204 replies to this topic

[Galactygon]

It's not just necromancers. There are no single-class mage NPCs currently being made, specialist or otherwise. At least, none that I'm aware of.

Other than "Redemption: The Longer Road", that is.

-Galactygon

[kirkjobsluder]

In middle age Europe there were no black or yellow people.

I'm not so convinced of this. After all, during the Middle Ages the Moors occupied Spain and Timbuktu was perhaps the dominant trade city of the hemisphere. There appears to have been an active slave trade going back to the 13th century although the slave trade did not pick up until the triangular trade with American colonization. So Africans would have been known in trade cities both as free traders and slaves.

Asia was another matter because of the difficulty of overland trade routes were prohibitive in regards to direct contact. (There is some matter of debate as to whether Marco Polo really was the first Eurpean to reach China.) Basically, the notion of an African-inspired character is probably more realistic than Yoshimo waving around a Katana.

The more the rules lawyers and background lawyers get bent out of shape over an idea, the more it seems reasonable that it should be in the game. However, that make three mods I'm not making progress on.

[kirkjobsluder]

If you do make background information up in your own head, chances are extremely high it'll be different than what other people make up in their heads. Soon enough you'll end up getting into arguments about who's right and who's wrong, arguments that would soon be resolved (or may not even start) if you can simply go and look up the source of the argument in a book somewhere. It seems to me that playing pnp in a fantasy world with little-to-no background information would soon lead to the DM compiling a list of various trivia .

It's not a matter of me or anyone else "needing" such information that's the problem; the fact is that the information is already there. Feel free to completely ignore the history, culture, species, etc of the Forgotten Realms as you see fit, but if you do so in a mod I'd advise keeping the mod private - otherwise you can expect a lot of whining and flaming posts, PMs and e-mails.

The perfect answer to this, is the answer that is written into the rules. The DM (or in this case, the Mod creator) is always right. If you are not willing to work with the DM (or in this case, the mod creater) you are welcome to vote with your feet and run your own game.

Perhaps its just that I'm old school (got the basic set for my birthday in '81). Perhaps its just that I spent too many hours engaging in wonderful campaigns sitting around the table with a shared players guide, a handful of dice and our own imaginations. But playing without hundreds of dollars of background matter just works. A large part of that was based on three basic rules: no rules lawyering, no background lawyering, no bitching and moaning.

Why was a lot of that published? Well, a large part of it was because TSR attempted to milk all the life out of the franchise rather than supporting good game play. But the basic point of the game is storytelling and the DM (or in this case, the mod creator) is the final arbiter of what happens in the setting of the story.

[NiGHTMARE]

But just as pnp players would walk out of a session with a crappy DM, so mod players would uninstall and delete a crappy mod.

Also, CRPG mods do not = pnp RPGing sessions. What happens if you install two or more mods with a similar theme, and find they have radically conflicting information? If such information were based on what the staff at TSR/Wizards have spent a great deal of time and effort researching and writing, the chances of that hapenning would be greatly reduced.

Wth your last comment I take you're saying that providing lots of history, cultural details and other such background information is a bad thing, and introducing new rules, tweaking old ones, etc is a good thing? ROFL. I gather you've never seen any of the "what the hell are Wizards doing taking out all the lovingly detailed background information and adding all these idiotic prestige classes, skills and feats" threads that you'll find on almost every D&D site in existence...

Edited by NiGHTMARE, 25 July 2004 - 04:31 PM.

[Sillara]

It's not just necromancers. There are no single-class mage NPCs currently being made, specialist or otherwise. At least, none that I'm aware of.

Umm, I just completed my NPC mod for SOA; TOB is well underway. And he is a single-class, specialist mage, a necromancer to be precise.

Sillara

[kirkjobsluder]

But just as pnp players would walk out of a session with a crappy DM, so mod players would uninstall and delete a crappy mod.

The quality of a DM has nothing to do with how many modules or sourcebooks he or she has on the bookshelf behind him or her. The quality of a DM has to do with the kind of game the DMs create. The best DMs I've played with owned only a DM guide, a monster manual, and a dicebag.

Likewise, the quality of a mod has much more to do with the kind of game it creates than the amount of source material owned by the creator. For example, to me Chloe with a largely novel background is a better story than Sola, even though Sola is probably better grounded in the overabundance of material that has been published about the Forgotten Realms. Why is that? Because Chloe situates the NPC into the conflict between Irenicus and the Shadow Thieves while Sola still requires some leaps of faith to get him to the surface and integrated in the party. I have a lot of doubts that any of the TSR/Wizards materials mention a lesbian poet of Waterdeep, but this is a brilliant bit of added detail that is entirely plausible.

Also, CRPG mods do not = pnp RPGing sessions.

That's right. We are not talking about creating source materials for the pnp FR. We are talking about creating mods for the CRPG Baldur's Gate. We know that in Baldur's Gate some different rules apply. The party can walk around with Viconia and Sola largely free from harassment. Valygar can cast spells in spite of a personal weak atheism. Anomen can become a member of The Order of the Radiant Heart as a cleric.

If we were in a pnp RPG in the Forgotten Realms, then it would be a different discussion with whoever was DM. There, two rules are necessary to make the game enjoyable: The DM has the final say, and no bellyaching. There is no worse killjoy than a rules lawyer or background lawyer in a gaming group. Only the DM has that perogative.

What happens if you install two or more mods with a similar theme, and find they have radically conflicting information? If such information were based on what the staff at TSR/Wizards have spent a great deal of time and effort researching and writing, the chances of that hapenning would be greatly reduced.

First of all, the TSR/Wizards materials deal with such a large and broad scale that I don't see it as being much of a concern in terms of continuity. Most of my writing has to do with the ideosyncratic natures of two hin clans and I'm not finding much to deal with there. Certainly, the underdeveloped hin pantheon is a minor help. But I suspect that just as the LA I visted was quite a bit more complex than any of the guidebooks I've read about it, that the Sword Coast my characters live in is quite a bit more complex than given by the TSR/Wizards materials. For example, just as there are groups that visualize Jesus as African, it seems reasonable that there might be groups that visualize Waukeen as halfling.

Secondly, I feel that it is most critical to match the continuity of the CRPG BG rather than the TSR/Wizards continuity. Not many people will notice if I say something about halflings that contradicts a paragraph deeply embedded in some tome published by TSR/Wizards. And what do we do about contradictions between TSR/Wizards authors? If I contradict some fact established by the CRPG, everyone is going to notice. I also pay attention to what other mods are doing, and I've been posting many of my ideas up for review.

Third, I think that the most accute danger of conflict will be not about setting, but about characters. I find it more likely that I write a banter with Minsc that contradicts another mod's view of Minsc. I don't see how an encyclopedic understanding of TSR/Wizards materials will help there. The only way to avoid conflicts between mods is to do something that in my mind is even worse than the potential for conflict. We could have an editorial board. However, to me, that breaks the basic goal of what modding is about.

Edited by kirkjobsluder, 25 July 2004 - 05:41 PM.

[Xaositect_Crayon]

I meant good as in Good aligned not well made

[Chevar]

Last time I look there was a topic here.. Guess it changed.

Listen, I've been watching the argument here.. and frankly I think it's more than a little silly. Every gamer has their own views of what does and doesn't constitue a good game. I've played over a dozen different game systems, and ran half that many. I designed my own, and stopped in the middle of version 5. Of the course of all of this I discovered a few simple truths.. I will take a moment to try and impart one of these truths.

My fifth edition was designed with so it could be played at three different 'reality levels' - five technically, but reality level 1 and 5 were completely unsuccessful..

REALITY LEVEL ZERO - real world physics - if a human is shot in the head with a .45 at point blank range they DIE - I don't care how many 'hits you have, unless you get lucky enough for it to deflect off of your skull (which can happen), you die.

REALITY LEVEL FOUR - beyond high fantasy - High fantasy games are fun once in a while, but this level os for those few annoying players that want to feel like their character's are 'gods'.

If the game is either two close to reality, or two far from it, MOST players will not enjoy it!

I've played Paranoya, which is a blast, but it is a game that deliberately does NOT take itself seriously - The GM's job is to try and kill off everyone as quickly as possible - send in the clones(the number of clones is determined before the start of the game)!

I've listened to a AD&D player gloating about one game in which they were in a dungeon and while crawling through tunnels they fought and killed 20 turasque! (sp).. I asked them why they were crawling, and how were there twenty - their DM was a hack.. a turasque is something like 300 feet long and 100 feet wide with 400hps and it's unique... this person liked playing at reality level 4.. but any normal gamer would toss their character and their GM out of a gaming group.

reality level 1 is low fantasy, and reality level 3 is high fantasy.

High fantasy is fun, but hard to run if you want to challenge the players.. Three characters CAN defeat an army, head on, in high fantasy games. They can be fun, it's like being an anime character. (Fist of the North Star comes to mind first). However for a high fantasy game to be sucessfull all the characters need to want to play in this reality, and the game needs to have a start and end point. they play a single saga, and then RETIRE, possibly to make a guest appearance in a future story. otherwise they will eventually become bored with their character (unless they're one of those ones that claim to have characters that killed every god in an entire mythos. (or worse yet if you ever say the origonal dieties and demigods - the entire Cthulu mythos!)

Low fantasy games can also be fun, but it's more work for the GM because you have to do more defining of the world, there's a higher level of politics, intrigue etc. I've met very few GMs that can competantly run a game at this reality level. The few that can pull it off keep their players engrossed for the length of the game, untill they run out of story ideas. as with high fantasy it's a good idea to have a logical ending point so it doesn't go down the toilet when the GM starts running out of ideas. Characters have a higher mortality rate in low fantasy games.. My favorite example is Cyberpunk by the book - with all then cyberpsychosis rules fully intact.

Then there's good old reality level 3. This is the place where most games are written, and where most players end up spending their time.. it's free range, geared so the characters have a good chance at survival, but still have to face their own mortality.the amount of detail differs with the experience level of the GM, but as long as the stories are enjoyable the players will have fun.

I've known GM's that do nothing but run adventure modules that were very well liked by their players.

When I run a game at this level the players either have a good or bad time depending on thier own decisions. I throw them in a HIGHLY detailed world with an EXTENSIVE history, start them just before they hit adulthood. They explore the world around them ingame, interact with NPCs, get jobs, and watch the news, read the paper to find out about places to explore (it's a sci-fi fantasy hybrid world dating back to 1987)

Personally I can't stand power-gamers, more so in traditional games than computer games. However the power-gamers like it that way. I get anoyed with games that are too close to reality, because I want to escape from reality, that's why I'm playing a game!

Just decide what reality level you enjoy playing at, and stop starting fights with people that would rather play at a different levels. There is no answer to what is best, only preferences. Debating which preference is better is silly.. The problem is, us gamers tend to be fanatical about our prefered level of play..

[NiGHTMARE]

This is supposed to be about mods, not pnp sessions. It's all very well if you couldn't care lesss about established Forgotten Realms lore, but you cannot ignore the fact that there are one heck of a lot of people who do.

If your mod goes against established lore too much (drastically altering FR history, giving canon characters personality transplants, etc) then a large amount of people are quickly going to uninstall and delete it. Maybe you don't care if hardly anyone plays your mod, but then again maybe you do.

On the other hand, if a mod contains a large amount of FR lore, then unless such things play an extremely important role in the storyline, play apart in a puzzle, or something, those who couldn't care less about such things can very easily ignore it.

Edited by NiGHTMARE, 27 July 2004 - 03:05 AM.

[kirkjobsluder]

If your mod goes against established lore too much (drastically altering FR history, giving canon characters personality transplants, etc) then a large amount of people are quickly going to uninstall and delete it.  Maybe you don't care if hardly anyone plays your mod, but then again maybe you do.

On the other hand, if a mod contains a large amount of FR lore, then unless such things play an extremely important role in the storyline, play apart in a puzzle, or something, those who couldn't care less about such things can very easily ignore it.

Certainly, of course. My point is two-fold. First, one can tell a great immersive story, without needing huge volumes of that lore. In fact, one of the beautiful things about many D&D modules is that many of them can be transplanted from one game world to another. Nobody is talking about throwing in conversations between Dr. Who and Captain Kirk here. With this forum as a place for review there is plenty of opportunity to say, "hey, this detail might help here."

Secondly, I think we have to give priority to the FR that exists in the game. Not FR as described by TSR/Wizards or the volumes of fiction published set in the FR (which IME range from trite formula fantasy to complete trash.)

ETA: Name-dropping cameos are probably the least favorite part of BG for me. The encounters with Drizzt are excessively lame. Volo is tolerable only because he does nothing. The only one that does not piss me off is Elmister as a plot device.

Edited by kirkjobsluder, 27 July 2004 - 06:47 AM.

[Avenger_teambg]

Actually you can't avoid ALL of these when you want to implement a joinable NPC.
If the NPC misses all of these 'peculiarities' then the NPC should be a simple average joe of Faerun, a simple peasant with no ambitions or reason to join the team and risk being killed.
Remember: he isn't above average in any stat, he has no unusual heritage which would compel him/her to leave the village, he has no weird traits that would make him expelled. He is just an Average Joe from Homlet.
What you must avoid is to use more than 2-3 of these peculiarities and pick something that wasn't abused too many times.
It is unfair to 'forbid' any NPC with a big cat/bear/wolf companion just because Drizzt happened to have one. Well, it better be a non-magical one.

[Lady LeFay]

I don't see why 'aryan' npcs would be a cliche for BG2 considering almost all the males in it + mods show DARK hair, graying, or bald individuals -- yea it's a bit cliche in fantasy settings (Tolkien was about the worse for this).

But I honestly liek to see a blonde male.


Mad Elves are extremely cliche for BG2 series, there's like what? 4 insane elves (not counting Silverstar) -- with crazy/weird gnomes a close second (Jan,Quayle,Tiax comes to mind). I'd like to see a loony Dwarf XD .

Full-blooded drows are getting a bit excessive, ya?

[Ragnar]

Actually you can't avoid ALL of these when you want to implement a joinable NPC.
If the NPC misses all of these 'peculiarities' then the NPC should be a simple average joe of Faerun, a simple peasant with no ambitions or reason to join the team and risk being killed.
Remember: he isn't above average in any stat, he has no unusual heritage which would compel him/her to leave the village, he has no weird traits that would make him expelled. He is just an Average Joe from Homlet.
What you must avoid is to use more than 2-3 of these peculiarities and pick something that wasn't abused too many times.
It is unfair to 'forbid' any NPC with a big cat/bear/wolf companion just because Drizzt happened to have one. Well, it better be a non-magical one.

You might want to check the Hubelpot NPC mod on that score..........

[SConrad]

Actually you can't avoid ALL of these when you want to implement a joinable NPC.
If the NPC misses all of these 'peculiarities' then the NPC should be a simple average joe of Faerun, a simple peasant with no ambitions or reason to join the team and risk being killed.
Remember: he isn't above average in any stat, he has no unusual heritage which would compel him/her to leave the village, he has no weird traits that would make him expelled. He is just an Average Joe from Homlet.
What you must avoid is to use more than 2-3 of these peculiarities and pick something that wasn't abused too many times.
It is unfair to 'forbid' any NPC with a big cat/bear/wolf companion just because Drizzt happened to have one. Well, it better be a non-magical one.

You might want to check the Hubelpot NPC mod on that score..........

Sorry, can't help it.

It's a father's love for his son. Hubelpot would know what I'm talking about.

[Deva]

Although I guess pretty colourful (I'm British so don't tell me my spelling is wrong) people would get attracted to adventuring anyway. I mean your not going to get 'CHARNAME' the 36 year old housewife with two children, human, in a happy marriage, oh, and she just happens to be a level 16 kensai/mage.

[BobTokyo]

Although I guess pretty colourful (I'm British so don't tell me my spelling is wrong) people would get attracted to adventuring anyway. I mean your not going to get 'CHARNAME' the 36 year old housewife with two children, human, in a happy marriage, oh, and she just happens to be a level 16 kensai/mage. 

I can think of a few adventure stories where a maried man with kids went off to fight evil (the "Lethal Weapon" series from the USA comes to mind, Schwatzenegger's "True Lies", and a few Japanese and Chinese films). Vimes isn't going to stay home just because he's a father now. I can't see why a 36 year old heroic female level 16 Kensai/Mage wouldn't head off to face evil if she had to.

[Deathsangel]

I don't see why 'aryan' npcs would be a cliche for BG2 considering almost all the males in it + mods show DARK hair, graying, or bald individuals -- yea it's a bit cliche in fantasy settings (Tolkien was about the worse for this).

But I honestly liek to see a blonde male.


Mad Elves are extremely cliche for BG2 series, there's like what? 4 insane elves (not counting Silverstar) -- with crazy/weird gnomes a close second (Jan,Quayle,Tiax comes to mind). I'd like to see a loony Dwarf XD .

Full-blooded drows are getting a bit excessive, ya?

*self-promotion* Upcoming Blond male = Zartran *end of it*

And Dante? Your own creation he is young...


4 Mad Elves? Jeez apparently I missed one. John, Bodhi and Jakkman (Watcher's Keep)

Tiax is indeed mad, Quale just thinks the world of himself (that ain't really crazy, a bit weird and not crazy) and Jan is more or less typical inventor gnome (just need to look a bit through turnip part)

*self-promotion* My Kido is human male and he is crazy, hope that is close enough for you *end of it*

[Deathsangel]

On a different note I agree with SConrad, that most adventures more or less because of their unusual thing go adventuring. If your not excepted by society, because of race/heritage/background adventuring might be a good idea if you have the skills/stats it can make your name (in)famous (depending on what you wish).

That they have the maximum of their racial stat, well perhaps one, certainly not two. One of my 3 characters has this.

Chevar is also right there are different levels you might like about the level of reality, but we all know we wouldn't like it if we got killed in an instant by .45 bullet (example in Jagged Alliance) close to the head. If this is true than perhaps it is true that some NPC are somewhat weird, but if they don't exceed the fantasy world rules. I don't mind. If the idea doesn't appeal to you throw the mod away. I tried Chloe for example, but the 25 Dex is just bothering me so much (plus some other stuff) so I got rid of her. I also don't play with Soulnafein, Viconia is okay but he is just stepping over to many borders for me, though I am sure that a lot of people would disagree (seeming he is pretty popular).

I reckon that every gamer for him/herself should decide what they want as reality level in their Fantasy (so you ought to at least have some broad horizon if ya ask me) RPG. If you do not agree upon something leave it be.

Just as note. I do not wish to offend anyone, so please don't be. If I might have said something a bit straightforward. I am known to be a bit forward.

[toughluck]

How about NPCs that do not follow the cliche?
- a person with a happy past who, due to wanderlust, found themselves adventuring; It is easy to imagine them meeting family members, doing side quests, and mentioning some pieces of information about the setting, from their own (profession/derivation) perspective. While they are adventuring, they would meet with family members, get a discount in a store, and so on.
- an unusual character. It would be difficult to do it in a game such as BG, in which their profession is known from the start, but how about a character that advances as an adventurer, but at the same time discovers growing talents in sorcery and wishes to pursue them? Any class aside from the adventurer is closed to them, but at some point, something happens, and they start pursuing a sorcerer path, having converted some levels from adventurer to sorcerer. Inplausible? Perhaps, but with (due) explanation, it would be possible.
- a good necromancer. Is it even possible? Can a necromancer be good if he tampers with negative energy? Maybe, but that would require a lot of thinking through... Maybe a person that had looked to necromancy to preserve his family, or recover them? Slowly going crazy, even though their motives were good? Well, sorry, I can't think of a good necromancer - one that wouldn't follow the cliche - 'become too powerful, and you are either destroyed and your power consumed by something else, or continue on the path and become a lich.' Meh...

Anyway, don't these characters start seeming cliche? And not a tad, a lot...