Micamo

I've not played it, but apparently Risen 2: Dark Waters takes this approach. From what I heard of it, it's supposedly not as immersive and wonderful as it sounds.

This is how things used to work in AD&D, and it was dumped in third edition for some good reasons: Not the least of which being "I'm level 9 and fighting CR 9 encounters and yet I still can't cast any spells above first level because my DM is being too stingy with giving out scrolls as treasure" or "My character is supposed to be a necromancer but I can't find any scrolls of Animate Dead to save my ass." Those two free spells you get each level up means the player has some control over what direction their character takes. Now, that's not to say I wouldn't be fine with some spells being unselectable at level-up that have to be acquired as a reward for a quest or something. But this should not be the only method for a wizard to get new spells.

Eh, good game design can avoid that problem and make gishes that are balanced with pure mages and pure fighters. The problem in D&D is trying to gish means you have to delay your spellcasting progression: Something that's utterly crippling because a new spell level gives you access to so much more power and flexibility that there's almost nothing that could possibly be worth giving it up: If you're ECL 7 and you don't have 4th level spells, you're pretty much strictly inferior anything that does. It's why playing races (or templates) with level adjustment or taking PrCs that don't give full casting is almost always a bad deal for a caster character (the exception is when you're doing something utterly ludicrous like dragonwrought kobold, and if your DM allows those he's either on crack or utterly sadistic). The best gish builds in D&D are the ones that don't actually take non-caster levels at all, they just walk around with huge buffs on themselves all day. Unfortunately they're apparently keeping per-day limits and spell levels in Eternity, so there's a big danger of running into the exact same design trap. My suggestion: Make gishes give up a number of spells per day in exchange for their martial abilities, rather than have to deal with delayed spell access.

Actually, the IE games sortof already did this. When you interact with an object or talk to someone, the isometric world freezes and all the action takes place in the dialogue box down below. Like in Torment, taking the items off the zombies in the mortuary, or dealing with pickpockets in the hive, or messing with the modron cube. The functional difference here is instead of showing a frozen view of the isometric world, the player is instead presented with a piece of art showing what they're messing with. That said, I'm worried that they'll let these scripted events scenes replace actually wandering around and exploring the world. If I have to explore a city, for example, by navigating through a Darklands-style dialogue tree instead of physically walking around and clicking on everything I want to check out, I will be monumentally disappointed. By all appearances this is the direction they're already taking: The crossing the bridge example we've already seen is a *perfect* example of something that should be done with the characters in isometric view that they're instead doing with a scripted event scene. In a rush to appeal to nostalgia by cribbing aspects of other old RPGs I'm worried they'll destroy the foundations of the IE-style game they were setting out to build in the first place.

The Gish is such a popular character concept it'd honestly be criminal if they didn't make it work: D&D is the only fantasy roleplaying system I know of that likes to give players a hard time about it.

Well, like I said, the specifics are hard to describe. I think the best way to illustrate my answer to your concern is to tell a story. I first tried Planescape: Torment when I was 12. Believe it or not, I actually didn't think very much of it. I started the game, saw the zombies, then I went through the mortuary and killed every zombie I saw. Then the dustmen started attacking me so I started murdering them too. When I got out of the mortuary I just wandered around the hive for a while, not really knowing what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. I eventually gave up and put the game down, thinking "Wow, why does everyone think that was so great?" Around 3 or 4 years later I decided to pick up the game again. This time, instead of killing all the zombies I saw, instead I talked to them first. Every last zombie in that mortuary has a unique, macabre description, and some of them have hidden goodies if you poke them in the right way. Then I talked to Dhall and listened to every last thing he had to say. Then I ran around the rest of the mortuary and talked to everyone and everything. When I finally exhausted the content in the mortuary, I left through the portal and entered the hive. Last time I sorta just ran through it skipping everything, but this time I was more careful. I went around exploring every nook and cranny, and everywhere I looked I found nothing but creativity and soul. When I had finished the mortuary I was in love, but by the time I had finished exploring the hive and (finally) went to find Pharod, I was a slobbering fangirl. The real problem the first time around, as I now realize, was that I was trained by other games that unless an NPC has a unique appearance or name, they have nothing to say to you, and that unless you're specifically told to go someplace it will have nothing of interest. I was taught that CRPGs were waves and waves of mooks occasionally interrupted by plot. I didn't find any of the magic in Torment because I never even thought to try looking for it. In other games the streets are filled with nameless clones to make the world merely look real, but in torment everyone has something to say and every object has a story behind it. Torment doesn't just enable scrutiny, it rewards scrutiny at every turn with a surreal, enrapturing atmosphere and fascinating, dare I say powerful writing and characters. It was almost everything I had ever really wanted in a video game.

Well, let me make something clear: I'm perfectly fine with different stuff happening story-wise with regard to a priest PC who defies their faith. I completely agree that there's a lot of interesting stuff that could be done with that, and it's a direction I think Project Eternity should explore. What I'm against, strictly, is this consequence being felt mechanically in the form of "You are now a walking bag of meat capable of accomplishing nothing but wasting space in the party." In D&D a Cleric who gets rejected by their god gets reduced to an Aristocrat with fewer skill points, a worse class skill list, worse proficiencies, and a better fortitude save. As a player, if you get stuck with this your best option is to just retire that character and roll up a new one. And since you probably won't be able to do that in Eternity it means you'll be stuck with that forever. Reload an earlier save. (Have fun with that in Ironman mode!) This is not having "deep and meaningful" consequences for your actions. This is having a great big "NO" painted over a portion of your presented options (potentially, a very large portion). It doesn't encourage roleplaying, it restricts it. Plus, not to mention this type of heavy-handed approach locks out several interesting character archetypes, depending on how restrictive you are. For example once I played a cleric who received her powers against her will, and she hates her patron diety. So she sets out to try to kill him, not realizing this will set her on the path the god intended for her (unfortunately the game fell apart before it could be finished due to out-of-game issues). It's a cool concept I had a lot of fun with, and I'd like to maybe be able to try to play something similar to her in Eternity, if I wanted. Carte-blanche shutting it out because it's "not roleplaying" would be pretty bone-headed.

"Hey, I lost my <MAGIC ITEM> while I was strolling through the <WILDERNESS AREA> because it was stolen by <MONSTER>. I'll give you a <REWARD> for killing the monster returning it." I was in some tavern where there's a guy who gives you the usual cookie cutter slay-monster-return-item quest, except after he gives it to you he steals some gold out of your pocket. I talk to him again thinking there's some dialogue option to confront him about what he just stole from you, right? Nope, he just steals some more. So I was all "You little bitch!" and straight-up murdered him right there in the middle of the tavern. Nobody seemed to care. I get my gold back off his corpse and decide to open my journal. "I met a little thief today who keeps stealing my gold! I don't want to cause a scene so it looks like getting his boots is the best way to get my money back." That's when I said to myself "You know what? No. I can think of a million ways I can better spend my time than this." I put it down and never picked it back up, and the only reason I maybe want to someday is because it's a classic RPG, and for that reason alone I want to be able to say I'd played it. (Basically, the same reason I powered through NWN2's Act 3.)

I think hour count is something that we, as a culture, need to seriously get over already. I've never finished BG1, but from what I played of it that probably would have been better than what we got.

There's a third option: If the player is clever enough, they can kill the villain early and win. If doing it early requires more intelligence and understanding of the game than doing it the long way, I say let the player have their victory. I think going out of your way to stall or negate the player's legitimate victory so you can extend the conflict hurts more than it helps most of the time. Like, take the Trial By Combat in NWN2 for example. What should have happened is if you win the trial and get declared Not Guilty, Nasher runs Torio out of the city without you having to fight Lorne. If they did that I would have been mostly happy with that sequence instead of fuming with rage over it (still would have been bitter about the whole squire thing, but that problem can't be so easily patched). Also, I kill Ammon at the moonstone mask. Shandra survives, I do the ritual of purification by myself, and maybe West Harbor has time to evacuate. I fail to see the problem with this scenario. You let them.

Then you don't put the villain there in Chapter 1 for the player to kill. You especially don't put him there, then make him arbitrarily invincible. At best you put an illusory projection there for the player to interact with.

I thought that only applied to while he's in his manse? I still cry foul (what, did he get the demons to give him Teleport as an SU somehow?) but that's at least marginally better than just being invincible because the writers won't allow you to even try to harm him. And, uhh, once again, I've played in tabletop campaigns that were great fun where I had all those powers and more. Why can't you do it in a CRPG? I like using magic to be creative, it's what attracts me to playing casters in the first place. Remember, when you write for a game you care about what the player experiences, not about what it'd look like from a third party reading the story of the player as a book or whatever.

No, the salient issue here is the dissonance between what I expect my character to be capable of doing, and what my character is actually able to do. The game even does this with spells that are actually implemented: A silence on Ammon at the moonstone mask would have solved so many damned problems (like Shandra would have survived), but I can't. What I hope to see in Project Eternity is that, when a problem appears that can probably be solved (at least partially) with the application of my spells, I can actually cast the spell right there and solve the problem. This goes for everything my character can do. Also, not being forced to work for complete ****ing morons would help too.

Number one, not being able to teleport is by far the LEAST of my problems with that quest, and with the game in general (though there are tons of situations where being able to teleport would have saved a lot of time and effort, especially after 9th level). Number two, the villains are able to teleport, and this just rubs me the wrong way. Taking powers away from the PCs to give them to overpowered Villain Sues is a pretty huge red flag that your DM is a total hack, if not one of the biggest. Number three, if a DM doesn't want teleporting in her game she can make her own setting (or modify an existing one) and just say "Hey guys, Teleport doesn't exist in this world." I'd accept that. The problem is we're playing in Forgotten Realms, where teleportation, divinations, resurrection, illusions, etc. all exist, the player just isn't allowed to take advantage of them for no well-justified reason (yes, SOME of them would be hard to implement in an open-ended way because this is a CRPG, but the player should at least be allowed to take advantage of these powers in scripted events). Then the game calls attention to the mysterious absence of these abilities by making certain aspects of the plot rely upon the player not having decent magic. It's just terrible writing all around. Number four, I've played in tabletop campaigns where I can teleport, and they somehow didn't have this problem. What's Obsidian's excuse? Yeah, and unlike you, I didn't ban conjuration, you dumb ****!* I bet that extra transmutation slot per day didn't come much in handy given open-ended polymorph and shapechange are out, huh? *"When I selected my banned schools, teleport was still a transmutation spell! It's not my fault the laws of reality have been updated since then!"

Much more important to me than having my class abilities recognized by NPCs is for my abilities to actually matter when it comes to what I can do in dialogues. Like, I remember that one quest where you had to protect the old dude who had the shard. The first thing that went through my head is "Okay, in case bad **** goes down, I need to get the shard from this guy before he croaks and it gets stolen or whatever. Where is it?" "It's in my pocket, and I intend to keep it there." Ooookay? Can I press him further on that? Can I pickpocket it off him? Can I cast a divination to see if he's lying or not? ****, can I even just roll mother****ing sense motive? Nope. You're supposed to just let it drop, and I was really ****ing suspicious right there. You fight off the demons that assault the house and then comes the big reveal: He didn't have the shard all along! (WHYYYYY!?) He gave it to Miss Dies-Before-Saying-Any-Lines, the apparent prostitute who is actually a member of the Nine. By the way, I love one of your options is to be all surprised that she was a member of the Nine in disguise. Oh, so I'm not allowed to roleplay a sensibly cautious planner, but I *am* allowed to roleplay a misogynist asshat? **** you. Anyway, I guess it's okay that she took the shard so she could take it somewhere safe and fortified like Castle Never. I'm sure they can handle fighting off the warlock's forces ther- wait, wait, wait, she took it to the Moonstone Mask? A brothel? ALONE!?? Okay, I'll teleport there right away and get the shard- oh, no teleport either? Great. I *walk* over to the moonstone mask on the other side of the city to find it filled with dead hookers. Wonderful. I arrive just in time to find Miss Strong-Female-Character dead and the not-villain warlock (who I later find out is Ammon mother****ing Jerro) teleporting away giving a speech about how evil he is. Wait, why can he teleport and I can't!? Don't give me that "he's way more powerful than you" bull**** because I've got 7th level spells, I should be casting Greater Teleport by now. Furthermore, why does my character just ****ing stand there!? Dimensional anchor! Bigsby's Grasping Hand! Silence! Evard's Black Tentacles! Web! Grease! Ray of Frost! A ****ing crossbow bolt! ANYTHING!!?! No, you have to stand there and be totally terrified of this villain that the DM is downright cheating to make look more competent than he actually is. If this was a tabletop game and my DM tried to pull this I'd have kicked him in the nuts, went home, and never played with him again. So, uhh, Lord Nasher, you have some explaining to do. 1. Why did the old man hang onto the shard until the last second? To deliberately lead the attacker there? Wouldn't it have been safer to just move it to a safer location as soon as it was realized that the shard made him a target? 2. Even assuming this whole switcheroo thing was a good plan (and it wasn't) why did you give it to Miss Name-Doesn't-Matter, and not, say, a high-level wizard who can teleport (hah!) away from innocents as fast as possible, and who is already a target thanks to having four shards already in her possession? 3. Why didn't you have her go to the most fortified place possible (like, say, Castle Never) to fight off any pursuers? Were you hoping her disguise as a prostitute and hanging out at the brothel would trick Ammon? Uhh, news flash, Nasher! If he has access to divinations powerful enough to locate the shard in Lord Smellypants' possession, he can also find it in the possession of some hooker. Unless you, you know, have A WIZARD (gee, I wonder where you could find one of those?) put some decent anti-divination abjurations on it. 4. Even if you could justify why she would need to be the one to take the shard, and that the brothel would be the safest place to hide it (you can't), why did you send me to guard Lord Oldguy the Incontinent (who already had plenty of armed guards) instead of the larger number of innocents over at the Moonstone Mask? Were you afraid I wouldn't want to disguise myself as a hooker to keep up the cover? Why didn't you ask? Giving up my magic items for the duration would have sucked but as long as I didn't have to sleep with anybody I could dress up the role and my dignity could have taken one for the team. Did you think Miss Never-Gets-Mentioned-Again was just so much more competent than me that she could handle protecting the shard by herself? Or, is it because you think Lord Lecherousprick was somehow more valuable and worth protecting than the 20 or so hookers who were murdered by Ammon and his demons? What, just because they're sex workers they don't count as people or something? **** you. As usual with bumbling allies in NWN2, you aren't allowed to ask any of these questions. You just get to say "Maybe the plan would have gone better if you had told me what's going on." In response, he just shuts you down and says "That was my decision to make, not yours." No, Lord Nasher, but it is my decision whether I plane shift you to the demiplane of infinite torture as punishment for being such a dunce! You just got a bunch of innocent people upright murdered for literally no justifiable reason (and you can screw up protecting the old dude, so it's possible for the plan to accomplish absolutely nothing at all). This isn't the first retarded thing you've done but it's the worst I've seen you do so far (but not the dumbest thing I'll see him do before the end of the game, as unbelievable as that may sound). You're the most incompetent authority figure I've ever met, and I think it's irresponsible to let you continue to breathe after this, let alone let you keep ruling Neverwinter, let alone keep following orders from you! (Oh, but you have to keep following his orders anyway because you signed up to be a squire. **** you, Obsidian.)

My problem with this mindset is that a cleric's faith in-game either never actually matters besides being roleplaying flavor, or the DM goes overboard and it makes the cleric class completely unplayable. (Whoops, you stepped on a spider without reciting the Three Prayers of Ethallion to send its soul to the afterlife? You lose all your powers forever.) The idea itself that clerics have to bow and scrape before a deity who can arbitrarily take away their powers at any moment is even setting specific: On Eberron, for example, every cleric is an ideocleric in practical terms (people in Eberron can invent, and subsequently become clerics of, new religions). Really, the issue of "What's the exact in-world difference between different spellcaster types?" is a question of worldbuilding, not mechanics. As far as Project Eternity is concerned, Obsidian, if my cleric character ever loses their powers because I made a wrong dialogue choice, I will never forgive you.

Call me crazy, but I honestly think DA2 was better than NWN2's OC. DA2 was a mediocre RPG with a few new ideas that was unfortunately rushed out the door as fast as possible to make a quick buck, but NWN2 was a completely dysfunctional, broken mess with almost no salvageable pieces or redeemable qualities. The difference between Demons and Devils (and between Law and Chaos in general) is whatever the current sourcebook writer says it is, everyone has a different interpretation; There's not the slightest modicum of consistency anywhere so there's no baseline to be faithful to. You can say you liked NWN2's interpretation, but to claim that it's a faithful interpretation is just plain silly.

I definitely saw that conversation, and it was much weaker than it should have been. His "admission" is "Perhaps I acted somewhat too rashly and should have stopped to think more about my actions." More fitting would have been "Everything I've ever done was entirely pointless and nonsensical because I'm the biggest idiot who's ever lived," but honestly even that wouldn't have been very satisfying. Redemption plots need a lot more than that to come off as anything other than hackneyed, and for someone who's gone as far off the deep end as Ammon it'd probably be impossible to do well. And even if they could, it wouldn't fix the real problem: Ammon is the classic DM's pet. He creates plot holes and stupidity everywhere he goes because the DM cares more about using him as a masturbation aid than making a functioning narrative. If I had suffered as much abuse playing in a tabletop game as I had suffered in NWN2, that DM would have ended the game needing a new set of teeth. The most likely hypothesis: They had intended for the player to assume Ammon had done it, then reveal later that he hadn't as part of a "Ammon isn't the bad guy you think he is!" twist. Then the reveal moment had to be cut, probably at the last minute, but the red herring hints thrown in that it was Ammon were not. It was probably just a sloppy editing error at the end of a development crunch.

Where did this get mentioned? I must have missed it somewhere, because that's actually really important. I was under the impression that after the battle he just retreated to his manse to build up his power for round 2. If he was getting raked over the coals in the Nine Hells instead, yeah, that sortof excuses why he wasn't trying to contact his family during this time. Though why wasn't doing a few divinations to check in on anyone he cared about, like, the very first thing he did after being freed? It also doesn't explain stuff like why he didn't know the Githyanki kidnapped Shandra specifically to use her blood to assault Jerro's manse. He somehow had enough intelligence on his enemy to assault their home base with a ****load of demons and devils, but not enough to know what they were planning to do? So he's an idiot, then. If you at the very least had the opportunity to bring this up in conversation and get him to try to justify himself on it, I could have swallowed this a little better, but as it stands you're supposed to just accept "Oh, he was murdering all those people For The Greater Good, so I don't need to question it at all." Are you SERIOUS!? Then what were the demons for? To fight the shadow reaver? But didn't the shadow reaver not even show up until after Ammon had already come and gone? It also doesn't explain why the Shadow Reaver hunted down and murdered everyone in West Harbor when they could have easily just skipped over it to get to the song portal, but at least they're supposed to be the villains so I can accept that they did it because "BWAR HAR HAR I R EBULZ" though it's still childishly bad writing.

Actually it's just the tabletop version of the Frenzied Beserker class properly implemented, not some Uber-special NPC ability the designers just made up. For some reason the one available to PCs in NWN2 is gimped and doesn't give you half the stuff it's supposed to. So, let's talk companions. It's no secret I didn't really like NWN2's companions overall (and really that's an understatement) but I feel like letting out some steam so I'm going to give my thoughts on all of them (though for most there's not really that much to say), in order of most-liked companion to least-liked: Shandra Jerro I like Shandra for a couple of reasons. First, she's the only companion who actually seems to want to follow you around (half of the others actively hate you and only do it cause they're forced to do so somehow and the other half just apparently does it for ****s and giggles). Second, she's the only one with a definable personality outside of her Race/Class/Alignment triple. Third, she's really the only companion it feels like you actually have conversations with. Most of the time the dialogues with other companions are just an exposition train: You ask them questions down the list and they give you their answers, one at a time. Occasionally, you'll be able to give a meaningless, cookie-cutter response that serves no purpose but to dispense alignment and/or influence points. She's not a great character but at least she's a passable, serviceable character. After she was senselessly murdered (don't worry, I'll get to that later) I kept that portrait of her in my inventory and felt really angry and sad whenever I looked at it. I'm sorry to say that makes her the best one in NWN2's OC by a huge margin. Khelgar Ironfist Oh look. A dwarf. Who likes drinking and getting into fights and who cares a lot about Clan Honor. Pass. Actually, I'm rating Khelgar so high because, as much of a walking stereotype as he is, he actually has a character arc over the course of the campaign (assuming you do his side quests that is). Granted he just morphs from one stereotype into another, but with the exception of Shandra that's more than I can say for anyone else. Amie and Bevil At least they're inoffensive. They don't really get the time they need to pan out one way or the other, but I'm rating them high because underdeveloped character is better than putrid, horrible character. Maybe if they had more material they'd have been another two Shandras. Or maybe not. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I like to think they would have been better written than some of the clowns here. Neeshka She's a Tiefling Thief. Also she has this ridiculous high-pitched voice. That about sums up everything about her. Actually just a Thief later on because about an hour after her introduction her status as a tiefling basically never comes up again. Grobnar A Gnome Bard. About as unfunny as it gets. Neeshka might have had a stupid voice but at least she doesn't make bad jokes all the time. Sand Oh look, it's Vaarsuvius, except written by a talentless hack. Rated extra low on the list because whenever Sand opened his mouth I couldn't help but feel "Man Rich Burlew did this waaaay better." Bishop He's one of our two Token Evil Teammates. Bishop is the companion that got the most content cut out of the game, so here's the point where I'd normally say "he probably would have been better if he had been finished before the game shipped" but I think we all know that's not true. I could write about his betrayal and **** but honestly, I expected it to happen from his very first scene and was only surprised he waited as long as he did. I just didn't care when it happened and I don't care now, which should condemn his writing as much as anything. Qara You know what I hate the most about Qara? I'm a Wizard, so you'd think my character would have some sort of opinion about Qara's whole "I do magic naturally! I don't need no stinking books or discipline or academies!" I had so many things I wanted to say to Qara, and not once was I ever allowed to say what I was actually thinking. I could only do generic "Yes, Mistress, I am your sniveling lackey who lets you do whatever you want" and "No! Bad girl! Magic is for grown-ups!" Out of all the concepts for the companions here this was the one I think was the most wasted potential. Casavir A Paladin. Actually, the only thing I have else to say about Casavir (because, really, "Paladin" is pretty much all there is) is his romance arc: There's no "arc" here, no story the player is participating in. Casavir silently pines over you, occasionally hinting at his affections. Then, at the end, he confesses his love for you and you can either accept or reject his advances. ...Is this how the Obsidian writers think relationships are supposed to work from the female end? Not once are you ever allowed to hit on Casavir or even reciprocate his not-so-subtle affections. It's a storybook romance played from the wrong end. The not-so-handsome knight quests for the love of the beautiful princess, who just sits around doing nothing because she's a reward for the knight's bravery and virtue, and not a person with feelings and opinions. It's not only boring, terrible writing, but I honestly think it's kinda misogynist. Zhjaeve Oh look, it's the DM's mouthpiece character! Zhjaeve's only purpose is to tell you what McGuffin you need to fetch next, and to be a ****ty imitation of Dakkon. Why is she so low on the list? One line. Just one: "So here I will make an oath, stronger than the Pronouncement of Two Deaths: The Pronouncement of Three in Darkness, Two in Light." No. No no no no no. Dakkon had actual character: The end of his character arc was a powerful moment because of what lead up to it and what it ultimately meant. You don't get to be more meaningful than that just by declaring it, you have to earn it. And you, Zhjaeve, have earned **** all. Don't you even ****ing dare. Ammon Jerro Alright. So this is the big one. Our other Token Evil Teammate. I'm gonna say this now, Ammon Jerro is probably the worst companion in any RPG I've ever played in my life. Every second he was on screen was unbearable pain, like dipping my face into a wood chipper. There's a lot I could complain about here but I'm gonna focus on the worst part. Okay, Ammon, so you did all this evil stuff to protect your family, huh? Questions? Oh, I have several. Number ONE, you say your family was "lost in the chaos" after the battle at west harbor with the king of shadows. What does that even mean? You couldn't find them so you assumed they were dead? Number TWO, if you were on our side against the King of Shadows all along, why have you been constantly trying to kill me instead of trying to make peaceful contact and explaining what's going on? This would have saved us both a lot of trouble! Number THREE, if you have powerful enough divination ability to find and harass me (and the other shard-holders) why didn't you use this to find your family? Or at the very least, try to get them raised? Number FOUR, how could you possibly not have found your family when they were living at your old farm? The same farm where you stashed those magic items you went back to find in Act 3? How could you possibly have never thought to look there, even if your divinations wouldn't work on them directly for some reason? Number FIVE, you say you didn't even know Shandra existed but she talked about how you sang songs to her as a kid. Did you just forget about this? Number SIX, when Shandra entered your Manse and started teleporting around, did you really not notice her presence? With you claimed omnipotence inside the manse, I find it hard to believe you honestly didn't. Why didn't you confront her and talk to her? Why didn't you remember THE VERY ABILITIES YOU PUT INTO THE MANSE and be curious why this stranger could use them? Number SEVEN, did you really need to bring a bunch of demons and destroy what little was left of West Harbor? The statue you wanted was way off in the mere. Couldn't you just port in and leave the village alone? Why did you need to cause so much extra pointless death and suffering? The only explanation I can think for this is that Ammon Jerro is either a liar, or he's the biggest idiot to ever walk the planes. Probably both. You know what I think, Ammon? I think you never cared about your family. Any of them. Maybe you told yourself that you did, but deep down they never really mattered to you. All that you ever cared about was how much wealth and power you could amass for yourself. After the battle your family wasn't "lost", you just told yourself that so you could run around making more pacts with demons without having to worry about feeling responsibility for them. And for what, exactly, have you sacrificed so much? Your limpdick warlock casting? **** you. You don't even deserve whatever awaits you on the lower planes: Nothing they could do to you down there could possibly be any worse than you just being yourself. And of course you're not allowed to kill him because Stupid Plot Contrivance #357. A contrivance that never even matters, because whenever a battle came up I always forgot my SLA's even existed: What did we need the Ritual of Purification for again, exactly? Cause that was a really long, really stupid series of terrible dungeon crawls that I really wish we could have just skipped. Also, I hate Ammon more than I could ever hate the king of shadows, can I just kill him as the final boss instead?

The trial sequence itself was my favorite part of NWN2's OC. It's the most well-developed and fleshed-out dialogue tree I've seen since Torment; The kind of sequence RPG developers told us became impossible with the rise of fully animated and voice acted cutscenes. Well, Obsidian proved you can do it. What's your excuse, ****? Everything before and after the trial itself was a load of horse **** though. Becoming a Squire of Neverwinter so you can be tried by High Justice. Gee, I wonder if this will be used as an excuse to railroad me into doing brain-dead stupid crap for these morons? (Spoiler alert: It is! Constantly!) You know, I have an alternate idea: How about I just kill any Luskanite who comes to try to capture me? Or how about I just go there for my "trial" and slaughter the entire chain of command? The way the storyline was going at that point I was convinced I'd have to go to Luskan and kill everything that moved there to get to Black Garius. I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked that I didn't (I sure as hell did have to retread everywhere ELSE I visited in NWN1), though how Black Garius actually dies was even dumber so that's hardly a consolation prize. The Trial By Combat. This was obviously a way for the player to get out of being executed if they failed at winning the trial (which I admit is better than making it impossible to lose) but why the **** do I have to do this even if I win? And for that matter, why couldn't I just call for a trial by combat in the first place? Why wasn't I even *told* this was an option until Torio pulled it out of her nasty ****? Would the trial by combat have been available if I hadn't gone through that Squire crap? Could I have just skipped becoming a squire and, thus, skipped all the bull**** I'm railroaded into doing as a consequence of it? It's bad enough I'm being railroaded without the game waving its **** in my face and laughing at me while it does it! Even after I was so won over by the trial sequence being so well done the only thing I could now think was "Well, that was just a gigantic waste of everyone's time." Oh, and what comes after that is even worse. All of your party members come in one by one and cry "You don't stand a chance against Lorne! Let me fight him for you!" Bitch, I'm a pretty well optimized Wizard. I'm the most powerful character in this party by like, 12 orders of magnitude, even after all of my really awesome powers (Greater Teleport, Contact Other Plane, open-ended Illusions) are either absent or completely gimped. I could slaughter you all in two rounds if I wanted, stripped down naked, much less with all my magic items. Frankly I'm more insulted than anything that you feel so lowly of my abilities. I brought him down to negative hit points with one spell, turned invisible, and waited for his rage to wear off. I pretty much actively despised most of the party even before this point anyway and after this the only one I still kinda liked was Shandra Jerro. Which is good, because we totally got to adventure together for the rest of the game, and nothing bad happened to her soon after this for the most arbitrary and stupidly pointless reasons imaginable. (True Resurrection! True Resurrection! GOD DAMMIT ZHAJEVE YOU'RE 17TH LEVEL AND I'VE GOT 100,000 GP IN MY POCKET, ****ING CAST IT ALREADY!!!)

Actually, I'm gonna be the contrarian here and say I like individual inventories sometimes. "Let's see, should I give the healing potion to my Fighter since he's the most likely to take hits and need it, or to my Wizard since she'll need it more in case she does get hit?" Of course this is only a meaningful choice if it takes actions to trade items and characters have to be adjacent to do it. If I can just have my fighter hold all the potions, then when my wizard gets hit, just pause, trade, and have the healing potion instantly materialize in her hands, then this is meaningless. (You could just model it as the fighter throwing the potion to the wizard, but again this should take actions and there should be a chance of the potion missing its target.) What I don't want to see though is constantly micromanaging who is carrying what when I'm just grabbing loot that I have no intention of using and just want to haul back to town to sell. Furthermore I hate it when my pack gets full and I have to abandon whatever I was doing and head back to sell my crap (or press forward ignoring all the loot). I can decide when I've had enough of dungeon crawling and want to head back to town, thank you, I don't need the reward cycle to decide that for me.

Actually, I think they're more similar than you may realize. Writing a CRPG is most similar to writing an adventure module. My favorite modules are the ones that, rather than crafting a plot for the players to experience, craft a situation. Make a location, fill it up with NPCs, decide what the NPCs are trying to do. Then drop the player in there, perhaps with a quest hook for the reason why they're there and what they hope to accomplish (e.g. "Find Pharod"), then allow the player to do whatever they want with what's there. Give advice for how NPCs will react to various things the player might decide to do, but then hand it off to the DM to do the rest. The main difference with a CRPG is you don't have a DM, you have to settle for scripts. This isn't as big of a difference as it sounds, though: Handled intelligently, a script can substitute a human DM very effectively within the assumptions of the type of game being played. Where you encounter problems is when the players decide to do stuff that's completely insane, or runs counter to the assumptions of the game. Like, a game where the players are all pirates trying to become captains of their own ship (ala Skull & Shackles), but then the players give up piracy and decide to run an orphanage instead. A human DM can handle this but no amount of scripting can.

I think it's silly to say the Sims is an RPG because, even though you can definitely play it like one (I've done it before), it's really best played as a sortof God Game where you make fascimilies of people you know in real life and make them smash their genitals together like Ken and Barbie dolls. Then you get bored and set them on fire.