kormesios

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel." The grandfather of all of these, at least for me, is the unpickable, unbreakable, magically sealed door in some utterly mundane location. The unjumpable 2-foot high fence is a close cousin. I'm willing to suspend disbelief if it makes the game fun, so these usually don't bother me too much. If they are going to take the time to code-away some ability, though, it should at least be worth a hand-waving explanation for why that ability doesn't work. Then I'll play along. (Probably harder to retrofit in with so much dialogue now voice-acted.) I think it's specialized items more than 'unbalanced' loot. I recall NWN2 also had a 'see hidden things' veil they gave you for one plot reason, it would have been very useful just a bit later in the game. If it worked as advertised, which it didn't. People writing later quests presumably don't know what goodies you ended up with in the previous one. They could try to do garbage clean-up routinely, I suppose, so when you finish a quest the plot-specific vanishes (e.g., when the veil is "exposed to sunlight" or something.) But would probably cause more quest-breaking bugs to slip by.

Less of a crime in fantasy game, part of the point is wish fulfillment. And playing with other people, you're going to get past the point where it's all about you pretty quickly anyway. You're forced to find your limitations, as you don't make all the rolls or win all the arguments. And I couldn't agree more, that playing a character you don't actually like can be fun for a while. Possibly the most fun I had was when I got saddled with a lizard man fighter in some DM's campaign. I whined at first, but settled into a role of someone who's problem solving skills could be summarized as "hit it until it goes away"--not stupid, just direct. My "real" characters I never ventured that far, probably because I didn't want people to think of as stupid or the butt of a joke or something. This one, why not? BTW, I brought up the word Mary Sue, but I actually hate it when it's applied to even mediocre fiction. The extreme fan fiction type is recognizable, and it's a good description. But in other places it's so vague it just becomes an all purpose slur meaning "I don't think character X is all that cool." If the word existed in literary criticism before the internet, Odysseus, Henry V, Tom Jones, D'Artagnan, Sherlock Holmes, Aragorn and Jack Ryan would all be dismissed as "Mary Sues", when only Jack Ryan actually is one.

I voted for BG3, but the selling point was the ToEE engine, not the BG3 name. I'd really like to play a polished game, complete with roleplaying opportunities, on that engine with turn based combat. A new Vampire game was a close second.

Musopticon got the actual definition. Though I didn't necessarily mean something quite so extreme. When I played PnP (high school and earlier) there was a tendency to want your characters to have all the traits (both abilities and background) you thought were really cool, which might be slightly different for everyone, but which could lead to "bad" role playing. Heck, I *still* tend to make characters close to that 14-year old's idea of "cool" when I play cRPGs with a point buy. Sometimes something as simple as sticking a character with a low dexterity, so you had to re-imagine him as a clumsy fighter or fat wizard, could actually force a player to re-think things a bit. I'm sure many more mature RPGers don't need such tricks to put some thought into a character, which is why I think the real answer is it depends on the group.

I liked randomization when I played PnP. No point in overdoing it, but in general it helped a lot of ways: different skills/characteristic were a nice starting off point for imagining a new character, gameplay wise it forces you to fiddle with new play styles, and it helped counteract my natural tendency to make an avatar a bit of a Mary Sue.

Sorry for jumping in late, but I thought this was worth emphasizing. The truth is, despite the huge computational powers computers have, it's still more or less a wash whether a computer will outplay a human grandmaster. And this, despite the fact that chess has well worked out strategies and millions of words describing them for programmers to draw on, so programmers know roughly what every human approach is. Humans are just very good at some things, like pattern recognition and sensing "good enough" solutions, that computers are bad at. Two other points, mentioned already, deserve more detail: (1) The goal is to make an AI that's fun to play against, not one that always wins. Humans often find strategies after a game is published that gives them a significant advantage at one thing or another, then exploit it mercilessly. If a computer algorithm found some strategy which allowed it to win consistently, programmers would immediately prohibit it from using it. (2) With Deep Blue, programmers adapted it to Kasparov. But usually it goes the other way--the player can adapt, the game AI sticks to the same set of algorithms. Once you find a weakness, even if it's subtle, it's always there. An idiot AI may do a frontal assault all the time, and if you know that it's easy to stop. A "clever" AI may analyse the situation and do a flanking assault if appropriate. This is better, but a good player will eventually learn when the AI decides which it's going to do, then trick the AI into trying the wrong one, counter attack, and beat it like a red-headed stepchild.

It's a simpler, in some ways cleaner game than EU2. It does less, but will give you a very good taste of what the game's like. If you pick it up, download the latest patch (of course), and don't be tempted to try the "fantasy" scenario.

I just played it last night, and still can't remember for sure, But I think it was like a 3-day gap. But you may still be on to something. That suit is probably Fisher's normal leisure clothing. When he packs for travel, he must throw a week's supply of them in a suitcase. He wouldn't be able to come up with civvy clothes on short notice, anymore than I'd be able to come up with a wetsuit. :ph34r:

I found a bargain bin copy of Pandora Tomorrow a few days ago, and loaded it up. It's definitely fun, although the dialogue is eye-rollingly bad. Thankfully there are only a few lines of it per mission. And I'm not sold that a black suit with night goggles is the best way to infilitrate a commercial train. A pair of jeans and a t-shirt might work better, no? But since the supid outfit meant he couldn't let anyone see him, he was forced to climb outside and *underneath* the train. Which was way cool and made up for it all.. Alanschu's already posted screenshots just above. :D

If you're doing PnP, why don't you just double or triple the modifier (vs higher DC), or roll a smaller die (vs lower DC)? Either one does what you want--easier or even guaranteed for skilled players, tougher or impossible for unskilled ones.

I include it all. Anything that makes playing the OC less enjoyable detracts from the score, IMHO. Which includes not just stilted dialogue and plot cliches but also crashes to desktops, corrupted saves and jerky graphics, if you run into them.

There's really no reason you shouldn't be able to win with Khelgar. Even if you've levelled him up poorly, you should be able to win after a few reloads or so. I don't know that re-starting is going to make things that much easier. Avenger's comment is important--the "Frenzied Beserker" thing can be annoying, and he keeps renewing it. So you either need to be patient and run, or hit him in between renewals (you'll see a little icon flash over his head when it wears off, IIRC).

Actually, around 30% are below 8 at this point, including me (7). Besides, these boards existed long before anyone had even played NWN2, so while there's self-selection, it's not as extreme as you point out. And there've been some pretty vocal critics here, even if not as many as on the main bio boards. So I would have expected a lower rating than it's getting. It'll be interesting to see if the distribution changes as infrequent visitors chime in.

Thanks for the responses! I'm pretty much convinced. Sounds like the focus is really "stealth", and it looks like I can easily pick up Chaos Theory for under $20, which is about my cutoff point for me taking a chance. I'll grab a copy sometime over the holidays, maybe to reward myself for shopping for everyone else. Even though I dislike Clancy, I wasn't that worried about the story. Nothing against an espionage thriller, and if the game's fun, I'll live with a stilted storyline. (It's not like the Deus Ex plot would have been a good novel.) A little worried about using PC controls, but I'm sure I'll manage to get used to them if the game is OK.

I never looked twice at the Splinter Cell games, since I can't read more than two pages of Tom Clancy's prose and don't play many FPS's. In fact, the only FPS' I've enjoyed even slightly are Deus Ex (the first one) and the Thief series. But I read somewhere that the Splinter Cell games are somewhat similar in gameplay--stealth intensive, not much shoot-em-up or twitch factors. Is this true? Should I give one a try?