Diogo Ribeiro

How exactly does "I don't enjoy that type of design but can tolerate it" even get near "I am quite pleased with dealing with"? If you don't particularly care for what I'm writing you're not obliged to answer back or even discuss it. But if you're going to I'd appreciate it if you managed to get the basics of what I'm saying. Which was... Wait, I've got an idea. Here's the issue framed in smaller paragraphs. I prefer to interact with a gameworld via my own skills or those of a character instead of both. I prefer to have my skills succeed because of me, or those of a character succeed because of itself, rather than having to deal with abstractions of both and seeing the game choke up because of it. Aiming is hard?

Or I would be involved in intense firefights as well, which happened several times. Those don't last much in Realistic but they do provide for excellent hit-and-run tactics while they do; for those I usually take the high difficulty mode prior to Realistic. What are the odds of a highly trained character without direct player input in the form of aiming successfully hitting an enemy, as opposed to the odds of a highly trained character whose aiming is controlled by a player with slow reflexes and overall poor marksmanship? Uh, you're basically repeating what I've a couple of tims in the thread. I've stated several times that my skill wasn't superhuman (contrary to popular belief held by idiots) and that there were still considerable penalties to the Assault and Sniper Rifle's accuracy, but that I still managed to find a way to get away from its basic form of penalty (ie, wobbling and severe recoil effects). Of course that the damage and accuracy penalties are still there in Untrained level because I didn't improve the skill; all I simply did was "wrestle" against the trajectory of the weapon or sniper sights when they recoiled or wobbled.

I think a lot of the pre-3E Forgotten Realms materials (FR Adventures hardcover, the various Volo's guides, etc.) are all available on the WotC website for free download. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Thanks Josh, I'll be sure to look into it

Is there freely available official D&D material on the internet for these kinds of places? They seem like interesting choices for module making but I know nothing about these settings.

Lol the real world is irrelevant when discussing game mechanics unless those mechanics are meant to in any way be realistic. And this isn't the case with neither game. And this happens because that's how the skill system works and is meant to work, not because I've found a way to break the rules. There's a bit of difference between taking modifiers into account when handling a combat situation to get different results with each new roll and finding a way to artificially influence those modifiers to get a favorable result with each new roll. Semantics. The game pretty much states that the recoil, or other associated weapon modifiers, will be hard to handle the less points you have into a skill. It very much is telling players they can't handle a firearm without penalties. Which is true - just not when it comes to Rifles. Lol how many times are you going to lie about what I say? I've said I managed to overcome some of the limitations. Yes, the sniper sights still wobble but not as much. Yes, the Assault Rifle still has a violent recoil but not as much. Where's the leetness in that? You were the only one to bark about me having uber Counterstrike skills and amazingly, are now going for the second time claiming I've made this claim. You're getting even more pathetic then I thought possible, and that's no small feat. Because quite simply one doesn't compromise the other. If the player or the character take the back seat temporarily then they have no chance of providing mixed results that will either cancel or screw each other. No big mistery or contradiction there. Having a game tell me that it will be based on two different methods of input (character statistics and layer reflexes) to determine how an obstacle is handled is going to bring more issues than temporarily placing the player or the PC in the background. In fact, if you can imagine how this would work if we were talking about the character's intelligence and the player's intelligence being used simultaneously instead, it's not much of a stretch to figure out why this is preferable.

Do a barrel roll!

In my experience, whether I get ill or not from playing a 3D game depends on how the screen is rendered. I don't know what there is, but some games, especially older ones, could make me feel queasy after awhile. Doom on a faster computer is a good example, and the original '3D' Wolfenstein (and its clones) are other examples. Perhaps there is a fisheye effect involved or some other rendering method that distorts the view while I'm looking around. Modern FPSs don't have that effect on me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I've had similar situations with Alien vs. Predator and Blood 2, but I was fine with Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

But not when it's published. Publishers generally agree with developers on a release date but if a game requires more testing or polish, publishers are still free to release it when they see fit. And were Troika given the chance to develop more patches?

They were ambitious, didn't always implement their ideas very well, and the games suffered from this. But you're forgetting that publishers have the final say about a game. Temple of Elemental Evil was sucking on Atari's financial tit and apparently causing some problems since the more you delay a game the more the publisher suffers with this, but as a publisher Atari knew full well the state of the game. Yet they chose to release it. While I'm not excusing Troika for their mistakes - which were rampant - the decision to ship unpolished games was not theirs. It sure wasn't Obsidian's decision to ship The Sith Lords in such a dire state, either.

The player's direct control over a character during combat only poses a problem when a system allows direct player control to override any skill or ability that defines said character. As alanschu pointed out, Morrowind stands as a point of contradiction between these two elements, as a player could use his reflexes to shoot back at someone with a bow but some character statistic determined that there was no hit despite the player having fired at point blank. Hence why I've stated my preference over a system that manages to include both elements but does not shortchange neither the player nor undermines the notion of a character. On the other hand, the player's control during non-combat situations only poses a problem when a system allows a character's role to remain neutered by allowing all hardships to be solved by the player when the character has the means to do so himself. I already gave examples on a previous post, so I won't go into it again. As I said I don't enjoy these situations but can live with them - not because of preference or bias or somesuch - but because the character is not in the same risk. Its integrity as a character is still there. In Fallout, a PC with low skill levels at Science may not be able to understand scientific gibberish on some computer. And there's nothing the player can do to go around this rule of the mechanics. He can only increase the character's skills, or if the situation was devised to do this, he could find alternate means to understand what is there. But the player could never, only within the context of playing the game, access the information that the PC could not see for himself. The game tells you the PC can't do something and he can't. Now compare to Deus Ex and the present situation being discussed. By comparison which do you think provides a more coherent system - the game that presents limitations to a character and the player must play with those limitations, or a game that presents limitations to a character but the player can break them? You could always counter that in Baldur's Gate 2, PCs with low or high Int scores were useless when it came to answering riddles because these obstacles were aimed at the player exclusively. But here the game doesn't tell you anything, there is no rule associated with this. Nothing ever states "You can't understand this riddle therefore you cannot answer it". No, I don't enjoy this design but at least it's conscious and knows who it's targetting. It doesn't tell you "You can't do this" and then allows you to. Where's the contradiction?

Uh, yes. Welcome to 1999, and thank you for being the only one who didn't fail their Reading check. These are not situations I enjoy but can live with. Theoretically, an oafish Orc probably wouldn't spot traps or be able to solve puzzles. Meanwhile, a genius-like character could (and should) probably solve a riddle or puzzle on his own depending on much knowlede of the surrounding environments he has. But these can already be dealt with in some degree which while not optimal can be satisfying nonetheless.

Abstracted vs. direct control. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout. It's possible. They pretty much maintain the necessary levels and differences between player control and character role. I'm not asking for a complete separation of both, neither would I want to. I want games that go for attempts at combining a sense of character and direct player into the same context to do a better job, or at least a coherent one.

Grenades, ballistic armor, using the environments for cover or to distract hostiles (ie, light, sound), speed or cloaking augmentations seem to work just fine. Would guiding a nuclear warhead yourself while adjusting its trajectory in realtime and seeing it all through an inbuilt camera in the nuke be any different than, say, a turnbased game where you deploy the nuke and have to contend with the nuke's attack power and the country's defense rating? Is guiding an invading army against a nearby region in HoI: Doomsday any different than guiding those soldiers across an FPS scenario where the invading success was determined by how quickly you fired? I would have to say yes. I didn't claim it would completely go around the skill system, just given limitations. And going around certain limitations doesn't mean it will go around all of them, does it. The lack of accuracy and attack power are still in place but you can circumvent some of the base limitations by doing what I did.

But the player can adapt to the recoil of a shotgun by improving the character's skill. Is there really an enjoyment to be had in learning how to master a skill by not mastering it at all, and just going around its restrictions? The game presents you with a minor challenge. Should you want to have a smaller recoil when using Assault Rifles you need to improve the Rifles skill. You then learn how to use it and adapt to the initially violent recoil. Then you figure out that the you can improve said accuracy without much challenge in acquiring and spending points - all you need to do is perform a movement opposite to that of the weapon's recoil. I can find no enjoyment in that, sorry. I would if I fought long and hard to obtain the necessary points to dump into it and thus improve it, though.

Crossdressing as a werewolf, no less!

The same kind of respect you show to others, right back at you.

Chances are it's all incoherent gibberish, anyway.

I just keep a medium to long distance and shoot while on the run. I don't always hit, but I don't always fail either. Metagaming would be making calculations and tests to see where the bullets fly off (if you remember bullets would go into different directions in a small arc that represented his chance to fail) at different skill levels so I can adjust accordingly when using the weapon. I don't do any of that. In real life I'm in control of myself, not overseeing an avatar that is meant to be its own individual. JC can't properly handle Assault Rifles whereas I can. JC is his own character, he isn't aware of what I know. The very existence of such a blatant recoil is to suggest that the character of JC is separate from me in several ways.

Not that safe of an assumption, really. In Realistic, hostile perception is somewhat more accurate than on lower difficulty levels.

I agree somewhat, and hence why I said to remain as separate as possible. I know full well it can't be completely separate. Your point is fine but I must confess I don't understand why you're telling me this. Even forgetting the past conversations we've exchanged about this, I also mentioned in this thread that I have no qualms with this. What I am pointing out is that if you want to have the player's own skills factor into the game, then do so without some arbitrary character system that skews their efforts or that renders it partially useless - or vice versa. This is why I've mentioned Deus Ex was a good example when it came to movement, since the absence of a character statistic permitted a much better flow between the notion of character improvement and player skill. There is never the case when JC is too slow to move or dodge because he has an 8 in Dexterity. JC is as fast as the player that controls him, which is fine. Not everyone's cup of tea but then again no game ever is. And it certainly won't stand the test of time since at one point older gamers may not even come back to the game at all since they no longer required the necessary reflexes to get into it (which is another plus when it comes to separating both player and character, but I digress). But if you're going to build a system where the player's skill is going to be directly tied to a character's own statistic or skill, then you should be aware that this might bring problems. In the case of Deus Ex this is manifest in several weapon skills, due to so many time tested gameplay realities that I'm surprised some people still have a hard time understanding. All I'm saying is - the parts that work are good, the ones that don't entirely work need some revision.

I mentioned two distinct scenarios, firefights and stealth, in two different ocasions. In fact, the possibility of firefights was brought up before stealth and when stealth came into discussion it was to illustrate a point, it wasn't particularly related to the previous example. You were the only one who assumed as much. When fighting any opponent with a ranged weapon at a fairly close range in the game, reflexes are always present because dodging enemy fire and targetting hostiles depends on the player's reflexes - since the notion of fighting implies action between opponenets and the very simple concept that opponents' reflexes are present in their reactions to each other's movements. Unless a player is standind still and trying to shoot someone, and even then they're shooting back at hostiles. If neither reflexes nor skill are required to shoot back at enemies, then do explain what is. His proficiency is not at stake. The player's ability to override restrictions to limits in those proficiencies is. If the game tells me JC can't handle a weapon's recoil, I - since I am perceiving the gameworld and it's rules through JC - shouldn't be able to handle recoil as well. And I can't to an extent, true, but I also can - oblivious to the game system - override it myself by pushing the mouse back down as the Assault Rifle goes up, producing a motion that nullifies most of the recoil penalty. Or I could trace a projectile path on a hostile's body so that the bullet trajectories get most of the body (ie, aiming at the legs and firing so the bullets will go up and through legs, torso and head as the natural recoil movement is applied) instead of just aiming at the torso and see half the bullets sprayed fail their intended target. Simple fact is that if restrictions are necessary then the system should allow the player to negotiate these restrictions through the game, not through actions that the game cannot recognize - and Deus Ex can't, at least in this aspect. If the game system tells me that the avatar is weak at handling a particular weapon group, then why am I able to use them just fine by going around the penalty applied? If I can negotiate the recoil penalty with my reflexes for a specific type of rifles then where is the penalty or the notion that the avatar is weak at this weapon group? You were the one that bestowed me with Counterstrike skills, not me. I always said this was open to everyone due to its ease and obviousness. I doubt godly skills or a PhD is required to figure out that if the weapon recoil makes a weapon go up then I might just counter that by moving the mouse down. Moot point since I didn't question that the system was working as intended. I'm quite sure it works as intended by the developers - just not as it should for players since there is no reliable limitation on a specific weapon skill handling. The character restriction is in place, the player penalty is in place - yet it's lacking something that prevents the penalty from being compromised by players. You were the one who claimed I had leet uber skills, not me. Why should I present evidence of something you claimed of me? I guess this must be another of those newfangled attempts at wittiness or originality I've been hearing about. May I expect some of those avant-garde "your mom" jokes from you next? When someone isn't answering my points in spite of them being clearly laid out, chooses to selectively read what I write only to try and make some half-hearted amusement out of it, and goes for unappropriate innuendo when they're confronted with the fact that they're (repeatedly) lying about what others are saying, they're very much acting the part of the troll. Or they may just be idiots who think their bloated egos deserve some kind of audience, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and consider you to be the first rather than the second.

Funny thing, I just searched the page for entries of "unaware" and it turns out I only see one such entry and it's in your post. Show me exactly where I wrote 'unaware'. Or alternatively, provide some actual argument instead of assuming how I am playing the game - especially when you flat out ignored that I said moving now, but managed to remember I said moving further down the line when you find it funny to claim I have Counterstrike skills. But not always, which is my point. I would, if the required skill wasn't at the hands of just about everyone. And there's nothing but your word to support its inefficiency. I tried it and managed, and can repeat it whenever I want to. Anyone that has hands instead of stumps can do this since it doesn't require greats feats of dexterity. So, whatever? I would suggest getting some game capturing software myself so I could show this within the game to everyone but I know you all too well to even accept the possibility you're in this for actual discussion and not pedantic and puerile trolling. I'd like it better if you stopped assuming you're wittier and funnier than what you really are because judging from the lack of poor judgement and selective reading that permeates your posts, nothing justifies that smugness. Then how did I get by the majority of the game with stealth and taking advantage of these blind spots most of the time? Why is it often impossible considering it was designed that way to allow stealth players to advance through the game? Let me guess - you tried it and it was inefficient and there's nothing to go by this except my word, and the words of everyone who can do - and has done - the same as me.

Shooting at moving targets is not reflexes? If you say so. A system that is meant to limit a character's choices because his skills are low shouldn't allow players to bypass it. Otherwise there is no point in such an arbitrary limitation because it's either not working or is working against itself. Yes, I could shoot moving targets that way. And I spent no points at all into firearms other than the game automatically allocated (which was one point for Pistols, if I recall correctly). Nothing to do with supplementing his poor skills with some degree of player ingenuity. Unless you want to tell me that countering the machinegun's recoil and accuracy by simply dragging the mouse down - in the opposite direction of the gun's recoil - and thus removing any deficiency associated with using it at poor skill levels is some form of "strategy"? I made no complaints about Denton not being an 'unstoppable killing machine', so I'd appreciate if you wouldn't try to stuff my mouth with your words. So, your claim it was often impossible simply isn't true.

You'll note I'm not asking for player skills to be removed altogether nor for a PC in a CRPG to be automated; the simulation of personality is always required and that requires player input. While we would probably disagree on just how much player skills are required in order to infuse personality in a CRPG character, I'm simply pointing out that there are issues when both things are allowed to clash together and that they usually tend to bring down the importance of a character's role. Because of this I'm suggesting that there should be an attempt made to at least make the entity of the character to remain as separate from the player as possible so as to avoid this issue.

There's always LARPing, I guess.