PrimeJunta

Why does it have to come from books, rather than, say, meditation, martial arts, a pact with the infernal powers, physical discipline, or something similar to learning to play a musical instrument? IME every time someone says "it's just common sense" he's run out of arguments.

This, indeed, is how (A)D&D is designed. It is in my opinion a bad design that locks in your character development from level 1. I'm happy P:E isn't designed with this principle in mind. This is, in fact, the reason behind the huge proliferation of supplements with class kits (for AD&D) and prestige classes (for D&D3). The base classes are too rigid, even with multi-classing, to allow many players to play the character concepts they like. It was a great cash cow for the publisher, of course. It is much better to have a system that sets some basic parameters and lets you define your character concept from there on out. Gives more freedom to the player, more room for creative strategies, and keeps the system simpler, easier to understand, and easier to manage -- and if it's well made, it won't lose any of the richness and variety.

Why would one assume that?

Prob not a priority since there'll be official Linux and Mac builds.

Yup, that one.

Close by, if we're talking about the same crypt. If he's not appearing next to it, then that is bugged.

@Osvir computer programs don't do that. They can get less stable if there are horrid bugs that corrupt files somewhere, but they do not get more stable over time unless patched. I wish they would, it'd save me any amount of bother, but they don't. One thing that could have happened though is that you updated something else on your system which caused bugs to stop manifesting. If not that, if it feels more stable, it must be either that you're just getting used to the instability, or, more likely, you're learning to avoid the things that cause it. That is certainly true in my case. Or, technically, I haven't had any stability issues to speak of as such; not a single CTD and I think one freeze that forced a force-quit. Which is pretty promising actually; the bones of the system are sound. I have however learned to avoid or work around many of the bugs that cause characters to freeze in place (and force a reload) or cause items or quests to disappear (and force a restart). I just played for a pretty long stretch with no problems other than cosmetic ones, but that doesn't mean the game works any better.

I got there. It just opened. I did get a crypt master key from a crypt master who kindly gave it to me after I burned him with fire.

There are also shades, a syllable-soup that looks like some kind of sinister undead, and that animated suit of armor thingy. Sinister enough. Oh, and did I mention spiders?

I'm sure there will be ways to gimp your character, whatever they do. How about leaving all your ability scores at 3 and soloing Trial of Iron and Heart of Fury? Gimped enough for ya?

AD&D? Mechanically it's ghastly. A collection of unrelated systems flying in loose formation, with incredibly frustrating and restricting kinks, gargantuan exploits, and entirely arbitrary limitations put in to try to keep them even a little under control. You need to do a lot of counterintuitive arithmetic in your head, class progression is almost completely on-rails, and it's hugely lacking in resolution mechanics for everything other than combat, which is a clunky, wonky, slow, unbalanced mess. Content-wise it is brilliant, wonderful, huge; like stepping through a portal into an alternate universe where you'll find everything from realms where gods stride with mortals, terrifyingly powerful magicians have reduced an entire world to dust and bones and still struggle over the remains, mysterious lands where genies rule the deserts, sambouks ply the azure seas, and clerics raise armies under the banners of their respective ethoi. Source: 20-odd years of DM'ing the stuff and loving every minute of it. Still wouldn't go back though.

It'd be nicer to talk with you if you left out the "instictive denial mode" stuff. I already agreed that with the current numbers, attributes aren't as impactful as they ought to be. If that's the point you're making, then we're not disagreeing at all. I was making a secondary point about D&D, though, which you still appear to be missing, but I've lost the energy to pursue it with you so imma let it drop for now.

Or dragging. Normally you click to target; instead, drag and release to set the AoE.

It'd be quite easy to make a Markov chain name generator once some lexicons for the languages are made available. If it's not in the game I might give it a shot myself, as an online tool if it turns out not to be easy to mod in directly.

My initial impression is that 5e is better. It pretty much has to be if they want their players back.

A lot closer to BG. CC is quite straightforward. The part that requires most thought is spell selection for wizards, ciphers, and chanters. Abilities require some thought as well about the kind of role you want to play for those classes that have the flexibility (front-line or back-row). But all in all you can get through it in probably less than a minute and end up with something that'll do fine.

Stand clear, furries incoming.

There are already buffs that adjust crit chance separately from accuracy though. Dirty Fighting with rogues converts a certain percentage of hits to crits, and there's a priest buff that does the same. I don't think it'd be necessarily bad to have an ability do the same. The magnitude would need to be tuned of course. There is a big area between "never crits" and "crits all the time." Dump DEX, pump PER => hit rarely but many of the hits are crits. Pump DEX, dump PER => hit often but rarely crit (most consistent damage output). Dump both => rarely hit, rarely crit -- you'd probably only want to do this on a "pure" support character (back-row cleric for example). Pump both => hit a lot, crit a lot: highly desirable but comes at the expense of something else, as usual, so you'd probably only want to do this on a specialized damage build.

Forest shamblers Spider queen Between the beetles and the spiders, the beta does have a lot of bugs...

dat codpiece

I don't have anything against them in principle. My only objection is if there are too many of them. If you can equip your entire party with superweapons then they're not so super anymore. Carsomyr notwithstanding, BG2 had rather too many IMO, as a consequence of attempting to cater to all weapon categories. A better approach IMO is to give the player a measure of control over which type of superweapon he acquires, and then only have one in the entire game. It could be a quest where the weapon is crafted, or it could perhaps be a unique blessing on an existing weapon from a god. What I would really like to avoid is magic inflation, where über-powerful magical loot is all over the place and if you're not rocking +5 everything by the end of the game you feel like you're slumming. Powerful magic items should be very rare and very impactful.

Yes?

I'm using Boot Camp as well, and it's working fine. Er, 'fine' meaning about as well as can be expected; I'm certainly experiencing fewer issues than many.

That there looks an awful lot like an arena. Bottom right. Could be an amphitheater too. Perhaps you get to decide which, or both.

I think he likes BG1 better than BG2. He did want to make BG3 after all, and a lot of the ideas from that are here. I'd be disappointed if there aren't creative ways to reward exploration, including ones that involve XP. Again, to compare with BG1, I wouldn't have liked it any less if I'd have gotten an XP reward for finding the xvart village rather than murdering them. Still feel a little bad for the puir wee critters.