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PrimeJunta

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Everything posted by PrimeJunta

  1. PrimeJunta
    That's... actually not Communism. More like syndicalism maybe. There are many different Communisms really, but there is one thing all of them have in common: the abolition of private property, either as an ideal or as a practice. Some go all the way, others -- notably Marxism-Leninism and most of its variants -- only want to abolish private ownership of means of production. Some pull back even further, abolishing private ownership of the 'commanding heights' of the economy (heavy industry, finance, essential infrastructure). From there on out the line between Communism, socialism, 'market socialism,' and plain ol' more-or-less-welfare-state late capitalist polities gets increasingly blurry, as even rabidly pro-free-market countries like the U. S. of A have significant amounts of socialized infrastructure (the interstate freeway system, defense, public schools, etc. -- the US even spends more public money on healthcare than most other advanced countries, only it seems to disappear somewhere so they don't see much return on that investment, go figure). In a world where real soon now 1% of the population will own more than the other 99% put together, calling that ideal "outdated and not needed" is a bit... premature I would say. Edit: BTW I'm well within that global 1% myself. It's still wrong, as almost all of it is due to happenstance. You can check your ranking here.
  2. PrimeJunta
    I have a work-in-progress homebrew PnP game which is overtly political. It's more hard-sci-fi than Shadowrun but has more fantasy elements than Cyberpunk 2020, and throws in some New Weird and New Space Opera elements as well. Edit: It may not present all of them as reasonable, but I did make the Khilafah (Caliphate) and the Union of Democratic Workers' Collectives the two most obviously successful systems...
  3. PrimeJunta
    P:E stands on more than one leg. Remember the original pitch? Hero + companions, exploration, combat, and writing. "Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment."
  4. PrimeJunta
    It is longer if you buffed... whichever ability extends Duration in this build. As you probably did.
  5. PrimeJunta
    But it's not like that in P:E at all!
  6. PrimeJunta
    I never even noticed any anti-communist bias. I never played Dragonfall though. You encounter a orkish Communist policlub calling themselves the Arbeiters. Turns out they're just a bunch of thugs spouting vaguely Marxist dialog lines. You can express sympathy for them but the dialog lines read like whoever wrote them had a manager standing behind their back going "Write them! Write them or you'll never work in this town again!" It's striking how different their portrayal is from the F-state anarchists. It's quite clear where their sympathies lie. Which is perfectly fine of course. But a game based on Iain M. Banks's, China Miéville's or Ken MacLeod's unabashedly Communist ideas would be very cool too, and not only because my politics tilt more that way.
  7. PrimeJunta
    Long enough. Slicken is way OP. I think it's due to a bug which causes full-duration status effects on Grazes.
  8. PrimeJunta
    Huh. I think that's a big part of the fun of AoE spells.
  9. PrimeJunta
    Nah. I'd rather discuss games. Not here to educate anybody.
  10. PrimeJunta
    Symptomatic of racism, not because of racism. Not the same thing. Still an interesting topic, and still not something to pursue ITT.
  11. PrimeJunta
    Yep, that means 10 against everything else.
  12. PrimeJunta
    In the IE games having a party member go down is an automatic reload for me (until I have in-party access to Raise Dead, and often then too). I can't stomach the trek back somewhere they can be Raised. That makes many of the set-piece battles much duller than they could be since I end up not fighting them to the end a lot of the time. I prefer a somewhat more forgiving system that allows for closer victories. OTOH I don't care for NWN-esque "everybody always gets up unless it's a TPW" either. P:E's compromise suits me great.
  13. PrimeJunta
    They are. Get over it.
  14. PrimeJunta
    It would also really screw up the gameplay in a RT game where you want the toons to respond immediately.
  15. PrimeJunta
    Again: level of engagement is not the same as low or high maintenance, in PnP or a cRPG. I do not find IE game fighters less engaging to play than IE game spellcasters*, even though AD&D fighters have no active abilities at all. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip. There is no action a vanilla fighter can take in or out of combat that any other class can't take. What makes a fighter engaging to play is that it does what it does better than any other class. No other class can hit things as reliably and as hard as a fighter. If the paladin isn't working, the problem isn't that it doesn't have enough active abilities, it's that there is no thing that it does better than any other class -- or, as you put it earlier, it needs to be conceptually tightened up. *In the level range we're discussing here, say up to 12 or so. High-level DnD is a whole different game.
  16. PrimeJunta
    They do, but lately more in the backer beta forums. Here's a nifty tracker which digs out the dev postings for you: [ http://pedevtracker.azurewebsites.net/ ] Josh especially is pretty good at answering questions on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/jesawyer/ ] and Tumblr [ http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/ ] also.
  17. PrimeJunta
    Low/high maintenance is not the same as more or less engaging. The former is something of an objective, unambiguous quantity: a character with lots of passives and modals is low-maintenance compared to a character with lots of abilities you need to explicitly invoke. The latter, however, is a matter of preference. Several players in my AD&D group always rolled with fighters, despite the fact that there isn't much for them to do in encounters except hit things. Others always swung with mages and showed up at the session with a list of spells they'd decided to memorize beforehand so they wouldn't waste everybody else's time on that.
  18. PrimeJunta
    I disagree. Especially with a party of six to manage, I like it when I have a few chararacters I can just park somewhere and let them do their thing, while actively focusing on managing others. The monk for example is extremely high-maintenance and "active," and I really dig it -- but I could not put up playing with a party of six monks, it would just get too frantic. I think this too is largely a matter of how the game communicates itself to the player. In this case, if a class is designed as low- or high-maintenance, this should be communicated to the player in character creation. Even better would be -- as the case actually is with many classes in P:E -- if the player can skew a class towards high- or low-maintenance as she gains levels. Ultimately, the point of having classes in the first place is that they provide different gameplay experiences. High or low-maintenance is one way in which designers can create class differentiation. It would be a shame to leave it unused.
  19. PrimeJunta
    Me too. It's a good system.
  20. PrimeJunta
    Good write-up. I think the reason for treating Flames of Devotion and Liberating Exhortation as core abilities is that they originally were. Things went a bit wonky when they opened up the talent and class ability selection. I doubt there's time to do much about the lack of things to do in combat (also I believe the paladin was always intended as a low-maintenance class), but I hope they will adjust the numbers to make the talents less lopsided. As it is, the paladin clearly fails Josh's "no trap choices" test. That said, when I tried it a couple of times in BB392 I found it both effective and reasonably fun.
  21. PrimeJunta
    I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to mod though.
  22. PrimeJunta
    In your world, is there anything between "no restrictions at all" and "restrictions that are so strict everyone will just save-scum around them?" 'Cuz in mine, the two to three weapon slots sit somewhere between those two.
  23. PrimeJunta
    I tried making one for an aumaua, and it looked surprisingly good actually. Would've been even better had I cropped it a little tighter. Now that they've upgraded the heads, a screenshot option wouldn't be bad actually.
  24. PrimeJunta
    I think that's less likely than metagaming with grimoire spell selection. Weapon focus and specialization (for fighters) is extremely beneficial, which means each character will have a restricted pool of weapons to choose from. I think it's more likely that each character will pick the best weapons that fit their feats and use those. Smart players will give different characters different foci so someone can use anything, and then switch combat roles around if, say, something really really needs to be hit with a mace rather than a saber. Edit: @Gfted1 There are two weapon slots by default. Additionally one of the aumaua subraces has "Armed to the teeth" as a perk which gives a third one. You can also take an extra weapon slot on levelup as a feat. Edit edit: I can think of one good use for the third slot: gun in one, melee in one, other ranged in one. Unless they've changed the reload times again, guns are only good for one volley (but VERY good for that), so it would be useful to have something as a third slot.
  25. PrimeJunta
    @Osvir 3. is actually impossible. There is no way to exit the map if you are "in combat." Stun, knockdown, hobble etc. do not end the combat state even if you manage to break engagement. 4. A limited stash would be worse. It means that for a long time you're happily playing with no inventory Tetris, then boom, you're faced with a marathon of it at once. Cf. Fallout 2's car trunk. 5. You can change weapons in combat, but only between your two (or three) weapon sets. 6. I don't think there are one-handed guns anymore. Sadly pirate pistols are a thing of the past. And yes, special ammo would need a UI feature to use it. 13. There aren't any AI UI helpers to speak of (and a good thing too). Characters just use their basic attack if not instructed to do otherwise.
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