Game News Baldur's Gate and NWN 3 are coming...

[Forest Dweller]

I just thought of something. Will all this cataclysmic change have any effect on the Wall of the Faithless?

 

[Lurkar]

I just thought of something. Will all this cataclysmic change have any effect on the Wall of the Faithless?

Wall of the Faithless, like many parts of FR lore pre-4e, isn't even mentioned. Most likely because the 4e FR writers didn't even know it or anything else existed, as it seems none of them even knew what "Forgotten Realms" was before they were told to rewrite it.

And just yesterday, Wizards has, once again, purged several of their leading and most experienced developers from their own company. Way to go, guys.

 

[S_Verner]

Shut the fuck up you faggot, FR is bad and you should feel bad.

The only fucking thing that pissed me off was that the one unique god I liked the story of died and that Drizz't didn't.

I mean, that god of wizards who gained his power by ripping the souls of two other gods of magic into fucking shreds, going to the astral, fightin some gith, and eating some floating god-corpses?

Awesome.

Drizzt?

Goddamnit, time to do the evil campaign again.

Looking forward to the Dark Sun rebirth, gonna be awesome.

 

[S_Verner]

And now 4e has completely warped it into being only about combat; not even the faintest sense of exploration OR story remains. The traps are now monsters.

Evidently I didn't play it enough to realise that either. We only played the first adventure (can't even remember what it's called right now), but I got the impression it's a decent crawler. It's a decent skirmish game at any rate.

Keep on the Shadowfell.

The one that has the high priest of Orcus teleport right infront of the spot where reality is stretched thin, and something is trying to push through.

If anyone in the group is smart, that fight ends in precisely one action.

Alignment was fucking retarded.

Wizard's modules are not supposed to offer broad political intrigue, and detailed plots, they FINALLY realized, that they fucking sucked at that, and that "non-standard" parties get fucked over by them, so they decided that since the GM, if he is any good makes most of the story up anyway, they wouldn't have to.

So WotC can do what they do best, make some stuff down for DM's to tweak, lay the foundation for campaigns, and make maps.

Also, I find it fucking retarded, that, in a Pen and Paper RPG you people want dialogue skills, fuck you.

 

[Longshanks]

I've never actually played P&P. But, I am curious, why no dialogue skills? For instance, what would happen if your character attempted to bluff an NPC? Would you play-act it? With success determined by how convincing your roleplay is? Or do you believe that such actions have no place in P&P, and that they should focus on combat?

 

[Disconnected]

I dont understand people insisting on playing D&D, there are so many better PnP RPGs, really some people dont want to realise that we no longer live in the 70s or 80s and there are hundreds of PnP RPG systems to choose from.

In the case of D&D and RPG systems in general, "better" is subjective.

As for why people stick with D&D when they're after shit that system doesn't do well, I wouldn't know. I'd guess it's to do with convenience. The same thing that keeps Microsoft in business despite the existence of free operating systems. What surprises me more, is that more people don't use RPG systems as a springboard for making home-brewed ones.

Keep on the Shadowfell.

That's the one, yes.

So WotC can do what they do best, make some stuff down for DM's to tweak, lay the foundation for campaigns, and make maps.

That's the reason I've got two shelves full of AD&D2ed crap. I have on rare occasions used an official adventure, but mostly I have all their junk because seeing the kind of shit other people come up with to create consistent settings, keep players entertained & at times, murder them in interesting ways, is a huge help to doing it yourself.

Also, I find it fucking retarded, that, in a Pen and Paper RPG you people want dialogue skills, fuck you.

Depends on the kind of games you play.

If your group's definition of role playing is to come up with clever ideas based on their class, abilities and in-game knowledge, and the GMs job is simply to figure out if and how those ideas work out, then you need some kind of dialogue system.

Back when we played the D&D boxed sets (long, long time ago), I created a dungeon where the main villain (a modified Gray Philosopher) ended up having a really obvious vulnerability to dialogue. The rules didn't have a system, so I went with ability checks (the D&D solution to everything) with some class/race modifiers I pulled out of my ass.

It worked so well my players didn't even notice it was house rules, until one of them took over as GM & couldn't find them anywhere.

If we hadn't used a dialogue system, the GM would either have had to wing it every time (which makes for a poorly prepared GM and an inconsistent play experience), or the GM would have had to avoid dialogue-based obstacles (making crawls more predictable). Basically, you need systems for anything abstract going on in your games. If you're not doing something akin to Freeform role playing (and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of RPers never do), you need some kind of system to prevent dialogues from either becoming a total mess, or from becoming monologues in disguise.