kensu

I just noticed that when you talk to a Dabus, rebuses do really appear above their heads. This is true in both the EE and with the most common fix mods on the original version. Did this happen in the unpatched game? Because I don't remember seeing this before... I know in the unpatched versions that a large percentage of NPC barks were broken, so that might have taken this down too.

There is a trick in Icewind Dale that I read on an FAQ when I was playing through it. Make all of your characters human and have them start out as fighters, but give them the attributes that would fit their roles. Once they hit level 2 or 3 and have a good HP base, dual class them over to their final classes, and it becomes a little harder to wipe out the mages and other low HP roles. (I also liked it because my mages were able to use longbows, which made them useful whenever they ran out of spells or nothing they had memorized could help in the given situation). Of course, IWD was supposed to be hard; I think the beginning of BG was just poor design (in their defense, most of the people hadn't ever worked on a game before, much less an RPG, so we're lucky it's as good as it was.)

The main problem is that the designers wrote the battle AI as if the creatures all had independent minds or were being controlled by players, and not by a DM. DMs are known to blunt or ignore rolls if it would seriously affect the enjoyability of the game (Which is one of the reasons why the DM's dice are hidden behind a screen, while the players' are out in the open). Like one issue I had is that if a character is put to sleep or paralyzed, enemies would take advantage of this and kill them; whereas a DM would have the monsters concentrate on the PCs that were still a threat. (Which is actually how a human or sub-human intelligence would act. I know when I use a sleep spell I have my characters attack the ones who made the saving throw. I don't wait for the sleeping ones to wake (though I probably should, since I play Good and Neutral characters, and attacking comatose enemies seems like an Evil thing to do), so if I kill all the able-bodied ones, I start to mop up the sleeping ones.) Now of course the difference is that you can save and reload a computer game, whereas tabletop games are all pretty much Ironman modes, and you can't ever take anything back. Still it did annoy me where there was certain battles I could only win if I got good rolls.

The EEs are on sale again on GOG. I bought the two so I could finally play SoD and see what all the fuss is about. So far I'm not that impressed... Ed: Has anyone else had the problem where BG:EE and BG2:EE screw up graphical overlays in Windows so you need to restart Windows after playing one of them?

Something fun to do for those fooling around with Infinity Engine editors. Change "Bless" so that it poisons everyone in the party, and turn the speakers up loud. It sounds like TNO and Fall From Grace are having sex.

It's been a while since I've read the campaign setting, but the reborn souls you're talking about are petitioners. In general the heavies of the Outer Planes (devas, angels, demons, devils or whatever they were called in 2nd Edition) are natives who were born there, and not reborn souls. Petitioners are born as human or some human analog characters who are level 0 or 1 and can never advance beyond then. (Remember those disgusting Lemures? Those are petitioners). Now that being said, P:T does have the strange case of Morte who is a petitioner, but who is able to gain experience and levels like a non-petitoner; but that may be due to the fact that petitioners aren't supposed to the leave the Outer Plane they were born on. (also the fact that a skull, while still on the pillar, has the knowledge of the entire pillar, so it's possible the experience is still filling in the vast reservoirs of potential left empty when TNO pulled him off the pillar)

What kind of mods are there that could possibly make Fallout 3 worth playing? Aside from one that turns it into Van Buren, I can't think of one.

Wow, I didn't even know they had sleeping portraits.

I think a lot of problems with the game are a result of the setting. A lot of why P:T was good was because of the Planescape setting, which despite its brief life was far more popular that similar attempts in D&D to create a planar campaign setting (see Spelljammer and the Immortals rules, which were nowhere as popular). The whole thing was about belief and point of view; the one sentence summary of Planescape was: philosophers with clubs. Numenera, on the other hand is: a world of trash-pickers. Among all the NPCs there is not a single philosopher, artist or scientist. Even the Changing God used technology he dug up and dusted off to do what he did. And considering the game is concerned with the left-over bodies of the Changing God, it reinforces the trash motif. A more fitting name would have been Numenera:Refuse. Yes, the game is all about trash, and that really isn't all the compelling. Perhaps if the designers had realized that, and built the game around the concept of wastefulness, I might be able to get behind it, but I don't think there was a single driving philosophy behind the whole thing, so it comes off as a bit arbitrary...

Has anyone else run into a problem where after combat ends you'll have one or more character start attacking other party members? I assumed this was them being Confused, but I was able to click on the character and take control of them, and that stopped it immediately, whereas in Baldur's Gate et al you can't take control of them. For that matter, have you noticed there's no way of indicating status conditions in the game? I had assumed maybe there weren't any, until one of my characters inexplicably managed to put an enemy to sleep, and I saw the floating z's appear above their head. (I think Modron used some of his stun bolts). Your characters can also become fatigued, but the only way to know that is they begin bitching to you. I suppose that's more realistic, but it's also kind of annoying.

Creating a dumping ground for anyone who wants to talk about P:T, since I imagine a lot of people are replaying it now with the EE out. Some things I noticed while playing through the original.... - It would certainly be interesting if a pack of Displacer Beasts attacked the Warrens of Thought. (Since Blink Dogs are the natural enemy of Displacer Beasts, I would assume Cranium or Moon Rats would be the natural enemy of Displacer Beasts) - I remember reading that Curst was developed by a different team that hadn't seen any of the other area in the games. Look at the bartender, he's got the inn menu (including the four types of rooms), which I've seen nowhere else in the game! It's obvious the developers thought they were just making a Baldur's Gate level. - Speaking about Moon Rats, why don't they show up in a video game? They could enslave Wererats too, they would take care of the rats during the time the moon is waning. - I understand the thinking behind why TNO can't become a priest (it's possible that he became a god at one point, in any case he's lived long enough to piss off every god there is, so none will have him. I think this was mentioned in a Chris Avellone interview). But couldn't he have been a Druid? Mourns For Trees could have taught him. - The way the Nameless One's class works is weird. It's like Dual-Classing, except you don't keep any of the abilities you gained when you're another class, and you can switch back and forth at will. That's like a Chuck Norris fact; The Nameless One can dual class back!

Yep, that ended up doing it. After you select a target, right-click will close the menu. Thanks!

I always saw Sion as an expy for the Nameless One. Aren't they even missing the same eye? (in some of the artwork the Nameless One is missing an eye. In-game it's the one you can pop out and replace)

NOTE: This is in reference to the original version, not the EE one. Currently in order to use a spell or special ability I need to do the following: 1. Click on the TNO or other party member to bring up their radial menu. 2. Click on the category on the radial menu (Mage Spellbook or Special Abilities) 3. Click on the spell or special ability I've chosen. 4. Select a target. Up until this point it's all well and good, but once I select a target the radial menu stays open, and I have to hit esc to close it, which really feels clunky. in BG and BG2 you don't have this problem since the spells and ability appears on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Is there a better way to access these abilities, and I'm just not seeing it? I noticed that you can assign a hotkey to any spell or ability in the game (!) but that seems like overkill. (BTW, does this mean that Planescape:Torment invented the radial menu that went onto be used in NWN and TOEE?)

I dunno, Mission seemed like what Han Solo would be like if played by Mindy Kaling. I think I was okay with Mission the first time I played through KOTOR, but the companions are such a joke compared to what Obsidian did in the sequel. I don't know if people still think of it this way, but at the time, KOTOR2 was seen as a spiritual successor to Planescape:Torment, with most of the companions having similar level of depth and interaction.

And all this time I thought I was the only one annoyed by that. A lot of people dislike it- I've usually seen it described as a poor quality attempt to mimic Joss Whedon's humour. That sort of humour relies very much on having well written and well liked (in the appreciation sense, not necessarily 'nice') characters though, if you don't like the characters you tend to end up wishing they and all their 'charming' quirks would be fired into a sun. Or use the Force to make their wookie friend kill them. >

Helping with the narrative == consultant. Unless Avellone is the director, it might be missable. I guess it really depends on who the director is; Avellone had a supporting role in Mask of The Betrayer, and that was as good as P:T.

I'm not so sure I would blame EA for what happened to Origin. Richard Garriot and Chris Roberts have both gone on to have spectacular failures ever since. Also some of those canceled projects were pretty insane. BioForge 2 was supposed to cost several hundred dollars and ship with VR equipment; and this was in the days before USB, so you probably would've had to plug something into your motherboard to get it to work.

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for the first time, I can't believe they're Bioware games because they're actually good. I pretty much gave up on them with Jade Empire, when they decided to strip it of most of its RPG elements (like, you know, an inventory system) to appeal to people who hated RPGs. I turned it off after I was told I was about to take part in a battle, and it switched to a Galaga-like minigame. Selling out to EA was really the last straw; I have never played any of the ME or DA games, and nothing I've ever seen about them has made me reconsider that decision.

In POE there is really no point in playing as a Monk, since the class is broken. This is not a problem that is unique to POE, since the monk class in DnD has been broken for a long time and no one at TSR or WOTC has been able to figure out how to fix it (or simply didn't care). I think the reason for this is simple, the developers of DnD were well-known for their dislike of the class, believing that it didn't fit in with the setting, to such an extent that it didn't even appear in the core books of Second Edition. As such they haven't had the impetus to fix the fundamental problems with the class. The main problem with the class is that while they are perfectly capable of dealing with melee enemies with armor, they are easily picked off by archers and mages. The latter problem is a discussion for another time, but I think the former problem is due to a fundamental error in the makeup of the class. Let me explain... Monks as they are now are built like any fighter derived class, it's assumed they will be like Rocky Balboa and take any damage meted out to them, and last long enough to wipe out their opponent. In DnD this is handled by having the AC of a monk based on their Wisdom score, making their skin into a natural kind of armor. The trouble is that this doesn't map onto reality at all. Martial artists aren't damage sponges, they are known for their reflexes, their ability to avoid taking damage at all. I think it would be realistic for a level 10 monk to have the same armor class as a mage, but it wouldn't matter since most hits don't connect, or at the best giving a glancing blow. In NWN2 I fixed this problem by taking a couple of Thief levels so my monk had Uncanny Dodge, which should have been a Class Feat for the monk! Now for how this would involve dealing with missile damage. It has been demonstrated that sufficiently skilled martial artists are capable of grabbing arrows out of the air. (There was even a Mythbusters episode where a student of Ninjitsu showed that this was a real ability). I suggest this ability be built into the monk class, based on their dexterity. To avoid this being a game-breaker the cap for this ability's effectiveness would be 50% of the time, and that would take a very high dexterity and level to achieve. This would work for arrows or crossbow bolts, but not for sling stones (which are too small) or musket balls (which are too fast, and would burn their hand anyway). Any thoughts? (Also, I think you should take a page from Wizardry and allow them to use shurikens, but that brings up the whole consumable ammunition problem)

I've always been meaning to go back and play Final Fantasy XII, since Akitoshi Kawazu is a mad genius and even his bad games have something worthwhile to experience in them. I've also liked the stuff that Yasumi Matsuno did with the Ivalice games.

Have an option to romance the Grieving Mother, and your companions will start making fun of you for having an imaginary girlfriend. :D

As long as they don't take the attitude that Bioware took with Jade Empire, "an RPG for people who don't like RPGs".

Flash Gordon and/or Conan the Cimmerian. Both have well fleshed out worlds and are icons of American fiction which would play well with to older audience, as well as provide a gateway to the works for younger players.

Just finished it. Generally I stand by my original assessment, however the game did get better once you got out of Sagus Cliffs. ToN does give you the impression that you're clearing your own path with your decisions, but from the walkthroughs I've read since then, it looks like making other choices either leads to a premature endgame or the choices end up being meaningless. Something that bugged me, long before it was even in prelease, is how in the developer interviews, they would mention how they would make sure to spend some time playing P:T each week, to make sure that they got the "feel" right. I can't imagine them doing that with Mask of the Betrayer, even though it was some of the same people. ToN has a lot of failings which can't be blamed on an attempt to recreate the experience of P:T; but if they had set up to do something new, I think I'd be more willing to look past those errors. ToN was at its best when it did something completely unlike its predecessor: the Fifth Eye saloon plot, the Endless Gate plot, the Lost Anchorage plot (I want DLC through that door we can't open! Let's take the space elevator down to the planet!), and most of all, providing opportunities to let your party members go when your paths are no longer the same, but when you still might need them. If they ever make a sequel (and the fact that we still know almost nothing about the Tides makes it pretty clear they were planning on one) they should try to make as different a game as possible. Edit: oh, and the Oasis Fathom. That needed to be a hub!