PrimeJunta

Yeah Stalin liked to play it safe. He assassinated or executed pretty much everyone who was anyone among the Bolshevik old guard. I do not believe he was mad, or psychopathic, let alone a fool, just extremely driven and extremely ruthless. And it's still possible he got himself offed by Beria, eventually. Dangerous occupation. Edit: I've little doubt that Trotsky would have been all to happy to engineer a coup, given half a chance. I also think the likelihood of him pulling it off from Mexico were about a fuzzball's in a cyclotron.

Yep. That's Stalinist gratitude for ya. Save the revolution and what do you get, exile and an ice pick axe to the back of the head.

He also put together an army in a matter of months and then proceeded to kick the asses of veteran generals of half the western world with it. Even the Brits and Americans who were no slouches at fighting. That's about as badass as it gets in my book. Edit: Whee, page 30!

:reads: Huh, turns out I didn't either. I always thought it was an icepick.

Oh dear, and here I was thinking we had finally managed to learn to get along.

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I have purchased a new pair of glasses. Somebody pointed out "huh, they look just like Lev Trotsky's." I swear on my mother's name that that was not intentional.

[NVM, deleted.]

1 - yes but the main thing is that it makes almost all fights much easier 2 - 0 as you can sneak past things even with no points in stealth (stealth is way OP atm) 3 - don't know, it gets exponentially more expensive as skills go up; mechanics is the only one worth maxing out 4 - afaik no 5 - maybe, depends on how you're playing it 6 - yes, all the lower-level class abilities remain available when you get to pick them later 7 - only on level-up afaik 8 - they're all somewhat useful, but my favorite (low-level) ones are Chill Fog, Slicken, Fan of Flames, and Curse of Blackened Sight (wiz), Iconic Projection, that AoE over time healing spell from level 2, and that thing that debuffs deflection from level 1 (priest) 9 - Durance is far from useless, play him right and he will turn most hard-ish fights into cakewalks; if you want a rogue though you need to hire one. They're always 1 level below charname. 10 - avoid getting hurt in the first place. 11 - console.

Nah. There's hand-holding, and then there's making things intentionally obscure. I have played games where I've really had to hunt for stuff this way, and it wasn't all that much fun. If you hid the names, you would at the very least need to add a system that lets you ask people where to find things and other people. So if you're looking for Captain Eadweard and you know he lives in Ondra's Gift, you could go to the Salty Mast and ask someone there if they've seen him; they could tell you where he lives and so on. Which would be cool but also a fair bit of work. Ever played Dwarf Fortress by any chance?

Gameplay on Morrowind was fairly ghastly but the world was fantastic -- complex, alien, different, beautiful in all kinds of ways. Rising through the ranks of House Telvanni or discovering the Ashlanders or digging into ancient Dwemer ruins was incredibly awesome. Oblivion was just so utterly banal in comparison.

Raedric is entirely doable at level 4 with your party. Your problem is that you don't (yet) have a good-enough grasp of the mechanics to be able to play effectively. Some pointers: Pay attention to which defense you're attacking. If your spells don't seem to bite, you're likely attacking a defense that's too high. Find a way to debuff it by attacking a weaker defense. Crowd control and debuffs are crucial in the bigger fights. For example: blind enemies don't attack or defend very well. Use engagement to your advantage. Tank-and-spank is a good general strategy (but by no means the only one). Only move in with your squishier characters once your tankier ones have engaged, so they can move freely. If kick-in-the-door style seems too hard, look for alternative approaches. Raedric's hold in particular has several. Look for synergies between your party's abilities. For example, Flanked enemies are easier to hit. Having your pet attack an already engaged enemy makes it Flanked. With your class bonuses, it will go down very fast when you shoot it. Don't forget to use your per-encounter abilities, every encounter. They go a long way. If it really feels too hard, backtrack and hire some help, or look in some other direction. It is possible to get in out of your depth fast if you just go wherever, especially early in the game. Compared to BG2, especially BG2 played "blind" without knowing how hard each quest is, P:E is very easy. If you're finding it differently, figure out what you're doing wrong and change it.

There is a pretty strong "wargaming" tradition in PnP roleplaying too though. My campaigns are heavily story/setting oriented as well, but wargaming-RPG's can be a lot of fun too, and they do require solid mechanics for that. D&D4 would work pretty well for that style of game I think.

@pmp10 HBS never targeted SRR numbers in their HK kickstarter. They stated explicitly that they would not be adding stretch goals past 1M, and stuck to that when they hit it with days to spare. The stretch goals that were in were relatively modest with the scope well controlled. It was by far the most relaxed KS I've ever backed. I liked it. It's good to see a company keep an eye on the ball and not start throwing cartwheels the minute someone waves a dollar bill at them. I also believe it's better business in the long run, and will certainly make for a better game.

A lot of OSS is written by programmers on company payrolls. Suppose a company needs a UI framework for Javascript for their product, don't like any of the ones available, and want their customers, subcontractors, and so on to be able to extend the UI's in their products. One way to solve this is to make one and open-source it, contributing any improvements made to it when making their stuff. If things go well, their customers will start contributing too. Everybody's still paid for their work, but they're collaborating on a common foundation which becomes available for anyone to use. P:E is not really a candidate for OSS in my opinion. It's too specific. A big chunk of its base -- most of Unity -- is already OSS. A lot of the middleware and other parts of the base -- Unity Professional -- isn't. In theory it should be possible to separate out the features and tools that are general to any party-based isometric cRPG, or even real-time with pause cRPG, into a set of OSS modules you could plug into Unity, but unless it's built that way from the ground up it is not going to be a small undertaking, and asking Obsidian to do that from the goodness of their hearts is asking a quite a lot. And in any case it wouldn't help improve P:E specifically; it'd be more interesting for studios making new games. I'm fairly certain we will see more and more things like this happening in the future though. I can imagine a situation where you could make pretty sophisticated games by connecting up these kinds of pieces to a platform, adding in assets from open-source libraries, and then "just" designing the gameplay and content. And, of course, contributing back any new but reusable assets (models, animations and such) for someone else to use in turn. I would like that, and we're already some way towards it.

For a moment there I thought you said FATAL.

I've been thinking about that itemization issue... and I think it may be more of a presentation problem than a substantive one. The item properties are broken down into enchantments, as you say. It makes them feel banal, interchangeable, and mass-produced, even if they have cool descriptions, and even if mechanically they're "the same thing" as in the IE games. "Spellbind - Jolting Touch" just sounds inherently duller than "Does an additional 20 points of electrical damage on critical hit." (Not a fan of the enchantment/crafting mechanics either. Making it as easy as click-click-click loses the magic. I had most fun with NWN2 OC's crafting in that series, and it was the most restrictive and arguably frustrating one.)

As an aside, I would SO back a Paranoia cRPG Kickstarter. It would take intra-party shenanigans to a whole new level. Imagine the romance subplot possibilities!

The Computer wants you to be happy. If you are not happy, The Computer will give you pills which will make you so happy you can't stand it.

Yes. Paranoia FTW.

Hoo boy, DF. Been some years since I managed to kick that obsession. Just re-downloaded it now... and man, how it's progressed. They write books. Books! I want to read The Mystery: Further Musings. Why can't I read The Mystery: Further Musings?

I'm a not a hardcore player and I play on whatever difficulty feels right to me. On P:E it's hard. On the IE games it's core rules. Also Dwarf Fortress isn't anywhere near that hard. You just have to learn that losing is fun.

D&D3 is only any good compared to AD&D.

It would be just as annoying to have AoE spells lock onto a target. You'd end up nuking yourself half the time as they moved in. It's very important to place your AoE's so you don't get caught in the friendly fire. Anticipate, or wait until the front line is engaged and things have settled down a bit. Think of it like throwing a grenade. They don't follow whoever you threw it at either, and P:E enemies don't try to run away from the AoE at least.

The list above was pretty comprehensive. In this case, only buffs (spells and abilities like Divine Radiance) will apply. However, you can do something else: debuff whatever defense your Invocation is attacking. All the caster classes have spells/powers/chants etc. which can do this. That's in general pretty much required for effective use of magic.

Mmm... I have high hopes for T:ToN. Although it's going to be so different that 'better' or 'not as good' will be a difficult comparison to make. And there's P:E2...