Okay, so I'm trying to play Baldur's Gate II and Fallout 2 and about 75% of the time my characters just completely miss. I guess I understand the concept behind this, but after a while it gets really, REALLY annoying.
If there's one thing that console RPGs do better, it's this.
Yeah I talked about this before. Those are all based on Dungeons and Dragons so they use that same "D20" system. And, apparently the fun thing in that sort of RPG system is that it isn't so much about skill as gambling. In other words the idea is not that as you get stronger you hit harder so much as you gain the ability to hit the enemy at all. In this world, apparently everyone has terrible vision and can't hit someone in front of them with a giant sword.
Yeah, I'm standing directly in front of a giant, radioactive scorpion and somehow I can't hit it a single time in six tries. Come on!
Well the giant scorpion knows acrobatics... yeah it doesn't make sense.
Eventually leveling up does have a noticable effect but it's in terms of very broad "over the course of many battles" odds rather than "over the course of one battle".
Really that's my least favorite part of the whole system of "D20". By it's very nature the odds swing wildly between being totally awesome in one battle to completely wiffing it the next. You may have noticed this in KOTOR. That's why I prefer systems where the odds, where they exist, are much more "local" in scope and having high stats is immediatly noticable in every battle. There really shouldn't be a chance of that low level idiot getting a lucky shot if you are at level demigod.
Here's an example. If you are fighting, say, a thief, sure they should by their very nature be dodging your attacks like crazy, but to make up for it when you do hit, they take really high damage, or they can't dodge wide area of effect magics, that sort of thing. A giant dragon, unless it's some crazy "wind dragon", shouldn't be dodging anything. Basically, odds should be limited to things like "critical hit chance" like being able to critical hit 70% of the time vs 5%, or stacked versions of it, or certain "binary" abilities like "instant death" being a very powerful ability with very low chance to hit.
I'm fine with high math in my RPGs, but when the stats are so dependant on a widely varying random number that even at high levels you run into battles, often, where you just die a horrible death due to "bad rolls", it sucks.
I prefer my games to be determined by skill, not luck. Hopefully this "D&D4" system coming out will drastically change how odds work so it's more in line with how video games that totally ignore the system work.
Quote:No.
I've talked about this before (here and neogaf). I think the best comparison I made once was saying that it'd be like deciding to watch the classic trilogy Star Wars movie series and starting with Empire Strikes Back.
No one would do that! It'd be stupid!
So why does it make any more sense to start the Baldur's Gate saga a third of the way through?
It doesn't, of course.
And Baldur's Gate 1 is a great, great game... BGII is a bit better, but BGI is a great, great game, and is absolutely the third best RPG ever, after only Torment and BGII.
I can really only handle one of these kinds of games at time. Otherwise, they all clump together in a huge piles of random quests, NPCs, and missed attacks. Not a pretty sight, believe me.
Yeah, which is why you play the three games in order. Not at the same time of course... that would indeed be confusing. :)
But BG1 is just such a great game... I'm sure part of it is nostalgia (I really loved the game, and before then other than a few titles (Quest for Glory, Castle of the Winds, just a few others) before then I hadn't been much of an RPG game player...), but I still love the game, particularly the first third or so, because I spent most of my time (repeatedly replaying) the early parts of the game... but Beregost, Nashkell and its mines, the Friendly Arms Inn... BG2 was great, but as far as memories go, nothing from it comes close. And the BG1 intro video and main theme music... some of the best.
Yes, BG1 has a LOT more aimless wandering, and has many zones with very little in them. It plays quite differently, in some ways... there is a much less focused quest than BG2 (only chapter 2 of BG2 comes close, and even there there is a lot more per zone and many fewer zones). The way BG2 tightened everything is mostly good, but the original game has great quests too, even if they are more spread out... and while the start is cliche (you are forced out of your home and start an adventure!), the way that they slowly bring in the elements of the overall plot is great. Sure, the initial plot (an iron shortage) seems simple, but I thought it was interesting, and compared to other RPGs, why not start out simple instead of throwing you out straight into "stop the evil Bhaalspawn"?
And yes, the interface isn't quite as good. No bags, 20 arrows per stack max, etc. And D&D is a lot simpler at low levels, there's a lot less of the awesome spell battles... but you get used to it, and I actually like the series' very slow levelling curve. The low levels are part of the game too. :)
BGII is better, particularly if you include ToB (chapter 3 of the main plot; BG1's expansion adds nothing to the main story, just levels and sidequests), but I think that sometimes BG1 is forgotten in its shadow, and that's too bad.
Quote:Here's an example. If you are fighting, say, a thief, sure they should by their very nature be dodging your attacks like crazy, but to make up for it when you do hit, they take really high damage, or they can't dodge wide area of effect magics, that sort of thing. A giant dragon, unless it's some crazy "wind dragon", shouldn't be dodging anything. Basically, odds should be limited to things like "critical hit chance" like being able to critical hit 70% of the time vs 5%, or stacked versions of it, or certain "binary" abilities like "instant death" being a very powerful ability with very low chance to hit.
But in D&D, armor just increases your dodge chance, essentially. Once an attack gets through the armor, it is potentially blocked/reduced by damage/magical resistances (not armor class), and then hits. The system just doesn't work that way... defense reduces the enemy's chance to hit, not damage taken per hit.
I think it works fine as it is, really... once you get used to it it makes plenty of sense. D&D just doesn't use the usual "defense reduces damage" system, just like how it doesn't use the usual "magic points" system and instead has spell memorization. :)
Don't think of it as a "miss", think of it as either a miss or blocked hit... because that's really what it is. You hit the dragon, but your mace bounced off its thick hide.
Quote:Don't think of it as a "miss", think of it as either a miss or blocked hit... because that's really what it is. You hit the dragon, but your mace bounced off its thick hide.
It still amounts to the same thing: battles that take three times longer than they shoud.
Ugh, spell memorization...
Let's face it. D&D is outdated and just not that fun a system.
What drives me even more crazy is the hit percentage. I have 45% hit percentage and yet I only actually made contact 2 out of 13 tries!! That's not 45%!!
Bah, spell memorization is awesome! I think it's a better system than magic points... since you can't just use the same spells over and over in each battle, you have to actually know your spells and how to use them. It's a great system.
Quote:It still amounts to the same thing: battles that take three times longer than they shoud.
That's just not true...
Quote:That's just not true...
It's very true, though only during the first few hours. Once you start leveling up, it's not nearly as bad.
Bah, plenty of MP based systems still require you to know your abilities well. The good games still require good use of abilities.
Still though, my personal favorite battle system is Chrono Cross. You don't lose your spells after battle, but you have to "earn" them in every battle. You gain the ability to use your special moves by using normal physical attacks, and their probability in every turn increases with every hit. It's a great system that makes every battle strategic.
Sadly Bill was never the same after his last voyage to uncover the lost resting place of Atlantis ended with an ill-advised taunting of a deep sea snail.
That's a pumpkin actually.
So it is! Huh... that's not how you are supposed to wear a pumpkin...
Great Rumbler Wrote:It's very true, though only during the first few hours. Once you start leveling up, it's not nearly as bad.
I already explained it, though. They're not all misses; they are misses and blocks. D&D just counts both the same.
Quote:Still though, my personal favorite battle system is Chrono Cross. You don't lose your spells after battle, but you have to "earn" them in every battle. You gain the ability to use your special moves by using normal physical attacks, and their probability in every turn increases with every hit. It's a great system that makes every battle strategic.
Any system where the players and enemies don't run on the same rules should be dropped from contention...
(It's not my fault that most JRPGs do things that way, it's their fault!)
Quote:I already explained it, though. They're not all misses; they are misses and blocks. D&D just counts both the same.
You can call it whatever you want, it's still incredibly annoying to have your character miss 10 times in a row!
Why? If your characters are better than whoever you're fighting you'll get a hit eventually, and rounds go by quickly in BG. So you fail to hit a few times... so?
Really though, with D&D you just need to think differently. D&D, as a game, combat system-wise, centers around one thing above all others: the to-hit roll. I know I said it already, but DR/immunities aside, you either hit or you don't in D&D. Defense doesn't affect how much damage you take from a hit, it reduces your chances of being successfully hit. Your thinking, that you should be hitting more, is based on other kinds of game systems that work completely differently, where defense reduces damage and dodging is separate (and rare). D&D isn't like that, and that's not a bad thing.
The problem isn't that my character misses. The problem is that my character misses ALL THE TIME. That's not fun! At all!!
All I want is for my character to HIT.
Quote:Really though, with D&D you just need to think differently. D&D, as a game, combat system-wise, centers around one thing above all others: the to-hit roll. I know I said it already, but DR/immunities aside, you either hit or you don't in D&D. Defense doesn't affect how much damage you take from a hit, it reduces your chances of being successfully hit. Your thinking, that you should be hitting more, is based on other kinds of game systems that work completely differently, where defense reduces damage and dodging is separate (and rare). D&D isn't like that, and that's not a bad thing.
Look, my point isn't that I don't understand why it's happening, because I don't care WHY it's happening, all I care about is hearing the same *whiff* *whiff* sound over and over and over as my character is slowly beaten down over several minutes by the puniest creatures in the entire game.
ABF. Think about it this way. You are playing the roll of the master of all fighting. You betrayed your village in your youth seeking great power and now roam the land obtaining every single technique in order to become a god. You go into some small town and a single villager attempts to stop you with a pitchfork. He runs by you and you dodge and quickly counter with an incredibly powerful.... miss?
DJ, in that situation you would almost certainly hit. It really doesn't apply. :)
I just don't understand the problem... the game has rules, they work well, it's got a very complex, well-defined system based on D&D, the oldest and (I would say) greatest of RPG systems... so you "miss". So? You can't hit every time, then it'd be absolutely no fun at all! Do you want combats to end in ten seconds or something? Of course not... because with the way D&D works, that'd be the alternative: hits every time. And most characters in D&D don't have much health, once you actually start hitting them... the key is avoiding getting hit in the first place. :)
(As for difficulty, play at Core Rules, not Normal. BGII "Normal" really should be called "Easy", because that's what it is... I mean, no permadeath?? What the heck? That's not D&D!)
Here's another thing. Randomness means characters are not initially balanced. Where's the balance? You randomly determine your stats via roll and that's what you get. Oh sure you could say "just reroll" but that defeats the point doesn't it? That's why I think one of the best revisions of that system PC games ever did was replace it with fixed stat points you spend in stats.
Well, from 3rd edition D&D and on, as you said, they mostly replaced "determine character stats with dice rolls" with "determine character stats with point-buy", which means that you can't get lucky and end up with a super-amazing character stats-wise, but also means that that element of randomness (and potential really bad stats, if you follow the rules for the pen & paper game and just take the first numbers you're given (though for the computer games, just trying again until your stats are higher is fine with me... :))) is gone.
So yeah, there's point buy. It's in most 3rd or 3.5 edition D&D computer games too (starting with Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor or, for Interplay games (and actual good RPGs), Icewind Dale II). I prefer die-roll stat-generation, myself, I think. :)
Technically you're supposed to roll a bunch of numbers, then decide which numbers go with which stats, without doing much rerolling... I think adjusting the numbers by moving points from one category to another might be okay, but yeah, you're not supposed to just keep rolling until you get great stats. But in the computer games, there is so much benefit to doing that, and no penalty, so I usually do that... but I don't think I would in the pen & paper game. Not that you have the choice, if you follow the rules for 3.5... though in the 3.5 campaign I played a few years ago, we did use die-roll stat generation and not point-buy. :) (Or maybe we could use either, and I did die roll? Not sure.)
I do like the eventual option to always have you start out with the max possible HP for your first level, though... it is kind of unfair to mages who start out with something like 1d4HP at the beginning of the game in D&D 1st and 2nd editions... that's such a small amount already.
<img src="http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080304.jpg">
That little girl has adult woman's hair.
Does anyone else see that?
Quote:Do you want combats to end in ten seconds or something?
Uh...yes?
At the very least, I'd like to actually be able to BEAT something. 9 times out of 10 that doesn't happen because I don't have money for healing agents, can't hit, and constantly get attacked by things that can kill me in approximately three turns.
Sorry lazy, it's just you. How is that "adult woman's hair"? Lots of kids have that hair. It's the "I'm too lazy to bother brushing your crazy hair today so just run around with this... "style"... all day and try not to get entire trees stuck in it" look.
Quote:At the very least, I'd like to actually be able to BEAT something. 9 times out of 10 that doesn't happen because I don't have money for healing agents, can't hit, and constantly get attacked by things that can kill me in approximately three turns.
So what you're actually complaining about is that you're not very good at the game. :)
(My answer there is that it makes more sense to start with BG1, because there you're starting from level 1, instead of being thrown in at level 7 or 8 having to learn a lot of complex stuff all right from the start...)
No, I'm doing fine in BGII, it's Fallout 2 that was the problem. I finally scraped up enough money to get a pistol and luckily I had the foresight to pump a lot of my extra points into small arms. At the very least, I'm actually hitting things, although I did get mauled by praying mantises.
Oh, Fallout 2. I never played Fallout 2, actually... :( I only have the first one.
Fallout uses its own system instead of D&D of course, though it was inspired by the SPECIAL system. In the first game misses seemed about average for a PC RPG...
Quote:I only have the first one.
If you've played the first one, you've pretty much played the second one as well. About the only thing that changed was the story and the characters. You can look at that however you please.
Nah, they also added more adult content... more stuff to earn the M rating.
No, totally seeing an adult's hair. It might be a wig, but it's definitely not what her should be.
What exactly are you seeing? It's not like kids can't grow their hair that long...
Yeah but that's like an $100 hairstyle. Little girls are supposed to have more stringy hair that doesn't look like the hair of a Hollywood actress. Personally, I hate when little girls are made to look like adults. If I want maturity, I'll pay for it, god dammit.
GR Wrote:No, I'm doing fine in BGII,
But are you playing it on Normal?
ABF Wrote:(As for difficulty, play at Core Rules, not Normal. BGII "Normal" really should be called "Easy", because that's what it is... I mean, no permadeath?? What the heck? That's not D&D!)
(Oh, and in BG1, the standard difficulty was Core Rules.)
Quote:Nah, they also added more adult content... more stuff to earn the M rating.
Yes, I realize that they did add some things to Fallout 2 that weren't in the first game, but it's still essentially the same basic game.
The problem lazy is you aren't aware of the thing where parents, most likely the mom, wants their kid to look fancy for that series of photos they are going to get taken together in front of some ridiculous backdrop of grey wrinkled blankets over a wall. That's the source of these haircuts, in their entirety. It's a lot more common than you seem to have experience with.
Oh, and this guy won't die easy.
<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ultimate_game.png">
Retard! I was using an example to add gravity to the previous statement of the girl who is obviously not professionaly photographed with the surrealist, not offering another demonstration of the same occurance! I brought it up because of its rarity! Jesus shit!
*makes out with you uncontrolably*
![[Image: pumpkin_matthew.gif]](https://www.omlet.co.uk/images/pumpkin_matthew.gif)