3.5 Lacks Discipline!

[User3]

# Make the game simply cease to function altogether at levels that are "too high". Ex.: Everyone eventually becomes immune to everything because resistances have maxxed out.

Thats just you making crap up again. There is no reason to give out level 10 effects at all except for the most extreme examples, like Fire Elementals being immune to Fire, gods, or artifacts. You can easily put a limit on mortal magic at 9, and for the rest of the game there will still be effects that can harm PCs and monsters.

What's the fvcking point? Why would you insert rules to try to make people have less fun? If people like playing at higher and higher power levels, what do you gain by stopping them?

Epic rules as they are written have the problem that once you get past 20th level and stop gaining 9th level effects(in magic item or spell form), you gain nothing. I mean, a bigger and bigger attack number to fight bigger and bigger monster is the real dullness. Higher and higher saves become meaningless once the PCs start using no save spells and no SR spells, and higher AC numbers become meaningless once you start using Blink effects and concealment to avoid damage.

Is metamagic the answer? I think we all know that the answer is "no." I don't know what an 11th level effect looks like, but it doesn't look like a Empowered 9th level effect like an Empowered Meteor Swarm, just like I know that an Empowered Magic Missile is not a Fireball, and a Widened/Empowered/Maximized Fireball is not a Meteor Swarm.

The limit of 10 is not arbitrary. Its the limit of 30 years of QA on a 10 spell level system as performed by millions of players. With level 9 being the effects so big that we can't tell stories even more, we stop at 10 as the point where putting this effect inot the hands of PCs must be done ona case-by case basis, because its all too easy to ruin your game. Level 10 effects in general can never make it into the hands of PCs.

Basically, if you want a model for Epic, then you need to go sideways. Make each level past 20 an additional 9th level effect(like a 9th level spell-like at will), so that by 40th level you end up with godlike powers and a giant cock to slap monsters around with.

But the eternal search for the "whatever I have now, but the +1 version" is not only a pointless and fruitless search, but it means that all drama has been taken out of the game.

Really. You can never have the funeral scene of the great hero because some guy will be like "hey, we only need a +47 Life effect and the White Prince is back!"

Then there is repeatability. With an endless system, you never need to do a different quest. You can just keep doing the "find a bigger Firesword" quest for every single monster in the game. Not a new weapon, or a new tactic, but a +17 Fireswod to set next to your +16, +15, and your +14 Firesword all sitting on your Firesword shelf with the other +1 to +13 versions.

Every quest can be the same. Then, only DM chicanery can force a different quest on you. You are never going to go on the quest to open a portal into a Prison Dimension in hopes of containing the power of the Deathless Lich. You just look around around for a bigger Firesword.

Right, so eventually everyone fights with Lightsabers that do Ultima Damage and there's never any variety ever again. That's a fvcking great idea, we can just make the high end so fvcking boring that eventually everyone will give up in disgust.

Unlike Final Fantasy, untyped Ultima damage should not be the best damage in the game. It should be smaller than other kinds of damage, so that you are going to look for it as a way to speed up your battle. I mean, its not about killing the Guardian of the Black Gate, it about beating him and still having enough time, HPs, spells, and items to finish off the the Razor Legion behind the Black Gate before the Vampire Lord of Sarsanat opens the Box of Broken Dreams.

Its just the same as having a Shatter spell on an adventure with a Fiendish Crystal Golem guarding a tomb with a bunch of Fiendish Spiders. If you can blow 2nd level slots blasting the Golem, you then have 3rd level slots to blow on AoO spells to blast the hordes of Spiders. Otherwise, you'll have to rest after the battle with the Golem and the Spider King can arrange his defenses or move his treasure or something, and instead of carrying the day you end up running to save your ass.

[Username17]

You can easily put a limit on mortal magic at 9

Oh that's just fvcking great, you mean that we can only look forward to improving our abilities eight times before the game stops making any sense? What the hell for? Why is that there!? You still haven't given one concrete advantage to why the game should explosively decompress ever.

Different groups are happy with having abilities improve at different rates, some groups want to see concrete improvement every session, some are happy going through multi-month story arcs before improving anything. I'm not saying that it's a lot of effort to add a hard cap where they can only improve themselves 8 times, but it's any effort at all. And it's effort whose only practical application is to make some fast moving campaigns come to a hard stop in two months of real time. That's shit.

The limit of 10 is not arbitrary. Its the limit of 30 years of QA on a 10 spell level system as performed by millions of players.

Caltech rules had I think 20 levels of spells. Everquest has what, 30? And while Everquest certainly has problems, it amply demonstrates that you can have 30 levels of spells and have that mean something. D&D spellcasting has the problem that it hits "irresistable force" at second level with the spell knock. And then in seven more levels it adds various sundry things that add "even more irresistable/immovable" - and yeah, it's confusing and complicated and meaningless.

The 8th level spell that opens shit would literally say:

"Opens even the things that can't be opened by the things that even open the things that can't be opened by the things which are able to open the things that can't be opened by Knock."

That's fvcking retarded. I lose track of that when I'm saying it outloud and have count on my fingers. And yeah, even going to 9th level on that is too much. I can't even tell stories anymore when I have to say that every time I make a case for why a door should open when I cast my spell.

But you know what? I can say "Open (8)". I can tell stories with that. I can also tell stories with "Open (13)", or even "Open (34)".

And tat's the whole point of this exercise. Once you've cut out all the crap about how things are irresistable or immovable or whatever, and just give everything a number, you don't have to describe things in inefficient analog every time you want to compare effects. It's all digital and things run smoothely.

We can cut out all thatstupid world destroying nonsense that noone even understands. We can have people have "Non-combat Summoning 12" which means that they have a pile of elementals of a specific power level on hand. We can get rid of all the arguments which stem from the fact that not a single person who writes Raise Dead trumping spells ever seems to remember that Reincarnate exists and is fvcking well 4th level. I mean, is there any spell or effect at all that will stop someone from coming back with True Reincarnate?

Well, once it's redefined as a Life (9) or Life (10) effect, that question will just plain be answered. And people can still have Life 11 effects. Or Life 15 effects. And people will still be able to tell stories with them because all the absolutes will be removed.

Really. You can never have the funeral scene of the great hero because some guy will be like "hey, we only need a +47 Life effect and the White Prince is back!"

Exactly. That's what Death is in D&D. The only controls it currently imposes on that sort of thing is that most people can't afford a +47 Life effect, which is the dumbest setup ever. Hell, you can't ever have the scene in D&D where the hero walks off into the afterlife happy with his accomplishments and all the other heroes cry because they'll never see him again - because people who go to the afterlife are totally raisable with life 4 effects and those aren't even hard to find.

That's not a valid complaint to throw at any particular rendition of the D&D rules, because the only way to get around that is to go the route of games that have no Life effects at all. Which is fine, actually. Both games with Raise and without can be fun. But bitching and moaning because you can't have the Raise Dead plotline in a world with no Life effects or bitching that you can't have the closure of having characters just shut up and stay dead in a world that has them is disingenuous. Basically, this whole statement is you cheating by bringing up an entirely valid - but completely irrelevent complaint and treating it like it had anything to do with anything.

With an endless system, you never need to do a different quest.

And is there something wrong with that? If you really like going on Sword Quests, why not keep doing Sword quests until you are tired of it?

But just because you can do something doesn't mean you will. You could fight 1st level Goblins, then 2nd level Goblins, then 3rd level goblins, and so on. Forever. Heck, since monsters are extensible, you never need to fight a different kind of monster!

No what possible avenue of complaint is that? The fact that you can at any time update any old mission is a feature. You also don't have to do it. The fact that you can reuse old adventures and update old enemies doesn't mean you can't have different adventures or can't have new enemies. What would suck is if you couldn't reuse old material. That would mean that you'd have to go through the rolodex and get different stuff every time and eventually you'd run out of material. When you can no longer do the new sword quest, you can do the contain the evil power quest, and then you have to move on to the hunt down all the bog monsters quest... and so on until you run out of D&D quest structures and then you aren't playing D&D anymore.

By keeping all the old stuff as an option, the possibilities constantly expand. That's good.

Unlike Final Fantasy, untyped Ultima damage should not be the best damage in the game.

But if resistances stop at the "top", then resistances are going to clump there to a greater and greater degree. And then untyped damage would definitionally be the best damage type in the game, because it's the only thing that ever ever works on anything. If mortal magic is capped at 9, then everyone is going to wander around with Resistance 9 to everything sooner or later. And then no mortal magic can harm them. Except for Ultima Damage which is the best damage ever.

There's no way you can talk your way out of this one. If resistances are capped at "always wins", then attacks that aren't Ultima type always lose in the long run. And that means that Ultima is always the best. If Resistances and Attacks are not capped, conversely, then Ultima could go ahead and not be the best, because the other stuff you had access to would grow with you and maintain the same relative level of whupass. So Ultima could remain doing 2/3 damage but being useful against 1.5 times as many enemies or something.

Your hard caps make Ultima Damage the best. And they make the game have an expiration date, and they make the game suck. Capless is good, capped is bad.

-Username17

[Oberoni]

You know, if we were actually cranking out a game book, it wouldn't be hard to have capless as the default, and include a sidebar for how to implement a cap.

Pretty easy.

That way, everyone can play the type of game they want.

[Josh_Kablack]

1109538870[/unixtime]]Indeed, actually most creatures have attacks that are recycled in some form or another. While the Pit Fiend has a Blasphemy attack, it's the same Blasphemy that Balors get, it's the same Vlasphemy that Pit Fiends get.

Nope.

In the game we have now, one is a CL 18 Blasphemy and the other is a CL 20 Blasphemy. So if we're going through and assigning Penetration ratings to each, they don't necessarily get to be the same.

That attack can get a tag only once for all the Blasphemies, and everything works out fine.

Nope.

It gets one or more types once for each of the Blashphemies, they all get to be Unholy, Sonic, etc, but each blashphemy gets to be a Blasphemy [X] or maybe a Blasphemy (Unholy [X], Sonic [Y], Stun [Z]) effect, but each individual blashphemy attack needs its own ratings in the system being discussed here.

But the fact of the matter is that Josh's system and K's have exactly the same amount of information to keep track of!

Almost.

For either system:

And when you are designing the game, you will need to know

• 
  
• What all damage types are available in the game. You need an exhaustive list here, and any new damage types in game have to fall under the heading of one or more established damage types.
  
• What the possible reactions to damage types are. You also need an exhaustive list here. In the penetration ranking system, the list seems to be vulnerable/resistant/invulnerable and take a range of numeric tags to express those three possibilities. In a FF-esque system, roughly the same number of non-numeric tags are used express a potentially greater range of possibilities.
  

When you are resolving an attack you need to know

• 
  
• What damage type an attack is
  
• How the creature reacts to that damage type
  

Now in a FF-esque style system, you need to cross-reference the attack type with the monster's appropriate resistance tag, and then perform whatever opertation is indicated. In a penetration ranking, you need to cross reference the attack type AND ALSO THE ATTACK'S PENETRATION VALUE with the monster's appropraite resistance value, and then perform whatever operation is indicated.

Thus, in the abstract the penetration ranking system involves more operations.

Every attack needs a tag on it that tells you what kind of damage it is

Hell yeah, I don't think anyone here is arguing that point.

Every creature needs a marker for every kind of damage you have. And while you could make the claim that you can somehow make this simpler by not printing all the normal (resist 0) effects

No, unfortunately in order to make the system work, you really do need to print out all the effects for each monster entry.

Humans get to have up to tags for like 18 types (acid, cold, electric, fire, piercing, slashing, bludgeoning, force, light, poison, critical, etc) that just say [normal] and then two or three (turning, banishment, rust) which say [Null] and then maybe one or two (life, positive) which say [Absorb]

But I'm still arguing that adding 30 tags to each and every critter in the game is still an easier task than adding penetration values to each attack and to each resistance.

It takes a damned long time to read something that isn't there, because you have to read everything that is there and deduce that the remaining thing is absent.

Agreed.

And if I wanted to try to design a system where we could safely assume that untagged meant [Normal], I'd want to limit the types of damage to absoultely no more than 8 ever, and probably fewer than that.

So in either case, every attack needs a marker, and in every case every monster needs a pointer for ever kind of damage. Those are absolutes, and the only thing that is different is what comes after the name - it's either going to be another name (like Reflect) or it's going to be a number (like 4).

Which is easier to compare: two numbers, or a word-based chart?

Yes, but....

I haven't seen anyone present a system for having the greater than/less than comparison of the Penetration Values system be used to account for any possibilities other than Immune or Not Immune.

A FF-esque tag system can easily account for immune, not-immune, extra damage, half-damage, healing in place of damage, or other effects.

So at least I'm getting extra robustness for the more difficult operation here.

But more importantly, why the fvck would we bother with a simplification if it left us in the situation where some creatures were "immune" and some attacks "hurt creatures who were immune as if they had half effect"? That's exactly where we are now, and it's a terrible place to be.

Agreed.

But the system I proposed doesn't actually do that. If you really wanted to, you could instantiate it with multiple similar attack forms and additional design guidelines for cascading resistances, but that would be doing things I never suggested to reach an end that is just asstastic.

At no point did I ever suggest that damage types should include both Fire and Epic Fire, nor did I ever suggest that creatures with Fire: [Null] couldn't have better than Epic Fire [Half]. Nor did I ever suggest anything along similar lines.

[Josh_Kablack]

1109656563[/unixtime]]That way, everyone can play the type of game they want.

Blasphemer!!!

Everyone has to play the type of game *I* want!!!!.

[Neeek]

1109662148[/unixtime]]
I haven't seen anyone present a system for having the greater than/less than comparison of the Penetration Values system be used to account for any possibilities other than Immune or Not Immune.

Then you weren't looking. I did. Back on the first page of the thread.

[Username17]

Indeed, a very simple statment like:

Higher Resistance is Immunity
Higher Penetration is Full Damage
Equal is Half Damage

would work. Also the idea that Resistance should just subtract from penetration has been floated - that a Level 1 attack should function on a creature with resistance zero exactly like a Level 12 attack functions on a creature with resistance 11.

---

And the idea has been floated that every creature be attuned to one element and be healed by specifically by that element. And thus that Fire Elementals would be healed by Fire by dint of being a Fire creature and an Undead creature would be healed by death spells because it is a Death creature.

To say that there has not been floated a plan to make the Resistance Numbers anything but binary is puzzlingly incorrect.

-Username17

[Neeek]

Alternatively, resistance>=attack*2 could be healing.

[Username17]

If you were going that route, it would be Resistance >= Penetration + a Constant. Not multiplied by a constant. The reasons should be obvious by now.

-Username17

[User3]

You know, if we were actually cranking out a game book, it wouldn't be hard to have capless as the default, and include a sidebar for how to implement a cap.

Or you could do the opposite, to the same effect.

Personally, I think that capless reduces DnD to a Massively Online game like Everquest where one's accomplishments mean nothing because you are nothing without the next bonus, and the difference between the spell levels is linear rather than the DnD geometric progression so that level progression gives tiny incremental boosts in power.

Having played FF XI, I can tell you that its not a storytelling model. Its just fighting and mercantile enterprise. If you like that game, then go for it. I'm just not sure that it should be a default.

Drama in stories comes from being faced with problems that are normally insoluable and coming up with a creative solution or at least an emotionally satisfying solution. When your family is murdered, you go exact bloody revenge because its satisfying and because you can't bring them back.

I mean, you don't need an All Raise/No Raise dicotomy. You just need a point where Raises can't happen anymore. Then you can tell bloody revenge stories. Otherwise, as long as a bigger Raise is out there then the bloody revenge story is out.

And thats what capless does to existing DnD rules. It removes 90% of the potential stories.

[Neeek]

1109690964[/unixtime]]
And thats what capless does to existing DnD rules. It removes 90% of the potential stories.

Umm...? Seriously, how many times have you been hit by something that you couldn't be True Ress'd from?

[Murtak]

Personally, I think that capless reduces DnD to a Massively Online game like Everquest where one's accomplishments mean nothing because you are nothing without the next bonus, and the difference between the spell levels is linear rather than the DnD geometric progression so that level progression gives tiny incremental boosts in power.

Having played EQ for a long time I can tell you that this is absolutely not true. EQ has it's share of problems but what you just said does not only contradict itself but is also completely false.
1 - How can you "be nothing without the next bonus" and yet only get "tiny incremental boosts in power"?
2 - There are quite a few ways to accomplish something in EQ. You can get your enjoyment from bigger items - and no, they do not have to come in tiny increments either. It is quite possible to get items that will last you for years (and through several expansions). Simply leveling up can also be an accomplishment. You can get your enjoyment from perfecting tradeskills, from killing famous dragons (or gods) or from visiting every zone the game has to offer. And I don't see how any of these accomplishments are invalidated simply because you will eventually be able to kill a bigger dragon, get a bigger item or visit a new zone.
3 - Just because the power of a spell line goes up in a linear fashion (which most spell lines do not) it does not mean that the overall power of your character goes up in a linear fashion too. Let's say you want to blow things up. Your damage spells do 100, 150, 200, ... damage. Linear progression, right? Actually it isn't. As you level up you begin to save mana on each cast. You get more mana regeneration. You get focus items which make you do more damage per cast. And your groupmates get spells that let you cast faster, regain more mana and nuke harder. And of course your base damage does not go up linearly in the first place.

Having played FF XI, I can tell you that its not a storytelling model. Its just fighting and mercantile enterprise. If you like that game, then go for it. I'm just not sure that it should be a default.

Openendedness does not equal pure hack & slash. Caps do not equal storytelling.

Drama in stories comes from being faced with problems that are normally insoluable and coming up with a creative solution or at least an emotionally satisfying solution. When your family is murdered, you go exact bloody revenge because its satisfying and because you can't bring them back.

I mean, you don't need an All Raise/No Raise dicotomy. You just need a point where Raises can't happen anymore. Then you can tell bloody revenge stories. Otherwise, as long as a bigger Raise is out there then the bloody revenge story is out.

Of course by that very definition you have an interesting problem ... at the same point where you can have a bloody revenge story you can not also have a happy quest for the ressurection story.

And with an open ended system you could have both. Kill the family with a death 15 effect when the players only have level 10 effects. Now they can either go on an quest for the rare ressurection potion or they can have their bloody revenge - something that is not possible with caps.

[RandomCasualty]

The whole resurrection problem basically comes from making death a lot more rare and also by removing resurrection from the hands of PCs. If you want to have your stories not include anything but cinematic resurrection then you have all your resurrection abilities in one shot artifacts. And those artifacts can just use the standard number format.

IF you think that resurrection should be more rare, that's fine, but removing it only at high level makes no sense. Because that means from levels 5-20 you'll have frequent resurrections then suddenly at epic they stop. And that's stupid.

And just because the topic of EQ came up, I can't help but bash it. Seriously, lets not use EQ as an example. EQ is based off of hosing PCs and making them suck. As you level up your character actually gets worse not better. Not to mention all the stupid dead time you have to spend waiting. The higher in level you are, the longer youv'e got to wait to heal and recover your mana... it's really annoying.

[Murtak]

1109724604[/unixtime]]
And just because the topic of EQ came up, I can't help but bash it. Seriously, lets not use EQ as an example. EQ is based off of hosing PCs and making them suck. As you level up your character actually gets worse not better. Not to mention all the stupid dead time you have to spend waiting. The higher in level you are, the longer youv'e got to wait to heal and recover your mana... it's really annoying.

I have gotten years of enjoyment from EQ myself. It does have faults, big glaring ones actually, but increased downtime as you level up? Are you talking about leveling from level 1 to 5 here? I can tell you for sure that for everyone but the soloing melees downtime decreases dramatically as you level. On my shaman I hate any lull in the action because I have to work just to make my mana go down slowly even while we are nonstop-fighting.

I assume by "getting worse as you level up" you mean "can not take on as many monsters of your level as before"? If so that is partially true. Some classes simply can not solo past a certain level. If you are talking about grouping though this is pretty much a matter of expansion. In some expansion things hit ungodly hard and have few HPs, in some they just have staying power. But I have not yet fealt that my character was growing less powerful. I still take on pulls of four with my groups, just as I did seven expansions ago. The shadowknight is still capable of getting by on lifetaps for a short time, the wizard still makes big holes in dragons' hides and the cleric still saves me at 5% of my HP total.

If you want to bash EQ feel free to go on about moronic zone design and lack of variety in non-raid encounters. Or class balance or "why do rogues have to be as fun as lawnmowing?". But I have not experienced or even observed any of your issues myself.

[RandomCasualty]

1109753694[/unixtime]]
I assume by "getting worse as you level up" you mean "can not take on as many monsters of your level as before"? If so that is partially true. Some classes simply can not solo past a certain level. If you are talking about grouping though this is pretty much a matter of expansion. In some expansion things hit ungodly hard and have few HPs, in some they just have staying power. But I have not yet fealt that my character was growing less powerful. I still take on pulls of four with my groups, just as I did seven expansions ago. The shadowknight is still capable of getting by on lifetaps for a short time, the wizard still makes big holes in dragons' hides and the cleric still saves me at 5% of my HP total.

Yeah exactly. At first an "even fight" means you win, and if you fight something weaker than you, you pretty much destroy it. You even have a shot at beating a challenging fight. Then even really does become even and challenging becomes impossible. Then soon even becomes a bitch, and "easy" fights become about even. And soon enough you can't even take even battles anymore.

Why can't even fights just be even? When I played the game I always felt like my character was getting weaker not stronger. When I played EQ I always felt liek I was playing a campaign wtih one of those sadistic DMs who did everything they could to make you hate your character and reinforce the idea that heroes were supposed to suck ass.

[Murtak]

Let me make an educated guess .... you were mainly soloing?

[RandomCasualty]

1109759074[/unixtime]]Let me make an educated guess .... you were mainly soloing?

Yeah soloing or in a 2 man group.

[Murtak]

That is your problem right there. EQ plays about as well solo as DnD does. You have some classes who can do it decently and a ton who have trouble soloing at all.

[RandomCasualty]

1109776166[/unixtime]]That is your problem right there. EQ plays about as well solo as DnD does. You have some classes who can do it decently and a ton who have trouble soloing at all.

Yeah probably, but it goes beyond that.

Even in a group, monsters never outnumber PCs. It makes you feel like crap when you need a group of 3 people just to take out some orc legionaire. EQ just felt like it was the ultimate character ego destroyer. It did literally everything in its power to make your character feel like shit, even by starting you out killing common vermin (and sometimes losing to them).

I dont' mind my warrior needing help to clear an orc cave, I do mind when he needs help killing a single orc, cause that's lame. You don't even feel like your character can kill anything without assistance. You're not outnumbered, your'e just overpowered every time, and that doesn't leave you with a good feeling about your character.

[Murtak]

That seems rather odd. I have seen warriors soloing well into the 50s (granted, not even cons). It is just that downtime becomes ridicolously long. But I have rarely had problems killing high blues (1 or 2 levels below me) one on one on my melees at least well into the thirties. You are seriously describing a different game then mine. Especially the "you are never outnumbered" part. It certainly happened to me a lot.

[RandomCasualty]

1109798171[/unixtime]]That seems rather odd. I have seen warriors soloing well into the 50s (granted, not even cons). It is just that downtime becomes ridicolously long. But I have rarely had problems killing high blues (1 or 2 levels below me) one on one on my melees at least well into the thirties. You are seriously describing a different game then mine. Especially the "you are never outnumbered" part. It certainly happened to me a lot.

Well, yeah possibly with the proper twinked out gear and people buffing you and all.

But that does bring up another problem I had with the game too, namely about equipment and quests and shit. So much about EQ was hidden and arbitrary, and likely the only way you were going to learn it was from reading websites that told you this shit.

Everything they possibly could do to be nice they were dicks about. Item drops were placed on just pretty much anything, and the only way you knew who had the good drops was by researching it or hearing it from people. Other than that, it was just pure luck, and even if you did go there, there were tons of people camping it already. And the game was notoriously stingy with equipment. It was like the DM who won't even let you buy normal plate mail until 8th level, only EQ was actually worse than that. Unless you relied on charity of high level charactes, you'd never get buffs or good equipment.

Then spell research was a really nice kick in the balls. It was cool how you had to collect components to make spells, that might of been fun, if your components were stuff with some logic like "griffon feather" or something that you had to collect from a real griffon. Only they weren't for the most part, they were random drops that you wouldn't know about unless you researched it. And that sucks. Having crap that you have to research out of game is stupid.

And those quests you got from people, well you pretty much wouldn't know about those unless you researched it either. And there were some awesome quests, that if you didn't know about you got boned.

And combat itself was the most boring part. Find a spawn point, sit at it, kill when the creature spawns then wait... and rinse and repeat a bunch of times.

I mean in the end there was basically nothing fun about that game at all. You leveled up a character who continually sucked and really never ever became a badass. Most of your time was spent pointlessly waiting for something. Waiting for a group to get together or waiting for a monster to spawn, or waiting for a group to finish camping a spawn point.

And you never got to actually like your character because you had no accomplishments, you were always just barely scraping by against the monsters you fought and the only time you felt like a big man was when you were fighting an orc three on one. Then maybe you could three or four fights without resting. Yep that's the extent of power in EQ.

[Murtak]

Whoa, that sounds like a bad combination of pre-expansions EQ, not enough grouping and some weird decisions/mistakes on your part.

Before all the expansions gear was quite hard to come by and much of what you say held true then. And the servers were horribly overpopulated, leading to mindless camping in quite a few zones.

But why do you complain about "item drops being placed on pretty much anything"? The pattern is pretty simply, in each zone you have the common monsters (the yard trash as many call them) and nameds that spawn at random intervalls, either in fixed locations or in random spots. The nameds have the good drops, the trash drops are either much crappier or much more rare.

So in theory your group enters a zone, fights their way in and encounters a couple of nameds along the way and you get a couple of random good items. And if the zones are not too crowded that is exactly what I tended to do: get a group together, clear a path into the zone and head towards named spawn areas. No sitting around. No boring camping in the same room. No slow and steady stream of single monsters. And you get a ton more cash and items that way.

Spell research, well, the concept I rather like - your components can drop of any appropriately leveled monsters. Some of the runes were a little on the rare side though (meaning by a factor of 100). I rather liked the more involved quests though. And with a few notable exceptions (fiery avenger, monk fists) these were quite solvable from in-game lore. For a perfect example of a quest see the
shaman epic quest
. Apart from the obscure beginning (which was announced in-game and in the patch message at the time) the storyline is perfect, the clues gradually grow more cryptic but are always solvable and you can pretty much do the entire quest without spoilers. I do not know why you complain about having to talk to NPCs to get quests anyways. Would you prefer to have a list of available quests pop up when you enter a zone?

I mean in the end there was basically nothing fun about that game at all. You leveled up a character who continually sucked and really never ever became a badass. Most of your time was spent pointlessly waiting for something. Waiting for a group to get together or waiting for a monster to spawn, or waiting for a group to finish camping a spawn point.

And you never got to actually like your character because you had no accomplishments, you were always just barely scraping by against the monsters you fought and the only time you felt like a big man was when you were fighting an orc three on one. Then maybe you could three or four fights without resting. Yep that's the extent of power in EQ.

Speak for yourself. Murtak has soloed multiple dragons, has made groups work that every said were impossible (go shaman, rogue, rogue, rogue, rogue, wizard), has slain his own god, explored all but two zones from front to back, killed the overpull that was shredding a group of his level on his own, had a 35 minute fight in which he and his partner killed over 20 enemies, is wanted dead in every single city on Norrath (including his hometown), solved the mystery of the lost Iksar tribe, saved the spirits of Wisdom, Might and Patience, defeated the champion of the gods of fire, water, air and earth and battled his way into the very citadel of anguish. He has been killed hundreds of times and yet he rises again. He has died from being dealt over 25000 points of damage in a single round of combat, from being frozen, burned, poisoned, diseased, electrocuted, banished from the face of the world and from having his life drained.

If you did not find enjoyment in the game, fine, things like that happen. But do not tell me that you can not grow powerful or that you can not accomplish anything. I have played the game for years, I was not twinked, I leveled up bit by bit, I had hard fights, I had easy fights, I explored and I conquered and it was fun.

Killing Emperor Crush in his own castle at level 10 was fun. Traveling from Oggok to Halas and from there to Kelethin at level 15 was fun. Surviving the frenzied pace in the Temple of Cazic Thule at level 30 was fun. Taking a group to the froglok king at level 40 and getting horribly slaughtered was fun. Robbing the crypt of Sebiis at level 50 was fun. Solving my epic at 55 was fun and will probably remain one of my fondest memories for years to come. Swarming Lady Vox with 40 others and barely winning was fun. Helping the giants of Kael Drakkal to destroy the hated ragons was fun, as was turning on the giants and destroying the avatar of their god. I could go on for page after page. There is a virtually unlimited number of things you can accomplish in that game. It is by far the strongest point of EQ and I can't begin to fathom why you would find this particular area to be lacking.