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Tale

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Everything posted by Tale

  1. Tale
    I think the point was made about easy combat. It's looking less like discussion now and more like a dogpile.
  2. Tale
    Maybe this is just my bias painting perception, but it sounds like they're reserving these two for their outrageous races. And I'm hoping that means they're aiming towards original, not something off the standard race or encounter list.
  3. Tale
    I don't know whose decision it was. I should hope Cain understands the decision at least. I am hopeful the answer is more complex than a single note on balance. That seems a valid reason, I just hope they have a deeper interest than that one alone.
  4. Tale
    It's going to be his weekend update video.
  5. Tale
    I'll blame the lack of detail. The Dwarven Ranger has environment, setting, acting, she's not just standing there. It's like a part of the character's life. These are poses. And probably didn't take as much time.
  6. Tale
    Looks like it. I'll join in on the anti-boobplate-but-not-a-deal-breaker crowd. The interview itself is pretty sparse on information, but cute. I didn't know this was Brennecke's pitch. That's cool to know, too.
  7. Tale
  8. Tale
    My prefer is for permanent death for companions to be possible in combat... IF the combat is tight (not too swingy) enough that we don't feel the death is random. This most commonly about the AI. If the AI is so dumb that the fragile companion tries thwacking enemies by rushing ahead of the group all of the time, then not really a fan. This pops up a lot in KOTOR, NWN2, Dragon Age. It didn't pop up as much in Baldur's Gate because, I think, the Isometric design forced more strategy instead of just letting the AI do their own thing.
  9. Tale
    I'd really prefer if we didn't have multiple poll threads on one subject, especially in the same day, let alone hour. Please try and confine it to one thread.
  10. Tale
    Even if this thread went somewhere, I'm not sure it would go anywhere positive. Though it seems like a fascinating subject for Way Off-Topic.
  11. Tale
    The mechanical problem I have when it came up in PnP sessions is that it becomes the go-to strategy. You always use it so you can interrogate the enemy and pump them for information. It slowed the game down and turned into uncomfortable torture sessions. In a computer game, it'll still slow down, but my bigger concern would be it forcing them to create dialogue for generic enemy characters. But it can't be any harder to develop than Arcanum's talk to the dead spell, right? And that was a dang nice spell. So maybe I still dislike it on the "that's not how clubbing someone on the head works," but I can still see it being cool as heck.
  12. Tale
    I get hung up on little details, for that I have to apologize in advance. Your example using good/neutral/evil is enough for me to dislike the idea. I'm hoping the game is more mature than to start ascribing morality to class builds. Or even in general. Beyond that, I question the purpose. Is this just a hope that you can triple the number of classes? Hey, if they feel that the budget is enough that they can diversify the classes into appreciable sub-classes, then yay. But I doubt that. I'd prefer to have something like a well designed and complex Necromancer class than just cutting up a third of the sole mage class and giving it that title. I mean, some of these concepts are ones I would genuinely like to see. But I'd like to see them be better fleshed out if included.
  13. Tale
    I asked about classes and multiclassing. Here's to hope.
  14. Tale
    Crafting is nice, but there should be legendary items which cannot be matched by crafted items, don't you think? Depends on the crafting. If crafting is a heavy investment, it shouldn't just become invalidated at the end for people who loot dungeons (read: everyone). And the cosmetic appearance of legendary items should be part of its tradeoff. It can be part of the item's theme or part of the justification for its status. Like a "Hat of Silly Destruction" which is a jester's cap with a long backstory of use in court to assassinate kings. To be able to turn it into a regular chapeau seems criminal.
  15. Tale
    I don't really like this idea. I like other ideas that have the same ends. 1) Crafting. A deep crafting option should let people make gear that looks how they want with the bonuses they want. 2) Horizontal gear progression. Gear does not always go up, gear becomes more specialized or otherwise has downsides in progression. Meaning that if you really like a particular piece of gear, you can just stick with that. But overall, for the sake of verisimilitude (that word sounds made up, doesn't it?), gear should look like what it is.
  16. Tale
    Well, we already had that. I think it's been fairly argued that old games did it well. It's the Bioware style that is primarily objected to. The curmudgeons seem to have a, badly presented, worry that it's not going to be well done. That the main implementation would be the poorly done fapping material version. Because that is the version that's in demand. And if Obsidian wanted to implement it in such a way outside the popular demand, they wouldn't need people asking for it. Maybe the logic ends up being "people asking for it"->"must want the fapping material version." I'm not prepared to deny the logic of it, but I'm not prepared to support it. Okay, I'm done talking about other people's arguments. Let me make an argument. There's no maturity on either aisle. You have kid friendly romance on the left and adult friendly titillation on the right. We have WALL-E here (a movie I love, so I'm not being disparaging) and Fair Game over here. Of the two, I'd probably prefer Wall-E but I'm not prone to calling it mature. I'd sooner call Watchmen mature because it had a point about its own artform. And since I've now diverged into comics, Kingdom Come. Or back to games Planescape. Where the romances were so subtle most people don't even care about them. Because they were too busy focusing on what they wanted to say, they didn't get distracted by it.
  17. Tale
    Yeah, I don't see how romance can be an indicator of maturity of a medium. Romeo and Juliet was making a point out of how immature it was, at least as much a point as one can make while still catering to popular interest in sex and violence. We've had it in video games almost as long as they had stories. It was in how many old adventure games? Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island immediately come to mind. I have a hard time thinking that it's only now maturing if that's a factor. And I always remember this one crappy action movie I saw, had Cindy Crawford and one of the Baldwins in it, they end up having sex on a moving train. It didn't strike me as one of the more mature action movies, just one going for cheap thrills, I have more respect for Die Hard. Perhaps it can be handled maturely. But I wouldn't pretend romance is automatically mature.
  18. Tale
    Back to my previous comment, how would people feel about attempts at subdual having a significant chance to end in death or life threatening injury, anyway? Is it a valuable system even when its uncertain? Because that is something I would see as interesting. A system so that the party occasionally ends up in a "I swear, officer, we was just trying to teach him a lesson!" situation.
  19. Tale
    What the hell did I do??! You make me miss my old avatar.
  20. Tale
    Personally, I'm tired of the trope that blunt force trauma to the skull rendering people unconcious is somehow safe. So that's the big challenge in getting me to appreciate it here. Grappling and particular spells (like sleep) tends to be as far as my suspension of disbelief is willing to go anymore.
  21. Tale
    No, the fairy tale. About the pale girl and her dwarf friends. It doesn't seem a compelling argument to claim that more imaginative fantasy is childish because of a story about pigs and wolves that was targeted at children, when there's a similar bedtime/disney tale involving dwarves that love to mine. It's how you use it.
  22. Tale
    I'm not sure what your point would be here. Fairy tales are just short stories of folklore. There's nothing wrong with them. But I don't think fantasy being open-bounded suddenly makes them short and part of an oral tradition. So you want to play a RPG with talking piggies, a wolf that huffs and puffs, little red riding hood and similar? Yes/no? As specific elements in a specific formula, we're back on it being too constrained. As vague elements in a broad universe, I can see just as much interesting things coming out of them as elves and dwarves. Need I remind you of Snow White?
  23. Tale
    I like classes because they allow for for more exceptions. But it costs more works. A classless system is fairly unified, which means that your stats tend to mean X, and rarely Y. A class system allows your stat to mean whatever they want it to. Though, again, the work may be disproportionate to the reward. D&D is the example I'll pull from here. We've got intelligence based Vancian casters, charisma based spells-per day casters, wisdom based vancian casters, charisma based whenever-the-heck-they-want casters. And they learn their spells differently too. Wizards get their spells from scrolls, Clerics get their spells as gifts from god during morning prayer, Sorcerers just know how to cast the spell, and Warlocks have it as power granted by a patron (and in 4th ed, this patron may grant some powers better than others). I don't see how you can do all of this with classless, these kind of distinctions define a class system. The best I can see is if you do a build-a-class system at character creation. What do you want to be your casting stat? How do you want to learn new powers?
  24. Tale
    I honestly think this would be worth it if Avellone got a little petulant in his writing.
  25. Tale
    I'm not sure what your point would be here. Fairy tales are just short stories of folklore. There's nothing wrong with them. But I don't think fantasy being open-bounded suddenly makes them short and part of an oral tradition.
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