Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum Highlights
Posted Sunday, May 25, 2003 - 11:32 CET by Astin X
Here are today's Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. 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.
Tim Cain, Project Leader
185 Pages And Counting
The manual is now 185 pages, and I'm not done yet. I still need to describe the major game interfaces, explain how followers and reputations work, add some appendices for things like rules changes and quick keys, and let's not forget a table of contents.
This rough draft will probably clock in at over 220 pages. And these are Word pages, so the final manual in Quark may be about 20% bigger, so that's about 260 pages. Oh, and I still need to add screenshots. Ack, that's probably 280 pages when they go in.
Apparently I am long-winded. I see an editing session in my future.
Steve Moret, Lead Programmer
A Dream Come True
While I appreciate your comment that we're doing the best games I think it is safe for me to speak for everyone here at Troika and say that we're just doing what we love to do.
Personally whenever people ask me why I decided to become a part of the game industry I answer, "because if I wasn't at Troika making games, I'd be at home making games, and Troika wants to give me money." For me, working on Temple has been a dream come true, and while I'm sure I'll eventually want to work on a different type of game right now I'm in complete bliss and I can't imagine anything else I'd want to do.
Back to coding,
And here are today's posts by the Greyhawk team at the official Atari forums:
Steve Moret, Lead Programmer
A Big 3.5 Fan
The new monster manual is supposed to be really revamped. They've structured the entries to help DMs manage the monsters. They quick list out stats if you're flatfooted and break down what the monster's attacks are (number and bonuses per attack) if they full attack vs standard attack. I think they have also switched to a one monster per page format for easy listing.
I'd say the MM has some of the best improvements. I am also a big fan of the rules clarifications in the PHB, and the simplifications in the DMG. Conditions have been standardized to and there is a much more comprehenisve list. I don't think I'll PnP a 3.0 game once the 3.5 books are available to everybody.
In my opinion I'd say 3.5 is what WotC wanted to do with 3.0 but they just didn't have the time to polish it really nice. I will be picking up all the new 3.5 books and encouraging all my friends to do so, and those that are new to D&D to not bother with 3.0 and to go straight to 3.5
But I may be somewhat bias