Enoch

The D20 system is best for levels 3-12. I recommend keeping as much of the game as possible in this 'sweet spot.' High-level D20 stinks for the same reason that very-low level D20 stinks: Combat is inordinately dominated by one variable. In low levels, it is the critical chance roll. One of those pops up against you, and you're toast at any level below 3 or 4 (depending on the weapon). At high levels, it's the saving throw. Almost every combat ends up being decided by whether you get caught in one of the insta-death or immobilizing spell (or whatever) effects that every enemy seems to have at that stage (and, no matter how much you boost your saves, there's still a 5% chance that you lose). When one variable dominates all the others, the combat becomes too random-- too easy for your character to be doomed by one bad roll. Not much fun. On a personal note, I much prefer low level campaigns (say, level 1-6). I have trouble identifying with the superhuman characters you end up with above that. They've got no real vulnerability.

Generally, I agree. The ending in KotOR was kinda lame. But, 2 points: 1) The game was closely modeled on the original films. The endings there (outside of Empire, which doesn't count because game developers aren't likely to end a game with the protagonist losing) were also pretty lame. Good guy wins; brief party scene; roll credits. 2) You can bet the bank that Obs is very happy with Bio's decision to leave the fates of all of the characters and planets completely unexplored at the end of the first game. It dramatically frees their hand in crafting the story of the sequel. Now we've got some drama as to who survived and where they may show up. That's a nice hook to get people to buy the sequel. I'm not saying either of these stand up to any close scrutiny, but it is useful to see the advantages of the other approach.

I'm betting that Revan didn't survive either. (S)he'd make a great 'force ghost.'

If Revan's an NPC in the game, I'd say we're more likely to find him/her dead than alive. Consider: Obs doesn't want to mess with anyone's internal perception of how they played Revan. They'll 'feel us out' early in the game to see if our Revan was male/female and dark/light/neutral. That still leaves other things like appearance, equipment, skills, and voice. I doubt they're going to give us a questionaire. They can establish in the opening text-scroll that Revan was killed in some mysterious catastrophe. Then, they can make Revan a Force ghost, offering us advice based on his/her former devotion. Put the traditional deep-hooded robe on him/her, and give the voice a nice wispy quality, and there you have it. Much less hackneyed than having us be him/her or kill him/her. Less problematic for each player's internal perceptions, too. As for the level 1 start, I don't have much of a problem with it. Jedi powers are so ridiculously strong that I'd say that you'd have to be well into your training before you qualified as a level 1 jedi (about the point you became a full Padawan and got your lightsabre). From there it's easy to explain that you were sent off on a mission where you didn't see any action (i.e. got no XP) and your master died or lost you or turned evil or something. Not too hard to get around.

And one more: (4) Newhart - Master Vandar wakes up one brisk Vermont morning to realize that it was all a dream. Just picture the outrage!!

More stuff like the first half of the Leviathan. Solo character, separated from your gear, sneaking around and avoiding the guards (Mission was the most fun). It was lots of fun in an entirely different way than most of the rest of the game (skills were actually more important than loot). And, it was certainly more in keeping with the general Star Wars tradition. So yeah. More sneaky infiltration and less all-out assault. The last I checked, Jedi weren't supposed to kill beings that they didn't have to anyway.

If everyone had to fight the things, those terentateks would've already been dead when you found them. It was possible to run them in circles a bit and get to the lever to open the door to the next room. I just assumed that all the other dark jedi did that.

Isn't that progression a bit illogical? Which seems easier to you: 1) Making a droid programmed with the knowledge and practice of the languages and customs of every signifcant cultural group in the galaxy, or 2) Making a droid that knows how hit things with a pointy stick.

This is an interesting argument and all, but I'm more interested in Gromnir's earlier point about where to go from here? Should the next game try to capture that same warm and squishy nostalgia of archetypal (archetypical?) character roles, or move on into new, more risky territory? Consider, though, that one of the few substantive facts we have about the game is that it has multiple villians. That means there's room for some variety here. There can be a Malak-style bully, a revengent Irenicus type, and a Ravel-esque doomed-by-my-inner-nature villian. Each of the Sith Lords probably has a different set of motivations for his or her actions, and these different outlooks will hopefully affect the protagonists options in dealing with them.

Exactly. And, it fits well with the established Star Wars stories. There was all that Han-Leia quasi-adversarial banter, and one heavy kiss. And that was enough. (I'm not counting the implied nookie in ep. 2.) Anyhow, I was one of those players who bailed on the romance plotlines early in KotOR. The obvious 'romance responses' were all so groaningly awful (much like ep. 2, I might add) that I couldn't bring myself to chose them, even just to see where they led.

Ideally, I agree. A SW RPG should have options to play non-jedi and non-humans. However, I can see why they would make a decision to limit our options here. The first reason is simply balancing the jedi classes with the non-jedi. The widespread practice of level-saving in KotOR show how lousy a job they did of that in the first game. Forcing the PC to be a jedi makes this much less important. (Personally, I still think they should make the effort to nerf the jedi classes, if only to make the game more challenging. Given the probable fan responses, though, this is unlikely.) The second reason, of course, is story-based. It's much easier to write an interesting story that can accommodate every player if there's something to tie all of the potential PCs together. In BG, you had to play a Bhaalspawn; in Fallout, you had to play the Vault Dweller; in PS:T, you had to play TNO. Granted, most of these restrictions don't limit the class-like capabilities of your character the way a jedi-only restriction does, but the principle remains. If being limited to jedi-only leads to a more compelling story, I'm willing to follow along for now. Though, I'd really be happier of they'd shoot for the moon and give us some non-jedi options.

I concur. It's all about comparative advantage. You get the most bang for your time and resources when production is done by people who specialize in what they're making. Let the RPG specialists make RPGs. Let the silly little card/racing/shooting game specialists make their silly little card/racing/shooting games. When PRG people make minigames, they're allocating their resources inefficiently. The quality of the end product would be greater if they took that time and effort and put it into what they do best, instead of fiddling around with something they don't know very well. Plus, all the minigames in KotOR stunk. <_<

Ozy, I'd have guessed that your battle cry would be "Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" B) I got: Striding along the wasteland, swinging two hardened pitas, cometh Enoch! And he gives an ominous howl: "I'm going to clobber you until you pee fire, and throw you out the window!!!" Well, that was fun. Oddly enough, I believe I have a couple of quite stale pitas in my cupboard right now...

A large part of this depends on how inherently involved the protagonist is in the rest of the story. Is the main character somehow marked as special, or is he just some guy (assuming male for brevity) who has stumbled into something? I very much prefer the "ordinary guy" protagonist. Whenever a game starts going into how my character is fulfilling some ancient prophecy or avenging the death of the father he never knew, I roll my eyes and sigh. That pretty much eliminates SP's numbers 3 and 7. (Torment overcame its opening because it never pretended that there wasn't something special about the PC.) A further determination depends on where the story's going to end up. If the game doesn't allow much player choice in the direction of the story, you want the opening to give the character a goal to start off with. Numbers 2, 6, & 8 work well for this. If, on the other hand, the story gives the player wide latitude in deciding his path through the game, you want an opening that isn't going to assume any kind of motive on behalf of the character. 1 and especially 4 are probably the strongest in this regard.

All that really sounds intriguing. My chief objection to the non-essential locations in BG was that they comprised forced meta-gaming. A character who's just witnessed his/her mentor give his life to protect him/her from a powerful assailant who wants to capture or kill him/her for unknown reasons probably isn't going to be very inclined to random wilderness exploration. (Granted, he/she is not particularly likely to want to investigate rotting ore from an iron mine, but that's another story.) The only reason my characters ever did such was to see why the areas were included in the game (and later to hunt down the valuable treasures that remembered being there). I hate doing things in games for no reason other than it's a game. Some real in-game effects of these non-essential quests and places would go a long way towards addressing this problem. My secondary objection to the non-essential locations in BG (and my first to it in Morrowind) was that it wasn't much fun. Randomly generated encounters and areas don't tend to be particularly well laid-out. This has to do more with the nuts and bolts of gameplay than high-minded concerns of story and linearity, though. That said, Gromnir's point about finite resources is still relevant. Making all those effects balanced and meaningful, and adjusting the main plotline to accommodate them inevitably takes time and effort that could be placed elsewhere. Would it be a worthwhile use of resources? Who knows?! Nobody has seen an RPG where such has been pulled off. But I'm worried that the fact that it hasn't yet been done doesn't lend much support to Frank's claim that it's relatively easy to do.

Jolee was the best in my book, too. If you actually draw him out and hear every one of his dialogues, he has by far the most satisfying backstory. I probably liked Carth more than most people seem to. Everyone complains that he's "whiny," but, if you think about, he has to be. He's in the game to be your character's escort around Taris when you're first stranded there. Normally, an experienced soldier and captain would take the lead, and you'd be playing tag-along. So, in order to give your character control over the game at that early stage, he had to be made obsequious. The rest of his storyline grew out of that necessity. It's a weak hand to begin with, but they played it out pretty well. I wasn't too impressed with most of the others. The VO was consistently excellent, but the writing was spotty. They were either rather uninteresting (Juhani, T3, Zaalbar), interesting but not developed enough (Mission), repetitive (Canderous, HK), or just a bad idea to begin with (all of the romance dialouge). Any criticism of Bastilla has more to do with the overall weaknesses in the story, and I'm not going to address that here.

Video games catch enough flak for having too much violence. Just image how that would multiply when the violence took place in a school...

Fair enough. I haven't been 'round here long enough to get a feel for how the place is run. It just struck me as odd is all. Now that I think about it, I guess the non-dev mods don't know anything more than we do.

Normally, I'd agree that combat-interrupting cutscenes with predetermined endings are a rather lame designer cop-out. But, in the context of a Star Wars game, they do make a certain amount of sense. The designers of KotOR modeled the game very deliberately on the original trilogy. Nearly every non-spaceship fight in those movies is interspersed with dialogue, and almost none of them end with a clear victory by the hero (Luke v. Jabba's crowd in RotJ is the only exception that comes to mind). Even the ultimate denouncement of the story, if translated into a CRPG, would essentially be a dialogue choice. The developers were faced with a choice of whether to conform to CRPG traditions and make a clear protagonist victory be the proper conclusion to every fight, or to follow the precedent of the films and force you into some predetermined endings. They chose the latter, and I think the game is better for it. There are probably better ways they could have handled it (Kasoroth's suggestions sound promising), but it works reasonably well as-is.

Anyone else think the fact that this thread hasn't been punted over to 'Off-Topic' is the best evidence yet that KotOR2 is in the works??

Alternately, they could be naming projects after prominent Native American tribes, beginning in the East and working their way westward. A very large percentage of American corporations are based in Delaware due to it's favorable tax policies. Perhaps the devs were inspired by Interplays unfolding implosion and are making a corporate-finance based RPG. I'd buy it. Of course, neither of those is very likely, but it's tough to find a definite pattern when your sample size is 1. And if we're adding states to the union, my candidate is the District of Columbia. Unlike the territories, DC residents (over 500,000) pay full federal taxes but have no votes in Congress.

I don't know the Apocrypha very well (and by that I mean I know nothing beyond the fact that some books exist that various councils left out of the canon), but there were a couple of OT Enochs, the first being the son of Cain (Genesis 4:17). That's about as deep as I go, theologically. I strongly prefer the more reason-based morality systems.

My nick goes way back to my Freshman year of college. When we first moved in, the RAs had signs on all the door with our names. Months later, when we figured that just about anyone who we'd want to see would know our names already, my roommate hung a sign on our door that read "Garth and Enoch" (not even close to our real names). He offered me first choice and I decided to be Enoch. Later, I used it as a character name when I played BG1. The avatar is part of a series of photos of jazz musicians I've been using. The current cover-boy is Sun Ra.

I'm a jazz-freak, mostly (I play the saxophone. Meet me by the dumpster after school, Deadeye :angry: ) Firmly rooted in the classics, but with an eye towards some of the more odd performances (see avatar). I was raised on the classic rock stuff, so I've got a healthy appreciation for that. I've also been getting more into the indie-rock scene lately (college radio stations are the best option when there's nothing interesting on NPR). I can never remember the names of the bands, but I'm always pleasantly surprised.

I have recently become a citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Quite a shock for a Northeastern liberal intellectual elitist like myself. The weather is a good deal nicer, though.