Mk1

Thanks, everyone.

OK, so the Paladin and Druid companions (I forget how to spells their names without mangling them, you can see how much I've used them so far) both have business in Twin Elms. Are theirs the kind of quests that will let me swap them into the party when I feel like taking care of them, or am I better off - for the sake of the story - having them in the party on the way to Twin Elms and throughout, because they're tied into the main plot? Or is it something in between, like the way you don't need to have Grieving Mother in your party when you go into the Skaen temple, but it makes a big difference?

Why use PnP rules? Well, I'm sort of repeating myself here, but I would say because writing good RPG rules is really, really hard, and CRPG designers are even worse at it than PnP RPG designers. So going with a tried-and-true PnP system that (while still flawed) has been playtested for decades and thousands of people have commented about what parts of it work and which don't in excruciating detail will almost always work better than something hacked together while trying to get a computer game made. At least if we're talking about party-based games with (in theory) tactical combat. Action games are their own animal...

I thought this was going to be a thread about the need for a "hide helmet" toggle, because IMO that's wha the helmet situation in this game needs the most.

Yep. Very early on you might want to just hold on to the grimoires and be somewhat selective (get some decent elemental damage spells and some that target Will, for example) but by level 5-6 money should be no object and you can just learn everything. I'm level 8, sitll in Act 2, and I have 3/4 of the stornghold structures finished and 60,000 gold burning a hole in my pocket.

While i don't like it's "feel" i believe 4e DnD to be a better system for CRPGS than 3e/PF. I disagree that 4E is better since I actually like games like NWN 2 that did a good implementation of the 3E system - but if we're talking about the system used in COMPUTER games, then yeah, 4E is probably still better than anything to date, including PoE. And it's not really so crazy, is it? In pen and paper games, all the designers have to make is the system, and that's hard enough. In a CRPG, they have to make the rpg system and a ridiculously complex piece of software (while trying not to imitate published RPG mechanic in ways that will get them sued) - small wonder they don't do as well when it comes to the game mechanics.

I'd like that too, in theory, but it's completely impractical, and would result in a terrible CRPG. For several reasons. One is that GURPS looks great on paper, but I've yet to meet a single person capable of running a truly good GURPS game. It's a system that's absolutely hopeless when you only use the basic rules, but no one ever bothers to master the full ruleset because there's a ton of rules and they're dry and not much fun. The second major one is that GURPS is a horrible fit for CRPG combat... because computer games tend to have a lot of it, which in GURPS will get you killed in very short order. GURPS combat is only fun (IMO) when it's rare and you play it smart to use tactics to make it highly survivable for your side - or, in other words, horribly unfair for the opposition. But most people who run GURPS don't get that, and simply throw fights at you like it's %$#@!&* D&D, and then have a stupid/surprised look on their face when 3 out of 4 of the PCs end up crippled halfway through the adventure... because it's just not exciting unless at least one PC gets shot in every fight. Third, if you make it true to the pen and paper rules, it'll either need to be the most open-ended game ever that allows the highest number of possible solutions to every quest, or it will be the most frustrating game ever - because in GURPS, there are 1001 ways to design a character that will be completely useless at "conventional" adventuring. Fourth, let's not even pretend you could implement GURPS advantages / disadvantages in a sane and balanced manner...

It's the best of the D&D, by far. Of course it's worthless tripe compared to half the other PnP's out there. I have a special place in my heart for D&D, but is far from the best system...or even a particularly good one, really. D&D 3E (or Pathfinder for that matter, since it's basically the same thing) might have serious flaws... but they're still a hell of a lot better, in terms of ruleset, than *any* non-action CRPG for which the designers made the rules from scratch. That I know of, anyway. And while I'll readily admit that there are tons of pen and paper RPGs that are better designed (theoretically) than 3E or Pathfinder, or that are vastly more ambitious in terms of exploring different ways to game, in practice they all require so much more DM skill or are so foreign conceptually to most people, that a lot of the time they turn out to be vastly less enjoyable than an evening of D&D-ish hack-and-slash.

Pathfinder *is* the closest thing to "real" D&D these days, and Obsidian has that license... If they stick close to the pen and paper mechanics, whatever game they make will basically be the new D&D CRPG, because the mechanics of Pathfinder are 90% the same as those they based NWN 2 on.

I think that can be part of the fun though. In real life you can never be sure that what you say comes across as intended, and you can never known what kind of reputation you build for yourself through your actions. Everyone has a different way of perceiving things. That's fair enough, but I still want to know exactly what my character *thinks* he's doing and make an informed decision. To use a pen and paper RPG example: I want my character to jump a 20' wide pit. I know what my base odds of doing that are, but if there's anything obvious that would make it harder or easier (there are wet leaves scattered around the edges, the air above the pit is filled with thick dusty cobwebs, there's only 12" of space to land in on the other side, etc.) then it's the duty of the person running the game to tell me all this before I roll the dice. On the other hand, he does not need to tell me (if my character doesn't have the perception to notice) that right on the other side of the pit, there's a well-hidden tripwire that releases a spike-studded log swinging on a rope, or that the tiny spiders I didn't notice in the webs are venomous. In PoE, I want to clearly know that my character believes he's trying to sound Benevolent - but I don't expect every NPC to react positively to him just because he means well.

On. The writing in PoE is good, but without the qualifiers, there would still be times when I wouldn't be sure whether a reply is supposed to be Stoic or Rational, or realize that picking the option that makes you sound like a sarcastic prick is what PoE categorizes as "Clever." Similarly, I like to see the unavailable conversation options, for a couple of reasons: Primarily because it serves as a kind of "Heads up, this is not just flavor text, the writers probably thought of multiple ways for you to deal with this, better pay attention!" signpost - again, something that is not always apparent when all you have to go on is text. Though also because it gives me a hint that (for example) it IS worthwhile to raise my characters's Resolve of 13 with items and rest bonuses, because I'm seeing a lot of checks of 14-16. Which I don't even see as metagaming, really - if my character has Resolve 13 and just barely fails to persuade someone who needed a 14, that's simply being able to read a social situation. But the game doesn't let you try and have dialogue reflecting how badly you failed, so this is the next best thing. Short version, I don't think of them as metagaming, but as providing information that you *should* have but a CRPG of this type is not capable of delivering.

Thanks for the replies - I'm in no huge hurry, and I'm about 2/3 of the way to level 7, so I'll probably save this for later.

So... I'm level 6, decided to take a look in the Paths, Level 2 was really easy and then I immediately got stomped by the Ogres on the 3rd level. Ordinary ones are no trouble, can handle a couple at a time without any effort, could probably take on 3-4 of those if I had to. But the fight with the Ogre leader, Druid and their Ogre mook seems impossible. They do tons of damage, I just can't heal and hit back fast enough, and no combination of debuffs I found so far seems to do anything meaningful. Is this something I should skip for now, and continue to level 4? Will exploration reveal some secret that will make this easier? Or are the Paths best tackled at a higher level? (My party consists of my Barbarian main, not min-maxed, Eder, Aloth, Sagani, Kana and Durnace)

Didn't even notice this in-game. Though this might be because I think the character models are generally speaking rather ugly and I avoid looking at them too closely. They actually remind me of Wasteland 2, and not in a good way.

Multi-classing is a fundamentally problematic idea in anything except a system that's built around it from the ground up and uses a small number of simple but customizable base classes. The moment you start introducing "hybrid" classes - like a Bard in original D&D, or a class like the Magus in Pathfinder, or a Chanter or Cipher in PoE, balanced multi-classing basically becomes a pipe dream. You can throw it in and ignore the consequences, like all recent D&D games have done, and your game will probably be fine as long as the core mechanics and classes are sound, but it doesn't make it a good idea as far as game design goes.

All those limitations you complain about are pretty much the main point of having a class-based system. It's a feature, not bug. Of course there's nothing wrong with preferring a classless system... but which one you choose fundamentally changes the flavor of the game. For a BG inspired game, I like the direction they went.

First, some disclaimers: One, I like this game a lot. (even if I just lost 5 or 6 hours of gameplay because of a Sanitarium bug) Two, I don't find it especially hard while playing on Normal. Three, I've played a lot of pen and paper RPGs, some of them requiring considerable system mastery. Four, I haven't been active on these boards, so perhaps this is incredibly redundant and has been said many times before... But Christ, are the mechanics of this game - especially combat mechanics - unnecessarily opaque. I'm about 25 hours into the game, and I still have no real idea how the interrupt system works, or how significant the impact of various stats is on being able to interrupt / avoiding interruption. I see the numbers, but I have no idea - explicit or intuitive - what they actually mean. I'm only marginally less clueless as to how much damage my characters are doing - I know what my dual-wielding Barbarian's damage per weapon is, but short of sitting there with a stopwatch, I will never know how fast my actual attacks are, how long the recovery time is, or how much more damage I get as a result of the +20% bonus from Two Weapon Style, for example. I have no clue what Perception does, aside from occasionally coming up in conversation. I gave a Perception boosting item to one of my ranged character because it seems thematically right, even though I'm pretty sure it's actually mechanically wrong or meaningless. This lack of clarity isn't helped by the fact that in most combats, things end up such a close-packed mess that I have a harder time telling characters apart then I did with the sprites of the IE games, back in the day. So half the time I not only don't know how and why my characters are doing something, but it's also unclear who they're doing it to. Fortunately, this doesn't seem to matter the vast majority of the time, so I'm enjoying playing with my incredibly sub-optimal Barbarian and a full party of companions without using any custom-made NPCs. But if it did, the lack of clarity would be absolutely maddening... and it still irritates the part of me that literally spent days working on an optimal Shadowrun 3E character back in the day to no end.

OK, so apparently if I go back to a save from seven hours before (right after the Leaden Key visions in the temple), I can get the quest to initiate as intended. I have a feeling I broke something before by either: 1. Looting Azo's office and finding incriminating evidence before speaking to Azo's assistant, which resulted in a journal update but (I think) screwed up the conversation options you get with the assistant. 2. Doing the above, but going back to the catacombs to finish the grimoire quest instead of talking to the head warden as prompted by the journal. Let's see if I can complete it without something else going horribly wrong...

I guess I'll do that when I get home. Missed the "how to report bugs" sticky, though given the magnitude of the problem - I'm assuming this is a complete game-stopper, since it's the main quest line - some kind of reply would be nice. Especially in light of how messed up this quest seems to be to be in several different ways.

Now that I think about it, the NPC (Azo?) was never there either - I just talked to his assistant and found some stuff on his desk, which triggered the "go tell the statue" journal entry. Didn't realize that this was a bug at the time. I have a feeling the fact I ran around doing other quests in the Sanitarium, and left to go back to the catacombs to finish up the grimoire quest, might have somehow messed up the quest trigger for The Man Who Waits. Well, crap, there goes a huge chunk of gameplay. Ugh...

I'm getting something similar, in that the game thinks (in terms of dialogue options) that I completed the quest without even talking to Azo (?) or going deeper into the Sanitarium and encountering Uscgrim. The journal is another story, the quest stays open there, nothing updates, but there is no one I can talk to to make it progress.

Looking around, I see there's a thread about this quest being bugged in other ways, with the Sanitarium turning hostile... I never even got through the locked basement doors that (I assume) lead you to the bulk of the quest. My journal prompt is to go tell the warden statue that one of the animancers is up to something, and when I do, all I get are dialogue options as if I finished the quest by fighting through it, but selecting them doesn't cause the quest to update, it just stays open. Anyway, bump.

I got the three Leaden Key quests, including The Man Who Waits, but I wanted to follow some side quests first. So when I ended up at the Sanitarium, I did Aloth's side quest, followed up on the grimoire wild goose chase, and finally found out something suspicious was going on, along the way. However, I left before talking to the warden about it, since I didn't really feel like digging into the secrets of the Sanitarium at the time. Now I came back (probably ten or twelve hours later) to complete the sceptre pieces task, and decided I might as well continue with the Leaden Key quest - but when I talk to the warden/statue, he acts as if I'd already completed the quest (I get 3 conversation choices explaining to him what went wrong, none of which make any sense to me, since I have't played through the quest), and my journal doesn't update. Is this game-breaking? Is there a workaround, short of going back and losing a huge amount of gameplay?

I tried swinging by there with Level 4 characters - and after climbing the walls, promptly got my butt kicked horribly by some guards, a Paladin and a Priest. Do I just need to up my game, or am I trying this way too early?

I've noticed the same thing... I'm not exactly short on money, have around $250,000 at the start of Taipei after finishing Rome and Moscow - but things just don't add up. The only way the numbers could make sense if the $ total you get at the end of the mission includes the value of items found and any money you get in emails following that mission, but that'd be really misleading. I made easily $150,000 so far selling unneeded gear / gold plated weapons, another $75,000 easy from various emails, and I doubt I have spent more than $125,000 on weapons and gear. I have been buying nearly all the intel, but that's not nearly enough to account for the difference considering all the missions where I "made" $30,000 - $50,000 a pop. I'm going to track the money closely during the Taipei missions, see what the numbers look like.