Ffordesoon

After much consideration, I think I'm going to go with another idea, the daughter of an Aedyran servant and a Vaillian aristocrat who escaped slavery at an early age. I'm still giving this new character the last name Gullspark, though, just because I like it. Which begs a few questions that only an Obsidian employee may be able to answer, unless I've missed the reveal of this information: 1. What are the conditions for being a "Vaillian aristocrat?" 2. Who do the Vaillians enslave? Is it another culture I'm thinking of that enslaves people? 3. How does slavery work in the Republics? Is it like ancient Greece's system? Rome's? Egypt's? Wholly original? EDIT: Also, are sabres in PoE?

Other than ME2, I can think of some occasions. In KOTOR2 the Handmaiden died when I played a dark side playthrough. In DA:O I was betrayed by the assassin. Also in Planescape:Torment you must fight one of your companions. In the original Neverwinter Nights 2, you either have to fight BIshop, or everyone else. yes there are some cases in games, but it is never something complex. in ME2 it was "did you do the quest? he lives! you did not? he dies! in other games like DAO it was just a numerical thing. you do and say some things, you get points and they like you or you lose points and they hate you. what i'd like to see is a chain of events that leads to death and/or betrayal. for instance, the companion has a story that involves a number of quests. what you do in each will determine how his story will end and it could be with his death Not true on either count, though I don't blame you for thinking it is, since both games make few systemic efforts at actual C&C. There are certain actions in DA:O that, if taken, will cause characters to leave the party permanently no matter what, and may force you to fight them. In ME2, loyal characters can still die if you assign them to the wrong roles on the suicide mission, and disloyal characters can still live if you assign them to the right ones. I believe there's also a small amount of randomness to it as well, with loyal characters being less likely to die and disloyal characters being more likely to.

If you don't visit it in the fampyr stage, how would you "experience" the change? Puberty?

I've been at the "Can't you just RP it if it bothers you that much?" phase for a while now.

Amen to this. I like following character arcs to their conclusions, and I'm good with helping characters see their own personal story through, and I'm even okay with playing a role in their journey. But even though I'm real and they're not, I hate being Mary-Sued into the role of their savior just because some idiot in Peoria can't stand the idea that his ego might not be given a tongue bath for two seconds.

That's another problem, yeah. I don't know how ambitious I should get.

For me, a great cRPG companion is one that's interesting to have around. I know that's vague, but that's by design. Ask me about any companion I've ever liked, and I can probably give you at least one unique reason why I liked them. Sometimes the reason I like them is because they're charming. Sometimes it's that they make me laugh. Sometimes it's that they make me question my choices. Sometimes it's that they make me feel good about my choices. Sometimes it's that they butt heads with me. Sometimes it's that they're complete wackjobs. Sometimes it's that I can't tell if they're manipulating me. The list of possible reasons I might dig a companion NPC is as long as the list of companion NPCs I dig. But ask me to list the companions I dislike and why, and you'll get a hundred different variations on the same theme: they bring nothing to the table, they're bland, they're dead weight, they're predictable, they're no fun, they're boring, they're wastes of space, they fail to hold my attention. They are, in other words, not interesting to have around. All the stuff that's already been said in this thread about what makes for good companions is also true, of course.

@Bryy: That's, uh, pretty much the long and short of it. I mean, there's a bit more to her that got grafted on later, and I could mine that for depth, but she's more or less a joke character designed to let me do a silly voice and be horribly inconsistent in my roleplaying and make dirty jokes. Which is fun, but not exactly putting my best foot forward in terms of character-building. @Lephys: That helps, thanks! :D

Here's a conundrum: I'm thinking of using the NPC survey to put a character I've had a lot of fun playing as in D&D and Pathfinder into the game. My hope is that people who have been in a gaming group with me at one time or another will see her and have a laugh as well. The problem is that she's, uh, not exactly a nuanced and multilayered character. In fact, as I play her, she's pretty much the Gold Digger/Bimbo/Lusty Sorceress stereotype to a tee. Which is a lot of fun to roleplay, but I worry that the character might come off as offensive when removed from the context of being silly with my friends on Skype. Which may not bother most of you, but it bothers me. I'm pretty damn serious about being inclusive and not playing to lazy stereotypes and all the rest of the stuff some of you might associate with "Tumblr SJWs" or "Biodrones" or whateverthecrap. I also have to live in the world, mind you, so I've learned to pick my battles, but this is content that I have a hand in creating, and I'd rather not put anything in the game I personally would find offensive if I encountered it as an unsuspecting player. I know I sound defensive, but I've learned the hard way that some folks have... issues with certain opinions, even when those opinions aren't anyone's business but my own. I do have other character concepts, of course, but this one is the most developed, not to mention the most, er, "showoffable." I also have ideas about how to give the character some more depth, but I don't know if they're out of scope for the amount of time the character will be onscreen, or difficult to convey, or whatever. Any thoughts on this?

Enh. Not too bothered by the decision, to be honest. Game's going to be plenty big as it is, clearly, and scope creep has been a problem on plenty of Obsidian projects. It would have been nice to have one companion of every class and some extra wilderness areas, I suppose, but it's not like PoE will be a failure without those features, any more than a car without spinning rims is a failure. The results of the poll in this thread were predictable, to an extent; if I say I'm going to buy you a certain amount of ice cream in two years, and then I ask after one year if you'd like more ice cream than I originally promised, why wouldn't you say yes? All you have at that moment is the promise of future ice cream. What's more important is that those of us who cast a vote in the affirmative for more stretch goals presumably did so under the assumption that Obsidian would be able to deliver on them. If they no longer feel that way, we should trust their judgment.

@Kjaamor: Oh, sure. I was mainly replying to your assertion rather than the OP's. To be honest, I didn't read the first post until just now. :oops: I see what you mean by "dehumanization" and "real-world conditions" now, and I agree that it would be gross if every single monster was just some poor sap with a disease. But I'm not sure that was what the OP meant. It certainly wasn't what I meant. My interpretation of the OP's post was that he or she would be interested in a questline or subplot or whatever involving deformed people who are persecuted as monsters or freaks because science hasn't overtaken superstition in PoE's world. I, too, believe that could be interesting. It's not as if PoE's world doesn't give us opportunities, either. What if there's some podunk town that's never seen a Godlike before, and a Godlike is born in that town? We could see the Godlike treated as a beast, or simply otherized to an unpleasant degree. There are plenty of options here.

Pfft. This bizarre idea that "real-world conditions" must not infect some imaginary ahistorical ideal of "pure" entertainment... I don't know where or when or how it started, but I'd like to punch the con artist who ginned it up in the face. All creative work is a subjective reaction to the real world and its conditions. All of it. Even a work that purports to be a repudiation of reality operates under the assumption that there is a reality to repudiate. "What if there was a world where people flew around using jetpacks?" is a question that can only be asked by someone who lives in a world where people don't fly around using jetpacks. And if this imaginary Jetpack World is like 2014 society in every other respect, it is a fictional snapshot of life in 2014 as the creator of Jetpack World saw it. If Jetpack World is not at all like life in 2014, it's still a reaction to life in 2014. Because creative people are real and live in the world, even if they long to escape it. You might as well inveigh against gravity. However well-reasoned your argument against it, it is still a fact of life. The real and the imagined will always cross-pollinate, because a real person has to do the imagining. And, to answer your question, just because a character is humanized does not invalidate lethal action on the player's part. On the contrary, it makes the decision to employ lethal force a meaningful choice.

Ah. Well. This is why I can never solve those word puzzles in the newspaper where it says, like, "score" with a line drawn below it. Some people go, "Underscore, obviously!" and roll their eyes. I'm the type of person who stares at it for an hour and then looks at the answer. Which is also at least twenty percent of the reason why I think puzzles in adventure games are usually aggravating distractions that only serve to artificially lengthen the playtime, and that the genre could get along fine without them.

BY WHAT I MUST KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

Here, I will give you the definition of an RPG: if the developer says it's an RPG, it's an RPG. Now can we stop with this garbage?

Ugh. This argument again.

@Josh: To be fair to him, y'all have discussed combat and stealth in much greater depth than diplomacy. Which isn't unreasonable, since you want to avoid spoilers and dialogue-based reactivity is the hardest system to describe in an interesting way without giving examples. But, you know, I can see how someone would get that impression.

I've said variations of this elsewhere, but: In D&D, particularly in the earlier editions, you are your class. 3E and above introduced a fairly large amount of flexibility, but at the end of the day, survivability and roleplaying are still at odds with each other. Even in Pathfinder, builds are only dynamic inasmuch as you can stack levels in the static classes on top of each other, and that still means a Level 1 character is stuck as one particular class and more or less must hie to the recommended specs of that class until taking a level in another class is possible. (This is assuming a Level 1 character can survive until Level 2, the odds of which are pretty low in pre-4E D&D and/or Pathfinder because your defensive options at Level 1 are basically "hide in the corner," "don't get hit," or "play a Barb" - but I digress.) This works well in PnP play, and not so well in a cRPG, because a good DM can dynamically adjust to her players' needs and wants in order to craft a better story, and a computer can't. In PoE, your class is more like a dream job. It's the answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" In real life, if you answered that question by saying you wanted to be X, well, you might not have the skillset for it. As PoE is not real life, you are granted the skillset for it simply by saying that's what you want to be. Now, to illustrate my point, let's apply PoE's rules to a dream job. Mine is to be a writer, and that happens to be an excellent example, so let's say I'm a Level 1 Writer. That's still a pretty broad category. Will I be a writer of fiction? Nonfiction? An essayist? A poet? A travel writer? If I'm a writer of fiction, well, what kind of fiction? Horror? Literary? SF? Fantasy? Humor? And what will be my medium of choice? Novels? Comics? TV? Movies? Multiple media? Every single one of these subcategories requires a different set of attributes, talents, skills, etc., and leveling equates to the process of finding out just who I want to be and becoming that person. (Yes, yes, I know that's very Tony Robbins. Touch the tip of your index finger to the tip of your thumb, and you will see the number of f**ks I give.) As for the separation of combat and non-combat skills, replace the word "combat" with the word "work." Suddenly, the division becomes "skills I need/want for my job" and "skills I need/want for my life." This is a division that makes intuitive sense to me. Just because you're a total keep-calm-and-carry-on professional at work doesn't mean you're Rico Suavé in non-work-related interactions. You might be the kind of person who says things that happen outside work are "non-work-related interactions" out loud, for example. The same set of stats influencing both sets of skills also works for me, because the people who are the best at a thing are often not very good at going outside their area of expertise, but their area of expertise is often less a column than a pyramid, if you see what I mean. A surgeon will probably be good at more than just surgery, because the skillset surgery requires - knowledge of anatomy, a high amount of manual dexterity, the ability to focus on a detail-oriented task to the exclusion of all else, a strong stomach, patience, et cetera - translates into other areas of life. Several of the aforementioned skills apply equally well to cooking, for instance. I hope my point is clear to you all, because I'm tired of writing this post, and I'm not doing a second draft* unless someone pays me, dammit. * - FULL DISCLOSURE: I did, however, do a few readability passes on this, because I am OCD as heck, y'all.

Per-day spells are effectively per-encounter in BG1 anyway. Having to rest in order to refresh them just means you end up resting after every encounter. Yes, there's the occasional random attack, but that's just one more encounter. Neither adds much to the game besides time, IMHO.

@Hiro: You're kind of right, in that wading into the fray and taking on dudes is definitely what this rogue does, but I think you're being sort of disingenuous here. Lephys did not pick the phrase "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!" out of thin air; his point was that the PoE Rogue is not going to act like the Thing from the Fantastic Four comics, who runs into the fray before anyone else and stays there, drawing heat and knocking heads, because he is a rock monster and can take a ton of punishment. He is, in other words, a tank. The Rogue hits hard and gets out, and as such does not fight like the Thing. Ergo, not a tank. That was a fear expressed by some in this thread, one which Lephys was attempting to dispel. Now, I will admit that Lephys' example was maybe not phrased perfectly, in that a PoE Rogue could concievably run into the fray while also yelling "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!" But it's silly to call Lephys to the carpet over phrasing that wasn't as clear as it could have been when what he meant was crystal clear, and even sillier to drag it out over multiple posts instead of just reading his response and going, "I know, I was just saying that it may be possible for a Rogue to tank with a full party." You're nitpicking with all this "Ha, you didn't mention Fighters originally, ergo you are being tricksy!" stuff. Yes, maybe Lephys should have said, "Your Rogue being a 'heavy-hitter' does not mean he is Benjamin J. Grimm, a.k.a. the Thing, a character in Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four who is a prototypical tank and uses the phrase "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!" quite often," but I think it is safe to assume that a group of human beings who know what THAC0 is also know the Thing says "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!" and is a tank-y character. Or maybe he should have said "PoE Rogues are presumably not going to be tanks." I don't know. What I do know is that it was very clear to me exactly what he was talking about. And then there are all those other words in Lephys' post clarifying what he meant, which you seem to be ignoring out of... anger? Spite? Suspicion? Genuine ignorance? I can't tell. Whatever the case, please stop. I apologize for backbench moderating, but this conversation really has been torture to read, and it is so pointless. No, maybe Lephys' posts do not refer to every single possible Rogue build and party configuration, but can't you just take that as read? He's not a murderer in an Agatha Christie novel, and you are not Hercule Poirot. You're a couple of dudes having a casual conversation on a video game forum. Last I checked, flawless formal composition and debate skills were not required on this forum. Let it go.

@Lephys: That's all true. Wouldn't dispute it. All I'm saying is that I feel PoE's system is the better one for a cRPG of this type, because the systems are not at odds with the overall intent of the design. By the way, when you compare the two systems, there's an intriguing echo of world history that seems vaguely intentional on Sawyer's part. D&D's main campaign settings have always been fantastical versions of medieval Europe, more or less. In medieval Europe, your social class was, to a very large extent, who you were. You might have been able to rise above it with a large amount of toil, but you could never escape it. 1E and 2E, at least, reflect this idea, and fragments of it are still hard-coded into D&D's DNA even today. PoE's campaign setting, by contrast, is something of a fantastical version of colonial America. It's a melting pot, where folks of many cultures and races and creeds have come to start a new life. Prestige is accrued by actions and words, not bestowed by divine right. Is it any wonder that a class is basically the thing you do to make a living, rather than something which defines who you are as a person?

I suppose they would be if you couldn't dual or multi-class. This seems to me to be a case where you have to look at the game mechanics as a whole. The IE games gave you flexibility with one mechanism, PoE will use a different one. If you changed that single element of either system, i.e., add multiclass to PoE or remove it from the IE games, things would break. That's exactly what I'm saying, though. We have two mechanisms that satisfy the same player desire. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that PoE's method doesn't make you choose between roleplaying and survival. I'm aware there are builds in the IE games and all editions of D&D that toe that line successfully, but they practically require metagaming knowledge, and are often builds which support a highly specific character concept that may or may not line up with your own. Also, because they're dependent on taking levels and skills in different classes, you have to plan out your character's leveling well in advance if you want to achieve an optimal build, and you can't deviate from that path even if you discover you would like to do so. Now, in tabletop, with a good DM, that fundamental lack of systemic dynamism ceases to exist, because the DM can tweak the story of a campaign to allow you to feel as if you're building your character organically. You can slough off your class like a summer job if you want, and the DM can account for it in the story being told, or the DM can allow you to roleplay a character who happens to be of a certain class despite their personality not fitting the archetype, or what-the-eff-ever. The rules are a starting point, not the game itself. In a cRPG, the rules are the game. Your "DM" isn't in the room with you, adjusting to your desires on the fly. He or she has to anticipate and adjust to the desires of as many players as possible without ever coming into contact with said players. In that case, why not attempt to build the dynamism of a tabletop session into the system itself? That's what Obsidian has done/is doing here, as far as I can tell.

Posted this in the last update thread because I was very very tired, and then realized that I meant to post it here. In re the "But multiclassing!" argument: If you have to build a character out of multiple classes to get the build you want in the IE games (muscle wizard, for example), doesn't that indicate that the classes in the IE games are overly rigid?

Oops, posted in the wrong thread.

In re the "But multiclassing!" argument: If you have to build a character out of multiple classes to get the build you want in the IE games (muscle wizard, for example), doesn't that indicate that the classes in the IE games are overly rigid?