how to use evil artifacts

[Nevasith]

For example powder of dark decay or spindle of sleep?

So far, every time I try to use it, someone drops their disposition to 0 and yell that I have poisoned them.

At the moment it looks like every meaningful character has empathy above 10 which is very problematic as it renders all potential election tricks impossible and those artifacts utterly useless. Is there something I'm missing? Is it possible to build a character explicitly to use those objects without getting caught?

[Fajeth]

How high is your shadowarts skill?

[Nevasith]

you mean stealth? I tried with 8 and with 10 on another char

[Fajeth]

Should be enough, unless they have more empathy. Not sure if there was a random chance in aswell

[Nevasith]

I checked the guy whom I tried to curse - village major, scholar, wons pesthouse. Scholars have empathy as class skill, do NPC have zodiac? I'm thinking that maybe he had one with max empathy on top of a sign?

I'm making a char specifically to test out stealth vs empathy if there's a random chance. (Scorpio zodiac + I'm planing to use the cloak that gives bonuses


OK, I did a number of tests with stealth 10 vs empathy = 5 and it never works undetected. To compare, spindle of sleep works every time, so I think something is wrong with the script. After some digging I've found
\Scripts\Measures\Artefacts\as_Usepddv.lua
and there some suspicious lines:

32] CommitAction("poison","","","Destination")


if (GetSkillValue("Owner",SHADOW_ARTS) > GetSkillValue("Destination",EMPATHY)) then
AddImpact("Destination","LifeExpanding",YearsToLive,-1)
Sleep(1)
end
chr_ModifyFavor("Destination","",-favormodify)

where favormodify = 100 set earlier in the file. I changed the file such that:

if (GetSkillValue("Owner",SHADOW_ARTS) > GetSkillValue("Destination",EMPATHY)) then
AddImpact("Destination","LifeExpanding",YearsToLive,-1)



Sleep(1)
else
chr_ModifyFavor("Destination","",-favormodify)
CommitAction("poison","","","Destination")
MsgSay("Destination","_HPFZ_ARTEFAKT_PDDV_SPRUCH_+0")
end

and it seems to have solved the problem.