, and Conjurer fired 3 missiles, which are available at level 5 and 6. If it was level 10, then he should fire 5 of them (level 9 and higher).

 

The scroll casts the spell at level 6. In the classic BG, level 10 wasn't even reachable, so I don't believe any of the scrolls ever cast the spell at that level. It's always been 6 as far as I know. Also, I would recommend NearInfinity if you wanna look at the game files, rather than Infinity Explorer. Not that it makes much difference for the classics...

 

I recommend having both, as they have different strengths and weaknesses. InfinityExplorer is a viewer, not really an editor. NearInfinity lets you edit some stuff, but I found that it doesn't display things as nicely as InfinityExplorer most of the time.
That said, DLTCEP has more functionality, but IEEP is much easier to use for actually editing stuff, and both can display the data as well, although with IEEP you first need to extract things with InfinityExplorer or NearInfinity.

All can be downloaded from here:
https://sorcerers.net/Games/IEmodding/index.php
There is no reason not to try them all.

 

I see, so it's level 6, when reading from the scroll.
I was wondering why Burning Hands does constant maximum 8+8 damage from the scroll, did more tests, and after 14 tries in total finally got 7+8. Amazing RNG to get 8+8 13 times in the row O_o

Thank you, Keneth and SlickRCBD, for helping me to understand Baldur's Gate better. You're only two who were able to resolve this mystery with strange high damage of this spell. Other 3 forums couldn't.
I'll take a notice of these programs to explore "innards" of Baldur's Gate.

 

Like what? The latest NearInfinity is a fully fleshed-out editor that can edit and display just about anything in the game, including entire maps with animations. I don't think there's any reason to use legacy tools these days.

IEEP and InfinityExplorer haven't been updated in decades, so I wouldn't recommend using them for anything, not even the classics. Also, no one's really keeping the tools on SP up to date, so aside from legacy tools like IEEP, they should be downloaded from official sources.

NearInfinity: https://github.com/Argent77/NearInfinity/releases
DLTCEP: https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/forum/137-dltcep/
WeiDU: https://weidu.org/~thebigg/

 

Sorry, to my knowledge, NearInfinity went a decade without updating and I kinda stopped looking after a few years on the external site. I was unaware there was a new version after it was stuck in the beta version for over 5 years.
I haven't looked for a new version of DLTCEP in a very long time either.
For the record, I used the following versions:

• InfinityExplorer 0.75
• DLTCEP 7.1
• NearInfinity 1.33Beta 18 (also still have 1.32 in my Start menu)
  
• IEEP 1.0.9

I haven't done much modding in the last 5-10 years, haven't updated my tools, and the computer they are installed on dual-boots Windows 98SE & XP. It's a Dell Optiplex GX110 with a 1ghz processor and 512mb of RAM. I've had it 23 years, and I can't believe it's that old.

 

I'm surprised you can even run a modern browser on that setup.

 

I never said I did, and I can't. It's only a Pentium II, and Firefox dropped support for that years ago. Not even Opera works on it and there was one Waterfox browser that would run, but it was slower than Netscape 6 (which was notoriously slow and what killed Netscape because they never really fixed it. Netscape 7 was just as slow, but they simply upped the system requirements, while the Mozilla browser had a notable speed improvement between two pre-release versions).

It's just the original computer I installed the Infinity Engine games onto and never uninstalled. It wasn't obsolete when I first installed Baldur's Gate, in fact it was my best computer and primary system at the time.
I never really migrated the games to newer systems, although with this Amazon giveaway so far of Baldur's Gate EE, IWD EE, and now PST:EE I've installed them on my Win10 computer.