MonsieurRigsby

Hi - I'm new to the SHS forums but have been playing BG on and off for years, and experimenting with various mods (but, being a serial restarter, never seem to manage to finish the fellas :-(). Thanks for a great mod that really seems to address some of the "deficiencies" of vanilla BG (I'm a particular fan of the Bard song and HLA changes, since the original implementation always bugged me: Bards just seem a great class to roleplay as the protagonist, but there's always a sense of "Ah - Bioware kind of gave up on Bard development half-way through and just chucked in some thief stuff").

Anyway(!), to get to the point, I'm keen to get a clearer idea of Avenger's overall rationale for the mod (and others' perceptions of this). The README (and elsewhere) states that it's to make it truer to PnP, but (IMHO) this wraps up quite a few issues/considerations into one, particularly how much of the rationale is to allow for a fuller range of PnP style roleplaying possibilities (i.e. more fun/purist/rogue-lover oriented), and how much is about believing that the game is better balanced for all classes with them (i.e. balancing oriented within the context of it as a CRPG).

Aspects such as the druid item additions seem largely oriented to the latter (and extends the scope slightly away from just rogues -- might be useful to state this upfront in the README since this angle only comes across from reading through the detail...). However, the main thrust seems to be towards the former but, in this case, how much was your design tempered to prevent thieves/bards/(druids) getting a little over-balanced i.e. restore them to parity but not beyond??

I'm interested because, as a mod user, one of the main worries (esp. if you haven't played the full game through end-to-end before) is that the mod will change the game balance away from what you expect and/or what Bioware designed for (but, of course, what they designed for may be flawed and some of their decisions may have been made for time/simplicity reasons and not really for game balance). There's also the whole balance vs. fun issue (you can have a perfect balance which isn't as fun as it was before). The new Bard HLAs seem a place where these decisions get tricky: they're much more Bard-harmonious (so to speak), but power gamers may argue that removing trap HLAs actually weakens the Bard (though maybe this is an area where they actually needed under-powering, irrespective of role-playing/PnP considerations?).

So maybe this is more about what style of player the mod is intended for and whether you felt you were able to please all the people all of the time or not... (e.g. a more role-playing type player may prefer more fun/strategic options/PnP faithfulness, and accept any slightly imbalanced additions because they don't tend to exploit them due to role-playing considerations).

(pauses for breath...). OK, hope that makes sense. I always feel you appreciate something better when you really understand the thought processes behind it and what was/wasn't considered important. Am also interested as to what users of this mod (who also helped shape aspects of later releases) wanted out of it or came to appreciate it for. I appreciate that elements of the answer are scattered all over various forum entries, but thought it might be nice to have a focused discussion along these lines (maybe even leading to a fuller statement of intent in the README and similar??).



(wonders whether could have stuck to a one-line question for his first post... ;-))