Monte Carlo

Some of the Mercs (A) hate each other (B) develop mutual fan clubs (B) something inbetween. Vultures eat corpses, mercs barf, you can marry female mercs off to hillbillies, you can commandeer an ice cream truck, buy guns in an adult movie store, get involved in prize-fighting, use mortars, make hundred yard headshots, sit on a rooftop with a Barratt light fifty, make things using springs, duct tape and stuff in an open-ended game world that feels like an agreeably schlocky straight-to-video Steven Seagal movie. Any game that has a "Tons of Guns" option at the startup screen has got to be a winner. Never played a game like it before or since, love it to bits. Cheers MC

Jagged Alliance 2, like wot they said ^

Medieval Total War 2: Kingdoms (Creative Assembly / Sega) Price UK

Hmm. I said Northern Irish, different accent really. Harsher, more guttural. Very expressive, can be whimsical or sinister or both at the same time. Liam Neeson is Northern Irish but has a much softer accent. Am trying to think of somebody with a Northern Irish accent who American posters will know of.

If I hear another dwarf with a Scottish accent I swear I will scream. It's not that I don't like Scottish accents, I really do, but what is it with the Scottish dwarf thing FFS? Dwarves with Scandinavian accents I could dig. Or Northern Irish accents. That would be cool. Cheers MC

As a gamer with no dog in this fight, it's highly amusing to see the Fallout Taleban reacting precisely as their dogma demanded and Bethseda getting hosed down for taking the franchise on in the first place. Fallout 3 should have been a niche-undergroundy, niche community thing done using that funky FIFE engine thingy. We could all have bought into that. Me? Boot up Tactics, best game of the series. Ho ho ho! MC

Many thanks for your thoughts, you skate across the surface of the NDA quite elegantly in my humble. Obsidian are lucky to have a community member of your integrity. Now I've blown enough smoke up your arse... My thoughts: 1. I'm a bit sad that performance optimization is still an issue; a lot of people here aren't graphics junkies, they just want a solid gaming experience (note: am still an avid X-Com fan and love the retro graphics). I run a two-year old Dell XPS gaming rig that is starting to feel it's age... I struggle to get NWN2 going all out. 2. I like Thay / Rashemen although I'm not a big FR fan.... Thay are the Nazis and Rashemen is the Eastern Front, dig my bizarre comparison and it makes a bit more sense, it's attrition baby. 3. For me the most encouraging thing is the curse / influence / well-rounded NPC thing. I am one of those people who criticized PS:T for the reasons you describe but think that good writers can always do less with more when it comes to words. This is what I'm expecting from this game. 4. I'm playing a Chaotic Neutral Tielfing Ftr/Thf/Duellist through NWN2 at the moment. I think it's safe to say my style is the polar opposite to yours which illustrates the challenge the designers have! Cheers, MC

Weighted point buy: paper-scissor-stone, cookie cutter characters. Corporacy in D&D? FFS. I once went to a game and created a character where the DM used a strict 4d6 discard the lowest, roll seven times, drop the lowest stat and arrange as you see fit system.* That's great, it's how I more or less always ran my games too. Except when he said, "You can't have any stat at 18." When I asked why he said that it was "power-gaming." My arse. I'm playing a fantasy game, mate. I want to be a 20 STR half-orc carrying an axe as big as he is. Sue me. I don't want to talk fakespeare and read about basket-weaving crafting skills in your painfully researched home-brew. It clearly wasn't going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship so I walked. * Just did it using a dice rolling programme, here's my half-orc fighter using the racial mods on top of my natural rolls: STR 19 DEX 12 CON 14 INT 7 WIS 9 CHA 7 Wow, what a munchkin character! Don't tell me I could have done it with WPB because (a) where's the fun in that and (b) if I'd have got better scores I'd have used them! Cheers MC

Many years ago a friend brought a little RPG box set around called "The Arduin Adventure" which was clearly a sort of bizarro tribute to the original "Grey Box" D&D set. They were written by Dave Hargrave (who is now sadly dead) and they were the sort of mad stuff your brilliant but strange friend might write whilst experimenting with mind-altering substances. To give you an idea of just how cool it was, check out the artwork here, courtesty of the extremely informative Wiki entry. Arduin was crammed with strange ideas, classes, tables and house rules clearly meant to be shoe-horned into a D&D game. It was a strange, niche product then and almost completely forgotten now but I think Hargrave influenced lots of RPG designers. I remember reading the books and spending hours working out what rule would fit in where whilst I created the coolest insectoid assassin character (Phraints, which still have a starring role in my homebrew campaign world along with lots of other little Arduin bits and pieces). Of course, being Arduin, you might just be as likely to come across a +3 Magnum revolver as a magical sword. Hackmaster captures the anything-can-happen fun spirit of RPG'ing back then. The po-faced FR canon you come across now was alien to the game, and Greyhawk was just a campaign map you filled in as you went along. Anyway, check out the Arduin homepage and this, the coolest dungeon map EVAR drawn by Hargrave for a friend shortly before his death. Lancer's Rest. Cheers MC

Thanks, Foamhead, you don't like the game. It doesn't really help me though does it, as I actually do. I wasn't aware that the NWN2 toolset was that different from the NWN version, though.

I am lucky in that a guy on my team at work is a fanatical gamer. He has taken a week off for when this game is released.

I don't actually play WoW, or any MMORPG for that matter, but I've lots of friends that do and love it. There is this whole WoW social scene going on, I know somebody who had a thirty-strong party at their place recently with all their WoW buddies from across the UK. And there was only a 10% geek quotient, which I find especially amazing. It makes the Bridge Evening at the Schloss Monte seem quite tame, even with the absinthe an' all.

Hmmm. D&D Lite for the console generation. It had to happen. Just be a happy grognard and stick with what you are playing now. Hey, I think it all went horribly wrong with 2E, it's nice out here in the gamer's version of a survivalist camp with your old rulebooks and tinned food, waiting for the gaming apocalypse. I am keeping my 1st Edition rulebooks to show my grandkids, my favourite bit being the DMG "Wandering Prostitute" table for urban encounters. Let us also not forget the incredibly sexist strength limits for female characters (18/50 IIRC). Ah, multi-class half-orc fighter / assassins, demi-human level caps, tables for everything, obtuse diktats from Lake Geneva by Mr. Gygax... they were happy days.

My understanding is that the virus was introduced as an in-game disease effect by the developers. I might well be wrong, but I don't think it was sabotage. If it were then the person who did it is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Cheers MC

No, we make good villains because we ruled the world for several hundred years with a rod of iron. Mwuhaahahahaaaa!!! (etc, in a very deep resonant British accent) I think Ray Winstone (i.e. King Arthur & Sexy Beast) who has a gravelly London accent can do a good villain. Americans seem to prefer upper-class British villains, though. I digress. Please, back on topic. Why are NWN2 modules, so far, so meh? Cheers MC

So, like, some d00d releases a virus into WoW and all of a sudden Ivy League boffins are using it to model the theoretical spread of real-life diseases! This sounds like the lamest excuse ever to play 'puter games at work, but whatever. Enjoy: BBC audio story

It has taken Monte Carlo many, many levels to achieve twenty ranks in Build Conservatory with the Attach blinds! and Completely level decked exterior! feats. To craft this item costs about twenty grand in his own money, which is a hell of a lot of sub-prime soiled dollars, btw. Ignoring the chaos around him he finally begins to build and rolls a '1'. He pulls out his +2 Browning and shoots himself.

Thanks. It's not that I'm a total philistine. Quality writing over quantity is good enough for me, and I know that brevity is challenging and takes good writing skills, a bit like playing the piano badly.

It's interesting, because of course (as Gromnir points out) D&D is indeed a squad-level combat game. Albeit a not very realistic one, it's actually more like a superhero game. Nothing wrong with that, I like it lots (for example, The Temple of Elemental Evil might have been dreck in lots of ways, but the combat engine was beautiful and shows what fun a pen & paper ruleset can be on the 'puter if shown a bit of love). OTOH, the RPGs that were more "realistic" were never as popular but the games mechanic actually forced less combat-intensive gameplay that could be just as interesting. I still remember a game of Traveller I played over twenty years ago that was fantastic, just like a console stealth game as our characters infiltrated a computer-controlled space station. If you've never played it, Traveller combat was very "You get shot with a plasma rifle. (rolls dice) You are dead." So when combat did happen, you just did everything in your power to ensure that when it did it was on your terms and you had the best chance of winning. Just like in the R/W. RuneQuest was also a bit like that, where even a powerful character could routinely lose body parts in melee and die. It made people think, plan and (yes) run away. None of these games survived or prospered, really. Certainly not on the PC. D&D did. The success of a brand only takes it so far. As for Visceris suggesting he never fudges dices rolls. Ha ha ha. Cheers MC

Given that I now have to wear bionic eyes specially grown in a lab after reading all that text in Planescape, can somebody guarantee me that I'm not going to wear these ones out on this game. I know it's heresy on this forum (PST fanbois are as passionate as the Fallout variety, but ridiculously mellow), but the text in Planescape made my eyes bleed. It was too much of an interactive novel for me, TBH. So, bigger text size options please. And if the text takes up 50% of the GUI that's a clue that you've written too much. Cheers MC

It's strange how I keep coming back to the same old games. NWN2 and Medieval TW2 are the newest games I own and I'm down to buying one or two games a year. The XPs for Medieval and NWN2 will be my 2007/8 buys I'll imagine. Currently playing (very) evil BG2 party "IWD" style (i.e. a multiplayer game of five custom-built characters cut-and-pasted into my SP file), core rules but strictly take-the-first roll for stats (even with borderline min/maxing my character's main stat is 17) I think I've got just about every mod EVAR installed, including the cheesy one that automatically adds the BG1 Tome bonuses by default and the sub-races mod. Trying to get my reputation into the minuses. The party, in case anybody cares, is Tiefling fighter (yes, a vanilla fighter), Dwarven Barbarian, Human Cleric of Talos, Elven Ftr/Thf and a Human Sorceror (who I've allowed to use a crossbow as per 3E roolz). Mostly chaotic evil. They all have gimpy weapon profs, i.e. spears, clubs, slings for some reason, except for the Tiefling who I've allowed to go down the 2H sword and halberd route. Not strong enough for a longbow (yet!). The dwarf I've envisaged as sort of tribesman thus clubs, spears and slings. The fighter/thief is all about crossbows, darts and daggers.

^ By the way, as I hit enter I remembered the farrago that was running 1st Edition AD&D in tandem with the "New" Basic / Expert boxed sets and modules. What was that all about? Those had races as classes (I'm a third level elf) and only three alignments (neutral, chaotic and lawful) etc. If there had been the internet back then we'd have been having exactly the same argument again, except in the early to mid eighties! Cheers MC

When 2nd Edition went to 3rd Edition there was, IIRC, completely free conversion material available if that was your thing. The sky didn't fall in. Anyway, D&D has always been for collector / obsessive multi-classers. That's how WoTC and TSR before them made a buck. I've not got the spare time for pen & paper gaming anymore, but when I was we all played home-brewed house rule variants that looked very little like the core rules anyway. I suspect I'm far from alone there. Last game I played was part 3E with a percentile-based combat system like RuneQuest. We used the sourcebooks for ideas rather than rules. Again, I suspect I'm far from alone there, either. Just out of interest, what does this mean for the OGL? Is 4E identifiably D20 enough for the old rules to apply or will all the D20 / OGL RPGs have to go 4E too? Will OGL material now be licenced for 'puter games? Cheers, MC

So who's making what mod then? What do I have to look forward to? Personally, I wonder if you could make a Forgotten Realms version of Jagged Alliance with the NWN2 engine. That would be rather cool, I like knocking the 4th wall down. Cheers MC

I think that the IWD2 backstory idea was underrated. I liked the reverse ethnic-cleansing parable, it was original for a fantasy CRPG and worked as a generic back-drop for a game not centred on a single player character. The efficacy of the writing / story to what the game seeks to achieve is the point. Oh, and of course, most of the dialogue of JA2. Priceless.