Jimmy_Weasel's page

Appreciated, that.

I fear that somebody is really gonna hate this, though:

My Val ended up with points spread out as much as is humanly possible. I avoided strength for a while. I admit that by the third or fourth point, I regretted the drop off in attack power. I probably would have done it a little differently, but close to the same thing.

I think it was Con, Chr, Dex, Wis, Int, Str, Str in that order.

I know it sounds crazy at first, but the journey made some sense out of this. Consider:

When we got to Valiea(sp?) we rolled d12s for her, and having lucked out, she allowed me to spread out even further. Con was great. Chr was less great, but for our group it was still helpful. Because we had some great hitters on the team, I started using Val more to support their battles with his 1d4+x. Thus I also started carrying almost half support weapons. Said weapons, crossbows and blasting pistols and such, could be recharged by Val to add bonuses to others' combat instead of discarded. But, in case of being caught with just a crossbow in hand for my own fight, +1 Dex was welcome too. Wis was fair. And Int? This was partly just to spite our Ranzak player who couldn't raise his intelligence at all. Silly, I know. But Ranzak's gain in intellectual respect for Val was worth it (so was his feelings of betrayal). Also, by that point, I was on a roll spreading out...and the phenomenon couldn't be stopped. Then, all into strength; and as I said, I really should have done that sooner.

But...by the time we got our role cards, some real magic started to happen with this. The best part ahead: In addition to being all around slightly better at various barriers with this spread, Val's first role card power was the Tactician power that lets you move when another player encounters a villian. At first, I thought how nice it'd be that I can bring combat bonuses on location. But what ended up happening was that tactician Val, with his wide array of skill bonuses, became the ultimate emergency temporary closer. A bacon saver, too many times. Once Val added the power that he could recharge allies to add their deck number +1 to any of his checks, his ability to move and successfully temp close almost anything anywhere reached a new level. Especially because at that point we really noticed that those little plus 1s to all his skills really mattered. You could feel their weight.

I played Valeros. But as it turned out, our party of 5 had way more kill power than we did the ability to succeed at general checks, such as to close. Being that when Val was up for a combat check I tended always to discard weaps for extra damage (in his case, recharging them), early on I had found myself having sufficient damage output, especially among a team that handled combat well. Thus, as handling closes and barriers presented a bigger threat to our group's success, I felt free to elect to place his first skill feat somewhere other than strength.

I get that this sounds like blasphemy for some, but for our particular group makeup, that choice proved many times over to be the right choice...for us.

I'm glad you like the way the challenges were presented in SnS, isaic16.

We had a blast with it. There certainly were sufficient moments for us where we looked over the scenario and suddenly felt the pang of being out of our element.

Slightly off the topic of difficulty, but more on variety, we also really really enjoyed how frequently different abilities came into play in Shackles. This was a big improvement (for us) over RotRL. Instead of players always maxing their character's primary abilities, we felt compelled to put a lot of thought into selecting our skill feat checkboxes.

Could be some wisdom in what you’re saying about scaring off new gamers, Mr. Birk 898. And I’m curious about isaic16’s comment about the possibility of the AP starting out very hard and not really escalating in difficulty. For if one day demons and devils no longer seem scary, there go some of our best metaphors.

But allow me to play Khorramzadeh’s advocate for a moment. Just for a little fun and reminiscing.

I enjoyed the breakdown of bane ratio stats. It’s helpful to see them laid out so well. These numbers definitely demonstrate something. But do they necessarily mean the B scenarios are poorly designed? …Why?

You see, growing up on tabletop games, I remember well that the easiest time for a PC to die was generally in the early levels. This was sort of a given. Everyone just seemed to know it. There certainly was more chance to put up with early on, and just about everything was threatening to your character. In fact, it was a celebration-worthy feat getting through that first bottleneck, indeed. Endure the trials, and only then the world begins to reveal its boons. As with the fool’s journey, games often started out awful and merciless. Survive, and the game got easier. In fact, it only got hard again after our hero mistakenly believes that he’s mastered some aspect of the external world...

So I guess we've been doin' it in reverse now, and for many long years. Since the beginning of WoW, at least, we like our challenges to always be gentlemanly and wait until we are ready. That's cool. It's kind of like the duel between Inigo and the Man in Black, and THAT certainly was cool. But it’s not the only ‘non-broken’ way to have fun. Near perfect scaling is something that us gamers have simply been indoctrinated with, and so now we demand it or we feel that some mechanic is flawed. I’m guilty of this reflex, too. It’s just, my doctor would like to see me cut back is all.

But, could we ever consider this callous, nooblet-hating lethality of yore as a legitimate and potentially rewarding alternative these days? There was certainly a natural balance and benefit to our experiences with character loss tending to happen to us earlier rather than later. For one, catching up was much easier! Getting to experiment with a variety of novice builds before getting our footing gave us a larger picture of the game as a whole, and it didn’t put us too far behind our mates at that stage. As a bonus, a low-level character death or two helped instill a feeling of genuine threat at a relatively low time-cost (compared to the loss of a high level character)—yet we’d also somehow carry that memory with us, eventually far into the advanced levels; and thus was maintained the illusion of dire consequences even at the point where characters sometimes began to enjoy something akin to invulnerability.

Someone here made a point that the threat shouldn’t be so high when we are first acclimating to our characters. Feels like a solid point. But, what about acclimating to loss and recovery? That is part of this game, too. Would you rather get your first taste of having to restart right away or much later? I’m for now when I can catch up faster. What’s that? You say you’d prefer Nevar? I guess that’s good too.

On repeating scenarios, I could only repeat what I’ve said in another post, so I won’t. It’s also a much less fun discussion than death.

At any rate, if the B scenarios are really going to be many peoples’ tutorial experience with all of PACG, I hear what you’re saying. But then wait a minute. What about the group out there that shelved RotRL because they were outraged over what little fight was put up by ol’ Pillbug “Pushover” Podiker? Like, those guys probably exist too, right? Maybe if they started with WotR, they wouldn’t have had to give up and move on to skydiving with Bengal tigers or something… To think of the lives, and tigers, that Wrath may have even saved.

Well, I suppose all I really mean is that I’m not so sure I’d call these scenarios poorly designed. That kind of implies that the makers set out to achieve a mark and missed it. The scenario configs really seem to me to be a purposeful ‘choice’, rather. Perhaps it is the wrong choice. But I guess if it is a choice, it can only be wrong for some. That is, UNLESS the designers truly intended to start out mild and then gently and evenly build the challenge level. THEN, your table would present some damning evidence that the gods must be crazy, sure. But who among us knows a dev’s mind, eh? We don’t even have any in captivity to study—for they seem to know how to spot our tangle traps, you see (even despite the label stating “100% Unpredictable”). But until we’ve got one strapped to the examining table, I feel I must yield that even such a peculiar bane/boon ratio progression as that boils down to a matter of preference rather than Unintelligent Design or something. Peace, & thanks for a stimulating and informative analysis.