Alex
Arcane
You've missed my point. Baldur's Gate had a system in which there was an action per round limit; you could attack, cast a spell, drink a potion etc. And then it got all thrown out of the window by introducing spell sequencers, contingencies, improved alacrity and that lovely mage robe, which reduced casting time. The result is game, where a mage can unload their entire spellbook in such a short time, that anything not immune to magic or wearing enough spell protections to make them resemble a xmas tree would stand no chance. And then of course they gave mages an instant kill spell that ignored magic resistance and offered no save. And if you think that is better than having cooldowns on grenades to prevent their spamming, then I have to disagree, because to me the ability to mass spam skull traps is the shittier design choice. (and frankly, combat in unmodded BG was just boring)What do you mean by "choosing to respect the internal logic up to a point and giving the player a vast amount of interesting options"? Because I had a lot of fun playing an evil sorceress, but frankly, I fail to see any sort of logic in how magic was implemented in that game. Prime example being the number of actions you could take in a round.I don't think Baldur's Gate is balanced, but I think it is a better game than Underrail. I think that by choosing to respect the internal logic up to a point and giving the player a vast amount of interesting options, Baldur's Gate made something much more interesting overall. I don't mean by this to demean Underrail, only to say that it focused on something less important.
About the problem, I was trying to explain it in all these posts I have made in this thread.
Well, though the implementation of combat guts and change some of the core ideas, Baldur's Gate and its sequel more or less follows the basic idea behind AD&D 2nd edition. Rounds still mean the same thing in both games (even though they are implemented differently), magic means the same thing, etc.
Magic in AD&D might seem weird and unthematic. But it is a lot of fun, exactly because it followed a specific logic inside Gary Gygax's head, copying ideas from various pulp fantasy works and adding some stuff of his own. It seems to me that a lot in Underrail is limited because of a premature and excessive concern about balance. For instance, I find it a bit ridiculous how your fire powers will only set people on fire if you have a certain feat. If the feat actually changed how your character acted, maybe your psionics would get stronger from setting stuff on fire, it could be argued that it was a thematic limitation. But it clearly isn't, it is just a balance concern. An example of game that at least used to take thematic concerns first was the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. You would have cold spells shattering potions, fire spells burning scrolls, summoning imps that could raise the dead and what not.
Then we disagree.