chevalier
Mon, 28th Aug '06, 9:32am
Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault (http://nwvault.ign.com). Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer</font>
Nonstandard stacking rules? (http://nwn2forums.bioware.com//forums/viewpost.html?topic=493693&post=4277302&forum=95&highlight=)
I'll try to bullet-point everything and provide more details this time.
* It's only for ability scores. All other bonus types follow the same rules that NWN had.
* It wasn't just to "fix" the FB, though the FB was clearly the worst offender.
* This code change was literally one line in the function that handles all ability score bonuses. It created a very small amount of work for one programmer and no work for anyone else. A "proper" bonus system would involve much more work for programming and a huge amount of work for scripters and designers. It was not feasible at this stage.
<hr />Or, as someone in the other thread suggested, it could be yet another goofy decision by Sawyer... the guy who consistently goes against the grain of traditional d&d, and the player base, by doing stuff like removing portraits(which were popular to the extent hundreds of custom jobs have been submitted to the vault), to really radical stuff like removing level draining ability from undead in Ice Wind Dale. One can only shake one's head.<hr />I guess you really shook your head when Icewind Dale had all of the racial ability scores that weren't in BG, or when IWD2 actually had proper 3E stacking rules for all bonuses. I don't remember removing level-draining from any of the undead in my areas in the original IWD (Dragon's Eye and Lower Dorn's Deep either had made-up creatures or creatures that don't have level-draining in D&D). I'm also not sure how I removed portraits from NWN2 when I was at a different company, but okay.
Feel free to forget that I just told everyone a few days ago that we removed Discipline and brought Knockdown and Disarm closer to their D&D equivalents.
I'm not the best designer in the world, but please give me a small amount of due credit.
More: <hr />Sawyer, I'm fairly confident in saying that nearly ever member of this forum is extremely, EXTREMELY excited about the discipline and knowckdown/disarm changes, and loves you (all of you) to death for it. However, that does not mean the community won't stop pointing out and discussing what they thing is wrong with the game -- and rightfully so.<hr />I don't have any problem with that. What I have a problem with is misattribution of design decisions to me and the linking of those (false) decisions to things like our implementation of the stacking rules.
It would be great if our stacking rules followed D&D's more closely (even though I think the FB's stack-ability of rage and frenzy is nuts). But we don't have time to implement it in that way, so this was the chosen method -- both by us and WotC.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Adam Brennecke, Programmer</font>
Complete type up of each Character Background, as seen at Gen Con (http://nwn2forums.bioware.com//forums/viewpost.html?topic=493878&post=4277823&forum=95&highlight=)
There's a few more background feats than the ones listed. http://forums.bioware.com/_commonext/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer</font>
Nonstandard stacking rules? (http://nwn2forums.bioware.com//forums/viewpost.html?topic=493693&post=4277302&forum=95&highlight=)
I'll try to bullet-point everything and provide more details this time.
* It's only for ability scores. All other bonus types follow the same rules that NWN had.
* It wasn't just to "fix" the FB, though the FB was clearly the worst offender.
* This code change was literally one line in the function that handles all ability score bonuses. It created a very small amount of work for one programmer and no work for anyone else. A "proper" bonus system would involve much more work for programming and a huge amount of work for scripters and designers. It was not feasible at this stage.
<hr />Or, as someone in the other thread suggested, it could be yet another goofy decision by Sawyer... the guy who consistently goes against the grain of traditional d&d, and the player base, by doing stuff like removing portraits(which were popular to the extent hundreds of custom jobs have been submitted to the vault), to really radical stuff like removing level draining ability from undead in Ice Wind Dale. One can only shake one's head.<hr />I guess you really shook your head when Icewind Dale had all of the racial ability scores that weren't in BG, or when IWD2 actually had proper 3E stacking rules for all bonuses. I don't remember removing level-draining from any of the undead in my areas in the original IWD (Dragon's Eye and Lower Dorn's Deep either had made-up creatures or creatures that don't have level-draining in D&D). I'm also not sure how I removed portraits from NWN2 when I was at a different company, but okay.
Feel free to forget that I just told everyone a few days ago that we removed Discipline and brought Knockdown and Disarm closer to their D&D equivalents.
I'm not the best designer in the world, but please give me a small amount of due credit.
More: <hr />Sawyer, I'm fairly confident in saying that nearly ever member of this forum is extremely, EXTREMELY excited about the discipline and knowckdown/disarm changes, and loves you (all of you) to death for it. However, that does not mean the community won't stop pointing out and discussing what they thing is wrong with the game -- and rightfully so.<hr />I don't have any problem with that. What I have a problem with is misattribution of design decisions to me and the linking of those (false) decisions to things like our implementation of the stacking rules.
It would be great if our stacking rules followed D&D's more closely (even though I think the FB's stack-ability of rage and frenzy is nuts). But we don't have time to implement it in that way, so this was the chosen method -- both by us and WotC.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Adam Brennecke, Programmer</font>
Complete type up of each Character Background, as seen at Gen Con (http://nwn2forums.bioware.com//forums/viewpost.html?topic=493878&post=4277823&forum=95&highlight=)
There's a few more background feats than the ones listed. http://forums.bioware.com/_commonext/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif