PrimeJunta

+1, @GreyDragon. As an aside, one of the few bits I thoroughly enjoyed in Dragon Age was the Fade episode, which was pretty much built around shapeshifting. It was rudimentary and simple, but I thought it showed what kind of gameplay potential shapeshifting mechanics could have, if properly fleshed-out and developed.

This contradicts what JES has previously said, namely, that most fighter abilities are non-magical and a completely non-magical fighter is an entirely viable build. But we will see when we will see. Personally, I'll be very surprised (and disappointed) if the P:E team turns out to be so incompetent that they don't get character/class differentiation.

I disagree. I would consider a game that has an objectively and universally best party composition almost as flawed as a game that had an objectively best character build. I'd like it best if that was situational too. Have some situations that would be easiest for a diverse party, and other situations that would be easiest for, say, an all-rogue party. Situational effectiveness and a variety of situations, again.

In my opinion this is the wrong question. Different characters should fare differently against different enemies. I'd rather ask questions like: Which of those two characters would fare better in a mission that involved abducting the Heresiarch's favourite concubine from a magically warded palace patrolled by elite fighters? Which would find it easier to defeat a group of ensouled, animated suits of armour? If the answers are different for different situations, then the system is well designed and well balanced. If the answer is always "Mmm, the cleric," then there's something wrong with it.

Gimping your PC and introducing other self-imposed constraints and handicaps, or making the game difficult in other ways is a whole different story. IMO difficulty levels, soloing, or playing to a strict code of conduct are much preferable ways to do that than having classes that are inherently weaker or attributes, skills, or abilities that are inherently less useful -- worse, if the game doesn't tell you so up front. Personal note: I like rogues, and years ago when I started playing the IE games, I got immensely frustrated because my rogue just did not survive very well. I can get by with a rogue nowadays that I'm extremely familiar with the system and know how to squeeze out all the value there is from it, but I still consider the "support character" a really bad design idea.

I was actually thinking also of D&D 3/3.5/Pathfinder. Your Zen Archery Fighter will still have a poor Will save compared to a cleric of the same level. Conversely, a cleric taking Martial Weapons/Longbow and Zen Archery will out-shoot a dedicated fighter/archer build, when suitably self-buffed -- all while retaining that huge list of spells. (Pet D&D peeve: clerics and druids are so overpowered that mechanically there's no compelling reason to play anything else. Which is unfair to people -- like me -- who like the concept of fighters or especially rogues more.) OTOH your Combat Insight cleric will only get Whirlwind Attack at level 12/15 (if non-human) because of the massive feat investment needed (Dodge, Mobility, Spring Attack, Combat Expertise, Whirlwind Attack). Combat Insight isn't in the base system, BTW, and isn't in any cRPG I've played either. It's one of the band-aids introduced in supplements to paper over the imbalances in the base system. If you think it's a good idea, then what (if any?) is your problem with P:E's attempt to make all attributes valuable to start with, without recourse to such kludges?

Your 10 STR / 18 INT fighter will be better at some challenges than your 18 STR / 10 INT fighter, and vice versa. They will not play identically. On the other hand, in D&D there's no meaningful gameplay difference between a WIS 18 and WIS 7 fighter, or an INT 18 and INT 7 cleric, and so on. Those stats are effectively meaningless for those classes. I.e., P:E will require you to trade off something of value to get something else of value, rather than to trade off something worthless for something extremely valuable. That makes character-building more varied and interesting, not less. Your "dumb brute" fighter's dumbness will be reflected in the mechanics too, not just the bruteness like in D&D; same for your "sickly genius" wizard's sickliness. How is that not a good thing?

Objectivity is also an ideal. It is known to be unattainable. Do you think that means that, say, historians, journalists, or judges should just say freck it and write or rule whatever they want, rather than trying their level best to be as objective as they can? If you don't, then why do you think game designers shouldn't try to balance their game system out as well as they can, even knowing perfect balance is unattainable?

Numenera is nothing like d20 (although you do roll one a quite a lot). For PnP gaming, I'm liking it hella more than d20 (although I'll only start running a campaign in it later this fall). Way more straightforward, way more room for creative play, both from the player and the GM side. For one thing, the stats and progression are there almost for flavor -- the cyphers are where the real action is at: you could totally run a high-power adventure with a first-tier party just by being liberal with cyphers. The Numenera team are going to have to do some hard thinking on how to translate that to a computer game though, as the system itself is really built around interaction between players and the GM. The mechanics are too simple for interesting gameplay if applied without that aspect. For example, combat is kept interesting through GM intervention and application of Effort, there's an extremely limited selection of "spells" (esoteries) but there are guidelines for players who want to creatively modify their effects, and players are encouraged to make up their own skills. The whole thing pointedly ignores things like systemic balance, leaving that up to the players and GM. One of the functions of the GM intervention rule is, in fact, to sort out precisely such things. In other words, it treats the players and GM as responsible adults who want to play a fun game, rather than rules lawyers looking to exploit holes in the system. There's no way a computer can do that kind of creative reinterpretation. I would expect that what the ToN team is doing now is figuring out how to build a varied-enough superstructure on top of the basic system to make things work in a cRPG. It'll be quite interesting to see how that pans out.

Heh. Anyway, that was fun. I'm taking a vacation from the Net starting now, though, so I'll be looking forward to whatever's being discussed here when I get back.

The funny thing is that I don't actually hate the game. I've replayed it numerous times and enjoyed myself. I just think aspects of it are rubbish, especially when it comes to writing, and moreover it would have been relatively easy not to do it so badly. Not necessarily. I'm sure it's possible to pick holes into anything; the question is how many holes you can pick, how big they are, why they're there, and how central they are to the underlying premises. MotB and PS:T, for example, are much, much better in this respect. Take Blade Runner. That movie is just chock-full of plot holes, inconsistencies, and illogicalities. However it doesn't matter in the least, as it's not even trying to be consistent. The story is driven by the theme, the characters, and pacing. Consistency never was a priority, and it doesn't have to be. I know and love Blade Runner, and NWN2 is no Blade Runner.

Does too. Not so. Planes can border on each other, or overlap each other. The Lower Planes, for example, border on each other. You can travel from Baator to the Abyss, in fact, Charon's Ferry Service provides a handy way to do this. Same thing for that ocean made entirely of holy water on the Higher Planes, or the spatial relationship of the Spire (and Sigil) with the Outlands, and of the Outlands with the Outer planes. Yet these aren't transitive planes, because there's no overlap. Overlap is the defining characteristic of transitive planes. That's why you can use astral projection to travel from one place to another on the same prime material plane – the two planes overlap. The relevance is that the KoS is projecting from the astral plane to the Prime Material, compleat with silver cord. Through a portal. That does not make sense. Astral projection doesn't work that way. You don't have portals when astral projecting to start with; that's kind of the point of astral projection. The physical body is the anchor, the astral body is the projection, not the other way around. The fact that the KoS can do it is completely arbitrary. Whoever wrote it up just made it so and said "because reasons." DM's fiat. Bad. Whatever the spell is, the underlying mechanics should be consistent. With the astral projection spell (or any other means of astral projection), the mechanics are as I described above – your astral body no longer overlaps with your physical body, and since your consciousness resides in your astral body anyway, the physical body goes catatonic, with the two connected with the silver cord. Now, if you use the spell to actually travel to another plane, here's what happens. When you arrive at your destination – another PM or an outer plane – (and here's the magical part) – the spell recreates a physical body for you in the new plane, using locally-available materials, and reconnects your silver cord to it, destroying your original body wherever you left it. The newly-created body becomes the anchor instead of your original one. When your astral body syncs with the newly-created physical body (the x, y, z coordinates on both planes overlap perfectly again), you "shift" to your new location. At that point your silver cord has a length of zero again. I.e., you can't project from the astral plane into a physical plane the same way you project from a physical plane into the astral plane, and the silver cord can, by its very nature, never exist on a physical plane. It only comes into existence when your astral body is out of sync with your physical one, and in that case it's an extension of your astral body. Yeah, true, I hadn't actually thought of that inconsistency. Rack up another one.

Not so. That is the case with the Inner and Outer planes, which do not overlap with the Prime Material, but not with transitive planes. Transitive planes overlap with other planes. The Demiplane of Shadow, aka the Shadow Plane, as it's done in MotB, is an example of a transitive plane that overlaps with only one plane, i.e., the Prime Material. The Astral and Ethereal planes are transitive planes that overlap with multiple planes – the Ethereal with the Prime Material and Elemental planes, the Astral with the Prime Material and Outer planes. Again: a transitive plane has a point matching every point (x, y, z) in each of the planes with which it overlaps, and possibly many points that do not overlap with any of them. That's what makes them transitive. Specifically, the difference is that the former is not possible in the Forgotten Realms cosmology. Whoever wrote it in doesn't understand how the planes work, and how astral projection works. It's nonsensical. Illogical, in the sense that I already described: he doesn't make sense within the Forgotten Realms/D&D/Planescape lore. Things just don't work like that. To recap: (1) Astral projection works from the Prime Material to the Astral, not the other way around. (2) What was he doing on the Astral Plane? (3) How did he get there? (4) If he was banished there by the Illefarn, why there? (5) What kept him from popping right back to the Prime through the many portals there? (6) Why was he laying waste to the Githyanki strongholds there, when he would stop at the borders of the Illefarn empire in the evil ending? (7) How come the Sword of Gith is the only thing that can hurt him (not really) when his only connection to the Astral Plane is that he was banished there? (Or was he, see (3) above?) ( What's the connection with the Ritual of Purification, which doesn't actually appear to do anything to him? The very basic idea – that the Illefarn would create a magical WMD drawing directly from the Weave, to defend against the Netherese, and that went Horribly Wrong when the Weave failed due to a magical experiment by the Netherese, causing said WMD to switch to the Shadow Weave after which things go Horribly Wrong – is fine, although jejune. Nothing from there on out makes a lick of sense. That's my problem with it. And it wouldn't even have been hard to make up a lore-consistent story about the Illefarn - KoS war and his subsequent attempts to return. You know what I think? I think that whoever wrote it was such a desperate PS:T fanboy he absolutely had to write the Githyanki into the story, and then went through all these horribly convoluted twists and turns to do that, ending with a nonsensical story that plays fast and loose with the cosmology of the setting. That was a bad idea to start with. If you want to write in the Githyanki, then make up a different villain. If you want to use an ancient evil arising from the Illefarn-Netheril war, then leave the Githyanki out of it. Or else be much cleverer about coming up with a connection. (Hint: try tying up the Netheril-Illefarn conflict with the Githyanki-Illithid one. One or both parties of either conflict, or perhaps rogue elements in them, could be in touch with the other. This could play into the creation story of the Guardian. If the Guardian was created by use of Illithid magic, for example, it would make sense that the Sword of Gith was capable of hurting it... and it would even make sense that the Guardian would come back to attack the Githyanki after being cut loose from Illefarn.)

I'm not, but the Illefarn did. That's how he ended up in the Astral Plane to start with, remember? (Edit: or did they? I forget, where did Illefarn banish him? If not the Astral Plane, then how did he end up there, and why does severing his connection to it make it possible to destroy him? Again, it makes no sense. It just mangles astral projection beyond all recognition.) Small discussion of planar physics (edit) in the Forgotten Realms/D&D universe. The physical body is on the Prime Material. The astral body is on the Astral. The Silver Cord is also on the astral. The Astral Plane is a transitive plane, overlapping with the Prime Material and the Outer planes. That means that for any point (x,y,z) on the Prime Material plane there is a corresponding point (x,y,z) on the Astral plane, but the converse is not true. Most points on the Astral plane have no corresponding location on the Prime Material. The interview with Myrkul in MotB, for example, happened at a location on the astral plane that almost certainly does not correspond to any location on a Prime Material, but very likely corresponds to some location on an Outer plane. The distances between any two matching points can also differ radically. Sometimes a very long distance on the Prime Material is a very short distance on the Astral, and vice versa. Which makes traveling through the astral plane, e.g. by astral projection, attractive. Under normal circumstances, your astral body completely overlaps your physical body; i.e., any point (x,y,z) in your physical body matches the same (x,y,z) in your astral body. With astral projection, your astral body and physical body move apart, but your consciousness stays with your astral body. The connection between your astral body and physical body is the silver cord, which simply connects the center of your astral body, wherever it is on the astral plane, to the point on the astral plane matching the location of your physical body on the material plane. It is a connection between two points on the astral plane. In other words, it doesn't exist on the physical plane at all, any more than your astral body. Your astral body is astral because it is on the astral plane; if it wasn't, it woudln't be. There wouldn't be any point, and in many cases there wouldn't even be any place for it to exist, as the astral body could be somewhere that has no matching location on the prime material plane. N.b.: the astral plane has evolved a fair bit over the history of (A)D&D, and there's also a certain amount of contradictory lore about it, e.g. some sources treat it as something like an outer plane, others as a transitive plane. But I believe this is the way astral projection works, mechanically, in all of the editions. The color pools you use to exit the astral plane add some complication to the story, but I won't get into that here. I disagree, especially about the KoS. Terribly bad villain; at the same time clichéd and illogical. Ammon Jerro was an interesting character psychologically; the trouble with him was that his actions didn't make a lick of sense.

Oof. That makes even less sense. The silver cord connects an astral traveler's astral body to his physical body. It cannot even exist on the Prime Material. If it did for the KoS, that's a major violation of D&D metaphysics. Second, it doesn't make any sense to banish something to the Astral Plane. It's a transitive plane, connected to Prime Material planes and Outer Planes. It's pretty easy to get out. I won't even bother addressing exodiark's post. It's all ex post facto rationalization of plot holes. Anyone can do that. The point is that in a competently constructed story you shouldn't have to. (Exception: intentionally surreal dream-like stories, following dream-like logic. NWN2 is not one of them.)

Once. To close the portal. Which can't be closed by any other means. For no other reason than "because." Seriously, there is no explanation as to why the sword of Gith, and no other sword, and no other method, works for that purpose. To close. A portal. Which is pretty much a basic magical technology in Faerun. There are portals all over the place. What's so special about this one that it can only be closed with the sword of Gith, and why the sword of Gith, when the Githyanki had frack all to do with the creation of the portal, the Guardian, or even the Weave? The Githyanki are a humanoid race formerly of some other prime material plane, currently residing on the astral plane. They have no special connection to the Shadow Weave, nor the Weave. It makes no kind of sense, and has no kind of explanation. NWN2 doesn't have good story, full stop. But why??? Why is the SoG the "password" in your analogy? The Githyanki did not create the Guardian, nor the portal, nor anything related to it. Their only involvement with the KoS is that the KoS apparently raided their strongholds on the astral plane – which is yet another thing that doesn't make sense, since the KoS is supposed to be guarding Illefarn, which is on the Prime Material, not the astral. In fact, in the evil ending we find out that the KoS stops his invasion at the ancient borders of the Illefarn empire. What in the name of Mog was he doing fighting the Githyanki on the astral plane??? But you don't actually NEED the ritual of purification. As stated, I didn't use any of it a single time in my last playthrough. It doesn't even do anything particularly special; nothing that you can't do as well or better with the standard spell selection Elanee and Zhaeve have anyway. It's another big ol' DM-leading-you-by-the-nose thing with no internal logic to it. They didn't even bother making it mandatory to use it in the end battle – how hard could that have been, they already even had the statues in place? Tangent – the end boss battle. They could've at least made that cohere with the rest of the story, with only tiny modifications. Instead of destroying the statues, you would've had to use each part of the Ritual on the appropriate statue; after that, the KoS would become vulnerable to attack but only with the Sword of Gith. At least that way all that bother with the sword and the ritual wouldn't have been completely pointless. Oh come on. This isn't just any sword we're talking about. It's the silver sword of Gith. An artifact. A unique artifact. So powerful it has all these wack abilities even when reconstituted from about half the tiny shards it broke into. "It just broke, duh" makes no sense. That'd be like Sauron's Ring of Power getting destroyed by being accidentally stepped on when on its side. It would make sense if, say, the KoS is such a badass that it can shatter even an artifact weapon – but then it would make no sense that that very artifact weapon is supposed to be the only thing capable of hurting it. (Except, of course, in practice it's not, since any ol' magic sword will do the job just fine.) Again, it doesn't make any sense. Massive plot hole. I mean okay, The Lord of the Rings has the deus-ex-machina eagles ("why didn't they just fly Frodo and the Ring to Mordor and save everyone a lot of bother?") but that's just one thing in a story that mostly stays with its internal logic. The NWN2 story is just riddled with this thing. Target-rich environment. (Uh. I wasn't even meaning to get into this, but you're actually defending this turd of a tale? I know twelve-year-olds who write better than this.)

Wel-l-l... another quick google turns up a bunch of sauropods with weights between 35 tons (conservative estimate) and 100 tons or more. The largest elephant ever shot weighed 12 tons, and an average bull elephant is about five tons. So that would make these sauropods about 7 to 20 times more massive than the average bull elephant. So how much is a lot lot?

@Nonek, the dénouement was better than average, but in at least The Witchers, the endgame gameplay was same ol', same ol'. I.e., mobs of mooks to wade through in sequence followed by a set-piece multi-stage boss battle where you had to push the right buttons in the right sequence to win. PS:T had the same, except that it was possible to talk your way out of the multi-stage boss battle if your stats were high enough. I'm really. tired. of that template. Is fun endgame gameplay really too much to ask? Is a set-piece multi-stage choreographed boss battle the only climactic ending you can give a game? I should hope not!

It would be a very different kind of game than the ones we're used to seeing. Combat would be lethal, and if you want to avoid the obvious result – save-and-reload-fest – you'd have to develop mechanics around that. Some ideas, from more to less obvious. * Super-effective healing, magical or otherwise. Consider the late Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. The Culture has technology so advanced that they can fix anything as long as your brain is more or less intact, and they can even take a real-time backup of that, with a neural lace. It just takes a few weeks to grow you a new body. The advanced humanoid races in that universe also have capabilities to control their metabolism and shut off pain. * Avoidable combat. Add other systems with which you interact with the world. Since the potential cost of combat is so high, you would want to avoid it whenever possible, and only get into it when you're pretty sure that the odds are in your favor. When asked how he managed to survive all those hundreds of duels, Miyamoto Musashi is said to have replied "I only fight people weaker than myself." * Mostly ritualized combat. Consider a world where combat is governed by a strict code of honor. You have duels, tournaments, and jousts, but they're set up in such a way that armor is much better than weapons, and the winner is determined by adjudication rather than death or maiming. Actual fights to the death would be narrative climaxes, where all your dueling and jousting experience would be tested for real. * Super-effective defensive capabilities. Consider Dune and the way shields work in it: lasguns are as good as unused because a lasgun intersecting a shield produces a nuclear-level explosion, killing everybody; projectile weapons are mostly useless because shields stop projectiles flat, so combat is mostly hand to hand, and the challenge with that is the ability to feint effectively so that you're able to get a strike that's slow enough to get through the shield to hit its target. Combine a few of these and I think you could make a pretty compelling fantasy or high-tech-sci-fi world. It would probably have a good deal less combat – at least to the death combat – than any of the cRPG's we're used to seeing. Perhaps about as much as we have in sci-fi and fantasy novels and films, which is still a quite a lot really. (As an aside, one trope that's getting a bit threadbare is the one-man army – i.e., your hero that kills his way through hundreds or even thousands of enemies. Too much asymmetry.)

IMO the very existence of multi-classing indicates that something's broken about the classes themselves. If you can't have satisfying gameplay within the classes you've set up, why not do away with them altogether and just let you pick abilities from ability trees as your character develops? AD&D was almost but not quite fatally broken as a system. D&D3 was entirely workable, but still riddled with patches and kludges thrown in to work around its failures. Multiclassing (and the kludges associated with it, like XP penalties) are just one such example. I prefer P:E's approach. I would like a classless and XP-less system even better. Just award character points directly as you go, and let the player spend them on abilities. Then throw in a few trainers with some special gameplay – quests, for example – that lets you open up new ability trees. More or less like The Witcher or VtM: Bloodlines, only minus the XP, and with a broader scope. It would even be totally feasible to base this on D&D mechanics, with feats, spells, skills, hit dice, saves, and so on. Just assign a point price to each of those and set them up in nice hierarchies and you're golden.

Yeah, I'm slightly nervous about this part. Endgames tend to suck, endings tend to suck worse, and Obsidian as a studio and many of the P:E devs individually have a history of fantastic games with endgames and endings that range from let-downs to disasters. In fact I'm kinda hard-pressed to think of games with endgames/endings that don't follow the "wade through masses of mooks, then have a boss fight where the boss keeps resurrecting N times or until you figure out that you need to smash the statues/close the portals/break the jars/jump through the flaming hoops with a triple Salkow, then have an explanation" template, which I think is frankly bad. Let's see. Fallout. Yeah, Fallout. Now that was a good ending and endgame. Erm. Hm. Let me think. :thinks: BG? No. BG2? Nope. IWD? Nope. NWN or any of the expansions? Please. MotB? Nope. KOTOR 1 or 2? Nuh-uh. VtM:B? Nope. Okay, Planescape: Torment, with qualifications. The very very very endgame and ending did not follow the template and was in fact brilliant, but there's way too much wading through mooks to get there. I mean come on, that's just lazy and shows a lack of imagination. Yeah, that's about it, really. Why is it so damn hard to make a good ending and endgame?

Oh, Micamo, Micamo. You're wasting your talents. The NWN2 narrative is what's known as a "target-rich environment." Good point here though: "Of course. The problem here is that it's not the player defeating the bad guy. It's the DM's Ultimate Villain of Ultimate Badness versus the DM's Ultimate Artifact of Ultimate Power. It's masturbation: The player is just there to watch, and unless they stop playing or participating in the plot their input doesn't matter at all." This is a common mistake in cRPG's, and I hope one P:E manages to avoid. Edit: and to add insult to injury, you don't actually NEED those doodads of ultimate power. Or OK, technically you do need the sword of Gith to close that portal, but the King of Shadows gets hurt just fine with any ol' weapon or spell you're packing, which pulls the rug out from under the whole thing. Okay, now I'm doing it too.

@Micamo, in P&P the "15-minute workday" isn't much of a problem, as the DM can always adjust things situationally to keep things interesting. The rules bend as necessary. What's more, P&P D&D combat is so cumbersome that you can only have about one or maybe two combat encounters in a session anyway. Computer RPG's don't have this kind of inherent flexibility, so exploits become that much more... exploitable. The caster/fighter/rogue imbalance is a flaw in the rules, though; as JES pointed out somewhere, having to make up your own rules to make a game workable kind of indicates a problem with the game. (As an aside, is there a D&D campaign anywhere that doesn't have house rules?)

@Woldan, uh, as opposed to, say, magic fireballs? Early RL grenades were highly unreliable and troublesome weapons, because of the difficulty of making a reliable fuse. Without that they'd tend to be duds, or explode too late, or go off in your face. I think the renaissance tech level was a great idea; it's underused in fantasy RPG's, and the period had enormous variety in weapons and armor. With magic thrown into the mix and firearms considered specifically as an anti-spellcaster weapon, it gets even more interesting. I'm quite sure that balancing grenades, explosive traps etc. isn't any harder than balancing spells, various soul powers, martial arts, technologies and so on.

If there are werewolves, there have to be silver bullets. Else I'll be demanding my money back.