Kasoroth

I agree. The fact that effective levelling required a lot of counter-intuitive meta-game planning was one of the most irritating aspects of the progression systems in both Morrowind and Oblivion. The learn-by-doing system (which I'm not opposed to in principle) makes matters even worse because you need to take the meta-game logic into account with everything you do, not just at level-up time. The first thing I modded in Oblivion was the stat multiplier progression, which I locked at x3 no matter how many related skill increases you have (instead of varying from x2 to x5). Personally, I think the way they should have made it work is to give you a fixed number of points to distribute at level-up, and change the multiplier number to a cap instead, so specializing in related skills lets you focus your attribute points more tightly, but doesn't actually give you more attribute points. This would also mean that you could increase your luck without taking a big hit to your total points. You still wouldn't ever be able to increase luck quickly, but you wouldn't be penalized just for increasing it at all. -Kasoroth

I think that level 1 to level 10 or 11 in an 80 hour game would be a pretty good rate, so that would be about one level every 8 hours per character. Having multiple characters is nice because it gives you more opportunities to see how the game mechanics work without pushing a single character from nobody to god in a short time. Even when there's only a single character, I'd still like about 10 D&D levels in an 80 hour game though. Also, I should note that I generally play at a pretty slow and relaxed pace (as a player anyway; my characters tend to avoid resting and long distance travel whenever possible if there's even a hint of urgency in the storyline), so an 80 hour game for me is probably more like 40 to 50 hours for an average person or 25 to 35 hours for a quick player. For a shorter game I'd like to have the level range scaled down proportionally, but if it's only going to be about 5 level-ups, I'd rather have it start at 2 or 3 instead of 1. So 2-7 or 3-8 would be good level ranges for a 40 hour game (probably a 20 to 25 hour game for the average player). For a game that short it would seem very out of place to me if the character's power level changed too drastically, so 3-8 seems to represents a significant but not absurd growth rate to me for a relatively short game. Also, it leaves room for expansions and/or sequels without going into the very high and epic levels (which I think are not handled very well by the D&D system), so that's another benefit. -Kasoroth

I agree with this completely. In fact, I did try to fight the Mulmaster Beholder Corps in CotAB at rather low level (not quite immediately after Tilverton, but pretty early) and got demolished, disintegrated, petrified, etc. I decided to try someplace else and come back later. In Wasteland I went to the cathedral very early in the game, ignored all the warning signs, and got blasted to little bits by monks and nuns with laser weapons. I came back later at high level, and carrying a proton axe, and I got revenge. It was much fun. Gaining a level was something to look forward to because it meant you might be able to get into someplace that would slaughter you earlier. In Oblivion, gaining a level is actually something to dread, because you have to worry about whether you're equipped well enough to handle what the next level will throw at you, and there's no way to retreat back to a "safe zone" if you get in over your head. -Kasoroth

As far as I remember Wizardry 8 didn't scale the encounters much, if at all. In Wiz 8 you could go into the dangerous areas at low levels and those big groups of tough enemies would be right there to turn your pathetic party into a fine red mist. Likewise, you could go back to the easy areas when you were high level and turn the encounters there into bits of blasted flesh with a few spells. It was great because the enemies were different from area to area, but didn't seem to change based on your partys' level. Oblivion is quite fun, but the encounter scaling is quite annoying because it's exactly the opposite of Wizardry 8. I created 2 characters in Oblivion, and I went through a particular dungeon with one character at very low level (about 2 or 3), and encountered some weak imps that were easily dealt with. I went to the same dungeon with my other character at level 14, and met a bunch of trolls, spriggans and will-o-wisps which required me to use up quite a few charges on my magic weapons to defeat. The encounter scaling in Oblivion essentially makes it feel like you're getting less and less powerful as you gain levels because doing the same thing is harder at high level than it is at low level. Wizardry 8 was a great example of minimal encounter scaling, Oblivion has way too much encounter scaling, especially for a non-linear game. For a linear game, it makes some sense to scale encounters because the player only has one choice of where to go next, so the game designer has to make sure that the one and only available path is of an appropriate difficulty. With a non-linear game, they can just create a bunch of different places of various difficulty levels, and the player can choose what to do. If you want to try to charge through the main plot at low levels because you like a challenge, go ahead. If you want to explore, and gain a ton of levels on side quests so you can stomp on the main quest opponents with ease, you can do that too, or anything in between. Unfortunately that's not possible in Oblivion because all the encounters scale along with you. I like the feeling of accomplishment that you can get from getting through an area that you had to flee from earlier in the game because it was too tough, and that's one element that Oblivion seems to be lacking. -Kasoroth

In my opinion, it's as important (if not more so) for a game to have a "lush, fleshed out world" as it is for a good novel. Without a fleshed out world, there's no good context for fleshed out characters to act in, and it's very hard for me to care at all about what happens to them because the circumstances of their existence seem too artificial. A good book can potentially rely on a very interesting, fast paced plot that never really gives the reader much time to contemplate the details of the setting, but in a game, the player is in some ways (as you mentioned) creating his or her own plot, and that requires a very good setting, at least for me. Just as a good novel only depicts the relevant and interesting portions of the characters' lives, a game can (and should) strive to do the same. This is largely a matter of interface. For example, in BG when your characters are tired you can click on a rest button, and 8 hours pass from the character in only a few seconds of player time. This spares the player the boredom of watching the characters rest for 8 hours, but doesn't break the consistency of the world because for the characters, 8 hours did pass. Compare this to NWN, where "resting" causes the character to sit down for a few seconds to be suddenly fully healed. From the player's perspective, both games have similar level of effort/time/hassle for resting, but the NWN implementation sacrifices a lot of game world consistency while the BG implementation does not. Similarly, limitations like weighty gold and limited inventory could be included in such a way that there is a time cost to the character to make multiple trips back to town, without burdening the player with the necessity of playing it all out manually, so that these activities are "lost in the white space" as they are in a novel. This returns us to the topic of time limits. As I said in an earlier post, I much prefer time limits that provide "opportunity costs" to the character without forcing the player to rush through things. If there was some kind of quick button in the inventory screen that essentially performed the "haul all these selected items to the nearest town, pawn them, and return to the currect location" action, and then passed the appropriate amount of time on the game clock, and you had time limited events where the time was measured in days rather than minutes or hours (and time passed at a 1:1 rate except during rest, fast-travel, etc) this would eliminate the player hassle of dealing with these limitations or having to rush through the game, while maintaining world believability by requiring the character to accept the limitations. If you didn't currently have any time critical quests active, you could freely click the "haul loot and pawn" button as much as you wanted, and the only consequence would be a different day on the game calendar. If you make the 4 day trip to town and back 12 times while chasing a fleeing villain through a dungeon, you should expect the villain to escape. I agree that creating drudgery for the sake of drudgery is a bad thing, but I think that the best solution is to implement a game interface that moves those activities "off-screen" whenever possible rather than simply giving the characters inexplicable super-human powers that eliminate their need for such drudgery. -Kasoroth

Personally I was significantly disappointed by the original NWN OC, but since the toolset was a large part of my reason for buying the game I didn't really regret the purchase (although I didn't like it enough to get the expansions). The primary things that generally contribute to my enjoyment of a game are interesting NPCs and a consistent, believable (I would say "realistic" but that doesn't really apply to a fantasy world, and some people, for reasons I've never comprehended, seem to associate it with simulated excretory functions of game characters) game world. I personally thought the NPC interactions of the NWN OC were very weak compared to those of BG2 or Ps:T. I also thought that there were way too many cases of gameplay mechanics that detracted from the consistency/believability of the setting rather than enhancing it, such as: 1) High level NPCs handing off the critical task of saving the city to a low level nobody. 2) Chests with healing potions and gems sitting undisturbed in a city full of starving, plague-ridden people. 3) Death/Respawn was handled way too casually without a good in-game explanation. I much preferred the BG way of handling death, and at least in Ps:T your immortality was closely tied in with the plot, rather than just tacked on as "by the way, If you die we'll just teleport you back to the temple and resurrect you." Avoiding player frustration is a nice goal, but in my opinion a game mechanic that is blatantly added specifically for that purpose even when it doesn't make sense in the setting ends up doing more harm to my enjoyment of the game than most of the "frustrations" (such as having to reload when you die) that it's trying to eliminate. If it can be included without feeling "tacked on", that's fine, if not, leave it out. -Kasoroth

Bethesda has had a relatively consistent style with the core Elder Scrolls games (which is a good thing in my opinion), but they've also made some spin-off games like Redguard that were quite different. Redguard may not have been a true CRPG (more of an action adventure with some RPG elements), but it did demonstrate that Bethesda is capable of doing something different from the core ES style. I'm hoping that they demonstrate some of that adaptability when they make Fallout 3 and take a lot of inspiraton from the style of the original Fallout games. One positive indicator that I've noted is that they claim there are more actual dialogue trees in Oblivion than in Morrowind. Morrowind's engine could actually do a kind of Fallout/Infinity Engine/NWN style dialogue tree either when you first talked to an NPC or in response to a dialogue keyword, but the interface in the editor for making them was far less user friendly than the conversation editor in NWN, and dialogue trees were barely used at all in the game (usually just an occasional yes/no question, or whether you wanted to resist arrest, pay a fine, or go to jail). If they're expanding the use of dialogue trees in Oblivion, it gives me some hope that they might use that as the primary means of conversation in Fallout 3, perhaps using the keyword dialogue only for generic "filler NPCs" such as those who only had single line floats in the original Fallouts, and maybe as a "can you tell me about...?" option like the Fallout 1 keyword dialogue system. One of my favorite aspects of the Fallout games was that you had a lot of freedom to go where you wanted and do what you wanted. This is something that Bethesda does well. One concern that I have is that Bethesda's main storylines are often quite linear, whereas the Fallout games generally had just a few "critical main plot points" that you had to hit, but they had a lot of side quests that were not required, but connected to the main plot in some way and provided clues to the main plot. Bethesda's side quests have not traditionally hooked into the main plot and provided clues the way the Fallout ones did, rather there were more main plot quests that you had to do in order to get the information you needed to progress. I think that Bethesda will probably do a very good job of creating a big world with freedom to go where you want, that's always been one of their strong points, and hopefully they'll give lots of options in terms of camera views. There's no reason a 3D game can't have the option for locked isometric view, first person, AND over-the-shoulder chase cam. In fact, being able to switch to first person when using a sniper rifle would be quite nice, especially if they can handle very long view distances. In Morrowind I switched back and forth between 1st person and 3rd person (1st for ranged weapons, 3rd for melee and general travel) and that worked quite well because you could switch views with a single keystroke. I definitely hope they keep the SPECIAL system relatively intact. I don't necessarily dislike the Elder Scrolls learn-by-doing system, but I'd rather see Fallout 3 keep a system that at least resembles the original SPECIAL system. Somehow I doubt that they'll include turn based combat (but who knows, they might surprise me). I'd like it if they did, but it wouldn't be a game killer for me if they didn't. The main thing I liked about the Fallout games was the way the plot was rather loosely structured, but many side quests tied in to the main quest in some way, and many also affected the end game slideshow showing what happened to each town. The setting was nice, but it wasn't what really made me love the original games. The turn based combat was nice, but it wasn't what made me a fan. If they can achieve a similarly flexible plot structure in Fallout 3, I'll be very glad that Bethesda bought the Fallout rights. If not, I'll probably be disappointed. I'm still going to wait for more information before I make a judgement. -Kasoroth

Hmm, I thought Wing Commander 2 was the one on the TCS Concordia, but it's been many years since I played it. -Kasoroth

I personally think that timed events can be very beneficial to a game if they're implemented well. They can also completely ruin a game if they're implemented poorly (but this is true of any significant aspect of gameplay). One thing that I think is lacking in most CRPGs is the ability to fail (other than by dying and reloading). For me, if there is no chance of some kind of failure (or at least a sub-optimal success), the game often becomes simply an exercise in either wasting time slaughtering easy monsters, or grinding through tough battles and reloading a lot. In the end, the outcome is always success (with the occasional option to choose an "evil" type of success), but even when multiple endings are given, they're usually based on a pretty obvious player choice, rather than how well you did things. Wing Commander 2 actually had a rather simple but effective plot structure that allowed you to continue the plot even if you failed at a mission's goals (the ship you're escorting got blown up, etc), as long as you survived (I think you could even eject if your ship was about to be destroyed, and get picked up by your allies after the battle) However, if you failed enough missions in a certain section of the plot, you would move into a "setback" plot branch. If you did poorly in the "setback" branch, the humans would lose the war and the game would end. If you did well, you would move back into the main plot thread (but you would have skipped over some section of the "successful" plot thread and gotten the "setback" thread instead). From there your success would determine whether you went into the "setback" or the "successful" variation of the next plot section. It was a nice system because there were very few individual things that could immediately end the game (generally just dying or getting your carrier blown up), but there were many things that influenced your success or failure. In a CRPG, a timer could be one mechanism for allowing some kind of failure without death, which tends to be lacking in many games. I'm just looking for a way to avoid the "Win or die, those are your only options" type of gameplay because it just doesn't really interest me that much. It also allowed several "branch points" but without an exponential increase in the content that needed to be generated by the developers. Regarding the details of timere implementation: I think it's important to make a strict distinction between "player time" and "character time" Games with a highly accelerated time passage (like 1 game hour for every 2 real minutes in NWN) can be highly problematic in this regard. For example imagine an event with a 1 day time limit to complete and requires no travelling, waiting (or other "off-screen" time passage), which would take about one hour of real time to complete. The character should reasonably expect to be able to rest for 8 hours and stop at the store, and then talk to some locals for a while, and still have plenty of time to complete the task within 24 hours. With NWN accelerated time, however, that "1 day" would pass in 48 minutes, which means that even if you really rush, there's a chance you might run out of time. This kind of design would make me want to chuck the game out the window, and I like timers. As an example of good separation of "player time" and "character time", I'll cite Fallout. Except when resting and traveling (and a few specific situations like recovering from surgery), 1 minute of "player time" was 1 minute of "character time", but when you traveled or rested, "character time" passed very quickly. This meant that the time limit gave you tons of time to explore an area and talk to people without fear of using up your time, and in fact encouraged you to explore each area as thoroughly as you could before you left, because if you missed something it would take a lot more "character time" to go back later. Learning about places and getting them marked on your map allowed you to hit more locations with less random wandering on the world map and thus save time. The time limit in Fallout was primarily a restriction on resting and world-map travel, which makes it effective as an "opportunity cost" without forcing the player to rush. If I remember correctly you get something like 150 days to find the water chip, which is 3600 hours. I've heard people complain that Fallout was too short, but I've never heard anyone say it took them 3600 hours to finish, which means that it was never really "rushed" in terms of the player needing to hurry, but it was potentially "rushed" in terms of the character needing to be concerned about limiting unneccessary world-map travel and resting. This is how a "time limit" in a CRPG should work in my opinion, it should rush the character, NOT the player. Fallout's timers did have some problems though, and the main problem I have with them is that they end the game completely (at least that's what I've been led to believe). I can't really speak from experience on this issue though, because I've never even come close to timer expiration even when I'm very thorough and try to do everything. In general I think that timer expiration should change some aspect of the storyline (probably in a negative way), but not end the game completely. I also think that there should be at least some point in the game that is "timer free" to give the characters a break for long distance exploration and random wanderings. This "timer free" section could even be placed after the main story is completed. Imagine a game like Fallout where you could continue after the main quest. Now make the following changes: Put in just the main ending cutscene at the end of the main plot, then ask the player if they want to retire or keep playing, and don't show all the individual area ending slides until the player chooses to retire. Then, if you continue playing a "Retire" button would stay on the interface so you could go finish up quests that you had skipped earlier and still see the effects of their completion in the end game area descriptions when you finally do choose to retire. They could even throw in some extra dialogue or other changes so you could see how the world reacts to your defeat of the big bad evil, or whatever was threatening it. An end cutscene followed by credits, and then back to the main menu always seemed a little disappointing to me. -Kasoroth

I agree with you that it's very disappointing to have no feedback to roleplaying. This was one reason that I disliked the completely player created parties in the IWD series compared to the NPCs of the BG series and especially Ps:T. The character interaction within the party made a huge difference in my enjoyment of the games. Sure, you could type out a detailed character Biography in the IWD series, and you could imagine that the party members talk to each other, but in the end it seemed really strange that there was never any verbal interaction between them within the game. This is also a big problem with keyword based dialogue systems including Morrowind's (I liked Morrowind but it fell well short of greatness) and Ultima VII's (which was a great game despite the keyword based dialogue). Ultima Underworld was one of the earliest games I can remember playing that really had full sentence multiple choice dialogue, and I've been a fan of that style ever since. It seems that there is an interface in Oblivion to select your tone in conversation (joking, threatening, etc) From the demos and info that I've seen, it's not entirely clear to me whether selecting the tone is a separate action that you take to influence the NPC's attitude (like flattery and bribes in Morrowind) or whether it is more of a "mode" that represents how you approach each topic, and is checked every time you pick any topic (until you change to a different "mode" anyway). This seems like it might be a reasonable mechanism to let players express their roleplaying in a keyword based system in a way that the game can react to, even if the actual roleplaying is only in their mind. If it's implemented well, it could be a significant improvement over previous keyword based systems, but I still don't like it as much as a sentence based system. With a sentence based system you know exactly what your character is saying to the NPC, and you can understand (or be bewildered by) the NPC's response in relation to that. If you ask about keyword "salted pork" in a friendly way and the NPC gets really mad, it leaves you wondering what you said that annoyed them so much, when in reality it might just have been a horribly failed "speechcraft" skill roll, you never really know if it's an intended quirk of the NPC's personality, or just a quirk of the game's conversation system. -Kasoroth

I think that there should definitely be tradeoffs for power armor, vs. heavy armor vs light armor. In general, lighter armor would be less restrictive to your mobility, make less noise, and be easier to wear for extended periods of time without getting tired. It would not protect you as much from damage as heavy armor would. Heavy armor would restrict movement to some degree, may or may not make more noise than light armor, and would cause more fatigue over long periods of time. It would generally be more protective than light armor, but less protective than power armor Power armor would restrict motion significantly, make a lot of noise, and require a power source to operate, but it would not cause as much fatigue as heavy armor and would even grant a bonus to strength, and it would be more protective than heavy armor. Not all armors would necessarily fit neatly into these categories, but they seem to me to provide a decent guideline. To implement these, an armor system needs a few basic traits: 1) Separate values for chance to hit vs. protection from damage. [Note 1a] Fallout's further division of protection from damage into a separate DR and DT seems to be an attempt to facilitate different ammo types such as AP bullets, but it doesn't really work very well in my opinion and isn't necessary to handle different ammo types. Instead I would suggest a system where armor had a single Damage Reduction stat that simply subtracted a flat amount from the damage dealt (like D&D's DR system). AP bullets would cut the target's effective Damage reduction by some percentage (for example, effective DR=50% regular DR), but subtract a flat amount from the damage dealt, so against an unarmored or lightly armored target, the reduction of DR wouldn't be enough to offset the damage penalty, but against a heavily armored opponent it would. Hollow point bullets would do the opposite and give a percentage increase to the opponent's effective DR (for example, effective DR = 150% normal DR), but give a flat increase to damage dealt, so against an unarmored or lightly armored opponent the damage increase would more than offset the target's DR increase, but against a heavily armored opponent, the increase in DR would exceed the damage benefit and make them less effective than regular bullets. 2) Armor needs to be able to apply penalties to a variety of activities to implement the drawbacks of heavier armors. The mobility restrictions of heavier armors might provide penalties to acrobatic activities, and to the "hit avoidance" stat. Noisy armors should provide big penalties to stealth, and some armors should alter social interactions (if power armor is very rare, it might make diplomacy harder, but intimidation easier, but on a military base where everyone's wearing it, it would not have much effect on social interactions at all) 3) Some kind of fatigue system would be good for representing the additional difficulty of wearing heavy armor. 4) For powered armor, a limited power source (instead of Fallout's infinite power source. Hey, why didn't the power armor come with an outlet to plug your energy weapons into for unlimited ammo?) would make an interesting limitation. This brings up several questions: Do you wear the power armor the whole time you're travelling, and drain power like the car's fuel supply in FO2, or do you take it off to travel to conserve power (and how long does it take to put it on when you get ambushed)? If it runs out of power does it completely immobilize you, or can you still move if you're strong enough (and what penalties do you get for "dead" power armor)? Regarding skill division, I don't really have an objection to combining thrown weapons and melee weapons into a single skill, particularly in a CRPG. In a PnP game you can get away with having a wide variety of rather specific skills (for example, GURPS has tons of very specific skills, and even separates thrown weapons from throwing things in general, and has a fairly complex system of skill defaults to represent the overlap between some of these narrowly focused skills), but in a CRPG it makes sense to consolidate activites into a smaller number of fairly general skills. I don't think that "Melee" is really a good name for a skill that includes both melee and thrown weapons (perhaps "hand powered weapons", or simply "hand weapons" would be a better name), and I don't think "Armor Class" is a good name for a stat that represents the ability to avoid being hit, but these are issues of terminology, not actual rules mechanics. -Kasoroth

I don't personally think that the Forgotten Realms setting is all that interesting, but it does have the advantage that it's familiar to a lot of players. I've found that when I play or DM homebrew campaign settings it can be difficult for players to try to fit into the world because the amount of information available about the world doesn't compare to the vast quantity of FR sourcebooks available, and even if the DM could produce that much material the players would need an enormous amount of time to read it all. Many people are familiar with at least some aspects of FR through sourcebooks, novels, and CRPGs, so they already have a frame of reference. I generally prefer relatively low magic, low level settings, where a 10th level character with a +2 weapon is pretty noteworthy and level 15 and above characters are legendary, so that's another reason why I'm not a huge Realms fan. I also like political intrigue involving characters/orgainizations that are not strictly good vs evil, where each side has some legitimate motivations and you could side with either one for "good" reasons, or with selfish motivations. Most groups in FR seem pretty black and white to me and aren't that interesting. The only other published [A]D&D setting I've used significantly is Planescape, and I really liked that. It was entertaining to have conflicts between the factions, power struggles among the Baatezu, three way fights between githzerai, githyanki and illithids, and random accidental adventures through one way portals to various prime worlds, with the Blood War always in the background but rarely directly seen. Sigil provides a great home base where the players can get to know a lot of recurring NPCs who can become allies or enemies, but still travel to a vast variety of different locations without being gone too long. The sad thing is that when the Planescape setting was first released, I had the impression that it was all about high level PCs fighting demons and devils, and was intended to be basically a smite-the-evil, hack-and-slash type of experience. I just ignored it at first. It wasn't until I started reading about the factions on the Torment website when Torment was in development that I started getting interested in it, and after playing Torment I searched all my local gaming stores, and on eBay to find the books and boxed sets (which were out of print by then). I really liked the rules-light and content-heavy style of many of the planescape supplements, where they would provide lots of information about the personality of NPCs and just have a little sidebar for stats, and they would give lots of details of stores, taverns, temples and other places in Sigil, rather than the WotC style of loading every book down with tons of feats, prestige classes, and spells. Unfortunately the feats, prestige classes and spells seem to sell better, and it's frustrating as a DM because players seem to buy all the books (and Dragon Magazine too) looking for some great new feat or spell or PrC, and many don't seem to understand why a DM would not allow these into a campaign. People end up spending half their time flipping through books looking for a particular spell or feat because they can't remember exactly what it does, and it really bogs down play in many cases. Having a few feats, a few classes, a few races, a few spells, and a few monsters in each book makes it a pain to find anything. My "Ideal Model" of how D&D should work (although I doubt this would be economically feasible unfortunately) would be 1) A few core rulebooks (PHB, DMG, MM). PrCs in the DMG should be considered examples for DMs of how to create PrCs for their worlds, not "standard" PrCs available in every world. 2) One (and only one) Campaign Setting Core Book for each campaign world, which would include all the feats, spells, and prestige classes that are common knowledge in the campaign world, as well as a basic overview of the world. This book has essentially all the campaign specific rules and world background that a player would need to know. If the book grows too big, split it into a separate rule book and world background book. 3) One or more campaign world specific Monster Manuals 4) A bunch of campaign world source books with lots of world detail, interesting NPCs, history, recent events, etc, and only the bare minimum of new rules necessary to support the material. NPC stats should be built primarily from the Core Rules and the setting's Core book, with more spells, feats and PrCs being added only if they are generally obscure, or known only in the limited region (or by the particular organization) covered in the sourcebook. If some game rule element is not specific to the topic covered by the sourcebook, they should have been included in the campaign setting's core book instead. Avoid putting new monsters in the sourcebooks, and instead plan your publishing schedule ahead so you can include them in a Campaign Setting Monster Manual first, and then have the sourcebook just reference which MM to look in when mentioning particular monsters. This way things are consolidated and easier to look up. -Kasoroth

It seems likely to me that a sewer in a medieval/fantasy/Faerun city would be pretty primitive compared to modern sewers, probably not much more than some underground tunnels (or even open air ditches) with sewage flowing through them. If it's possible to set water levels (and preferably adjust the water color to look more polluted and filthy) in dungeons, then it's likely that using a standard dungeon or cave tileset with water to "emulate" a sewer would actually give you a more authentic sewer than the sewer tileset of NWN with all of its pipes everywhere. -Kasoroth

True, but the map that came with the FRCS shows the scale better because it's a straight down view and there's a miles scale in the bottom corner. It's nice to have the map view zoomed in enough to see detailed features of the rivers and cities, but the size of those features in relationship to the distance between them is exaggerated a little more than I'm comfortable with. If they stretched the map to 4x the size in each dimension so you had to scroll the screen around to see it all, but kept the individual mountains and cities the same size, and the rivers the same width, and given it a more top down view, I think it would convey the sense of distance better. From Luskan to the far edge of the Mere of Dead Men is about 250 miles, but it looks much shorter than that on the NWN2 map. D&D rules allow you to walk 8 hours per day without suffering fatigue penalties, and a creature with a standard movement rate of 30 will cover 24 miles in this 8 hour march. This means that it should take over 10 days to cross that map area. In BG, distances seemed very compressed, for example it should have been more than a 5 day walk from Beregost to Baldur's Gate, but it was less than that in the game. Fallout and Fallout 2 are the only relatively recent (yes, I'm stretching the definition of recent here) games that seemed to really show how long it takes to get anywhere on foot. I think Daggerfall also was pretty good about this, but I don't remember it well enough to be sure, but that's going even farther back in time. I hope that NWN2 ends up being more like Fallout than BG in this respect. -Kasoroth

Well, the topic of Ph@t Lewt and epic levels was brought up, and that has an impact on both game balance and atmosphere, so I don't think it's really appropriate to focus attention completely on one aspect and ignore the other when they are as strongly linked as they are. It's very easy to add Ph@t Lewt to a game, but it's somewhat more difficult to make it both balanced in terms of combat AND fitting to the atmosphere. The prevalence of magic (in terms of items as well as higher level spells like Raise Dead and Resurrection) in a game world would naturally change the nature of the setting, and very often I've seen such things included as game mechanics but not really taken into consideration as an aspect of the world. Some people may not be bothered by this, but I find it to be extremely jarring. About Forgotten Realms, yes it does have more magic than many other worlds, but not to the extent that it was represented in NWN. I'm not sure where my Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue ended up, but if I remember correctly most of the goods in there were not actually magical, they were just rare and exotic. She did have some kind of teleportation network for transporting them though, if I remember correctly. I think that was also based out of Waterdeep, and while goods probably could be delivered to small villages, it seems unlikely that the average small village smith would have (or be able to afford to buy or make) a plethora of magic weapons and armor. While magic is well known, accepted and not particularly mysterious in Faerun, it's also not shown (in the novels anyway, at least the ones I read back in the late 80s, early 90s) as being anywhere near as plentiful as it was in NWN. BG1 was closer to how it was depicted in the novels, BG2:SoA was pushing the limits, and BG2:ToB and NWN really went overboard. -Kasoroth

It's very nice looking, but I don't think it really gives a good sense of scale. It makes everything look way closer together than it really should be. The Fallout maps might not have looked as pretty as this one, but I really miss having maps that provide a sense of scale. A map that was similar in functionality to the Fallout map but some of the artistic style of this map would just be great, but I suppose I'll have to keep waiting. -Kasoroth

I disagree, balance is not the only thing that matters. In fact, in my opinion, the combat balance is much less important than the atmosphere and tone of the gameworld. The combat balance in Planescape: Torment was not really very good in my opinion, but it is one of my favorite games because the graphics, music, characters and dialogue really seem to fit the setting well and convey an appropriate mood. Neverwinter Nights really didn't set the mood well at all. Neverwinter really just seemed like it could have been any generic city and it wouldn't have made a difference. Partly this was the repetitiveness of the tilesets, partly it was the abundance of barrels and chests with healing potions sitting untouched in a city of starving, plague infested beggars, and partly it was the fact that a bunch of high level characters handed off the task of saving the city to some new recruit. There were a lot of design decisions that sacrificed the integrity and logic of the setting in favor of a little convenience for the player. While it's nice to eliminate tedious elements, it should be done in a way that tries to minimize the loss of atmosphere. In truth, it didn't really matter to me which game was more balanced for combat because that's not the primary aspect I look for in a game. Sure, it's nice if the combats are appropriately challenging, but that's not what will make or break a game for me. If tons of magic items in every village pawnshop is appropriate to the setting (which it's not in Faerun, even though it is more magic heavy than many other D&D worlds) then I would be fine with that, but if it doesn't make sense for the setting, leave it out. I tend to prefer settings where magic is relatively rare and special, and most of your power comes from your character skill rather than your equipment, but I'm capable of enjoying high magic worlds as well, as long as it makes sense in the setting. Magic items and epic levels are really just a type of numeric inflation that's not really necessary. As you noted, it's possible to make a balanced game of either style, but that doesn't mean that every game should go to epic levels and have tons of loot. If it's a game about travelling the planes in search of mighty artifacts to slay gods and Tanar'ri Lords by the dozen, then by all means include epic levels and ph@t lewt, but I'd like some games where I get to play a skilled but relatively ordinary character struggling to achieve extraordinary goals. I don't always want to roleplay a godling's rise to epic power, especially not over the course of a single 40 hour game. -Kasoroth

Indeed, d20 modern is generally better than D&D for teaching reckless players a bit of humility. D&D has raise dead and resurrection spells to take away some of the teeth of such threats, and trying to deny those spells to clerics of the appropriate level tends to result in some profoundly unhappy players. I've only played d20 modern a few times and never DMed it, but I suppose its harsher rules could be adapted to a more "realistic" fantasy setting as well if you take out the modern equipment. Then a few crossbowmen on a balcony might be feared like in GURPS rather than laughed at as in D&D. -Kasoroth

Which system offers the quickest possible play? Of the games I've played, AD&D 2E might be a strong contender here. The choices available to 1st level character are pretty limited (especially if you don't use the optional "Proficiencies" or "secondary skills" rules, or any of the non-core "Player's Option" rulebooks) so you can get through character creation very quickly without new players having to learn much about the system. Which system is the most complete in that it covers most of all situations that could occur? Of the game systems I've tried, I'd have to say GURPS. The core rulebooks cover quite a bit, and there are tons of supplemental books to cover specific settings/play styles. Which system offers the most realistic simulation of 'reality' ? GURPS is a strong contender here as well, if you avoid the more fantastic supplements. Which is the most complex that has been made? That's a tough choice to make since complexity can take many different forms. Some systems have relatively simple mechanics but become complex due to the vast scope of options they allow, while others complex mechanics to try to simulate realism, while keeping the options relatively simple and limited. A general trend I've seen (especially in game systems that are/were popular, such as the various [A]D&D editions) is that the ruleset grows increasingly unmanageable as the system ages. For example, the core rules of both AD&D 2E and D&D 3.5E are pretty simple once you get you've played for a little while, but if you start including all the optional rules from expansions you end up with an unnecessarily complex maze of crossreferencing between a stack of rulebooks. 2E had tons of "kits" from various "Complete Book of..." supplements, proficiencies from "Combat & Tactics", etc, and a major optional system (which could be considered 2.5E) in the "Skills & Powers" book. 3.5E has piles of books with new races, feats and prestige classes, and even new base classes. Which system is the most innovative? Many good innovations get borrowed by later game systems, so without knowing the complete history of the RPG industry it's hard to know where a particular idea first originated. I'd have to say that the original D&D game was pretty innovative in its time because it took wargaming and added a role-playing aspect to it. By modern standards though, it is very primitive. I think that the idea of a generic rulesystem that can be adapted to a wide variety of settings was a good innovation. GURPS was my first experience with such a system, but there may be other systems that came before it that I've never played. Also, moving from a strictly class oriented system to a more flexible skill oriented system is a good innovation, though again, I'm not sure where this first originated. Which is the worst? I would say that [A]D&D prior to the d20 system is probably one of the worst that I've played a significant amount. There have been other game systems that I've looked at and tried to create characters and run a short test scenario with some friends, and discovered them to be basically unplayable, but they're too bad to even bother mentioning. Some things that I disliked about AD&D 2E: 1) The rule mechanics seemed rather incoherent, like a bunch of little separate sub-systems that were just thrown together. 2) The system (core rules anyway) was very class oriented. Although there were optional rules later on that changed this somewhat, I base my judgements primarily on the core rules. 3) The game mechanics for certain things (such as dual/multi-classing, and level advancement) were different for different races. 4) There were seemingly arbitrary restrictions built into the core rules (such as race/class restrictions) that should have been left to the campaign setting rather than included in the core rules. Many of these problems were improved in the d20 based D&D editions. Some people dislike D&D 3.x and claim it's too "Munchkin" friendly, but I think that's much more a function of the DM allowing too many supplemental sourcebook feats and prestige classes rather than a fundamental flaw in the mechanics of the d20 system. If you keep a few simple rules in mind when you DM, D&D 3.x is no more Munchkinful than AD&D 2E (some of these rules apply to RPGs in general, some are D&D3.x specific): 1) Anything from a non-core rulebook is excluded by default. The DM may be willing to compromise on a case-by-case basis if you have a good reason why the core rules are not sufficient to represent your character's capabilities, but expect the answer to be "no" in many cases. You don't really need the "Dread Pirate" prestige class when you can already represent that with existing feats and skills (such as Leadership and Profession (sailor)) and playing the role of a pirate. 2) You can't just wander over to "Ye Olde Magick Shoppe" and buy any items you want. Most of your magic items will have to be pried from the cold dead hands of enemies that used them against you, or will be gifts for performing an exceptional service from someone. You generally have to take what you get, not choose your favorite item from the menu. 3) You can't just wander over to "Ye Olde Magick Supply Shoppe" and buy materials for any items you want. Just because you have the item creation feat, spells, levels, the gold, the time and the XP to create an item doesn't mean you just get it. The "cost of materials" gives you the average market value of those materials, it does not mean that they're available in any town or city you visit. In fact, the specifics of the materials included in that cost are generally not even listed, so it could very likely involve some kind of "quest" to obtain them rather than a gold cost. This is all at the DM's whim, so item creation feats are not a "free ticket" to being able to get exactly the items you want. 4) You can't just wander over to "Ye Olde Magick Pawn Shoppe" and sell off the excess magical loot you've found for its full (or even half). the market value. Even inexpensive magic items are too expensive for most shops to deal with. There might be shops that allow people to sell things on consignment or at auction for a cut of the price, but to have such a place where you could effectively sell off expensive magic items would require it to be in a pretty big city, or in a smaller town that was widely known as a trading post of magical items. A trader who was willing to give "instant cash trade-in" for magic items would probably offer only 1/4 or less of the market price, since he/she is taking all of the risk that it won't sell, and would need considerable profit to cover the high cost of security (locks, guards, traps etc) necessary to protect items that are valuable and highly desired by the most dangerous people in the world (adventurers). 5) Prestige classes are campaign world specific. The ones in the DMG are just examples. If there are any well known non-secretive groups in the campaign world that have prestige classes associated with them, the players may be informed of the requirements and abilities of them at the start of the campaign (and able to design their characters with the PrC in mind). Other Prestige Classes must be discovered as you play. You might not even know the PrC exists until you happen to meet the requirements by accident and are offered special training by some associated group or individual. Prestige classes are not supposed to make you more powerful than base classes, they are merely intended to give you an additional connection to the campaign setting. 6) You should learn enough about the campaign world before creating your character that you can create a character that fits it. While 3.xE doesn't have any class/race restrictions "hardcoded" into the core rules, this doesn't mean that players are free to disregard the customs of the campaign world completely. An unusual class/race combo might be fine if the player has a reasonable explanation for it, but a player should be willing to accept a DM's refusal if the character is simply unreasonable in the context of the campaign world. Which is the best for each genre? I don't really have an answer for this question, although I tend to prefer d20 based systems for more fast-paced, action oriented games, and GURPS for more realistic games. My preference is based more on the play-style I'm trying to encourage rather than the genre or setting though. d20, as well as the older [A]D&D systems tends to encourage somewhat reckless behavior by the players, especially toward lower level opponents. GURPS can be less forgiving of reckless behavior, and a bunch of NPCs with less points than a starting PC standing on balconies with loaded crossbows can present a credible threat even to a fairly skilled PC fighter. -Kasoroth

When I look at my game playing habits over the past few years, I've noticed a trend: The games that I play the most all either came with editors or have significant modding communities using unofficial tools. I've also noticed that I generally spend about 2 to 10 times more time tinkering with toolsets than actually playing the games. Back when the PS2 was still a relatively new console (just before they dropped the price from $300, grr) I decided to buy one and give console games another try, since the last console I had purchased was the original GameBoy (and before that the Atari 2600). I've always been more of a PC gamer, but seeing the industry moving more toward consoles I figured it was in my own best interest to give them a chance rather than simply hating them blindly. The end result is that I now have an overpriced DVD player, because that's about all I use it for. It was while I was trying to figure out why none of the console games really seemed to grab my attention that I noticed the very strong trend of preferring games with toolsets. In fact, I think the KotOR games are the only games within the last 3 or 4 years that have held my interest long enough to finish without toolsets/mods. Every other game I've tried recently (both on console and PC) either had modding, or I got bored of it very quickly and never finished it. This is one of the major reasons that I hate consoles. A proprietary hardware platform that is strictly controlled by the manufacturer is never likely to give me the kind of gaming experience I like, not matter how good it is in terms of technology, so I think I'll stick with PC from now on. If publishers eventually abandon the PC as a commercial gaming platform, then I'll probably abandon commercial games, because my experience with the PS2 has demonstrated that I just don't like console games much. On the bright side, if commercial game publishers abandon the PC, then Linux may become the PC gaming OS of choice for the "indie" game developers who remain on the PC. Then I wouldn't need to keep a second operating system just to play games. -Kasoroth

I'd like to meet that two year old <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Someone apparently rented a video from Blockbuster once using a very fake sounding name, and my address and phone number, and then didn't return it. Now I have not only received calls from blockbuster asking for the return of the video, but also pre-approved credit card offers for this apparently fictitious person who has no paper trail (that I know of) other than a blockbuster card with unreturned vidoes on it. If they'll offer credit cards to imaginary people who don't return their videos, they'll give a credit card to just about anybody. I got a credit card when I was 14 or 15, but I was much more responsible with it than some of my friends who got credit cards when they were in college. I've gotten rid of it now, and just use a debit card instead, since I only used it for the convenience of not needing to carry a lot of cash, not because I wanted to borrow money. -Kasoroth

Knights of Legend and Bard's Tale 3 were definitely up there. In fact, I don't think I ever actually finished either of them, but I did have a lot of fun with them. Tough CRPGs seems to be a thing of the past though, unfortunately. I actually enjoyed the frustration factor of getting stuck at a tough spot, and would return to games later to try again. Most newer CRPGs you can simply walk through without difficulty and finish on the first try. I'm not sure if the problem is that most people simply don't like to be challenged by a CRPG, or whether it's that people are so accustomed to easy games now that they aren't psychologically prepared for a challenge and get annoyed at the developers for providing one, rather than enjoying the challenge for what it is. -Kasoroth

Yes, I have one glued to the wall above my desk. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I don't think there are many people in the developed countries using old PCs: after all, they wouldn't be able to run Windows 95, let alone any OS newer. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Actually I recently discovered my old 386 motherboard and CPU (Am386DX/40 with math co-processor) and a pile of old 30 pin SIMMs. I filled all 8 slots with 4MB modules (It originally had 4 1MB modules) and pulled an old 420 MB hard drive from a junked PC (early pentium) at work. I put it all together, and aside from the BIOS battery being dead and not storing settings when the system is powered off, it booted fine to the Win95 installation on the hard drive. It had an old ISA 1MB Trident SVGA card that was horribly slow, but capable of running 800x600 in 8-bit color mode. I tried installing Win98 on it, but the installer refused to run on anything less than a 486. I wanted to try installing it on a newer PC and then transferring the hard drive to see if I could get Win98 to run on the 386, but I misplaced my motivation somewhere along the way and never finished that experiment. OK, back to the real topic of the thread: Most of the PC gamers I know either build their own systems or ask me (or another knowledgeable friend) to build them a system. If you compare the costs of console systems to a high end Dell (or other pre-built) gaming PC, then yes, the console is probably significantly cheaper, but that's not really a fair comparison. I could buy an X-box and try to sell it on Ebay with a starting bid of $2000 dollars, but that doesn't lend any credibility to the argument that X-boxes cost $2000 dollars. Likewise, I could build an awesome gaming PC and sell it on Ebay with a "buy it now" price of $1, but this doesn't give credibility to the argument that high end gaming PCs only cost $1. When comparing prices, the only fair way to do it is to compare the lowest prices available to the general public (not special case prices limited to a small sub-segment of the population). If the ability to build your own PC was unavailable to the general public, and only feasible for people working in the PC industry, then build-it-yourself prices would not be a fair comparison, but this is not the case at all. Building your own PC is not exclusive or difficult. The information necessary is commonly available, and most people probably know someone who is capable of doing it, or could easily learn to do it themselves from the internet. Some people would rather pay a lot of extra money for the convenience of having Dell (etc) plug in a few cards, mount a few drives (which often doesn't even require a screwdiver on newer cases) and install Windows (which is mostly an exercise in pressing "Next" and waiting), but I don't think it's fair to include this extra cost in a price comparison between PCs and consoles. There are a few points that I think are relevant to the cost argument: 1) The console gaming market is fragmented between multiple incompatible platforms (MS, Sony, Nintendo, etc). These proprietary platforms often fight for "exclusives" meaning that game developers are often encouraged NOT to make cross-platform releases, and even without these exculsivity agreements, the cost of porting between consoles results in many games being released for only 1 console system, and few games are released for all of the major console systems. This means that to play all console games you really need 3 consoles. 2) Most people need or would like to have a PC for non-gaming purposes (word processing, image/video editing, storing the thousands of pictures they take with their digital cameras, storing all their mp3s, web access, email, etc). Let's assume the following costs: Good built-it-yourself gaming PC = $1200. Cheap PC for non-gaming use = $400 New console system = $300 I have intentionally left the TV/monitor out of the pricing because that's very hard to compare fairly. You could put an extremely expensive HDTV on a console or a PC, or you could use a cheap TV/monitor on either. If you buy the 3 major console systems and a cheap non-gaming PC, that's $1300 If you buy the gaming PC, that's $1200 Now when you buy games, the PC games are generally cheaper than the console games because game developers have to pay license fees to the console manufacturer to offset the fact that the console hardware is often sold at a very slim profit margin, or even a loss (particularly in the early stages of the console's life cycle). The comparison from the consumer point of view is made more difficult by the fact that some games are console exclusive and some are PC exclusive, so if you really want to play them all you need the gaming PC and all three consoles. This is NOT a good situation for consumers. This "competition" in the console market between different incompatible platforms is like the "competition" between Beta and VHS when VCRs first came out. The consumers (and game developers for that matter) win out when there is competition within a standardized platform rather than competition between incompatible platforms. The Intel vs AMD competition is good because it gives buyers a choice of CPUs within the x86 platform. If AMD raises their prices and/or lowers their quality, I can switch to Intel for my next PC and still use all the same software as before. Console users do not get the same benefit from the competition between Sony and MS because the platforms are both proprietary. Currently the vast majority of PC games are released for the Windows platform, but various Linux developers are trying to create Linux implementations of the Windows APIs, so that the proprietary Windows de facto standard can esentially become an open standard and thus give consumers the benefit of competition between Windows and Linux as competitors within a standard platform rather than between two incompatible platforms. MS is not pleased with these attempts, and would like them to fail, because the fact that Windows is the de facto standard is one of the primary reasons that many people who don't like Windows still continue to use it (I am included in this group of people). -Kasoroth