NathanH

In passing, why isn't there a portrait notification of engagement? I know there's the red lines in the main screen, but they can easily get lost in a big melee with lots of effects. There should be a chain or lock or something displayed on the portrait of any engaged character.

I dunno, I'd have totally got rid of Sagani as punishment for her bobbins attribute choices even for such a small reward... Unfortunately everyone in my party at that moment I wanted to keep, and I couldn't be bothered going back to pick up a victim...

If you open a red container but don't take anything from it, does that count as stealing? I ask because my only resistance to the lockpicking-is-stealing idea is that you can accidentally click on the lock, and I'd rather it wasn't straightforward to mis-click your way to hostility. But if opening red containers counts as stealing anyway, this objection doesn't matter.

There is an option to tell the chief warden fellow something along these lines, and I suppose that would be passed on to Azo.

I didn't really know who was doing what in this quest, but it gave me the option to break her neck, so I naturally took it. This fortunately allowed me to kill the cultist leader, because he came across as a mixture of a deranged psychopath and one of those annoying people who posts childish political rants on their facebook wall. Then I extorted some more money, because more money.

In fact the random monster system in some sense works against its purpose: assuming you're not going to just auto-reload (thus rendering the system pointless), it means that resting when you're in relatively good health is safe enough, whereas resting when you are near death a significant danger, thus making you want to rest before you actually need to!

As has been pointed out many times already in the thread, there are more options than "no pre-buffing at all" vs "pre-buffing exactly as it was in BG2 in every way". As an example, durations are sufficiently short that you can't put 25 buffs on everyone because they would all run out.

There is a console command to force a rest.

I used to think that time-wasters were not good mechanics, but now I am not so sure. The point of resting restrictions is to try to get you to play dungeons without resting too often. If people aren't resting too much because walking back to town to rest is too annoying for them, then it's doing its job. Essentially, being able to go back to town and rest is really only there to make sure you don't get irrevocably stuck. It's not intended to be used as a common mechanic. It only becomes a problem if the higher difficulties force even good players to do it more than very occasionally. In that case, what's really the problem is the supply limit at harder levels anyway.

Probably the camping supplies limit level should be unhooked from the easy/normal/hard setting and given its own setting.

You're missing the point. Problem ain't - from my perspective - that it'd be tiresome to pre-buff. Problem is the system does not convince the player (especially the one used to rest-spamming and spell-spamming) to play better in other way than discouraging him (in an annoying way, thus simply annoying him). Good system should either straight up punish the bad play (like Souls' series do: there is no room for mistakes, because punishment for failure is going back to square one) or encourage change. For example: I'd like to play without being able to save/load, but the way the engagements are made it's either them or us. And if it's us, then it's over. It encourages the foreknowledge (because otherwise your journey would end in a bear's pit: there is no way of gauging the difficulty gap between encounters) and using full arsenal of your spells per each encounter (thus, indirectly, rest-spamming; going back and forth between locations to take camping supplies). Just in case. Because otherwise you'll die and all progress will be lost. I find this a huge flaw from the design perspective, because this does opposite to what was expected: I will either do something the designers didn't want me to do or I will not use the mode entirely (beating the purpose of having such mode in the first place). Hmm, it is probably true that pre-buffing could interfere with Iron Man.This opinion will probably annoy you, but I don't think that a large RPG should worry about whether Iron Man is winnable.

As I have said many times, my posts have been addressing the criticism "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming". If your criticism is deeper than that, then a pre-buffing interface option is clearly not a solution. The goal of my posts is to eliminate the posts saying "No pre-buffing! It is tedious and time-consuming!". Alternative criticisms of pre-buffing, in any of its forms, remain welcome.

So, a lot of people reply with this sort of thought. Are people of this opinion worried that the way that it feels your character would respond is then interpreted by the game to create some sort of almost objective measurement of their personality, with real in-game consequences? Presumably you also have an idea about how your character should score on the various personality scores, and it may be that "how it feels your character would respond" is tagged by this system in a way you disagree with, with in-game consequences. How do you all feel about this?

Sure. And all I'm saying it is that addressing it by tacking on a pre-buffing macro is kludgy. Earlier you said it was kludgy because "It's a tacked-on feature which adds complexity without addressing the underlying design problem". But now you have accepted that, if the underlying design problem is agreed to be "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming", it addresses the underlying design problem. Please address your inconsistency.

I guess it is reasonable enough to limit per-encounter buffs to combat only. It won't satisfy the extreme simulationists but then per-encounter abilities don't by default. You can also make the per-encounter abilities reset only at the end of combat, so you can use a per-encounter buff to pre-buff, but you have to "pay for it" by not having your full complement once the encounter starts. I would favour just disallowing them out of combat, though. Simpler and safer. You'd have to try it out, but the durations on the buffs seem sufficiently short that you'd only really be able to fire off one or maybe two before combat started and still get decent use out of them, so I also wouldn't worry too much about that aspect in PoEt. What would we do about Ciphers? Combat-only OK for them?

No! No! No! If the underlying design problem is "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming", and you apply most of your buffs consistently, then a pre-buff interface addresses the underlying design problem elegantly and efficiently. It's not a kludge. If the underlying design problem is "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming", and you apply many different buff strategies over the course of a single dungeon, then a pre-buff interface is unlikely to be a solution. If the underlying design problem is other than "pre-buffing is tedious an time-consuming", then a pre-buff interfaction is not a solution. In the last two cases the pre-buff interface isn't a kludge because it doesn't solve the underlying problem. I don't like to push this as much as I am, because it's just a tangential comment anyway, but it's tedious that essentially simple points that I'm making are being consistently misunderstood. Allow me to provide a clear example. I am playing NWN2. I have a post-rest buff strategy that consists of: apply all of my 1 hour/level abilities on my preferred targets for them. I have a pre-tough-encounter buff strategy of: consistently apply a collection of 1 minute/level abilities on my preferred targets for them. A wholly-reasonable criticism of this mechanic, that has been used throughout this thread, is that in NWN2 (or BG2, or whatever) this is annoying because casting all of those spells is tedious and time-consuming. In fact I stopped playing NWN2 precisely because of this! A pre-buffing macro solves this problem elegantly and efficiently. I simply set up my two strategies once in the macro interface, and fire them whenever I want. This should be no longer tedious or time-consuming. There are many other wholly-reasonable criticism of the pre-buffing mechanics in this particular example. There are many wholly-plausible pre-buffing mechanics that do not conform to this example. But these are irrelevant to my comment. So what is my point? My point is that the argument "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" can be addressed if that is the only reason to avoid pre-buffing.

I will say it again: if the primary reason that the mechanic (pre-buffing with long-duration buffs) is clunky is "because it is tedious and time-consuming" then a macro system is not kludgy because it is an efficient and sensible solution to the problem: with such a macro system, pre-buffing with long-duration buffs is no longer tedious and time-consuming, so the mechanic is no longer clunky, and so the solution is efficient and elegant. On the other hand, if the mechanic (pre-buffing with long duration buffs) is clunky because of other reasons then a macro system is not a solution so cannot be a kludgy solution because it is not a solution!

I see Well, I prefer the first argument - it's not tedious, because no one forces you to do it just because it's possible. This would be true if they just, say, allowed pre-buffing in PoEt but didn't change the balance. As a "global" argument for games of this type it's going to be a bit more controversial, because it depends on how the game has been made. For instance, if I made a game of this type, I'd be balancing my final-boss encounter in a dungeon on the assumption of significant pre-buffing, so in a game I made you'd typically be obliged to do some, and so I'd be obliged to create some quality-of-life improvements to help you do this comfortably.

I think this is a poor argument. If one's only dislike for pre-buffing is "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" then pre-buffing convenience functions are possible and address this dislike. Thus, the argument "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" is removed from the discussion. Progress is made. If you believe pre-buffing is a problem for other reasons, then you simply use those arguments instead. But you don't try to use the "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" argument to help you, because it has been demonstrated that there is no need for this. I'm actually with PrimaJunta on this one. I prefer to have pre-buffing as a encounter-to-encounter tactical option, not as a general tactical necessity that needs regular automation support (which would really somewhat defy the purpose, except if you really *want* an additional "buffing logistics minigame" mechanic, which I don't care about). Also, it would be a quite some extra work to create such an interface. If your pre-buffing activity isn't a general tactical necessity that needs regular automation support then it is almost by definition not "tedious and time consuming" so doesn't need to defend itself against the criticism that it's "tedious and time consuming" to begin with. I simply address the argument "pre-buffing is necessarily tedious and time consuming". It should be noted in passing that my counter-argument fails in the case where very many different large pre-buffing regimes are needed. To be honest I never intended this to be more than a passing comment. But it was worth comment: the "tedious and time-consuming" argument is fundamentally a quality of life issue and should be considered quite different to the other gameplay mechanics issues. For instance, the "tedious and time-consuming" wouldn't even hold for PoEt as it stands, because PoEt buffs are too short to cast very many anyway.

I think this is a poor argument. If one's only dislike for pre-buffing is "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" then pre-buffing convenience functions are possible and address this dislike. Thus, the argument "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" is removed from the discussion. Progress is made. If you believe pre-buffing is a problem for other reasons, then you simply use those arguments instead. But you don't try to use the "pre-buffing is tedious and time-consuming" argument to help you, because it has been demonstrated that there is no need for this.

An odd comment. A pre-buffing interface seems like an elegant solution to the problem "it is tedious and time consuming to pre-buff". Other arguments against pre-buffing exist. But "tedious and time-consuming" is trivial to overcome.

Pretty much this. If you allow prebuffing (and really long duration buffs, as a lot of people have also requested), you get the "buff checklist", which is tedious and somewhat brainless. Well, as mentioned above several times and noted in your post, this is only the case if we have both pre-buffing and long buffs. Currently we have neither. Arguing against adding one because adding both would be bad is wrong. It's also worth pointing out once again that the tedium aspect of pre-buffing can be overcome trivially by a pre-buffing interface. Many roguelikes have such a feature. For instance, one can imagine a screen why you specify all the buffs you want to apply to all your characters on-rest.

My only potential criticism of the resting restrictions would be that they might be too low on the harder difficulties. They're perfectly fine, perhaps even over-generous, on Normal. The reasons for resting systems versus having everything available in every battle are as follows: i) You can have major battles and minor battles in one dungeon without having the minor battles be completely irrelevant. ii) It creates a "resource management" mechanic that many people like. iii) You can have some really rather powerful spells, because you can't use them that often.

Yes, this thread is being quite tedious because of this mistake. In PoEt we have: i) Resting restrictions ii) Short-duration buffs only iii) In-combat casting only. I think it's uncontroversial to say that having at least one of these is a good thing. It's probably true that having two of them is a good thing. But three? Maybe that's too much.

I'd play Pillars first, it has all the modern touches and is so a much more accessible game to a modern gamer. It will allow you to "get" what this type of game is all about, but in a comfortable environment. After Pillars I recommend trying BG1, but don't worry too much if you find you don't like it so much, and feel free to skip to BG2. Definitely play Bg2, because it's the best game ever made. But I'd not necessarily recommend it as the first game of its type.