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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer
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Why is the NWN2 modding scene so.... meh?
J.E. Sawyer replied to Monte Carlo's topic in Computer and Console
Some of the Rogue Dao folks were at Obsidian this week and I got a chance to sit in on the Purgatorio demo. They've really done a terrific job. And while it should be stated that they have accomplished this with a core team of 20+ people, you really can do a lot with the engine and toolset. -
Motorcyclists, post about your SWEET RIDES
J.E. Sawyer replied to J.E. Sawyer's topic in Way Off-Topic
As an update to this, that tank started leaking the day after I put it on the bike. The manufacturer told me... after the fact... that it isn't meant to be polished. Thanks! Yeah, who would think of polishing an alloy gas tank? So I'm sealing it with an epoxy sealant now. But the polish will be ruined. So it has to be stripped, scuffed, and repainted. I'm thinking a black and yellow paint scheme, like the old BMW GS "bumblebees". -
When has this ever worked? The various ethnicities/religions of people in Iraq don't just happily live in their own sequestered zones. "Excuse me, if your home isn't already destroyed, would you mind picking up and moving everything you own ~150km to the southeast? Yes, a nice Sunni family that currently curses your name will be living in your house after you've left. Thanks much." It's sad that probably the "best" example of this is Pakistan/India. Yikes.
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There were areas that were more difficult, and when I wrote up my comments to the designers, I called those areas out as either having good difficulty or too high difficulty. However, at the alpha phase those were punctuating exceptions that bucked the overall trend. Harbesh Carver was the dwarf rogue, and he had a decent Int, high Str and Con (I think). The whole party was really built around character concepts instead of actually being powerful characters. That said, I did play through the entirety of IWD2 with that party. Because they start off so... weird, you have to get creative with how you build them and play them over time. EDIT: In Andy Woo's D&D game, I'm currently playing a terrible character. He's a 2nd level cleric with the following stats: 10 Str, 8 Dex, 10 Con, 18 Int, 14 Wis, 14 Cha. He's a bookish priest based loosely off of William of Baskerville from Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. He's really not good at anything, but he's still fun to play in a tabletop setting. D&D (and an understanding DM) allow this, but the game's structure doesn't really support it as a truly viable build in the overall "power spectrum". He'd be flat out terrible in the IE or NWN games.
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I believe Nathaniel Chapman created high-level starter characters that people can use in MotB if they so desire. Also the Hands of Fury was a great party.
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It's slowly coming along. Part of the difficulty is that I effectively have to re-design all of the areas due to changes I think are necessary. I also decided to create a few new areas that fit better into the story/setting. I have a team of about four area designers, three of whom are currently laying out areas (the fourth is waiting for me to give him maps to work on). A few Obsidian designers have also volunteered to help me with spell, item, and GUI modifications. It will still probably be a while before I can really show anything.
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We did listen to Adam. In this thread (or perhaps another), I threw Adam under the wheels of the difficulty cart because he built a water genasi 10 fighter / 7 cleric as his starting character. Genasi are not a powerhouse race, but more importantly, being able to cast only 4th level cleric spells in an 18th level dungeon is practically like being able to cast no cleric spells at all. Low on feats, high on nothing, the character is just flat out bad. Adam's a smart guy, and he is lightly familiar with D&D. So how should we tune an expansion that's oriented around 20th+ level characters? When I played through the expansion the first time, long stretches were so trivially easy that I became bored. I enjoyed the story and the areas a lot, but the overall low level of difficulty probably would have made me stop playing the game if it hadn't been an Obsidian product. Kevin and Avellone and Ferg were quick to prevent me from requesting IWD2-levels of difficulty because they have more sympathy for nubs than I do. And I should make it clear that I didn't tune the combat personally. I made suggestions that were considered by individual designers and either accepted, rejected, or modified based on their best judgment and the goals Kevin thought were appropriate. I think the game difficulty, as tuned by the designers, is interesting but not difficult for me. And by Adam's experience, some parts are very difficult for someone with his relatively-low familiarity with D&D. D&D is a complicated ruleset and there's a minimum level of understanding required to do anything with it -- especially at 20th+ level. The only real way to get around that is to selectively shave off so much of the complex D&D rules that you're left with something like BG: Dark Alliance or the old Capcom D&D games. If you try to keep all of the core rules but tune the difficulty so you don't really have to know anything, the D&D veterans simply aren't going to find the gameplay compelling at all. For the record, I will also say that the Black Hound will not be tuned in this way. While I am changing a bunch of rules for the campaign, combat babies will have to leave their rattles and bonnets at the door.
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The expansion does start out pretty mellow in the combat department, but it ramps up quickly after that. We put a good amount of effort into revising the combat scenarios so they felt tactically challenging. We tried to find ways to differentiate enemy types from area to area and within each area. Tactical difficulty is usually more interesting than numeric difficulty, if that makes sense. I think that weathered veterans will at least find the combat engaging. Total nubs (e.g. Adam Brennecke) will probably be wiped out at a few spots. But hey, you're playing an epic-level D&D game, so suck it up and get promoted out of the Nubtorian Guard. I certainly believe that the majority of players moving from NWN2 to MotB will find the latter more interesting and challenging overall.
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Their team has the two top scorers in the league and our team had never played a league game before. They had a lot of solid passes and shots and were very aggressive. I pretty much expected the game to wind up like it did. It was the same way on the Interplay soccer team. I get the impression that a lot of these city league teams are random guys who have come together to play soccer, as opposed to people who work together at a video game company together and say, "Let's make a soccer team." The uniforms:
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We had our first game this Tuesday and were soundly destroyed. However, we did have some moments of heroism. Moments that were lost in time like teardrops in a 7-0 loss. We didn't have our jerseys, so we were playing ghetto style with black t-shirts and duct tape numbers. The jerseys came today, so I'm sure next week we will thrash the competition.
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Learn to play nub. My single-classed monk did it. Though at least you didn't start off the game with a Water Genasi Fighter 10 / Cleric 7 (like Adam Brennecke).
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I actually think the Bouncers are more difficult to deal with than the Rosies. Before I take on either, I make sure my submachinegun is loaded with armor-piercing rounds. I alternate between Electro Bolt and electric buck until I need to reload. At that point I usually need to use an EVE hypo, so instead I switch to the submachinegun and dump the drum into the big daddy.
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Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
Why not use the d100 equivalent? (Rolemaster joke) /\ -
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
Mid-level D&D rarely has situations that result in "oh whoops" death situations. Cyberpunk 2020's FNFF -- now that's a system that makes almost instant fatality a possibility at any level. That's hard. In the big picture, D&D isn't too bad. I think that's why the low-levels feel so different than 4 to teens. -
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
Your chances of being killed at 1st level are disproportionately high even if you as a player essentially do nothing worse than simply show up on the battlefield somewhere near combatants in your CR range. A human with a greataxe -- a run-of-the-mill martial weapon -- can score 1d12x3 on a critical, which means an average of 19.5 points of damage even if he or she has no strength bonus. That's pretty devastating, considering it can kill most 1st level characters even if they are at full health. Heaven forbid it's actually a 1/2 CR orc with +4 strength. An arrow can crit a wizard or sorcerer for an average of 13.5 points of damage assuming no other bonuses. You could be playing the most well-intentioned melee-avoiding wizard in the world and still get sucker punched by that. We just ran through a few combat scenarios tonight with a bunch of 1st level 3.5 characters. Sure enough, it was haphazard as hell and the DM had to pull one very bad punch as -- amazingly enough -- a kobold with a spear scored a x3 critical hit against the party barbarian. What are the odds?! Well, of course, they're pretty good over the course of all the encounters you may be involved in, as Gromnir pointed out. Just saying "ADVENTURE IS DANGEROUS" and rolling your eyes isn't an argument. How about we cut the starting characters' hit points in half? How about everyone starts with 1 hit point? That would sure be dangerous. We could also double the recommended CRs of all creatures in an encounter. That would be even more dangerous. I don't think anyone would like it, but I wouldn't insinuate that you're a whiner if that were the case. Yeah, games are supposed to be challenging. The key to "challenge" is that there's something the player or character has to overcome. The more that random chance plays into that resolution -- on a purely statistical level -- the less it's a challenge and the more it's just pure luck. Roulette is a game of pure chance. The player has no way to influence where the ball will fall and thus the only player choice is where to bet money. Poker is a game of chance and skill. The cards you are given are random, but in most games, you have the time and space to read the discards and actually play the hand. Professional poker games are also games of attrition, so players can make tactical choices over the course of many hands. There's a reason why a lot of people enjoy watching hour-long professional poker games more than watching someone playing one roulette bet for $500,000 on 33 Black: the former is engaging and interesting, the latter is completely dull and boring. 1st, 2nd, and sometimes 3rd levels of D&D are the roulette wheels of the game, oscillating wildly between enormous success and terrible failure due to the incredible dominance of the d20's die range and the participants' very low hit points. You can certainly try to make tactical choices to avoid getting involved in combat, but once you're in, you're at the mercy of the die. A lot of people find that 4th-14th levels are the sweet spot of D&D. It has nothing to do with how powerful the characters are, because that's always relative to the enemies. I think it has almost everything to do with the balance of value between the die roll and the character's statistics. Chance is important, the character's build is important, and the player's choices in the moment are important. No single element seems to dominate the various scenarios. Below 4th, chance holds a lot of power. Above 14th, a lot of bonuses start to make the die rolls irrelevant. So when WotC talks about using 2d10 instead of d20 and giving triple hit points to starting characters (including enemies), what they are really doing is normalizing those elements over time. A stray arrow from a CR 1/2 creature wouldn't ever take a 1st level wizard from max health to death in a single shot, but a 1st level fighter PC would also be incapable of outright killing an orc in a single shot. Low-level battles potentially become longer, but players have more breathing room to retreat, heal, defend, etc. -
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
All of that stuff should have just been feats to begin with. The rules have always made low-level D&D characters feel terrible, even in 3E. I've never wanted my characters to feel like gods, but being able to survive an unlucky crit from an orcish axe at 1st level would be nice. The ToEE CRPG proved just how terrible low-level D&D characters feel (in case anyone forgot slugging through The Slums in Pool of Radiance). You whiff constantly and get blasted into nothingness with one or two unlucky die rolls. At 3rd or 4th level, you finally start to feel like you have a healthy amount of control over your success or failure. ToEE, like Tomb of Horrors, sucker punches players constantly. You could put junk like the "werewolf/angel mirror" in any edition of D&D and it would be just as bad. All tabletop games are as easy as the DM/GM makes them. I slaughtered just as many (if not more) players in my 3E campaigns as I did in my 2nd Ed. and 1st Ed. games. -
Translation: Alvin ran into Antonio (our new Aliens rigger/animator) at practice and broke one of his ribs, which also punctured and collapsed one of his lungs. gg murderer.
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Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
Sweet let's go back to elves as a class, percentile strength, and only "warrior" classes gaining HP benefits from con over 16. The only real argument I can accept for keeping the current spread of points is one of granularity. But I don't think having finer granularity is all that important. If there were three levels of ability score bonuses from magic, items, etc. -- 1, 2, 3 -- don't think that would be a bad thing. However, I also don't see anything bad with starting characters at -3 in all stats (-4 or -2 for racially-modified ability scores) and allowing them to buy up from there to a cap of +4 (+3/+5). Alternately, everyone could start at 0, with the ability to buy up or down to those limits. -
That XXL is actually an XL.
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Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
I played red book, blue book, 1st Ed., 2nd Ed., 3E and now 3.5. I very much doubt that I will cling any more to 3.5 than I did to previous iterations of the rules. If 4E is really crummy, I'll just stick to modified 3.5. I do think it's pretty hilarious to gripe about WotC wanting more money and daring to make a 4th edition after only 7 or 8 years. What edition of GURPS are we on (4th)? Ars Magica (5th)? Vampire (4th)? Call of Cthulhu (6th)? Paranoia (4th)? Those are all games that have been out for less time than AD&D. Even Stormbringer/Elric! is on its 5th edition. -
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
I can say that because I think that the things they simplified are better in their simplified form. I have no problem with units being in squares. It doesn't really take much reverse-engineering to figure out that squares are 5'. Humans have a base movement of 6 squares. 6x5 = 30, the same as D&D. If you care enough to actually track a character's movement in detail, you might as well use the grid units instead of converting between two different units. -
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is on the way...
J.E. Sawyer replied to Sand's topic in Pen-and-Paper Gaming
What I've seen of Saga/Star Wars is very good. -
Yes.
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BTW, BioShock is yet another game running on the "broken" Unreal Engine 3.
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This demo gets very high marks both for atmosphere and general presentation. The bathysphere trip intro is fantastic. There are nitpicky graphic issues here and there, but ultimately I don't think they matter much. I'll definitely be picking this up for my 360.