Raithe

Fireball was always a pain, yes, its nicely explosive.. but I never really had time to use it... unless I kept up micromanaging everyone... While the cone of cold, shock, and use of Blizzard seemed to work so much better.. A rogue to stealth open a door.. Morrigan to Blizzard through it from a distance... Maybe with the lightning Tempest for good measure, step back and wait (with ranged weapons active for anyone who managed to stumble out of the doorway..)

I actually kept Strength and Cunning around the same for my rogue.. by the time I had Dual-Weapon Mastery I had him armed with the longsword made from meteor ore (a yay for wardens keep) and that honors blade you picked up in seperate pieces in the Deep Roads.. with the triple Master/Grandmaster Runes he made a fairly decent chop-suey guy.. especially when keeping fine control to make sure he was flanking enemies.. Ranger specialization - was kind of nice to play around with an "extra" to distract enemies, but not one I think to really get a lot of use out of.. Cone of Cold .. The single most used spell in the entire game , maybe bar Heal, but heal was used almost purely by the tactics setup rather then chosen to use.. Morrigan's shapeshifting abilities.. loved the concept. Never used them.

hm, well I just finished my first run through about half an hour ago.. had a human noble rogue and didn't have too much trouble. My main complaint was always being low on health poultices during the first half of the game.. it wasn't until getting on towards the landsmeet that I was able to keep a good stock of them up... It mainly just called for careful use of the main character during battles. Not just letting him wade in tank style.. Making sure to use flanking positions and Dirty Fighting to set up for other things.. Once you got that down pat, it seemed to work well...

3.5 worked mostly. Star Wars d20 wasn't too bad, although the new Saga Edition takes a bit of getting used to.. But DnD 4th is just such appaling cack. I can't really see how a good system can be adapted from it for any new computer versions of DnD settings.

Although how much of the "media hysteria outrage" over it was whipped up for publicity reasons is another matter...

hmm.. actually... yes.. I still have the Spelljammer box with the old 3.5inch discs stashed away in a wardrobe.. Dark Sun.. good yes, but the thing that worries me if that is the game.. it'll be the computerised version of DnD 4th Edition... which just.. I shudder at the thought. I'd say Dark Sun was the hardcore because the mix of: a> rarity of water / metal b> a sensible reason for why the cities had overpowerful mages (who also happened to be overpowered psionics, worshipped as gods, and with legions of fanatical followers) c> any other arcane types having to keep their magic secret or be killed in a variety of painful manners.. (which also made spell research awkward) and the whole they pushed that you had to pay attention to spell components... (which a lot of d&d campaigns tended to let slide unless it was expensive/rare components) d> it was one of the few official settings that really encouraged high fatality for the players...

"Hostility between the nerds shows up for pretty much the same reasons it does everywhere in nerddom. A mix of tribalism and the belief, deep in every nerd's soul, that winning an Internet argument entitles you to take your enemy's catgirl."

I had no intention of going near this game.. The past few years I've found I need some serious storyline to keep me interested in heavy first person shooter types.. And then my 60+ father turned around and said "oh, I'm getting it".... Of course, given that he's just finished the last Wolfenstein, maybe he just wants to shoot things up in his retirement these days..

It's all relative.. It's cheaper then starbucks. It adds about 20 minutes of quest, it's got VO, there are some items, some extra "codex" related stuff if you happen to be interested in finding more out about the "world" and why the Warden's got kicked out of the country in the first place... On the downside, when you leave it, the keep locks itself and you only get a merchant and storage box outside. I guess having to redo the keep _without_ all the dead bodies, and cleaned up would have added too much to it.. Also, it's then possible to be stuck with a quest you can't complete because you can't re-enter the keep. One of those "codex" quests about a previous commander, when you find all four pieces of "codex" a quest opens up to find a secret cache. But if you leave the keep , you can't go back to find it. I read the riddle wrong and thought it might be back at the statue with the sword..so left the keep and boom.. Ah well, for a few odd pounds, it wasn't bad. But I was expecting a bit more.

And for the other slide... Dragon Age might infiltrate the pen and paper section soon... Bioware have got Green Ronin producing the pen and paper rpg version apparently... So not only did they avoid any D&D licensing issues for the game, now they're pushing into D&D's traditional zone.. And so it spreads...

Cliches can work. After all, they started as original ideas, became central to what a "good" example was, and get reused for years/decades after... Although I'll always remember reading a critic talking about the republished works of E.E."Doc" Smith saying that it was all hackneyed and cliched through so much sci-fi... Apparently he didn't pick up that Smith created a whole heap of those techniques/tropes back in the old days before they got overused... But Bioware have a basic formula that works for crpg... and people still play them, and usually , mostly enjoy the experience. How many ways can you start off as a low-level dweeb, be pulled into something world shakingly sort of epic, and travel through a series of locations gaining strength, skill, and an understanding of the situation before having some form of climactic confrontation to deal with the problem?

I have to admit, that bit that is annoying me is healing in boss combats in this game. I don't know why, but after visiting most of the locations, raiding all the elfroot plants I can find, buying all the potions from merchants.. I'm always sucking down with only 2 or 3 poultices... usually the lesser. In ways I'm feeling that I have to be missing something blindingly obvious.. but still.. Morrigans herbalism ramped up, but no ingredients available to actually make any of the damn things myself.. Having to start the Brood Mother battle with 3 lesser healing poultices, and 6 lesser lyrium potions... Is proving to be a touch of a problem...

although how zombiefied players will be after sitting for x hours straight playing the game... that could be another matter..

For the most part, I've been finding that apart from a couple of "boss" battles in the main quests combat hasn't been too difficult... Except for those really annoying "random" encounters when you're travelling between locations on the world map. I don't know what it is, but I've ended up reloading from thos encounters much more then anything else... which can get a touch annoying at times.... "oh, that boss/werewolves/ogres was easy, but the chance ecnounter with hurlocks killed my entire party within a minute... "

For the mild derailment.. I have to admit that as I read through this thread, I'm getting certain Gilbert & Sullivan songs going through my mind... Tarantara!

It'll come down to how everyone in the group approaches it.. Cyberpunk games, and Vampire type (well, every single WoD related game) hammer the brooding seriousness and tend to slide into the almost emo approach.. But that's part of the guilty fun of playing around with them.. That's inherent to the genre. But Star Wars.. now that's grand opera on the space plane.. Yes, you can play certain levels of seriousness to it, add a sense of grit to the play.. even if you don't put in much "Force" waving. Although jumping back to a Knights of the Old Republic era and playing around more with Jedi / Sith philosophy, falling to the dark side and possible redemption.. If you want to put the effort in, and the other players can handle it, those are all quite possible. But even if you do it with the firm emphasis that all the players are non-force users, throw it in the Rebellion era, with everyone playing fringe characters, dealing with smuggling groups, pirates, the hutts, and trying to keep below the Imperial radar.. the very nature of space opera means you have to have the han solo shoots first, hijack the starship, swashbuckling piratical boarding sequences... Heh, I guess I'd just suggest having your gaming group sit down, put on some star wars music, and see what sort of moods they all end up in That'll give you an idea of how they'd handle a Star Wars game and whether it's worth it..

Have to be careful which way you go.. the score of a game, or the soundtrack of known music that's put in the game.. But a nice game score can be great to have on in the background..

I'd say your best bet to find a solution would be to check the forum boards of the restoration project rather then here.. The only thing I can really suggest is try using a slightly earlier save and going through it again, see if the problem repeats. Sometimes the glitches caused by the restoration mod don't always occur again.

Dang, mine's via Amazon, and they have it down for delivery on the 6th...

Well I shall sit and wait for friday.. When the UK delivery system kicks into motion...

I have to say, background music to get people in the frame of mood is ridiculously easy.. And if you have a grasp of the expanded universe it's not that hard to push the epic away (or at least, sort of sideline it) and concentrate on different campaign styles. That said, I think it's almost impossible to have a deadly serious campaign with Star Wars. Even if you're playing one set in the Dark Times / Rise of the Rebellion eras, and trying to pump that "burgeoning resistance movement / criminal fringe" aspects, everyone still slides into that slightly geeky 5 year old when playing... So if everyone having fun is purely the yardstick you're using... Then good games. Hm, cyberpunk has always been more the grim and gritty "near-future" times for me, sometimes you want to play sci-fi thats pure pulp/space opera..that's what Star Wars is good for.

I have to step out and admit a guilty secret... I've been picking up the Star Wars Saga rpg books for a few months now. Originally, I thought the system was a little squiffy, almost like they had tried to shoehorn aspects of d20 Modern with elements of Spycraft 2.0 and then squeezed in a few strange things... But after going back and reading it again, doodling around with it, it's grown on me.. and I find myself actually quite enjoying it... So I have to say, Star Wars Saga is actually something that WotC can expect money from me now. After all, D&D 4th is just some twisted, horrible mess that I will never go near (even if it does have such shiny art). Still, I happen to be curious, how many people out there have been getting their space opera jones worked on with some Star Wars campaigns? Who did follow over from the original Weg to d20 at WotC, and now to the Saga Edition? Thoughts? Speculations? Emotions?

Ah, so the crazy lady going "60 copies!" wasn't actually crazy? Vhat.. no custom install settings??

What's always struck me with crazy reviewers.. at least about games.. is that they can really only give you a review on the technical aspects of a game.. Mood, atmosphere, the question of story and soul, all those really come down to the point of view of whoevers playing it, and what they actually enjoy. Unless you can find a reviewer that has exactly your tastes, all they can really tell you is game breaking bugs, the graphics and engine related matter.. So I've always found it worthy to take all reviews with a healthy dose of salt. ALthough after suffering the soul-destroying thing known as Oblivion.. I'd probably take any review that says that a game is not at all like Oblivion as a plus..

I've spent the last.. hm, two years about with everything running on the 1400x900... It's all servicable and appropriately happy making with most things of a game type nature..