teknoman2

and why could it not be that by not doing the optional stuff you dont get to level cap, by doing them, you get to the cap at about 80-85% of the game (when the optional stuff are done and only the story is left to wrap up)?

the thing is not to put certain items on the main path of the game. the "legendary sword of ultimate destruction" should be in a place far off the beaten path, where you have to shed sweat, blood and tears to get to... not in the hands of an enemy you have to face for the main quest. or even worse, have him hold a normal sword and have this in his chest you cant have the item description say "this item was used by a hero 1000 years ago and it disappeared with him at the end of his quest, never to be seen again..." and the item to be sold in a shop like it's nothing important

I disagree on this, very much so. It would make for a really boring game. Variety is good thing, as can be seen from BG2 which is the more popular game. variety is good. overloading the game with junk items is bad like in BG2 that you mention, from the start you can find really nice looking stuff in shops, but by the time you can afford them, you have already found better items in the areas you visited and are left with the question: why should anyone have any reason to buy this? or certain overpriced stuff in adventurer's mart that simply had nothing to offer for the money you had to spend if to get the money you need in order to buy a +2 sword, requires you to pass through a dungeon in which you find +3 weapons for the entire party, the existence of the +2 sword is meaningless. the designers should have made that sword +3 with some special ability that would rival the one you found, giving you a reason to consider buying it and thus creating variety. also if you have the "sniper's crossbow" (a heavy crossbow that gives +3 to attack, +4 to damage and no specials) cost 30k, then you have the no name heavy crossbow +4 that gives +4 to attack +6 to damage for 21k in the same shop, in a game that has no requirements for the equipment, is anyone going to consider buying the first? it would be even worse if that guardian you had to kill in order to get where the shop is had a heavy crossbow +5 hand placed among the loot

on the 2, i'd say it is sometimes also a problem with the game's balancing. after a certain point in IWD2 enemies have +15, +16... +26 to their attack, and the best non magical gear can at most raise your AC to 22, meaning you always get hit. the only thing you can do, is hope to find a +5 armor, a +5 shield, a +5 ring of protection (and these stuff dont even exist in the game), just to limit the enemy chance to hit by 30-40%. if the combat system is designed in a way that only the absolutelly highest quality legendary magical items can offer any chance to avoid a hit, then in order to give you a chance, they need to overload the game with impossibly powerfull items

how about if it is set in the world of PE, but at the distant future compared to the current PE time... just think of PE classes and game mechanics on a cyberpunk setting in the same world the fighter can be like robocop for example... heavy, slow moving and indestructible the barbarian can be like terminator... moderatelly fast, hard to kill and with the ability to lay waste to trash mobs

Why do you need that at all? What tactical complexity does it add that simply making casters cast the spell normally does not? It's also worth pointing out that while contingency was incredibly useful, you paid a high price in terms of spell slots for that utility. In a more general sense, some of the fixes in this thread forget the somewhat dramatic change to the casting system that's happening. Removing pre-buffing also makes more sense in the context of this game, because this game does not have spell slots the way the IE games did, so there is far less of a limited resource thing going on. Time is a more critical resource than spell storage in this game. This is especially true when you consider that you can change entire books given enough time. as i said the spell is centered on the caster. so if he wants to use a single target buff on another character, he has to do it normally. also it counts for 1 spell and the spell must be selected at rest and must be availbale for use at the moment the skill is triggered. if for example you set it to autocast a lv5 spell and you only have one such spell available, it will work the first time, but not on the next battle. if however you set it for bless that is a per encounter spell, it will activate on every battle. another way is to give a caster class a skill that allows to instantly cast a spell and can be used a limited amount of times like 1 per encounter or 2 per rest as for the tactical complexity, it mostly has to do with the fact that enemies will be able to do the same. however you will have to fight 4 or 5 battles per rest and you will need to set a spell that can be used at all times. the enemy will only have to fight you, so he can use any spell he wants. so your lv7 priest can set it to activate the lv3 spell prayer that is a per encounter spell at that level. however the lv15 enemy priest (boss) that does not have to fight anyone else, can have it set to activate the lv8 spell divine intervention that makes his whole team imune to damage. here's the tactical part: you have to work through the enemy buff in order to win the battle

trust me, if i was on the DC universe, i'd be joker... a chaotic neutral version, but in essense a guy who does not give a dime about anything or anyone as long as he has fun

Nonek, you're freaking me out a little ^_^ When the devs say there's no prebuffing, are they including trap laying, or just defensive spells with duration? You're kind of "buffing" an area with traps, but that's really not how I understood the term. This part of IE combat is one of the things that gave it such a strategic dimension as well. Yeah, it might bear clarifying that it's not really speculative to say that a system with triggers and contingencies can retain the feel of IE combat. The SCS mod had three different options for enemy mages' prebuffing. I've tried each. The minimal-prebuffing option had mages (apart from end-stage Irenicus) start with just Stoneskin and maybe one or two other long-lasting buffs. It doesn't destroy their play or change the feel since they still slam up defenses by having a contingency or two go off and using a sequencer. Balancing issues are obviously important here. I'm sure your proposal will be good =) each person with the ability to lay traps, can have 1 at a time. and it's not buffing the area if you set traps. you think there may be enemies behind the door, you set a trap on it and then open the door. if there are enemies, you get them to step on the trap, if not you get your trap and go to the next door. prebuffing is: you cast one of your few spells before opening the door, without knowing if you will need it (you the player may know, but your characters do not). so you start the fight with an unfair advantage

a similar idea was used in a jrpg ("something" generations of war, i havent played it but my brother did and told me about it), where the main character is a guy (custom build) who, after lots of adventures, gets married to whoever the player pushed him towards with his choices, and the next chapter of the game sees his child (class, attributes and so on are based on who the parents were) as the main character and this child too, will have a love afair with someone based on the player choices, bringing us to the 3rd chapter where the child's child becomes the main character and has to deal with the results of the actions of his/her parents and grandparents, while creating a situation that will burden his/her child in chapter 4, with the story ending at the end of chapter 5, long after the original main character has died of old age

i dont. i do what i want and to hell with whoever doesnt like it. i do not conform to what others expect of me to be like

Sun Tzu wrote this: 是 故 百 戰 百 勝 非 善 之 善 者 也 不 戰 而 屈 人 之 兵 善 之 善 者 也 "To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." That is, to say, the players of P:E will never reach the acme of skill. well as long as the dialog is not made in a way that no matter what you pick it will end in battle it will be fine.

one way to do it, would be for casters to have a skill that allows them to autocast (with no casting time needed) one spell centered on them, the moment combat starts. ie a priest auto activates bless and a wizard haste, meaning 2 important buffs are cast instantly. same of course goes for the enemies. a high level enemy wizard, could auto cast mass invisibility to all his allies as soon as you came in sight, giving them an edge something like a contigency spell with an enemy sighted condition, without the need for the spell

it would probably play like a point and click adventure game

Ideally the game would know when your characters would know that they are entering a combat situation and allow them to pre-buff in those situations but not allow them in other cases but I'm not sure on the feasibility of such a thing, nor on the potential problems it could cause. a simple way to do it, is to allow buffing when enemies are within the line of sight of a party member.

the problem with the IE games and buffing were the rounds. it takes just 1s to cast a buff on your fighter but then you have to wait another 5s for the next round to cast something else, and within these 5 seconds the battle has moved on, meaning that in order to cast the buff, you missed the chance to cast a fireball where it would do the most damage. and if you cast the fireball first, it may be to late to cast the buff after it, because the enemy spell you wanted to protect yourself from has been cast. so the obvious way to do it was to cast the buffs before the fight. since PE does not have rounds, it takes 1s for the buff and 3s for the fireball... in 4s you are done and can cast another spell or 2 in the time it would take to cast only the buff and fireball in an IE game

What he's talking about is that Josh has said that you won't be able to cast buffs until combat has started. Thus, gone is all the "pre-buffing" as we know it. It's not that buffs are gone. Just that buffing up before starting combat (pre-buffing) is gone. Where did he say this pls? Josh mentions it here. Josh goes on and mentions when combat starts that character either buffs your party or does some other thing like cast a spell at the enemy. This is what usually happens in pnp. You don't pre-buff your characters before you open the door to a room full of enemies. there is however a logical reason behind prebuffing in certain situations. you peek through the lock, you see the enemies and knowing the enemy is in there, you cast buffs before opening the door. in other situations however is simply meta gaming. you touch a gravestone with a jewel that reveals where an ancient sword is buried, it is the right one, the sword appears and so do the ghosts of all evil people slain by that sword. you have no way of knowing that they will appear until they do, however they are too strong for you to beat and you have no time to buff. next time you buff before touching the stone, even if your characters are not supposed to know what will happen when they touch the stone

ranger or rogue im not sure yet, but my philosophy has always been "kill it before it attacks", so these 2 classes fit nicelly and if half elf is not available i will go for either human or godlike

but the effects of these do not wear off after an attack for the warrior... even if the first roll was 1, the next will not be. and even if they do wear off, the warrior will keep on swinging and will keep on doing damage the same way he always did. in the case of harm however, you get one chance and if the roll fails, you are left with an overbuffed priest that cannot fully benefit from these buffs, cannot buff the fighter so he can take over, and all these buffs took spell slots, meaning that if it fails you lack the spells to use an alternative tactic

yes you did not have to nor should you send the mage to the front, but unless you wanted to save on spells, there was no reason to keep him out of the fight. and still you could give him a sling or some other ranged weapon to use when not casting spells. he may not have the attack bonus of a fighter or ranger, but could still put a few hits on target. personaly in IE games, i kept some characters completelly out of combat only when i was dealing with cannon fodder that the melee characters could wipe out without wasting spells or ammo. same practically goes for this game too. if my fighter and rogue can go in and lay waste to a group of enemies i dont have any reason to send in the wizard, because the nice aoe spell that could clear the entire room instanly may be a once per rest spell

a fighter mage thief in BG2 or IWD, had the thac0 bonus of the fighter, the skills of the thief (if he was not wearing heavy armor) and without armor the spells of a wizard. that means he had to rely entirely on the spells for protection by using shield or stoneskin to minimize the damage taken, while he was using his weapon to kill things and could initiate combat with a backstab to soften or kill the first enemy. in PE a fighter has high deflection and can avoid most damage from direct physical attacks. a wizard does not have this, but he can wear the same armor as the fighter and can cast a spell like stoneskin that simply negates all damage or shield that increses his deflection. then use a conjured fire sword that targets the reflexes of the enemy, making the enemy fighter an easy target, or use a normal weapon against a rogue that has lower deflection. and if trained in stealth, he can initiate the fight with a tactical advantage even if he cannot backstab the options are there, but the system is new and we have no experience in using it so we swing like a pendulum on our opinion of it with every new info

fighters are warriors who specialize in melee combat, rangers are warriors who specialize in ranged combat. i dont see the problem there

everyone can learn the mechanics skill that is used for picking locks or disarming traps, but rogues start with a bonus to it. same goes for all skills: everyone can take them, but some classes start with a bonus. pickpocketing will be an option in conversation for specific npc. one thing i ve been wondering about, is the stamina to hp ratio. Josh said it will be 3:1 or 4:1, but will it be that 1 hp wil go down for every 3 stamina missing even if you take 1 stamina damage per hit or the hp will go down by 1 if the hit you take does 3 stamina damage? to put it in a more practical example. if my fighter takes 3 hits for 1 stamina each or a hit for 2 and a hit for 1 will he lose 1 hp, or the enemy needs to give a clean hit for 3-5 stamina in order to take away 1 hp and a 6-8 for 2hp?

the floating rock contains gravitic ore and was once floating in the center of the now ruined structure, acting as a key for the basement... i hope it does at least

It's not the setup and usage of the spell to effect that's akin to a cheat code. It's the effect of the spell, itself. That's why I just kept using the base spell specs as an example, even though everyone keeps saying "yeah but what if this?". Sure, you can adjust its likelihood of working or not, via clever knowledge of/use of the system and rules. More power to ya. However, you can already do that with everything else; Boost weapon proficiency, so your attacks will more likely not-miss. It doesn't make them do infinite damage, it just makes them work. And, you can never do anything clever that makes that spell (Harm) have the effect it does. It can never work better or work worse. It can only work, or not-work. You can even cleverly prep a heavily armored foe, for example, so that some sword attack (if swords, say, weren't effective against heavy armor) ends up being ridiculously effective where it wouldn't have been without all the prepwork. But, it still doesn't have some all-powerful effect, like "you just die; I don't even care how many HP you have or how much damage I deal... I deal all of it... or all of it, -1". In other words, if you take that spell out of the game, and you just use conventional means to damage the dragon to death, it relies on your actual tactical use of the tools at your disposal to effectively reduce the dragon down to 1 health (to match the effects of the Harm spell). Whereas, with the Harm spell in, and it selected as your battle strategy, all those efforts are put towards simply getting an ability to not NOT-work. A single ability. You're just adjusting passive numerical factors to get it to work. You're not making anything actually work to a better or worse degree. You're just making it work. I'm going to have to intrude on you here. Harm (in vanilla BG) requires several things to succeed, and only one to fail. It must be successfully memorized and cast. One makes it finite, the other leaves you vulnerable and subject to wasting the effort should casting be disrupted. If your cleric doesn't use it within 2 rounds (12 seconds), the spell is wasted. The cleric gets no bonus attacks and low THAC0, making the necessity of a touch attack less than likely. If the cleric misses (most likely), the spell is wasted. If all of those conditions succeed, it works. I think even Magic Resistance can derail it, though I am unsure. I use Spell Revisions mod. The point is, it's finite, expendable, disruptable, and difficult to execute. You will likely need to devote considerable other resources to make it successfully occur. Using several spells to debuff the foe, buff your character, quality gear, and enhancing potions to carry it out is not trivial. Nor is it any different from your sword example--or even using Breach/Spell Thrust/Lower Resistence/etc. to cause you greater success of landing a spell. Armor Class causes melee attacks to completely fail, yet I doubt you hold the same reservations of lowering a foe's defense to make melee attacks "work" as banal. You're aguing semantics or taste. however, even if you do all the things you can possibly do to maximize the chance of success, it still goes down to a dice roll. and that dice roll is a hit or miss, making the entire preparation a waste of time and leaving you with limited resources to use for the rest of the fight in case of a miss

I sort of remember a system like that in Bloodlines, but most of the people who are critical of the objective system (not myself) are concerned because the IE games offered a certain level of flexibility as they were not designed around needing to accomplish something significant to gain any experience; this especially can be an issue in wilderness areas where you may stumble upon minor encounters that don't have the depth or length of an actual quest but should still be rewarding to the player (assuming PE contains such encounters... which it should!). BG1 was full of such encounters. but that is the point right there. if you meet something somewhere, it means the devs put it there for a reason. you will meet the random trash mob while you go around, but instead of getting your xp by the random mobs you kill as you explore, you will get your xp by getting to important places. now if you think that wasting time to sneak around a goblin is a must, since killing the goblin (with a single attack) is pointless because you get no xp, it's another issue