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Baldur's Gate Combat encounters in IE games vs. pnp AD&D?

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I'd like to hear how they compare to experience of people who played AD&D PnP.
Especially the amount of encounters, difficulty, etc.
 

Johannes

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Pnp has less running around kiting shit. Encounters and difficulty in pnp can of course be anything you make them to be.
 

Gord

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Usually number of encounters is massively inflated in cRPGs (IE and others alike). PnP usually will have significantly fewer encounters, especially since larger fights can take some time to resolve. Of course it also depends a bit on the game master or the adventure module you are playing.
 

Athelas

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Presumably people playing PnP don't sleep for 8 hours everytime they walk a few yards.
 
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hoverdog

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Never played pen&paper AD&D, but from what I heard the MAJESTIC wizard battles of late BG2 are purely a Bioware creation.
 

Lhynn

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A lot more creatively, shits not constrained by the system. Having a DM gives a lot more freedom.

Never played pen&paper AD&D, but from what I heard the MAJESTIC wizard battles of late BG2 are purely a Bioware creation.
You heard wrong, if anything they are watered down versions of what you can get in PnP
 
In My Safe Space
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Usually number of encounters is massively inflated in cRPGs (IE and others alike). PnP usually will have significantly fewer encounters, especially since larger fights can take some time to resolve. Of course it also depends a bit on the game master or the adventure module you are playing.
So, for example Planescape: Torment would have much less encounters if it was a PnP campaign? How much less?
 

Gord

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So, for example Planescape: Torment would have much less encounters if it was a PnP campaign? How much less?

Hard to say, it depends on too many factors (in general the adventure module, your DM, the PnP system you are playing, etc.)
And then the question is also, what number are we looking at? Fraction of time spend on combat? Encounters per hour? Absolute number of encounters?

I had sessions lasting several hours that consisted of nothing more than one big combat. On the other hand you can have role-playing-heavy modules where you have only maybe 1 or 2 combat encounters over several sessions.

But staying with PST and AD&D, it would still depend quite a bit on what parts a DM wants to emphasize.
Since the strong part is the story and the writing, one could well play it with significantly less combat, imho.
Also one should keep in mind that in a group with several people even one combat round can take a few minutes, so unless you want the campaign to slow down to a crawl, you'll probably want to remove a good part of the trash encounters - do you need 4 enemies behind every corner, even when they are weak? I'd rather try to "set the mood" - a small dungeon might contain a few (say 1-4) separate encounters with fitting enemies, for a wilderness area one encounter can be enough already and bigger fights I'd do only at important parts of the story anyway.
Of course a larger multi-level dungeon can have more encounters, but that might be enough material for an entire module already.
Which is another thing to consider: A cRPG can contain quite a lot material you can consume faster than in PnP, even without trashmobs.
 

Dorateen

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When I played PnP, we used the critical failure on a roll of 1 rule, which resulted in breaking non-magical weapons. There was one time, after a series of unlucky dice rolls, I was without weapons breaking both the primary and back-up, and had to fight off an ogre with bare hands.

The closest proximation of that experience I've found in a cRPG is the Champions of Krynn Gold Box game, where characters would lose their weapons when killing a baaz draconian, which turned to stone.

I still think the Gold Box games were as satisfying an emulation of tabletop as one can get, even compared to the Infinty Engine's expanded spellbook and classes.
 

Matalarata

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Usually number of encounters is massively inflated in cRPGs (IE and others alike). PnP usually will have significantly fewer encounters, especially since larger fights can take some time to resolve. Of course it also depends a bit on the game master or the adventure module you are playing.
So, for example Planescape: Torment would have much less encounters if it was a PnP campaign? How much less?

Time management is hard to explain... It all boils down to the system (AD&D 2 ed is much slower and clunkier than pathfinder, for example) a medium sized encounter used to take 25-40 min back in the days vs the 15-20 of nowadays.
To give you a vague idea, we play about 3 hours a week.
That said, thinking about Torment, I'd say a "dungeon" like the catacombs should (IMHO) contain about 1-2 encounters. A better example would be Nashkel Mines in BG 1, I would personally boil that down to 2-4 short guerrilla fights + some tactical nightmare at the end. In no sane world you should play such a boring dungeon IRL as it is in game
 

mastroego

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The thing with PnP is that it's ultimately what you make of it.
"You" meaning, for a large portion, the Dungeon Master.

Back in the day I used to have a very, VERY creative DM.
He would ditch rules in a heartbeat if it'd make sense and add flavor. We rarely spent time on minutiae (I'm not saying minutiae can't be fun).
It was a lot about narrative, we never used miniatures and hardly ever saw maps.
He was truly a force.

Then players do their part too.
For instance, one of my teammates used to have a shady character always running something on the side. At the end of a campaign, he betrayed us all as a service of his dark god. :mad:
(mind you, this can be dangerous in the wrong group)
Glorious times.
 

Lonely Vazdru

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I'd like to hear how they compare to experience of people who played AD&D PnP.
Especially the amount of encounters, difficulty, etc.
Difficulty is too variabke from one DM to another to compare with IE games but in my experience frequency is way lower in PnP than IE games since PnP offers many "real" role playing opportunities that CRPGs can't emulate (even Planescape which is the closest to the real thing). So you don't spend 80% of the time fighting.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Usually number of encounters is massively inflated in cRPGs (IE and others alike). PnP usually will have significantly fewer encounters, especially since larger fights can take some time to resolve. Of course it also depends a bit on the game master or the adventure module you are playing.
So, for example Planescape: Torment would have much less encounters if it was a PnP campaign? How much less?
PST wouldn't work as a pnp module on any level. It's entirely focused around a single character and the choices he makes.

That said if you looked at Kurst, no GM worth anything would make you fight through a horde of respawning enemies like that. In a PNP situation, you'd try to come up with a way around that didn't involve fighting. Using invisibility spells, sneaking, or finding an alternate path. Mabye convincing some other group to attack at the same time to create a distraction (this requires a good GM, but the others only require an average one).
 

Fenris 2.0

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It would all depend on the Group; over my lifetime I played in three groups; in my youth the game was pretty combat orientated, we had fun cleaving Orcs and Goblins left and right with our heavily armored TDE-Charas. As young Adult I played AD&D, the game was much more tactical, but still very combat-centric. My last Group consisted of monocled gentlemen playing D&D 3.5, their age varied from the early thirties to mid 40s, and we had only two or three battles per evening, but they were usually very hard.
 
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Lilura

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They're not RtWP, that's for sure.

PnP campaigns usually progress more slowly, there's more discussion and socialising. The difficulty is dependent on the campaign/module and on the DM.
 

Jaesun

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Have you played or read a PnP module before Awor Szurkrarz ?
No.

Here is a really basic and small simple campaign/adventure: http://www.freegamemanuals.com/pdfrpg/TSRDungeons&Dragons3.5ADarkandStormyKnight.pdf

This was a module Wizards of the Coast gave out for free.

Have a read at it, and take a look at how all the areas are designed and the encounters. This would give you a simple basic design on how D&D encounters are like.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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I always preferred combat focused P&P.

Sessions were never that long and once you've rolled for initiative and gone through the turn-based combat round after round then either died or divided up the loot it was normally time to go home. Of course, you need some characters to talk to and other bits and pieces to interact with, but it was, essentially, moving from one battle to the next. The extent to which you could engage with extensive emersive DM brainiacing would depend entirely on how much time you could commit to a session and how regularly (within memory) you met up.

It's easy to remember that you'd got three fights into a cave, it's a bit harder trying to remember your motivation and intentions on what you were thinking you were doing with a highly subjective and meaningful social encounter.

On top of this, P&P very rarely ever came to any kind of conclusion. It always had a beginning, but rarely ever a middle and end. Just like with cRPGs, it was always more fun in the lower levels when most encounters were a genuine threat. I've no doubt many here will have experienced gorgeously expert DM'ing of the highest order which didn't require much fighting, but for most dumb schmoes it was just about getting to the next fight/treasure.

If you had an averagely dumb DM, you could well find yourself excluded from future events by too much thinking outside the box...
 

Norfleet

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When I played PnP, we used the critical failure on a roll of 1 rule, which resulted in breaking non-magical weapons. There was one time, after a series of unlucky dice rolls, I was without weapons breaking both the primary and back-up, and had to fight off an ogre with bare hands.
That really isn't actually a very good rule, since it means that a weapon will break 5% of the time every time you use it. This is absurdly high, considering that it would be harder to destroy a weapon in real life by intentionally banging it against a concrete block. I know if I take a hammer and whang it against a concrete block with the intent of breaking it 20 times, it will more likely than not remain unbroken and functional.

You don't notice what these odds mean in PnP because combats are far less frequent. Throw this into a CRPG, which is essentially a long gauntlet of battles, and the odds any weapon survives the game pretty much drops to near zero.

This is really not an example of a good tabletop rule to port to CRPG-land.
 

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