ShadowTiger

I cheated so that I could have a custom party of 6 characters right away. They were all level 2 except main character level 3 and I had zero issues with the dungeon. The problem you have normally is simply that you do not have enough per encounter abilities. My cypher and my chanter both have AOE lightning damage that ended the battles in 10 20 seconds so I didn't really have any issues. The priest would daze them and then turn on the healing aura with fire damage to enemies for an added boost. I wish I had played on hard in retrospect but I wanted to see how much easier it was than the livestreams I watched with only 3 or 4 characters.

I just tested it. It only affects healing spells/abilities you cast on yourself or other people. There is no passive benefit to receiving healing.

If you look at the little status icons on your portrait, when there is an enemy on either side of you you get a "flanked" debuff which is a moderate penalty. It is probably worth trying to flank enemies, but only rogues get backstab damage. As long as you aren't suffering disengagment attacks from such movement I think its worth doing.

I haven't gotten a gun yet so I am still figuring this out, but here is what I found so far. The faster attacks are good in some cases, especially if your character is a rogue I think (to capitalize on brief duration of stun, prone, etc for the sneak attack bonus). Overall, I think it is safer to just get the highest damage weapon you can find, but I would experiment and see if the long cooldowns are preventing you from using your abilities at the right time.

Thank you for this detailed breakdown!

I am still early in the game, but my barbarian with 18 might and a nice 2 handed spear with reach is very useful. I have 15 dex so pretty good attack speed, no armor, and just hang back and do tons of damage. I didn't make the character very optimized since I found that 19 Con gives you lots of health but you still die in two seconds if you have very low damage reduction and deflection. Not sure if its worth dual wielding for faster attacks if you have to wear medium armor to survive on the front line. You might be able to make a good front line fighter build, but I think maxing out might and dex could be the way to go for someone who hangs back with a reach weapon.

I'm not very experienced but I think my build works pretty well. My paladin is Hearth Orlan with these stats: M 6 C 12 D 6 P 20 I 14 R 20 I am playing with custom party of 6 characters, so a bit stronger at low levels than game was designed for. However, I almost never get hit. Most encounters my whole party will be unharmed or suffer minor injuries. I have had a few tougher fights where only paladin takes damage and goes to around 50% endurance. I have 3 tanky characters, a Chanter, Paladin, and Priest and the paladin is probably the best but the chanter works almost as well. I am using a medium shield + interference weapon (hatchet) for a total of +17 deflection, which is the best you can get in the early levels. Overall your build looks good. Curious to see what other say.

Since there seems to be a discussion of what is "evil" here is my pallete of characters that I use for cRPGs as well as PnP games. Maybe for those who never play evil characters it could be an interesting perspective? There are 3 neutral evil characters and 1 chaotic neutral character. One person is a swordmaster who enjoys picking fights with tough people and then letting them go (unless they really deserve death). People who get in her way are slaughtered mercilessly unless it would get her kicked out of town or put in jail. In that case, just teach them a lesson. She doesn't hold a grudge and assumes that a landslide victory is enough to deter future conflict. She loves collecting magic swords and will try to buy or steal anything that catches her eye. Another character has had a rough life where friends and family were killed at every turn. She had to turn to evil to survive, and being more of a bully type character simply took what she wanted from those who were weaker. She doesn't like anyone much at all, and is filled with rage and vengeance against the world. When she does meet a group of companions that get along well, she values them greatly because they could be taken away at any time. The third character is a necromancer who pursues knowledge and power. She doesn't have much respect for other creatures and views them as insects... potentially worth study but not really significant in the daily life. If they are annoying, they get squashed or shooed away. She tries to suppress her emotions as she sees them as flaws and vulnerabilities. She does go out of her way to avoid trouble though... she is too focused on academics to really engage much with the world around her. She doesn't see anything wrong with desecrating corpses to create undead servants... it is awfully convenient if you can get past the smell. The chaotic neutral character is an animalistic assassin that enjoys the hunt. She doesn't really care who she kills or why, its all about the journey to get there. She seeks out challenging foes but doesn't mind toying with a few hapless victims when she is bored. She has a distinct lack of personal ambition or greed, which is both a strength and a setback in many circumstances. The idea is that she is somewhat easy to manipulate and that whatever group she travels with can steer her to fulfill their goals while keeping her happy if they are careful. Hopefully Eternity will give me a chance to flesh out these characters by throwing them into new circumstances that offer decisions that they would actually agree with!

Knowing the AC you are trying to hit is exciting in P&P because it makes you feel invested in your die roll. Instead of going cmon, gimme a 20, you are saying cmon, I just need a 14 or higher! In the end though, knowing the AC of the target has little impact on what your actions are, except perhaps whether you use called shots or power attack. It may effect which enemies you focus fire, choosing the lowest AC ones for your weapon users and having your magic users focus on the one with highest AC. However, usually it is really easy to know which enemy has the lowest or highest AC just by looking at them. In all my time playing BG, IWD and NWN I have never used AC or DC numbers to change my decisions. Mostly because positioning, AOE spell placement, kiting, focus fire, and rotating wounded soldiers out are much more important tactically than which enemies you target. Generally you worry about enemy DPS the most, trying to take out the bandit archers or the mage who can cast powerful spells. Usually these enemies are glass cannons with the lowest AC, as noted by cloth/leather armor. I guess the biggest problem area would be that if you know the skill check value, and you fail by a small margin, you can use potions or spells to boost yourself and get success. Not knowing those numbers (assuming you haven't memorized them) would cause you to waste potions / spells trying stuff you have no chance of succeeding on. That doesn't sound like a better game experience to me, but if thats something you want then I guess expert mode should have it. The fact is, most people who fail a skill check will just ignore it and move on, never thinking to come back after they level up and try again. I am one of the few people who would go back if I thought it was important... so it wouldn't really matter either way. That is... assuming you can backtrack at all. For one-shot skill checks, like avoiding traps... I have no idea why knowing the target number would make any difference.

I have played a bunch of different games and also pen & paper. I hate multiclassing when it becomes a complicated mess, aka 3rd edition. 2nd edition was a little unbalanced but at least it was simple and binary. Either you multiclass at level 1 or you never do. Once you dual class, you are done with your old class forever. I think that 4th edition multiclassing was pretty good, where you could spend progression abilities to dip into other classes (with a double feat tax... bleh). Then they added hybrid classes, which lets you start of at level 1 with two different sets of abilities, cut cleanly in half. In D&D Next, they are experimenting with 3rd edition style multi-classing again and I really don't like it. I guess the main problem is that I am both a role player and a roll player. I want my characters to have strong stories, backgrounds, and concepts, and I am willing to sacrifice power for realism. On the other hand, I want my characters to kick ass and make a name for themselves, that requires mastering the system and having enough power to contribute to the battles. Thus I think "Kits" is the best way to customize characters, by having both advantages and disadvantages that customize your character and also help you write the characters. In baldur's gate 2 my party was: Kensai Berserker -> Cleric Archer Swashbuckler Skald Necromancer. Notice that I don't have any pure classes, they are all kits. Thats because pure classes are bland in comparison. I also don't have any multiclass, thats because you can't multiclass kits, and also because I prefer a pure concept. The reason I dual classed to a cleric is because I needed one, but I came up with an awesome backstory for my character and WHY they became a cleric. It would have been cool to do so through in-game quests, similar to multi-classing in planescape torment (not exactly). So yeah I am a bit late to this thread but I think the poll indicates a general agreement... multiclassing is cool if its not too much work, as long as the classes are interesting on their own and also it would be nice if it was part of the story/quest/npc system. At the end of the day, character customization is what we really want, and sometimes multiclassing is an easy way to achieve that.

Having played a bunch of isometric games, I have never once felt the need to rotate the camera. I think it is a huge waste of time and resources creating a 3D world if you can get away with a 2D one. I certainly don't want to be required to rotate the camera to know where everything is, that is the beauty of a well designed isometric game. I like being able to use the arrow keys to scroll around instead of the mouse, not every game supports multiple monitors.

I never really had a problem with intelligence, though I thought it was weird that priests get bonus spells in IE games but wizards don't. I think the most important thing is to make sure that each attribute is equally useful, including resisting spells and completing quests. The easiest way to balance this is to reduce the number of stats, which is why there might be a temptation to just go with str/int/dex like all the simple RPGs. That being said, I really like the way they do it in arcanum... Intelligence simply unlocks higher level spells. That game had 8 attributes, 4 physical and 4 mental, I thought it worked out well.

Women look perfectly fine wearing armor made for men. There is no reason for the armor to have the shape of breasts, or to curve at the waist more than for men. First of all, there are plenty of women with wide shoulders and narrow hips who have the same general shape as some men. Secondly, most women's breasts aren't so huge that they need that much room to breathe. Thirdly, there is no reason to make armor molded to the body, it defeats the purpose. My final thoughts are: Either have all armor be one-size fits all, or have all armor be customized to the individual person. There is no good reason to have gender-specific armor (besides letting the artists have free reign to express themselves).

My problem with the cities isn't that they are too small, but that they are too sparsely populated. Even a tiny village with 100 people living in it should have 100 people walking around... I would be surprised if there were more than 100 NPCs in the entire Baldur's Gate city. It is really immersion break for many of the houses to be locked/empty, or just have npcs with one line of dialogue. It would probably be too difficult to make a giant city that does this well, so I agree that focusing the story on a small area but really fleshing it out would be nice. That being said, this is a minor concern for me as long as they have a beautiful and/or interesting set of areas for me to explore.

If you could sneak up on enemy mages and backstab them or walk in with invisibility and call down a huge spell it would make many of the boss fights trivial to beat. I realize that you are talking more about a story and realism issue, but just keep in mind how many things they would have to change to make the boss battles work properly. I agree that it would be nice to get rid of forced conversations and for the game to preserve your formation so that your fragile party members never get caught out of position. They should then stage ambushes where monsters attack you from the flank / behind and factor that into the difficulty of the fight. I have always hated forced conversations, they are so unnatural.

I actually loved having a few members with boots of speed that could scout ahead and pull enemies while the rest of the party caught up. It saved a bunch of exploration time finding dead ends and doubling back. This is all in Baldur's Gate 2. I agree sometimes it can be annoying to wait for the slower members to catch up, but that would be just as bad if nobody got a speed boost. Maybe a nice compromise would be to make all speed boosts Auras (at least outside of combat)... its not very realistic but much more convenient.

I think China has the right idea : D http://twitchfilm.com/assets/2008/02/An_Empress_and_the_Warriors_33.jpg http://www.moviedevil.com/images/bd/CWs5jwQ6GN.jpg http://www.sikharchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/An_Empress_and_the_Warriors.jpg An Empress and the Warriors http://www.chinesefilms.cn/mmsource/images/2012/06/06/642fa7375da14c149adab8fea0a4ba37.jpg http://www.chinesefilms.cn/mmsource/images/2012/03/05/ae3f017140ea46c782588a306761783c.jpg Painted Skin 2 http://baltazar.org.ua/uploads/posts/2012-10/1349947800_2.jpg http://andronico.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hua-mulan.jpg Hua Mulan https://www.dropbox.com/s/zblbijc8fzoekka/snapshot.jpg Seven Swords As you can see, most of the depictions (especially Mulan because she is impersonating a man) are almost identical. Here is one I found that is more form fitting, more of a stylistic choice I imagine. http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/f72ZsuGUzy4sRJpQlWAF9cef8uB.jpg

Now that I think about it, I think in Neverwinter Nights they linked resting to the difficulty slider. Perhaps they just need to add a hardcore mode that limits where and how often you can rest? Hopefully they were already planning on adding a hardcore mode... I forget if they announced that yet.

Resting systems are very easy to exploit, can be very unrealistic/immersion breaking, and are used differently for different people. Personally, I hate resting, and I just played through Baldur's Gate 2 with the minimum amount of resting (pretty much only rested when my party was exhausted from traveling between zones). I know that some people who are having trouble with the combat do the "5 minute work day" and rest after every single battle, sometimes twice. I think this diminishes the game and the only way to avoid it is to have lots of time sensitive quests (do a task within x hours). My suggestion is to have about 1/3 of the game be too dangerous to rest, 1/3 have random encounters, and 1/3 be safe. Note this is not probabilities, this is zoning areas as safe, dangerous, or suicidal for resting. I also think that resting in town should be more effective than resting in the wilderness, and pretty much require a healer to make it worth doing outdoors.

Well traditionally rangers and druids can have animal companions, which are exactly like that. I don't think its been implemented often in video games besides MMO's, but I think it would work well in this type of game. If there is going to be a familiar system for Wizards, I would like to see them grow as you level up and become much more powerful. Usually they just float around and don't do much in D&D, which is lame. Every time a visual change happens to your minion it requires more artwork to be created, so that would need to be limited. I think this could work for a group of minions as well... like the way your imps in Overlord slowly get better weapons and armor as you loot the environment. In terms of necromancers, I would love to be able to simply re-animate killed enemies and NPCs, even if it only lasts for a few minutes. I think it would be awesome to get a zombie warrior in full plate to be your meat shield in a tough fight.

I agree that this mechanic would mostly help with people who care more about story telling than min maxing the combat system. You are forgetting that realistically, it doesn't take a long time to familiarize yourself with a mundane weapon, maybe an hour or so... maybe a few sessions of combat. A magic weapon might take much longer, especially if there is no identify spell and you have to figure out the properties by trial and error (like in angband and other roguelikes). I think if it were to be implimented it should be a very short learning curve, as I said, which would only prevent you from changing items in the heat of the moment. The main thing it could do is change up the difficulty curve in the game. Most RPGs give loot drops at certain intervals, which creates a graph where the difficulty gradually increases as you fight tougher and tougher foes and then suddenly drops sharply as you get a new item. This can get boring at times, especially when games share the same difficulty curves. Finding ways to spice things up can be as simple as changing the ways monster encounters are designed but can also be helped by something like weapon familiarity where you have to tough out a few battles every time you switch weapons. For example, lets say you are fighting an undead area next, and you know this ahead of time. You have everyone switch to blunt/holy weapons but they aren't used to it yet. They also might not have fought undead before. You could have them go and fight some basic zombies and skeletons to get familiar with their gear and then go and kill the lich or skeletal dragon when they are ready. Normally in games they force you to fight through the minions to get to the boss, but if they designed the game so you get to choose the order, it could make the game way more fun, realistic and challenging. There is an issue though... because it means that people can blunder into battles they have no way to win, and that means either having a very difficult game, encouraging people to save/reload, or building in escape mechanisms into most or all encounters. Again, the familiarity system is not in itself a strong game design mechanic, but rather a tool that when combined with other mechanics, philosophies, etc can produce interesting results. I would like to see it added, but it really depends on how the game works as to whether its worth the effort of adding it in. For example, in Baldur's Gate EE, where your items break because of the item shortage... all it would do is make battles more chaotic since you could suddenly get a penalty because your weapon broke and you have to pull out a new one. On the one hand, yeah thats kind of cool, it makes the item breaking mechanic more poignant for the first few hours of the game (until you get magic weapons for everyone). On the other hand, it is interfering with the ability to balance out combat encounters, depending on how strong the penalty is for a non-familiar weapon. I am fairly conflicted on the issue, especially since nobody has actually tried it in a game before (AFIK).

I came to this thread a little late and while there is really good discussion about the weapon familiarity mechanic I feel like it dances around the core issue. Weapon Familiarity is a mechanic based on realism. In the modern age, we have mass production, but even that isn't perfect and you can get small quirks (such as a gun that jams frequently in certain environments). So, does your game universe have a reason why you might need a period of time to get familiar with your weapon, for the sake of realism? Should you be putting a mechanic in purely because it is realistic, therefore adding immersion, or do you have to balance its addition with the amount of coding work, UI work, and how fun it actually is? Does adding in the mechanic add interesting choices for players to make that will change how they play the game? I think its very important to separate weapon familiarity from weapon progression, in my mind they are unrelated. You can have a system where weapon progression is linked to familiarity with the weapon, but that really is a coincidence, and doesn't really matter. Weapon familiarity really only has one mechanical purpose, and that is to provide players with a numerical indicator of how attached they should be to a particular item. Rather than simply dump your weapon on the ground and pick up a new one, the item has value because of the time you invested into it. This creates a conflict in player's minds every time they upgrade, a new piece of information to factor in when they decide to upgrade. The mechanic encourages people to stick with past choices they make rather than adventure into new territory, if a weapon is a "side grade" that offers different stats but not really better ones, you may decide to skip experimentation in favor of whatever familiarity bonus you currently receive. It really depends on how you want players to interact with items and combat for you to decide if this mechanic adds anything meaningful to the game. If it was really easy to disarm foes and pick up their weapons, you could argue that having a penalty to using someone else's weapon that you have never seen before would make sense and at the same time weaken a potentially overpowered ability. So if you are solving problems with the game design or adding in new options for players while also being realistic, I think this mechanic works pretty well. The core question is are there major game design problems that weapon familiarity can solve, and can it solve it better than other game mechanics? I think the answer to that question is probably not. I personally like the idea just for the sake of realism and but I have to admit most players would probably just ignore it if the effect was small and would probably get frustrated by it if the effect was large. Finding a middle ground where it makes you like your items more but not be afraid to switch to new ones would be really difficult.

I think that if you are luring a patrol into battle you either need to either trick him into investigating something slightly suspicious or kill him instantly. If you fail to do this, then he should alert all the other guards that there might be enemies nearby. Most storytelling vastly underestimates an experienced guards ability to do his job properly, IMO. Respawns should originate and monster lairs (monster generators if you will) and spread out to nearby areas that are devoid of monsters. I think it would be cool if that bear cave you fought at level 1 turned into a spider or basilisk cave later on in the game if you go back to it.

They already do this in Pokemon, by making your "rival" choose the element that counters yours. In more recent versions of the game they have toned down the difficulty so its not as big of a disadvantage, but the idea is still interesting. I think it is okay if you want to babysit to the player and give them an NPC that compliments their character. So if they are a wizard, give them a fighter to protect them. If they are a warrior, give them a cleric to heal them. It sounds like you are focusing more on the story aspect, and the whole powers and abilities is more of a repercussion of your ability to maintain a relationship with the person. I think this would only be interesting if your actions determined the fate of your companion. There would need to be a forced separation in the mid/late game, and then depending on your actions you either fight your kindred soul, ally with them against the villain, or they die/leave and you have to go without them. I guess another option would be for you to merge or something. It is certainly a good idea story-wise, but mechanically I think it interferes with the balance to much. I personally hate it when the protagonist is significantly stronger than everyone else around him, so I would want the actual game play changes to be subtle. It would be a very interesting twist if the kindred soul could turn against you and steal some of your party members as it goes on its own adventure!

It could work if the entire game was based around different attack severities. For example, lets say we have Miss, Weak Hit, Medium Hit, Strong hit, Critical Hit 5%, 30%, 40% , 20%, 5% Ray of Frost: Miss: No effect Weak: 1/2 minimum damage Medium: Normal Damage + slowed for 1 round Strong: Normal Damage + slowed for 1d6 rounds Critical: Double Damage + Immobilized for 1d6 rounds Fireball (assuming 1 attack roll per enemy): Miss: 1/2 minimum damage Weak: 1/2 Normal Damage Medium: Normal Damage Strong: +50% Damage Critical: +50% Damage + creates a zone of fire that damages creatures for 1d3 turns Cleave (assuming 1 attack roll for all enemies): Miss: No Effect Weak: Hits up to two targets for half minimum damage Medium: Hits up to two targets for normal damage Strong: Hits up to three targets for normal damage Critical: Hits all units adjacent to you So hopefully you can see from my example... if you design everything to use this system... then it adds much more than a die roll for damage. It fundamentally changes the way you experience the game, and it looks pretty fun to me! Notice the flexibility to change the rules per attack, which means you can have the best of both worlds.