Micamo

While we're throwing out names: Godscarred.

While planetouched are some of my favorite D&D races, I have to agree that Godlikes have yet to earn their place, as a concept. It's yet to be shown exactly what a godlike is or what being one means, or if godlikes existing at all is even appropriate given the setting's relationship between mortals and the divine. Also, that name is just stupid. Godlike. Makes me think of those stupid quake announcer mods some TF2 servers use (M-M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL!!!). I also keep accidentally mistyping it as "Goldike" and have to go back and correct myself.

But it's fun! I've been considering doing a similar thread for Baldur's Gate. The thing is though I'd have to actually finish it to be able to critique it with honesty.

We've gotten pretty far off topic so, uhh, let's see, what else can I bitch about... Oh yeah, here's something: The King of Shadows is a horrible, boring, ineffectual villain. Let's start from the basics. Who (or what) is the King of Shadows? "Well, thousands of years ago the ancient empires of Illefarn and Netheril were at war, and..." No no no no no, that's not what I mean. I already know about Illefarn and Netheril from out of game sources, but within the context of this narrative, they're meaningless. They never come up and have no connection to anything except in regards to the origins of KoS. They provide no context for the events of the game. As far as I'm concerned they're about as satisfying an explanation as him being an awakened banana peel someone found in the trash. Okay then, what kind of threat does KoS represent? What kind of powers does he have? "He's a god-like being made of the pure essence of the shadow weave!" This again? Again, within the context of the narrative, I have no idea what the shadow weave is. You might as well say he's powered by peanut butter for all it would matter. What does he want to accomplish? What are his motivations for doing so? "He wants to take over the world because the shadow weave is the essence of EVIL!!" ...Seriously? The main problem with KoS, I think, is that he's treated like a character by the writing but he's actually more like an abstract force of nature or a natural disaster. I think he'd have worked a thousand times better if he were instead presented as this magical surge spreading outward from the vale of meredelain and level draining everything to death, and your job is to stop its spread or reverse it. The real villain of the story would be someone who, for whatever reason, is trying to stop you because they want the spread to continue. It would even improve the origin story because you could say "He's the consequence of a mistake some wizards made a long time ago and look it doesn't really matter that's not what this story is about." How do I stop or defeat him? "Well you gotta find the 7 magic doodads and..." Okay, what are these 7 magic doodads and why do I need them? "They're the silver shards of the Sword of Gith, wielded by the legendary Githyanki general at..." Yeah yeah yeah context problem again: This is something that would have fit more in Torment than there, because the Githyanki/Githzerai history thing actually mattered there. Here, it's meaningless. You're slapping on a convoluted backstory to make your MacGuffin sound more interesting than it actually is. Why do I need the sword of gith? "Uhh, it's really powerful?" Would any item of equivalent power do? Why do I need the sword of gith specifically? Furthermore, why did it shatter during Ammon Jerro's battle at west harbor, why couldn't he kill KoS for good there? Why did I survive when one of the shards embedded itself in my heart? "...I dunno." *sigh* Of course. The problem here is that it's not the player defeating the bad guy. It's the DM's Ultimate Villain of Ultimate Badness versus the DM's Ultimate Artifact of Ultimate Power. It's masturbation: The player is just there to watch, and unless they stop playing or participating in the plot their input doesn't matter at all.

The intent behind vancian casting is that the caster has to very carefully ration their magic and only use it when they absolutely need it, or else they'll be screwed the rest of the day until the party decides to rest. The design assumption is that the party goes through 4-5 encounters each day, and spells/day and spell power is balanced around that. How it works in practice is that casters blow through their spells as fast as possible to "nova" their way through encounters, then the party stops to rest the moment the casters are out of high-level spells, thus only going through 1-2 encounters each day: The so-called 15-minute workday. It's hotly debated whether this is a problem at all and, if it is, what should be done about it: Some say it's just the players being munchkin powergamers and they should knock it off, others say it's the DM being too much of a carebear and she should throw random encounters at parties to stop them from resting, and intelligent people say it's a problem with the rules themselves that this exploit exists at all. But everyone agrees it makes casters much more powerful than they were intended to be. My two cents: No matter what the extent that the 15 minute workday is a practical problem (I've always allowed it and played in games that allow it and it's never once caused problems for us, but plenty of people complain about it so it must be a problem for someone, somewhere), I think it's bad design at least from a theoretical perspective: It's balance dependent upon metagame factors rarely under the control of the DM, let alone the designers. It's like having a class with different powers depending on what kind of shoes the player is wearing. 4th edition tried it but there were, uhh, other problems. Of the D&D-likes I know of I think Pathfinder comes the closest: 0th-level spells are at-will. This is a great boon in the early levels but diminishes in importance as you level up, though Mage Hand and Prestidigitation alone are enough to carry a character from levels 1-20 if they're smart. I've experimented with house rules that expand this to making low-level spells at-will as well as you level up, as those spells become less relevant and you can afford infinite-use magic items or permanencies of them anyway, but the spells *really* aren't designed for this at all. You'd have to rewrite most of them from scratch to make this work, which is not a big deal if you're making a new system from scratch anyway but a major pain in the ass if you're just looking for a quick fix.

By default, characters get back up after they die with one hit point left, like in NWN2. You can turn on permanent companion death though (not much point in that I think if you're just gonna reload, but whatever floats your boat).

I disagree: Sorcerers are *very* newbie-unfriendly. Why? Well, let's say you selected a spell that sounded much more awesome when you first read it than when you actually tried to use it (which will happen to newbies more often than experienced players, especially since there are so many overly situational trap spells printed). If you're a wizard, no problem, just swap it out tomorrow. If you're a sorcerer? You're screwed and have to wait a few levels to be able to swap it out, and you can only swap one spell at a time this way. If you have a nice DM who will let you retrain without too much trouble this is much less of a problem. Furthermore if you're micromanaging your spells as a prepared caster every day you are wasting your time: Make one list (that you edit each time you level up, which is what you have to do as a sorcerer anyway) of spells you keep prepared each day, and make scrolls for whatever else you need. If you have a specific reason to need to prepare a new spell outside of this list, then just make a note of the temporary change (going straight back to your usual list when you're done). (Another terrible thing about sorcerors: They can only make scrolls of spells they have on their spells known list. A wizard can just make whatever scrolls they want. Spend one session of walking around with a handy haversack filled with situational scrolls you've made and you'll never want to play a sorcerer again.) I'm holding judgement on the grimoire thing until I see it: I fear it'll have the same problem you get when you have a DM who insists on using the spell page count rules so you have to juggle multiple spellbooks around (there's a reason so few DMs use those rules that most players don't even know they exist).

Fighter: "Well, I can stand here and full attack, or I can move and just get one attack. If the planetary alignments are right, I've dedicated my entire build to it, and the enemy isn't bigger than me, I can trip them, knock them over, grab and hold them in place, or charge at them for more damage." Wizard: "Well, I can make illusions of anything I want, summon things to do anything I want, dominate things and make them do anything I want, shapeshift into anything I want, give them a curse that does anything I want, turn the bad guy into a squirrel, send them straight to hell, teleport myself and my friends across the continent instantly, use telekinesis to fling things around, fly around all day, create extradimensional spaces to hide in, turn invisible, spy on bad guys from as far away as I like, send illusory doubles into combat for me, play 20 questions with alien gods, instantly conjure any tool that I need, communicate telepathically with whoever I want, meld the landscape into anything I want, etc. etc. etc., all of this with just my spells that I get for free and being able to invest other aspects into my build into whatever I desire, instead of having to dedicate myself entirely to one trick to be able to attempt it on weak enemies at all." Fighter: "*sobs*"

Only if you're running around expecting to solo the groups of mobs to death with your two magic missiles/day (you can have 4 spells/day if you specialize and max out INT). If you use your spells more wisely a low-level caster can easily be the most effective member of an adventuring party, especially with NWN2's "kneel for 6 seconds after an encounter and get everything back" deal. Go for buffs and control spells and if you need to be doing damage whip out a summon (they were even nice enough to increase the duration!). Having to go spellcaster-free for quite a long time unless you play a caster yourself it frankly quite ridiculous.

That seems like a weird number for the level cap. Are they planning to raise it in an expansion or something?

The problem with this, I think, is in player training. A player decides "Okay, I'll be an evil character this time" and then start picking the bottom option of every dialogue, because we've been trained that top = good and bottom = bad. Then they notice that their character is a whacko stereotype with no coherent motivations or character traits, and get upset. A part of me wants to say "Well of course your character is incoherent, you moron, because you're not thinking about what you're saying and basing your choices purely on their location in the UI. How do you expect to have a good roleplaying experience when you aren't properly roleplaying?" But another part of me blames game developers for this: Most RPGs (or games touted to provide "Choice And Consequence" like Infamous or Dishonored) are designed, either implicitly (through sometimes subtle writing choices) or explicitly (through morality meters and mechanical benefits), to assume and reward this behavior in the player. Try to "roleplay" your way through these games and you will be rewarded with nothing but pain and suffering: The correct way to go through them is to turn your brain off and be a passive participant in the story. This trend was started by Bioware (and Alignment in D&D before it) but has been perpetrated by almost the entire gaming industry. Even the recent trend of games trying to give more "meaningful choices" are failing miserably at it because they still cling to these design assumptions.

A good example of a villain that almost gets this is Caesar from FO:NV. Caesar's legion looks like a bunch of sadistic, psychotic morons, but you can actually sit down and chat with Caesar about his motivations for doing all of this and he'll actually give you a detailed, reasonable-sounding answer. Of course it's Hegelian nonsense but hey, serious academics swallowed Hegel's crap for decades. I totally believe an uneducated person after the apocalypse could stumble upon Hegel's theory of history and fall in love with it. The key irony is that his goal is to build a unified society where everyone serves the Pax Romana, but the only person in the legion who believed in the Pax Romana was Caesar himself: Everyone under his command really is just a murderous psycho who knows that bowing to the legion is their best chance to get to fulfill their urges. Lanius is the best example of this, though not the only one. If/When Caesar leaves the picture the legion devolves into a bunch of Stupid Evil ****heads. That said the legion doesn't work because this conversation is something most players never see: You can only have it if you join the legion, and it's miss-able even then. Without seeing this conversation all you ever see of the Legion are Caesar's insane subordinates. It's the Loghain problem all over again.

My thoughts on this: - Enabling solo play is a laudable thing, but I'm not sure it should be a design goal important enough to potentially detract from non-solo play. - The best way to enable solo play is probably to just make sure every class has enough abilities to make it through the game by themselves: e.g., no locked doors with no key that only a rogue can get open, no enemies that are immune to all magic, etc. Relying on multiclassing as a solution for this is inelegant and makes your progress in the game dependent on your builds: What happens if you come to that locked door you need rogue skills to open, but you haven't taken any rogue levels? Guess you'd better go back and level grind until you can get a few rogue levels, huh? Inquisitor had this problem and I hated that about that game. - Multiclassing is cool, but personally I'd rather see no multiclassing at all than a broken multiclassing system, for either meaning of the word "broken." A system where single-classed characters are always superior is just as bad as a system where single-classed characters are always inferior. And worse than both of them is a setup like 3rd edition D&D where most multiclass combinations are completely worthless unfit characters (needing a multiclass PrC to work, which introduces a host of other problems), and a very small number of combinations are so good you never want to use a single-classed character for that party role (some dips). - On multiclassing, the hardest thing about it is that different multiclassing mechanics are optimal depending on what kind of thing you want your hybrid character to be doing. Here's some examples: -- Perform two party roles at the same time, with the same actions -- Be capable of performing two roles competently, but only actually do one at a time (switching back and forth as necessary) -- Perform only one role, but acquire abilities from a secondary role that complement this main role (e.g., buffs that you only ever use on yourself) -- Perform only one role, taking abilities from classes that provide the same role (like a Fighter/Barbarian) and mixing and matching to make something more specific. - 3E multiclassing mechanics can really only ever do the third and fourth ones well, and even then only in certain cases: For the first and second ones you need either a completely new base class, or a PrC that does what you want. A big part of the problem is that you have to take levels in order, which means you'll have to suck down several levels of crap you don't want to get to the one ability you DO want, which encourages taking one or two level dips in classes. 4E multiclass feats improved this slightly but was still too inflexible. The 4E hybrid system can sometimes do the second well, but as in 3E most hybrids suck, mostly due to MADness (and 4E math assuming min-maxed attribute scores with mostly SAD classes). (I haven't read through the new Dragon magazine rules that were apparently released recently, and thus can't comment on them.) Huh, really? I thought that was still up in the air. Ah well.

Eehh. I disagree. Ps:T goes out of its way to avoid RPG stereotypes, but it's very much doing its own thing. You can *get* Torment on its own in a way you can't really *get* Spec Ops without also understanding the workings of the Bro Shooter genre. Okay, as much as I normally don't give NWN2 a break, heresy time: I actually didn't mind these parts all that much. They weren't particularly great, but I can't bring myself to write a giant rant about them. The only parts that really bugged me were Callum's douchebaggery and it made me really uncomfortable how you can't even attempt to reason with the orc tribes, you're forced to genocide them. Though that's really a problem with FR as a whole, Orcs in that setting really fail the Jew Test big time. I guess it just boils down to the type of gamer I am: If those things were side quests and I could go through the gate into blacklake whenever I wanted, I would have done every last one of them before ever even considering going into blacklake. I'm just a completionist at heart: The only way to dangle some content in front of me and make me not want to do it is if you're a really, really big douche about it (ex. everything that comes out of Lord Nasher's mouth). Yeah if you're in a rush to get through the gate and get on with the main quest it's ridiculous how many hoops they make you jump through, but if you wanna just relax and explore the city it's not so bad. EDIT: Also, Spec Ops is like, 2 hours long. And the ending is probably one of my favorites out of all the games I've ever played. Get it done. Showing a world where heroes don't exist is not the same thing as critiquing the concept of RPG heroes. No more than a game without waffles in it is a treatise on the superiority of pancakes.

This is subversion, not deconstruction. Here's an example: Spec Ops The Line. Love it or hate it (personally I adored it) you can't deny that the game was trying to say "Call of Duty sucks, and this is why." The game you're talking about is one that says "Baldur's Gate sucked, and this is why." You could make a damned good game about that, but NWN2 is not that game, nor is it trying to be. Mask of the Betrayer is almost "Forgotten Realms sucks, and this is why" but it never quite goes that far with critiquing the problems behind the setting's design.

Honestly, given the **** you deal with from friendly NPCs in NWN2, I think becoming an omnicidal maniac is the only sensible response. Callum: "You! Help fight these orcs!" Me: "I don't take orders from you." Callum: "Oh yes you do! While you're in my camp, I OWN you!" What I wanted to do right there was just kill him and help the orcs take the camp, *just* for being such an uppity little ****stain. I was ****ing *pissed* in Act 3 when he gets killed by a baddie in a cutscene. I wanted to do it, god dammit! Can I at least mount his head up on my wall? No? **** you.

This is not what deconstruction actually means. Deconstruction isn't taking tropes and inverting, subverting, or averting them. Deconstructing a trope is when you use the work to make an argument that the trope shouldn't exist. A deconstruction of traditional RPG heroism would be making a game that says "If you even *want* a Big Damned Hero to show up and save the world, let alone be one, you're a deluded, horrible person and you should be ashamed." The only thing the NWN2 OC has to say is "Look at me mommy, I can make a ar-pee-jee!"

Transistor.

I agree that there should be an australian-influence conlang in Eternity, because australian aboriginal languages are unironically awesome.

If you're expecting to see this before 2016 you are officially insane.

Indeed, little makes me happier than seeing a pre-literacy culture done well (and little makes me more disappointed than seeing them lazily painted with Big Dumb Cavemen tropes).

This is just plain silly: They're not near-nonexistent, they're the vast majority of the world's languages. Most languages have only started to be written very recently, or are small enough that there's no literary tradition for them (and thus no historical inertia to preserve archaic spellings) and thus transcriptions change freely along with the language. And there are still many languages alive today that have never been written at all, and almost every language that has ever existed was never written. Furthermore when you're talking conlangs, unless you're doing an alternate history conlang (which is a perfectly valid thing to do), the romanization is a transcription, not the native writing form of the language, if the language has native writing at all. As I said before, it makes zero sense for transcriptions to reflect the history of the language's pronunciation.

Maybe: I'd say the problem is that the system rewards crappy (or at least boring) storytelling. In a game that's all about resource conservation anything that allows you to get your resources back is something you wanna do as often as possible. Resting whenever you can is the optimal strategy, period. You can patch up the problem with "consequences" all you like but there's a fine line between "logical consequences for your actions" and "you did something I don't like so I'm going to punish you for it."

You could just make a CRPG version of The Riddle of Steel.