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Sylvius the Mad

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Everything posted by Sylvius the Mad

  1. Sylvius the Mad
    That would be amazing. I would really like that. We'd basically be instituting something like the old inanimate object saves from 1st edition AD&D, where wooden shields were sometimes destroyed by fireballs. I love this idea.
  2. Sylvius the Mad
    OSR? Depending what OSR is, I might want to see these arguments.
  3. Sylvius the Mad
    Except zero scaling does not force the player to follow a set path. It might cause some paths to become very easy if you do them later, and it might cause some paths to be very challenging if you do them sooner. Or, even better, some paths might be harder or easier depending on your party-makeup if you meet them earlier or later. Or, and this is the real prize, a shallower overall power curve in the game allows no scaling and player freedom, since the power difference from the minor enemies and more powerful enemies is smaller. There should be encounters which, should you meet them too early, kill you easily. There should also be encounters which, once your character has developed, are trivial to defeat. And those trivial encounters shouldn't just vanish because you're stronger. City guards should be a fixed level. Bandits should be a fixed level. Wild dogs should be a fixed level. If I fight Ogres, and learn that I can kill them by doing 15-25 damage, then the next time I meet ordinary Ogres again that should still be true, even if I now do 45-60 damage per attack.
  4. Sylvius the Mad
    I think you've mischaracterised the second type of game. it isn't that the player doesn't learn anything, but that the player's learning isn't relevant. Any game with infinite pausing effectively emulates this. The primary difference between a skilled player and an unskilled player is that a skilled player can make good gameplay decisions faster. So if the game is fully pausable, and the player can take as much time as he would like to make decisions, the impact of differences in player skill are minimised. That should be a design goal - to minimise the impact of differences in player skill, but without removing gameplay options. Players should still be allowed to make suboptimal decisions on-purpose, but they shouldn't be forced into sub-optimal decisions by timer-induced panic.
  5. Sylvius the Mad
    Given my preference for the various reagent-based magic systems used by the Ultima series, I'm a big fan of spells as items.
  6. Sylvius the Mad
    Don't do either. Scaling is the devil.
  7. Sylvius the Mad
    Yes. A thousand times yes.
  8. Sylvius the Mad
    This is exactly right. With any decent character design, broad concepts of good and evil largely cease to be relevant. Is defending the profiteering merchant from the angry starving crowd the good or evil option? I'd say it depends on why you're doing it, and Obsidian isn't ever going to know that in advance.
  9. Sylvius the Mad
    For the record, I really liked that lockpicking proposal Perhaps not for PE, but it sounded fun.
  10. Sylvius the Mad
    It's a party-based game. You would be busy executing the plan to herd your enemies to their deaths. Your mage character would be waiting, yes, but you wouldn't. In a single-character game, though, yes, I would enjoy what you describe, though I understand that not everyone would. But that doesn't matter, because PE isn't a single-character game.
  11. Sylvius the Mad
    I would only agree with that in a system where a character was necessarily stuck with his class. If a Thief was always a Thief and there was nothing he could do about it, then yes, the Thief had better be fun to play. But that wasn't always true in AD&D or 3E D&D. 3E's multiclassing rules basically reduced Rogue to something you'd take a few levels in for the skill points or backstabbing. And in 1st and 2nd edition, dual-classing was available (to humans only, for no reason I can explain) to add a new class whenever the old one began to offer diminishing returns. However, I will absolutely not agree with the premise that "every class should stand alone as fun, competent, competitive and playable in it's own right" at every level of advancement. One of the strengths of the early editions (which was, to some degree, removed in 3E) was that some classes were more effective at low levels, while others were more effective at high levels.
  12. Sylvius the Mad
    Thieves did benefit some types of parties. A mage-heavy party, particularly a low-level one, did tend to get killed by springing traps, so disarming those was valuable (traps on chests seemed especially deadly).
  13. Sylvius the Mad
    I'm a big fan of Madsdam. Excellent name for a city.
  14. Sylvius the Mad
    I don't like the companions having it, either. Everyone should follow the same rules. The PC. The companions. The enemies. The peasants. Everyone.
  15. Sylvius the Mad
    1. I love this answer. 2. The Thief rules in 2nd edition AD&D basically demanded dual-classing to make the character viable at higher levels. Thief-Mages worked very well (non-magical stealth was remarkably handy for a Mage with Illusion as his prohibited school). That said, Thieves could still be effective combatants in BG because of how over-powered archery was.
  16. Sylvius the Mad
    I completely disagree. Having the magic system designed so that there's always something to do seems like busywork. If my mage can wait for all of the enemies to be herded into a group and then kill them all with a single spell, that's way cooler than constant casting of smaller spells. Fighters do something every round. Mages don't. Partly because that sort of design would dramatically limit magical power. There aren't going to be any spells that kill everyone if the mage is expected to be casting constantly.
  17. Sylvius the Mad
    I do not want to see the game make any assumptions about why I'm completing or not completing a quest.
  18. Sylvius the Mad
    Hopefully you'd have the foresight to leave gaps to allow each grouping to grow. In NWN, for example, the only thing I keep on the front page of the inventory is potions and anything reguarly swapped out. If I don't have enough potions to fill the space, then there's empty space there. Plot items are kept on the second page, and so on.. Being able to turn auto-sorting off would be terrific. I remember how much I liked the inventory system in the original Dungeon Siege, but then the expansion ruined it by adding a mandatory auto-sort feature. I never did finish the expansion. Well, there you go. As mentioned, that inventory system already exists in Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna. I like the idea of automatic money changing at merchants. I do not like the idea of decimal currency; that's entirely too modern a concept. If Britons could manage farthings and guineas, gamers can handle something more organic than decimal currency. Anyway, I'm glad we reached agreement on Inventory Tetris with an optional Auto-Sort.
  19. Sylvius the Mad
    Taking volume into account ins't the only benefit of tetris, though. The manual sorting is itself a strength of inventory tetris, and you've discarded it. I like tetris because it lets me put everything where I want it, and it stays there until I move it. Having to go browsing through my inventory to find things is a waste of time, and having to do it every time is a bigger waste of time than periodic sorting.
  20. Sylvius the Mad
    First of all, I'd like to say that I think this had already been done. It was called Dragon Age 2. Anders was the main character. Second, I would hate this. I don't really like following a set story, let alone one in which I don't even play a central role. Something I've said before with regard to set stories I think bears repeating. If the PC is going to be dragged along on a pre-set path whether he likes it or not, he should still be the one in control. I compare it to the difference between a passenger on a bus and the driver of that bus. Both necessarily follow the same route with no possible deviation, but the driver is the one who makes it happen. I would much rather be the driver than a passenger.
  21. Sylvius the Mad
    For individual character inventories, the NWN inventory system was just about perfect. It was manually sortable, the grid accounted for the problem of large items, and anything in there could be placed on the hotbar for quick use. Aside from perhaps being too large (4 pages might be better than 6), it was brilliant. For shared inventory, I have to refer to the only game I can recall handling group encumbrance well, and that's Wizardry 8. I'm not a big fan of shared inventory, so I would rather individual inventories in an NWN style (weight + tetris).
  22. Sylvius the Mad
    But you'll miss out on whole conversations if your PC isn't the sort to talk to that guy. But if you have a companion who would, and you can have companions act as party spokesperson, then that content isn't missed.
  23. Sylvius the Mad
    Right, but if the classes are not restricted to specific roles, then we still have some party construction options. Even if there were only 5 companions, so a full party always had the same 5 people plus the PC, we could still have some tanks or no tanks, or some ranged DPS or no ranged DPS, or some crowd-control or no crowd-control. But if the classes are limited to just their intended role, then that party of the same 5 people is always going to be basically the same party. That's no fun. But look at how much more limiting DAO would have been if only Alistair could tank, or if Wynne was always a healer. One related problem that pops up in a lot of modern games (DA2 does it) is encounter design always favouring a specific distribution of roles within the party, but I'm just going to assume Obsidian isn't going to do that, because it's crazy. But based on Tim's responses to the Reddit questions, I now think this question warrants asking.
  24. Sylvius the Mad
    Ultima IV - Hands down, the greatest CRPG of all time. Ultima Underworld - The only CRPG with twitch-based combat that I've ever really enjoyed.
  25. Sylvius the Mad
    Yes. Building characters in new and different and interesting ways is fun. Balance isn't something I think the game designers should really spend much time on, specifically since I don't want scaled content either. If the content isn't scaled, then Obsidian is already not in control of balance. We might be reading too much into his specific word choice. As such, I think it's valuable to raise the question of roles-by-class explicitly. But without that many companion characters, that risks limiting players to just a handful of viable party constructions.
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