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szary
Mar 12, 2014
All this Wizardry 6 chat made me try it again, I bounced off it hard in the past and it's still pretty rough. The interface is the worst offender, it takes at least 8 clicks to cast a basic healing spell and any kind of inventory manipulation is a pain. I know it was 1990, but Eye of the Beholder came out the same year and had fully mouse-driven interface with paper dolls, hell, even Pool of Radiance from 1988 wasn't such a chore.

Anyway, I got past the initial brutal difficulty hump and I'm kind of digging the game now, at least until it finally gives me carpal tunnel from all the clicking.

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Max Wilco posted:

Stuff like this is always what makes me neurotic whenever I start an RPG (typically an older one, though there are some new ones where I have that issue); the game gives you a bunch of skills and points to distribute, but you don't know whether or not to put points in a skill, or how many points are decent enough for a skill. It's like, it doesn't seem worth it to put points into 'underwater basket weaving', but maybe it comes into play for some quest twelve hours in and gives you some really good items. You also don't know if the character (or characters) you rolled are decent enough to make it through the first dungeon. You could spend four hours making a party, only to realize twenty minutes in that half of the party can get die instantly to rats.
Well, one of the really bad design decisions that most old RPGs take from D&D is that your most important decisions are made at character creation, before you've even played the game.

Max Wilco
Jan 23, 2012

I'm just trying to go through life without looking stupid.

It's not working out too well...

Cardiovorax posted:

Oh yeah, the enchanting system in Morrowind was broken as hell, it was pretty great. What you may not have heard about is that you could also make magical assault rifles with it. There used to be an enchantment category called "On Activate" which basically let you use any random object like it was a magical wand of sorts: pick a spell, pick a magnitude, pick a soul, and you can cast it as long as you are wearing the item and it still has charge.

So where do the assault rifles come it? Well, what might not immediately expect from that description is that unlike any other kind of spell, item spells did not have casting animations. They also never failed. So what you would do would be to pick a cheap little spell at a low magnitude, ideally something that bypasses elemental resistances like Absorb Health, and then spam it at enemies as fast as you were able to click the mouse. Item run out of charge? Just feed more souls into it, which you were able to do in the fly through your inventory.

So yeah, the enchanting system in Morrowind basically allowed you to turn it into a first-person shooter at will, which is pretty drat great.

:eyepop: I think I need to get back to playing Morrowind here soon.


Devor posted:

Kind of like Daggerfall spell casting. There's no casting animation or speed restriction, so you can dump your mana as fast as you can hammer the Cast hotkey.

Unfortunately, enemies had the same ability, so enemy spellcasters who noticed you at close range were incredibly dangerous, because they just ZAP, and dump all their mana into spells trying to kill you in an instant. If they noticed you far away you at least had a chance to dodge projectiles (unless they only had touch-range spells).

I remember learning about a trick you can do in Daggerfall where you can make a really low cost spell like Slowfall or a light healing spell, and them just spam it over-and-over quickly to increase your casting skills rapidly.

Speaking of Daggefall, one amusing anecdote I reminded of is when I was watching someone stream the game, and they were talking about item enchantments on clothing. Daggerfall has a bunch of different various clothing items, so they had equipped the character with a brassiere with a Levitate enchantment for, "something that lifts and supports" :rimshot:


szary posted:

All this Wizardry 6 chat made me try it again, I bounced off it hard in the past and it's still pretty rough. The interface is the worst offender, it takes at least 8 clicks to cast a basic healing spell and any kind of inventory manipulation is a pain. I know it was 1990, but Eye of the Beholder came out the same year and had fully mouse-driven interface with paper dolls, hell, even Pool of Radiance from 1988 wasn't such a chore.

Anyway, I got past the initial brutal difficulty hump and I'm kind of digging the game now, at least until it finally gives me carpal tunnel from all the clicking.

I think Eye of the Beholder came out in '91, but yeah, it looks a lot more approachable.

Pool of Radiance is in a similar boat where it looks really primitive and difficult to play, but I know the Gold Box games are well loved, and I remember there being utilities that make the game easier to play.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

Zereth posted:

Levitate worked everywhere in Morrowind, too. And then in Oblivion and Skyrim it just doesn't exist anymore.

Not quite, Tribunal added a functionality to turn levitate (as well as mark and recall) off, I believe on a cell-by-cell basis.

Turning mark and recall off on the other hand had to be done through scripting even though it was invariably for the same cells, because Bethesda things.

And yes that meant you had to manually script another point to turn mark and recall back on, ask me as a modder how I know that from experience

punishedkissinger
Sep 20, 2017

I'm sure this has already been discussed but I picked up Pillars of Eternity 2 on sale and it's wayyyyy better than the first game. The settings is fun, the ship management stuff is great, lots of little QoL changes. I hope we keep getting these BG2 remakes forever.

Peaceful Anarchy
Sep 18, 2005
sXe
I am the math man.

szary posted:

All this Wizardry 6 chat made me try it again, I bounced off it hard in the past and it's still pretty rough. The interface is the worst offender, it takes at least 8 clicks to cast a basic healing spell and any kind of inventory manipulation is a pain. I know it was 1990, but Eye of the Beholder came out the same year and had fully mouse-driven interface with paper dolls, hell, even Pool of Radiance from 1988 wasn't such a chore.

Anyway, I got past the initial brutal difficulty hump and I'm kind of digging the game now, at least until it finally gives me carpal tunnel from all the clicking.
Using the keyboard is much quicker. The mouse interface is horrid because it's just the keyboard interface but you click things instead of selecting them, but you can't use the keyboard at the same time and moving the mouse is so much more annoying than using the arrows on your keyboard.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Max Wilco posted:

:eyepop: I think I need to get back to playing Morrowind here soon.
Have fun with that and ask me about the Alchemy God Loop sometime if you thought that was funny. Going all-in on Enchantment as your primary skill is a surprisingly viable and powerful playstyle, because it basically gets you all the benefits of all the schools in a single skill and reliant only on Intelligence.

The only downside is that it is incredibly expensive to get started with, because you can't really reliably enchant anything worth bothering with before you have at least 50 Enchantment skill yourself. It's one of my favourite kinds of gimmick run, though. I usually jumpstart it by console spawning me a single Star of Azura, which lets you collect and practice with cheap souls as you go without completely bankrupting you, even if it takes a while.

Son of a Vondruke!
Aug 3, 2012

More than Star Citizen will ever be.

punishedkissinger posted:

I'm sure this has already been discussed but I picked up Pillars of Eternity 2 on sale and it's wayyyyy better than the first game. The settings is fun, the ship management stuff is great, lots of little QoL changes. I hope we keep getting these BG2 remakes forever.

Unfortunately, Pillars 2 didn't do very well financially. It sold significantly worse than Pillars 1. Which is a damned shame, because it was fantastic.

punishedkissinger
Sep 20, 2017

Son of a Vondruke! posted:

Unfortunately, Pillars 2 didn't do very well financially. It sold significantly worse than Pillars 1. Which is a damned shame, because it was fantastic.

I was just reading that. What a huge bummer. The first game was so underwhelming and they came back with this absolute gem and no one is playing it.

:(

Max Wilco
Jan 23, 2012

I'm just trying to go through life without looking stupid.

It's not working out too well...

Cardiovorax posted:

Have fun with that and ask me about the Alchemy God Loop sometime if you thought that was funny. Going all-in on Enchantment as your primary skill is a surprisingly viable and powerful playstyle, because it basically gets you all the benefits of all the schools in a single skill and reliant only on Intelligence.

The only downside is that it is incredibly expensive to get started with, because you can't really reliably enchant anything worth bothering with before you have at least 50 Enchantment skill yourself. It's one of my favourite kinds of gimmick run, though. I usually jumpstart it by console spawning me a single Star of Azura, which lets you collect and practice with cheap souls as you go without completely bankrupting you, even if it takes a while.

Tell me about the Alchemy God Loop.


Son of a Vondruke! posted:

Unfortunately, Pillars 2 didn't do very well financially. It sold significantly worse than Pillars 1. Which is a damned shame, because it was fantastic.

That sucks to hear. I picked up PoE II: Deadfire when GOG offered an email discount on it a few months back (even though I haven't played the first one yet, because :gogtears:).

Air Skwirl
May 13, 2007

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed shitposting.

Max Wilco posted:

Tell me about the Alchemy God Loop.


That sucks to hear. I picked up PoE II: Deadfire when GOG offered an email discount on it a few months back (even though I haven't played the first one yet, because :gogtears:).

Increasing intelligence increases the effectiveness of potions you make, including making potions that increase intelligence.

And potions effects stack.

Max Wilco
Jan 23, 2012

I'm just trying to go through life without looking stupid.

It's not working out too well...

Skwirl posted:

Increasing intelligence increases the effectiveness of potions you make, including making potions that increase intelligence.

And potions effects stack.

Oh, I've heard of that trick before. I think Skyrim had something similar, thought I think it got patched out.

Chev
Jul 19, 2010
Switchblade Switcharoo

szary posted:

I know it was 1990, but Eye of the Beholder came out the same year and had fully mouse-driven interface with paper dolls

Max Wilco posted:

I think Eye of the Beholder came out in '91, but yeah, it looks a lot more approachable.
Eye of the Beholder basically took everything UI-wise from Dungeon Master, which was from 87, so it seems even less excusable. DM, however, was originally developed without a series precedent and on a platform where elaborate graphics and a mouse were natural, and a lot of its streamlining is simply due to the game being real time: you had to be able to act fast or you'd just die. Meanwhile, Wiz6 is from an lineage that was just graduating from wireframe dungeons and keyboard-only, and by virtue of being turn based it's obvious it'd ignore some of the heretical lessons of a dumbed down real time games and all their fast paced action, it was a thinking man's game and stuff like that. I remembe that when Might & Magic 3 came out in 91 it was a super big deal that such an RPG would have an interface that could dispense with keyboards entirely, and Ultima 7's mouse-only interface in 92 was similarly considered a revolution.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Max Wilco posted:

Oh, I've heard of that trick before. I think Skyrim had something similar, thought I think it got patched out.

In Skyrim, you make a potion that buffs enchanting, chug it, enchant gear that increases Alchemy, wear that, brew a more powerful potion that buffs enchanting, craft a more powerful armor that buffs alchemy, repeat forever.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

Max Wilco posted:

Pool of Radiance is in a similar boat where it looks really primitive and difficult to play, but I know the Gold Box games are well loved, and I remember there being utilities that make the game easier to play.

Gold Box Companion is a game changer - I would not play those games without it.

There is a humorous LP of the series ongoing right now as well.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

punishedkissinger posted:

I was just reading that. What a huge bummer. The first game was so underwhelming and they came back with this absolute gem and no one is playing it.
I think I have talked about this before in this very thread, but the thing that really kills me is that the first game is even more enjoyable on a second playthrough after you have had a few years pass to forget enough things; I am just finishing up my second go-round now, and actually understanding what the hell is going on in the game world makes a real difference to immersing yourself in it. Which I think is a point I originally made about the appeal of the Forgotten Realms as a setting--it is not that there is anything profoundly great about it, but for all the people who grew up playing D&D, we know enough about it for it to function well as a setting, as we automatically pick up nuance and understand connections in ways you may well not if all of the places and people and factions are all new to you and get mixed up in your head.

Related: I once used the Forgotten Realms town of Scornubel as an example of something nobody could ever possibly care about and that there was no reason to know about, only to find it actually gets mentioned in Baldur's Gate on two separate occasions. You just never know when useless gaming world knowledge might be illuminating, mannnnnn

Chev posted:

by virtue of being turn based it's obvious it'd ignore some of the heretical lessons of a dumbed down real time games and all their fast paced action, it was a thinking man's game and stuff like that. I remembe that when Might & Magic 3 came out in 91 it was a super big deal that such an RPG would have an interface that could dispense with keyboards entirely, and Ultima 7's mouse-only interface in 92 was similarly considered a revolution.
Thanks for reminding me of the arguments from the early 1990s again, where a game needing a mouse meant it was a dumbed down game for morons who could not understand hotkeys. It was actually a little hard for me to swallow my pride and play Ultima VII despite arguing that nobody needed a mouse; this is why I know you technically can play Ultima VII without one, it is just, uh, not easy

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



quantumfoam posted:

Cough tribunal expansion? cough
... I never actually played that :sweatdrop:

Max Wilco posted:

Apart from levitate. I remember hearing or reading about how in Morrowind, you could enchant weapons, armor, and accessories with all sorts of broken and insane stuff. You could make a ring that drains your health, and even though that obviously detrimental, it was something you could do.
Detrimental if you equipped it, but there were ways to get NPCs to equip it and then you could stand around waiting for them to die witghout getting dinged for murder.

Son of a Vondruke! posted:

Unfortunately, Pillars 2 didn't do very well financially. It sold significantly worse than Pillars 1. Which is a damned shame, because it was fantastic.
I found Pillars 1 boring as hell.

But I just picked up Pillars 2 becuase it's currently cheap and I keep hearing about how much better it is, and it has a turn-based mode, and I can't spend the money on going to restaurants right now, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Does anybody have any suggestions for a build to use or such?

Skwirl posted:

Increasing intelligence increases the effectiveness of potions you make, including making potions that increase intelligence.

And potions effects stack.
AND you can get ingredients to make fortify intelligence potions form a vendor! Or at least two vendors, both of which are in towns with Mage's GUilds in them, thus letting you teleport between them.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Dr. Quarex posted:

I think I have talked about this before in this very thread, but the thing that really kills me is that the first game is even more enjoyable on a second playthrough after you have had a few years pass to forget enough things; I am just finishing up my second go-round now, and actually understanding what the hell is going on in the game world makes a real difference to immersing yourself in it. Which I think is a point I originally made about the appeal of the Forgotten Realms as a setting--it is not that there is anything profoundly great about it, but for all the people who grew up playing D&D, we know enough about it for it to function well as a setting, as we automatically pick up nuance and understand connections in ways you may well not if all of the places and people and factions are all new to you and get mixed up in your head.
To my perception, the problem was more that they tried very hard to make a fully-formed Forgotten Realms knockoff setting from whole cloth, but they didn't have fourty-plus to let it grow and actually become that detailed and complex. Instead it just ends up feeling shallow and drawn with a wide brush. The entire thing gives me the sense of something the Dwarf Fortress "procedural history generator" might have spit out - a bunch of random world facts and connections are all there, but they're just pointless factoids. They don't actually matter to anything.

For what it's worth, POE2 doesn't really do anything to correct that in my view. I think the sandbox experience is better, but I still find everything about the setting itself completely generic and forgettable.

BadAstronaut
Sep 15, 2004

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?

Catgirl Al Capone
Dec 15, 2007

BadAstronaut posted:

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?

Reject a straightforward good/evil dichotomy in favor of varied moral frameworks with explicit goals, i.e. self-interest, community interest, etc. Avoid stats-driven systems that can't be abstracted enough to be invisible. Separate intent from outward appearances so you can effectively lie and party members who know you will play along while party members who don't get taken aback and might even react with anger.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
The problem with morality systems in RPGs is that too many people don't get the point of them. The original alignment system of D&D was meant to be nothing more than descriptive of actions, not motivations. If you're a lawful good hero, you do good things for the well-being of a society and its people. If you're chaotic evil villain, you break laws and hurt people for your own benefit. It wasn't ever supposed to be a nine-stage spectrum of how people actually think and the worst thing a game can possibly do is to actually try for that and make some formalized model of what motivates your character, when the entire point of role-playing a character is that deciding this is supposed to be your job.

Baldur's Gate 2 has an alignment system, but it never tangibly rewards or punishes you for how well you follow it. It just takes it as what it's supposed to be: a statement of intent at character creation. The rest of the time, you get results based on what you actually choose to do, which is really only good way to do it. I find POE2 incredibly obnoxious to play through at times because it connects every. random. thing. with some kind of arbitrary character trait just as "being dynamic" or "having willpower" when you may not actually even agree with that assessment - and depending on your character class, there are some actual mechanical consequences to that. I really hated that and it makes me pine for the days when you could just choose to say what you wanted to say without every game treating it like you're taking some kind of very odd psychological evaluation.

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

Zereth posted:

... I never actually played that :sweatdrop:

Detrimental if you equipped it, but there were ways to get NPCs to equip it and then you could stand around waiting for them to die witghout getting dinged for murder.

I found Pillars 1 boring as hell.

But I just picked up Pillars 2 becuase it's currently cheap and I keep hearing about how much better it is, and it has a turn-based mode, and I can't spend the money on going to restaurants right now, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Does anybody have any suggestions for a build to use or such?

The Pillars 2 thread is chock-full of great info and details, but for a quick rundown:

You can't go wrong with a single-class Monk for a powerful, fairly straightforward fighter-type. Avoid Nalpazca, as their gimmick can be finicky and gets annoying late-game when enemies start dispelling your drug effects, and if you choose Helwalker you probably want to focus on ranged attacks or dual class (Helwalker/Wizard makes for a hellaciously nasty nuker, but it's a bit more complicated).

Single-class Barbarians are simpler than Monks and also plenty powerful, though the turn-based mechanics hurt them pretty bad.

If you want a simple, effective support go Paladin/Chanter. They don't complement each other directly, but it creates a Chanter That Won't Die, which lets you get tons of value out of your passive chants.

Wizards are as incredible and versatile as ever, but they have a lot of choices. You can switch grimoires to get different spells mid-combat, which offers a lot of versatility.

My personal favorite combo is Fighter (Blackjacket)/Chanter (Troubador), though it's a bit more complex. You pick clubs, flails and morningstars as your weapon specializations, because their special abilities debuff enemy defenses. You also pick the invocation that drops all enemy defenses (Ben Fidel's Neck Was Exposed), which stacks with the weapon effects for a total of -25 to whatever defense you're targeting, which is brutal. You also get a bit of Chanter That Won't Die, though not quite as much as the Paladin combo.

Other popular combos are Rogue (Tickster)/Fighter (Blackjacket), a super-tank with passable damage output, and single-class Cipher (Ascendant), which can do incredible burst damage but requires you to know your way around the spells. Honestly any class/class combo can work, the game is pretty well-balanced. Even the standout classes aren't anything like a Kensai/Mage.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




BadAstronaut posted:

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?

IMO for the most part morality systems are just bad. Reputation systems are much better.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Cardiovorax posted:

The problem with morality systems in RPGs is that too many people don't get the point of them. The original alignment system of D&D was meant to be nothing more than descriptive of actions, not motivations. If you're a lawful good hero, you do good things for the well-being of a society and its people. If you're chaotic evil villain, you break laws and hurt people for your own benefit.
It was even simpler than that: the alignment system of the first edition of D&D was nothing more than "Will this monster attack you on sight Y/N."

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

BadAstronaut posted:

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?

Party members and quest givers that ghost you more and more the more you veer from their morality comfort zone.
Like refusing to trade gear at all, or go on missions with you until your rep improves. If refusing to go on missions for a while, suddenly appearing as minibosses after You-the-Player doing something exceptionally vile reputation wise?

Sherry Bahm
Jul 30, 2003

filled with dolphins
I feel like it's bad whenever a game tries to tell me what I'm thinking or feeling or what I'm trying to do. I might be doing things differently due to the given circumstances or who I am interacting with, and there's often a lot of grey area that gets shoved in the Good/Bad or Lawful/Chaotic box because the game needs to calculate it numerically *somehow*. Which in the worst cases is how you get games where you earn good points for random murder, because the guy just so happened to be bad according to the games morality system.

I like the idea of Reputation instead because you can have a Reputation that belies your true motivations, and you can have it vary by region, faction or person to person. And that sort of thing actually makes things more interesting imho. You're less focused on where your alignment chart sits and more engaged with other characters perceptions of you, which can vary from one to the next, even when speaking of the exact same act.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

BadAstronaut posted:

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?
I think my overarching problem with morality systems is that it's impossible to design one without putting your own ethics and politics onto it, but most studios don't want to make art that takes a political stance. (They love making stuff that says, like, bigotry is bad and democracy is good, and patting themselves on the back for being so brave. But try finding a studio with a budget taking a clear stance on an actually controversial issue.) The result is a lot of both-sidesing between two equally myopic points of view, or the old cliche of Selfless/Mercenary/The Joker options in every dialogue.

The best one I've seen is probably Fallen London. Certain actions accumulate points in traits like Ruthless, Hedonist, Magnanimous, Melancholy, etc. There are also traits that measure your allegiance to various factions. And while you are often forced to make a choice, none of the traits are zero sum. You can have high ratings in both Forceful and Subtle or Hedonist and Austere, and you can curry favour with both the Constables and Criminals or Heaven and Hell.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:57 on May 19, 2020

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Is Shadowrun Returns and its sequels sufficiently old-school? It is based on a tabletop game from 1989

I've just started the Dead Man's Hand campaign and I'm trying to make sure I have a build that will let me see all the content. I don't normally play deckers, but it seems necessary to see all the cool stuff. I'm looking at going Shaman/Decker/Rifle, but maybe that's spreading myself too thin.

prometheusbound2
Jul 5, 2010

BadAstronaut posted:

OK, nerds, I'm putting a lot of time and energy into this at the moment and I want to know: what can I do to improve morality systems in your RPGs?

What kind of effects, consequences, party member reactions and so on would you love to see?

I've been following the development of the game I know you're working on, Broken Roads, and honestly I'm really excited for the idea of the philosophical system. I like RPGs that define character traits beyond combat mechanics and allow you to flesh out your character. In Divinity: Original Sin (only the first one) your character has a number of personality traits and moving along the spectrum grants skill bonuses and perks.

This is a very small, aesthetic touch but I love it when games give narrative descriptions of different skill levels or descriptive titles beyond stat numbers. In New Vegas, you receive based on both your level and your karma (one of the only uses for Karma in the game). As a broader point, I also like these narrative descriptions for skill levels. New Vegas kind of does that--when you create your character each attribute level has its own title. I think Dagerfall did something similar as well. The pre-original divinity games did it for each character attribute in general, which I thought was awesome.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
I think the thing about morality systems in RPGs is that before you even start working on one you need to answer the question as to what your goal with it will be. A lot of RPGs just throw them in because other RPGs have them and it ends up being really generic because they never really put a lot of thought into how the PC's morality would impact the story or the game world, it was just a feature they could stick on the back of the box.

So the first thing to dig into would be "am I trying to make the world more reactive to the player's actions, or am I trying to make some sort of ethical point?". Both of these are fine! But you have to know what you're aiming for. For the former, a reputation system would make more sense than a flat morality system, because it just gives you more degrees to work with. A flat good/evil meter basically forces you to divide every faction in the world along one of those two sides, wheras a broader reputation system allows you to set up relationships like faction A is friends with faction B but hates faction C, but B and C are neutral with each other, and your relationships can go up and down independently with all 3 depending on how you interact with them. You can get as detailed as you want with this, with maybe every faction having their own moral framework and the kinds of things they like and dislike being more complex than just "you killed our friends/enemies".

Meanwhile, if you're going for more of an ethical thing, then you need to determine what actions would be meaningful for the ethical test you're posing to the player and build your story around them. A very simplistic example of this is Ultima 4, where the game has a very specific ethical framework and you are scored on different measures based on what you do, with the ultimate goal being to max them all out and become the Avatar. Another more recent example would be Disco Elysium, where rather than judging you on a good/bad axis, it grades you on much more specific political frameworks based on how capitalist/communist/liberal/fascist you are. The main difference between these and the above is that the morality systems aren't designed to make the game more reactive to your actions, but rather to reinforce the themes of the story through the gameplay.

steinrokkan
Apr 2, 2011



Soiled Meat

Halloween Jack posted:

Is Shadowrun Returns and its sequels sufficiently old-school? It is based on a tabletop game from 1989

I've just started the Dead Man's Hand campaign and I'm trying to make sure I have a build that will let me see all the content. I don't normally play deckers, but it seems necessary to see all the cool stuff. I'm looking at going Shaman/Decker/Rifle, but maybe that's spreading myself too thin.

Shadowrun Returns is by far the weakest of the three new Shadowrun games. TO the point I would even recommend leaving it for last and picking up Hong Kong / Dragonfall instead.

Don't expect deep combat mechanics in the style of old school CRPGs, it plays more like poor man's XCOM.

IIRC it's possible to get the most out of decking with moderately high stats / decker allies, decking is just combat that happens on a separate Matrix map, I don't remember there being any content locked behind hard stat checks.

I played through all the games as a rigger, you get to control two drones with somewhat specialized roles if you go that route, it was pretty cool. Combining three classes may be too much of a compromise, wait with spreading out until you see if there are available team members fitting the roles you were considering.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 19, 2020

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

So the first thing to dig into would be "am I trying to make the world more reactive to the player's actions, or am I trying to make some sort of ethical point?". Both of these are fine! But you have to know what you're aiming for. For the former, a reputation system would make more sense than a flat morality system, because it just gives you more degrees to work with.
It's also less annoying because it judges your actions in a way that won't conflict with your own motivations or what you think about the way you solve a quest or encounter. If you do nice things for a community, it will like you more. If you hurt a community or transgress against its laws and traditions, even if you think you did so for the right reasons, it will like you less. It's very straightforward and relatively close to an objective measure of your behaviour that doesn't force you to get into whatever obscure mindset that developers wanted you to have.

What I would like to see is a reputation system with some real complexity. It has always been very stupid to me that you can be the celebrated saviour of every trade city in the general vicinity, but unless you did anything for them persoally, no one else cares about it. What I want is a game that takes some time to think about how places interact and how those interactions would affect the way the region thinks about you. If two cities have lots of trade ties between each other, the people regularly talk and interact with each other. Obviously, your reputation with one should affect your reputation with the other. If you go to some podunk isolated mountain villages where travellers come through once every decade, obviously nobody there should have the slightest idea of who you are.

Basically, I want there to be a distinction between global fame and local fame and have it interact in a sensible fashion.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Halloween Jack posted:

Is Shadowrun Returns and its sequels sufficiently old-school? It is based on a tabletop game from 1989

I've just started the Dead Man's Hand campaign and I'm trying to make sure I have a build that will let me see all the content. I don't normally play deckers, but it seems necessary to see all the cool stuff. I'm looking at going Shaman/Decker/Rifle, but maybe that's spreading myself too thin.

As a counter-point, while the first Shadowrun game definitely is rough around the edges, I think it nailed the noir-ish gritty Cyberpunk atmosphere best. I played it first and don't regret it. Dragonfall was a fantastic follow-up, and I consider it a modern classic, but Hong Kong lost my interest for some reason.

It just felt out of balance, somehow. Suddenly the NPCs were way too wordy, combat was too easy, yet the cash rewards were too stingy so you never got to play with all the new toys introduced above what Dragonfall had.

As for your character, a rifle hacker is rock solid, but you should skip the Shaman part, it doesn't provide any synergies that I can remember. That said, in Dragonfall the decker NPC feels like the odd man out of the party, so you could play a decker in that game, and try something else in Returns.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Cardiovorax posted:

To my perception, the problem was more that they tried very hard to make a fully-formed Forgotten Realms knockoff setting from whole cloth, but they didn't have fourty-plus to let it grow and actually become that detailed and complex. Instead it just ends up feeling shallow and drawn with a wide brush. The entire thing gives me the sense of something the Dwarf Fortress "procedural history generator" might have spit out - a bunch of random world facts and connections are all there, but they're just pointless factoids. They don't actually matter to anything.

For what it's worth, POE2 doesn't really do anything to correct that in my view. I think the sandbox experience is better, but I still find everything about the setting itself completely generic and forgettable.
I pretty much agree, despite enjoying the setting at this point; I remember Rope Kid functionally talking about this when discussing how the mechanics only sporadically matched the lore, like when you bust your rear end to align with a faction in the middle part of the game, despite those factions having been virtually unheard of until you get to that part of the game and then also basically disappearing from the story again after you leave that part of the game. Which is where your point about having 40 years to bake comes back around--when you already have an intrinsic sense of who is who in your game world, it is likely much easier to ensure something like that does not happen.

moot the hopple
Apr 26, 2008

dyslexic Bowie clone

Hannibal Rex posted:

As a counter-point, while the first Shadowrun game definitely is rough around the edges, I think it nailed the noir-ish gritty Cyberpunk atmosphere best. I played it first and don't regret it. Dragonfall was a fantastic follow-up, and I consider it a modern classic, but Hong Kong lost my interest for some reason.

It just felt out of balance, somehow. Suddenly the NPCs were way too wordy, combat was too easy, yet the cash rewards were too stingy so you never got to play with all the new toys introduced above what Dragonfall had.


I had the same experience. I got through 1st and thought it was maybe a B- minus game. Dragonfall I completely loved and thought showed many improvements.

I lost steam with Hong Kong within the first hub and also don't know why.

Joe Chill
Mar 21, 2013

"What's this dance called?"

"'Radioactive Flesh.' It's the latest - and the last!"

Peaceful Anarchy posted:

Using the keyboard is much quicker. The mouse interface is horrid because it's just the keyboard interface but you click things instead of selecting them, but you can't use the keyboard at the same time and moving the mouse is so much more annoying than using the arrows on your keyboard.

I set Wizardry 6 to keyboard only and used the key mapper in Dosbox to work with my gamepad. I found playing it with a gamepad more comfortable than the default keyboard keys (Arrow keys and enter).

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Cardiovorax posted:

The problem with morality systems in RPGs is that too many people don't get the point of them. The original alignment system of D&D was meant to be nothing more than descriptive of actions, not motivations. If you're a lawful good hero, you do good things for the well-being of a society and its people.
Like mass-murder of orc children!

An example given by Gygax himself, which involved quoting Colonel John “the butcher” Chivington, by name, who was defending his actions at the Sand Creek Massacre.

The D&D alignment system has a... lot of problems.

Big Mad Drongo posted:

The Pillars 2 thread is chock-full of great info and details, but for a quick rundown:

advice :words:
Okay but does the game have respecs? If it has respec options so I can back up and do something else if I decide it's not working, I'm much more willing to mess around and try stuff, but if I'm locking myself into the stat layout which turns out to be a bad one, for example, I want to know what i'm doing in advance.

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos

Zereth posted:

Okay but does the game have respecs? If it has respec options so I can back up and do something else if I decide it's not working, I'm much more willing to mess around and try stuff, but if I'm locking myself into the stat layout which turns out to be a bad one, for example, I want to know what i'm doing in advance.

You can respec your skill points at many merchants for a fee. You cannot change anything you pick at character generation (so your race, class, and stats are set) but you can undo anything after that all the way back to level 1, and also your companions.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Zereth posted:

Like mass-murder of orc children!

An example given by Gygax himself
Who cares what Gary Gygax thinks, though?

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
Gary Gygax was hugely influential on all gaming as we know it. It's important to understand the thinking behind his design decisions so that we can understand why so many of them were so very bad.

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