HoF Mode and Non-Combat Solutions

[Jojobobo]

How do you think a Heart of Fury mode will work with non-combat solutions to quests? Or do you think that as HoF mode was only ever exclusively a combat related thing it will remain as such? I'm intrigued to know what people think on this, I'm also genuinely curious to hear how people think a HoF mode figure into non-combat quest routes (if it will do at all) because I can't think of any ideas of how the devs could implement it as such myself. For those of you who have no idea what Heart of Fury mode is this link (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/552350-icewind-dale-ii/faqs/55200) might help, look under the heading "What Happens in Heart of Fury?" for more details about how it works in IDW2.

[Larkaloke]

I think it could work, so long as all of the non-combat solutions are toughened up just as much as the combat solutions. If it is equally much harder to sneak or persuade your way through various situations and encounters, I think that would maintain the spirit of the thing. The penalty of failing to sneak or persuade would already be higher than normal, since that would tend to lead to the already much more difficult than normal combat.

[SKahn]

I think it could work, so long as all of the non-combat solutions are toughened up just as much as the combat solutions. If it is equally much harder to sneak or persuade your way through various situations and encounters, I think that would maintain the spirit of the thing. The penalty of failing to sneak or persuade would already be higher than normal, since that would tend to lead to the already much more difficult than normal combat.

 

Except that you can't really make persuade or sneak "harder" other than to just increase the failure rate. So all that would do is to then force you into combat. That's probably the best answer actually. There's no point in having a massively increased combat difficulty if you are going to simply avoid said combat.

[Jojobobo]

Precisely, if it's a flat failure rate the only thing they would change is combat difficulty. Still it might be nice if they could use some out of the box thinking to change persuasion or sneak attempts - the only thing I can think of is subtley changing the layout of a dungeon or the array of enemies in it to affect sneaking, and having to make multiple hidden checks on dialogue to persuade someone where on normal mode you'd only have to make one (this would only work on non-voiced NPCs though if the devs had to slightly alter the dialogue, and would be a big development time sink compared to the simple changes you could make for sneaking so I don't know). Are these good ideas, or very bad?