DraQ
Arcane
Except they aren't your characters. Only those characters that you have created yourself, designated protagonist or characters you put in the party before the game even started are yours.MMXI said:NPCs are, yes. But I treat recruitable party members as my own characters.Baron said:But NPCs should have their alignment hidden simply because they're the DM's characters, not yours.
Did you chose them and put in the party before your playthrough even started (discounting "LOL I've read about them on the intertubes/ have seen them when I played the game last time so I planned my party accordingly")?I'm talking about those that the DM has created for me to choose between.
If no, they aren't characters DM created for you to chose between. They are characters DM created for you to bump into, join/ignore/slaughter them and have them seek their own goals which may or may not involve stabbing you in the back and absconding with all your gold and an artifact of power when you least expect them to. They are still NPCs except they have temporarily jouned your party. If you play tabletop and don't have access to inventories of DM's or other players' characters that are currently in the party with you, why should it work differently in a cRPG?
Sceptic said:And then be all surprised when Jon Irenicus registers as goodMemorise that shitty know alignment spell, cast it, remember it.
Know Alignment is theoretically great, but considering how little thought was given to character sheets in the BG's relying on it is pretty dangerous.
I generally dislike stuff like explicitly defined alignment, so I can't say I'm too happy with spells and other stuff directly targeting alignment.
Besides, PS:T would be a much worse and shallower game if it allowed detect evil. I was delighted with how it messed around with alignments, so we could have Trias, Ravel and pretty much monster evil Practical Incarnation that wasn't that far off typical munchkin good PC behaviour-wise.
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Well, characters unwilling to give up gear they can equip and don't find restrictive (for example Fighter-Thief would prefer good leather to good plate, despiteI also happen to agree with this. Key word being "ideally". But until developers come up with AI that's good enough for this, I'd rather go for full control.DraQ said:Ideally, NPCs should not reveal their entire character sheets, should not give up the best gear suiting their focus or essential supplies*, should not accept orders they'd deem suicidal and should interact with shopkeepers on their own, keeping their personal gold reserves.
Same with overrides based on charisma and overall approval of character's actions - even in BG characters reacted to actions based on their compatibility with their alignment (based on reputation score), so locking and unlocking full access to inventory, character sheet and such based on the same triggers wouldn't be exactly rocket science.
Except outside of combat nothing bad will generally happen if one of my valiant retards travels the first ten meters of his planned 'shortcut' through Maztica and Kara-Tur before I stop him and send him back on the right track, while in combat, even the several seconds my thief spends sightseing before he manages to get behind the back of enemy caster may mean that my strongest fighter gets bad case of charm and uses my fragile mage as a pinata.MMXI said:Oh, of course! Outside of combat you can inch your characters towards their destination slowly, even if you only want to get to a shop on the other side of the map, but in combat when enemies are within your line of sight you have to make long range movements to a safe haven 5 miles away!
Word.Nah. Bullshit.
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I find your ignorance dismaying.RTS style interface? Of course it does. It allows you to select characters individually, while also letting you select your whole party. That means you should play it like an RTS! Good luck!
IE was first developed to be used for an RTS, it shows. RTS interfaces are geared towards commanding massive amounts of non-essential units with little depth per unit, RPG interfaces are geared towards commanding one to few units that are all essential and have a huge amount of control depth. It also shows.
So you don't consider recruit-stripping NPCs of their valuables if they don't fit your party composition excessive cheese? Good to know.LARPing is storyfag shit? What are you on about? No one mentioned LARPing.
No, u.Is your inability to read still holding you back from making decent conversation?
I see your definitions are hopelessly muddled so let me give you hand:Storyfag shit is storyfag shit. Having evil party members with hidden alignments suddenly turn on you at convenient points in the game instead of having party members with open alignments who you can treat however you want is indeed storyfag shit.
Storyfag shit is when you follow a highly scripted, sometimes branching rail, while exploring well written dialogue about the nature of a man (if you're lucky) or poorly written gay romances (if you're not).
Having untrustworthy NPC party members is a concept that can be applied just as well to an open, procedural world with thousands of generated characters, provided that characters can be given goals and corresponding conditions regarding when and if to defect, for example a thief character may be generated to be motivated by greed and have a chance to defect when player has less than two backstabs worth of health, while also having above certain value of loot on him, as long as they are not in a populated area and there is clear path to the nearest town/dungeon exit, a paladin, OTOH may defect if he sees the PC killing random people for gold/lulz/necromancy resources. The only difference between storyfag and simulationist application is the amount of dramatic and highly individualized dialogue that will occur during the betrayal.
Lastly, I'm deeply and thoroughly amused by your bashing of storyfaggotry while also defending fucking BG, of all games.
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Of course I do.Your argument is so full of shit because you essentially want to sacrifice full party control for "believability" and "immersion", having characters who have their own opinions of you and only follow orders under given conditions.DraQ said: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.
The only reasons to have any sort of background fluff, "dwarves tend to have beards" included, and to have ruleset as baroquely convoluted (and, for this reason, inherently exploitable and hard to balance) as even the simplest RPGs is "immersion" and "believability".
If I wanted to play an abstract, mentally stimulating game, I'd
I may not care much for storyfag approach, even though it did result in some exquisite gems, as I'm a simulationist at heart, but as the whole point of storyfaggotry is telling a story, the point of simulationism is simulating a setting. What follows is that mechanics doesn't exist in vacuum, but is tied to the context of simulated universe and in pretty much any universe it makes perfect sense to have distrustful characters even if they are adventuring with you.
Plus, since I'm simulationist, thinking about charisma translating into the game not only as non-combat NPC interaction modifier, but an actual leadership quality gives me an instant hardon.
And how the hell are you supposed to compete quests without quest compass and popups?But my characters are my fucking characters! Why the hell would I want their statistics to be hidden from me? How the hell am I supposed to use them effectively if they aren't who I think they are?
How the hell are you supposed to do battle if you don't know the results of all rolls in advance?
Maybe you should actually dig for information rather than demand it to be handed to you on a silver platter?
Maybe you should plan for multiple alternatives (like the shady guy trying to stab your kidneys and run away with the treasure, or barbarian guy getting his death and glory rather than listening to your intelligent, but not overly charismatic wizard who seems to be mumbling to himself rather to actually give orders) rather than demand convenient certainty?
Because the protagonist actually *IS* your character. Unlike shady guy #34 you picked on the way because he's good at picking lock and enthusiastic about stabbing unsuspecting people in the kidneys.So why not apply that to the protagonist?
So, yeah:
Unsuccessful strawman is unsuccessful.
But, hey, since you enjoy strawmen, I can provide a counterstrawman of my own:
If you agree that full control is better, why don't go for even fuller control? Instead of just controlling your party (along with shady guy #34) you'd be able to control the enemy as well! Think about it. Wouldn't it make for much more interesting combat scenarios if you, a living, thinking human, rather than some dumb AI controlled enemy actions? Imagine the thrill of finding your party in the middle of an ambush not planned by a complete retard for a change.
Of course, the downside would be that you'd pretty much be a creepy guy playing make-pretend alone, with pixelated dolls and a ruleset, but aren't strawmen fun?
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You mean all those games where you actually create all the characters in the party (or at least core party) and where there is no way nor reason to hide anything, rather than picking drama queens/deep and meaningful characters/generated mooks on your way?Doesn't matter. It was an example. All I care about is for the alignments of party members to be displayed on their character sheets, which they are. DraQ wants the stats of party members hidden so you only have partial character sheets, requiring you to use spells like know alignment to figure them out. That would pretty much destroy all that is great about party-based RPGs.
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Because when I'm thinking of great, party-based cRPGs, I may think of Wizardry, but sure as fuck won't think of BG.