abaris

If I play a selfish prick, I side with Raedric. Since I can't quite muster the stomach to do that in real life, I often do it in RPGs.

Yeah, I had a character that ended up with solid 4s on deceptive, cruel, aggressive and clever and a whooping 0 on benevolent and diplomatic, but offing the caravan or the people in Valewood never crossed my mind.

That would be a nice touch. I hope the stay with isometric. Todays game have always to be shiny, shiny, shiny on the outside whereas they offer very little on the inside. The side quests are mostly a FedEx simulator with quest markers and the UI and options are limited due to consolization and the controller buttons.

Oh, I didn't kill anyone unprovoked. The only ones I did kill where some of the goldies taking issue with me looting their room. Hey, they attacked me first.

So in short, the purpose is to create a right little sunshine of a character.

Well, better to leave them out than have another cheesy implementation. As I said above, I'm hard pressed to find any credible romances in recent games.

I'm fine without silliness. Some of the banter is hilarious anyway. Btw, recently I purchased BG2 enhanced and plan the very first playthrough of my life. I was on an old mac back when it first came out. Does anyone know where to look for character creation tips?

If you give them the appropriate skill. Which is mechanics. Otherwise not everyone can find traps, unless the trap is low level.

I do. And when they go off, they usually have an effect. They're pretty useful at choke points to deal just a bit of a softener. The problem is, as has been said, they're a bit too soft now.

Compared to other games it's an incredibly weak skill. To be fair, I never had a real stealthy character in POE, since I found the mechanics skill of much more use, but normally 2 or 3 points of stealth get you through most if not all situations. It's even enough to rob one or two chests in populated rooms without being spotted.

Even if the combat already started it's the first two seconds that count for sneak attack. So for that purpose, your rogue doesn't need any stealth. Just a hit within the first two seconds of the engagement.

Yes, the problem lies in how they're implemented. In principle, a role playing game should offer as much roleplaying options as possible. For me, combat comes second to the opportunity to flesh out my player characters. So romances do add a nice touch for the character being more than just a bot. But I would be hard pressed to find even one game where it was done in a credible way.

Why don't you start on normal when you don't know the game, the challenges and the locations and the game mechanics? Do you want to be frustrated? And why limit yourself to 4 when there's enough XP lying around to reach the cap level with a full fletched party?

What's the reason to kill the caravan? Is there some hidden meaning to it or some valuable loot?

I'd really be curious how you get the ingredients needed to even slap on a crap enchantment before Guilded Vale. Or is that just you talking for talking's sake.

They probably didn't plan it that way. It may be that the gods of budget intervened. I had the developer commentaries running at some point, but I don't think anyone comments on that issue.

Not to forget the brothel in Ondra's gift.

I understand it rather as use than abuse. That's even one point where the combat is halfway realistic.

I tried it out because I wanted to know how reactive the NPC population is. That was after some fighting in the street where noone was even the least bit interested in the proceedings.

Yup, that's something reasonable to wish for. Enemies roaming the maps would make it more interesting.

Honestly, I feel the same with many games. When I feel the end is nigh, I kind of don't want it to end and my motivation to continue drops considerably. In this case, the level cap does add to this feeling, which wasn't a problem with the last game I had similar feelings: D:OS. But I don't get annoyed with the game. In my case I just start over with a different player and look if I can do some things in a better way.

If you're not telling what you're doing it's hard to say what you're doing wrong. Let's start with difficulty, tactics, encounters, quests .... the lot.

Thath's why I was talking about the gold labels. Even if the upper floors are populated by white labels and gold labels, noone cares about the gold labels if you happen to engage them.

I used the strategy window in DA:O, but it still needed constant management, since if you ordered any character to down a healing potion when falling under a certain percentage of health, they often froze in that animation, since constant hits and the cooldown period prevented them from carrying out the order. Also the switch weapon command often resulted in an equip/unequip loop, since conditions were changing that rapidly. But it rendered the character useless, since it never really attacked or defended. Where it really did shine where orders like protect PC Y if surrounded by enemies and stuff like that. But DA:O was far more forgiving concerning disengagement than POE is.

How would you resolve combat in any other way than pulling the enemy to your prepared position? Rushing in with guns blazing?