Double lol wut. Khelgar has way more in common with Amiri than with Harrim.
Axebird wrote:Harrim... I have no fucking clue how you connected him, a nihilist struggling with cultural isolation and alcoholism, to a brash thrill-seeker that wants to become a monk purely because he thinks they're all about punching people.
Neverwinter Nights, not Neverwinter Nights 2. Grimgnaw and Harrim are pretty much the same character.
Axebird wrote:Erudite, joyless, and deathly serious about popular perception are definitely not racist gnome traits. The fuck?
You've obviously not seen his Treasurer dialogue, then.
Valerie got forced into being a paladin of Shelin, had a teenage rebellion and overcompensated into "all art is useless". "People don't know no means no" appears to have been a problem zero times for Valerie until a paladin of Shelin came to 'redeem' Valerie.
Have you even listened to her dialogue while chilling at the trading post or barony? Go back and ask her about her time with the paladins/monastery/church whatever the fuck.
Seriously, you guys seem not to actually be paying attention to what the fuck NPCs are actually saying.
Double lol wut. Khelgar has way more in common with Amiri than with Harrim.
Axebird wrote:Harrim... I have no fucking clue how you connected him, a nihilist struggling with cultural isolation and alcoholism, to a brash thrill-seeker that wants to become a monk purely because he thinks they're all about punching people.
Neverwinter Nights, not Neverwinter Nights 2. Grimgnaw and Harrim are pretty much the same character..
Harrim's story is that he went to Groetus after being bullied by the dwarves for being a fuckup, and grows increasingly disillusioned in the gods as he learns that what he believes to be a curse of Torag might actually be a blessing of Torag or a blessing of Groetus.
His similarities to Grimgnaw appear to start and end at "serves a god of oblivion".
RelentlessImp wrote:
Axebird wrote:Erudite, joyless, and deathly serious about popular perception are definitely not racist gnome traits. The fuck?
You've obviously not seen his Treasurer dialogue, then.
Can you actually say what is wrong with any of the characters? Why are you so insistent on being vague and saying nothing? His Treasurer dialogue is mostly recommending middle of the road choices and moderation, refusing risky investments (halfling brewery) and so on. His one questionable advice was when he recommended publically renouncing Abadar's tax collectors while quietly supporting them. Which apparently makes him a stereotype?
RelentlessImp wrote:
Valerie got forced into being a paladin of Shelin, had a teenage rebellion and overcompensated into "all art is useless". "People don't know no means no" appears to have been a problem zero times for Valerie until a paladin of Shelin came to 'redeem' Valerie.
Have you even listened to her dialogue while chilling at the trading post or barony? Go back and ask her about her time with the paladins/monastery/church whatever the fuck.
Yes, I have listened to her dialogue.
Last edited by Longes on Fri Nov 02, 2018 9:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Some of these comments need spoiler tags, badly. I just got into chapter 2.
I ended up running the game in parallels so I could run the respec mods. (tried uMod, didn't work for me)
Valerie: TWF Fighter
Harimm: Redid his stats so the point values are on par with everyone else, then left him a cleric.
Octavia: Magus: Eldritch Archer, because 1) Primary character is a wizard and I've found scrolls to fill my spellbook to be rare. 2) I find that her action responses are less entertaining than Linzi's variations of "Applause Please". 3) Most all of the skills checks can be done by the bard, who is just a utility knife for the whole game so far.
That's my party so far:
Valerie, Amiri, Harimm, Linzi, Octavia.
I might respec my character as a sorcerer, because the flexibility of a wizard on the table-top doesn't seem to play well in the game so far. The game needs to have a lot more opportunities to learn spells so that a wizard's flexibility in spell selection is a viable choice.
Axebird wrote:
Amiri pretty clearly doesn't care about her old tribe at any point, so I'm not sure where you got that from.
Amiri's relationship with her tribe is not great, but it's still her tribe so the issue isn't that she doesn't care, it's that if she was more forthcoming on the matter the whole bit would get the "It's complicated" tag on Facebook.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Mon Nov 05, 2018 9:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
Locked treasure in this game is a huge failure from a gameplay perspective. They should have implemented a tiered result mechanic that might also translate well to PnP:
If a thievery roll is required for opening treasure chests, don't pass/fail the test. Make the thievery test determine the contents of the object.
I haven't found any place in game to take useful notes. The game should let you drop a marker somewhere that lets you add a note, which would shows up in the map and the journal for easy reference. Because you can't do that, there is less incentive to accept a failed trickery test to open a chest, because the test can only be performed once per level. I bet most players save their game before the attempt ane reload until successful. I could hand write notes, but that isn't optimal, nor should it be required to play a game with an extensive 'journal'.
The save/load cycle breaks game immersion for something as trivial as opening things. The thievery roll should just determine the contents of the object you're attempting to open. If the test to open a chest is successful, you get the full monty. If you fail, you get a lower tier reward. I wouldn't even show whether the test succeeded or failed, just give the results.
I sort of think this idea might work well in tabletops too. When MC defines treasure, two or more values are listed, the successful one and the failed one:
The idea here is that unless cracking safes is the main theme of the game, certain in-game non-plot consequences should keep moving the game forward regardless of the result. You absolutely would never put a plot device in a chest that could only be opened by the 1 PC maximized for opening things, because that's a roadblock if the PCs fail to open the chest. Chests are always non-plot consequences. When encountered, the party can carry the chest home to a fence who specializes in opening such things for a cut and suffer encumbrance penalties while lugging about a bunch of locked boxes, or they just open it and get a treasure roll based on the success of their thievery tests.
To put it another way from a meta perspective, a chest as a treasure object should be a chance to use thievery skills to score random loot based on the tier of that chest and the result of the skill test. It should not be a pass/fail to get/not get loot. Pass/Fail on a less used skill sucks for the PC who invested resources into that skill, exponentially so if the test can only be tried once per level.
It's a bit hard to diegetically justify variable loot, and some people will throw a total bitch fit if you admit that disassociated mechanics have to be that way.
Not impossible if you rely a lot on items that could be damaged - "Your slow and clumsy opening process smashes the viagra bottle inside / slashes the jute tapestry depicting your conception / spills the healing potion onto the oil painting of King Daxall's dick reducing its resale value accordingly"
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
I'm not a fan of disassociated mechanics for dubious benefit. In either scheme you're still stuck annoying a fair number optimizers. Pass/Fail with a reasonable chance to succeed can and will result in people reloading but "Pass, but the loot is determined by rolls" is likely to be dealing with charts that are a helluva lot more granular than pass/fail and could easily resulting people reloading more than in the pass/fail setup if there's sufficient differences in loot preference.
Plus, tying it to a skill that presumably has to be invested in is kind of an ugly fit because unless you let how the skill works go unexplained you're not even getting the benefit of hiding the fact that there's even a randomizer at all. With setups like Pillars of Eternity's loot generator you at least have the benefit of many players not realizing they could be gaming the system until the second playthrough.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Mon Nov 05, 2018 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah there's a reason my examples were "increase or reduce number of GPs" instead of actual items.
Frankly though if you want people to feel rewarded for pumping "chest opening" in a video game it really should be deterministic with TNs set on the assumption that you don't ever open a chest unless you can take 20.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
I hear and understand the pitfallls of narrative driven results from loot, but I wonder if there is room for such results in a d20 game, where a character’s equipment values are based on level. If your PC is expected to have X grand worth of gear, then the MC is required to establish an economy that keeps your equipment values on par with your PC levels, even if this economy isn’t thematically immersive. If random treasure values just feed into the leveled gear mechanic, then your thievery skills tie directly into that mechanic in a such a way that successful loot rolls benefit the optimization of the PC’s kit choices vs an MC having to invest time justifying a mechanic or checking off items on the PC gear wishlist like goddamn Santa Claus. If opening a treasure object was Pass: 2K worth of PC choices or Fail: 1K with of choices, then the the MC has to work less to justify potentially exploitable campaign resources like crafters and alchemists. In other words, d20 already has narrative result mechanics: as you gain levels, your gear value goes up automatically, even if all you did was fight filthy Paleolithic kobolds.
Now I admit the above differs from what I stated originally about what’s in the mystery treasure box, as I’ve had some time to think about this a little more.
Axebird wrote:I don't know what's up with Valerie. Her first companion quest never fired for me and I don't use her in my party.
you're supposed to get a letter about her and if i am not mistaken there is a window of only a few days to receive it. if you are out of town and don't get back in time you only get a message telling you a letter could not be delivered. not sure if they fixed it yet, pretty sure that missing a companion-questline isn't intentional.
Oh yeah, the shit where you have to save every single time before you do one of the obnoxious adviser leveling projects, just in case the game decided to toss a massively important one time only companion event at you during the 14 days that auto passes and cause you to miss it forever unless you reload, can go fuck itself. I seem to have missed both Joan of Suck and Zombielf's plots because of that mechanic (and one of the kender bard's quest as well, but then the game some how later decided I had done that one anyway during the war of the river kings chapter because it began talking about some NPC I had never seen before but some how I had apparently granted asylum to) And apparently Zombielf's side quest is massively important because she'll just flat out murder another party member later on depending on how her quest line goes.
If Kingmaker's walking, travelling and loading speeds were about 3x faster, and if Kingdom management's failures didn't carry the risk of a Game Over, I'd not mind this "random events guarantee that each game will be unique" fuckery.
But as is, the game is simply too slow and involved to have this mechanic.
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
Sadly, this is a game that already has an extremely active modding community to unfuck the game. Save editors to change point buy of custom PCs, resolving kingdom events in a day or so, and altering the rate at which overland travel fatigues you. All pretty goddamned necessary at this point.
EDIT: NPCs don't fucking care. I just had a fight where I interrupted a Summon Monster spell, IMMEDIATELY followed by interrupting a Snowball spell, but then the spellcaster immediately cast Acid Splash. Gee, I wish I got to cast 3 spells in the same fucking six seconds.
Last edited by RelentlessImp on Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Whoa. I posted this over a year ago and haven't been on the forum in a while. Great to see what everyone thinks of this game. I will not be giving it a try then.[/i]
Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:Whoa. I posted this over a year ago and haven't been on the forum in a while. Great to see what everyone thinks of this game. I will not be giving it a try then.[/i]
You can also wait for the inevitable sale, after all the patches they're making right now. I don't regret having bought it because there's a lot of options to try and enough content to look overwhelming at first.
Last edited by nockermensch on Thu Nov 08, 2018 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
I think it's worth a try. It's a BG-like that forgot what made Baldur's Gate actually good (namely, not fucking you over for making your own party AND having decent NPCs) and the voice acting is... something somewhere north of 'decent' but south of 'great'. If you've never played Kingmaker on the tabletop, it's also a good way to see how not to do it - namely, no horses (or mounts of any kind), no teleportation, and no access to gear you might actually want to equip on people, forcing you to build characters around the gear selection in the game, and to screw you over if you make a wrong choice on weapons.
Additionally, there's a massive over-reliance on picking up the teamworking feats, mainly because there's so few feats you'd give a shit about.
Also also, it looks like your barony capital never fucking changes, no matter how much you build it up.
Last edited by RelentlessImp on Fri Nov 09, 2018 6:10 am, edited 4 times in total.
