Jarmo

I'd like to be able to craft pretty good enhancements to different kinds of things. Especially weapons. It's always sucky to create a halberd specialist and then not find any good halberds anywhere, only katanas and spears and daggers and whatever. Just barging into someones smithy or laboratory and starting to craft, no. But if the smith or alchemist is a friend you've already helped in some major way (quest!!), then why not? He'll help you even. Or maybe the crafting is done by the friendly craftsman, bring in the schematic/recipe/whatever, give the ingredients and help along. If you didn't help her already, she'd help you anyway, if you're a smooth talker, the task is interesting enough, or if you give a pile of cash for the trouble. Recipe crafting. ToEE had a pretty simple but neat crafting system, you have the base masterwork item, know the correct spell, have the appropriate crafting feat. Off you go. FO3 and NV had a somewhat nice system, find a schematic and ingredients and a work bench and off you go. Pretty much the same system as in NWN2, except in NWN2 you needed the correct spells as well, sort of a hybrid between NV and NWN2. The thing I didn't like in any crafting systems, was a huge amount of loot about and no way of knowing beforehand if something is going to be essential. Find a diamond or beljuril or emerald, can you sell it? Oh, the star sapphire you got in act 1, you'd need it in act 3 and there's only one in game. Too bad. In NWN2 I ended up with like 10 bags full of stuff that might be needed in crafting later on, or not. Mask of the Betrayer had a pretty nifty system again, with different levels of different kinds of glowing stuff extracted from different things. Minor crafting. I'd also like to be able to do or have done some minor basic enchancements. Like scribble an extra damage rune in the blade. Or have someone cast sharpness on the blade or durability on the leather jack. These would be maybe +1 damage or attack, and might lose their effect after 50 hits or something. A single use +1 strength bracelet or something. Major special crafting. Then besides the basic crafing, there should/could be special items, split in many ways or creatable in special circumstance. Like find the hilt of dawnstar from kings tomb and then later the broken blade of dawnstar embedded in the balrogs skull. Bring them to a master smith and he'll say you'd need brittle starmetal to reforge the sword and he knows just where to get some (extra quest!). In the end you're rewarded with the best sword in the game, quite a bit more powerful than anything you could craft yourself. And it'd be nice if you could at that point decide to lengthen the hilt to get a bastard sword or claymore instead, or shorten the blade to get a shortsword.

Here BTW is one of the rare examples of Conan done as it was written by Howard. Hmm.. any simple way to scale down the image in post? Anyway: Petri Hiltunen's interpretation of Conan in "Queen of the Black Coast," illustrating Conan's Aesir helm, Kothic hauberk and greaves, Nemedian ring-mail, Aquilonian broadsword, and Ophirean cloak. Bêlit does go a bit lightly armored, but such is the way of barbarian pirate queens, I suppose.

Those horn things could be pretty light actually, given how they don't need to fill any specific purpose (except looking badass and intimidating). Rolled metal sheets for the horns, light spikes with canvas in between, a couple hundred grams extra, maybe. Japanese helm ornaments were much bigger and used in combat, but were made of sone sort of paper.

A Megaton anecdote of Good vs Evil. I was playing a shining knight of the wastes, at least as far as the game knew. Told the sheriff about burkes (or burne?) plan to blow up megaton and helped to take the bad guy out. Of course. But I let the bad guy shoot first because I wanted the neat sheriffs hat, and the ak-47....

As a side note, Conan of books (as opposed to conan of movies and comics) actually wore full body chain armor and considered those who didn't, to be morons. (and he was kind of half barbarian half rogue multiclass as well)

Aw come on. Surely there's some support for boobs? I am willing to lend my hand wherever boob support is required.

Ranged, well at least the shield bonuses shouldn't apply if you shoot from behind, dodging is also harder if you can't see or know the missile is coming.

Oh yea, Black and White choices can also work and be hard if there's an actual cost. Maybe you've cornered a vampire or a demon, if you spare him and let him go, he'll give you a permanent enchancement of +1 to strength, but then he'll stay and torment the village. Or go and torment some other village. So doing the good thing is going to be harder. And if you do the evil thing, well that might come back to bite you or a friend later, in some more or less literal way. Just not the simplest possible choices of do whichever, doesn't matter, moving on.

Oh well. I'll have to adjust my position a bit. I'm still of mind that rogues DPS role with unique backstab ability is wrong and everybody should get some bonuses when flanking. But I'm ok with rogue getting bonuses to damage and hit, on the first strike when he's attacking undetected. Don't mind everybody else getting the same bonuses though, only the others probably don't have a hide skill (but could have invisibility from some source instead). Not any silly 6d6 bonus, but something. Maybe to the tune of +4 on both. Just makes sense to me, if you manage to attack from behind, that's a bonus, if you attack an unaware opponent, that's a bigger bonus. Also, if combat is ongoing and an opponent is not actively targeting the rogue, I'm fine if the (skilled) rogue can then slip out of sight and disappear.

There is a big problem with the ME1 example: Well that's actually a problem of ME3 and while it wasn't such a big disappointment after suffering through ME2, the whole series really went downhill fast after the first one. And even the first one kind of fell to the old good vs bad thing. Could have been a case of "too bad we don't have The Spartan anymore after that terror strike back in 3432". The dilemma in ME1 was still neat anyway.

Goto, yeah. Well at least he threatened me with a nuke, so it kind of makes sense to accept him, grudgingly. That ***** ranger dude in NWN2, I'd have stabbed him in the face right away, only I couldn't for some reason. At least I didn't need to take him along except that one time, but still, there was no reason whatsoever to not just boot him the heck away.

Smaller. Less is more. Sometimes. Rather less areas all filled up with content and stuff and detail than more sparser ones. On the other hand, in BG2 you'd get random encounters when traveling the world map, and sometimes it was a bit of "we got ambushed, in the same damn alley.. again!" DA:O was all this as well. Sometimes more is more.

I like being able to make simplistic moral choices, but I like the difficult choices that much better yet. The best I can immediately recollect was the one in one ME1 DLC (bring down the sky or something). You'd be faced with a save the hostages vs kill the terrorist leader situation, where you'd have to choose between preventing a dozen or so casualties right now, or probable much larger casualties sometime later. Could be something to that effect, pardon the murderers if they help you save a bunch of people right now?

BTW, is the existence of japanese and other oriental leather lamellare type armor also contested? I've been under impression they were an accepted fact.

The first one's a real eyeopener for sure! Looking at padded with newfound appreciation. In my defense, my info on the ineffectivenes/uncomfortability of padded armor came from some history (channel?) show of some kind.

Disputable information, but my take is that bows, crossbows and firearms (of proper wheellock variety) were all in the same ballpark as far as accuracy goes. Bow has the fastest firing speed, normal crossbow comes second, then wheellock, while real heavy crossbows (drawn with cranquin or otherwise) are the slowest. Damagewise a firearm should be most effective, heavy crossbow the close second and the bow coming up last. Though long- and composite bows would beat light crossbows. Historically, it took somewhat around 100 years for firearms to take over in the major western armies, couple a hundred years more and bows were still in use in armies around the world, though top tier troops would have converted to guns. Non military use of bows, well they're still used today, professionally too, in the few remaining isolated tribes.

I'm not an expert on padded armor at all, but from the picture I'd hazard a guess they were mostly used in areas with cooler climate? Also, don't know the technique used, but I remember from somewhere you couldn't wash them (or something bad) so they'd be pretty much full of fleas and thingies soon enough. And I seem to remember it was particularly bad against piercing damage, arrows and such. Not well liked by the users but cheap enough. As to leather and cost. I distinctly remember hearing or reading East Rome switched to boiled leather armor at some point, when they couldn't afford chain (or lamellar) anymore. Might have been a temporary thing. Might have something to do with there being a lot more horses about in the eastern areas. And the price of metal.. was pretty darn high at some points in history.

It's not a matter of whether a leather glove will render you invulnerable to flames and sword strikes. It's a matter of if you'd rather put your hand in flame wearing or not wearing the said glove. Something to the tune of leather coat would give minimal protection, enough to deflect a minor scratch or to turn a cut into one. Not good as armor goes, but better than nothing. Boiled leather, used in shaped armor (breastplates) and scale and lamellar were also made of it. Not as good as ones made of metal, not even close, but again, better than nothing and better than padded armor or a leather coat The basic reason to use leather armor would be cost, much cheaper than steel or bronze. Leather clothing on the other hand, is also pretty comfortable, especially if compared to something like padded armor.

Loghain was a great opponent, in theory, as a concept. But then there was just too much of the snarling bad guy thing going on. Really a letdown in the end, he just didn't come across as this war hero, master strategist, leader type. Add a bit more conviction and nobility in there and he'd have been great. A guy who really thinks he's on the right side and does just what he has to do. King of shadows, was a tragic, tortured character. But you needed to read stuff and do the discussions to get any of that. Just following the audiovisual presentations, he was just this big black nasty shadow. No good proclamations or nothing, just a black thing without character. With even a bit of hint at her hero origins in the end would have been a great touch. Both of these were more multidimensional than Irenicus, with better and more reasonable backstory. But Irenicus wasn't bad there either and he totally owned in his monologues and in the love to hate category. Bodhi as well, who wouldn't just hate her after the tricks they pulled. Both were the kind of villains you really, really wanted to kill and really, really enjoyed tearing them to bits in the end. King of Shadows and Loghain were more of "it has to be done" variety. Besides, Skeletor is awesome.

Probably hard to implement, but otherwise why not. If a random fighter tells you to back down or he'll whoop your ass, wouldn't it be more convincing if he's wearing full plate and a greatsword, than if he's wearing rags and is armed with a wooden stick? Or maybe he's a stickmaster and gives the stick a menacing whirl while threatening.

Caught attention to this, what if some conversations turned different depending on what kinds of buffs you have? Say you meet a Lust demon that enslaves you and makes you her slave to torment... erm... Gluttony demon that captures you and makes you his slave. I wish to just flirt with the thought that having the Protection from Evil buff on I would see through the mental power of the demon and be "warded" from the mysterical magic (Domination/Jedi Mind Trick). Or we could see through lies of others, the lowlife Rugtug who is a piss-ant snitch twitch, and when encountering him we could see through him like a glass of water because he is of course rotting evil in terms of his Egoism. With Protection from Evil you could make the rat squeel. That'd be pretty neat. I think at least Icewind Dale had some special option when you were a Paladin with detect evil ability, and of course Knights of the OR had the very jedi mind tricks in conversation. But yeah, something like fire shield cast on you should make intimidating some random muggers a whole lot simpler.

I'm not actually sure the stats are all that important in BG. There are some real annoying things like you need Str of bloody 18 to use composite bow, pretty much forcing you to minmax it if you want to be an archer. Saving throws are one thing, but you fail them all the time anyway. Dex helps your armor class obviously, and without any hindrance from heavy plate too. But actually dangerous opponents pretty much hit you anyway no matter the AC. STR is the main thing I guess, but you can get gauntlets of ogre power and girdle of giant strength, so it's not all over if you dont have it. The class restrictions were more annoying by far. Swashbuckler, can use longsword, can't use spear, can't use longbow, can't use halberd, can't use this and can't use that. Between me and Viconia, we had to ignore most of the good stuff. Also many effects are kind of stupid as in Gauntlets of Ogre Power not giving a strength bonus, but setting strenght on 18/00, or some potions or spells setting AC on some set level, like 4 or 0, no matter if that's a bonus or penalty. D&D 3.0 or 3.5 rules (NWN, NWN2, ToEE) are a vast improvement, though opinions differ on this obviously. The only thing I liked more in 2.0 were the summoning spells, where you'd first need to cast protection from evil or suffer yourself, and the ability to have a bunch of summons around simultaneously. I missed getting more stat points during the game, as it is I lost stat points during the game and never regained them. Don't know if I'd like to get a point every level like in some games, but some improvement during the course would have been nice.

Human, dual class started with thief-swashbuckler with longsword and dual wielding proficiency. Something like chaotic good, good intentions, looks after his friends. Had some moral issues when somebody hired me to just go and kill some wizard, but went with the flow anyway. Took 10 levels of that and then continued as a mage. Statswise.. I had some workable beginning stats but then cheated the heck out of them with Shadowkeeper. Made sense to me to have pretty high scores, being a son of Bhaal and all. ---- Add. It's strange how the whole of Shadows of Amn was some strange sideshow. It'd have made more sense for Throne of Bhaal to directly follow BG1. Lots of bhaalspawn revealed at the end of BG1 -> ToB is about going to kill them.

The best part of the game was tedious to you? No big surprise, but it wasn't the best part of the game for me. Much the same, I liked the Unseeing eye quest... except for the beholder lair which was all too much combat and summoning. It would have been better for me if I could have just walked past some easy corpse eaters, found the item, zapped the baddie and be done with the whole thing. I just don't like the challenge padding through combat in quests. All of puzzle fights where you have to figure out what to do is much like having to solve a math problem before getting to move forward, and saying "you need to get better at math", or "use more lube and learn to like it" just doesn't help at all. If I had actually liked the combat I'd probably have given the game 8+.

Yea, for me the battles with wizard opponent were real tedious. "Oh look, he's casting time stop and buffing himself with invulnerability to everything." Then it was either having half a dozen of pierce magics prepared, or more likely running back and starting to summon pit fiends until the wizard inevitably would run out of spells and protections. Actually that's the one part about combat I liked, it was kind of fun to just stand back and watch the demons tearing irenicus or dragons to bits. Deva and Planetar were a lot more effective but didn't look any good.