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BisbyWorl posted:Class: Bard Voting for this one.
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Feb 14, 2024 05:35
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Cythereal posted:Character Overview: Seelah Seelah was 100% my favorite character in this game (although there are a few others that come close), and I never voluntarily removed her from my party at any point. She's just great all the time! Honestly, she makes me think of the conception of paladins from the Quest for Glory series. Sure, they can be badasses when needed, but they also take the idea of being good seriously, which can mean being kind, generous, funny, or in any other way nourishing to the spirit of other people without necessarily being a self-righteous jackass.
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Feb 17, 2024 23:42
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Yeah, playing on normal with Crusade mode on, I'd say more usually like 80-100 hours for most people, but this is one of those games where it can vary a lot based on what sidequests you do, how many minor NPCs you talk to, etc etc. You can spend a lot of time in there if you really want to.
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Feb 18, 2024 02:53
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Cythereal posted:
I'd just like to point out this genuinely clever line. Cythereal posted:
And this piece of characterization. This is one of the reasons I really like this game. It's very easy to fall into standard tropes when writing, especially when writing fantasy where we've got a bunch of really strong stereotypes in place. But here, in the prologue, we've already got a paladin without a giant stick up her rear end, a conventionally attractive half-elf who is clearly super evil, beast-people who are crusaders-in-waiting, and now a half-orc who, instead of being some sort of barely-civilized monster, is too polite to spit on the floor.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:20
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"Come on, living legend? A walking folktale, maybe. I just need to make sure I don't turn into a running joke."
(The half-orc is too well-bred to spit on the floor, but the name sounds like a slur on her tongue.)
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Honestly, in general with this sort of fight, they should probably just have the boss pull out the Sword of Plot and execute a Slice of Inevitability move that blows the whole party away on turn one so that everyone knows what's up and you can just get on with it. Or, if you really must give the players the ability to win but still lose, have someone else come in at the end and save the boss rather than have them stick around at 1 HP for twenty minutes until they manage to win.
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Feb 24, 2024 23:40
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berryjon posted:Thank you! Not just you Cyth, but for this game to remember that being a Paladin isn't about riding around on a shining steed being a delivery system for Righteous Facepunching(tm). People see too much of the din that those sorts of characters make, that they forget that being a Pal comes first. To be fair, Seelah also rides around on a shining steed punching people righteously in the face. She's just got other interests too.
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Feb 26, 2024 04:45
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Later editions of D&D are clearly kind of embarrassed by alignment and have only kept it around in a vestigial form. (I find it useful as a character creation aid, but it having fewer mechanical consequences is, generally, a good thing.) The meaning of alignment has shifted many times since D&D's invention; once we get to the edition Pathfinder borrowed its mechanics from, the definitions were roughly as follows: * Lawful: values social structure and collective action - the best way to achieve one's goals is in alignment (ho ho) with a mass of other people. Actions that damage the fabric of society are wrong. * Chaotic: values individualism and and flexible behavior - the best way to achieve one's goals is through your own efforts. Actions that curtail individual freedom are wrong. * Good: values the lives of others and attempts to ensure their well-being - the best goals are those that benefit as many people as possible. Actions that will help others live and grow are right and actions that will harm people are wrong. * Evil: values their own well-being above others, or deliberately harms others for their own sake - the best goals are those that maximize benefit for you. Actions that do not benefit you are wrong. Neutrality on either axis means either not considering those questions (a neutral good person who does what they believe will benefit the most people in a given situation, without any particular consideration as to whether that involves favoring collective or individual rights), wavering back and forth between them (a lawful neutral person who tries to obey society's rules and do the right thing but frequently uses those rules to hurt others with accompanying rationalization), or trying to deliberately strike a balance between them (a true neutral character who as read too much Weis and Hickman and believes the world will literally blow up if everyone is too good). In some editions, there is also the concept of "unaligned" beings, who are like dogs and just sort of do things arbitrarily. The problem is, when you go slinging around words like "good" and "evil", you're opening yourself up to a LOT of variation in what people are going to think those words mean, even if you literally include a definition in your book. The terms are just far too loaded for that to matter very much. Law and chaos may have less specific meaning for people, but you still get a lot of folks thinking law means that you should be shouting DEUS VULT 24/7 and solving all problems with fire and additional fire, because that's a stereotype that has seeped into the fantasy genre. And of course if you, were, say, developing a video game with multiple writers and an outsized text-to-editor ratio, you might end up with a few different interpretations clashing even in the same game. To put it another way, alignment is a mess unless the writers establish immediately what both axes mean, and then enforce that uniformly across the board. Or, you know, you could just chuck the whole thing and go with reputations instead.
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Feb 26, 2024 19:22
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Cythereal posted:Well that's some loving Blizzard grade racist bullshit in Golarion's world. Removing racism from D&D and its derived settings has been... let's call it an ongoing process. I do feel like a lot of progress has been made in the last couple of decades, but there's still a ways to go.
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Feb 28, 2024 04:47
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RelentlessImp posted:Decade. Singular. Nobody even bothered trying to remove racism from the mainline D&D settings until fairly recently. Eh, I don't really agree with that. I've been playing D&D for... gosh, over thirty years now, and I've seen a lot of change and growth. There's definitely more to point at very recently, like removing the concept of some types of beings (like orcs and goblins) always having to be chaotic evil, not using the word "race" to describe the different types of player beings ("species" is now the preferred term), etc, but I also remember some of the earliest baby steps like R.A. "Maybe the Elves with Black Skin Aren't Always Evil" Salvatore and "maybe lawful good paladins wouldn't be allowed to kill (minority-coded) goblin babies" and so on. And even with all that improvement, we still have stuff like the Hadozee in the recent Spelljammer books (which was bad enough that WotC had to apologize and revise later editions - I don't want to poo poo up this thread by going into that too deeply, but anyone who is curious can google it). I think the thing that really has kept it slow has been that tabletop in general (not just D&D and Pathfinder) has been primarily under the control of white guys. They're both the stereotypical customer and the stereotypical employee of tabletop companies, and regardless of how well-intentioned both groups may be (and I do believe there are a lot of positive intentions around), having a single point of view like that is going to make it awfully easy to ignore and dismiss the issues that need to get fixed, which are a lot more visible to people who aren't in that group. Those demographics have been shifting more lately (I hear we're up to 40% women playing D&D, for instance), which is why I think change is accelerating; the customer base is demanding it.
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Feb 28, 2024 15:18
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Cythereal posted:CYTHEREAL RANT INCOMING Even if you ignored the racial elements (and you SHOULD NOT), it's also a pretty weird thing to reference in a game that is (at least partially) about redemption. I love this loving guy. It's so hard to find time for your real interests while keeping your career going, you know? Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:i like the God of War: Ragnarok take on dark elves, though. the dark elves are small, bearded, live underground, and forge weapons. in other words: they're just dwarves. why the gently caress did you think we were two different types of thing, you weirdos The most likely reason that's the GoW take is that that's a pretty common theory about the svartálfar amongst actual scholars of mythology. They don't show up much in the original texts and when they do they basically live in the spaces dwarves live in and behave like them.
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Feb 28, 2024 22:27
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It actually can be a somewhat complex issue in tabletop; you need to know enough about the system that you can contribute to the game and hold your own in the group, but going FULL min-max tends to make every table feel the same as you churn out a bunch of cookie-cutter characters (and causes endless headaches for DMs that have to come up with encounters that ride the increasingly narrow knife-edge between challenging you and outright murdering you). This is a computer game being played on story mode, though, so... yeah, loving be a dragon if you think it's cool. Why not? Have fun with it!
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Mar 3, 2024 15:09
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There definitely are some translation issues in these games; I wonder how that particular text cue plays out in Russian. (Maybe it's equally weird there.) Kingmaker has a lot of stuff like that; the text is very readable, but you'll consistently run into odd turns of phrase or terms that a native speaker would be unlikely to use. I feel like the games improve in readability more or less linearly; I barely noticed anything in Rogue Trader.
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Mar 4, 2024 03:12
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40K isn't something that's for everyone, definitely. The two Pathfinder games are easy to recommend to anyone who enjoys RPGs with a bit of (okay, a lot of) crunch. Their world is (pardon me, Pathfinder friends) a generic fantasy world. It isn't the Forgotten Realms with the serial numbers filed off in the same way that its systems are 3.5E, but it knows you've seen the Forgotten Realms already and it winks at you a bit. "Hey," it says, "here's our take on those same concepts, and don't you think it's just a bit cooler?" It's easily accessible to anybody with a passing interest in fantasy literature or video games and it's about as comfortable to get into as an old pair of slippers made entirely out of proper nouns. In Rogue Trader you really have to be ready for the Grim Darkness of the Far Future Where There Is Only War, like some kind of slab of 90s edgelord culture frozen forever in time. (Yes, I know when Warhammer 40K first came out. It's a vibes thing.) This is a weird universe where almost everything is terrible. Your main base in that game is an enormous spaceship, so big that entire families of people live down in the lower decks running things for goals they will literally never know or understand; there's one quest where you visit down there and (depending on how it goes) one of the people you interact with mentions that he's going to tell his children that he actually got to see the captain. There's a little magnifying glass spot in there where you can find a shipping box that's an heirloom, and why not? People need to store things, don't they? If someone hadn't happened to mention to you that something was up, the problem you go down there to solve would have been handled by the normal methods: beatings and executions. Every moment you're just doing your RPG poo poo on the top deck involves an entire city's worth of unimaginable cruelty going on literally right under your feet, and you're not conscious of it, just as your character wouldn't be conscious of it. It's a world where thousands of people die every day to keep the Interstate working, thinking the wrong thing at the wrong time might result in tentacle monsters dragging your soul to hell, genocide is viewed as a holy mandate, God is the corpse of a dead tyrant, and it's impossible to get a cup of really decent coffee. Playing a game set in this kind of world could be incredibly stressful and upsetting if you really engage with the fiction. If you can deal with that, though, it does make a good setup for an RPG, especially if you want to play a good person, because having it be a world in which being a decent person is this hard can make it feel really rewarding when you manage it. (Assuming you have a clear idea of what being a decent person means to you anyway.) Obviously this is a matter of taste in fiction; it's not like there's a moral value in liking or not liking that universe, and it's definitely something one should be careful about recommending to people. A lot of terrible poo poo happens in Wrath, but at least if anyone tells you the world is supposed to have terrible poo poo in it, you can identify that person as a bad guy.
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Mar 4, 2024 05:18
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CommissarMega posted:One thing I like about games like Rogue Trader, Tyranny and the Pillars of Eternity series (which I hold to be the best CRPGs ever made) is that they tend to challenge my own personal views on morality, as well as present the idea that under certain specific circumstances, morality is not an absolute, but can and/or must be flexible to meet the needs of said circumstances. I'll probably have a few words about this exact thing once Cythereal gets further into the story. In some ways Wrath really is a game about morality, but I do wish it looked at it through a lens more like Pillars used. Not all games can be created by Josh Sawyer, though, and I don't think it does a bad job for what it wants to be. CommissarMega posted:Places like the Worldwound, Cheliax and Nidal get all the press because they're places where your usual party of Good adventurers would want to oppose. This is kind of what I was saying with all my blah blah blah about Rogue Trader; there's no point in setting this kind of adventure story in a peaceful area where nothing is wrong. Right next to a giant gaping hole to hell? That's where you can be a hero. And you can be a specific kind of hero in this setting, because the entire concept includes the possibility of hope and victory; Seelah isn't in there saying you're all going to fight to cover a gradual retreat or make doomed last sacrifices and Irabeth isn't ordering you to find ways for everyone to evacuate the city. The demons aren't going to inevitably eat everyone's soul like you might expect to happen in Warhammer. (For that matter, this is also a great place to be a villain, if your tastes run that way, since there's power there to be seized.)
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Mar 4, 2024 10:31
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Nenio is the sort of character that generally annoys me. She didn't, though, and I think it's this introductory sequence that really sold me on her, from the whole "awkwardly dressing up as a cultist" thing to the actual quiz to the fact that she accidentally harries a cultist into going back to the farm. How can you not find this charming?
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Mar 5, 2024 05:05
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He's basically Lord Byron, with all the bad things and... well, additional bad things that entails.
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Mar 5, 2024 07:00
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For anyone who hasn't played these games: not being able to pick up Grease is a pretty serious problem for a combat caster. Basically, if your first-level arcane casters are not completely filling their spell list with grease, you have nobody but yourself to blame any time you lose a fight. Grease is, without exception, the best low-level combat spell. It doesn't care about your hit dice, it persists round to round to continue applying its debuff even if your enemies make the reflex save the first time, and it lasts an absolutely ridiculous, completely crazy one minute per caster level. It does the most horrible thing you can do to an enemy, which is to take away their turn, not to mention that your melee can now slice them up more or less with impunity and get even more damage when the enemy stands up because standing up provokes opportunity attacks. As long as you can be careful not to put it where it gets in your way, there basically aren't any downsides. Cast it in every fight you have any problems with unless the enemies are immune to it due to flight or having hundreds of legs. That said, I wouldn't see a vivisectionist as a combat caster per se; feels like it's better suited to self-buffs and physical sneak attack damage, especially considering mutagen. (Which presumably is why the comparison with eldritch scoundrels, who do also serve that role.) Having access to some healing on top of that isn't bad.
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Mar 7, 2024 14:00
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Cythereal posted:A Love That Crushes Like a Structural Support Column I think it's fair to say that, as a community, we are all hating this poo poo. Cythereal posted:
Kineticists are super interesting, as a class. Apart from balancing the burn mechanics and swapping buffs in and out based on the needs of the fight, there's also the flexibility you get with different elements and the fact that the class is based on constitution, of all things. It's nice to have some stuff in here that isn't a remix or combination of the classic (har har) character classes.
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Mar 9, 2024 03:01
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It's a bit of a mistake to say there'd be no infighting amongst devils, too; they're organized, but that doesn't mean they aren't evil. The struggle in Hell is to evolve into more powerful forms, which you generally do with the approval of your superiors. But that means that everyone else at the same level as you is a competitor, everyone below you is jockeying for your position, and everyone above you is a target both for short-term toadying and long-term betrayal. They aren't just going to cut each other dead in the streets like demons will, but their machiavellian schemes against each other are also going to be counterproductive. Think office politics, but with more murder and horrible flesh blobs.
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Mar 9, 2024 16:43
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It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that she's evil; I mean, even if you don't notice what abilities are available to her, you don't hand someone a magic item that hides their alignment because you need to conceal their horrifying devotion to neutrality. But Owlcat has included a lot of characters in this game (and Kingmaker, if you'd already played that) that are evil but either a) express it in ways that a player can understand and deal with or b) can be made less evil by your actions. What's surprising about Camellia is that she doesn't fall into either of those categories. (Or, at least, it's surprising if you manage to miss all the hints the game has been dropping on you.) But yeah, it would also be a mistake to underestimate the willingness of heterosexual men to make excuses for the hot half-elf.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:38
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The earliest example of this sort of romance I can remember was in one of the Gold Box games. Strictly hetero, of course; I think you couldn't even get the character of the "wrong" gender to join your party. But whether you'd get together with the character did depend on things that happened in the game, even if the writing tended to be perfunctory just for reasons of text space in old video games. (Please turn to entry 231 in your journal for the remainder of this paragraph.)Cythereal posted:Aerie is a particularly interesting example of a story misunderstood by the community, I feel, because the correct move in her relationship is to not sleep with her the first chance you get. The correct thing to do is to realize that Aerie's moving too fast before she's mature enough and emotionally ready for a really serious adult relationship, turn down her advances, and get with her again in the expansion when she's a much more stable and mature individual who's ready for something like this. Far from your dick healing her, thinking with your dick will actually end the romance early on a bad note. I thought that was a really clever move. The BG2 romances were a little clunky, but they clearly spent some time thinking about who the different people involved were and tried to make them all different experiences, almost like people have different personalities and treating two different people in the same way might have different results. I also have to confess that I didn't actually hate Aerie either as a character or a party member. Yes, this is mildly blasphemous.
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Mar 11, 2024 00:06
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Linzi in Kingmaker has a ring you can't take off of her, so Owlcat's engine has always been capable of it. (Her ring has an effect, and Camellia's could similarly have a secondary effect to make it less obvious what's up.) Some folks earlier in the thread said that her alignment used to be less obvious, but was changed to be the way it is currently; assuming that's accurate, making it easy to tell that she's evil would be a deliberate choice by the developer. The undetectable alignment thing is more of an in-universe explanation of why she manages to live in this city and travel in these circles and not get nuked into oblivion by the first paladin she runs across.
idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Mar 12, 2024 |
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Mar 12, 2024 04:02
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Cythereal posted:Mimics! Wrath's interpretation of this venerable fantasy monster is, in my opinion, honestly kind of adorable. They're quite sturdy for this point in the game, but slow and don't have the sense to wait until you get close to reveal themselves. Good thing Ember is a little more sensible than some elven magic-users. Cythereal posted:
The one I always wanted was "gold pieces per pound", because it would make dumping things when encumbered a heck of a lot easier. Also, gently caress encumbrance as a game mechanic, seriously. Dropping ten padded armors because they're one gold per ten pounds is not what I'd call engaging gameplay. Just give me a "sell stupid poo poo from anywhere" button, game, nobody cares if it's realistic or not. Cythereal posted:
Since there's a lot of Daeren chat going on, just your periodic reminder that Seelah is the best at all times. I'm willing to buck the trend here and say that I didn't really like Daeren at all. (I think I'm just tired of that archetype; I didn't like Astarion, either.) Everyone in this city has some kind of horrible backstory filled with demons, but not all of them are incredibly rich and powerful and related to royalty and all that. His demon struggles involve lavish parties and having his every material need met, whereas a lot of the demon cultists you're running into are just off of failing farms and becoming cultists as an alternative to starving to death, and your main interaction with them is a love that crushes like a mace... sorry, I misread my notes here, that's an actual mace crushing their skulls. I don't mind redeeming him because, hell, redemption is kind of a good character's stock in trade, but that doesn't mean I have to like him or think he deserves it.
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Mar 13, 2024 05:49
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"I met Seelah at a tavern in Kenabres. Before the attack, of course. She was one of the few who would sit at a table with the Condemned. Knights usually don't even look at us. But Seelah is different — I knew it the moment I saw her!"
"That's what made me notice Seelah too. So I sat down to talk to her. I never understood why everyone treated the Condemned so horribly, and I still don't. Our Curl is a great lad! So after that night, Seelah and I went round the taverns together every day."
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ProfessorCirno posted:For Wendy, I'm doing a m-m-m-mega hacked run atm with both Lann and Wendy, and like...yeah no there's no contest, Lann is 100% better written. I'd say only bring Wendy along if specifically you want that "redemption" regardless of how dumb you have to act about it and how many obviously evil things you have to overlook, or because you just cannot help but desire that spidercatussy. It's the "ignoring the obviously evil things" that gets to me. Like, having her in your party is, from the perspective of your character, an absolutely awful idea that makes no sense. "Oh, Wendaug is betraying us to the demons again, must be Thursday." Cythereal posted:Personally, I'm starting to get a little leery of how both times I've been asked to find a traitor or criminal they're described as dark-skinned. Funny, I didn't see Joe Dever credited as one of the writers. Cythereal posted:So it might seem a bit strange to harp on Woljiff's deceit at this point, but there's more going on here than the obvious. Woljiff is a tiefling, there's demonic blood in his veins, and the Moon of the Abyss is a demonic artifact given to a woman who had a child with a demon, from the demon in question. It's also called "The Moon of the Abyss". Eh, seems fine. I'm sure it won't cause any problems for anyone.
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Mar 15, 2024 06:24
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I really love the triceratops. And also, just the concept of someone riding a triceratops to a holy crusade.
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Mar 17, 2024 18:35
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Maybe "Nowdog".
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Mar 18, 2024 00:54
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You can tell poo poo is getting real when people start hearkening unto things.
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Mar 21, 2024 02:55
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JT Jag posted:Yeah, I think Ember hit the nail on the head with what she said. Staunton didn't leave with Minahgo because of Stockholm Syndrome or anything, he first did what he did because he wanted to use the heroes to Suicide by Cop, and ultimately teleported away with her because he knows it will be miserable torment to be in the hands of demons, and that he deserves it. This is my read on the situation as well. He was clearly trying to get killed here, but he'll take getting punished as a backup option if dying seems unlikely.
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Mar 21, 2024 04:01
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And were less vulnerable to chocolate.
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Mar 22, 2024 04:44
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Cythereal posted:
Just to contextualize this for people who don't know the system: overcoming spell resistance is a D20 roll plus caster level, so this thing is effectively adding two to the entire party's levels for the purposes of beating spell resistance, and a depressingly large number of enemies in this game have it. If you fail the roll, the enemy just completely ignores your spell as if you never cast it, and that's on top of the normal kinds of failures and saving throws spells can have. Not only does it do that, making attacks cold iron bypasses a lot of physical damage resistance, and making them good-aligned bypasses even more. Basically, this item is going to take a bunch of fights that would be enormous pains in the rear end normally and simplify them a lot; not granting you instant victory or anything, but removing a lot of obstacles that you would otherwise have to even hurting the things you're trying to fight.
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Mar 24, 2024 19:26
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It always seems better when these choices involve something you actually want to keep rather than something you might hang onto just to be a dick.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:25
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Cythereal posted:
This is actually when I decided I liked Galfrey (and I still do, for that matter). Daeran desperately needs more people taking the piss out of him at all times. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 02:39
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(Daeran's cool expression wavers, but he seems not to be fully cognizant of what is happening — that, or he is holding himself tightly in check.) "It is a great honor... I suppose..."
[Chaotic] "What a wonderful gesture, your Majesty! I imagine our dear Count would have been inconsolable if you hadn't given him this chance to serve the common cause!"
"I knew you would approve, Commander." (The queen bestows a smile on you, then brings her gaze to rest on Daeran once more.)
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 So she's a hedgehog as well as a fox?
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Mar 28, 2024 21:13
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Well, one possible set: Gourry, human fighter, specialize in either longsword or greatsword and look for a weapon with the Brilliant Energy trait. Zelgadis, oread magus. (Not an optimal combination, but what can you do?) Amelia, human, probably an inquisitor. Could go paladin, but light/no armor seems to fit her style better. Xelloss, probably a tiefling, cleric and sorcerer with a mystic theurge prestige class.
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Mar 29, 2024 14:08
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Every time Daeran talks, this is the voice you should hear in your head:
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Mar 30, 2024 13:51
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In this particular case, the response of the law is likely to be "hang this fucker". He clearly committed murder and/or attempted murder by means of a blunt instrument (zombie fists). He can repent on the way to the gallows and maybe save his soul, though. The key issue is not whether the undead hobbyist survives or not, it's whether Sosiel beats him to death with his bare hands when he's already surrendered and helpless and is pleading for his life. This is, generally speaking, an action that would be frowned upon by his Goddess as well as polite society.
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Mar 31, 2024 20:27
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Cythereal posted:So, coupled with my intense aversion to playing sides and story routes that I feel are villainous, in the final analysis I like Galfrey - but am deeply frustrated by how the game handles her. I think she's one of the most complex and nuanced characters in the game, but the story struggles to find a place for her without going all Lancelot and Guinevere. I think this is why I ended up liking her. I tend to do a bunch of romance paths at once in games, at least for anyone I like or think I might like, until the story stops me. (I played Azata, so it was never going to work out.) So I saw a good bit of Galfrey and had at least some understanding of what she was thinking and feeling. I can only imagine how much more upsetting it would be to have her just kramer in out of nowhere and knock down all the pins without the game really giving you a sense of her character first. Gun Jam posted:"Galfrey is old" One of the most important things to know about how long elves and dwarves live is that the vast majority of fantasy writers have literally no idea how to deal with how long elves and dwarves live. The standard thing is usually to say "well, being 200 is like being 20 for them, it just lasts 100 years somehow". Long--lived humans never get the benefit of this sort of thing, so Galfrey at about a hundred and forty should be viewed not as a young elf, but as someone is half again as old as any human ever gets and who has been fighting this war against demons for a century. Even fighting in a war for very brief periods of time can give people terrible PTSD; she is and should be a complete wreck of a person.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:55
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Cythereal posted:While it's never specifically stated, I think part of the intent behind everyone's beliefs up to this point has to do with Iomedae herself. By my understanding, Iomedae is very much a Joan of Arc figure, a mortal peasant woman who became a hero and then a goddess. Iomedae's faithful, and those keenly aware of her story, would naturally be primed to be sensitive to mortals - particularly mortal women - suddenly displaying miraculous powers, and thus prone to strong reactions both positive and negative. It's a little thing, but one of the things I like about Iomedae in general is that she looks like this:  Not necessarily the image a lot of fantasy would push (and has pushed) as the goddess who's the champion of The Forces of Good. The reference to Joan of Arc is, of course, pretty straightforward. Cythereal posted:
Honestly, I feel like a lot of the received wisdom about optimal builds involves a batch of spherical adventurers slugging it out with stationary enemies on a frictionless grass tile. Look at this shield, for example: DR 5/magic is fantastic! Most of the attacks being levelled at your tank in the early game are going to be non-magical and having five points knocked off the top is really going to help at these HP levels. Having a shield on a character to use as a tank isn't a bad strategy generally - this game doesn't make it difficult to make the enemies engage your tank, because most of them will just attack the first person that comes in range. (Some have AI that will send them to knife your squishies, of course, because you can't have everything go your way.) Since each point of AC is statistically more useful than the previous point up until the enemy has to roll 20 to hit you, really piling it onto a single character is better than half-assing it. Sure, you can use a pet to tank, but you can also use them to DPS if you want and there's nothing wrong with that. (Yeah, pets are functionally immortal, but you really shouldn't be planning for your tank to get knocked out in every battle.) Cythereal posted:
Well, yes. Cythereal posted:
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Apr 5, 2024 02:31
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I really have become more powerful than paladins who are far more experienced
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ProfessorCirno posted:...Jokes aside, you've kinda hit the issue with shields, and it's not specifically a problem in Wrath of the Righteous. There's no mechanic to ensure the "right people" get targeted by enemies. Sure, but I said the exact opposite of this. Because the mechanic to ensure that the right person gets targetted by an enemy is, in the CRPGs, "march that person towards the enemy first". You send (for example) Val with her tower shield in Kingmaker and her ridiculous AC in first, and almost everything attacks her and never peels off of her for the entire fight unless it starts getting pounded on by something else in melee range. You send the rest of the melee DPS around the sides so that they're only exposed to one enemy at a time and let the tank sit there eating the vast majority of the attacks while the enemies get burned down. (You can even have Amiri attack straight over Val's head with a polearm if you want, although obviously that isn't going to work on reach enemies like cyclopes or linnorms.) It even makes a little sense for the AI to behave like this, because Pathfinder as a system prioritizes standing in one place to maximize damage - since you have to sacrifice your move to get all your attacks, the AI is weighing up running over to the squishies and getting one attack (or none, if you really have good positioning) against being able to attack the heavily armored person in front of them five times and choosing the latter although in practice, the latter is going to result in much less actual damage to deal with. Obviously you don't want to do up your whole party like that, because as you say, you need to have enough damage to kill the enemies quickly or else they're just going to very gradually deplete all your health anyway, but if you can put a lot of armor on one person and use positioning to make sure that person is eating most of the hits, it does result in a lot less damage overall. The exception is the occasional enemy with "rogue" style AI, like actual rogues but also dweomercats and stuff like that, which will indeed run right past the tank. Hopefully they eat an attack of opportunity along the way, which is nice, but that's not going to kill them. It's definitely a smaller number of enemies that do this, though, and thankfully most of them tend to have fewer HP, so it's still a very effective strategy. (Source: literally replaying Kingmaker at this exact moment - I'm about halfway through and I've only very occasionally run into things that ignore the tank, certainly fewer than one in twenty encounters, maybe fewer than one in thirty - I don't recall the ratio in Wrath, but I think it's similar.) This is kind of what I'm talking about when I refer to abstract mechanics discussions. Sure, they CAN run past the tank and just completely ignore them, based on the rules, they just usually don't because of the way the AI is programmed in these games. Seelah can be pretty effective in this role; her AC will be slightly less crazy, but she's got some magic benefits that help her pull it off. Putting her on a tank horse is a good option too, though. In terms of unfair difficulty, I think the most common strategy I've seen is to use summoned animals and characters with the mirror image spell as tanks since they're effectively ablative HP sacks that are trading your spell slots for a little more health than the damage or debuff you might otherwise get out of them. Still the same general idea of "send this useless poo poo brigade in first and the enemies will burn them down and ignore the people murdering them". You can achieve the same thing in BG3 pretty easily, especially if 3/4 of your party is doing ranged attacks from just outside the enemy's move distance* so that only one is in melee range at any given moment anyway. (This is one of the reasons I don't like spreadsheet math for these games - it tends to ignore movement speed, one of the most important factors in 5E.) Most enemies will prioritize attacking the thing right next to them as opposed to running over to where your squishies are. And if they do choose to do that, they just wasted an entire round on moving, and 5E combats don't last long enough to waste even one turn. It is definitely harder in tabletop, because your DM is probably not powered by a very simple AI, although there are a few mechanics in 5E that can push it (abilities that give disadvantage to enemies attacking anything but person A, that kind of stuff). Not to mention that in 5E the difference between sword and board and 2H is like a couple of points** of damage per attack anyway; you should absolutely stick a shield on anyone that can carry one in 5E, especially given how they've squeezed the AC values down across levels. I think the highest attack bonus in 5e is +19 for the Tarrasque, whereas enemies Cythereal has already seen in Wrath barely any way into the game already have +12. Even if you stick with completely non-magical shields for some reason (magic ones don't require attunement, so why would you?), that +2 bonus in 5E is going to be meaningful throughout your character's entire career. * If you're using Astarion or something, remember he can disengage as a bonus action - enter melee, hit the enemy, leave melee and move away so they keep attacking your tank instead. ** Standard 1H weapon at d8, average 4.5, 2H weapon at d12, average 6.5, strength and magical bonuses and special abilities and sneak attack and so on are not affected by 1H vs 2H in 5e, so you're likely to move from 7.5 - 11.5 for the 1H and 9.5 - 13.5 for the 2H for basic attack damage over the entire course of your character's career. That won't affect what you do with maneuvers, spells, smite, rage, and all the other places your damage is supposed to come from. Use a shield, MAYBE unless you're a barbarian or a Champion fighter or, God help us, an Echo Knight.
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Apr 5, 2024 08:00
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ProfessorCirno posted:Beyond that, and this is probably the biggest gap in playstyles, I find it so much easier to make defenses a matter of buffs and control rather then equipment. Sure, playstyle is of primary importance. After all, these are games, and if we're playing them in a way that is annoying to us, we might as well not bother playing them. Speaking of which, that's exactly my feeling about using temporary buffs to get up to an acceptable level of tankiness; for me, managing a pile of different spells on everyone all the time is basically the sixth circle of Hell. I don't want to say "oh, I could replace that shield by creating an alchemist mercenary, putting them in the party, and repeatedly casting a spell on everyone", I want to say "oh, look, that shield gives +4 or better, maybe with an extra effect like the DR 5/magic that just showed up in the LP, and now I never, ever have to think about casting the shield spell ever again". I don't mind buffing up before an obvious boss room or opportunistically throwing a communal resist fire on everyone when I spot a brimorak, but keeping buffs running all the time just to deal with regular encounters is kind of the definition of tedium. A lot of people don't feel like that, though, and that's totally legit; if you have more fun managing the buffs than sticking a bunch of armor on a character, go hog wild. It clearly works well and will get you through the combat encounters in the game, which is the only thing a combat strategy has to do to be worth it. I only object to the idea that having a character tank with a shield is some kind of stupid baby way to play, when in fact it's a mathematically sound and very functional strategy. I almost never have to buff for regular encounters when I'm playing these games; I have my formation set up to shove the tank wwwwwaaaayy out in front and that does the trick almost all the time, and as a result the experience of playing the game is just plain more fun for me. ProfessorCirno posted:Also, not to go too deep into tangents, but the real reasons you use two handers in your general melee in BG3 are 1) itemization (Alas, poor longswords, your items are dogshit, save one, and that one isn't even good for attacks, it just gives your party a great buff) and 2) feats (using a shield means no Great Weapon Master or Polearm Master). Which is why shields work so well with your spellcasters instead - if I'm not attacking with my weapon, then I don't care about things like GWM. But if my goal is to do weapon damage, there's very little that's going to do better. Honestly, I probably already went too deep into the tangent on my last post (sorry, Cythereal, like a lot of nerds I get excited when talking about numbers). So let's talk about something that's actually in the game being LPed in this thread that might touch on some of the same concerns: power attack. For the uninitiated, regular power attack In Pathfinder 1E is an ability that you acquire via a feat which you can toggle on and off. When on, it reduces your ability to hit, starting with a -1, and then adding further penalties periodically as you go up in level, and increases the damage when you do when you do hit, starting with a +2, and going up in the same way as the penalty. (There are also two other feats, Piranha Attack and Deadly Aim, which function the same way for dexterity-based melee and ranged attackers.) Whether the tradeoff of turning it on is worth it is actually an fairly complicated calculation - the more damage you do without it, the less worthwhile it is, and the less likely you are to hit, the less worthwhile it is. So the best usecase for it is when you're low level with crappy weapons and fighting trash encounters... except that you might be able to kill those things in one round of attacks anyway, meaning the extra +2 damage just goes to waste. And as you get to higher level and start acquiring more attacks, not only does your total damage per round go up, the to-hit bonus on later attacks goes down, making the whole proposition more risky especially with the escalating to-hit penalty. But then you start adding in enemies with damage resistance, and having it feels like it might be more worthwhile again to deal with those since damage that hits the resistance doesn't do anything and you're probably not carrying around a sack full of swords with all the properties you'd need to void every enemy's DR. (Although if you've got Iomedae's belt buckle...) And if this is starting to sound like you have to check the AC and DR on every enemy you fight in order to determine whether you want to use this feat on them... it's because you more or less do if you want to use it optimally. People have literally set up speadsheets and online tools to help figure out when to use this and when not to. And if that doesn't sound like fun to you, well, you're not alone - again, this is a playstyle thing, where some people enjoy deciding whether to use it every time and some people really would prefer not to have to. It would be nice if you could look at this feat in comparison with what you get from other feats, especially because you may not enjoy having to make that determination before every attack (or feeling badly about the fact that you're not doing so, which is also a potentially significant factor), but in practice it gates a bunch of other feats people tend to like, so you're going to be picking it up with most melee damage dealers unless you're doing something weird. (If you want to get to Cleaving Finish, for instance, you're taking Power Attack even if you just turn it off forever and Cleave even if you never use it.) In a universe where that weren't the case, though, it'd be nice to be able to spend a feat (a limited resource!) on a straight increase to damage and to-hit rather than buying yourself another headache. It would be hard to say whether it's worth it overall without having a complete rundown of every single enemy encounter in the game and simulating attacks against them with appropriately levelled characters, and I am not sure anyone has tried that yet (nor do I think they should). Just as an aside: one interesting quirk in this game, featwise, is that the weapon-specialization feats, which are just straight bonuses, don't have much opportunity cost to them - since you can respec, if you find a really good heavy mace or whatever you can just pop back to town and change your character to give that a bonus instead of the warhammer you were previously relying on. Vargatron posted:I think Iomedae's character design just owns and the short haircut works so good. See, this is what I'm saying. Iomedae doesn't look like some abstract ideal of goodness with all the cultural baggage we've been taught to expect of that kind of character, she looks like someone who absolutely will wreck your poo poo if you're Doing Wrong. The visual design of any character communicates information, and the information she is communicating is that kicking your evil rear end is just item twelve on her twenty item to-do list today.
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Apr 5, 2024 15:40
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