Yonjuro

Yes, the shadow dragon is a well done encounter (*) and certainly not a sucker punch. So is Firkraag (*). In the Windspear Hills dungeon you find several items that give you clues about fighting Firkraag - especially the sword that protects the wielder from fear. That was a good clue for those of us that didn't know what to expect from a dragon fight that an appropriate buff spell would be useful but it wasn't as if we found Elminster's Tome of Dragon Slaying with detailed instructions. Also, Firkraag was a good warmup dragon for the shadow dragon since you can cast 'friendly' spells on him without turning him hostile e.g. things like Strength that will lower his strength. Its a good practice encounter for the shadow dragon that attacks you as soon as he notices you. (*) (except that a thief can kill either of them quite easily with traps)

Yup, exactly. I completely agree on these two and it was the reason I brought them up. Sure. My problem with Kangaxx was that (in hindsight) the fight is too easy. I don't think you can just replace his imprison ability with an imprison that can be countered after the fact and have an interesting encounter. I think it needs a complete redesign. The fight with Irenicus on the Tree of Life is another example. I've posted about this before. He is built up as some kind of uber mage and then, when you finally face him, the fight is far too easy. I killed him by accident the first time by summoning some skeletons and a hakeshar to soften him up - the next thing I knew he was dead (the text that says something like 'your party was so badly injured that they got dragged into hell with you' was a LOL moment in that game). An encounter with one nuclear ability (imprison in the case of Kangaxx and Wail of the Banshee in the case of Irenicus) just isn't very interesting.

This is a useful addition to the discussion. I will talk about two fights that I found challenging. The first was the final fight of BG1 (the ToTSC version, which, I think, is harder than the original version). BG1 was my first D&D Game (in fact, it was my first game; I'm old and there weren't any games when I was growing up). I found the final fight to be challenging because there were two difficult melee opponents coupled with a magic user who dispels all of your buffs and does status effect spells and a second magic user who does area of effect damage (mostly with arrows of detonation, I think). I found it challenging because you can't really ignore the melee guys to focus on the magic users since they do so much damage. Ignoring the magic users is always a bad idea and the status/aoe spells make maintaining a formation a bad idea (whereas maintaining a formation is a good idea to beat the melee guys). It took me a while to figure this one out and I found it challenging for a few play throughs. The last time I played I had Imoen kill the final four by herself and nobody in my party even lost a single hit point - metagame knowledge is powerful stuff and these things do get a lot easier as you learn more about what's available. I suppose that a similar fight without the need for and availability of hard counters would be more interesting for a longer time which is something that I can appreciate about Josh Sawyer's recent comments. I hope that the game will be as much fun to play as BG was even though ti will clearly be different. In BG2, I think the Twisted Rune is a similar fight - there are some interesting complications that come up when you put that collection of enemies together (e.g., the beholder will remove negative plane protection from whoever is tanking it giving the vampire an opening). The only real problem I have with it is that it is very easy to stumble into it before your party has any chance of beating it and you can't leave. That aspect, to me is the sucker punch part of it but otherwise it is an interesting encounter and very doable for a high level party. Kangaxx wasn't difficult for me mainly due to luck - I encountered him for the first time with a high level party with two mages and a berserker (three characters who could become immune to his attack) and with two weapons that could hit him. After seeing the one thing he does (and reloading), it was easy to contain him and beat him to death before he could imprison any unprotected party members (who were 'valiantly' hiding in the corner - this fight reminds me a lot of the basilisk map in BG1, a very nice XP farm where the protected characters terminate with extreme prejudice while the unprotected ones hide). Of course, with a different party it could have been challenging (or impossible).

That would just be ramping up in difficulty of the fight. Would it be over the top? I don't know as I haven't played that encounter. That would just be bad game design, but the facts are that beholders follow the rules of the game, you are given the tools (spells, summing, the shield of Baldurian), so it is very possible to beat the encounter in many different ways. Agreed, but I had a point with these specific examples. The point of the Spell Shield example is that Spell Shield might as well be called Beholder Begone. The game has provided you with a specific important tool. As you mentioned, there are other tools too, but at some point an encounter becomes what Mr. Sawyer referred to as a sucker punch in a recent interview. Reasonable people can certainly disagree on when that is (I'm not convinced that the Beholder encounter we've been talking about qualifies though I can see why somebody would think so), but more on that at the end of this post. Unfair doesn't mean unwinnable, unfair means that the rules that apply to you don't apply to the AI. I made some examples in the above posts. I see. I thought you were saying something else. That's certainly a reasonable view. With auto-save, the cost of losing that encounter is minimal. My view is different; I always try for a no reload game because reloading makes the game less fun for me. I don't always succeed. E.g., I certainly reloaded that time when I stumbled into the twisted rune with a low level party in my first playthrough. If an encounter requires you to fail once to get needed info and then reload and destroy that makes it unsatisfying (for me and for the other no reload types). I would prefer an encounter that is challenging but possible to beat (maybe with some good luck but without the hindsight of reloading) the first time and that continues to be challenging afterwards.

To be honest it would have to be something ridiculously over the top...... Well, how about this: I don't think that would be possible, but to answer your hypothetical, no it wouldn't I would just need to find another way to kill them. I would probably use spell turning+spell shield+spell immunity and set most of my characters to ranged attack. Suppose the beholder area had a mutant beholder with an eye of dispelling. Spell shield protects you from beholders because their magic removal eye doesn't work like Dispel Magic (or Remove Magic). Would that modification be ridiculously over the top? Is it a sucker punch? Or, simpler, if the game hadn't provided you with a spell shield scroll before meeting the beholders. That's six seconds to no protections at all no matter what buffs you did. Well, hang on. BG2 is carefully designed to be winnable. If you want unfair for real, it would be very easy to mod BG2 to make it unwinnable, and the mod wouldn't have to be ridiculous (where ridiculous would be something like replacing the mephit portals in the intro level with beholder, mindflayer, vampire and lich portals (recall that Imoen has spells up to level 4 at the beginning of the game)). It could do things like the above - give beholders real dispelling and similar creature mods; remove some scrolls and potions etc. Thinking of a minimal mod that would make BG2 impossible is left as a an exercise for the reader.

I don't think that would be possible, but to answer your hypothetical, no it wouldn't I would just need to find another way to kill them. I would probably use spell turning+spell shield+spell immunity and set most of my characters to ranged attack. Exactly; this is a completely hypothetical question. So, in my other post, I posed the question, if this encounter is not a sucker punch, what would turn it into one? For example, putting this area in BG1, say, in Candlekeep in place of Shank or Carbos (the two very lame assassins who try to kill you in the tutorial level) would qualify, but maybe you can think of a less ridiculous example that you would consider a sucker punch.

I may be having trouble seeing past my dissatisfaction of the ToB story to be giving that style of expansion a fair chance, but I think I (slightly) prefer a TotSC style expansion, though TotSC would have been better if there was some, at least, tangential connection to the BG1 story. As it is, there is a sense of urgency to the main plot and not a good in-game reason to do the TotSC content. If there is something like ToB and Watcher's Keep (that is, a separate story and an area accessible from either) then I would hope that the areas in the original game would be accessible from the expansion areas. The idea that you can get from point A to point B and back and you can get from point B to point C and back but you can't get from point C back to point A seems wrong.

This sounds about right. Hindsight shouldn't be the only way to find out things that you need to know to beat an encounter and, conversely, hindsight shouldn't make encounters trivial. The beholder area is kind of a borderline case for me - the first time I went in there (err, and every other time since then) my whole party was invisible (using pixie dust; my favorite spell along with invis. 10' radius) and then, immediately, the elder orb started casting a spell which I assumed was true sight (it was). So, you have a chance to leave or move further into the tunnel before the casting finishes (I had Minsc go berserk and beat it to death as the rest of my party headed for the hills). That said, if sticking an elder orb in the entryway of an area transition isn't a sucker punch, it's certainly very close to being one because imprison cast on the PC is game over. It would absolutely be a sucker punch if you couldn't leave without killing the elder orb.

Tbh I never noticed it, I just now found out that is the case from you. But even if it did work as intended I would just spam summons and kill them, rest and repeat. So, if the beholders had more death spells than you had summons and they replenished them whenever you rested, would this encounter become a sucker punch for you?

And, one of my answers to this: I agree that the Karoug encounter was a sucker punch, but I didn't notice because: - I had Khalid in my party (who is specialized in bastard swords when he joins) - I saved Aldeth from the Druids in cloakwood which opened up his quest in Baldur's Gate - I did Aldeth's quest in Baldur's Gate and got the bastard sword +1/+3 vs. shapeshifters which I kept because it was better than the +1 bastard sword that Khalid had equipped before that (BTW, I think that was done by the designers on purpose). If you didn't get lucky and do all of the above, you could have a problem. One way to fix that would have been to put the sword of Balduran in, say, Dradeel's cabin instead of in a trapped chest that you might reasonably not think of opening until the encounter was over. A second way would have been to have other encounters throughout the game that taught you to open things during combat to get items that improved your chances of winning. (If anything, Durlag's Tower taught you not to mess with traps at the wrong time.) It could have been more of a sucker punch if Khalid already had a Bastard Sword +2 which might have caused me to sell the +1/+3 sword (you know, how often do you meet a shapeshifter anyway, and how difficult are they really?) That said, I liked the werewolf island because it was an interesting story and difficult in other ways (mainly that the werewolves hit harder than almost anything you've seen up until then). So, apart from the sucker punch, it was an encounter that I liked. (As I mentioned, I happened to get lucky and not get sucker punched, so I just liked the whole encounter). I'll put it this way: In theory, it should be possible to beat the game without reloading (even though in practice that will be very very unlikely). Since there are three people who will misunderstand what I just wrote, I will attempt to clarify it (and they will misunderstand anyway, but I get a warm feeling inside for having tried). My point is not that the game should be easy - I want it to be very challenging. My point is that it shouldn't be necessary to fail an encounter to get the information you need to beat it. To show the contrast - I don't know any way to discover that Kangaxx can imprison from a distance and can't be hit by less than a +4 weapon other than by reloading once (and, if you reloaded more than once to destroy Kangaxx, you just don't know how to play these games ). On the other hand, a dungeon in IWD Trials of the Luremaster had undead spellcasters that would randomly teleport your party members to very remote parts of the dungeon - that made the encounter difficult and destroyed most strategies that players would be using but it didn't require you to reload, go buy something that you didn't know you needed, and start again. Challenging, but not a sucker punch.

(Some of ) this discussion is pretty interesting. I'd like to pose a question for any of you who would like to offer your opinion (I'll do a follow-up post where I put some of my own answers): Of the encounters that people have brought up as sucker punches (or bring up a new encounter if you want), a. If you agree that one of the encounters that has been mentioned is a sucker punch, what could have been changed to make it not a sucker punch? Or, b. If you disagree that it is a sucker punch, how would change the encounter to make it into a sucker punch? Another way of saying this is: When is an encounter a sucker punch vs. just a challenging encounter?

If an entire ethnicity declared war on you, babies and all, then sure. However, I'm fairly certain all the 6-year-old children of that nation/people aren't actually going to war with you. Generalizing is not necessary illogical though. To a racist your argument would sound a lot like: I'm going to go into overly pedantic mode for a moment: If you are doing a logical derivation and you reach a point where you can stick an upside-down E into your derivation and instead you stick an upside-down A there (that is, you derived an existential quantifier but added a universal quantifier instead) than that is the logical fallacy of 'over generalization.' Racism is basically that fallacy writ large. As others pointed out, humans are hardwired to overgeneralize dangers because those who didn't learn to run away from potential dangers eventually got eaten. So, I would put it this way: Racism is not logical (but it comes from reasonable mechanisms of self-preservation). We now return to our regularly scheduled non-overly pedantic programming.

Good idea. That could be a good companion for a melee focused ranger if they end up implementing that option.

Yup, a highly evolved battle tactic perfected by Philip II and expanded upon by his son, Alexander the Great, who made effective use of cavalry in conjunction with the phalanx, flanking and containing the enemy. The Macedonian sarissa (spear) was about 6 meters (20 feet) long. In the picture you can see the 'business end' of the spears from the first few ranks in front of the formation. A would be defender would need to get past four ranks of them to even have a chance of getting to the people in the front rank who were presenting them with a wall of shields. It required lots of drilling to get the group to move as a unit. It's interesting that armies still train in group movement (that is, marching in step) even though rifles etc. make such tight formations a lot less necessary than it was in the old days.

Great update. The area art looks fantastic. I really like the druid cat form too (though the legs might be a bit dog-like).

The farmer's wife (standing in the field SE of where the armor is) tells you that her son broke the plow blade on something while plowing that field. The armor is at the end of the final partially plowed row. That's how I found the armor the first time.

Just to underline this one: BG1 has a one liner for an ending (something like 'Sarevok has fallen') and then he disintegrates and the credits roll. Story telling doesn't work that way; there needs to be an ending.

I agree entirely in the case of counters. My point was more that it's ultimately up to personal opinion in deciding if the line's drawn at "mitigation possibilities" or at "plausibility in the setting" (which could be before or after mitigation) or at "challenging for the average player" or any one of a number of criteria that could inform a designer's choice. Oh, I see. I misunderstood your post.

I'd draw it at mitigation possibilities. My rule would be: there should be a way to protect against anything. Thus, if I was designing a system, and my assistant came up with a spell there was no defense against, I'd either scrap it outright, or I'd design the defense against it. No need to draw arbitrary lines based on personal opinion (what you've been admittedly doing on this thread) Ultimately, every line in game design's drawn based on personal opinion. There's no other way to do it without the designer pretending some knowledge of objective truth they don't have. Not really. The objective truth is either, this spell has a counter or it doesn't have one. The designer knows which of those is true. Stun's view of the world seems to be different from mine in a lot of respects but I think that rule is pretty reasonable. I might add something about the counter not being made up of weird stuff that a player is unlikely to have collected.

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.

This is a case where the IE games could be improved upon. You had BG where enemies tended to stand there and do nothing when someone got shot right next to them vs. IWD where sometimes it worked that way and other times attacking nearby enemies would draw out all of the enemies on the map to mob you. I didn't spend a lot of time w/IWD 1 or 2 but 'enemy draw' didn't seem very predictable. I don't think either approach got it exactly right. With the 'circles of perception' there is a chance to implement this better.

This is one of the things that didn't sound good to me. There are a lot of cases where scouting gives your party information before combat - if you were in that situation, why wouldn't you use that information to your advantage? I'm not a fan of combat mode vs. non-combat mode. I don't like turn-based combat for that reason and so I wouldn't be entirely happy with an arbitrary no buff spells before combat rule. Maybe there will be something less contrived than just not be being able to cast certain spells outside of combat. For example, if there were no pure buff spells, that is, each buff is also a debuff for an enemy, that would be one way to implement it.

I guess we're a little off topic but I am interested in the question of smaller parties/solo runs too. Related to that is this question: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65037-experience-split-between-party-members/?p=1412664 Is XP divided among party members like it was in the IE games? There were interesting tradeoffs in using a smaller party that leveled faster.

This is a nice idea. The Alley of Dangerous Angles worked like this in PS:T. You could fight one or both groups, pay them to let you walk there or lead one faction into the other and let them kill each other (and maybe there were other solutions?). I had forgotten about that! You're right that it's similar, although I think that there's room for improvement. In PS:T, you are expected to be able to defeat either of the gangs on your own if you're good enough or advanced enough and seeing them fight each other is more of a nice bonus. By making the enemies too powerful to defeat outright, you can introduce elements of fear, helplessness, and underdog status to occasionally puncture the standard RPG power fantasy. Sounds good to me. Maybe we can call this 'strategic retreating' (or maybe it could be strategic negotiation in some cases) as opposed to tactical retreating. In the (very long and occasionally heated) thread about objective XP vs. kill XP, I was trying to come up with examples where the two should work differently. This is a good example - kill XP would be zero if you let your enemies kill each other - objective XP could be non-zero (assuming you had some agency in causing the encounter to happen).

I wasn't clear. Gah, you're dragging a specific example out from me, which I was hoping to avoid because that tends to get bogged in tangents, a la the Harm example (and further, specifics are more speculative than discussing the general features of the systems so there's that drawback as well). Oh, I see. So the point is that if there were, say, three encounters: one with a lich, one with 5 skeletons and one with both a lich and 5 skeletons, the encounter with both should be worth more than the sum of the other two. Sure, that makes sense.