Amentep

Not all skills are built equally. i.e. survival in the majority of the NWN games/expansions. Sometimes there are skills you invest points into, then rarely have a chance to use them at all. It just works out that way. Yes, bluffing has far more diverse usage than intimidation. It's the nature of the beast. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the intimidation skill attached to a stat other than charisma to add more appeal to it, or have it be a skill that will use your highest stat between STR and CHA. I wasn't asking for utility of skill, but a lack of duplicity of skill. Survival does not have another skill that encompasses what it does in NWN; whether it is useful in NWN or not, its use is not ambiguous. To my mind either you have distinct [bluff] and [intimidate] mechanics (ie situations that are distinct in how/when you use them), so that they are unambiguous in use, or you've got a very good argument that you don't need two separate skills. The way most people are suggesting [bluff] be used on this thread is that its basically a [speech] skill. In which case I would argue, instead of having [bluff] and [intimidate] as individual and indistinct skills, you'd want to have a [speech] skill and allow situational modifiers (ie STR might apply a modifier to [speech] for intimidate checks and charisma for [speech] bluff checks or beauty for [speech] charm checks) because that's how people seem to be using it.

There isn't any difference. And its a fair point that big business with a vested interest in things being the same will want people confused over the issue, because confused people are apathetic. I'm only giving possible reason as to why people are confused, not making a value judgement on the reason. Science may not care about politics, but once research goes out there, people are able to use it to represent what they want; a research scientist may not care about anything but the truth of his research; the research university he's working for cares about the next big grant they're going to get if they spin the research results in the right way. Any dissent will confuse the layperson, hence the reason why...people are confused over global warming. Any big issue is going to be made political (and financial) Depends on your goal; do you want to convince people of the correctness of your views? If so you might want to consider that you'll not convince anyone by yelling at them and calling them names. What they'll take away from it is not that you're right in your view of global warming; in fact they'll be less likely to listen to the next person who comes along talking about global warming.

Right, I agree that would not be the way to do it. I think for the PE world to really pull us in, they need to think about how to integrate the concepts of creatures like these (that is *if* they decide to include them) so that it feels like part of the setting and not like Vampire: The Masquerade broke out in the middle of Project Eternity.

And again I point out that instead of telling people how stupid they are, explaining to them why the evidence is right makes more sense. If you're not willing to educate people who disagree with you...you're wasting your time yelling at them. EDIT - to explain why someone might feel this way - There is money in alarmism. Alarmist reactions tends to flood money into fields. Therefore being an alarmist can get you money. Academia does have a leftist bent; Academia is the primary market for research journals. Research journals are the primary venue for Researchers to publish their research. Ergo the argument could be made that the market is going to sell more journals if they play to the preconceived notions of academics. Given that we've had a few scandals over the past decade over articles published in supposedly peer reviewed journals that actually didn't have any sort of review, given that people on the right will have a natural distrust over information provided by the left...is it really THAT hard to see why people in the US - where the left/right divide is a gaping chasm - don't always have a full understanding of something as complex as global warming? And just yelling at people calling them stupid for not understanding what is so obvious to you isn't going to help convince anyone to see what the evidence tells us.

Good news to hear; hope it continues that way for him.

I'm not sure I really care one way or the other. I did like - was it Storm of Zehir that allowed party interrupts? I liked that. But generally speaking I have no problem with my pc being forced to be party spokesman.

I'm... not sure how that is a staple of JRPGs. For every time you get something like Breath of Fire's "let's discover the secret history of your species," there's a thousand "let's kill the world-conquering/destroying alien/god". Also not sure what you meant by the music being JRPG-ish, but****whatever. I think he means that you have a fixed protagonist and the story you unfold is his. Largely you're on rails through the story with the only difference being in how far you can delve into your history (not unlike jRPGs which have best-better-good-bad-worse endings depending on whether you do certain things at certain points in the game).

A "vampire" is essentially a human parasite; could easily be adapted to the world by having a normal person whose soul is fractured in such a way that they've become a creature who must absorb the energy of other people's soul. This would be seen as a horror in the PE universe from what lore I've read (and a reason for cultures that hate fractured souls to point to why they hate them). Children born this way may be left out to die and perhaps a cult, other vampires or something try to find, rescue and raise them. Or perhaps "vampirism" is a state inflicted on people who perform necromancy (and have it go horribly wrong). Works the same way (absorbing soul energy) but still has a cause rooted in the PE world. A "werewolf" could be a fractured human soul that on rebirth bonded with a wolf soul to try and become whole. Cultures who didn't like fractures souls would hate werewolves, however some cultures could see great favor in this (say barbarians or druids). Low-magic or not, these kind of ideas could play within the lore of the world and the use of souls as a primary force. As I said earlier in the thread the way to make these kind of creatures - IMO - would be to look at the basics of the concept and apply it to the underpinning nature of the PE world, not to drop in Dracula and the Wolfman into PE and run with it.

I used manual pause for spell casting. After a while I turned on auto-pause for enemy sighted, just because I kept finding myself missing the start of combat due to distractions where I was playing. So a mix.

I dunno, I like the fact that they're random. I like random critical hits too. I find it fun in games where you can't apply a mathematical formula to combat and determine automatically the statistical odds of success. I don't like finite or dispelled effects ending my game, but somebody hits me with disintigrate as long as we both have access to it...again it adds a certain amount of chance (thus danger) to an encounter for me.

What, only good researchers publish a lot and bad researchers don't? No, you are a damn denialist. ... Leave this thread. Dishonesty is not welcome in it. To those reading this thread, I will not respond further to Hiro's denialist manipulations... Not to be unfair, I understand you're passionate about this subject, but if your goal is to try to get people to understand the impact of humans on the global environment (as opposed to just berating people who may not agree with you and/or may not be as well informed as you) dismissing out of hand the people who initially disagree with you isn't going to win anyone over to your cause who isn't already a part of it. One of your own links - http://www.npr.org/2...scientists-sure - is about how uninformed the US public is about consensus on global warming; I'd presume that this wouldn't actually be uncommon worldwide. And yet rather than treat another poster as being uninformed and use that moment to try to educate them on the issues you feel so passionate about, you attack him and demand he leave your thread.

To me this would make the skill useage mirror how it tends to work in P&P (ie you declare you're going to use a skill). I think the issue would be what happens if the need to use the speech skill comes up in the middle of speech (this could be dealt with mechanically by having the ability to toggle on/off speech skill usage, but I'm not sure that would be a prudent course).

Its not that I want to dismiss it so much as that game definitions due to mechanics don't always line up with the definitions of words used. In other words, the scope of a skill is defined by the creators of the game, not by the English dictionary. Lets say a game defines a combat skill called Assault which is used when any PC attacks a foe first. However the "Avenger" class gets a combat skill called Avenge which is used when an Avenger attacks a foe first who has unjustly committed a crime. So an Avenger dumps points in Avenge and a Bard dumps them into Assault. They go to face a foe who has unjustly committed a crime. The Avenger can use his Avenge Skill and the Bard Assault. And they roughly get the same effect. Now later they meet a guy who hasn't unjustly committed a crime. The Bard can still use Assault for a sudden attack, whereas the Avenger cannot use Avenge. 2 questions are raised - why would an Avenger choose to dump points in "Avenge" rather than "Assault" and why would the game divide out what is in essence a specific case of Assault as a separate combat skill rather than have one skill that covered both situations. This is, in essence, what you're doing when you say a Bard should be able to bluff an intimidation. Not only can the Bard intimidate as well (or better) than the half-orc Barbarian, but his skill is more useful in other situations. And to me this is just wrong. If the idea is to have [intimidate] be a special subset of [bluff] then you don't need both skills. You just need bluff. ObTopic: To me this is further reason why skill tags are unnecessary (because they could confuse the player); I'd also argue that for these kind of skill checks can't ever happen like they would in P&P, so hiding the mechanics makes you less angry when a situation doesn't offer you your skill choice and you think it should (because you're not thinking about having a [skill] tag in front of your dialogue).

I don't mind instadeath spells for either my party or the other party. Not a must, but certainly it could be planned for. I don't want "game over" from spells that end (like Maze for soloers in BGII) or that could be dispelled if other party members were around (like Imprisonment could be with Freedom).

They should spend money on the game. Then if they need review quotes to sell audiences on the game, they can make them up. "This would be the perfect game if Ziets hadn't written a romance. Still 9/10 because I got my Cipher hatemance in." -Chris Avellone, developer, Planescape: Torment.* Or they could pull quotes from the forums here. "The would be the perfect game if they had included more romances. Its still 10/10 though." - Pror Omance, Obsidian Forumite* Or they could pull quotes from the forums at RPG Codex "Anyone who says this game isn't good is just a butthurt consoletard. 9/10 because its not turn based but decline real time with pause." - Master Codexian, P.C.R.P.G, esq.* *Not a real quote; Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental or for purposes of parody.

I'm not sure if the entire game would have to be written around it; it would have to be fairly well integrated in the game just simply for time to devlopment, to fit the game and the NPC involved. So the idea that you can easily drop-in romance to hit an easy "win" for the fanbase doesn't really work most of the times in terms of the game and NPCs, IMO. That said, part of me can't help but wonder if Avellone wrote his reply just because he knew it'd add about 500,000 pages to existing romance debate...now that's just mean

Holy cow! I guess Lucas really is giving up on film.

Abstraction of the number of tries (and broken lockpicks) it'd take to take for a "closely" skilled character to hit the right combo on a lock that's slightly harder than their current skill set would allow them to pick otherwise?

That you're using two things (bluff and intimidate) to express intimidation. Having one thing represented by two things is pretty much a textbook example of ambiguity. Lets look a little closer at what is happening with a typical example "give me that necklace or I'll gut you like a fish". Clearly the intent is to [intimidate] the NPC into giving the necklace over. Clear and straightforward use of the skill. Now lets look at the example as used as a [bluff]. A [bluff] is a deception; a way for the PC to make the NPC believe something that the PC wants the NPC to believe. A typical bluff might be pretending you're royalty to some rabble as a way to get them to go along with your plan ([bluff]"Hello, I am a Nigerian Prince...") Unless you're stating something outside of the realm of believability - [bluff]"I am secretly a blue-bottomed hummingbird transformed into a human form - lead me to your nectar!" which should just make you look Tiax-like crazy - the bluff should have a chance to succeed. In essence the NPCs can believe the PCs story. So why would a [bluff] of an [intimidation] work? The only reason it can work is that the NPCs can reasonably believe in, and be intimidated by, the PC's ability to back up an intimidation. So really what the NPCs have to do is pass an [intimidation] check so that the [bluff] is believable - except if the [intimidation] is passed there's no need for the [bluff]. Ergo [intimidation] is the correct skill to use, as I see it.

I'll wait until I hear more, but I haven't heard anything that has made me think the mechanic for healing (however its handled) isn't going to "work" in the game.

I agree with Sawyer a whole lot; I think his fear of people wanting NPCs to be romance-able even against the design of the NPC is very fair. Because I do think there are some players who feel that the NPCs should be subjugated to the will/identity of the PC, caught in the gravity well of their leadership. I'm against that. I think its poor NPC design to allow players an option to violate who the NPC is just for the sake of giving the PC something "special" (a romance, a quest, or anything else).

I've never understood the point of respecing, personally. Wouldn't use it if it was in the game. This may be because I'm an inveterate restarter of games and spend a great deal of time playing around with character creation. Heck in the Fallouts (all of them) I've picked perks and then kicked myself for not picking one that I realize later was "logically" better for the character I was going for. But no character is "hopeless" to me. Unless s/he turns out like this, of course -

I'd like a moratorium on the the word "immersion" while we're at it. I prefer talking about PC-NPC relationships which is broader in scope and of which romance would be one "tool" in the "toolkit" for the developers to have when creating NPCs and doesn't imply that romances HAVE to be used only that they COULD be used if it fit the character, story, etc.

Man, been so long since I played Wiz8...I really don't remember that. Anyhow I was thinking personality types could be used to have some reactivity from created party members beyond the PC. Would have to be very rudimentary or it'd become too time consuming (and probably why its better to just have them as silent party members).

The whole point of the adventurer's hall was so that the player could - as an option - create character race/class combinations that the player won't see via the NPCs. Because there was no way they were going to do 66 companions. In which case the answer has already been posted - play BG in multiplayer mode. No guarantee Obsidian would implement it that way, especially if the companions are more interactive. Maybe Obsidian will want to try a new way. I suppose they could create "personality" types that align with the 5 companions and then give personality/class/race dialogue to the created party member so they're still somewhat responsive to gameplay events (if lacking in character related aspects). Or they could just create a small generic dialogue tree for created companions. But I imagine that it'd be more like IWD if you have a party of created characters.