Kjaamor

HENCE JETPACKS.

I'M ALSO BUILDING THE JETPACKS. EDIT: P.S. HOW DO YOU TURN OFF CAPS LOCK AND BOLD?

It's okay, guys. Today I watched a Java tutorial and took my book out from under my monitor. I GOT THIS.

...and now I feel even more gutted that I trained in a medical discipline.

...until you get Fireball, and then what was left of the difficulty drops right out. I've owned ToEE twice now, and both times I've suffered similar feelings. Really liked it at the start, but then it drops out fast. It doesn't help that if you're playing anything other than lawful/neutral evil (or chaotic neutral, I guess), you run out of quests by about a third of the way in.

I thought the ideas in the original post were pretty good. In terms of the problem though, let's not criticise Rogue or Barbarian. Let's get right to the heart of the matter and collectively sigh that so many years ago a very successfully tabletop roleplaying game - a game at its heart based around characters fighting - decided to name one of their classes "fighter".

Try telling that to magic users. Even multi-classing into most of the prestige classes crippled your spell allocation. In 2nd Edition, if you multi-classed magic, you could remain competitive, but clearly inferior to your single-classed brethren. In 3rd, if you tried to equally level two spell schools, you'd be miles off the pace and might as well not bother. A level 5 cleric/level 4 mage in the 3rd edition is not worth a fraction of what a level 9 Mage is. Fighter is very much the exception rather than the rule, since every other class had high level class-specific abilities/traits that rewarded you for maintaining your class. I've said it before, but I find the third edition offers a huge selection of worthless choices while the second offers a limited selection of tactically viable choices that encourage experimentation without penalising you (except, you know, bards, but screw those guys).

It would be lovely if what they did do was presented in a Fallout 2 style pattern rather than a BG way. That is to say that rather than taking a pre-defined script, there are a handful of different options for different triggers. I.e. Attack: Melee/Melee then Ranged/Ranged then Melee/Ranged/Passive Engage: Enemies I see/Enemies that I see but remain near party leader/Enemies that are attacking the party/passive Etc. I appreciate that this is a party-based game and that we'll have full control over the companions, but basic scripts are useful for the trash fights and particularly exploration. In the significant fights, I want to micromanage everything. When I'm walking through some fields, I'd like it if my party could handle those few Gibberlings themselves.

The impression I get from P:E is that its going to be quite a bleak setting, and I'd expect the ending to reflect this. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it, but that's the style they seem to be going for and fair play to them. To be perfectly honest, gritty and bleak has become something of its own cliche in terms of media art - at least in terms of what I've been exposed to. I've said before that the writing in F:NV was at times breathtaking, but often extremely unsatisfying. Star Wars got brought up in this thread as a joke earlier, but aNH and tESB are good examples of how a story can be extremely involving and retain darkness without having to rely on either shock value or nihilistic 'you can't save people, just make them suffer slightly less' thinking. The obsession with making fantasy increasingly gritty seems peculiar to me. Having said all that, the happy endings and moments that Okkoko seems to be referring to don't generally exist within western rpgs, and tend to be the stock of their more melodramatic japanese counterparts (and KotOR). I'd said before that I love that stuff, but it is not something I expect to see in P:E, and I'd rather Obsidian stick to what they're happy doing.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only person in the entire world who preferred the 2nd Edition class system.

As you say, this is purely theoretical since I'm more likely to base my party around personality and/or story, but nevertheless this is a fun exercise so let's go. My adventurer's hall party would be... Fighter Barbarian Paladin Priest Ranger Wizard It's basically the old "Front 3, Back 3" that I generally use in Baldur's Gate. The Fighter spearheads the attack, flanked by the Barbarian and Paladin, and the three of them take aggro and pound on the weak mobs. Behind them, the Ranger dps's the most dangerous target while the wizard cobs AoE over everything. The cleric sits between the two groups healing and/or buffing as necessary. It's not necessarily a powergaming setup, but it's familiar and functional. The beauty of it is that it pounds through trash mobs with minimal micromanagement, but retains scope to shift for more difficult fights. If the build does struggle, then I would shift to a 4/2 setup probably (lose the Barbarian for an extra Ranger or lose the Ranger for an extra Barbarian, plopping the Paladin wherever the dps is) I've never been much of a rogue player - it's just not my style - and so if they're not a utility class I'll just lose them entirely. Equally, the style of druids is never something I've really got on with, and I've always found cleric-types to be much more useful in the role. I'd sooner have someone who can do one thing very well, that two things quite well. Ciphers I'm just struggling with because of the name, oddly enough, but I may yet change my mind on them. Chanters depend on whether they end up as clerics, but right now they look a little too much like bards. Monks have some cool ideas going on, but I've rarely got the best from them in any setup. Plus the whole wounds system doesn't look terribly efficient to me. Either you have the Monk main tank, but they still look squishy for that role and that presents problems, or you put them off-tank/dps but get less wounds which probably leaves them less effective than a Barbarian. But lo! Look upon the classes in my party and feel my Grognardness.

Useful list, thanks, though as I've said before, 'all classes all roles' and preventing failure trouble me greatly.

An opening cinematic, and an ending cinematic (hopefully in addition to a Fallout style - slide show ending). I think everything else can be covered with the scripted events.

I'm not too bothered with the idea of the personal antagonist notion, because I think it's the easiest one to get a good result from. Man versus environment and particularly man versus self don't seem to lend themselves as immediately well to rpgs. My biggest concern however, is that we get man versus company management that IWD2 brought: Fight a series of bosses with nary a mention of the boss above until the current boss has drawn blood. I never felt my npcs had any relationship with any of them and I didn't regard any as having any personality in the story.

Get the European edition. Edit: Also, what are you on about with Fallout? Not only could you harm them, you could get the child-killer perk!

Bass is something that happened to other interviews. Josh Sawyer interview! Now with simulated tinnitus!

Someone buy that team a new microphone immediately.

My intial favourite thing about this poll was that it gave me the option to vote for seven rings - an opportunity I siezed with 1.4 hands. However, upon reflection, the best thing is simply the way the final option helpfully included "(10 fingers)", lest we forget.

There is a distinction between one on one combat with potion spam (Diablo), and healing within a group. If you have a party of one using healing potions then you truly are just expanding your health bar arbitrarily. However such games fall into the action rpg category because the necessitate all the tactics of a 'Join up the dots' puzzle (and frankly it astonishes me how they ever manage to sell a single copy). In the party-based system, things are different because that extra health needs a destination, and getting it wrong matters. Even if we discount status bonuses and non-healing healer powers, you still have to choose whether to heal the fighter at half health or the archer at quarter health. It's a tactical choice. (I'm gonna have to continue this later, or I'll be late for work)

Harry Potter and the Eternity of Eternity

Perhaps I'm getting confused as to the definition of healbot, but healing roles are far from redundant as gameplay abstractions. Who do I heal, how do I heal, do I even want to use my healing powers or would I be better using something else? Healers are almost inevitably the same characters who have access to spells like haste and fire shield - you literally balance the tactics of cure and prevention. It's also not about larger health bars in the sense you describe, it's about being able to distribute a further health bar across the party reactively. Even in the standard ott example of 'An entire role based on constantly undoing damage faster than enemies can DO the damage', you forget that even if healers are removed 'An entire role based on constantly doing damage faster than enemies can DO the damage' is true for characters and party alike. This is what dice-roll rpgs are all about.

I am instantly reminded of a forum I used to frequent which had a 100+ page thread exclusively dedicated to photoshopping Eddie Van Halen's mouth onto people/animals/things.

He's pregnant.

Just in case anyone reading this topic hasn't read this yet, Josh talks extensively about the nature of classes and abilities in page 5 of this thread. Highly informative and I, personally, find it quite comforting.

Just make it an option when you start a new game.