PrimeJunta

Huh. I didn't even know that one. I used Feeblemind instead and then hacked him to death as he stood there drooling.

OTOH the ancient Greeks went into battle naked, as did Celtic woad warriors and a good many others. In a fantasy world where women can be warriors too, I can't see why there couldn't be naked amazons. But yeah, platemail bikinis and boobplate are still dumb.

I love you too, Gfted1. :kiss kiss:

Oh joy. The waah-no-quest-XP-degenrashun "discussion" again. This place is a barrel of laughs.

I've done this many times.. including clearing Moathouse on Ironman. TBH, not playing TOEE on Ironman would be anti-fun for me. There is no tension otherwise. The only problem with TOEE Ironman is how buggy the game is. Impressive. Do you also enjoy hitting yourself in the nuts repeatedly with a brick?

The problem is that most games of this type can't be played enjoyably without reloading after losing a fair fight. Suppose you have a party-based cRPG with permadeath. Further suppose that it's a reasonably difficult game. I.e., you can get party members killed in fair fights, even if you're a reasonably competent player. Now, suppose a party member does get killed. The result is that your party is materially weakened. This means that if all else remains the same, you will be more likely to lose more party members in further fights. This creates a feedback circle, with difficulty rising exponentially after every loss. With the difficulty assumption above, this makes it extremely unlikely you'll even be able to complete the game. If you lost one party member, you're more likely to lose a second one, more likely than that to lose a third, fourth, fifth, and last. Unless you magically upgrade your gaming skills so much you'll be able to make up for the loss with that. Which is unlikely. Game over. To break this cycle, you need some way to make up that loss. Options are: Resurrection magic. This is IMO worse than stunned-and-get-up, since it nerfs death itself – what should be if not the biggest penalty for failure in the game, at least one of the biggest. Magic resupply of (near) equivalently powerful replacement party members. E.g. an adventurers' hall where you can hire another meat shield of more or less the same level, ad infinitum. Level scaling. Joy and happiness. In my opinion, none of these options are particularly attractive. Sure, it's unrealistic to have people beat up to incapacitation only to get up and prance around merrily afterwards, but from where I'm at none of the others are any more realistic – nor, IMO more importantly, do they make for any more enjoyable gameplay. I quite like PE's current approach to this – characters that are beat up badly enough become maimed, which significantly reduces their effectiveness until they get some medical attention that's more sophisticated than you get in the field and presumably costs money. That's enough to motivate you not to get them carelessly beaten up, but not so severe that it'd be an automatic reload trigger. I'm all for hardcore modes with permadeath, though. That can add to the replay value a great deal. But with that you know what you're getting when going in. Don't believe me? Then I challenge you to play Temple of Elemental Evil from level 1 through 3, not in Ironman mode, without reloading after losing a fair fight. It can be done, but it's sure as hell not my idea of fun.

Oo, good list. I even agree with a lot of it. Marked the ones I agree with in green, the ones I disagree with in red, and the ones that I'm neutral about – as in "it all depends on the context or the implementation" in gray. These aren't ironclad preferences, though; there are games where immediate permadeath instead of stand-up-after-the-fight work, but in most games of this type it's just another reload trigger, and I'd rather minimize those. But monks. Monks are cool. Especially Friar Tuck style quarterstaff-wielding beer-swilling monks.

A tall, young, bald, senile midget with red hair, a clean-shaven beard, with a tiny straw basket made of wood, with two dozen giant miniature space battleships in it.

That would be a fairly substantial system in its own right. It would be cool to have a maritime-themed campaign which did have it. Doesn't sound at all impossible to implement on top of a cRPG system.

I'd just be happy with a combat log that breaks down the adjustments for every attack. If I see "Flanking +2" or "Assisted +2" there, I know that hey, flanking and assistance is kinda cool. I've played RTS's with morale meters. It's a great feeling to be able to make a sudden maneuver which succeeds in breaking the enemy's morale and sends the lines unraveling and the troops fleeing. I'm not sure how much fun it would be in an RPG though.

I don't think the IE games did that, except maybe for morale. The D&D rules certainly don't. What the D&D rules do have are rules on flanking bonuses, flatfooted, and that kind of thing, and at least some of the games we're talking about did implement those. ToEE certainly did. I kinda like the idea though. I just wouldn't like the bonuses/penalties to be invisible. It is a game after all and I prefer games where I don't have to guess what the rules are. Tangent: The Numenera PnP system has an interesting way of dealing with this, by the way -- the GM can have mobs (between 4 and 10 critters, depending on size and coordination) attack as single creatures that are two levels higher and do double damage. Totally unsuitable for a computer game of course, but it's a really elegant solution for a tabletop game, especially if you're talking through the combat and not using figurines. It makes mobs of low-level critters potent threats -- if you have 3 Armor a level 3 critter will only be able to harm you on a crit, but with that rule a mob of them would do 6 damage, which gets nasty fast.

@Lephys, I kind of disagree about that. Valve does exactly that extremely well. They introduce new tools little by little, and every time after you get one you get a situation where it's useful, and then it builds on those to create more complex situations. Half-Life 2 did it. Portal did it. And I found both kind of monotonous and grindy. I much prefer varied difficulty. Perhaps my ideal curve is a relatively easy start that introduces the mechanics and pulls me in, followed by troughs and spikes, with the possibility of going into really tough areas by choice -- but with the game clearly communicating that those areas you're about to go in are dangerous and you might maybe want to level up a bit first.

I didn't actually do any of the fetch crap. I just heard about that meadow and the moathouse and went exploring. I leveled up by splatting those ugly frogs outside the moathouse, skeletons on the meadow, plus a bit – but not all that much really – camping for wandering monsters. I think there would be a quite a few ways to make an exciting first-level D&D game without having to do boring first-level crap. I have in fact run a few myself. They can even have some combat. It just doesn't have to be mortal combat. And naturally there are any number of fun non-combat challenges that you can throw at your players. The first serious adventure in my campaign involved holding back a nighttime attack until the town guards showed up, followed by a two- or three-session ghost story/murder mystery. It would have been theoretically possible for someone to get critted and die in the combat due to no fault of their own, but it would've had to be really unlucky, and it didn't happen.

As an afterthought, Arcanum is a pretty good example of a game that manages to fail in both directions. As Chris Avellone has demonstrated, it's impossibly difficulty if you roll up a squib – which is very easy to do unless you already know what to expect and how the game works – but once you find out about Harm it becomes ridiculously and tediously easy. It's kinda amazing that they managed to fail so spectacularly. Real shame too as the game does most other things really well. @Jarmo, if you were referring to my choice of not having arcane casters, I hope my cleric+druid will get the job done. They do have area-effect spells, just not so many that deal direct damage. But area buffs/debuffs/status effects are really effective. I've already made use of Bless, Bane, and Entangle actually. Entangle is pretty neat with the reach weapons that let my characters stand outside the radius and poke at stuck things with impunity.

Gotta go with Messier-31 re Dreadnought. The Royal Navy trademarked that one. It invokes a massive armored battleship, not a raging barbarian. "There are only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and the naming of things." On the one hand, bland names let you, the player, flesh out your character concept because they don't say all that much about what it's like. But they're bland and boring. On the other hand, descriptive and rich names spark the imagination and are interesting, but restrict you to the concepts they describe. So really I dunno. Guess we'll have to see how it plays out. Personally I don't care all that much either way.

I've been getting my teeth into a D&D classic I've neglected, namely, Temple of Elemental Evil (yes, with the Co8 fixpack). It's got me thinking about the difficulty curve in games of this type. But first, brief impressions. I'm not very far in, just cleared the Moathouse and arrived at Nulb. The combat, when it starts, is seriously good. Far and away the best in any D&D game I've played. Tactics matter. Also, I've rediscovered the phalanx. Man is it pretty. No other party-based D&D game I've played comes close, including the latest iterations of NWN2. This makes me really salivate over PE; if they can make it as pretty but at full-rez on my 27" iMac, woo-hoo. Everything is pretty. The monsters, the lovingly-crafted avatars, the cloaks, the animations, the environments. Everything except the UI which looks like it's a development placeholder, which it probably is. Nice sound effects and music too. Plot? What plot? Never mind. I do like meself a bit of plot though, and this would've been way better if Troika had put some thought into it. Plot-wise ToEE is like porn: it's only there to provide an excuse for the action. And difficulty. This is actually really problematic. As in I don't know what my opinion is about it anymore. The game starts out incredibly punishing, just like BG and BG2. It took me a quite a few tries to get my party of first-level delicate flowers to level up. I started playing on Ironman because I'm an inveterate save-game abuser, but that was clearly a bad idea. Ironman clearly requires either godlike D&D skills or metagame knowledge, remembering what's about to be sprung on you around the next corner. So after about a dozen tries I gave up and started one in normal mode. Much better. Then it gets easier. Like, a lot easier. The difference between level 1 and level 2 is huge. By level 3 I was barely dying/reloading at all. I hope the difficulty will ramp up again as I move into the next area as this is getting kinda boring. I still think that kind of punishing initial difficulty is a bad idea. It'll just get lots of people to give up in frustration. If I hadn't had so many similar games under my belt, there's no way I'd have the patience to learn to get the stupid party up to level 2. A game that has enemies that one-hit kill you, and doesn't in some way let you know that you're about to go somewhere really dangerous, is poorly designed IMO. Fortunately we haven't seen much of this lately so it's unlikely PE will be done like this. On the other hand, that kind of difficulty curve gives a really tangible feeling of progression. Splatting that giant + bear that obliterated my party in, like two or three rounds when I first came across it felt like a real achievement. I think treading that line has to be one of the hardest things in game design. Go too far on one side, and it's dull as dishwater, a mechanical, repetitive grind of easily splatting forgettable enemies. Too far on the other, and it gets way too frustrating to be fun. What's more, since you're designing it and know it inside and out, you'll have to rely on playtesters to find out exactly how hard a game you're really making. It's also an area where IMO most games of this type fare rather badly. Mask of the Betrayer was pretty good I thought. Fallout was pretty good (Fallout 2 not so much.) Most others fall fairly far from the sweet spot in one direction or the other. I wish there was a patent answer to this question. I don't think there is though. I do hope Obsidian gets it right. (For those curious, I'm playing with a party of two fighters with a couple of levels of barb for rage and fast movement, one ranger with a level of rogue to get Open Locks and Disable Device, one cleric, and one druid. No arcane casters on purpose; they're especially useless at low levels and this is low-level D&D. Once I got those sad sacks to level 2 it's been working out pretty well.)

I haven't seen anyone arguing against antagonists showing you a little respect. Some of us just aren't huge fans of epic-level fireworks. Not the same thing.

A million times this. Thirded. This would be wack.

The Wikipedia article on stalemate was pretty fascinating. According to it, stalemate was standardized as a draw in the early 19th century; before that, the rulings were all over the place.

Uh, you actually want to watch a scene where little figures march across the screen when viewed from a 45-degrees top-down perspective? To each their own, I guess. If they do do that, I hope they'll put in subtitles and make it possible to just click through them, 'cuz I would find it excruciating. You're right though that it wouldn't cost much, so there is that at least. (I'll still take the painted intertitles though TYVM.)

I almost wrote "I don't like epic levels, I think they're silly" but that's not actually strictly true. It is true, however, that I've never played a game that did that kind of power in a way that I liked. ToB was just dull. I would have enjoyed MotB much better if it had been levels 1-18 rather than 18-30. HotU was an enjoyable-enough dungeon crawl but even that got a bit dull. The only setting that really accommodates epic-level gameplay that I've come across is Planescape; there you're mixing it up with demigods and archdevils due to the nature of it. PS:T however was not epic-level, and I haven't played any other Planescape cRPG's. George Ziets had a pretty wack idea for an epic-level Baldur's Gate sequel, though: you'd start out as a just-ascended minor god, but then the old death gods would gang up and evict you from the Throne of Bhaal, and things would get weird from there. You'd produce avatara which would do stuff in various planes at various power levels, and so on and so forth. That, I think, could work. But if we're talking straight-up prime material plane fantasy, no epic levels, thanks. They're just silly.

IMO this is yet another question that's really hard to answer without knowing how the mechanics hang together. If there's enough variety within classes so you can make a fighty magic-user or magic-using fighter, for example, then I don't see any compelling need to multi-class. If there isn't, then multi-classing can add a lot of welcome variety. For example, if we're looking at D&D, AD&D multi-classing was a disaster, a dreary chore and an exploit at the same time. D&D3 was built with multi-classing in mind to start with, and there IMO it fits very well -- the classes themselves are extremely narrow, but multi-classing lets you build a huge variety of character concepts. (OTOH it's also really easy to produce a multi-class squib, which is perhaps not so desirable.)

Or the SoundCloud guy who sounds just like Christopher Lee.

Mm. I've been puttering around in Storm of Zehir a bit again. I gotta say that that game makes the "utility character" really sumthin-sumthin'. My party leader is, shall we say, not optimized for combat. Instead he's got all the skills that are useful on the map. He's a human rogue with INTO 18 and one level of wizard and ranger to unlock Survival, Spellcraft, Craft Armor and a few others, plus Able Learner. He is without a doubt the single most fun and useful character in the party, because of that world map. The rest of the party are min-maxed wrecking balls so it doesn't really matter that he can only get the odd arrow in in combat; in fact that's kind of part of the fun -- and I think that making him excel at combat as well would have detracted from the experience. So it's not like you can't have a D&D-style party-based cRPG where a "utility character" is fun. But. Storm of Zehir is a bit of an unusual game. It's really crying out for a character like that. The world map makes it so. Without that world map, that skill-machine would be just dead weight. I could've distributed the most important skills across the party while making only minimal compromises to their combat effectiveness, and gotten one more min-maxed wrecking ball, which would've been a signficant bump up in power. I guess that kind of puts me in two minds about this "all classes fight equally well, but differently" thing. If the game really is combat heavy, and if there is no pay-off for making one guy the skill machine, then I guess that's the way to go. But if they take a lot of inspiration from SoZ, I think I'll miss my cerebrally-oriented explorer who just sits on a rock while his companions deal with the opposition.

Except, Karkarov, that PE has a 2D background, remember? The only 3D models on the screen are the characters and monsters. You can only zoom in and out. I.e, you'll see something like Gorion getting whacked by Sarevok, which is IMO a pretty lousy cutscene. Again, I'd much prefer they did this with intertitles and/or narration.