PrimeJunta

It's not like DnD attributes were particularly simulationist either. I'll give you STR, but the others are entirely gamey and arbitrary. CON - the toughness of your bones and thickness of your skin has nothing to do with your immune system or ability to deal with poisons. DEX - watchmakers do not necessarily make great gymnasts, and vice versa. INT - the ability to do maths is unrelated to the ability to write a book, and neither has anything to do with the ability to find a secret door. WIS - bullheadedness is just about diametrically opposed to a knack for getting deep, intuitive insights into things or understand someone else's motivations. CHA - same stat covers Azog the Defiler (intimidation), Brigitte Bardot (seduction), and Miles Davis (good at playing a trumpet). Makes no sense.

Haha wow. Are you for real? That's .sig material right there.

My nephew (age 5) doesn't need handicaps to beat me. That may also be because I kinda suck at chess.

Hehe. If there's one thing these forums have taught me, it's that people fixate on really different things. One person's footnote is a central, inalienable part of another person's experience. For me that would be the lore, worldbuilding, and writing. Fortunately that was never in question for this project, given Obsidian's excellent track record in that respect, not to mention what the project leads have done in that area before. I love Fenstermaker's work, MCA is MCA, and Josh's meticulous history-nerdiness and the way he's worked that into the lore is fantastic. I get bored of fantasy combat simulators pretty quickly if that's all they are. I want lore and/or story, ideally both. If it has great combat gameplay on top of that, I'm ecstatic.

You can??? Since when? :shock:

@nipsen wat None of what you say makes sense. In BB278, fighters were hyper-specialized, totally locked into the "defender" role. They were useless with ranged weapons, they had no talents supporting any other tactics than tanking. Same applied to the other classes. Attributes made virtually no difference to effectiveness, you could leave everything at 3 and still have a perfectly playable character. People did that to demonstrate it. Now you can make ranged, defender, or damager builds of fighters, and they do play materially differently. I've tried. Srsly bro you've been playing some imaginary game in your mind, not the real one that's actually here. Also if you think Josh has caved to the grog brigade, go listen to the grog brigade. If anything they've caved to me – most of what I asked for is in the game now, some of to the grog brigade's chagrin. (Also going to qq for a refund is epically childish. I'm really surprised you have the gumption to show your face here afterwards, especially with that sad paternal tone you're affecting. Grow up @nipsen.)

In theory. In practice the enemies keep wailing on you and damage comes straight out of your health, so it is an extremely quick trip to Maimed at the very least.

@nipsen you requested a refund? LOL at nerdrage.

@aeonsim That's probably a pretty good strategy for even a normal playthrough. Build up a champion in your party, with others as support, and let her do the hard work while the rest cheer from the sidelines (and cast some buffs).

Presumably that combat stands in the way of something you want to achieve. Isn't achieving that something (and the XP you get for that) reward enough for the combat? Edit: nevermind, I'm getting a strong sense of déjà vu. We've had this conversation, and I don't think it's very likely we'll end up any place different this time around, so I am respectfully bowing out of it.

If all the combat is avoidable, soloing would be easy, for sure, at least once you know how to build your character so you can get all the nonviolent solutions. I'm assuming P:E will have a bunch of combat that's not avoidable though. Edit: Triple Crown would be really tough though. If you go for a maximum-nonviolent solution, you'll be relying on stealth a lot. All it takes is one slip-up to trigger combat, and since you can't run from a battle, you are so hosed if you're not ready for it. No mistakes allowed at all.

I haven't seen enemies use any AoE spells. Edit: No wait, I have, and they didn't nuke their own. I'm all for more difficulty levels, but I think there are better ways to do that than changing the mechanics, e.g. removing friendly fire. Edit edit: Consider chess. If you want an easy mode against a stronger opponent, your opponent gives you a handicap -- you get to remove one of their pieces before the start of the game. The rules are still the same. Removing FF would be more like, I dunno, letting your bishops move like queens. It wouldn't really be the same game anymore.

I keep bringing up grinding because it's the only case I can think of where combat XP matters for solo runs. Smaller parties in P:E will gain XP faster, but not that much faster. It's not a pot of XP that gets divided by party size. More like a 5% bonus per "missing" party member. I do not remember the exact number, and I'm not even sure if it's been finalized. So soloing you'd get XP maybe 20-30% faster than with a full party.

Yup. But, again, I don't see how it makes a difference how you get that XP. Going quests-first isn't any different from BG2, for that matter. I'm sure that doing them in the right order is crucial to ironmanning it. There aren't even that many wandering monsters in BG2 if you don't grind with the rest system. It's obviously too early to tell if soloing will be easier, harder, or as hard as in the IE games, but I don't think it's going to be easy. That's kind of the point though, don't you think?

No, you can't.

But either way you're limited by the XP that's in the game (discounting respawning/grinding). In P:E I'd expect you'd be looking for sidequests with non-violent solutions or solutions that avoid the toughest combat early on. Still the same thing -- you want max XP for min danger. I honestly can't see what difference it makes how the XP is awarded, as long as you know what you need to do to get it. I suspect a bigger hurdle will be the XP equation -- you'll only get, what, 30% more XP soloing than playing with a full party, rather than six times as much. You won't be all that much ahead, level-wise. (Although of course the AD&D geometric level progression canceled out a good deal of that big pile of extra XP, especially later on.)

Haha, there's just a raging argument here where the grognards (=super-hardcore IE combat fans) argue that P:E combat is too static and not frantic enough (because of engagement) and feels COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from IWD and BG/2. Also, there is no prebuffing nor counterspelling in P:E. Now: the general consensus is that beetles bite too hard in the current BB. This will likely change in the next one which is expected at any time. They have so much damage threshold bypass that you're better off fighting them naked -- armor will just slow you down without adding any protection. That's clearly wrong. Re difficulty and learning curve, the BB is rather brutal since you jump in at level 4 (formerly 5) with a full party, and face off against enemies of that level. I'm sure the real thing will be much less so because you start alone or with 1-2 companions at level 1, so you'll have more time to ease yourself in. You might want to check out this thread about BB fighting tips for newbies. Also, there's no shame turning down the difficulty to Easy. The BB392 build is hard, and I'd say that Normal difficulty corresponds to Very Hard on most modern games and is IMO somewhat harder (because of the beetles) than IWD on Core Rules. I've been alternating between Hard and Normal with the different backer builds since the difficulty swings back and forth a quite a lot. Hard on BB392 is... pretty rough ATM.

Observation 3 is correct. You can add a third by picking a talent for it on levelup if you want to. Observation 5 is ... not quite correct. The trick with the rogue is to hang back until your frontliners have engaged, than use her to stab at enemies that are already engaged and therefore can't hit you. Observation 6 is correct, and will be changed in future BB's. "Damage mitigation/control" won't work, not in this build. The beetles and lions especially will hit you harder than any defense you can put up. The way to win is to do more damage faster. (Again, this may change in future BB's as the numbers are adjusted -- I think the design intent is that defensive builds and tactics are viable also, at least a lot of the time.) Anyhoo, here are a few pointers to playing it somewhat effectively. One: synergies. The rogue gets sneak attacks if an enemy has, basically, any negative status effect going. So, to get her to do damage, you have to slap those status effects on. The rogue can do this herself with Blinding Strike and Crippling Strike (if you take it on levelup), but it's much better to use other characters for it. BB Fighter can Knockdown and BB Wizard has all kinds of spells that inflict status effects. If you roll up a Druid, Chanter, Cipher etc. you'll find even more. The same applies to spells. Many of the enemies are pretty good at dodging BB Wizard's AoE damage spells, for example, but if you use an AoE debuff on them first (Slicken is way, way overpowered and will almost certainly be nerfed, but it will certainly work), then they will bite. Read the spell descriptions: for example, Fireball attacks Reflex, so to make it bite harder, find a spell that attacks something else (Will or Fortitude, for example) to debuff Reflex on the enemies first. Once you kill enough enemies to see their defenses, pay attention to those and attack whichever defense is weakest first. Lesson: use one character to apply a status effect on enemies (e.g. with an AoE spell or special attack), then another to exploit it (e.g. BB Rogue for Sneak Attack, BB Wizard for AoE damage). Two, crowd control. Look for crowd control spells in BB Wizard's and (if applicable) your PC's spell repertoire and use them, like, a lot. As stated, Slicken is something of a "win" button right now. Druids have a second-level spell that wins beetle fights handily (it Paralyzes animals), plus a number of others that inflict Hobbled or Slowed, and so on. Even apart from the synergies, they'll stop the beetles or whoever from zerg rushing you and give you time to deal with them. Three, positioning. Assign two characters to frontline duty. If you make a fighter, barb, paladin, or maybe priest, they're good candidates. Otherwise I usually use BB Fighter and BB Priest. Armor and shields are useless against beetles but useful against most other things (this too will change). Once the front line has engaged, you can circle around with BB Wizard (and/or PC, if applicable) and use those cone and line-shaped spells to great effect. I especially like Ice Knives because it not only does damage but also inflicts Hobbled, which makes BB Rogue happy and other spells bite harder. Four, choice of target. This will likely change as the game is rebalanced, but right now your first priority should be to kill or neutralize the heaviest enemies engaging your front line the fastest. This because, as you said, everyone's so fragile. So, once BB Fighter engages a beetle, have him immediately use Knock Down on it so it won't bite, then hit it with everything you've got. Rinse and repeat until victory. If you've used crowd control you will have time to win it. Five, choice of weapon. Some of the weapons just plain suck (and I'm sure that'll be changed too). I usually go whack Medreth's group first because they have some nice gear. The War Bow is the all-round best ranged weapon. The Fine Mace is really good because it has DT bypass. BB Rogue wielding two stilettos (also with DT bypass) hits satisfyingly hard. BB Fighter should stick with the morning star. Later on you can maybe upgrade someone to an Exceptional Estoc and maybe BB Rogue to Exceptional Saber, because by then you won't have the super-heavily-armored beetles to deal with. You will also find firearms which you should experiment with as they're very powerful as an opening volley (but useless as the encounter proceeds due to the slow reload time). Six, build and levelup choices. Accuracy is king. When rolling up a character, pump PER to high heaven to get max Accuracy, take Weapon Focus as early as you can and stick to weapons in that group, and take any other talents that buff Accuracy. (BB Wizard has a level 1 spell that guarantees a bunch of crits for the next one he casts, so keep that in mind too.) That's about all I can think of ATM.

What does the way XP is awarded have to do with solo/challenge difficulty? The only way combat XP could affect that if there were respawning monsters so you could grind to level cap, which sounds like a pretty cheesy way of going about it.

That was your plan, though, wasn't it?

You do not need to "encase all your friends in lead and/or forcibly hold all the enemies in stasis for a while at a distance" to effectively use AoE effects in the BB. Not. At. All. The no-FF "green fringes" plus the way engagement stabilizes the battlefield means that neither your targets nor your party is scuttling around like ants. You can target them quite effectively without doing anything special about it. There's enough uncertainty to make it a little interesting, but not so much it feels you're out of control. AoE effects in the IE games were way less controllable. Especially as you couldn't see the AoE before actually shooting it off. I have to resort to all kinds of workarounds there to make them useful.

Ah, but D&D-ian morality is not apolitical at all. It is extremely political: deeply conservative in its essentialism, much like the fantasy genre in general.

Going by the BB, P:E would be a perfectly respectable adventure game even if you stripped out all the combat. Cool writing and highly reactive to your choices. I'm not surprised at all that people who hate combat would still want to experience the story. I'm sure there would be demand for a "story mode" mod.

That's an interesting thought. I think the problem with it is that "what humans are" is a really thorny question. We don't really know, other than "social primates." That leaves a huge amount of room for variants, and determining which one is "right" is a value judgment. When looking at really existing societies both today and historically, it's clear that we've organized ourselves in a blinding variety of ways, each succeeding and failing in different areas. Science -- physics, chemistry, to a lesser extent biology -- is relatively easy. There's a manageable amount of variables to deal with. Social studies -- social psychology, sociology, politology, psychology, historiography and so on -- are much harder because there are too many moving parts. You just can't demonstrate things to anywhere near a similar degree of certainty. Science is a poor lens to look at politics. Engineering is a much better one. We can look at what we have, examine what's working and what's not, and try to devise something better based on that. Either patch up the systems we have, or try to design something new based on what we've learned. (I'm generally speaking far in favor of the former, as designing societies from the ground up usually ends in disaster. I.e., I'm more of a Eurocommunist/Bernsteinian revisionist than a revolutionary, despite occasional bouts of Trotskyite fervor.) Edit: "and not necessarily humans as a whole; this could be unique depending on any amount of biological factors individual to population" -- Do you actually believe that biological differences between 'populations' have some bearing to political structures? If so, all I can say is . (Hint: There is no such thing as a 'population' in the biological sense in humanity today. We're not reproductively isolated, and haven't been for a long, long time. As much as you may dislike it, we're all one population bearing a big ol' mess of genes from all over the world.)