ZornWO

Thanks guys, you both were very informative. Is that to read between the lines to say the Glanfathans who defend the ruins also clear them? That's a reasonable theory. It also implies the Engwithan ruins fell to disrepair beforethe Glanfathans started to view them as sacred (unless there was a big disruption in the Glanfathans' site maintenance at some point).

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). But there I meant to have them be two separate encounters rather than separating enemies from one encounter. So, let's say you encounter a crypt full of Skeleton Warriors, and then just after beating them, you encounter a lich. Having those encounters be sequential would, generally, be easier to defeat than an encounter where the lich and SWs attack together, forming a team (as the SWs' magic resistance and melee would complement the lich's powers). That's not a perfect example since their abilities complement each other only in a relatively minor way (as well, there's the issue of if you rely on AoE attacks). But even when I solo sorc and have a house rule against rest spamming, I'd generally rather encounter a sole lich and then later some melee undead than the two together. A kill-XP system would reward the different encounter patterns (two separate encounters vs. one big one) the same way; a hand-crafted accomplishment one wouldn't necessarily. The terrain example would be another: if an enemy has high speed and an ability to break engagement at will unless surrounded, it would probably be harder to defeat if you encounter it in an open plain or a forest than if you find it in the end corner of a cave or such. Regardless of the specifics though, the general point is just that the two XP systems are not wholly equivalent simply b/c combat difficulty is not always a simple additive result of the enemies' individual difficulties (though I meant it when I said it's reasonable to say the XP systems are much the same - as a first approximation, "individual-kill XP = XP for combat" is a fair guesstimate).

Yeah, I too noticed the collapsed roof/rubble etc. was missing from the ground, like the ruins from last time. This is copying WoW and asking the dev's to stick closer to D&D? This has 4th Edition D&D written all over it. And I'm really happy to see so much D&D stuff in it. I've never played WoW or 4E, so I can't say whether or not Kahani's concerns are well-grounded, but on many of the BG boards, 4E gets a lot of hate. Does it play that much differently than the 2nd and 3rd editions?

Yes, sorry if the post needs clarifying for people who didn't read the thread through. Stun's point in the sentence is just what you were able to discern. The sentence simply means what it says (like all great, simple points, it's robust to context). It generated a fair amount of disagreement. It's a reasonable view for him to take, but I think the two systems (XP-for-kills, and XP for "accomplishing" the end of a battle) are not wholly equivalent for reasons no one really mentioned, so I spoke up. A similar example would be killing a pair of different creatures whose abilities complement each other. It would be more difficult to kill the pair together than to kill them separately, a fact that the XP-for-each-kill system that Stun was advocating wouldn't reflect, but an accomplishment-XP system could reflect, if done well. My basic point is/was just that combat difficulty isn't necessarily an additive function of the enemy creatures' individual difficulties. Not that that's a great argument for or against either XP system. If nothing else, an XP-for-kills system reduces the chance for the devs to misjudge the difficulty of a battle and reduces the time devs must spend on the matter. Plus there are hosts of other arguments on the thread as well. The XP systems each have pros and cons. Again, I'm on the fence.

Well, in honor of the Dark Lord Insomnia, I've read the whole thread, apart from some spots I skimmed. On the XP discussion, I'm very much on the fence. It seems high-risk, high-reward since it might make RPing more at home in the game than even the IE games. I'll just add: You know, I actually think this is wrong for reasons different than other people have argued. Let's say you kill two different groups of three wights (or whatever). One of the groups was on terrain that played to their abilities, and the other group was on terrain that hindered them. It make sense to reward the accomplishments of killing each group differently. It'd be easy for this type of thing to have poor balance, so Hiro's point well upthread that this XP system seems to require more dev time and attention seems a fair one. Ultimately I doubt it'll make or break the game.

I guess that makes me the PoE Barbarian, zippin' around.

I seem to be full of links today. edit: ~~~ Anywayz, I love lore discussion... I just wish there were more of it. Hmm, hopefully tho they'll save a lot for the Paths of Od Nua, it could really give it flavor.

On the Eternity website, in the Artwork on the Media page, there's a picture that just screams "magic portal," labeled Od Nua. If (but only if!) they handle it well that type of teleportation seems to fit. If they handled it IE-style, where they time the message and thus the start of the event to be after you exit a dungeon, it wouldn't bother me. I didn't like it at first in BG2 but I think I'm inured to it and part of the IE "feel" is its odd treatment of time. There are ways they could improve it imo, but I wonder how many of the ways it could change would have broad support/not be divisive?

I found the (small) page on the Dyrwood calendar. AI = Anni Iroccio Apparently it's from Update #20, which I actually had read a "long" time ago and forgot most of. It has some of the above. I'd seen the first one but not the second. The first one is worrisome, though they've been fleshing out the abilities and spells more recently, so...

If it's of interest, Josh Sawyer in his GDC talk mentions they've already been outsourcing some art for the wilderness areas. They're easier to outsource b/c they require relatively little specification to go smoothly, in contrast to city and dungeon locations, which are more expensive to create and have tighter constraints on their content.

Mr. Magniloquent, we're on the exact same page, particularly on our shared greatest hope. (And could I have made it any less clear in that second paragraph about when I was discussing PoE and when I was discussing BG2? Good grief, I disappoint.) edit: continuing grammer faelz ftw. edit 2: I totally forgot to add, I'd be open to having spells affect other spells' statistics either through casting (like a standard metamagic spell) or just by inclusion in the grimoire.

As one of 'em =) (if not the only one - I'm in a minority, I think!) I'll say, in vanilla IE games I'd completely agree. The AI isn't going to remove your protections in all likelihood, so using PfFire on your entire party lets you lob fireballs with impunity. But with a good AI (read: SCS), the spell system can turn against you easily (I'm assuming, and very much hoping, both the players and the enemy AI have the same rule set). If you have an AoE-based attack plan and they remove your protection spells, you've sacrificed spell slots for basically nothing and your own attacks are a problem. I've actually sometimes wondered if some of the differences in opinions on the IE games you see around the boards isn't b/c of different experiences with the AI, especially since it seems most people in the forum share the same broad goals for the game. Like, I don't think either of us want protection spells to be the Awesome Button Against Friendly Fire, and yet we disagree regarding the extent to which IE protection spells were that. And ultimately it's not an either-or thing; I'd very much like to see positioning micromanagement too, given what I've read. It's easy to picture the two (spell mechanics and positioning) complementing each other in combat, and there are a lot of good ideas on the thread to make positioning more than what I've found boring in previous games (especially DA), where you cluster your frontliners to one side of the enemy so you can have the AoE spell just miss your guys. I'm just really worried about the spell system, so that's part of it.

I'm not so much a fan of having AoE attacks all be partitioned so they cause friendly fire in one chunk and don't in another depending on INT (though, yeah, I'd live with it if they do it that way). Maybe having a particular spell or two that work that way would be fun, but not as a general game mechanic. Maybe instead, INT can raise the AoE and also reduce the percent damage friends take within the area? It'd be easy to understand and it'd be "smooth." O/w I can't think of alternate ideas. I'll keep trying...

About the illithid lair in the Underdark, it is possible to defeat the lair without resting (SCS even has a component that forbids resting). I've done it with cheese (infinite-spell trick), and I was able to do it once w/o cheese tactics by bypassing some of the combat (the normal illithid can't see through invisibility and SCS lets you keep it that way if you want). If you have the bugfix that makes undead summons resistant to the illithids' mind attacks, it's positively easy. Plus players on the no-reload threads have come up with a large variety of other ways to beat it. And above all, it's optional! The Matron Mother's quest itself is optional, but even if you want to do it, the illithid lair is optional even under that quest. It'd be great to have optional, highly challenging quests in PoE. In fact, it'd be surprising if it didn't have that. People form such strongly held precise preferences about mechanics, it's almost intimidating. I just have abstract goals, maybe I'm defective :-o

Hopefully it's clear my last post was meant in an inquisitive way. It reads a bit impatient. My hope for these kinds of things is always just to have interesting, complex tradeoffs to manage. Friendly fire seems conducive to that aim, especially since in addition to the direct tradeoff (hitting enemies vs. risk of hitting friends) there could then be tradeoffs in mitigating that first tradeoff. It's encouraging to see so many posters apparently on that same basic page. My hesitation on having custom spells is that those systems tend to have simpler tradeoffs to make the spell design understandable and probably for the AI. It'd be great to have a game that overcame that problem. If you had all the things JFSOCC mentions there wouldn't be that issue.

I liked in the IE games to immunize my party to an element, say acid, and then lob AoE spells of that element around, like Death Fog. It required sacrificing a lot more spell slots for protection spells, but it felt like it rewarded making that tradeoff in your spellbook - and when enemies did it (particularly with the SCS mod) it made protection-removal spells more important too. You're suggesting a kind of metamagic spell to transform your AoE spells into party friendly, yes? That sounds like a good idea. Maybe the spell and ability systems can have both - a metamagic spell that enemies can't counter that, say, reduces the % of the damage the party might take, and hard-counter buffs the enemy can dispel. The more, the merrier imo. I'm not sure I'm reading you correctly, Lephys, but when you say, "I don't know that I'd want any easy method of just casting anyway and not worrying about where my friends are (shielding them, for example)," are you saying you wouldn't want these buffs and metamagic spells/abilities? I guess I don't see what the tactical interest in "skirt the edge" is? If you do it to free up spell/ability slots from the buffs, that might be interesting, but if there are no such buffs you're giving up, what's the interest, just positioning?

The system sounds fun. It might be a little gamey to have your own circles depend on an average of other creatures in the level (the thing I dislike about it, if I understand it correctly, is that it gives you a metagamey hint about the kind of foes you face on the level even before you've scouted). If they make no changes to it though, it'd still be fun I expect. I'm wondering though abt something else - what are the benefits to scouting ahead? Is it just to avoid combat, position yourself for combat you do have, and eavesdrop? In the IE games, it was fun not to prebuff unless you reconnoitered the area to find the enemy. With the SCS(2) mod, the enemies started buffed too, so it made it a level playing field - one you had to earn. It's not a dealbreaker (particularly w/ the surprising eavesdrop mechanism), but it'd be great to have a game that had that, without it being a purely self-imposed restriction. Since PoE buffs are combat-only spells, the question's really just - when does the combat condition start, when you see an enemy or when you both see each other? It's related to Lysen's issue regarding backstabbing - can you make one initial combat move before the enemy's alert to your presence?

I was just thinking last night of a medieval Muslim trading city on an island off the SE coast of Africa, which built these big domed buildings made out of coral. Google's reminding me the name was Kilwa Kisiwani. I love this type of thing and that the explanation for the Engwithan ruins is an organic ingredient. Thanks for opting for "impossible" structures.

I am very worried, especially after I heard Josh Sawyer's talk here that mentioned that making the areas took much more work than they expected. Plus, I haven't heard anything at all that would address my biggest fear, which is that the spell system won't be sufficiently elaborate to be worth studying for as long as BG2's spell system was. Plus plus, I'm naturally a pessimistic sad panda.

On the discussion regarding the arches, I like that the ancient Engwithans had different construction technology than ancient Earth cultures had. It's good when fantasy worlds don't follow Earth's tech tree so slavishly. You know how the ancient Incas had remarkable stoneworking techniques? Their massive stones fit together like a puzzle and stuck together through earthquakes despite not using any mortar at all, and it took archaeologists decades to figure out how they did it. You just know that if we hadn't discovered the Incan ruins, and some fantasy authors had written of such a thing, people would have complained it was silly - but it really existed, it was really workable. There are other examples too. The ancient Chinese had a mortar that outlasted bricks. Bricks would erode over the centuries, while the mortar would mysteriously last, and again, for decades it baffled archaeologists until they worked out that the Chinese had been using rice derivatives, giving the mortar a stickiness that let it last. There was a similar thing with ancient Roman concrete, which lasts better under saltwater than modern concrete, and was similarly mysterious until just recently. You can just picture how, if the ancient Romans hadn't had that, and if a dev had imagined a ruined city with a concrete harbor still partly intact, people would have complained. The first thing I thought of when I looked at the ancient Engwithan ruins (after thinking how great a job they did with the stone texture), was that there was no collapsed roof. The arches still standing despite missing the capstones also stood out, and the highly varied widths of the arches is another thing. But, I think of it not as a problem, but an archaeological puzzle. Maybe there was no roof and it was just a platform, or maybe the people in the Twin Elms have cleared the site for some function, turning it into a ceremonial site or something. Or, perhaps the roof, like the capstones, were precious or semiprecious material, now stolen. The site is so clear of fallen stones, despite there obviously having been more stone than still stands, that some sort of robbery or site clearing seems likely. But maybe not; perhaps the capstones were made of something that's turned to dust. It's not like they needed to be strong anyway once the Engwithans devised this great mortar material that lets the capstone-free archways continue to stand. There are other oddities in the site and possible explanations... Anyway, the point is that Earth ruins can be highly unintuitive at first, so fantasy ruins should at least sometimes be even more so. Some wonder can be good. Wow, this was way longer than I intended for something that ultimately doesn't matter, and ofc now my hand disorder's killing me. tl;dr - the ruinz are cool don't chanj them, devs!

If a player scouts ahead using stealth or divination spells, and finds an enemy ahead, does that start the combat condition even if the enemy isn't aware of the party's presence? (Like IE wouldn't let you save if there were monsters nearby.) I wanted to reiterate this just in case in got lost in the, uh, brouhaha. My concern is that there won't be much benefit to scouting ahead, apart from maybe positioning your party.

If a player scouts ahead using stealth or divination spells, and finds an enemy ahead, does that start the combat condition even if the enemy isn't aware of the party's presence? (Like IE wouldn't let you save if there were monsters nearby.)