Captain Shrek

It's a PDF .

The psionic system inspired my groups new ruleset. It's amazing. But right now tied closely to the setting we use (also in house). Might forward it to you if you are interested.

Personally I am more in favor of the Psionic point buy system for Erudites. Now that is magic done right. It is a pity that psionic powers are no where close to what wizards get.

Not sure what you mean here. Vancian magic is associated with spell preparation as well and slots that are typically fewer than known spells. If you are referring to sorcerer like casters then it *might* make some sense.

So why not turn on god mode and not bother about combat difficulty? That way you have pretty explosions + story. Problem = Solved?

I wonder who is really butthurt here, shadowstorm. People who are making arguments or people unable to make arguments.

This would *break* lore to make it the most useful skill ever. Not even kidding. Think about it. Scroll of charm that crits all the time.

There, fixed. Cipher is game's easy mode. If you can't rofl-stomp every battle with him, you don't understand the game.

This is probably one of the best ways to create a good encounter design and mitigate metagaming. I have been advertising this approach since ages on beta forums: Just trigger quests based on dialogue comprehension. Let people decide for themselves by reading stuff where a quest is, how to solve it. That way metagaming only helps as far as replaying the entire game and not an encounter. When will people learn this... DX did it amazingly well. So did the first witcher game a bit . Best ever was of course morrowind.

Maybe reduce the trash combat from the game? That might make per encounter D4D mechanics unnecessary.

DOS has amazing combat. It has okayish encounters. In fact, I will be bold and say that DOS has better magic than ANY post 1997 CRP GAME ever.

Nothing needs to be prevented. Just make time a currency that you can spend. So that if you waste time things start happening. Makes healing magic and resting that more important.

DAO is nothing like an MMO. All the characteristics mentioned were well ingrained in RPGs before MMOs.

I have a better overall idea. Limit total carrying capacity. Make resting supplies heavy and use survival skill to check against intruders in the camp. There, fixed.

The fighting mechanics are terrible however, and are MUCH better in BG. It just feels like a cheap MMO rather than a RPG. Also, BG has more depth and is less gamey overall, there is more freedom (all this crap like giving your companions trinkets to get +1 to relations, or this horrendous camp). All in all, the result is thus: BG - finished several times, DaO - finished 0 times, stopped playing and never touched the game again. Neither do I want to. Lol. In what way is DAO like an MMO?

Well, it should, shouldn't it? Look at the time difference between releases of those 2 games. Why are you people so hell bent on trying to pretend that all new(ish) games were made without any history, with no reference, no previous (similar) work to take inspiration from, etc. Was BG perfect? Hell no, but at the _time_ it was made it really breathed fresh air into dying RPG genre (and no, Fallouts didn't have the same impact because of settings that a lot of people didn't like) Very good. Now read my posts in the thread and check that you agree with me 100%.

What are you talking about RoT has amazing low level story better than BG anyday. The combat is probably best ever for an RTwP. DSA ruleset is almost exactly applied as well as it can for RTwP. The *only* reason why it may lag behind BG in combat is the lack of spells. The melee and ranged combat in RoT >>>>> BG melee/ranged which is nothing but right click and wait. You guys have weird nostalgia filters. Even encounters in RoT are better than BG.

Why? It's not like those games are models of balanced attribute design either. Yeah, but D20 has undergone a lot of revision. Plus it has tons of content. Napoleon said, and I would back him up on that, Quantity has a quality on its own. pathfinder for example is an amazingly good system for Games. And there is no need per se to stick to D20. There are better RP systems out there.

DAO has ***WAY*** better C&C than BG. Equally bad encounter design and slightly better story.

But the thing is, almost none of the games released since BG were better than it. BG2 aside. So by itself it doesn't say anything. What are you talking about? Unless you mean RtwP this is untrue. Games like fallout, DX, Morrowind etc were superior to BG. Most of the fascination for IE games comes from their precedence to other games that were inspired from them and their aesthetic appeal. For RTwP itself, I would rank DAO and DAS:RoT higher than BGs.

Still, the fact remains that no way am i going to raise my mechanics to 10 on all 6 of my characters. Why would you be raising mech to all characters? Priest and rogue are obvious choices, maybe one other, you certainly don't need whole team on it. Because one guy can put JUST ONE TRAP. idiotic, I know.

Why play the game. Set it on autoresolve. Problem solved.

>Guns can pierce arcane veil Lol. This was probably the least important reason to use guns.

Limited camping and healing implementations are horrible. The idea itself is good though. Half-a**ed things like no healing but yeah inns cure everything make the game a chore. A better solution would have been limiting total capacity, restricted resting or at least danger-prone resting in certain areas. Still haven't understood why the HP/Stamina thing or no healing exists though. They contribute to bloating the game with unnecessary mechanics. removing the HP bar changes absolutely nothing.

Can you highlight what was 'good design' in BG exactly? While I like Pillars of Eternity more overall, I have to admit Baldur's Gate 1 had more interesting encounters. You had groups of all ranged enemies (kobolds, especially in Firewine Ruins), some powerful mages, big monsters (PoE has a few groups of ogres and that's it), spiders/slimes whose poison was actually dangerous, battle horrors. Encounters were more diverse. Heh. Alright, agree to that. Unfortunately, the encounter design in BG is not that great. Except in PoE it is not there mostly. For great encounter design, refer to Blackguards.