Jump to content
The Community Blog (An Invitation)

nikolokolus

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1162

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by nikolokolus

  1. nikolokolus
    Most vivid memory is still of my very first character I ever played in a PnP game with some friends in 7th grade. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, but somehow managed to charge an ogre with my half-elven ranger and his trusty Halberd (why was I using a halberd? I have no idea.) rolled a natural twenty for a critical hit and did 2 points less than max damage, killing it ... runner up, is that same character dying rather badly about 2 hours later to 3 goblins. There's a lesson in there I think somewhere?
  2. nikolokolus
    Oh god, not again ...
  3. nikolokolus
    "In matters of taste there is no debate"
  4. nikolokolus
    Personally, I'm in full favor of a fatigue system for melee actions as well as spell-casting.
  5. nikolokolus
    I guess it partly depends on how archery/ranged is balanced in the game, but in general I like arrows and bolts to be finite and I think they should have weight (or at least they should have weight in the expert mode of the game).
  6. nikolokolus
    I kind of like this idea. There should be compounded risk for using spells, if that's not enough of a deterrent to make people conserve their energy or take it easy then they deserve to have their caster die or suffer some serious crippling effects, or have their spells cause some seriously nasty side effects.
  7. nikolokolus
    Soul sickness, fatigue, burnout, radiation sic ... er, forget that last one. Whatever you want to call it, I think it might be feasible to have a system that progressively saps your characters willpower, strength, or whatever the more spells you use. I sort of envision a meter (call it soul strength ... or preferably something much better) and use a scale of -100 to 100. As you cast spells they get increasingly weaker as a caster uses up their strength, higher level spells do it quicker and once you get to zero you don't lose the ability to cast spells but you start compounding negative effects on top of your character that can't be removed with normal standing around, they need true bed rest or some kind of supernatural restorative to remove. If you reach -100 your character dies ... hell maybe they even become a zombie, I don't know, I haven't quite worked out the details, this just occurred to me a few minutes ago ...
  8. nikolokolus
    I'm certainly not arguing for a system where every strategy is equal or everybody wins and there are no losers, but there were fights where you absolutely had to have guessed correctly about spells in Baldur's Gate 2 or it was a re-load. Thats's not particularly good encounter design in my opinion. I love tough fights and I like perma death and I especially think players should be punished for stupidity or foolhardiness, but punished for guessing wrong pre fight? In general there should paths to victory that don't require meta gaming knowledge gained by dying and then reloading ... whatever that entails in terms of mechanics.
  9. nikolokolus
    ...no, what it did was tell ya that ya was wrong in yer tactics an' ta rethink the battle...hence roleplayin'...sorry it were not Diablows-like enuff fer ya... ...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!... What you describe isn't tactics nor is it roleplaying
  10. nikolokolus
    I see, i died and had to reload = game sucks. IE games encouraged preparing for a fight. I appreciate some good snark as much as the next guy, but you confusing my distaste for clunky game design with a desire for an easier game isn't quite the same thing
  11. nikolokolus
    Hilariously long troll post for the win
  12. nikolokolus
    I don't remember it sucking in any of the IE games. I remember countless times facing a tough fight, dying and reloading only to pick a new set of spells. So in other words, was that a failure of tactics or a failure to guess correctly? Josh Sawyer posted something about this on his formspring account and it really made me think. The IE games basically encouraged meta gaming and not cleverness if you think about it.
  13. nikolokolus
    The funny thing is that every game has a form of level scaling, be that through a leveled list, game chapters, or areas with progressively tougher critters. One way or another games are almost nevergoing to throw out a red dragon as an encounter at level one.
  14. nikolokolus
    There's an elephant in the room. I've been playing RPGs since the basic D&D box set and as fond as my memories are for early D&D are, let's face it, Vancian magic kind of sucks as a gameplay mechanic. Now take that PnP system and cram it into a CRPG and you've got a proper mess. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's a good design. There has to be room for innovation. Now maybe that is or isn't a particular kind of cooldown system, but I'd at least like to see what Tim Cain and JE Sawyer can cook up before getting out the pitchforks
  15. nikolokolus
    localization isn't cheap, but if Obsidian could be convinced that there is a significant enough audience clamoring for a Portuguese translation, then they could add it as a stretch goal. Who knows?
  16. nikolokolus
    Armor is typically meant to cushion a blow and turn a blade. Boob-plate is just one more thing for a sword to get hung up on and thus potentially failing to turn a blade. Sounds like ceremonial armor at best.
  17. nikolokolus
    I think this is the best argument I've read against Vancian magic ... and it comes straight from JE Sawyer http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/376730408441642308 I was mostly leaning toward wanting a Vancian system in the game, but after reading this, I think I might have just had my mind changed.
  18. nikolokolus
    Basically it boils down to this: If cooldowns occur in a matter of seconds then they usually suck. If they occur in minutes or tens of minutes, then they can work. The key is timing them so that certain abilities are essentially usable once per encounter, which mimics the x uses/day feature in the IE games. When people spam rest in those old IE games, that is basically no different than a cooldown if you think about it.
  19. nikolokolus
    Nope, this isn't a thread demanding answers about how awesome crafting and enchanting will be, or how will souls augment an epic weapon, but rather I wanted to talk about how much information should we the player get about magic items as we play through it? One of the weaknesses of RPGs with lots of explicit mechanics and lots and lots of explicit detail is that sometimes all of that lore and all of those numbers go so deep and is so precise that it removes any sense of discovery or mystery. It's like when you played in a PnP game as a teenager and finally got your hands on the Dungeon Master's guide and poured over the magic items list, or picked up the Forgotten Realms source book, just because it was so much fun to read ... and then you knew without a doubt that weapons did X amount of damage, and had Y powers and if you found one, you'd give it to your ranger who specialized in whatever that weapon was best at fighting and from then on, a magic item was just a collection of numbers, statistics and dice adjustment. Personally I think it would be refreshing if magic items, even after identification, just had textual descriptions of their history and possibly rumored powers but only through trial and error or long use do full extent of powers get revealed. I played in a long running PnP game where the DM used this mechanic to great affect, It was admittedly a low magic world, where everything could be kept from the player and managed behind the screen, but it really did enhance the game play and sense of wonder that we had. Could this work or is it just too extreme and would it just drive people bonkers?
  20. nikolokolus
    So is this one vote for armor that enhances and highlights your character's dong?
  21. nikolokolus
    Thanks for doing this. That's a lot of work, but much appreciated!!
  22. nikolokolus
    I like seeing the rolls, so I'm all for it. If they do include it, it would be pretty trivial to code.
  23. nikolokolus
    Two things: 1) I'm 100% certain that this project has a design document that was made well in advance of the kickstarter campaign, and I'm guessing they have it scaled for budget ... this is a professional game developer with a long history of making games. 2) Obsidian has been making very modest and incremental stretch goals, they don't appear to be caving in to the pressure to build false hope or promise the moon ... that's a good thing! So no, I'm not particularly worried that they won't be able to deliver the goods.
  24. nikolokolus
    Yeah its pretty easy to extrapolate what kind money 2500 backers equals (~$100,000 at current avg pledging levels).
  25. nikolokolus
    God I hope this is sarcasm.
×
×
  • Create New...