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PrimeJunta

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Everything posted by PrimeJunta

  1. PrimeJunta
    @Kjaamor I'm not a filmmaker so I'm quite sure anything I would've done would have been miles worse, so I'm not gonna answer that one. I can explain a bit what I didn't like about Jackson's elves though. The crucial thing with Tolkien's elves is their tragedy. Their story is one of fading and loss that spans millennia. They tread the line between the real and the supernatural; they're distant and superhumanly, unattainably, sublimely beautiful. Seeing a Tolkienian elf should invoke the kind of emotion you would get from walking in a stand of giant costal redwoods on a perfect day, knowing that tomorrow Consolidated Lumber will cut it all down. I don't get any of that from Jackson's elves. None of the majesty, tragedy, certain, inexorable, impending loss. Instead I get camera special effects, Cate Blanchett trying to do contralto in a Brünnhilde bodice, a slightly pudgy Haldir with a carefully powdered nose, Arwen snogging with Aragorn, and oh! the hair. The hair! Jackson's elves are way more like D&D elves than Tolkien's elves. Tolkien's elves deserve better. Jackson is great at action movies, and Tolkien's elves are not action heroes, even the ones that act and do heroic things. It would have taken a director with greater sensitivity to do them justice, even in an action film. Edit: for the record, I loved the movies. Jackson does hobbits great, and the focus was solidly on the hobbits. I just think he dropped the ball on the elves.
  2. PrimeJunta
    At least the way I'm imagining this, yes, pretty much, to all of those questions. If you discover and kill their spies and scouts, don't allow anyone to escape from the battlefield, protect yourself from scrying etc., it ought to interfere with their attempts to counter your strategies. Also offer an interesting new gameplay dimension, and encourage you to switch party compositions from time to time. Of course it presupposes a story where you have that kind of antagonist, not random roving bands of... bandits. It would be jarring if those random bands of bandits changed composition for no reason. Thing is, lots of games do have that kind of antagonist.
  3. PrimeJunta
    I'm sure there could be plenty of explanations for large numbers of undead. Maybe there's a mad god who sticks souls into corpses for her unfathomable purposes. Maybe souls of people who died under traumatic conditions linger and spontaneously animate corpses from time to time. Maybe these types of situations bypass some of the stages of undeath and go directly to skeleton, dargul, or something else. Maybe this, that, and the other. Gromnir is right though that the devs haven't given any such explanations, and it would be good if they did rather than just letting it pass without comment.
  4. PrimeJunta
    @Gromnir, you're right, I did miss the qualifier in your first message. I agree with you re elves and the LotR movies btw. Peter Jackson doesn't get elves. Haldir of Lorien especially was so bad that I breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the end of him. Only Elrond was half-okay and that only because he was half-elven and therefore more believable, if you could get past the Matrix thing. I also agree about "don't do it like Tolkien" and boobplate.
  5. PrimeJunta
    But adapting to the encounters if you don't know what they're going to be is even more fun. Your replays with different types of parties would gain even more variety, as the encounters would change too. I really like this idea. Procedurally generated variety, but in an intelligent way. Of course you could always ruin it by overcooking, but that's true of everything.
  6. PrimeJunta
    That... is a cool idea. It wouldn't even be too hard to do. The counter-strategies themselves could be quite simple; just field the appropriate counter-units to your party members. To make it feel fair and interesting, introduce a suitable time delay so that the counters don't appear immediately, and even better, require some way for the enemy to gather intel on you. You might see shady characters spying on you at the local inn, the enemy doing armed recon, retreating quickly after making contact and so on, with the opportunity to thwart these strategies (kill or capture the spies, allow no-one to escape the field of battle). Each of these thwarts would add to the time lag or add errors to the counter-strategy. Huh. Cool!
  7. PrimeJunta
    Only noticed @Posbi's excellent post now, and I gotta say I concur. There's nothing wrong with having disparate elements there but the whole should make sense. It wouldn't even be all that hard to rearrange them for that. Have a village surrounded by a stockade with the craftsmen and services, nearby the manor with the topiary maze, surrounded by a hedge, overlooked by a tightly-packed, walled keep at a higher location. The amphitheater can be an ancient ruin nearby that you can rehabilitate if you want. The hedge and stockade are enough to keep occasional bandits away, the keep is big enough to hold the villagers, lord, and entourage in case of a full-scale military attack, and in peacetime it all works together. Although it probably is far too late for that. If so, a pity; bit of a missed opportunity there, especially considering Josh is a history and warfare nerd.
  8. PrimeJunta
    I wanna play an aumaua ranger with a pet octopus.
  9. PrimeJunta
    Perfect is a bit of a high bar to clear, obviously, but... NetHack. IMO it has both excellent class differentiation and class balance. A Wizard, Archaeologist, Tourist, and Samurai each require a different strategy to play to maximum effect, the differences carry from early game to endgame, and they're not dramatically different in power at any point in the game.
  10. PrimeJunta
    Haha, yeah, I know what you're talking about. I've given up on some games for similar reasons. They do feed the OCD in us...
  11. PrimeJunta
    Only if encounters are designed only to be soluble by trial-and-error. It's totally possible to have challenging encounters that you can figure out on the fly, by playing carefully and intelligently and adjusting your tactics... if the mechanics support it. Try NetHack for example, no save-scumming there and if you're good enough almost every game is winnable -- but if you're a newbie, you're lucky to make it to level 3.
  12. PrimeJunta
    Neither of which are in any way essential to the game or story. Nowadays they would've just charged five bucks for it as a DLC.
  13. PrimeJunta
    Whoo, good summary and interesting thoughts there too. My quick take on the points: BG2 1-2 - save-n-reload. Hate it. Wish it would die already. 3 - quadratic mages. Dislike. I tend to go for late-game power which means I play mages, which means early game is a tedious and tiresome careful tiptoe of rest-spamming. I strongly prefer classes to follow a roughly similar power curve, but be powerful in different areas. 4 - level scaling. No comment. If I don't notice it, I don't have a problem with it, and I never noticed it in BG2. 5 - quest hubs and narrative structure. Agree. 6-7-8 agree. I tried to start a BG2 playthrough a while back but after the first conversation was about a hamster up a retard's butt, I headdesked and gave up. PS:T 1 - character creation. Agree. My radical take is that PS:T would've been better with no character creation at all. Just give a prefab TNO and let you evolve him when playing. You do know you can change class on the fly, any way you like, and the ridiculous logarithmic XP means you can get to quite decently high levels in thief and fighter even if your 'main' class is mage? 2 - aesthetics - never paid any attention. 3 - yep 4 - I didn't think the combat was all that bad actually, and except for the endgame and the lead-up to it it was pretty well paced too. 5 - npc's - yeah, they rule. 6 - Modron cube. Never had that problem with it. I don't think I've ever properly ground it, after completing the quests in it. Never had a problem affording things either.
  14. PrimeJunta
    Gotta nitpick... there are in fact a few times where Tolkien alludes to elven ears as being pointed. The most explicit ones are from his early work though, and therefore not canon, and the most recent one actually describes hobbit ears with 'elven' in quotes. According to this splendid essay, there isn't enough evidence to unambiguously settle this important matter one way or the other.
  15. PrimeJunta
    :catches up: Huh. From where I'm at this argument is to a large extent about semantics. Personally, when I say 'kiting' I am referring specifically to the degenerate strategy, i.e., exploiting flaws in AI or the combat mechanics, which let you hit and move without being hit by careful micromanagement. The IE games had holes that let you do just this. This doesn't mean that attempting to avoid engagement is in itself kiting. If you're faster than the opposition and use that speed edge to your advantage, that's totes legit, whether we're talking bullfighting or a cRPG.
  16. PrimeJunta
    I would expect that undeath isn't a curable condition, since death isn't either. Although I suppose it might be possible to transfer the soul of the undead noble into a living vessel. Hard to see how that would qualify as the good path though...
  17. PrimeJunta
    @Fearabbit for the record, I'm not arguing against Obs's armor designs. I think they're just fine. I do have an issue with Sarex's position that because something is fantasy then nothing needs justification, and I find titillation and pandering a turn-off rather than a turn-on. I do reserve the right to argue these positions should the spirit so move me.
  18. PrimeJunta
    Yes, "grasping at straws" is a very good description of what you're doing here. Since you're still wriggling to avoid the point, I'll go full Lephys on you. After that I'll just have to write this discussion off as a waste of time. Suppose that you play a fantasy game. In this fantasy game, all the carts have square wheels. Yet in this game, the carts, and their wheels, function exactly like you would expect carts and wheels to function. If there is no in-world explanation beyond "megic!!11!one" for square wheels functioning like round wheels, then the setting is internally inconsistent. If the author only put in square wheels because he thought it would help Sarex maintain an erection while playing, then that choice is 'pandering' and 'lazy worldbuilding.' Now substitute boobplate and warriors for square wheels and carts. Dig? (PS. I noticed that you chose to take off on the tangent I specifically said I wouldn't follow instead. That's your prerogative of course. You might want to read Samantha Swords' blog btw; there she discusses specifics of how to beat physically stronger opponents in fights.)
  19. PrimeJunta
    Which part of "internally consistent" don't you understand, Sarex? Here, I'll put it in real simple terms. There are obvious, mechanical reasons why boobplate or golden codpieces make for lousy armor. Therefore, if in a fictional setting one gender or the other charges into battle wearing such stuff, it needs an explanation. Either they get lots of fatalities, or there's some other magic thing going on, which needs to be explained. If there is no explanation, the setting is internally inconsistent. It fails to account for something obviously, mechanically, wrong. With me so far? There is, however, no physical reason why one gender of any given species should be physically weaker than the other. In fact the contrary is true in many species. Still with me? Good. Therefore, the creator of a fictional setting can make genders in fictional species or race -- human, demihuman, humanoid, other, whatever -- be just as equal or different in physical or mental characteristics as s/he wants, without having to give an explanation for it. This is because it doesn't violate any of the setting's internal rules. This applies to aumaua and orlan just as well as ocean or meadow humans. Of course you're also wrong about women of the species homo sapiens sapiens on this planet not being physically capable of, say, fighting in full plate armor with a Doppelschwert, given suitable training, but that's a tangent I'm not going to get into here. I'll just leave a couple of links: http://fashionablygeek.com/videos-2/this-armored-lady-won-the-longsword-competition-at-a-world-invitational-tournament/
  20. PrimeJunta
    A fictional setting should be internally consistent. If you want your male warriors to go into battle wearing giant golden codpieces and nothing else while the women wear functionally designed, meticulously crafted Nürnberg plate, then there should be some in-world explanation for that. To do that just because you like giant golden codpieces and lots of hard, muscular male flesh is careless, shoddy worldbuilding.
  21. PrimeJunta
    Oh. I thought it was you he loved. Romance sighted. Paging @BruceVC.
  22. PrimeJunta
    I'm sure if you ask Gfted1 nicely, he'll remove it and issue me a sternly-worded warning.
  23. PrimeJunta
  24. PrimeJunta
    I don't know. I do know that if I was given two writing assignments, "write dialog for this story, assuming Pro Tagonist does the talking" and "write dialog for this story, assuming any of Pro Tagonist/Pallegina/Edér/Aloth/Sagani/Cadegund/Kana Rua/Adventurer's Hall Type does the talking, whichever has the highest appropriate stat", then it would take me a lot -- like a LOT -- longer to complete the second assignment, and the result would be a great deal blander and more generic.
  25. PrimeJunta
    @Sensuki ya think? It's pretty long-running for a fad IMO, and it's having a real, positive impact. From where I'm at, it looks more like some hitherto extremely male, extremely white, extremely straight Internet subcultures have finally started to go through the process of realizing that hey, there are non-male, non-white, non-straight people who want to participate fully, without having to mask their identity, and not as tokens, mascots or sub-subcultures. I see terms like "white knight" or "SJW" as just derailing attempts by the people who for some to me incomprehensible reason see their white, straight masculinity threatened by this process. The good news is that it's not working. There's been a massive improvement in gamer/geek culture over the past ten years or so, and it's only gathering momentum. It won't be too long until the last die-hards will be left behind with the MGOTW's, pickup artists, and MRA's in their little bitter self-imposed jerk circle.
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