PrimeJunta

@Emerwyn: I don't think you need to worry. Again, the character creation doesn't even let you specify which god you follow unless you're a priest, and the reputation/disposition system is independent of it. The rep/disp mechanics do affect priests and paladins, but that's IMO entirely as it should be.

Sure, there were skeptics: those were the small and rarefied circles I was talking about. They had about as much impact on society at large as the Flat Earth Society has on ours though. As to your tastes, at least I don't care at all. What I'm trying to establish here is that "remote, inactive gods" and "faith" in the sense of "trust in something unproven" would be anachronistic in a pre-modern setting. I am also arguing that it's lazy to thoughtlessly transpose modern attitudes into a different social and historical context. I'm not saying that it would be impossible to make an intelligent fantasy world with a modern view of faith, of course. I'm saying that to do so would require considerable thought to all the various ways this would impact the culture and politics of that world. Sapkowski actually does something like this and I think it's pretty damn cool. (Loved the gnome who described an emerald as beryllium-aluminum cyclosilicate.) Uh, because this one is explicitly modeled on a particular period of history on Earth? The Obs devs said it's "early Colonial, Renaissance, minus the printing press." And as a matter of fact just about all Western trad fantasy is based on a pseudo-Medieval outlook. Most of it is done really lazily, with people with essentially modern attitudes dropped into a swords-and-sorcery world. I don't particularly like that. I prefer it when creators treat their source material with thought and respect. Again: if you want a pseudo-medieval fantasy game with a modern conception of religion, I think that could very well be extremely cool -- but it would require some serious thought on how that change would have changed society, from kings whose divine right to rule would no longer be unchallenged, to slaves carried through their lives by a promise of a reward in the hereafter. Doing it the usual way -- just drop people with modern attitudes about faith into a world with emperors and kings, ducs and grefs -- would be much less satisfying. I could not parse these two paragraphs. If there's some reaction you expect from me, could you please rephrase them?

Sure, but the point is that in pre-Enlightenment times, people did attribute that sort of thing to divine intervention. From their point of view, the gods/God were/was present, active, and manifesting in the world. Thor throwing thunderbolts wasn't just a story, he was actually there behind the thunderclouds, as far as the people getting rained on were concerned. It wasn't a matter of faith any more than your faith in the FDA's ability to keep rats out of tins of tuna. Whether it was actually true in an objective sense—whatever that may mean—is irrelevant to the question. Point being, only very very very VERY few people ever struggled with questions like "does God really exist?" or "is there really an afterlife?" or "does God punish the wicked and reward the righteous?" or "does God speak through people?" These things were accepted as a matter of course. Still are in lots of places; I lived in Nepal for a while, and believe me, the gods were very real, present, and active for the people there. There's a statue of Kali Parvati Bhairavi in Kathmandu which is a popular place to seal contracts because everybody knows you will keel over dead of massive bleeding if you tell a lie standing before her. Faith didn't enter into it at all; people accepted that the same way you and I accept that if you stick a fork into a power socket you're going to get a nasty electric shock. Second, the Enlightenment did shift the meaning of "faith" a great deal. The sense you're stating it -- "trusting something that is not in and of itself proven" -- only became meaningful when somebody pointed out that, say, the Resurrection or the existence of God itself isn't actually proven. Faith in that sense only appears when the tenets are challenged. Until that period, it never was -- not outside some extremely small and rarefied circles anyway. Edit: Corrected the name of Kali's avatar in question. Wouldn't want to piss her off.

So, gold. From the official Obsidian twitter account: ...tick...tock...tick...tock...

Faith as we understand it is a modern invention. In pre-Enlightenment times, all but a few skeptics assumed as a matter of course that gods manifested themselves to their followers and displayed their power in a tangible manner. "Faith" meant more like "trust that the particular god or religion you're following won't let you down, and commitment to behavior expected from its adherents." They did expect the can to contain tuna. A fantasy world with post-Enlightenment faith-based religion could be interesting, but pretty different.

Another good thing about moving away from D&D is not having to deal with the really. stupid. names. Drizzt, for crying out loud?

"Pillars of Eternity: Just as confusing as medieval history."

I don't get the impression that P:E is like that. Religions are important and people identify with them—much like in the real world—but from what I've seen most characters in it have entirely unrelated agendas (also much like in the real world). The gods—one particular god actually—only come up directly in the BB in one quest, and that quest involves a secret cult. What's more, the gods and religions are much more "human" than in D&D—the cult in question is fueled by some extremely concrete and extremely real grievances, with the god being more of an embodiment of those grievances than the other way around. The gods are real, present, and active in the world though. If you want to check out some lore related to that, read up on the Saints' War. It's a bloody awesome bit of lore from where I'm at. Paladins don't need a deity. The Darcozzi Paladini and Bleak Walkers are not associated with deities for example, to name two. Character creation won't ask you to pick one unless you're a priest. Bottom line, I don't think there's cause for worry on this score, unless you're looking for an entirely godless/religion-less world that is. Although obviously I have no idea what the plot of the real thing is going to be and what part the gods will play in that, if any.

Yes. (Note that Sharp_one isn't actually a backer and hasn't played the BB. I.e. he doesn't know anything you don't know.)

I lost a big chunk of 2009 or thereabouts to Dwarf Fortress. There were some pretty hilarious bugs there at the time, like dwarves catching fire, then going to bed to get better which set the bed on fire, which set the next dwarf who went to sleep in it on fire, and son on.

From where I'm at, the Chanter has the (A)D&D bard beat, hands-down. That said, IMO that's not a very high bar to clear. I love the concept but the (A)D&D execution never really felt right to me. The best D&D bard IMO was in NWN2, and that was way different from the standard D&D3 one.

I have no idea. I'm a serial re-starter of games. No matter my intentions, I go through the intro with, like 30 different characters before settling into one. Sometimes I restart halfway or three-quarters through. Unless the game is really easy and really dull in which case I just keep going with my first one until I get bored and give up altogether. <cough> DA:I <cough>

I actually got out of my chair and did a little dance after reading this. Edit: Loved this bit

I'm inclined to be forgiving about the portals. One characteristic of Planescape is that it is wild. Step through a door in Sigil and you'll never be absolutely sure where you'll end up. You simply can't do that in a cRPG with limited scope.

@illathid @gkathellar IMO Planescape -- the setting -- is itself a subversion of standard D&D. The people who made it had, basically, "been there, done that" with everything D&D. They wanted to do something different, and Planescape was the result. There was a phase in the history of AD&D when things went a little out of control; DM's had gotten bored with orcs and dragons and came out with some really strange ideas, most of which really... didn't work.* Planescape took everything from that period that could just possibly work and violently pummeled it until it did. PS:T certainly put some additional twists into it (especially the delightfully aggravating way it made a mess of the character mechanics), but most of the weirdness is Planescape. *Case in point: throat leech. Who in their right mind thinks that would make for an interesting encounter? Flumph? Crypt thing? -- I have a first-edition Fiend Folio in my bookshelf and ... well, whatever it was the guys who wrote it were on, I do not want some.

I have read many, many summaries of Tolkienian mythos, and this has got to be the best one to fit into one medium-length sentence I've seen. (Imagine if Galadriel had been born a brunette. Much inconvenience would have been avoided.)

Similarity is very superficial. No more than the general shape of the face and angle of the head. Shoulders are posed differently, eyes, nose, mouth, and hair are all different shapes and styles, lighting is completely different, style is only somewhat similar. I.e. yeah definitely coincidence. With so many portraits framed more or less this way in so many games you're bound to have even closer matches than this. Doesn't mean the Bavarian Illuminati are behind it.

Mmh. There isn't really a "D&D lore." There's a ton of wildly different and often inconsistent D&D lores, loosely hooked together by various more or less clunky conceits. Some of it is utterly brilliant, some of it is jejune, most of it is immensely serviceable as background for role-playing games, tabletop or otherwise. Very little of it is particularly original, and internal consistency or depth are not its strong suits. If you took a random bit of D&D lore and changed the names, I contend that you would be unlikely to flag it as specifically "D&D" rather than just "cheesy but lovable generic fantasy." (This does not apply to all D&D settings; Dark Sun and especially Planescape for example, despite the literary antecedents of both.) Your larger point however I strongly agree with: believable, consistent, well thought-out, rich, and deep lore makes all the difference, and creating such a lore from zero in two years while making a game at the same time is... challenging. If anyone can do it, though, it's Obsidian: they have the best game-writing talent in the industry, bar none, and I've been hugely impressed by what they've shown us so far. I'm sure it won't be able to match the Forgotten Realms in sheer quantity, but it's already clear it's got it beat in thematic consistency and the feel of believable fantasy history. I also love the way they're treating potentially clichéd fantasy tropes like fighting religions -- you don't have gods that are evil because muhahaha, but gods and religions which fight for understandable reasons. The treatment of Skaen is bloody brilliant, the notion of the Godhammer bomb and the Saints' War is really cool, and I love the whole notion of souls, animancy, and everything it implies. Also, Inuit dwarves. How bleeping cool is that?

Definitely agree about the duration bloat. It adds a lot of tedium, for example when you win a fight but one of your toons is left with a long-duration stun, confusion, paralysis or whatever and you don't feel like wasting a precious counter on it, but instead have to just twiddle your thumbs for, like, minutes before it expires.

@Skull "Easy to learn, hard to master" mean anything to you? AD&D is kind of the opposite. The rules are a mess and a lot of work to learn, but once you figure out the holes in them, it becomes easy.

BG2. Finally enjoying it. Just cleared out a nest of mind flayers.

I played a fair bit of DA:I until I got bored and quit. It had some redeeming qualities -- looked good, environments were thoughtfully designed, it worked technically well, some the characters were well written and voiced, most of the quests, areas, and other content in it were well-grounded in the lore of the world, and the conceit of the Inquisition tied things up with a nice little ribbon -- but gawd was the gameplay just dull. Spam spam spam spam spam, endless mountains of same-y loot, endless collect-5-of-this, 10-of-that quests, and so on and so forth. If they had put, like, one-tenth of the effort that went into those environments and put it into making the gameplay – what you're actually doing when you're playing the game – engaging, it would've been a pretty good game. As it is, it's utterly forgettable. I'm not BioWare's biggest fan, but I have enjoyed many of their games, and I really really really hope this isn't how they'll all play from now on because it'd be such a huge waste.

@Nonek That's true, but the underlying spell mechanics in both games are the same. At low levels the P:E system is clearly richer and more interesting than AD&D (compare what the level 4 BB wizard can do to what a level 4 AD&D wizard can do, for example), but I am a little worried that once we hit higher levels -- some of which will be in P:E already -- the magic system will feel "flatter" and less involving. There is probably room for improvement there for the expansion and the sequel (always hoping there will be one).

Will check that out. My initial reaction is that it sounds like it would be hard to do without making things too easy. I don't think counters should necessarily be abilities or actions everybody can do. There just have to be enough different ones sufficiently available that you're unlikely to paint yourself into a corner. BG2 does rather well in this respect actually -- while you do need hard counters, there are many ways to get them. Arcane or divine spells, items, class abilities, scrolls, or, sometimes, ways to just avoid them. Sometimes it falls flat -- beholders, for example, are just stupid monsters, as monster designs go, and the <item> of Balduran used to counter their abilies are un-fun. (I didn't have that much trouble with them this time by the way. Sneaked ahead with PC to scout out their positions, then just used BVR spells to thin out the herds. Individual ones were easy to kill just by backstabbing. They're still really dumb though.)

BG1 isn't hard as much as random (at levels 1-3 or so, and especially with fragile classes like mages). To get through that all you need is quicksave/quickload and a relatively moderate amount of patience. I think it's not a lot of fun and am glad most games since then do things to make early game less instantly lethal, but it's not such a big deal IMO. Since it's lower level, BG1 is much less complex and therefore easier. As to BG2, much of the difficulty comes from not knowing where the hard battles are, and where to find the easier things. Once you do know, it becomes immensely more enjoyable. One of my long-standing criticisms of it -- and this I haven't changed my mind about -- is that it's really terrible at communicating this to the player. If you're a paladin, it literally pushes the Firkraag quest on you even before you make it to the Copper Coronet; the first time you go to the Temple District it pushes the Blind Eye quest on you. Both of these are really tough nuts to crack for a low-level party, exponentially more so if you're not intimately familiar with the mechanics. And yes, I still contend that the game would have been objectively better if it had telegraphed the quest difficulty better and made you actively look for those harder quests rather than pushing them on you from the start.