commie said:
DraQ said:
Wyrmlord said:
Wow, Jakub Zahowrski, even when you agree with me, you have to say something bad about me.
What do you have against me, Jakub?
Praatek Senjay detected.
What? DraQ is a Jakub? And here I thought being a Mariusz sucked arse, at least I don't have a Joo name!
MMXI said:
DraQ said:
The pathfinding in BG is so broken that the additional control given by ability to command partymembers is often illusory, and suicidal lemmings are easier to herd in TB. Then the main remaining difference is pause-spam VS aimed shots.
Pathfinding is only a problem out of combat in the Infinity Engine games.
Nope. It's primarily problem in combat, especially when said combat happens in cramped interiors.
When travelling you have a lot of time to corral your wayward retards at your leisure before venturing forth.
The only people who think otherwise seem to play the game like an RTS, issuing group actions in combat and not pausing enough. Your fault.
Well, the games do have RTS style interface, and if pausing enough means mashing space bar like an epileptic chimp, I have better things to do.
Shit combat is shit is shit is shit.
This is some serious storyfag shit right here.
Lolwut.
Making stats matter and implementing actual mechanics rather than LARPing is storyfag shit - you've heard it first from MMXI.
If I bring a guy into my party so that I control them then I want to know their bloody alignment. I don't want shit hidden from me. If I want to take an NPC's items and kick them out then the game should let me do so. I wouldn't mind if the NPC turns hostile after kicking them out of the party with no items, but why would they attack my party naked? That would be incredibly foolish. The characters I recruit should be mine to control. A Baldur's Gate with AI controlled party members, hidden statistics/alignment and items that you can't take from them would be so much worse.
Because BG where you join with a psychotic evil necromancer and psychopatic rat of a halfling as a pretty much distressed youngster, then tell them to give up their scrolls, weapons and armour and send the on their way is just so much better.
There are two approaches. Either you treat your combat seriously and try to integrate it with the rest of the mechanics as much as possible, or you treat it as a minigame, not unlike other minigames, with little actual relation to the events it resolves.
If you want to mesh it well, then things like an NPC you've first met 5' ago not trusting you with their stuff, a cowardly rogue deciding to leg it when you expect him to charge into the fray and people's willingness to accept your orders instead of their own (AI driven) judgement being tied to your charisma, their discipline and opinion of you are yet another part of the deal in the same way as your best swordsman chopping you up because you gave him a cursed sword is.
If you want it to be yet another minigame, dissociated from the context keeping the game together, then play some genre where it fits - JPG for instance.
Fuck. AD&D is based entirely around alignment.
Yes. One of the countless reasons why it's such an infantile sucky shit that sucks, actually.
The alignment is hidden from their character sheet? Memorise that shitty know alignment spell, cast it, remember it. Does one of your characters happen to take damage when casting that holy smite spell? They're evil. Does your recruited cleric get good cleric spells instead of evil cleric spells? Then they are good.
And those are mechanical means of learning character's alignment, completely unlike metagame'y "look at the character sheet".
Only in a game that uses alignment for plot related shit only could you effectively hide alignment. It's way too ingrained into the AD&D rules, especially in combat, for it to be an effective option.
There is always an option of performing setting-rape and limiting or eliminating easy ways to learn alignment. Setting-rape is only wrong when the setting is good in the first place anyway.
Plus, if recruitable party members had all these shitty "role-playing" restrictions that you wanted them to have, everyone, including myself, would just play a multi-player game with a player made party of 6 to get around that faggotry.
What if you were always restricted to controlling only one character from a single box?
Plus, D&D has much shittier "role-playing" restrictions built firmly into the ruleset. I'd gladly exchange an arbitrary inability to wear armour as a mage or to use edged weapons as a cleric (there can be consequences for the latter if it angers cleric's deity of choice) for a sociopathic halfling not wanting to part with the only thing standing between him and enemy blades with a pretty much random passerby (Unless said passerby offers him something better to cover his back, that is).
A character not wanting to exchange gear unless for better gear, possibly overriden by various factors like trust, obedience and needing to buy a cure disease potion badly seems like a reasonable limitation in comparison to arbitrary ones imposed on you in IE games.
Hell, an alignment itself is shitty roleplaying restriction.
during his sabbatical.
