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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. Fallout is not structured like this at all.
  2. Any abandoned structure can effectively be a dungeon. My "salvagers" often went on simple fetch quests that were made very complicated by groups and events that interfered with their goals. When a fetch quest involves travel, you can throw almost anything in the way and get some interesting results. I usually had a handful of "random" encounters that I prepared ahead of time and launched on players as the mood/pace demanded it. It worked out pretty well. E.g. the party got a job that involved going to San Francisco to find out what happened to another salvager, a friend of their employer. The "fast route" took them along I-80, east of Sacramento. They could go on the "long route", but they had no idea what nasty stuff was out there. On I-80, they knew what to expect: the 80s. Sure enough, those dum-dums attacked the party and got smacked around pretty badly. Two of the guys were riding on a little SEC-powered motorcycle. One of the party members really wanted it, so he took it with him against the wishes of the others. When they reached Sacramento, they saw that it was a hive of scum and villainy (surprise). The new motorcycle-owning PC decided to hide the motorcycle from view and drive it around the "north side" of Sacramento. Of course, since he had not been to Sac-town before, he did not know that it had been heavily booby-trapped by scumbags. Along the way, his bike hit a mine and blew up. He flew into the dry riverbed and was taken away by scumbags for interrogation. A mini-adventure evolved in which the other PCs made a rescue attempt and wound up blowing away a bunch of dudes.* Outside of the fact that one of the 80s owned a motorcycle, none of the stuff that followed was planned for. I just made sure that I was confident enough in the setting that I could handle the PCs trying to do wacky things like that. * Actually, they got terrified because a guy with a double-barrel shotgun was inside the house and could possible kill any one of them with a good close-range shot. Solution: throw three grenades in the windows and pray.
  3. What you and I think constitutes good writing may be very different. And what constitutes a professional writer? He's very underdeveloped, but that's mostly due to areas featuring his content being cut. I already posted about this in the OC forum several hours ago.
  4. No, I've always been annoyed by bad writing. No. But it isn't for all relationships, and I don't think romantic relationships should always culminate in sex. And I am one of those people. I'm pretty sure Avellone and/or Ferret cut the romances down to what shipped in the game. I really had almost nothing to do with the companions, for good or ill.
  5. I do not enjoy many of the stories, characters, and dialogue styles that are popular in CRPGs. Emulating them is unenjoyable and writing as I see fit isn't likely to be popular, so I don't do it anymore. I stick to mechanics and story suggestions; I reserve personal writing for personal time.
  6. I'll go even further and say that I think some characters can and should be "false" romance options as long as there is some sort of resolution to the plot line. That's why I really like the romance in Full Throttle: Mo and Ben can't be together, but they have a bittersweet resolution in the game's final moments.
  7. I don't hate love in game stories; I just hate reducing love to shallow, masturbatory fantasy indulgence. Maybe that's all love is to some people, but I think that's a pretty narrow view. Ego-stroking is very popular in CRPGs, which is one reason I don't feel comfortable doing CRPG writing anymore. I appreciate that people wanted more romance options in NWN2, but sometimes I think that people want there to be romance "victory" conditions for all companions. I think that can diminish some characters. For instance, if Shandra and Qara had their own romance plots, I think some people would still want Neeshka to be "romance-able", regardless of how Neeshka's author felt about the character's place in the story. That bugs me. I don't like the idea that you can "win" everything or get everyone on your side. I'm also not fond of the idea that romance always has to resolve with a "fade out" to implied coitus, but that's another issue. I'll re-state what I wrote before: I want romance to receive either less or more attention in games. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, especially when it's something with so much emotional potential. But I certainly don't want to go the route of harem anime, which is total fantasy indulgence and gross pandering.
  8. The "faithful followers" know that I was only on the project for the last six months of development. Having an understanding of how little course correction can be done in six months tends to cause most people to not act like I personally penned the story and all the dialogues for NWN2 over the course of two years.
  9. I stalled on Foucault's Pendulum and am reading language books these days. The last full book I read was Angurgapi: The Witch Hunts in Iceland.
  10. Hold on. Seriously, how often do dialogue options available in RPGs vary so subtly and lead to different conclusions that you absolutely need to read full text before selecting one? 1. Good sir, can you tell me whence came the young maiden from the field? 2. Could I trouble you for the distance to the village of Thimbleflam, farmer? 3. If you don't start answering my questions, I'm going to dash your head upon these rocks and hurl your bloody corpse into the river! 4. Would it be inappropriate if I were to ask you to MAKE OUT WITH ME?! 5. I was wondering if you could answer some other questions for me, old man. translates to: 1. Where did the maiden come from? 2. How far to the village? 3. Cooperate, or else. 4. Kisseys? 5. Other questions. Obviously, the phrases I chose aren't serious, but what are you missing here that's going to inform your choices? Unless people are playing games I haven't seen where you have several different choices for intimidating people or several different ways to ask where the maiden in the field came from -- that also lead to distinctly different conclusions, I have to add -- what is preventing you from making a choice? If you want to intimidate the subject, you're going to pick the intimidation line. While the specific words you speak might not be what you had in mind, you almost always run into that same issue with full text responses. For example, if the option were expliclity, "If you don't start answering my questions, I'm going to dash your head upon these rocks and hurl your bloody corpse into the river!" that would probably still be your only intimidation choice. I think the real issue is how much of Shepherd's personality is loaded into the lines -- not whether you see full text or condensed phrases.
  11. Why are you bringing up NWN2 when no one is arguing that it is anything but linear?
  12. Salvatore has already written for games. IIRC, he wrote the plot and dialogue for Demon Stone. Also, McFarlane created Necrid for the Xbox version of Soul Calibur 2.
  13. Joinable NPCs shouldn't be critical to quests if you want to push for open gameplay (as I do). And if people only feel that choices that affect The One True Plot can be "real" choices, there aren't really any games that fit the mold, including Fallout. In Fallout you could defeat the Master in a few different ways or you could "end early" by getting dipped. People seem to enjoy the amount of choice in the Fallout games despite the limited number of main plot end states, so I'm not worried about it.
  14. To be honest, I think it's enough to keep the player relatively in the dark about their surroundings. You can point them in the "best" way to go (which is what Fallout did) and make exploration risky through the use of hazards and a general lack of knowledge about where they are going. It works out pretty well. For example, it's possible that someone could stumble out of Vault 13 and click randomly on the map until they found Necropolis, but it's pretty damned improbable.
  15. Game stories don't need to be tangled masses of interconnected plotlines that can diverge in a billion directions. Stand-alone plots, or plots with a small number of references to other parts of the game, can work just fine. Also, if companions are optional and their reactions based on stimuli that can be found in lots of different places all over the game setting, they can become their own self-contained plots. Fallout is a great example of how to "do" a non-linear story. The main plot is pretty basic and has very few plot critical components. Individual places along the way are non-critical to that plot, but they can fit into it just fine. You can skip Shady Sands or the Hub if you really want to, or you can do them "out of order" without damaging the main plot. So I don't really think "many bifurcations" of a single plot are necessary. Having a few in each plotline is really enough.
  16. I can't speak for the whole of Obsidian, but I would like to see us making more "open" games: open worlds with loose storylines featuring very few "critical path" points and characters. That said, I also want to make games where the choices a player makes are meaningful. Choices that don't effectively change the resulting narrative are meaningless.
  17. My eldritch knight made pretty short work of Lorne. I kept haste, displacement and stoneskin up constantly. Once he hit 0 health, I just ran around the arena and absorbed the occasional AoO.
  18. The FRCS and PGtF aren't considered core books.
  19. Goblins have average intelligence and spells/magic has its own alphabet. Drow were playable in 2nd Ed. Actually, they were playable in 1st Ed. if you had Unearthed Arcana. They've never been part of core rules, though (not even now).
  20. I'm currently playing Viva Pi
  21. My statement was meant to suggest that because I was only the lead designer on the project for the last quarter of its development, I didn't have that much influence on it.
  22. It's not really mine to take pride or shame in.
  23. In the OC? Yes, far too late. The OC is a very tightly-wound clump of stuff. Non-linearity and the ability to attack/kill any old shmoe wandering around are things that designers have to accept and accommodate from the get-go or they wind up going, "OH WAIT THAT BREAKS A THOUSAND THINGS DURRRR." as soon as they allow people to do so. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but when it comes to D&D games, I'd rather approach them as personal projects. If we do an expansion, I won't be working on it. That said, there are a lot of other designers who recognize big flaws in the OC, so it's not like I'm a voice crying in the wilderness.
  24. I don't think those are silly complaints. Freedom to explore and freedom to be a bloodthirsty idiot (no, seriously) are both very valuable in CRPGs, I think. I wish the NWN2 OC were more "open" on many fronts.
  25. What you're "just saying" is that I'm lying. If you want me to explain things, I will, but come on. I have no significant personal investment in defending choices made on the project a full year ahead of when I took over as lead designer. I also have no personal interest in defending the licensors. It's their license, and they can do with it what they want. The standards for D&D licensees (computer or print) are not the same as WotC's internal standards. In fact, Ryan Dancey said that they were different several years ago (right around the time when Valterra's Book of Erotic Fantasy came out). WotC can show Loviatar as a dominatrix with butt-piercings in Faiths & Pantheons because it's their license. They can also publish Lords of Darkness (drug use) and the Book of Vile Darkness (lots of crazy things) as D&D titles because it's their property. In fact, WotC can apply different standards to different products if they want. They didn't want to be backed into a corner when it came to defining acceptable material (whether for branding or maturity of content). I also didn't say that all of our armor and weapons came out of source material. I said that WotC was very particular about what they wanted. For example, close to the end of the project, they requested that one of our wizard robes (which may no longer be in the game data) be replaced with something that looked more "Forgotten Realms"y. They did not point to a specific illustration and say, "Copy this," but they did outline the particular things they believed would make it more appropriate for the setting. The result is the sort of Jedi-esque outfit that wizards start with in the OC.
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