Monte Carlo

Two thoughts - (a) It is instructive to watch how these twentysomethings are conducting themselves, reflexively using the Internet as a medium to manage / resolve / conduct this whole affair. It's like using a shovel to re-pot a bonsai tree. (b) I'm reminded of the old saw that academic disputes are so bitter because there's so little at stake. Kirottu, the article by the woman who used the word 'Patriarchy' a couple of paragraphs in? It was TL;DR could someone summarize please?

I don't know where to start with the combat. I've tried a paladin and a rogue so far on normal and hard. Sadly my view is pretty negative. I'll simply bullet point my first impressions: * First, there are relatively few visual or audible clues / feedback for abilities, and it took me a while to figure out what the little green pips mean. * It feels like a strange real-time / phase based system, a sort of constipated turn-based game. * Speed - a bit like Mommy bear's porridge, default is too fast and slow-mo too slow. Somewhere in the middle would be just right. Would it be possible to introduce a speed slider, perhaps? * There's a lack of impact - the kinetic ooomph of hitting something. As someone else says, it sounds like a pillow fight. * I haven't a clue what's going on. Seriously. The powaz all look great but there are so many and it's all happening so fast... and is the patchy auto-attack a bug? Put simply, the combat in the beta is virtually unplayable for me. I'm not exaggerating. And I so badly want to like this game.

:D

I'm sure we could all go round again discussing the merits of quest-versus combat-based XP, I think we've all dug entrenched positions on it. I just thought what was mooted, i.e. predominantly quest-based with a nod to combat (modest xp rewards) suited everyone. But that rug got pulled. I missed the announcement myself, which suggests Sawyer didn't make one. As for me, I hate quest-based only, and George makes a valid point. Combat is still a key focus of this game - why are you punished for it?

The portraits are bizarre - no non-WASP characters unless you want to play someone with flowers or mushrooms growing out of their heads (which, TBH, I don't). Why the preponderance of 'godlike' characters? Pro-tip - characters wearing helmets and hoods allow for ambiguity, alternatively just dump the old IWD ports in as a bonus.

This isn't a useful comment. Why do you think it's a bad idea? (1) Do you want people to inadvertently build a bad character? (2) Do you think that it isn't possible? (3) Do you think it necessarily means that the attributes can't have a large enough dynamic range? (4) Some other reason? As it is, you're adding noise to the discussion. Most of the discussion revolves around something like point 3 (which remains to be seen). Point 1 is ridiculous. Point 2 is clearly not true. Maybe you have an actual 4th point that would add to the discussion. Do you or not? Hey, Doctor Spock, it's called hyperbole and I dug exactly what the dude was saying.

I'm biding my time before posting full feedback, but the combat for me is virtually unplayable because of the speed and confusion of encounters. I don't like the inventory system and the no-XP thing will always be a major no-no for me. I'm not finding it too buggy, funnily enough, and I like the overall look of the game. But FFS slow down that combat.

Sneaky, slipping the xp thing in under the radar like that. Ironic that Sawyers RPG design dogmas are already last generation, which is what happens when you value fashion over style.

I don't mean gimp - I mean enjoying different classes as challenges in and of themselves. A run through BG2 with three bards plays differently from a run with three fighters and so on.

* shakes head * Josh's 'trash options' are my future trololol gaming challenges. I know we're never going to agree, but this game seems designed for the less hardcore 'play-the-game-once' crowd. I've nothing against them at all, in fact PoE should cater for them, but that doesn't mean all must have prizes. Dammit, create hardcore classes, trumpet your trash classes, say "play this class at your peril, here be dragons." I'm sure i'm not alone.

The bit with the ill-fitting hoods, with Don Johnson and Jonah whatshisname arguing with the KKK, made me fall about laughing. It was almost Pythonesque.

For all the talk about their PC versions, my impression is that the tablet ports are really the key selling feature of the Enhanced Editions. Cool for tablet owners. I honestly thought touch-screen combat would suck, but it doesn't.

I'm not that old. Same grid-square as Gromnir and some of the other senior more mature forumites.

I'm reading Charlie Stross's 'The Laundry' series of books. Written in 2003 / 2004 they feel their age (Palm Pilots? Saddam's Secret Police?) and are a bit clunky, but the premise is novel: the Lovecraftian otherworld of Eldritch horror is real, explained away by advanced maths. The Laundry is a top secret organisation dedicated to keeping it secret, and stopping the tentacled-ones from breaking through. The protagonist is an IT professional turned intelligence agent, but lives in the unglamorous world of dingy bedsits and, er, IT. Lots of geekery ensues. An aside: I found his take on the Holocaust actually quite offensive (i.e. the Wansee conference was designed to fuel a Nazi necormancy experiment, ten million deaths powering an extra-dimensional gate - personally using the Shoah like this strikes me as being in extraordinary poor taste), but apart from that the story is solid. Stross's world-building and cast of geeky mathematician-spies is intriguing enough for me to buy the second and see where it takes me.

^ I think that rather proves my point. Ex-IRA men are knuckle-dragging street thugs, not dashing espionage paramilitaries. Even Burn Notice had a glamorous ex-IRA 'operative' as the protagonist's girlfriend. Let's not even start on the risible season of Sons of Anarchy set in Ulster. I could go on. The point is that the IRA tickles the anti-Colonial nut-sack of a certain type of American, and they get too romantically gooey about the idea of the brave IRA, sitting in the woods, sniping at redcoats. Not the psychotic thugs planting bombs in hotels and shopping centres.

IIRC the protagonist is an ex-IRA man who redeems himself by becoming a bomb disposal officer. Let's imagine a movie where an ex-ISIS guy moves to America and becomes a SWAT team guy. All those beheadings are now null and void, I suppose. Hollywood has a rich tradition of viewing the bovine thugs of the IRA as resistance fighters and marquisards. After 9/11 I know more than a few Brits who felt 'now you know what it feels like." Beantown bars have passed the hat round for 'The Boys' since time immemorial. For many years Americans provided money that murdered British and Irish civilians, to a neo-Marxist terror group.

I didn't really like the first movie so I think I'll give it a miss.

Baldur's Gate EE on my Nexus 7 tablet. Fair play to Beamdog, it's ludicrously easy to play and looks great (even on a 7" tablet). So now I've got BG wherever I go, I hope they do the same for BG2.

Precisely, GW is a great example Wals. They are currently undergoing a very, very painful restructuring program. Their one-staff-shop model might make it difficult to generate new customers, though. Once upon a time, as I'm sure you remember, GW (and White Dwarf) covered all RPGs, then GW became a games entity unto itself and pushed only its own products. Another example in a non-gaming context is football shirts - English Premiership teams release too many and the kids stop buying them.

^ Even Woldan ain't going for that.

In my experience, chicks have usually got better things to do.

Yeah, and you could look at the old Pen & Paper RPG model. TSR, who made D&D, issued a core game with supplements, which were entirely optional. The quality of many of these supplements were good, and many customers bought them. This, boys and girls, was simply the dead-tree iteration of DLC. With three core rulebooks and some imagination you didn't need any of the modules, in much the same way as I can play Company of Heroes 2 without the Mechanised Assault Commander or the Ambush Flecktarn skin for my panzers. Anyhoo, TSR got greedy. They pushed the business model to the max, nickel-and-diming customers to the limit as they tried to leverage more and more out of a dwindling playerbase. Wizards of the Coast continued the trend, kicking the hell out of a dead horse with even MOAR splat-books that you simply had to have. And, verily, the pen and paper gaming customer base were sad, went indie and everything went to rat****e for WotC. Paizo, interestingly, deliberately doesn't splatbook too much with Pathfinder. They know that to do so would be to over-leverage and lose sales. Instead they do less, but more impactive iterations of their products (bigger campaign settings, card games, minis for example). This is a conscious decision. It is quite cleverly finding that elusive balance between leverage and exploitation. And the fans seem to like it and Paizo goes from strength to strength. Back to Wizards of the Coast - D&D5 seems to be copying Paizo. It seems a more generous, inclusive take on the franchise. However, splatbooking is in WotC's DNA, so we'll see how that one goes. I know these are imperfect comparisons, but there are certainly similarities. If any PC game wants to release too much wanky DLC they will eventually reap the whirlwind, either technologically, reputationally or otherwise (hello, WoW, I'm looking at you). The commentator in the OPs initial article was simply stating that LOL isn't, at the moment, exploring that area between profit and customer ennui. So what if he does? I frequent a number of gaming forums - a common theme (and it is with younger gamers) is that asking for you to pay anything for DLC is exploitative. This is a direct consequence of digital entitlement. All companies are seeking the sweet spot Paizo has found, and will continue to do so. To expect anything else is naive. TLDR: PnP gamers have suffered this since the early 1980s, when young Monte splurged all his allowance on AD&D. 'Tis nothing new and the sky won't fall in.

And there was me thinking it was an ironic comment on how hideously fakkin awful these girls are going to look in twenty years time with their skanky prison ink...

I'm so sorry I've got a **** Bruce. It wasn't my fault, it was a cruel twist of fate.

I was in the Salzkammergut for a bit. Ham. Cheese. Ham. Cheese. Ham. Occasional pizza. Beer was nice, though. Think I saw Julie Andrews hanging out with some nuns and the local SS commander.