:( Sad that obsidian is making this game isometric...

[Sarex]

I agree 100 % and your suggestions are all valid strategical decisions you can make to effect combat. I am currently playing IWD for the first time and there are loads of spells you can  cast, like animal summoning and Skull Trap, to change combat. Anyone who truly thinks that the older IWD games are just about luck don't understand the AD&D rules 

 

This! The number one rule is expect the best, prepare for the worst.

[Hassat Hunter]

 

 

Doesn't make any sense. A one-shot kill can occur whether you killed 8 other enemies before or not. It has the same probability.

Let's use math here. A mage has a few kill spells, you got 10% chance to instantly die. Yes, follow me? Okay, you get hit by one, 10% chance to die, right? The second? 10% chance to die. Total; 20%. Third, add another 10%. By now your deathchance over those casts is 30%. Your odds definitely are getting against you. The chance for you to survive all that is significantly smaller if you get just one of those 1d10 rolls, rather than 3 of them, or more.

Even if the mage only has ONE spell like that, killing him before it's cast... well, you no longer have to worry about it, do you?
A one-shot can't kill if it's never fired. Does that make sense?

In both examples the mages got killed way after the melee enemies. Which makes it pretty clear they could easily have killed the mage before instead, but decided not to do so. And then died. Is it really the games fault, a bad roll? Or just bad... STRATEGY?

 

 

BUT if you just killed 8 enemies and now you're standing there, barely injured, going against one mage - that's exactly the same as if you didn't kill the 8 enemies before in terms of "how high are the chances of getting one-shotted by that mage".

No, it's not, see above. That chance to fail is adding up over time your chances to die.

Also, think like a mage. You have 8 allies, versus 6 enemies. What would be the best power to start with? Speed... or disintegrate? Now all your allies died, would you still use your buff magic? No, of course not, you would try to survive or kill enemies, speed would be useless. Just because the mage wasn't damaging you casting haste, or protection from normal weapons or whatnot buffs, would he still do that without people to buff?

 

 

indeed i could. but that would leave me exposed to other threats.

So you have to check for yourself, go after the mage, or is it too risky against the benefits... you know it, STRATEGY.
So based on this assumption, I let the mage live and go after the others. That's a STRATEGY. Oh noes, the mage killed me.
Reality: Your STRATEGY wasn't quite good. You died. Maybe adapt it?
People theorising here: Okay, so cause I chose to let the mage left, and he killed me, there's no strategy in the game, only luck. I had no other choice! (and there's the error right there, you do, you just chose not to. And it did you in.)

 

 

in a random battle against a group of enemies you cant know what the enemy wizard will use, when and on who until he does. at that point you no longer have the ability to counter it and just hope it doesnt work or reload if it does.

Or... you kill it first. Then you don't even have to *care* what the hell he got, he's gone and dead. If you're really REALLY worried, you let a rogue backstab him and the battle starts with him or her dead to begin with.
Look at all those STRATEGIES.

Also, I bet the original poster of this 'issue' wouldn't complain if he got a critical or insta-kill from his crew based on luck.

[jethro]

Hassat, you can point out a hundred mistakes he did in this example fight, the simple fact stands that mages have insta-kill spells that you can't prevent completely from being cast. That's bad game design even if it happens only seldom in reality. Think about hail-mary passes in football. They can turn around a game but if the opponent leads by 20 to 0 even a hail-mary can't help anymore. What if a successfull hail-mary were an insta-win? Even if the success chance were much lower it would be a borked rule wouldn't you agree?

[Hassat Hunter]

I've recently played X-com... there always was a chance my guy, against all odds, totally got murdered.

Is that bad gamedesign?
If so, modern game devs got it right, with their fainting PC's, super-low difficulties and lack of challenge.
Though it would be odd that some old-school RPG got 4 million despite that the formula has been so well optimised, who would ever want to go back?

EDIT:
Also above counter list doesn't even include silence... another way to shut mages up. Or petrify them, stun them. Actually it's all about boosting your party, nothing even offensive against other mages. So there are 8 ways already, and many more can be tought up. Is that "can't prevent completely from being cast"?

Edited November 10, 2013 by Hassat Hunter

[cleric Nemir]

 

EDIT:

Also above counter list doesn't even include silence... another way to shut mages up. Or petrify them, stun them. Actually it's all about boosting your party, nothing even offensive against other mages. So there are 8 ways already, and many more can be tought up. Is that "can't prevent completely from being cast"?

 

Yep. Also some spell resistance on gear and a good ole Death Ward buff or such.

[Fearabbit]

 

Doesn't make any sense. A one-shot kill can occur whether you killed 8 other enemies before or not. It has the same probability.

Let's use math here. A mage has a few kill spells, you got 10% chance to instantly die. Yes, follow me? Okay, you get hit by one, 10% chance to die, right? The second? 10% chance to die. Total; 20%. Third, add another 10%. By now your deathchance over those casts is 30%. Your odds definitely are getting against you. The chance for you to survive all that is significantly smaller if you get just one of those 1d10 rolls, rather than 3 of them, or more.

 

Alright.

Now let's use correct math here.

 

10% chance of being killed by a spell. First time has 10% of killing you, second time also has 10% chance of killing you.

However, if you know the mage will spam this spell this means that your odds of not having died after the second time are (0.9*0.9)=0.81, 81%.

That's your first mistake. They don't stack, they multiply, but only if you look at the whole combat and say "if he hits 10 times, I have a chance of surviving that's (0.9)^10=0.35, 35%."

 

When looking at a single instance, however, the chance is always 10% (that you get killed). Karkarov killed 8 enemies while the mage kept spamming an insta-kill spell at him, and he didn't die? Well, then all of that doesn't matter for the next time the mage casts the spell. The probability of dying is 10%.

 

It wasn't the reduced chance of having let the mage live so long that killed Karkarov, it was the completely normal "90% of surviving" chance that killed him, and that is what he's criticising. That there is something as a 10% insta-kill chance. Killing the mage first or last doesn't change that, he would've died in both cases and strategy doesn't come into play.

 

 

EDIT: And the X-Com example doesn't apply because that game isn't over when one of your party members dies. Baldur's Gate, as far as I know, cannot be continued if your main character dies. And this very specific combination of effects - "this has a chance of 10% to kill someone, and if it's the main character it is game over" - this is what's causing a problem here.

Edited November 10, 2013 by Fearabbit

[Hassat Hunter]

Ah, so that was correct. Was doubting and decided to simply go with the 10% each time approach.
Of course it matters if it was one casting or multiple... If you're going to face one 10% and die, that's bad luck. If you face 10, and then die, you were just being stupid.
In this case the spell wasn't even an insta-killer like Disintegrate, but a regular spell that just caused so much damage the PC died. So we could even add "more constitution" to the solution. So many options to survive... and still it's called 'luck' and 'the game has no strategy'?

Still, the point stands, if the poster had the time to kill a dozen enemies before going for the mage, and then died, going for the mage faster would mean he would have survived. 100% guaranteed even. How's that not strategy?

[Fearabbit]

This is the one thing that people always get wrong about simple probability, so please just trust me on this. I agree with you that it's a good strategy to take out the mage soon because the more he casts, the more likely it is that you suffer heavily. But if you have already survived without any losses, then the next time you're not running any higher risks. The tenth spell isn't more likely to kill you because it's the tenth spell. But ten spells are more likely to kill you than one.

 

Still, the point stands, if the poster had the time to kill a dozen enemies before going for the mage, and then died, going for the mage faster would mean he would have survived. 100% guaranteed even. How's that not strategy?

 

No, the chance of surviving would have been 90% if he had gone faster. Just like it was 90% when he took his time, maybe because he had been lucky a dozen times or because the mage did other things like buffing his allies, we don't know that. In this very specific situation, it didn't matter at all how fast he took out the mage.

 

The only way to guarantee a 100% success is to kill the mage before he can cast a single spell, because it could be just the one that insta-kills you. That's the part where the game stops being tactical and just gives you a checklist of things you have to do in a certain order to survive - I'd say that's not a good tactical gameplay design.

 

High constitution would have helped, but how do you know that you need high constitution when in earlier battles you never even lost a lot of health? In hindsight it's easy to see how he could've survived, but hindsight is not the same as tactics. Tactics are based on the empirical evaluation of your situation, and choosing a different attribute instead of constitution when you never had problems with HP before was actually good tactics, if you ask me.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

The only way to guarantee a 100% success is to kill the mage before he can cast a single spell, because it could be just the one that insta-kills you. That's the part where the game stops being tactical and just gives you a checklist of things you have to do in a certain order to survive - I'd say that's not a good tactical gameplay design.

 

 

 

You are right about this and the lack of tactical soundness, but gameplay-wise I found it absolutely okay and sometimes even fun. But, and that's a big but, it requires reloading and redoing the encounters one or a few times, perhaps even to get the arbitrary outcome you're after (i.e., survival). For a computer RPG that was all fine and dandy, but in PnP, there are the woes of Disintegrate, as many a DM can testify. Just think of the S14 module - Tomb of Horrors. I've seen people freak out when their beloved character got annihilated from something they couldn't just save themselves from, except not doing the adventure at all or turtling beyond comprehension or something. In short, it may work in a CRPG with this kind of spells, and it can be masochistically fun at times, but is it the best the game designers can do? I don't think so, so in that sense the tactical aspect of gameplay matters quite a bit.

Edited November 10, 2013 by IndiraLightfoot

[Stun]

Hassat, you can point out a hundred mistakes he did in this example fight, the simple fact stands that mages have insta-kill spells that you can't prevent completely from being cast. That's bad game design even if it happens only seldom in reality. Think about hail-mary passes in football. They can turn around a game but if the opponent leads by 20 to 0 even a hail-mary can't help anymore. What if a successfull hail-mary were an insta-win? Even if the success chance were much lower it would be a borked rule wouldn't you agree?

There are no insta-kill spells in BG1. Lets face the facts now. Karkarov's main character died in a mage fight because he used inferior tactics for the battle.

[Fearabbit]

 

There are no insta-kill spells in BG1. Lets face the facts now. Karkarov's main character died in a mage fight because he used inferior tactics for the battle.

 

 

Please read my posts concerning the "inferior tactics". Even if it was not an insta-kill spell, a spell that does anything from 1 to 30 damage has about a 10% chance of instantly killing you if you have 27 HP.

 

The mage presumably stood there buffing the other enemies, because he wound up with a party that had almost full health. Then, in the end, one spell hits the one person that may not be killed with maximum damage. That has nothing to do with tactics, it's just bad luck.

(In my opinion it would have something to do with tactics if the spell always did 30 damage and you knew about it beforehand.)

 

 

...erm, what does this have to do with isometric view again? :D

[IndiraLightfoot]

True, Fearabbit! There are at least two threads in Gameplay & Mechanics about this: One about Insta-kills and one about randomized outcomes in CRPGs.

[Stun]

 

There are no insta-kill spells in BG1. Lets face the facts now. Karkarov's main character died in a mage fight because he used inferior tactics for the battle.

 

Please read my posts concerning the "inferior tactics". Even if it was not an insta-kill spell, a spell that does anything from 1 to 30 damage has about a 10% chance of instantly killing you if you have 27 HP.

 

So? That's not anything resembling a rebuttal to what we're discussing. It's just a whine about game difficulty. If you have 27 Hit Points, and enemy mages can do 30 points of damage at once with their spells, then you should be using your head and employing tactics to survive such encounters, instead of just assuming that the game will protect you from high enemy dice rolls and that if it doesn't then that must mean the system is "broken" and "untactical".

 

Bottom line: Stop blaming player failure on bad luck. Many of us have completed no-reload challenges in BG1 and BG2. It can be done, and it can be done relatively easily and consistantly. This alone proves that 'Bad Luck' is merely an element of gameplay, not a system flaw.

Edited November 10, 2013 by Stun

[cleric Nemir]

This is the one thing that people always get wrong about simple probability, so please just trust me on this. I agree with you that it's a good strategy to take out the mage soon because the more he casts, the more likely it is that you suffer heavily. But if you have already survived without any losses, then the next time you're not running any higher risks. The tenth spell isn't more likely to kill you because it's the tenth spell. But ten spells are more likely to kill you than one.

 

 

Agreed 100%.

 

 

 

 

Still, the point stands, if the poster had the time to kill a dozen enemies before going for the mage, and then died, going for the mage faster would mean he would have survived. 100% guaranteed even. How's that not strategy?

 

No, the chance of surviving would have been 90% if he had gone faster. Just like it was 90% when he took his time, maybe because he had been lucky a dozen times or because the mage did other things like buffing his allies, we don't know that. In this very specific situation, it didn't matter at all how fast he took out the mage.

 

The only way to guarantee a 100% success is to kill the mage before he can cast a single spell, because it could be just the one that insta-kills you. That's the part where the game stops being tactical and just gives you a checklist of things you have to do in a certain order to survive - I'd say that's not a good tactical gameplay design.

 

High constitution would have helped, but how do you know that you need high constitution when in earlier battles you never even lost a lot of health? In hindsight it's easy to see how he could've survived, but hindsight is not the same as tactics. Tactics are based on the empirical evaluation of your situation, and choosing a different attribute instead of constitution when you never had problems with HP before was actually good tactics, if you ask me.

 

Ah,this just points to lots of other discussions. Like in the thread about instakill spells, it comes down not to the question is it good/bad tactics, but to the question whether you like to reload, instakill as a concept - dying at a snap of someone's finger because you had no chance to buff or get to that someone in time in first try. Do you want to be instantly able to get by every encounter in your fist try? Instakill is a death as any,he can also instantly kill you with lightning bolt ( because you were not only not resistant to it, but being in metal armor you provided him a bonus mayhap? )   - one shot and you'd have to reload. You cannot know what an encounter brings and be prepared for each and every. Mage with instakill spell encounter is no different than mage with "spell penetration & empowered spell sorta thing" icluded, whooping your ass with lightning bolt - because you forgot (he popped out of nowhere,zomg) to replace the ring of fire with the ring of lightning resistance.

 

If this game is to have a death of the PC included, that death can occur in so many ways,and the speed of that process can be very quick or very slow, regardless if there's instakill or not.

 

As I consider this to be a fact, I was not thrilled by this . It would mean that instakill spells are to be also toggled or reserved for Expert mode as dying at all. If they EVEN decide to have instakill spells,they haven't yet as far as I know (please link if you found some evidence, I'd like to know more on this) .

 

I was reading trough the instant death thread and found that devs also mostly consider instakill "bad idea" and "cheap",but I am not persuaded at WHY. Wrong tactic can,wrong equipment choice or buffing or positioning etc also can, as many pointed out, kill you as fast as instadeath can. If you ARE able to die,that is. Simple as that.

 

So there's either gonna be lots of wrong tactics and death, or the game's Normal mode equals Ultra easy mode where you cannot die,cannot make an ultimate mistake whatsoever and all is dandy fine. Can someone explain me what happens when ALL the party is KOed?? Does enemy walk away? If you ain't dying,you sure ain't getting a "game over" scene,as far as I can deduce. So WHAT do you get? And how logical or how appealing to us it can be being designed like that?

[JFSOCC]

It's the debate between difficult and punishing. If a player can reasonably be expected to be capable of defending himself against being one-shotted, even if it is not easy, then that's difficult.

 

If a player can be overcome without reasonable expectation that he or she can defend him or herself against such defeat, then it's merely punishing, and bad game design.

 

If there is ONLY ONE way to defend yourself against such a defeat, then that negates all strategy and tactics. Single solution encounters are unfun, and also bad game design.

 

But from what I've heard, a lot of effort is being put in decreasing probability ranges, precisely to prevent these situations. A good thing, in my opinion.

[Stun]

But from what I've heard, a lot of effort is being put in decreasing probability ranges, precisely to prevent these situations. A good thing, in my opinion.

Yes. And not that this is anything new. All of the IE games did this as well. Take BG2 for example, where the "luck" and "Probability" element was most prominent. Now look at all the spells, abilities and magic items they put in that game to assist you in "beating the odds". Edited November 10, 2013 by Stun

[Hassat Hunter]

 

 

But from what I've heard, a lot of effort is being put in decreasing probability ranges, precisely to prevent these situations. A good thing, in my opinion.

The biggest risk in that is making probability ranges too small, or not at all. There's a reason D&D uses a d20, imagine how fun it would be without the dice roll. People wouldn't still be playing it.

Imagine if swords always hit, to prevent "to hit" rolls missing. So damage and HP is adjusted accordingly. Then again, your sword ALWAYS does x damage. Nothing more, nothing less. Crits are gone too, too much random. Everything's all fixed.

Wouldn't it be the most boring RPG in existance? Yes, yes it would.

[tajerio]

 

But from what I've heard, a lot of effort is being put in decreasing probability ranges, precisely to prevent these situations. A good thing, in my opinion.

The biggest risk in that is making probability ranges too small, or not at all. There's a reason D&D uses a d20, imagine how fun it would be without the dice roll. People wouldn't still be playing it.

Imagine if swords always hit, to prevent "to hit" rolls missing. So damage and HP is adjusted accordingly. Then again, your sword ALWAYS does x damage. Nothing more, nothing less. Crits are gone too, too much random. Everything's all fixed.

Wouldn't it be the most boring RPG in existance? Yes, yes it would.

 

 

Fortunately, they're not doing that.  There's still a range of values for damage from everything.  But the normalization of probability is a Good Thing, since it neither does away with luck nor makes it crucial to survival.

[JFSOCC]

 

But from what I've heard, a lot of effort is being put in decreasing probability ranges, precisely to prevent these situations. A good thing, in my opinion.

The biggest risk in that is making probability ranges too small, or not at all. There's a reason D&D uses a d20, imagine how fun it would be without the dice roll. People wouldn't still be playing it.

Imagine if swords always hit, to prevent "to hit" rolls missing. So damage and HP is adjusted accordingly. Then again, your sword ALWAYS does x damage. Nothing more, nothing less. Crits are gone too, too much random. Everything's all fixed.

Wouldn't it be the most boring RPG in existance? Yes, yes it would.

 

No, it would just need more carefully crafted challenges. You would still have variation with AI and skillsets.

[Hassat Hunter]

 

 

But the normalization of probability is a Good Thing, since it neither does away with luck nor makes it crucial to survival.

I don't know... "normalisation" sounds to me like 'as easy as modern games with all their failsafes so you can barely die'

As for above post, the amount of skills would also be less with fixed values. Gone chosing a weapon based on 'less damage, more crit' or 'more damage, less crit' since crit's a chance. Skill's would be boring cause +1 is a lot less interesting if you already know your value, rather than if it adds 1 to the 1-20 roll *maybe* allowing you a hit.
No, I can't see it working. Not fun anyway.

 

 

[JFSOCC]

I don't know HH, I think knowing full well that that spell always hits for x damage, and you see a spellcaster capable of casting that spell, and you have a character which cannot take that hit, the certainty doesn't negatively affect the challenge. You're going to be tense, keeping your weaker character away until that spellcaster is dealt with.

 

The threat isn't removed, so the challenge isn't removed.

[tajerio]

 

 

 

But the normalization of probability is a Good Thing, since it neither does away with luck nor makes it crucial to survival.

I don't know... "normalisation" sounds to me like 'as easy as modern games with all their failsafes so you can barely die'

As for above post, the amount of skills would also be less with fixed values. Gone chosing a weapon based on 'less damage, more crit' or 'more damage, less crit' since crit's a chance. Skill's would be boring cause +1 is a lot less interesting if you already know your value, rather than if it adds 1 to the 1-20 roll *maybe* allowing you a hit.

No, I can't see it working. Not fun anyway.

 

 

 

 

If the values were fixed, then I would agree with you.  But they're not.  The range of variance is simply reduced.  That puts more, not less, importance on the player's optimization and tactical skill, since big lucky hits are much less likely to save the player or screw the player.

[Iucounu]

Some level of variance might still be interesting, when you want to simulate such things as consistency and reliance.

for example, if you have an enemy mage and it's crucial to interrupt his spells, you'd rather stick with a reliable fighter who's guaranteed to hit the mage consistently. If for some reason it's crucial to disarm a weaponmaster with a powerful weapon, you'd take your fighter with the highest potential to disarm, regardless if he's consistent or not, as he might still be the only one who stands a chance to suceed at all.

 

Both cases don't necessarily involve randomness of course, as long as there is a certain safety treshold so that failures to a reasonable amount aren't fatal, and there is room for repetition. The consistent fighter will almost always interrupt 9-10/10 of the wizards spells (and will be fine as long as the one spell that comes through doesn't outright kill him), and statistics dictate that the inconsistent fighter with the higher potential will eventually disarm the weaponmaster if he tries often enough, and it doesn't kill him if it takes him 5 or 6 tries. 

 

And it's also not based on randomness, that the inconsistent fighter would most likely fail to interrupt the mage often enough, while the consistent fighter with the lower overall potential would fail to disarm the weapon master, so it's a tactical decision when to use which fighter for which task. 

 

As for the safety treshold - everything is better than hitpoints imho.

[cleric Nemir]

Can our character or a companion even die in the PE ? Cause if it cannot as they say, what happens when, example, a party member is maimed/knocked out? He will not be coup-de-grace'd, so does enemy lost interest in him? Does he become temporary invulnerable to any AoE damage and untargetable? Just lying there until someone restores his stamina, and he jumps back up like no fireballs hit the spot where he lay? Or until the combat ends, and then he just gets up and says "PHEW, glad that was over".

With not only instakill spells, vorpal swords and such out of the picture, but player/party member's death, how can anything be appealing in such combat ? "Tactics get better when you can't die", that would be a great final one. 

[jethro]

I've recently played X-com... there always was a chance my guy, against all odds, totally got murdered.

Is that bad gamedesign?

 

Your guy? Every guy in XCOM was replacable. If he got killed, take his understudy, the game doesn't end automatically. In BG your own character, not your companions, is a single point of failure, end of game if he is dead (if I understood teknoman2 correctly, I have played BG so long ago I don't remember myself)