So I picked up Neverwinter Nights from gog.com a few days ago. I've been having fun but it definitely feels slightly like an action RPG moreso than older D&D titles. Does anyone know if it's possible to set the game engine to pause every turn, so the play style can be more like turn based combat?

I guess it's the complete version with extra content or whatever because I made a Yuan Ti character and that character race seems like one of the laughably overpowered ones. At level 1 you have racial ability to basically cast Darkness, Fear, Charm, the entangling vines thing, and the animal charm spell once per day? I'm not as familiar with 3rd edition D&D but when I compare that to the original Rules Cyclopedia Dungeons and Dragons that's like inherently being a low level Magic User or Cleric in addition to whatever character class you chose. It's almost comical.

I also notice it seems like a big part of the game is multiclassing and coming up with different "builds". I cannot believe how many character classes and prestige classes they added.

Man, things are sure different than in the days of 1st edition. It feels like the emphasis of the game is different. I feel like in 1st edition it was more about survival and exploration, and nowadays it's more about aggrandizing the character.

If you ever played the old SSI "Gold Box" Advanced Dungeons and Dragons games, those were hardcore. They let you multiclass if you wanted to per the rules, but it was really easy to get lost walking around dungeons and even towns, and the encounters were brutal and you very much had to be absolutely calculating in order to survive. I think my "Gateway To The Savage Frontier" campaign came to an abrupt halt when an encounter involved gargoyles but most of the party didn't have magic weapons. You also could run into hill giants in overland encounters so for a level 1 party you had to know when to run the hell away.


Personally I would have taken D&D in a different direction thinking about the way things turned out. For me I'm usually less about character aggrandizement and more about tactics and resource management. My idea would have been to preserve the brutal nature of classic encounters and dungeons and keep the 1st edition "roll 3d6" character creation method. But instead of making 1 character each player would make several and would choose which character to deploy on a particular quest. If that character died he could bring in the next one of his characters. Inactive characters are assumed to spend their time training and so would gain EXP at a low but steady pace. Characters on mission would gain EXP fast but would have a risk of dying. So it would kind of be the opposite direction, making the game about groups of people rather than about demigod individuals.

Dig into the options menu. I am reasonably certain (but not 100%, so don't quote me) that there is a checkbox somewhere that does what you want. Short of that, I believe the space bar pauses the game.

I'm pretty sure what you really want is Temple of Elemental Evil if you want a D&D game that follows the rules more traditionally.

Return to the temple of elemental evil, right?

Ahh, Troika games. Brilliant games, bugs that need another magical suitcase nuke to deal with.

FYI, they did Arcarnum, which allowed you to either clickmash like Diablo, or turn-base, or a mix of the two...and has a story that started at epic. Also steam engines, guns and swords. If you do get it, get the fan patch, makes it 120% more frickin awesome.
They also did Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, kicking music, great story, some seriously fucked-up shit and bugs that made you cry. Again, fans broke the game open and found the treasure within, extended storylines, seriously weird Easter eggs... (Try playing a Malkavian and then meet up with the Japanese girl avenging her master's death....Hell, just play at Malkavian.)
And they had a go at Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, a 3.5 game that was more 3.5 than the so much more playable Neverwinter series (Yes, I also include Neverwinter Nights 2 in that.) .
It was so DnD it that stank of cheese-twistits, basements, Mountain Dew and the speed the developers were mainlining in order to have a demo in time for the quarterly budget updates.

I was also pretty sure there was an option to pause after each "turn" in Neverwinter, so you could set up combat better.
Rogues had a good alpha-strike but Warriors were just punching machines. Turn after turn after turn, just keep killin'.
Rogue were brilliant if you were wanting ALL the skills:)
Monks were pretty hardcore as well.
Wizards had spells...ALL the spells. But after cranking out a few of Snowaden's Mighty Dweomer (Ie: Magic Missile Mark V) they had to go sleep now.
Sorcerers were mainly for giggles and the awesome Dragon disciple.
Bard? See the sorcerer topic above.
Ranger - have 2 two swords, will tickle animals. Bow rangers with all the feats got pretty sick, but not as good as a fighter. (the to-hit and improved crit made it juicy.)
Barbarian - me rage, me weak.
Clerics - can't hit for crap, can be a healing GOD. Oh god, I just remembered Linu, oh she's friggin AWESOME. And that's the thing, the henchmen had their own personality...FOR SELENE MOONBOW!
Druids - ehhhhhhhhh, nope. (this ain't Pathfinder, so they sorta sucked)
Paladins were pretty ok, but not as friggin OP as they were in the Icewind Dale series.

Great, you've invoked the Deus Ex meme.
Now I have to install my Platinum Neverwinter Nights, again:)

Oh - on-line Neverwinter is still around, but they're a bit...odd. Just sayin'

Actually, you want a good old fashioned, MASSIVE dungeon-slog? Just try and find Pools of Radiance: Myth Drannor. I think I've only finished it once. Holy hell that game is huge. Please note it can eat (massively corrupt) your C:\ due to some sloppy-ass code, but it's a big-ass game. Also has some big-ass bugs in it as well, but the number of adventure and quest paths in it...I wonder what it was like multiplaying it? (apparently, it had the option, but you know, this was when Dial-up was king)
Frankly, if the lovely and I want to get the kill on, we just fire up one of our dozen versions of Dungeon Siege and let the donkeys start killing the monsters. Well, we could until we upgraded from XP.

-Tir.

Yes, technically the Troika remake of ToEE (http://www.gog.com/game/the_temple_of_elemental_evil)

And now you have me wanting to play Arcanum again, great, just great.... jerk.

But for all the bugs ToEE had, they all got fixed by a group that even added back in pulled content (such as the brothel).

ToEE was excellent (bugs aside, and most are resolved with fan mods/patches).

Frankly, it's what the D&D games should all have been. I would kill my mother for the BG series running on ToEE's turn-based engine. ToEE was 3.5 but I don't blame them for that, I blame my stubbornness to stay with AD&D 2nd edition.

It's the biggest problem I have with SR - lack of THAC0.

To this day thinking about all the people whining about THAC0 being too hard makes my vision start to turn red. Gonna go all Ragnar to the next guy who says it and headbutt them to death while giving myself a concussion.

THAC0 is only hard after someone cast Feeblemind on you.


I am noticing that the gameplay in this modern D&D game is manifestly different than the gameplay in older games from 10 years ago, and indeed from the way table top goes. While they may use similar statistical formulas, the gameplay feels very arcadey in that the approach seems to be to throw challenging encounters at you but also expect you to exploit/abuse the Rest function so that your party is always at full strength. So the emphasis becomes more about how fast you can deal damage by burning all your resources at once, instead of being about resource management.

Back in the day, I remember that to restore all your spells, you had to make camp and rest overnight. So in the first place you needed enough rations and water to spend the time in the field or else you would start to be statistically penalized for starving. Next, you needed undisturbed time, but most locations had a 1 in 6 chance of random encounters per turn (10 minutes!) or other time unit. So it was unlikely you could refill your spells unless you found an appropriate spot to rest that could be plausibly free of random encounters. This is probably why the 1st edition books made lots of reference to "spiking" a door closed, as in using a climbing spike to jam a door closed so the party could rest and recover. (Of course, I would think that if I am the DM and I am role playing an intelligent enemy, this just means that when the scouts find a door is suddenly and suspiciously jammed shut, they come back an hour later with reinforcements and a battering ram, or just set up guards camped outside the jammed door waiting for the party to emerge if they hear noises indicative of enemy activity.)

Furthermore, if I remember the rule correctly, without magical healing, or without use of the Healer skill, you only recovered 1d3 hitpoints for a full night's rest and the Healer skill could only add 1d3 on top of that. So especially at higher levels with larger amounts of hitpoints you basically couldn't recover just by resting. If anything you rested so the cleric could get healing spells that would then be cast to heal the rest of the party. There was actually an automated function in the SSI days where you could have your clerics use Heal Light Wounds repeatedly to patch up HP after a fight while your party rested repeatedly until this process was complete.

So the game was all about being judicious with resources especially spells, being cautious, bringing appropriate supplies, and knowing when to camp versus when to journey back to a secure area like a town while taking into account transit time and hazards along the way.

It feels like the heart and soul is utterly, completely different in the more contemporary games. The way you even look at your statistics is different, if you want to prioritize maximum damage dealt in least amount of time, versus prioritizing survivability and picking skills or abilities that are easily recharged or which require minimal resources to use as a big factor in the decision.

I mean, the game is fun; it's a game with entertainment value, no question about it. But I really wonder about how all these changes happened. I mean I understand it's the same kind of thing with the latest edition of D&D.

It's like people were more intelligent and serious in the 70s or something. People joke about "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam" but maybe more appropriately it was "Fantasy Fucking Tolkein's Cautious And Deliberate World War I Experience". Today it seems so lopsided towards instant gratification, fast paced stimuli, and a sort of current of aggrandizement that runs through everything.

To be fair, THAC0 was a needlessly complicated mechanic.

You could argue that having negative AC being a good thing whereas with everything else a high value is a good thing is a needlessly complicated mechanic. THAC0 was simply a way to organize yourself based on the extant system.

Using negative numbers in a game system like that just isn't good. AD&D had a lot of good mechanics, but I'm not convinced THAC0 was one of them." So, if I need a 5 to hit AC 0, then I need a 10 to hit AC -5" That is more complicated than "I need a 10 to hit a 10 and a 15 to hit a 15" and accomplishes the same thing.

I remember a PC RPG (probably one of the Might&Magic series, or something similar) in which you had a spell that formed a "bubble" that isolated you from the outside. An easy way to beat the final boss was to hit him with all you got, then cast that spell, sleep for the rest of the day - while the boss kept attacking your protective bubble - then wake up, remove the bubble, attack, and repeat.

The combat could take (in game) weeks to complete. That trick was both silly and awesome.

Actually, I asked a few of the more clever modders if I could tinker with the settings to turn Neverwinter nights into Pathfinder (it seems this wasn't an unusual suggestion) but it seems that it was hardcoded into the back engine, and trying would break it.

Pity, neverwinter with the pathfinder classes would be pure awesome.

-Tir

Considering how many classes they added to NWN with some of those modding groups, it shouldn't have been entirely impossible. You couldn't overwrite the original ones, you'd have to just make new ones.

Although I did read an interesting criticism of that on another forum. Having AC simply go up and up and up encouraged bad designers to simply assign extremely high AC numbers to scary monsters. The sky is pretty much the limit.

However in the old system by having AC start at 9 and displaying a range on tables going to -5 or so, people were more likely to design monsters within that range, instead of simply going, "my monster is going to have AC -20 because it can." AC -20 or so would have been very uncommon. So the way of presenting ACs tended to encourage some consistency from campaign to campaign by having everything be within a certain ballpark.

Statistical inflation is a historic scourge of RPGs. So I can appreciate the argument that the old system discouraged this, at least for AC.

"Considering how many classes they added to NWN with some of those modding groups, it shouldn't have been entirely impossible. You couldn't overwrite the original ones, you'd have to just make new ones."

Hiya - classes is easy, apparently, but actually revising the skill sets (remember, it's not the same as 3 or 3.5) and the feats (and the Rogue tricks) is where things got very weird. Pity, it'd be awesome fun:(

-Tir

True, the skills being how they are is hard coded and some of the rogue tricks simply would not translate over.

I think AD&D still kept some of the tactical simulations roots. 3rd edition was more about being able to make each character unique. From what I've heard, 4th is trying too hard to balance classes by making everything a reskin of everything else. I've not tried it, so I'm guessing take that with a grain of salt.

Also, I've found my Neverwinter Nights boxes. I have more fond memories of Baldur's Gate than Neverwinter Nights. Neverwinter just felt bland at the start, then all about getting more xp so you can try out the neat tricks of your character build. Then again, I remember abusing traps and AoE spells in Baldur's gate, and trying to stack enough buffs that you couldn't see the character's face anymore.

Maybe I prefer Shadowrun now because you don't have to wait until X level to accomplish whatever neat idea you have, it's available from the start. You just get better or broader as the game progresses. I'm already good at what I want to do, now let's go try different things with it.

That's not a bad way of putting it. Some classes fight up close, others from a distance; but if you want to make a character who helps the party in ways other than fighting, you're SOL. I found D&D4 very video-game-y.

That's just the thing about the D&D games. I feel like as a player my experience is less dynamic than when I play Shadowrun. In Shadowrun characters can die easily, you can create new characters and hop into the ongoing game easily, and you can experiment and try different things. If a character concept doesn't work no problem.

In D&D it's like you're committed to play the same old character for a long time, and it's possible to "screw up" the build or whatever. It makes me think of a radio show financial planner who monday morning quarterbacks the financial decisions of the callers and scolds them about them, insofar as there is arguably a right way and a wrong way to optimize in D&D.

The lowest AC I can remember is a GW shadow dragon with -12.


I found it very WoWish in specific.

Yeah, if I remember right, Worldshield armor from Hollow World gave you AC-10, and that was essentially supposed to be one of the best armors in the universe.

Seriously, if you had your hands on that Worldshield armour, your DM had forgotten what in hell it was.


And I thought Balder's Gate was loading and re-loading the Dragon encounter with your solo monk, just to kill it with your quivering palm. (Achievement Unlocked: The Chosen One)



-Tir

Thanks for the head's up. I played Arcanum and found it, well, unplayable due to some serious balance issues and other goofs. I may open it up again.

The balance issues for Arcanum I don't think ever got really ironed out, although some modders worked really hard on it. ToEE on the other hand got totally fixed.

Arcanum was full of great ideas that didn't work so well in practice. I don't remember any of the tech building skills that were worth getting more than a few levels in (best gun you could make was probably the 3rd or 4th skill level). Magic got insane at the max level, as it always does. The brain damaged half-orc was a hilarious powerhouse character who was so stupid that s/he was bad at talking (and writing journal entries) to the point the devs had to create new lines. Mine became a "thiefy-type guy." It was worth playing around with, but the bugs and lack of balance made the game tiring after a bit.

Fallout I and II were probably the isometric games I got the most enjoyment out of. Planescape:Torment was up there too, but there was just too much of a feeling of a "right way" to do things.

You didn't even need max level spells - just the harm spell from dark necromancy, the very first spell... and maybe later disintegrate from force for dealing with golems and whatnot.

There are a couple of fan mods for Arcanum. Try CARcanum, it's the hard type mods, and fixed the harm/darkhelm style trickery. Part of the issue with magic is that cost decreases while aptitude increased. So you could spam Harm to a ludicrous degree with a capped Magic aptitude. And the gun and smithyb schools both had some solid high level schematics, not tobmention what you can find. If you play

Technically, it would be "add AC to your roll. If it's over 5 you hit."

If you're going to play NWN... Keep a firm leash on any henchmen who cast spells. They have no sanity filtering whatsoever for spells they cast, and will gladly spam negative energy spells on the undead, throw a Cure Critical Wounds on you after you get a papercut, will spam AoE attacks on an enemy you're kicking in the crotch and nuke you in the process, and so forth and so on.

As an aside, my advice would be to skip the original NWN campaign and the Hordes of the Underdark campaign, and play Shadows of the Undrentide. It was the only one I didn't get terminally bored/frustrated/annoyed with, and could actually play through to the end. The original NWN has too much Ten Bear Asses shit going on, and Hordes of the Underdark has too much blatant railroading going on. Which is kind of an odd thing to complain about in a computer RPG, but you'll see what I mean if you try it out. Especially odious is stealing any gear you might have imported along with your NWN or SotN character at the beginning, utterly shafting any gear-dependant characters and making them rely on cheap crap.