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?

7. In my scale, 5 or less is where I regret buying the game. I consider 6 adequate-but-uninspired or flawed (Oblivion, ToEE), 8 thoroughly entertaining (IWD, KoTOR), anything higher amazing (Bloodlines, BG2).

You can't change anyone's alignment. You could influence them, especially if you lie all the time, but they stay good. Based on other comments on the bio-boards, if you role-play an evil person throughout the dialogue, you'll end up with low influence with everyone who's good. For the most part they'll stay with you, though, since however evil you are the KoS is worse. So the disconnect is going to be there. There is, however, one good NPC who might dump you before the ending.

It's clear why it gets done--BG and BG2 did it, and explained why in their readme--but at least in those games it didn't re-arrange party locations. And I don't think it de-stealthed you either. I distinctly remember running back to re-organize an assault after a conversation, at least in some of the infinity engine games. In NWN2, it was worse when it happened. But I just didn't run into that many stealth-breaking conversations. Or maybe I just naturally worked around them, since I knew what to expect when I saw an evil guy not already colored hostile. Either way, I certainly got through most areas using standard stealth, scout, and ambush tactics.

I had only one problem: if a stealthed NPC like Neeshka hit a trigger for a conversation, it teleported my protagonist to that point and started a dialogue. And I only observed this once. (Though, it was incredibly annoying that one time.) Otherwise, leaving characters behind while one person scouted, removed traps or launched hit-and-run attacks worked fine. I used that as a strategy constantly, It made a couple areas trivial. Trying to get more than one person stealthed (or invisivbility) was a disaster, though. Whoever wasn't under direct control would attack anyone who came within range, which kind of defeated the purpose. It'd presumably work in puppet mode, but I didn't think it was worth the trouble.

Exactly what happened to Lolth is a mystery, I believe it was made that way so RPers would be able to make the story up themselves. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Back in the first edition days (the only one time I played), there was a module that let the adventurers kill Lolth herself--it was the culmination of the classic series that began with the classic "Expedition Against the Hill Giants." I wonder if the ambiguity was done to let players who'd done an "official" module easily import characters and histories in a new setting?

I think the problem in with paladins and the orcs is that most people--including the developers--are basing the decision on our real-world moral intuitions. And the fantasy world is superficially similar, so we want to do that, but there are hugely important differences. The blanket claim that paladins should never kill something that has surrendered (or is not an immediate threat) would be fine in our world, There are plenty of options--imprisonment, a local police force, a judiciary system, etc. Once someone is incapacitated, they can be dealt with without killing them. But these options don't exist in the fantasy world, certainly not to be applied to orcs. And since orc behavior is (usually) modeled as a cross between man-eating beasts and sociopathic serial killer behavior--they will kill whenever they want to, and they want to very often--having a "good" person fulfill judge/jury/executioner roles is, IMHO, something similar to what we'd consider a legitimate exercise of force in today's world. Unless you're making a gameworld where there's a non-violent way to render orcs harmless, which is almost never available. (The exception is defeating them and getting them to withdraw, which shows up occasionally.) But personally, whatever I think the good choice would be in a "real" fantasy world, I didn't take the kill them approach in NWN2, and don't do that in almost any game. I play the game for fun, and don't want to do things that make me feel evil, even if it's arguably the right choice.

Actually, this is not bad design, just you missing an option. I asked Shandra once, politely, she declined. Being a chivalrous chap, I then told Sand not to press the issue. He made a rude comment to me (shocking, I know), but I finished up the trial on my own. Won, too, even without her testimony or Sand's wit. And you did the thief path? It may have been even funnier the other way. If you do the City Watch path, you see her being shaken down, and if you interrupt she virtually insists on paying them--it's a sign of a her business propsering, she says. I'd been a pretty good guard up to that point, but I let her pay, then hit the thieves for a cut. An impromptu fine, I figured In the trial Torio makes some comment about "Judging people by their actions," I thought I'd been spotless--then the gnome walks in, and I had the same reaction you did. How am I going to be able to explain *this*?! Fortunately it was a decently written cross-examine, a little diplo skill and I managed to blunt her testimony.

You can drag combat (and search, stealth, etc.) modes to your quickslot if you like. Open the skill/feat page and drag it to whatever location you want. You can even turn off the mode bar afterwards if you like. Takes less time to figure this out than it does to complain about it.

I thought the trial was very well done. One of the better things in the game actually. J. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yup, I loved it. It's great when things you've done previously--to companions or other NPCs--have unexpected (but realistic) consequences. And also when skills or stats you've developed mostly for flavor suddenly become useful at a critical point. The only complaint I had about it was that it was an awfully long period of cut-scene pacing. Not sure I'd always be in the mood for that.