PrimeJunta

In re BG2 bugs, I just hit a game-breaking one. Critical path questgiver doesn't show up where he's supposed to because I cleared a dungeon before getting the quest. (I looked it up. It's a known issue.) So LOL at the "BG2 had no issues" thing. Since I'm too hardcore now to console my way around it, I'll take it as an excuse to start over.

I'm going to do something I haven't done in I don't know how many years: take a day off work only to play a game. Figure it'll be Friday since it's unlikely it'll get released early enough on Thursday (CET) to be worthwhile. Don't tell my wife.

Someone's jelly. It's okay, me too. I still like to take a peek at the streams though. Keep 'em coming I say.

In Jutland actually, in Aarhus. Staying here for a year and a half with my wife who's doing her post-doc at the university here; my company was nice enough to let me work remotely.

I'm in Denmark and have gone native, so do I get to substitute a bottle of Aalborgs Taffel-Akvavit? If so, about 40 cm and 6 meters ATM. The closest Koskenkorva is probably ... quite far actually.

Been a long while since I played NWN2... Doesn't he start with mediocre Dex and awful Wisdom? But I haven't built/played any PC monks in 3rd/3.5e... so perhaps those stats aren't as important to the class as I thought. :not sure: Yup. DX 13 WIS 10. That's a far cry from optimal for a monk, even a fighter/monk, especially WIS, but hey, since when were cRPG pre-made companion stats perfect? -- Also, there are Periapts of Wisdom and such available and craftable which can bump it into decent numbers. FWIW I put every ability point he got into WIS just for the monk multiclass, and we all know just how useful WIS is for a pure fighter. Gypped, I tell you. @Dongom: I already said I wouldn't object to the possibility for minor readjustments, like swapping one talent for another, or moving a couple points from one stat to another. And as I said, I'm all for savegame/character editors and console commands. What I object to is in-game respec: re-leveling up from level 0, even if the class, background, and, say, attribute numbers are kept.

it is basicly totaly different, czech, slovakian, ukrainina, polish - they're similiar. Russian? not even a bit I speak Russian and Ukrainian, and they're pretty similar. Not as similar as Swedish and Danish, but more similar than Swedish and German. Once you know a bit of both the phonetic differences between East and West Slavic languages become easy to hear, but if you don't speak any Slavic languages, they do sound quite similar too. It's mostly the consonant sounds -- the rolling R's, the sharp ts, ch, sh sounds, and the dipthongs. Phonetically, Russian spoken in a Baltic accent sounds very similar to West Slavic languages actually.

I have it on good authority that the version that's gone out to the press has seen serious performance optimizations, and more are on the way. I wouldn't draw too far-reaching conclusions based on the BB, even the latest build.

It sounded to me as if you meant that you had heard about the option from other players. But if you were referring to Khelgar's in-game dialogue... Khelgar might want to become a monk, but knowing the D&D ruleset, even just the rules as presented in that video game, a player could reasonably assume that Khelgar would be unable to become a monk or that the devs would allow some kind of respec to make it viable. Without a respec, in order to make informed decisions when leveling him, you would need to know in advance whether or not Khelgar would actually get the chance to change his class to monk, hence you would need metagame knowledge. Yes, I was referring to Khelgar's in-game dialog. Yes, I did assume that Khelgar would eventually become a monk. Companion quests are a thing, and I assumed as a matter of course that since Khelgar's companion quest is about him becoming a monk, that would eventually happen. I did not make any assumptions on how that would happen, other than what the game told me. Up to the point where actually became a monk, it went pretty much as I expected, except that the Trials just sort of happened. I did assume Khelgar would eventually multi-class to monk. Why? Because quests like this generally resolve. As to the requirements, the only one he doesn't meet is alignment -- he starts out as Neutral Good, while monks are Lawful only. That would be a more-than-natural thing to change in a quest. There was nothing there to indicate that a full respec was to be expected. (As a matter of fact, I would've felt less gypped if there had been no option for Khelgar to become a monk after all. That all his quest resolutions would have resulted in him realizing that a monk's life is not for him. The reward could've been, say, a bonus monk-y feat or two plus ability bonuses.)

Gopnik chic FTW.

In that case, cooperation is the mother. If I ever get to inspire a spell, the effect will be to get everyone in the encounter to drop their weapons, form a circle, hold hands, and solemnly sing Kum Bah Yah for the duration, then leaving them dazed in a happy warm fog of love for all creaturekind for a few rounds afterwards.

I don't envy your job. Stomp on the eye-gouging too much and you risk turning the place into a sanitized echo chamber. Do nothing about it and eventually the only people left are the biggest eye-gougers. Kind of a BBS Darwinism thing. Neither is a desirable outcome IMO. I will go on the record here though that IMO the Obsidian forums have a number of long-time members (some of them actually mods) who get away with a good deal of highly questionable behavior. I know of several people who have left these boards because of them, whom I rather miss. "Grow a thicker skin" weeds out a lot of people who would have worthwhile things to say, but just don't want to put up with the annoyance. So, since you asked, I think you might do well to pay a bit of attention to how high-profile posters -- including myself probably, by now, for that matter -- behave. They/we do more to set the tone here, and the place would be altogether more congenial if they/we behaved better, IMO. FWIW I will also attempt to practice what I preach and not stoop to the level I did here anymore. Regrettably I am much easier to provoke than I would like to be. But thanks for asking.

A strawman is when you misrepresent an opponent's argument and then attack that misrepresentation, usually because you can't find a way to attack the actual argument.. In this case, you are (again) misrepresenting my argument as one based on caring how other people play the game, and then ridiculing that. It is a classic strawman. You've done it so many times by now that I'm pretty sure it's not just poor reading comprehension but actively dishonest. Do you do that in your professional work as well? Ah, but that's not the strawman. That's just dismissing my experience: i.e., that the very presence of respec cheapens the experience for me, whether I make use of it or not. It's the same reason I dislike broken mechanics which lead to easy but boring exploits. This may not bother you, but it bothers me, which is why I'm arguing against it. Nice attempt at misdirection though. Again, I no longer believe you're honestly misunderstanding me; rather, you're lying about what I said to whoever might be reading. I do not have much respect for that. Annnd... here you go again, lying about what I said. This really is a pattern. Are you a natural talent, or did you learn it in law school? I said: choices and consequences are crucial to my experience of a cRPG. One side of the choices is the impact I have made on the world. The other side is the impact the world has made on me: namely, my character-building choices. The possibility of respec trivializes that other side. I never said that respec would change the first side of the coin. That would be stupid. (Snip rest of incoherent ramble since it's pretty much a furious attack against this new strawman Gromz has built.) Also, if you're so convinced the game will be that broken, ask for a savegame/character editor rather than in-game respec. I have nothing against those. This, by the way, is the last message with which I will ever engage with you. I'm thoroughly disgusted by your blatant dishonesty: it is the kind of thing that poisons the atmosphere on entire forums. If you're this desperate to have the last word, then, by all means have it. Goodbye.

Last time I played IWD, Stabby, my main damager, was dual-wielding daggers, switching to single-wield + shield when tankiness was required. Since good daggers are so plentiful in the early to mid-game it made that part a lot easier. (FWIW, I find that I care less about powergaming the endgame than getting ahead of the curve early to mid-game. By the endgame I'm likely to be so powerful anyway that it doesn't make much of a difference, and I have lots of options. Whereas an extra attack or two points of THAC0 -- or AC, for that matter -- can make a fairly dramatic difference early on.)

[Edit: NVM, I'm not getting into this discussion again.]

[Edit: NVM, not getting into this discussion again.]

Can't sympathize with you there: You were metagaming based on spoilers. Almost seems a case of "just desserts" imo... On the contrary. I did not know a full respec was involved. I assumed that Khelgar would eventually become a monk as he kept going on about it, so I tried to build up to that, whenever it would happen. It's actually one of the few things that genuinely interested me the first time I played it, and I actively looked for temples, monasteries, and what have you to help it along.

Quarterstaff-specialized fighter in IWD. The only magical quarterstaff usable by a fighter is the Staff of the Hand, which is random loot and does not always show up. This is close enough to "completely and utterly useless" in my book. Again, IME the less-than-optimal choices in P:E character mechanics are nowhere near this level.

Have you tried playing one? I've played the "blatantly bad" fighter I mentioned, and it was a long way from unplayable. Not as effective as a better-built fighter, but he was getting the job done just fine. I guess we'll see when we'll see.

Yes, there's a minimum Lore requirement for them. Don't know how much crafting costs, haven't played with it.

It doesn't run well on 32-bit OS's. Crashes frequently. If you have XP 64-bit, though...

What's actually puzzling me about controllers is that they managed to make a dedicated device for playing games which is often worse for playing games than devices not dedicated for the purpose (mouse and keyboard).

Reputation and disposition. I'm looking forward to a game where I actually get to role-play a character in a non-trivial way, and have the world acknowledge and react to it. I'm even considering distributing my attributes and skills purely on role-play grounds, leaving the mechanical optimization to talents and feats, and see how that pans out.

I've seen it. I just haven't been able to make a character that's anywhere close to unplayable, other than the ranger in one of the BB's which was because the ranger class was borderline unplayable. Again, there are plenty of balance issues there for sure, but nothing close to genuine trap choices à la quarterstaff specialization in IWD or, say, Toughness, Great Fortitude, a couple of Skill Focuses and CHA 18/STR 10 for a D&D3 fighter. As far as I can tell anyway.