Yonjuro

An interesting way of looking at it. There's that "swagger" factor, I suppose. Would Ali have that? Sure, I guess he is a good example. One could argue (I'm not *sure* I would argue this ...) that Mike Tyson had this working in his favor for a long time too (you know, in addition to his 25 STR score). Most of his fights lasted exactly as long as it took him to reach his opponent plus 250 milliseconds (and then ten more seconds for the count out). Once somebody beat him, then he was no longer 'unbeatable' and other fighters started making intelligent use of tactics against him.

I like where you're going with this. Clever tactics that you employ through your character are interesting to me. Clever abuses of the game engine that the player can do (like closing a door and having the high intelligence mage on the other side stand there like an idiot) are not so interesting. One example that I liked was in BG1 cloakwood mines. If you triggered the battle horror traps on the lowest level, the battle horrors would follow you through the level exits. Luckily you just acquired boots of speed and could lure them far away and lose them. Much nicer tactic (for a solo playthrough where you don't have a thief to disarm the traps) than whack them upside the head, run out the door, repeat ad nauseum.

Or, worse, retreat one step out of an enemy's visual horizon and rest. I saw a youtube video with this tactic (I must admit that it was a virtuso performance of cheese and showed a good understanding of how the engine worked; I'm not sure that it would be fun to play though). Hmmm, maybe any tactic that includes the word 'reload' is too cheesy. As compared to, say, getting a high level mage to waste his timestop on you low level skeleton summon. That's cheesy in the sense that it is exploiting bad AI (I suppose the mage should be beating the skeleton to dust with a quarter staff and saving the timestop for you, right?), but it isn't as immersion breaking as reloading. So maybe it's cheesy but fun? I like this tactic for, say, the windspear hills ambush area. The goblin archers use it on you and then you use it on others. I don't like it if there is no plausible reason that would make it work apart from broken ai.

Yup, and hasted skeletons vs. mindflayers are a beautiful thing. I also sometimes used the lower level skeletons (plus an invisible character to control them) as decoys. Windspear Hills dungeon had that nice ambush area and lots of enemy mobs (vampires and werewolves especially) that were good to keep your party away from if you went there at a low level (that is, early in the game). The vampires in particular could dominate your decoy if you used a party member instead of a skeleton. They were also immune to stinking cloud so even the low level skeletons could beat the unconscious enemies to death while you waited. Sort of the undead equivalent of spider spawn + web. Sure. The bounty hunter kit traps were another good way to divide enemies if you used them strategically.

This thread is to discuss your favorite tactics which may or may not include cheesy exploits of game mechanics. Where that line is drawn is probably in the eyes of the beholder (you know, the person evaluating them, not the D&D monster ). In IE games, powerful tools with cheesy uses probably included thief traps, summoning spells etc. So, when are these tools, when are they cheese (and, when they are cheese, when do you love using them anyway)? I admit to being a frequent user of summoning spells in BG2 and love having them available. It makes my game play more fun (though I was surprised in one play through when I accidently killed Irenicus using skeleton and hakeshar summons that were intended to soften him up. I guess they were a little overpowered at that point in the game . Oh well, it still counts ).

I'll play devil's advocate on this one. As a long time martial artist, I have seen a lot of people who have an aura about them that can be intimidating. It works to their advantage in a fight/sparring match in that their opponents overestimate them and don't try things that would work. I would map that to CHR more than any other stat and it makes them more effective fighters. For INT, look at Marvin Hagler v. Sugar Ray Leonard. Hagler was the very high STR/CON fighter who lost to the very high INT/DEX fighter (probably no real dump stats on either guy). In the IE games, it could have been implemented where a high INT fighter was a valid build and that would have been believable if players understood how it worked. (For example, maybe a high INT fighter would be less likely than a low INT fighter to be cowed by a high CHR fighter; maybe you get a bonus to hit for high INT and a damage bonus for high STR). P:E will have a completely new set of attributes. As long as they are well designed and understandable, there will be no problem.

I agree. Going back to the earlier example, in BG1, your PC should have some motivation for visiting Durlag's Tower late in the game that connects to the main story. As is, the player has two motivations, fun dungeon with great loot (not to mention XP), but the PC ... nope why would they go there? And, it doesn't have to be deeply intertwined with the main story and it can be optional, but it is better if it connects. An example that I mentioned briefly earlier in this thread was Yoshimo's story line in BG2. It's optional, but it ties in nicely with the story and even back to BG1 where you may have met the character in Yoshimo's journal and felt sorry for her at the time. I thought this was very effective (and I didn't even know about it until, I think, my third playthrough since I had never kept Yoshimo in my party before that - so it was a nice story that really added replay value to the game). In your example, in one game, maybe you don't clear out the bandits and then, in another, you do and are rewarded with some changes to the story that you didn't experience the first time. It doesn't need to severely help/handicap your gameplay doing it one way or the other (it probably shouldn't) but it adds to the atmosphere and replayability of the game. It probably works best if you get storyline A when do that quest and equally interesting storyline B (with comparable XP rewards available - if any) when you don't do it. This gets rid of the completionist mentality that can be immersion breaking in a game (when metagaming and gaming don't match).

In BG2, I always felt that there should be the option of taking Firkraag's head and impaling it on a pike (or maybe have Cromwell stuff it and then give it to Garren Windspear to hang over his fireplace (and then finding out later that the old paladin only took it to be polite and then put it in the closet)).

Hmmmm. That could work as a game. I never really of that of that before. There could be different characters (e.g. Woodie Guthrie-like bardish character; community organizer etc.). Sure. homeless former farmer -> laborer -> labor organizer -> labor leader -> politician homeless former farmer -> petty thief ->.... -> organized crime boss homeless former farmer -> .....-> union busting business tycoon ... Yes, I see what you mean.

There are indeed many stories that rely on urgency, and that is probably one of them. As far as possible alternatives, there are really too many to mention, given how much literature there is about things other than saving the world (journeys of personal growth, pursuing relationships, etc.). I should start by saying that I think we're in vehement agreement about most of what we are talking about here. In the interest of keeping the discussion going: What is an example, an existing story or a new one that would expand the cRPG genre in the way that you have in mind? I'll start with something that I don't think would work: About 12 years the play called "Art" toured the U.S. I think it may have been a French story (it seemed it might have been). The play had three characters and the main story line was an argument between two of them about a painting that one of them had purchased. It was a fantastic, deep and surprisingly funny story with lots of threads that mostly related back to the main story. I can't imagine this story being a successful or enjoyable cRPG (especially with the multiple choice dialogs that cRPGs currently use; maybe future CRPGs will do something better). So maybe this is a bound to the genre (then again, maybe some enterprising game developer will prove me wrong), but there's a lot of room between BG1 and "Art". An extremely standard trope indeed, albeit a quite successful one. I used the word motif rather than trope because it is very easy to see this motif in a lot of stories. It is remarkably easy to apply Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" to a wide range of stories. For example, let's take "Art" again: The 'Descent into the dark' happens in the argument and the 'revelation' is the self-realization that two arguing characters come to about why they are arguing in the first place. It's hard to find a story that doesn't have at least a little sprinkling of the hero journey in it somewhere. We agree. The point I was hoping to make is that this is the challenge, not that it necessarily can't be done. For example, BG1 came out and later 'Tales of the sword coast' came out as an expansion. All of the 'Tales' are optional, and have nothing to do with the main story. Perhaps they would have been more enjoyable with even a tangential connection to the main story (as it is, they are fun to play but feel a bit like either an XP farm for the main quest (that is, you might imagine your PC is hoping to strengthen the party for what is to come by doing these things) or a strange diversion from the main quest given what is going on.

OK, sounds good. Let's take BG1 as an example because the story is fairly simple. Your main character is a young person who gets thrown out into the world and hunted by assassins which gives a sense of urgency to the problems in the region related to the iron supply that turn out to be related. I think we don't want to remove the personal urgency from this particular story or else we're the manager of WalMart solving our iron supply-chain issues. But there there are midpoints on the continuum (or other ways of telling this story entirely). So what kind of thing do you have in mind? I would argue that (but always with an open mind). I think the appeal of the BG story, in particular, was that the main character doesn't initially set out to do be the hero of the sword coast, but things happen and the character rises to the occasion, a very standard motif, but a good one. I agree that freedom to explore is important to good game play. Although, this can easily degenerate to wandering around wondering what might turn out to be interesting which I don't find engaging. My earlier comment about Planescape: Torment falls into this bucket. There was too much: wander around, figure out whether you need to talk to this person (or this zombie who is named Fred instead of zombie) for the third time to find out something interesting (oh, but my intelligence stat is only 16, so I'm not smart enough to understand what they are telling me; if only I'd put that point into INT instead of CHR (of course then they wouldn't have been willing to speak to me in the first place)). Anyway, sorry for the rant about a game that I want to love but don't have the patience to actually play. My real point here is that exploration makes for better game play, but if the story is too hard to uncover, then you don't end up with a good experience. My fondest wish for P:E is to have the immersive depth of P:T with the great (epic) fun of BG. My unfondest antiwish is to have the pixel hunt of P:T with the depth of character development of IWD. Luckily, I think the former is more likely than the latter.

Thanks for this more precise definition of the concept I tried to argue with. I like all the posts being made. Apart from that I've found a good analogy: Ask yourself if you can write a good and compelling book with all the narratives given in the game. Absolutely. For example, I've never done a full play through of Icewind Dale (a linear game more than embedded one to use mcmanusaur's terminology). The combat was nicely done, but I didn't care enough about the story to keep going. On the other end of the spectrum, I really wanted to like Planescape: Torment because the atmosphere was so well done - but the game play didn't work for me. I think BG2 has a combination of story and game play that works. My hope for Project Eternity is that it will be a great story and will be as much fun to play as BG2. I don't think it's easy to do for the reasons that you mentioned in your first post. A good story needs to draw you in with a sense of urgency and exploring the world can be at odds with that. (A good example or, I suppose, a bad example is Elder Scrolls Oblivion which has an open world with lots of nice things to wander around and do, but ... wait wasn't I supposed to be stopping demons from invading the world or something? Oh, whatever, let's pick these mushrooms.) it was called "Watcher's Keep" in English.

re: BG1 - Or werewolf island for what, a month in game time? While poor Scar is waiting outside the Flaming Fist HQ for me to come and report on the Iron Throne or (if I do it later) poor Duke wassname is getting slowly (slowly) poisoned. Exactly - and if you wait until still later, the two people that Sarevok has stabbed in the thieves maze have to wait a month for you to arrive before they can finish bleeding to death. If that doesn't add insult to injury, then I don't know what does. I agree with you that the story still holds together. Circling back to Mr. Sawyer's point about wanting all characters being equally developed, let's take Jan Jansen as an example. Suppose you dismiss Imoen at the beginning and don't add her back and use Jan for your thief/mage instead. Jan has an interesting, side quest (with a nicely done uncharacteristically blunt comment to his rival that gives him some character development) but the story line is a bit unfinished (until the very end of throne of Bhaal when you get the epilogue). If that were fleshed out more and (especially) if it were more related to the main story, it would probably work better. As it is, you trade a major story element for a partially developed side quest (which is also a bit buggy in that if you kill his rival, nobody notices). It's true. I think BG2 has a good balance between story and game play that works well - I've played through it a bunch of times and will play it again. I haven't spent as much time with any other game.

I was just about to join the forum so I could post the exact same topic (hence my derivative username - thanks for posting, my younger Samurai brother ). (A good example of how this can go wrong was in BG1 with the TotSC expansion. From a metagaming perspective, going to Durlag's Tower too early is not a great idea. In fact, about the best time to go there is right before the final fight when your party has a lot of experience, but from a story perspective, that is all wrong. You're in hot pursuit of Sarevok and so you ... err... go to Ulgoth's Beard for a vacation?) In BG2, if you played through BG1 with the canon party (Minsc, Jaheira etc.) and decided that Imoen is, in fact, your character's best friend/little sister figure, then the story works well. (And, Yoshimo's story line works well too.) If you choose different party members in BG1, or didn't play it at all, you may not enjoy the BG2 story as much. I think Mr. Sawyer has touched on this point in the past. The game ideally will let you play however you want and give you a good story(, but necessarily without adding exponentially many nodes to the story graph). This gets harder when you have sequels and expansions, I suppose. Tldr; There does seem to be conflict between a compelling story and freedom to explore/play in different styles or with different characters. Getting this right is probably how one makes a masterpiece of a game.