PrimeJunta

Every secret underground cult worth its salt has a secret handshake. The Skaenites deserve one too. How else are they going to recognize one another?

One more thing: there's one way I can tell I'm getting better at this. I'm using up most of my spells. I rest when (1) I'm running low on potions -- I like to keep about 3 Extra Healing per head --, and (2) Viconia's out of heals. Before, I usually had most of my spell battery still unused at this point. Now, I've usually used more than half, and most of the ones I've used are the higher-level ones. I'm also getting further between rests. I think I rested three times in the Sphere: once before the halflings (changed my loadout to be more anti-caster), once before the demon hunt (got several demon hearts! I think I'll have them pickled and exhibited on my wall), and once before the Tolgerias fight. I can tell that overcoming my hoarding instinct -- for spells, consumables, what have you -- is also contributing greatly to the fun.

First off, interim report on today's session. I gave some orders at the thieves' guild, then, curious about that government job, I went to see the wizard at the ministry. Took on a simple enough bounty on some nobleman that had annoyed them. Followed the breadcrumb trail out of Athkatla to the Umar Hills place where there was that rather easy quest, faffed about a bit there, running some errands for the mayor but not going to that temple, and eventually found him in a shack on an escarpment. He explained that the Cowled Mages were really after his blood in order to get into something called 'the Planar Sphere,' so naturally I murdered him and used his corpse to get in there myself. Then all kinds of fun ensued. This was probably my favorite part of the game so far. Great set-piece battles, great variety, exciting maps. The only thing I didn't care for in the Sphere was the puzzle with the symbols on the floor. I couldn't find any clues to it, so I just trial-and-errored it. Got it right on my second try, but that was pure luck. Anyway, that was grand. Oh, and, I beat that necromancer without prepping for it. Had used my anti-caster spells against the halfling mages, so I had to fall back on scrolls. Fortunately I had one scroll of Breach and another of... something or other, and Viconia hadn't used up her Aerial Servant, so it wasn't that hard even if it took me a few tries. (Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting... ouch.) Also Viconia finally got some gauntlets that put her STR up to 18/00 so she can equip some decent heavy gear. With her self-buffs she becomes a quite a force of destruction in melee as well, if necessary. That makes me happy. Don't care much for the Thieves' Guild gameplay. The gold amounts are so piddling that I don't have much incentive to care. I'm up nearly a thousand GP though with two rounds of it. That's almost 1/50 of my current bank balance, so woo-hoo. It does put a gentle time pressure on other questing, though, which is good because it makes me watch my resting. I had to "cheat" (by my twisted standards) in the Sphere once, because I got caught with my pants down by that annoying Cowled Wizard, so I reloaded, loaded up some casterfight magic, and proceeded to reduce them to their component atoms. (That one was a legit suckerpunch. Took me completely by surprise, and I honestly can't imagine how I could've been expected to prep for a casterfight there. I didn't get mad though 'cuz I'm starting to accept that that's just the way this game rolls -- Stun describing it more like basketball than a movie was... enlightening.) Some further comments. One. This style of playing is growing on me. I've stopped caring what my characters are "supposed" to know, and prep according to what I know. It is more fun this way. Two. A long time ago, Stun insisted that you do not need metagame knowledge to play this, that there are no suckerpunches, and if I think so, that's just because I suck. I still disagree with him about that. In fact, I'm starting to feel more and more strongly that metagame knowledge is the whole damn point. You play and play, practice and practice, learn more and more, and it gets easier and easier. Some of that knowledge is in-game. Most of it is metagame: who's gonna attack you where, where the traps are, where you're gonna find the cool gear that makes life easier for any given stretch of it. Three. I am beginning to see the appeal of that. It's the same appeal as in NetHack, where you play over and over and over, get deeper and deeper and deeper, and find all kinds of tricks and twists that let you survive. (I have a "but" on that, but I'm pretty sure you guys can already guess what it is, so I won't repeat it here.) As to save-or-die... it has its place. There is such a thing as too much of it though. I still think the IE engine gameplay would be more enjoyable if somehow the order of things -- specifically magic -- mattered a little less. As it is, the magic system mechanically favors the attacker: if you get your attack to bite first, the other guy is not going to be able to cast, and you win. Which is why they put in all these spell triggers and contingencies, to make things more interesting. I'm going to have to do some research on mage battles in BG2 actually. I found one obvious way to beat them -- send in a summons, preferably immune to as much stuff as they'll lob at you, so they'll fire the offensive spells at them, during that time zap Breaches and what have you at them, then send Korgan to finish the job. Easy-peasy. But since Stun, Sensuki and others have said that there are many, many other ways to do them, I'll have to study up a bit. 'Cuz I'm getting curious. I'm a little concerned about this in P:E actually. If it won't have similar things, suppressing mages will be trivially easy -- you just assign someone to a high-Interrupt, fast attacking ranged weapon, ideally give him a few Interrupt buffs or talents, and plink away. No way they're gonna get a spell off. That's certainly the way it works in the BB's only magefight. (Except that if you're rocking firearms, you'll also gib him in the first volley.)

I agree it's not necessary. That wasn't my point. (It appears I was wrong about how universally discoverable it was.) It was, however, the first IE tactic that I figured out. It was with a bear wandering just outside Candlekeep. Then the ogre with the girdle fetish. Then others. I kited pretty much every creature that was either (a) slow or (b) solitary. You can kite wolves just fine as long as there's only one and there's some object like a tree to run around. My point is that if the game has obviously discoverable easy but dull exploits, then a lot of players are going to discover them and look no further, instead refining their ability at that particular dull and easy exploit. Therefore, the game should (a) minimize the number of easily discoverable but dull exploits, (b) incentivize the player to play in a way that's fun rather than dull, and © point the player in the right direction. Of these, IMO (b) and © are far more important than (a). I think both BG's would have had far more Stuns and Sensukis and far fewer Gfted1's without changing a damn thing about the mechanics, if only they had paid more attention to (b) and ©. This would not have limited the grognard battalion's options the least, either.

@Jarmo Not sure I want to play IWD2 again. I have a half-finished game waiting to be resumed somewhere. Those waves after waves of identical filler enemies wore me down, even though some of the setpieces were as good as anywhere (the battle of the bridge was particularly memorable -- as indeed were the fights in the starting town). I'll keep playing BG 2 for a while -- not sure I'll finish that either; I really couldn't care less about Irenicus and Imoen at this point, but I do want to see what else is in Athkatla -- and then maybe Heart of Winter which is one module I never tried. (I think it's the last major IE game/expansion I haven't played to date.)

Flashback to 1984 or thereabouts. Our first ever AD&D session. I was voted DM. We spent an entire Sunday lovingly crafting our characters. Even carefully drew portraits to the best of our ability. Then we set out for Adventure, using some prepared module, don't even remember what. Miraculously the party survives the first encounter with goblins or something. There's a chest. The thief checks for traps. I secretly roll, like, a 3. No traps found. He opens it. "As you open it, a small needle flicks out of the lock and jabs you in the wrist. Roll a saving throw against Poison." It's another 2 or 3. "Uh... well, you're dead I guess. Wanna roll a new character?" That... was not fun. It is also conceivable that at least a part of my aversion for save-or-die mechanics can be traced down to that incident. Young minds are impressionable after all.

Fair enough. Perhaps I'll come to like it too, eventually. Not convinced yet though. Edit: ninjae'd, that was in reply to Save or Die.

What about if Finger of Death too two rounds to act, and you had one round to apply a counter before dying, after being zapped? "Hit by Finger of Death? Apply Kevorkian's Arcane Defibrillator, level 3, mages only. Now for sale at well-stocked magic merchants!"

@Stun You can't believe how relieved I am to hear that. Looks like looking things up and asking fellow adventurers for help isn't "cheating" then. Another preconception of mine getting into the way of fun, clearly. BG 2 isn't a game. It's a way of life.

Yep. Incentives are powerful. In Rome 2: Total War, they changed the way mercenaries work. Before, you just bought them once, then paid normal upkeep, and many of the mercenary units were very cool or plugged a hole in what your faction could do (at that point anyway). In R2:TW you pay the full cost every turn. I liked that change a lot. I still use mercenaries, but only when it really counts; then I use them as shock troops since I'll be letting them go the next turn anyway. It adds a new twist to both the strategy and the tactics, and I think it's also more like how real warlords used real mercenaries. It was a dangerous business. (If on top of that they added a mechanic where mercenaries would start demanding higher prices if your general or side got a reputation of having lots of them killed, it would be even cooler.) Edit: and another thing about incentives. I think one reason for the abiding hate between the 'grognards' and the 'casuals,' aka everyone else, is related to incentives in BG1/2 in particular. It's a combination of the "throw him in the deep end of the pool and let him learn to swim" approach on the one hand, and highly exploitable systems on the other. What's the first "tactic" you learned playing BG1? I would bet it's kiting. Have Imoen and PC take turns pulling a bear or an ogre while the other one pelts it with arrows. It's a really efficient tactic in terms of in-game resources, but it's also really dull. The consequence is that lots of stopped right there. Because kiting worked so well, we kited every damn encounter that could be kited, adding twists like pulling enemies one-by-one, and so on. These are all tedious, repetitive, dull, and efficient. Consequently, we missed out on almost all the fun the game's combat could offer. I believe this phenomenon goes a long way to explain Josh's obsession with eliminating exploits and "degenerate strategies." They simply make many, many players miss out on the fun. I also think it would be even better to find ways to direct players to use the fun strategies from the get-go, rather than focus on eliminating the un-fun ones.

@GordonHalfman very good points. I think a lot of the time we have been talking past one another just because we have different ideas of what a "hard counter" actually means. You're also probably right about option (A) and BG2. As Stun is fond of pointing out, there really are lots of ways to do things. You can get into situations where you need to backtrack and come back later. That's not a bad thing at all IMO (except for that ludo-narrative dissonance thing which presents most quests as not something you can just drop and find waiting for you three weeks and five levels later.) I 95% agree about encounter design and challenge also, and I'm not even sure about the 5%. Signposting again. I find it fun to knowingly push somewhere I know will kill me dead if I'm not extremely resourceful. I do not find it fun to innocently blunder into something that kills me dead in no time flat. I.e., the problem isn't the encounter design; the problem is if the game neglects to communicate to me that I'm about to do something dangerous. BG2 does do this kind of communication on occasion -- f.ex. the ex-worshippers guarding one of Kangaxx's sarcophagi warn you that there's something really nasty there, plus there's all the "emanates chilling aura of evil" descriptions and such. I have issues with the times it doesn't do it, like the trouble I had with the beholder cult quest. I don't have a huge problem with level-gating content BTW. NetHack does this; you won't get your class quest until you're a certain level. That makes leveling up to that point an objective in and of itself. Used sparingly, that can work too. Used everywhere, it makes you feel like you're being yanked on a leash. Generally however I would prefer more subtle signposting.

There is a console. I haven't played BB392 on Easy. Normal in BB392 is... kind of hard actually, compared to most modern games. I'd say it's about the same as IWD on Normal with a decent party. Some classes are kind of out of whack though so it's a lot easier played some ways than others.

@archangel Why would it be worse? -- I think it would be better. I like the back-and-forth part of attacks and counters, and immunities make that backward, forth-and-back rather than back-and-forth. As I said elsewhere, I'd also remove dedicated counters altogether, and roll the "counter" effects into other spells. I.e., have every spell do something useful, and also counter something harmful. I think it would make the gameplay more interesting and dynamic, rather than just making the counters a flat resource cost. @4ward There are enemy casters and adventuring parties in the BB who have similar abilities as you do, and the spiders throw webs from a distance. There's nothing in the mechanics that precludes stun/charm/confuse from afar, for sure; whether and how much of that they'll put in I obviously don't know. There's not a whole lot in the BB; there are a couple of enemy casters but they're extremely easy to neutralize so I don't think I've ever been slapped with anything worse than Slow. As to melee enemies: I think persistent effects are out; even petrification is temporary, and I don't know if there's level drain. That's a shame IMO, as they make certain enemies that much scarier and something has been lost if you know you can just wait out any status effect (and waiting it out won't even take very long). The main diff. between P:E and IE combat is engagement, which changes the way the encounters feel a lot. In P:E, there's a rush to initial positions, the front lines engage, and things settle down; then you have a period where you move around your non-engaged toons for maximum effect (circling to the side of the melee with your wizard to blast with Rolling Flame, flanking someone with your rogue to backstab etc) and deal with enemies doing the same (a beetle getting behind your line is Bad News). It's a much more deliberate pace; you can't just rush for a high-value target somewhere in the back without getting clobbered. The grognards on this thread really really love the way movement works in the IE games. Over the past few weeks I've gone from actively disliking movement in the IE games to quite enjoying it. I still prefer the more measured and deliberate pace of P:E though, but I understand why Stun, Hiro, Sensuki and the others are so angry about it. It is a big change, and it's legitimate to expect that something that significant wouldn't be changed in a game promising "combat from IWD." (IWD2 notwithstanding -- it didn't have engagement, but it did have attacks of opportunity which had a similar effect restricting movement.)

@archangel Suppose level drain took two rounds to take effect, and slapping Negative Plane Protection on the character in the time window would stop him from getting level drained. Worse or better?

Mine too. Which is one reason I never really developed a huge enthusiasm for the fights. It's just not a fun way to play. It only got seriously fun when I developed quicker and more varied but costlier (in in-game resources) tactics. Another thing that's greatly increased my enjoyment of these games: overcoming my hoarding instinct. Now I'm using consumables a quite a lot, instead of saving them for later. Resting and memorizing another Haste is more efficient in terms of resources than glugging a potion of Speed, but glugging a potion of Speed involves less clicking, has a more relaxed duration, and is more fun. I consider this a bit of a design issue in the games: they do incentivize boring and tedious activities by making many fun activities cost more. I don't think most of us count "time played" as a resource. /bracing for more sneering from @Stun

More musings. I'm feeling BG2 is a lot like IWD would have been if they had put the areas/encounters in a random order. I.e. if you could stumble into Yxunomei or Malavon straight out of Easthaven, by taking a particular direction, i.e. they had left it up to you to discover/decide in which order to do the encounters. I can see why someone would consider that fun. I liked Gothic 2 a lot precisely because it kicked you hard in the groin if you went off in the "wrong" direction, but let you do so nevertheless. However, it did communicate to you quite clearly when you were about to do that. One of my more memorable moments in G2 was in a later playthrough when I snuck to that pyramid to get that badass sword early on, avoiding all the monsters I knew would roflstomp me if I got spotted. But... I do like meself a bit of signposting, and do feel BG2 would be much more accessible without detracting at all from the "hardcore" experience if it had more of that. It's a shame nobody will ever mod that in, because modders are by definition hardcore players and won't need it.

I bet you get a lot of girls with that line.

I could name a few names. They usually show up, throw a hissy fit, and leave.

Or go with Linux.

@Hiro Thanks. I knew about that actually and had the fight proven too tough that's what I would've done. In my first attempt I snuck to the feeding area and figured there's something I could do there, there were dog bones, I had previously seen the kennels, and clicked on the kitchen thing where it mentioned I could make stew, so I had put the pieces together. (I really like dogs though and would have felt bad about it so I kind of didn't want to. There must've been plenty of roasted troll bits lying around; it's too bad there's no way to use those.) My questions e.g. about metagaming it were more general. I beat them easily with Cloudkill last time, but intentionally did not go out of my way to get that this time around, "because my characters wouldn't know about it." I'm getting a feeling that this "because my characters wouldn't know about it" thing is actually detracting from my enjoyment rather than contributing to it.

Annnd... another thing, regarding that favorite bone of contention, hard counters. Specifically: immunities (something you apply before you're attacked, like Negative Plane Protection vs level drain or Chaotic Commands vs confusion), or counters (something you apply after you're attacked, like countering one Charm with another). There's one thing about hard counters in BG2 that I don't like. Namely, that it's so vitally important to get the counter in first, a lot of the time, and a lot of the time, the set-pieces are set up so that things materialize at you out of thin air, more or less. If the attack hits before the counter, it's very often combat over, or at least one or more fatalities. This gives an incentive to apply the immunity before the fight, which your characters couldn't know about but you do because you just died and reloaded. Consider level drain. Negative Plane Protection is a hard counter available at a relatively low level, but in limited numbers. Yet the casting time is pretty long, and because of the high cost of Lesser Restoration (essentially, a rest, and if you're a caster, two rests because you'll need to re-memorize your spells), you really want to avoid getting level drained. My preference is for counters over immunities. I got a huge kick out of the magicfights in IWD's Severed Hand because they worked like this. Someone was Dire Charmed; Dominate them right back, or Hold Person to get them to stay put while it wears off. Immunities should IMO be largely on items, not spells, and these items should be rare. So, another question to the grognard gang: which one do you prefer, immunities or counters, and why?

Questions, especially to Stun and Sensuki. (And yes, this is relevant to P:E, bear with me.) I'm noticing that a lot of my preconceptions about how you're "supposed" to play this type of game are interefering with the way I'm playing it (which I'm trying to shake, more on that below). I also notice that it appears that both of you have a somewhat different approach to playing it. For example, the umber hulks in the Keep. This time I didn't have Cloudkill available, and the fight was a lot tougher. I tried to "man fight" it, as per Sensuki, and it did not work. Even when buffed to the hilt, Korgan didn't survive a massed umber hulk assault for long, certainly not when I sent him into the room, and not even at the door, and they move so fast I'm just not able to keep up with the AI to manipulate it, other than to the extent of having my Chaotic Command-protected Korgan absorb the Confusion attacks. I eventually won it with a fairly intricate combination of Web + Ice Storm + fireballs + Korgan mopping up the survivors. And a fair bit of reloading. But that was OK, going into this with a three-toon party I'm expecting some things to be a bit harder. Now: Sensuki's general strategy appears to be based on having figured out how the AI does targeting, and manipulating that. Stun, on the other hand, appears to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything in the game, and is able to find the optimal mechanical solution to any situation with whatever's available. ("Just polymorph into a mustard jelly. WOW!") I.e., Sensuki's approaching this more like an RTS, and Stun is approaching this more like a set of problems with a set of tools to solve them. (Incidentally, Stun's approach is more to my liking.) Am I at all on track here? And Stun: did you learn all this yourself from the game, or did you use resources that didn't come with it (a little/sometimes/a lot/yeah baby!) Then: I notice that there are efficient things I don't want to do because, for some reason, I don't think a game "should" be played that way. These things include: "Easy" strategies, unless I discover them myself, while playing the game. Web + Cloudkill on the umber hulks was fun because I figured it out myself (and used an expendable). I didn't know Cloudkill yet, and I didn't go buy the scroll because "my character wouldn't know about this." I did the same thing with the beholder quest: I knew -- metagame -- that I'd be facing beholders, and I knew -- also metagame, probably derived from reading it somewhere ages ago -- that Glitterdust would be extremely useful against them, but when going into the sewers "my characters wouldn't know that" so I didn't pop by Adventurers' Mart to buy it. Instead I set myself up for a highly frustrating tiptoe crawl involving summons out the wazoo which I did not enjoy. Use of metagame knowledge, like which quests I should take in which order because of the challenge level or some particularly cool item/character/whatever I should get early on. Clearly for many of you, discovering this in multiple playthroughs is a big part of the appeal. I think to really appreciate BG2, I'd have to shake this preconception as well. This is why I enjoy roguelikes: there's the same process of learning the game, but the particular content is different every time. Exploiting the AI -- Sensuki's favorite strategy, basically. For some reason I feel I should pretend to myself that there's an actual intelligence behind there, and thinking "if I do X, then I know the AI will switch targets like so, and I'll win" feels like I'm exploiting the system rather than playing it "fairly," whatever that means. I.e., Stun's approach of using the right tool for the job is much more appealing to me. (Mah immershun!) Believing what the characters in the game tell me. For example, if someone says something is urgent and "won't wait too long," I tend to take that at face value. This was one of the things that ruined things for me in the first attempt. I think I get the famous ludo-narrative dissonance (got to use the term in context!) when I agree to do something urgently and then ignore it. (I'm like this IRL too by the way. If I promise to do something by some time, I do my level best to get it done. I'd rather not promise.) Going through the same content again, unless there's some materially different way to do it. I didn't enjoy de'Arnise keep all that much this time; I knew what to expect and what to do, and just did it. The umber hulks gave me pause because no Cloudkill, but that's about it. So, another question: you who have played this game through multiple times -- say, more times than there is gated content in it, like the class strongholds -- what keeps you at it? How do you keep it feeling fresh? And finally, the relevance to P:E. (1) Other than adding lots more gated content, is there a way to make the game less punishing for a first-time run (or even a run 10+ years after the first run) while maintaining a similar level of replayability? If so, what would these be? (2) How should metagame knowledge be taken into account when designing a game like P:E? For example, in a game where you get to pick the order in which you do things, if you place a powerful artifact somewhere, players who know it's there will beeline for it. When is this good or bad? (I just beelined for Frost Reaver +3 and I don't think it'll make the game less fun. OTOH beelining for the Enclave in Fallout 2 will kind of make the whole game derp since the Enclave Power Armor is effectively godmode). (3) How important is mechanical and narrative consistency? If a character tells you something is urgent, for example, should the game enforce it? Always? Sometimes? Not at all? Should you know how urgent? What should the consequences be?

Ahhh... good. I'm not 100% hip on what the stats of each summoned creature is. Is this information (e.g. about an aerial servant's fists) available in the game somewhere? How about elementals? I read the spell descriptions and there was nothing there. I've used Lower Resistances but it hadn't occurred to me that it would work on golems. My mind equated 100% resistance with immunity. Subtle, but def. something that a smart player can figure out. -- Did de'Arnise Keep again. The maps were much easier to navigate with a party of three, but I still didn't care for them. The lowest floor in particular has you progressing from north to south, and if e.g. you're holding the Umber Hulks at a doorway, it gets very tricky to click on them because the door is in the way. I wonder if it was developed early? The Umar Hills maps were much more polished, as was the tomb map for Kograk's axe. It'll also be interesting to see if the level of polish in the P:E BB maps is characteristic of the full game, or if there will be similar differences in quality there.

Interim report. I busted Xzars buddy out of the Harper hall, only it wasn't him at all! **** move, Harpers. **** move! In other words, cool twist. As quests go, this one was good. Then one thing sort of led to another, and now I'm running my own thieves' guild. Left a trail of corpses in my wake, including that one traitor. His fault for not wanting to talk to Renal Bloodscalp. In other words, yeah, this is fun again. I hope the thieves' guild timed stuff won't mess too much with plain ol' adventuring; I kinda like the idea of checking in every 5-10 days, as it also serves to "organically" limit resting. And I know what the schedule is. I gave some orders more or less at random; hope the place is still standing when I get back from wherever. It'll also be interesting to see what tips, if any, P:E's stronghold mechanics take from that. The whole lieutenant-and-assigning-orders thing is clearly similar to the stronghold in NWN2, which was IMO one of the better parts of the game. The wizard fight in that quest had me trekking back to a shop by the way. I had no +2 weapons, and those stone golems needed dismantling. It was OK though; there was an affordable +2 mace which Korgan used to clobber it, and now Viconia has it (shame she's not much good at hitting anything with it). Anyway: the Xzar/Montaron questline and the Thieves' Guild questline were both highly enjoyable... when played from a Neutral Evil mage/thief point of view that is. Also, still leveling up like blue blazes. Am liking this three-toon strike team much better than the previous full party. Banter is much less annoying too. I think that's enough BG2 for today though. I will definitely continue this later. Maybe use mah metagame knowledge and go do that de'Arnise Keep again -- there's a sweet axe there for Korgan whose +1 battleaxe is really not cutting it. -- So yeah, I can see why you guys thought this was a good questline. It is. I stand by my original criticism though, that it should have featured more reactivity for those drawn into it willy-nilly. There were obvious evil or at least selfish dialog options in the poisoned-dude quest, so it should not have been hard to add them converse there. So, here's another thing I dig, and I hope P:E will be able to feature: I took off in a completely different direction, am having a completely different experience, and it's working out great. That's a good kind of content density. As I've said, my beef with Athkatla isn't what's in it; it's how it's presented/flung at you. @Stun: Thank you. I'll pay more attention to items especially. I have been using consumables a lot more this time around, as there really are a lot, and they're only taking up inventory space anyway. Having to overcome a certain amount of hoarding instinct, but that's all good. Re golems, I'm curious -- besides +2 or better weapons, how do you kill a stone golem? I had no problem with the ones I met since I could just go out and buy one, but I'm curious.

... But hey: let's reflect on P:E. Here's another thing that's different between BG2 and P:E -- alignment. We've been talking a quite a bit about how (not) to play a paladin, or a Lawful Good character in general. Now we're talking about Neutral Evil. P:E doesn't have alignment, only reputation and disposition, and the various paladin orders have their ethoi you're supposed to follow. It seems these are being tracked, since there are some talents which let you work around them if you do the "wrong" things. I've always felt ambivalent about alignment in DnD and am in fact not sorry to see it gone in P:E. On the one hand it's constraining and pushes especially less experienced RPG'ers into caricatured Chaotic Evil mwahahaha stereotypes. On the other hand, I really dig the Planes, and the Planes would not work if they weren't aligned to the ethoi. Alignment gives us the Blood War, spells like Protection from Evil, Holy Smite, Unholy Blight, the good DnD3 priests' spontaneous spell conversion, Turn/Rebuke Undead and so on. It's quite crucial to many mechanics, and greately enriches the multiverse. So, thoughts. No alignment. Gain or loss?