Short Pillars of Eternity Combat Story

I still haven't figured out how to take screenshots, so unfortunately this is text only.  And minor, non-story spoilers follow...

My party was walking through the Black Meadows, a barren patch of land that appeared to have been desolated by a battle involving a small army of dragons.  As as creep out of the wasted meadow, we entered a small forested region and encountered some Forest Lurkers.  These remind me of the dnd "shambling mound" creature, and are highly resistant to piercing damage, have a lot of HP, pretty good defenses, and pack a mean punch.  I started fairly conservatively with my spell usage, having my cipher paralyze one of the two lurkers, while the wizard used his encounter powers, the rogue tried to sneak attack her way through their high piercing resistance, and my fighter tried to tank.

After a fairly long battle of attrition, I finally dispatched one, but my cipher was out of focus, and my priest was using all of his spells to heal the fighter who was taking a lot of damage from the creatures.  Suddenly, the last of my cipher's spells wore off, and the last lurker knocked Eder, my fighter, prone and started to really pummel him.  I realized that he was not just in danger of being knocked out, but because of all the endurance healing I'd used, he was actually getting very close to being permanently killed!

Fortunately, at exactly that moment, my cipher hit with his crossbow, regenerating just enough focus to cast a desperate spell.  I cast amplified thrust, and, with Eder being only one more hit away from death, the spell slammed the monster back away from my fighter, allowing my priest and rogue to run interference.  The party still might not have survived it--I had completely exhausted all of my spellcasters' spells by that point, and my ranged rogue was rendered useless by the piercing resistance--but I realized that I had a scroll on my wizard.  He rushed forward to cast it and managed to deal 60 points of damage with that final attack to kill the monster.

Whew!

Also: this game is really fun.

Musings on Dex Fighters

Maybe tanking with a rogue isn't the best strategy?

I'm currently playing through the Prophet, Chapter II by Baldecaran. My character in that module is a rogue/ranger, and is pretty similar to my character from Swordflight: a dual-wielding, dex-oriented fighter type. In Prophet, my character is a halfling with many more rogue levels than ranger levels (I think he's 8 rogue/3 ranger or thereabouts; in Swordflight, he's a human fighter/rogue, with equal levels of each).

I enjoy this character type a lot, but I'm having a little bit of trouble in the Prophet II. The module author made use of a lot of physical damage resistance on his monsters. That's fine if you're a power-attacking fighter, but for a rogue/ranger with very little strength, it's tough to lose 5 damage on each hit I land with my shortsword and dagger. My halfling has only STR 10 (probably a mistake on my part, but I was focusing on DEX, INT, and CHA for these rp-oriented mods), so he really relies on the extra attacks from dual-wielding to keep his damage rate respectable. There haven't yet been any +STR ogre gloves, nor have there been many potions of bull strength available in shops or dungeons.  My character does have 5/- resistance to all three physical damage types as well, and pretty good armor class, so he can hang in there.  But the battles have become these long, kind of boring wars of attrition because neither side can do much damage to the other.

I think the solution moving forward will be to move a lot of my protective gear from my character to the Ranger henchman in the module.  I've been letting him hang back and snipe with arrows while my rogue basically tanked, but it'll make more sense to reverse roles.  That way, I can take advantage of my character's sneak attack more easily.  I'm sure this was the obvious strategic move, but I have a bad habit of trying to horde useful equipment for my PC's and neglecting my henchmen...

Next up: Trinity

I've seen Tiberius mention that his favorite NWN2 modules, aside from his own, were Harp and Chrysanthemum and Trinity.  Well, tonight I downloaded Trinity.  I have a level 8 warlock who might be a good fit.  Here's the opening movie!

Comedy in a PBP game

I had to share this fun little exchange from a play by post game I'm in.  Emmett (played by robotbear) is a rather feral barbarian, who just abruptly exited from a meeting between the adventurer party at the local city Baron.  While the adventurer's continued conversing with the NPC, Emmett went and found himself something to do...

Robotbear: MEANWHILE, in another part of town: Emmett is starring into the eyes of a horse, neither creature giving the other any clue like they are going to blink first (Insight check: 12+6=18). 

Enthusiast (DM): While his erstwhile allies held audience with the Baron, Emmett was staring at a horse, wondering what secrets were housed within the animal's soul. The horse, meanwhile, stared blankly, hoping to lick the barbarian if he inched close enough. He looked nice and salty. 

The creature made a feint (Bluff: 12-1=11) to one side, hoping to draw the barbarian close enough for a lick, but the horse's prowess was no match for Emmett's quick mind. He knew exactly what the beast was up to, and there was no way he was going to fall for its trickery. 

Stubborn as a mule, the horse made every effort to resist the urge to blink (Saving throw against blinking: 6). Alas, it was no use. Emmett, apparently, was even more stubborn than a mule. He savoured the sweet taste of victory.

Shame that the horse didn't make that saving throw...but that's funny stuff, right there.

Storm of Zehir: Finding the Fun

Thing that I like about Storm of Zehir: Dinosaurs!

Part of the reason I haven't done any module reviews over the past few months is that I'm still in the middle of Storm of Zehir.  It's a long module, at least it seems it with my 5-6 hours per week pace, and I went through a period of frustration with it about a month ago.  A full review will follow once I'm done, but I got frustrated once arriving at the Sword Coast.

The reason?  Well, the game really emphasizes exploration.  And that's great.  The problem is that (as is probably appropriate in the world, but is not always fun as a gamer) many of the areas that you can explore are certain death for a player the first time you encounter the areas.  It's not just the random-encounter areas; you also experience this with some of the quests that you receive early on in the game.***

***Incidentally, this is the reason that games like Morrowind scale their encounter areas to match your current level.  A lot of people don't like this for world cohesion purposes, but it prevents the frustration I encountered.

At a certain point, I got fed up with exploration and just decided to stick to the main plot in hopes of getting done. The plot in Zehir is decent, with occasional flourishes of excellence that are broken up by some extremely poorly executed segments.

Once I went this route, I eventually found myself enjoying the game far more.  And now, with the main plot veering back away from the Sword Coast, I'm taking time off to explore.  And it's fun.  My team can handle those areas without trouble now (mostly...my wizard died last night in a battle against some Banites...but it's the good kind of challenge, not the ridiculous kind), and we're racking up small bits of extra experience, treasure, and item crafting recipes.

Next up: crafting! I've finally got enough extra gold and components to make some serious progress with crafting, and I'm looking forward to enhancing my gear.

Playing: Aielund Saga

I opted to start playing through the Aielund Saga again. The plan, I think, will be to walk through Saleron's Gambit, The Prophet, and Aielund more or less simultaneously, switching off at the end of each chapter of each series.

I never finished Aielund, though I played through at least the first several chapters and enjoyed it. Going back, I've been surprised to see it's been given a major facelift. Many of the areas have been reworked to include placeables from Darkness over Daggerford, and it fits beautifully.

Furthermore, I'm really enjoying how well it plays. My first two sessions were pretty linear, but as I ended tonight the sidequests were piling on fast! I'm not really sure what I'll do next. It's lots of fun, as many involve new areas to explore.

I'm also playing a fighter. I often look down on fighters, but there's no denying that it's fun to play the badass tank now and then. I love that he gets so many feats--makes me feel free to explore several weapon types (bastard swords!), feats I rarely take, etc. He's pretty smart, but unlike many of my characters, he (a dwarf) has a penalty to his charisma, so he misses many of his persuade checks. Somehow, that makes it all the more fun.

Anyway, more later. Time for play has been more rare since the semester started, so I cherish these rare chances..

Game Design 101 - What I Learned from the First Half-Hour of Super Paper Mario

Yesterday, my wife and I made use of a fabulous 20% off coupon at Toys R Us (now expired or I'd link to it--sorry) to purchase our second Wii game, Super Paper Mario. My wife was a big fan of the original Super Mario Brothers on NES, while I'm a fan of rpg's--sounded like a good match.

Unfortunately, the game fell flat on its face right from the get-go. The reason? It quite literally took 15 minutes to sit through the opening series of cutscenes. And then another 10 minutes to play through the first non-action area, and then sit through another cutscene, to finally hear the first "da-da-doo-da-da-dit---dah" that would signal the start of the actual game. And by this time, my wife had her head down on a couch cushion, undoubtedly wondering if we'd just wasted 40 bucks. :) It might have been different if the cutscenes were actually riveting. But the story of Super Paper Mario, like most Mario games, relies more on cuteness and humor than suspense. But even with with Resident Evil-level drama, a half hour is a long time to go before you get to do something interesting in a game.

So to all you would-be game designers out there, please learn from Mario's mistakes! Half-hour cutscenes and dialogs to start a module are a BAD IDEA! As demonstrated in Subtlety of Thay and countless of other NWN1/2 modules, the exposition and the majority of the plot development can come later. Get the player involved in the game--preferably doing something exciting--as quickly as you can.

Fortunately, I can report that once we got past the initial slowness, Super Paper Mario is turning out to be a lot of fun. The concept of flipping between 2D and 3D "dimensions" for beings from side-scrolling universes is awesome, and flipping to the 3D realm and discovering hidden secrets is a real treat. And I love the use of HP (though I refuse to call them "heart points") in a platformer-style game. It might make it a little bit easy (so far), but for someone not blessed with particularly good platformer skills (in fact, my wife laughs at me whenever she watches me play...I can't jump from block to block to save my life), it's a lot more fun to get a second shot at jumping that chasm than having to start a level from scratch.

We have some relatives coming into town in a few weeks. I think we've decided to trudge through the cutscenes one last time and create a save just before the real action begins in case any guests want to play. Because it does seem to be a fun game. I just don't know what the designers were thinking when they put together the opening.

Finished Subtlety of Thay

Tonight, I finished the Subtlety of Thay. It's an excellent module--I'll write up comments tomorrow. I think I'm largely (though not completely) in agreement with BGP Hughes' review of the module, which was just posted to the Vault today.

For now, though, I need to go to sleep. :)

Hacking and slashing

I spent tonight playing Keep on the Borderlands. I think I still have a long way to go, but I'm having fun. I felt that the module started a bit slow, but now that I'm knee deep in dead goblins and their kin, I'm having a great time. The caves you fight in are often long and interconnected, making for a lot of underground exploration...which can result in some surprises when you encounter tougher than expected enemies in a new room. There's also a nice amount of customization of the enemies, and the loot is just right for my level. I'm currently level three, and yet I cannot yet afford full plate at the store for my cleric or her fighter companion, much less magical gear. I love it when discovering mundane half-plate on the body of a hobgoblin actually is exciting because it means an upgrade! :) Good low-level fun.

I'm up and running!

NWN2 is finally up and running. I had some trouble getting it to re-install. Kept running into read errors or something as the dvd drive was trying to switch between different files during during the installation. I don't know if the problem was the dvd (it looks clean and undamaged) or my dvd drive. But I managed to rip a dvd image, mount it onto a virtual drive, and install from there. I have to have the actual DVD in the real drive to run the game (thanks SecuRom), but at least it finally worked. I'll deal with any additional hardware issues later, 'cause I wanna play a game for once.

Which means I was able to spend some time playing Dark Waters. It's a really interesting module. About as light in the combat department as you can get, and the puzzles have (mostly) been a lot of fun. I still am really enjoying the voice acting, and I got reasonably far into the module tonight. The two main companions are extremely well done, and tonight I finished a sequence involving conversations with an odd chap--the voice acting really brought it to life. Overall, I'm very impressed. I think what I've learned from this is a) voice acting can actually be done well by the community, and be a great strength of a module, and b) that one should focus on the good talent and just leave the other lines silent.

Romping through Tragidor

A cold/stomach bug has knocked me back the past couple of days, so I haven't made as much progress in Tragidor as I would have hoped. I've also been working on my other blog (a baseball-related blog) a bit, as spring training is approaching and I'm behind in the news. I've been asked to write up a small blurb for an upcoming publication profiling my favorite team, so I need to make sure I'm current.

Nevertheless, I got a few hours in tonight after the wife and kid went to bed. Tragidor continues to be a lot of fun. I do think that the module would benefit greatly if Phoenixus would take a few evenings to do one full proofreading pass--or, if nothing else, utilize spellplug to catch the really glaring misspellings. And there are a few more "ambush"-type spawns than I'd prefer. But even so, this module has been both challenging and extremely fun. The story is picking up too--I'm honestly not sure what is happening, exactly, but I think I'm about to find out. :)

Quick comment about the nwn2 engine: while the exterior areas in nwn2 obviously have tremendous flexibility, I've become quite impressed with the flexibility of the interior tilesets as well. One of the powerful ways that the interiors can be modified is via tinting. The screenshot to the right from Tragidor shows the power of tileset tinting really well. This is the castle interior tileset, but two of the tinting channels are set to be entirely black, with only the cauking of the room having any color. The effect is a genuinely surreal area that looks completely unlike anything I've seen in the game yet--for a second I thought this was a custom tileset! Kudos to Obsidian for allowing this flexibility and to Phoenixus for taking advantage of it in a very creative way.

I'm winded

I just finished one of the most thrilling battles I've experienced in an rpg in a long time. It kills me not to talk about it in detail, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't already played Tragedy in Tragidor.

Suffice it to say that my lv. 6 sorcerer expired her spells about a third of the way through it, even though she'd already killed massive numbers of enemies with fireballs and burning hands, and had disabled at least the same number with clouds of bewilderment. She had to make a frantic retreat down a hallway and rely on a dinky wand of missiles and, yes, her freaking longsword (she's an elf) to take down those who pursued her. She got lucky and survived with 2 hp remaining, ghostly visage expiring two round sprior to the end of the sword fight with her last foe. Meanwhile, her barbarian and rogue companions waged a desperate fight against the remaining hordes, eventually reigning triumphant thanks in large part to the barbarian's great cleave.

I'm actually mentally exhausted and yet exhilarated at the same time. For what ultimately is not (apparently) a major plot-related battle in this module, that's quite an accomplishment on the part of the author, Phoenixus.

The other thing that was really exciting about this module was how the outdoor areas were used. While the OC had nice outdoor areas, there were always clear lines of sight in every direction, so you were rarely surprised. Phoenixus's module contains outdoor areas that are genuinely lands that must be explored. Trees and brush are abundant so you can't see far at all. There are also no map pins for the areas of interest, of which there are a good number. I found the new Survival skill in NWN2 to be all but useless in the OC because things were so predictable. In Tragidor, however, I'm finding myself relying on it while walking through the wilderness.

How anyone can still say that there's no future in NWN2 modding when something like Tragidor is out and available for play is beyond me. No, it's not perfect, but thus far it has shown itself to be a solid, engaging adventure that is genuinely innovative in what it offers the player. The proof is right here folks, NWN2 is the new platform of choice. I've never been as excited about the potential that NWN2 has as a modding platform as I am right now.