SlithyTove

And I think people sometimes underestimate just how *good* real people can end up being. Absolute dominance is rare, but it happens. Tesshu claimed to have killed over 100 trained swordsmen unaided in his lifetime, sometimes with odds as bad as 10 to 1. It would be easy to write off as braggadocio, but given the time and place in history that he lived, it's not only plausible, but probable. Or someone like Jelly Bryce who was effectively superhuman with firearms of any kind. Every tall tale told about him usually ended up being a fact once people started digging. Sir Richard Francis Burton would be a shoe-in for a high level bard or some-such. People can be pretty amazing on their own. Add a little soul-power...

Not a PE suggestion, but I always wanted to try a game where you had inverse scaling. Say, like you were a lvl 1 Paladin Truthy McPureHeart, and had a lot of zeal but were, effectively, kind of crap at the whole Paladining thing. Then a dying, desperate god sacrifices itself and gives all its remaining power to Truthy who, overnight, becomes a God and pretty much amazing at everything and generally going toe-to-toe with evil dude Gods. But, being mortal, he cant contain all that power and it dissipates making him weaker as the game progresses. Rather than gaining new abilities you have to choose which ones you will lose at each checkpoint. By the end of the game you are back to being a crap paladin and trying desperately to get the final piece done to save the world and the final boss will be some toothless old road-bandit you met before going "looks like you've fallen on hard times there..."

I am shocked, shocked I tell you at your insinuation that I may lack some of the specifics on such a common and worldy important subject as, er, um the specifics of D&D 3.5e rules as it relates to tackling large armies of runts. Out of curiosity I did a search for D&D 3.5 Strategic Flight on google: only 15 from various forums and you were posting on about half of them. That is comedically esoteric. Save that line for something like basic misunderstandings of the scientific method, statistics, or history. *blows rasberry at gavinfoxx* Also.... BG2 (the reference frame) was 2nd edition so 3.5 rules aren't relevant to what was being mentioned. In 2nd ed casty classes had ways out of nasty situations (teleports and things), but staying power issues. FIghtery types had staying power (with some healing of some kind), but remained vaguely grounded in their humanness. They could get run over by cavalry, mass tackled by the pheasants behind them, chained up, and lit on fire until they stopped moving. Or led into a castle courtyard where they drop the gates on both sides and shoot them full of arrows and drop boiling pitch until dead. Or Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court style. etc etc And either that, or XCOM style are my favorite scaling benchmarks.

A high level fighter would be a "best case". All the casty classes would run out of spells pretty quickly. That level 1 dude will always have at least a 1 in 20 chance to hit. With 1000 archers behind some meat shields on an open field he is eating 50 arrows a turn. And most respectable armies would include at least a few single-digit level knights, wizards, priests, etc. Eventually one of them would get a hold person or what not through. If that high level fighter could hole up in tight quarters where they have to come one at a time to him he could do for thousands of level 1s before they got him. But there are historical cases where real people in tiny groups could hold off hundreds in similar scenarios so I don't see that as such a bad thing. Maybe a monk where they are just immune to virtually everything a standard army could throw at them. But only if you obey video game rules. Pen and paper style they can just string nets between horses until they get him and drown him in a barrel or something. They are still slightly grounded in the realms of people even if they incredibly powerful. Would be sort of fun to simulate something like this in PE now that I think about it. Once (if? PE2?) the player gets truly ToB powerful, put them up against the equivalent of a small medieval army where they have to chew through a flood of fairly weak attackers to nab the leader and force a surrender Inca v Spain style.

I have actually usually found fully voiced over 3D games to be LESS immersive to me than the BG2 or PS:T games. For 3D it always seemed fairly obvious as to why. Instead of having a character that I have a picture for and am imagining speaking, I have a clumsy cardboard puppet-creature pretending to be human. Lips and emotions don't quite match and even the best stuff just goes into uncanny valley territory. And I spend a lot of time thinking about how that part of the back isn't meant to stick out like that (or some such) when the puppet-creature is trying to show me something important. Something that just occurred to me in the course of this thread is why full voice overs tend to be less immersive to me: the cardboard cut out voice. If a voice actor is only doing key phrases and monologues they can really throw themselves into the role. They can bring the emotional energy and dedication to make them feel accurate, life-like, and powerful. If they are doing "barter dialog 2526, branch 16, good alignment, diplomacy" and they have already done thousands and thousands of lines, then there is just no way that they are not phoning that in. And phoned in lines really show through and break immersion in a big way.

A lot of interesting ideas here. I always thought the method of buying and selling Legendary magic items should mimic how it works in real life: the art auction. No art store in existence has the kind of cash on hand to just flat buy a Van Gogh. And no one who just happened to walk into the store would be able to buy it. There are relatively small numbers of people who can afford such things. Hence, the art auction where they get possible buyer types together to figure out what it is actually worth. You can give the player the ability to put items up for auction, and to bid on items periodically put up by NPCs. If you use a relatively small pool of bidders with fixed incomes you can even turn it into a minigame where you can try to bluff a rival into over-paying for an item you don't want to try and get the item you really want more cheaply (with certain character traits giving you some inexact information about what items an NPC desires, what they might be willing to pay, etc). At that level all money and prices are relative. As you inject money into the pool of people who buy and sell artifacts they will have more money to bid against you in the future, but prices also drop as you add legendary items into the pool.

I rather liked the power rise from levels of BG through ToB. By the end you are very very powerful, but still not strong enough to take on a medieval army all by yourself and it took a long time to get there. I also very much like the XCOM: Enemy Unknown style of leveling. Rookies are just useless, and a full Colonel is very strong, but the Colonel can still only take about as many hits (read: very few) as the Rookie. His power comes from the utilisation of his and the rest of the team's abilities to make sure they don't get hit much. It's the complete opposite of the jrpg leveling where you often end up MILLIONS of times more powerful by then end. The XCOM method feels more "real" in the sense that "weak" enemies are still dangerous if you let your guard down. Just like Wild Bill Hickock, you can be the fastest gun in the West and be killed by some idiot because you weren't paying attention.

VTM: Bloodlines was a great game, but it was quite small by comparison to PST, BG2, or Arcanum. If they had taken the same budget and put it into content it would have been much larger. Ideally we want huge depth and full voice over, but that won't happen until computers are capable of reverse engineering peoples voices and saying what is needed on the fly with the correct dramatic inflection. In the meantime it is all about want vs budget. As I recall too, the first half of VTM had great dialog and could be navigated as easily by a socialite/diplomat as a thug (just like the pen and paper). It was GREAT. Then, all of a sudden it degenerated into a game where you had to just bash stuff and there were silly boss fights, etc. Wouldn't suprise me if they just ran out of cash and time on the story side and had to pad with some crap dungeons. BG2 is the perfect example to follow IMO. It had just enough voiceover for me to automatically read all material in the characters voice anyway. Additional voiceover would have added nothing (and slowed down the game for me).

I definetly like crafting, but mostly for consumables like ammo, potions, oils, grenades. Be nice to see some class specific crafting as well, like holy-oil for priests. But I much prefer BG2 style epic weapons where they are found/forged by masters from located pieces. I still remember the Flail of the Ages, Crom Faeyr and the like a decade later but I haven't the slightest clue what I was just swinging at people in Skyrim even though I had to denude every mine in the realm to get the ore to make it. I also prefer magic items of any kind to be comparatively rare with more gradations of quality. A folded steel katana is a vastly better weapon than a pot-metal machete but there is nothing magical about it at all. Unlike NWN2 where I had bags full of magic by level 3. I don't mind craft-based weapon modification though (like gem socketing for example) which can modify even legendary weapons in subtle ways.

Hello! My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my parents, Blue Montoya and Violet Montoya. Prepare to die. Sorry, had to. :D Going with cipher since it is an unusual archetype. Also, interested in how priests play out since there will be no curative magic. Druids and wizards are my mainstay though.