Jediphile

Hehe - better not tell my players this.... "

Yes, but there is a big difference between house rules that fit the individual campaign style of the GM and house rules that try to fix the broken rules of a system. You seem to cast those two in as the same, but they're not. Most campaigns will, in any system, throw in their own tweaks here and there, but that's a matter of individual preference among the players and GM. This doesn't indicate that the rules are flawed, just that the players and GM want to do something a little differently. In short, they add those tweaks because they want them - not because they need them. The same cannot be said to be the case for my 2e revisions with regard to the dual-class options, for example - those I definitely introduced because the existing rules were terribly flawed and, worse, a wide open opportunity for exploitation.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Precisely. I've run into this particular wall again and again in 3e. In one game, we were playing in Forgotten Realms, and I wanted to make a sly wizard, loosely based on Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. For those of you who don't know him, he is a spy with an awful lot of bad history posing as a tailor on a space station, but he lies every chance he gets, and he is very slick and very smart about it and a master at nasty comments and subtle threats (that doesn't do him justice at all, but it's what I can do now...). So I needed my character to be really sly - he didn't have to be a thief, he just had to that sort of 'evil charm' and be really subtle. Now, you can infer that any way you want, but in 3e, the way to become 'silvertongued' is to build the Innuendo skill - a lot! But I couldn't do that as a wizard, because the rules wouldn't let me. That's bad game design! Uhm... Not to put too fine a point on it, but is that precisely what you've said you did with 2e rules? I know I did...

The point is that it doesn't need to be. In fact, a good GM can make such a disadvantage nearly unnoticeable. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> A good GM can make the flaws of event he worst system not matter at all. But if the GM is that good, what could get out of a system that was much better? And as EnderWiggin said, an flawed system is still a flawed system. A good GM can get around that, but why should he have to? Shouldn't the system be tested and flawless to begin with? Yes, I know that will never happen, but I think we can get a good deal closer to perfection than we do in 3e...

Since this is the PnP forum, I guess you've all had them - those defining moments that were so much fun or so much terror or so much... whatever, that you're still playing RPGs or at least remembering with the hint of a smile on your face. So let us reminisce and embrace nostalgia... I'll go first with one of my experiences. The game was AD&D 2e. We were playing in the Mystara setting (not that it matters) and were in some northern lands exploring some mountains. The group was a fierce human warrior (about level 10-11 or so), a powerful human wizard (around level 12 - that was my character), and a halfling thief (about level 9 or 10, I think). In the mountains we came across a fairly large red dragon whose alignment was apparently "hungry"... A harsh battle commenced. We approached the matter with strategy, of course, so the warrior charged the dragon and kept it away from the rest of us. He struck it with powerful blow while taking great damage himself, while my wizard stood in the back and aided his attacks with spells. The halfling, of course, decided quickly that this was all very dangerous and so disappeared to the shadows... Meanwhile the battle raged on. The warrior and my wizard were doing severe damage to the dragon, though the warrior was hurt a lot himself as well. This went on for long rounds, while the thief waited. But he eventually decided to at least do something with his time, so he told the DM that he would sneak behind the dragon. This also took several rounds while the warrior was hemorrhaging hit points and my wizard was beginning to run low on spells. But we were making progress at least - the dragon was visibly hurt too, though it wouldn't go down yet. The halfling thief had found his way behind the dragon, though, and decided that he would try to backstab it. The DM warned him that the dragon might turn on him, even if he failed the attempt, and that his chances were not good, since he didn't have a good hit-probability, didn't have a magic weapon, and didn't have high strength, while the dragon had a very good AC. Indeed, the halfling would need to roll a natural 20 to hit at all! I think one of us (might have been me, but I honestly don't remember) noted that this would logically not be possible, since the rules stated that backstabbing was relevant only against humanoid beings. And besides, the halfling would not be able to reach the dragon's "back" in any event... The DM shrugged it off, however, because, as he said, "what are the chances of success anyway?" But the halfling was adamant to try and rolled the dice. Of course he rolled a natural 20. Now, I should point that in these days, we played natural 20s as straight double damage. If you rolled a natural 20, then you rolled damage roll plus damage modifiers and then it was twice that. However, since this was a thief, he also got his backstab modifier, which, along with the double damage, added up to quadruple damage on the dice roll. However, since it was a nonmagical weapon and the halfling had no damage modifiers, the damage inflicted would be four times whatever he rolled on his 1d6 die for damage. So he rolled his d6... And he rolled a 1. The dragon took 4 lousy points of damage from his massive backstab... And then it rolled over and died... Actually the rest of us besides the guy who played the halfling haven't talked much about this since, so maybe it's not the best story...

Yes. You have a problem...

But if they mean so little, then why bother having them at all? Why not just give people points to build with and then let them go and buy what they want among the skills and traits and what have we? Not to offend, but any idea of classes will always face that criticism. But HPs are still accumulated by level, I take it. A rule like you describe seems more to be invented to fix a problem than to restructure the system and remove the flawed parts. I could accept HPs after a fashion, but only as a representative of how much damage a particular part of the body can take before it is injured or worse. I once played a Cthulhu campaign where we used a system (stolen from Twilight 2000, IIRC), where each body part (torso, head, arms, legs, chest) were assigned "hit points" based on the character's constitution/health stat (2

Tell that to Ahlan Matale!!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I would, but he keeps firing that blaster at me every time I come within range... :D Seriously, weren't those people all mercilessly killed by Malak's forces? I'd say good riddance if it wasn't for all the bloody trouble of reconciling their differences...

This was from part 7. So shortly after a casualty of Exar Kun during the Sith War? Remember that Dantooine became a casualty of Darth Malak during the Jedi Civil war and 4 years after Dantooine became this casualty you are solving a Mercenary problem on that planet! So at least 44 years after Ossus became a casualty of Exar Kun it looks to me that this is not so "shortly". I mentioned the planet because I wanted to mention some Jedi planets which IMO should also be in Kotor III. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, yes, but given just how bad the devastation of Ossus was at that time, it doesn't seem relevant to me to let it have any significance yet. I mean, Ossus still looks like a ruin when Luke comes by more than 4000 years later... But that's just me. Besides, I tend to think Sith worlds will be more important that Jedi worlds in KotOR3, since that is presumably where Revan went, and where the Exile followed.

They don't get to have a choice. The clones are "grown" in tanks and are never allowed to obtain consciousness until Palpatine wants to jump into one. This way he can die about as many times as he likes and still survive in a new body. Luke's apparent fall to the dark side is really just a pretense to get close to those tanks so he can destroy them, though Luke doesn't resist the dark side quite as well as he thought, either.

Huh?!? Where did that come from? Not saying you're wrong, but I have no recollection of anything to suggest that. Did or miss something or does anyone else remember this? Can anyone point where this was suggested in KotOR2?

Too bad they didn't say this in the movie. But then how could they - nobody had heard of Battle Meditation until the Saga of Nomi Sunrider was written almost a decade later... Well, he *was* only revived during the "Dark Empire" trilogy of series. That means he lived 14 or so comic books beyond ROTJ - that's not too bad. It would have been much worse if kept dragging it on long beyond that, but they did close the Pandora's box they opened inside the series itself. So even if you don't like it, they did at least clean up the mess themselves. And how did she "see" that - as a Miraluka, she is completely blind. Even if we do establish Nihilus as male and leave the Exile to be either male or female, that still doesn't preclude the idea that the Exile is Nihilus. After all, the 'nothingness' that the Exile would have abandoned couldn't have lived on by itself without manifesting itself in some form and incarnation, and so it could have entered and revived the body of whatever near-dying jedi was around on the field of battle on Malachor V. Problem solved. Indeed, I suspect it took the dead or dying body of someone close to the Exile - a fellow jedi or perhaps the Exile's master.

Essentially making a mistake similar to that made when Mystara was to be an AD&D campaign world... And to think WotC vowed to never repeat the failures of TSR... When will they ever learn?

True enough. Several GMs just pass the problem over and ignore low-level encounters, but I roll the dice for random encounters every time - just because the PCs are powerful doesn't mean that the world has suddenly been depopulated by kobolds or orcs or whatever. If I do roll an encounter of, say, nine orcs, I just tell my players, "you encounter nine orcs, do you want to play the fight?" The answer is always no, since there is no reason to go through the pointless dice-rolling exercise, but I ask anyway. That way the idea that orcs and whatnot still exist is kept alive. I may give token xp out for this, since they are so few that it really doesn't matter, but I don't give treasure. The players accept that, though, because I also play with critical misses, and nothing is worse than breaking your favorite +4 sword in a fight with a small group of wolves - yes, that did happen to us once... A workable solution. I do play straight 2e in this area, though, and allow the full bonus to each and every attack. One player is now a 16th-level minotaur-turned-human warrior and has been built with 2e Player Option rules specifically towards the goal of being a two-hand sword grand master who can use a two-hand sword in each hand. If I changed the rules, it would be really unfair on him, because he worked for years to get his character to be the combat-monster that he is now. I do challenge the group with equally powerful monsters on occasion. They fought some bugbears trained by Bargle in the Black Eagle Barony recently that gave them a run for their money - the wizard cast a Phantasmal Killer on the bugbear leader, but while he failed the save, he did manage to postpone the effect until later in the battle with the Hardiness high-level skill from the DM Option: High-Level Campaigns book. While the players initially moaned about this, it eventually won the battle, because it turned out to take effect just as things were looking bad for the group. So I don't think I need to import that rule, though I will seriously consider it, if I begin another 2e campaign. I'm far more likely to introduce a rule that states that rolls of 1, 2, or 3 always miss, while only a 1 results in the dubious pleasure of rolling my critical miss tables...

Actually two of my players are married... to each other. They have two children now, and she was *demanding* that the rest of us gather at the table to play a day or so after giving birth! I must be doing somthing right as GM... I just talked to her yesterday because I have to move and therefore may have to shut the campaign down a little before I intended, but she was adamant that we should continue playing, even though they both work full time jobs and have little spare time with two kids growing up. I guess she's been infected badly with RPG-fever

I don't agree. Palpatine's clones were a bit of a surprise when introduced in the "Dark Empire" comic books. And they did serve to explain something that had always bothered me in the films. I mean, take a look at ROTJ - Luke is on the Death Star II with Vader and Palpatine and there are some confrontations. Now, in spite of anything Luke does on the Death Star, the rebels do disable the generator and do enter the Death Star so they can destroy it. The whole point of the story was that Luke *had* to face his father and destroy the emperor, because nobody else could (except Leia, as Yoda suggests in ESB). But by the end of ROTJ, it really doesn't matter, because Luke could have turned to the dark side, been killed, or whatever and the Death Star II would still have been destroyed and Palpatine and Vader would still be just as dead... Palpatine's clones *did* fix that problem, because it showed us that Luke could never have defeated him there, and it wasn't until his spirit was finally exorcised that Palpatine was finally defeated. Too bad about the crappy "Empire's End" books, though - they could have been a lot better. As for Nihilus, it depends a lot on how he returns. Imagine having the Exile's old friends face off against Nihilus, defeat him, take off the mask and then see... The Exile! That could be great, I think :cool:

Yeah, that's the good thing about open endings - it leaves a lot of interesting speculation. After Episode V, people were really going crazy over whether Vader was really Luke's father or not. Not quite the same with KotOR2, though. KotOR2 isn't just open-ended - if it had been that would have been okay - it's unfinished and cut to pieces. The Nihilus bits all still being there is interesting, though... Yes, that's an interesting aspect, isn't it? I don't think it was planned as such, since that would indicate that Visas knows of the Exile/Nihilus connection (if that presumption is correct), and I doubt she is, but it does work well to also suggest the connection on a more subtle level. It can definitely be construed as another clue.

Fun... An alternative: Exile: "Kreia, are you Handmaiden's mother?" Kreia: "I could tell you, but you would be weakened from it - such answers you must discover yourself. And you'll make the Handmaiden weaker too, if you discover the answer for her..." Exile: "Okay, that's it - I've had it with all the cryptic mumbo-mumbo! Now give me a simple yes or no already - are you her mother or not? I WANT THE TRUTH!!" Kreia: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!" -- Okay, that was a cheap shot - my bad :"> " :D

Thanks for the link and the path to the voiceover. Why would those be opposed? Besides, I'm not so sure Nihilus is destroyed. The way he dissolves could mean anything. For example, rather than being destroyed, he could have 'reconnected' with the Exile. That way the Exile has regained his ties to the force again, and note how that conveniently coincides in the plot with the point where the Exile and Kreia separate - Kreia leaves just as the confrontation with Nihilus comes, so the bond may have been severed without the Exile ever realizing it. After all, he wasn't even aware that his connection to the force had remained lost, and that he used force powers only through his force bonds with other people. What I find interesting in the cut Vash dialogue where concerning Nihilus is this: "Look within for the answer. We are each solely accountable for everything in our lives. Nothing ever happens to us unless we allow it." By this comment it is clear that the Exile has accepted a lot without being aware of it. What else has he accepted without realizing it?

I play almost exclusively with the same old crowd I've known for years and years, and even then I tend to be choosy about who I play with. If I meet new players, it's usually because someone in the group wants to introduce someone else to the game, but that doesn't happen very often. A notable difference was about five years ago, when I met a guy in the local gaming store (which is now closed ) and got to talk with him. We both liked Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and he tried to get me to join the Last Unicorn Games version of Star Trek, that I already knew, but hadn't actually gotten around to playing. So I said yes, and we played Trek RPG for years. Can't complain since my PC ended up in the captain's chair, but the others seemed to think it was fun also. That added many new players to the people I game with, and those are mostly the same people I've played Exalted with until recently.

But did we? He strikes him down, and then Nihilus disappears in some strange haze of red, while the protagonists don't even raise an eyebrow... And the Exile takes the mask, but can't even be bothered to look at Nihilus' face? Odd... After all, since they were both at Malachor V, Nihilus might have been someone he knew, perhaps even an old ally, yet Nihilus' face is never revealed. Why? Probably because Exile had confronted Nihilus by then. As for the Lonna Vash explanation, do you have a reference to that (sound files or in the dialogue)? I'd really like to see or hear it.

Yes, but don't you see that this is precisely why Nihilus is connected to the Exile - he is, to use your own terms, the part of the Force that the Exile rejected on Malachor V. He is not whole. He is a void. Thus the name Nihilus - "Nihil" meaning 'nothing' in latin, as others have also correctly pointed out. And while the two 'halves' have been separated for a decade, Nihilus has survived by stealing the life force of force sensitives like some 'force vampire'. Since the will of the force was for the Exile to embrace the dark side on Malachor V, this is why Nihilus is a Sith and kills only jedi. He is powerful, but he is nothing at his center, because his real self, his real individuality, is running around in the outer rim as the Exile. Nihilus shouldn't exist, and he is constantly draining away - he needs to consume force in order to exist, but he cannot drain the Exile because that is himself - he is drawn to the Exile, his true self, not the other way around. And as for them both being tainted, that's another clue - the Exile isn't tainted, is he? He just lost his connection to the force, until the game begins. But as soon as he enters the republic again and so gets closer to Nihilus, poof, his force powers begin to return...

:D Thanks. We aim to please

Great list! I really like all of those planets! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> All the planets I want to see are there, except for Khar Delba/Khar Shian. Not sure about Ossus, though - it doesn't seem to make much sense so shortly after it became a casualty of Exar Kun during the Sith War...

True, but 2e is a decade and a half old, so of course it's going to outdated - what game of those days isn't? Besides, I've never said 2e didn't have flaws. I know it does. The ability to exploit the system with the dual-class system was awful, for example, and we all fixed those rules. What I'm criticising is that 3e isn't really that much better even after 10+ years of experience to draw on. The mulit/dual-class system is better now, but there are still major gaps in the rules, and then new and flawed rules are thrown in there on top of the old ones. Eeeeek... Yes, level limits are stupid and gone in most campaigns - they certainly are in mine (though I do use them as a starting point for xp penalties...). The progressive element to advance in levels is one of the strongest features of any edition of D&D, and a GM would be crazy to throw it out, since nobody would play. One of my players considered retiring his 12th-level minotaur fighter simply because that was the level limit under the rules, even though I said I wouldn't put a firm level there and only penalize his xp progression a little. That tells us something about how strong the progressive element really is. 3e was an improvement, but I wouldn't say it was a big one. Certainly not as big as it should have been with ten years of practical experience with 2e flaws. As for players switching over, yes and no. The majority of players I know have tried 3e and play it on occasion, yet I know that if I began a new 2e campaign, then they'd still rush to my table and leave 3e behind. I know that because they have all said that, so my GM style is obviously far more important to them than playing 3e instead of 2e, which tells me something about the "quality" of the system...