81 réponses à ce sujet

[The Fred]

If you built an SP mod like a PW (OK so I've never actually made a PW, but how I'd imagine one to be in certain respects), you could have a whole bunch of generated quests and so forth for characters of various levels. Different areas could have different level foes, etc. Probably a lot more work given that you don't have a DM to run things, and possibly a bit boring given you wouldn't be able to put in lots of long, involved story-twist things as easily, but certainly doable, and probably doable well.

[mungbean]

But we haven't even discussed the romance hooks. Some people want an elf maiden, others that barely touched aasimar priestess, and I suppose we have to throw something in for the girls.
Just trebled the work in a well developed lengthy module right there.

[Dann-J]

mungbean wrote...

But we haven't even discussed the romance hooks. Some people want an elf maiden, others that barely touched aasimar priestess, and I suppose we have to throw something in for the girls.
Just trebled the work in a well developed lengthy module right there.

Especially if you don't restrict things only to heterosexual romances. That could double the workload yet again.

[PJ156]

DannJ wrote...

mungbean wrote...

But we haven't even discussed the romance hooks. Some people want an elf maiden, others that barely touched aasimar priestess, and I suppose we have to throw something in for the girls.
Just trebled the work in a well developed lengthy module right there.

Especially if you don't restrict things only to heterosexual romances. That could double the workload yet again.

Or just throw in an asexual orc female.

Everyone, of every level, is equally disgruntled.

Job done!

PJ

[Dann-J]

Eguintir Eligard wrote...

now that last paragraph is EXACTLY what what we are saying. You dont just sub in a level 26 for a level 6 and treat their behaviours and the quest experience like its an assembly line with everything but the HD and attack bonus being identical, because its cheap and hollow.

I get it now - you're talking about modules with overly grand and highly specific storylines, where the player is told what level/class/alignment they *have* to start at. IE: the sorts of modules I can't stand as they put too many restrictions on the player, and usually end up railroading them through a rigid storyline in the way the module author wants, rather than allowing the player to choose their own path. I find those sorts of modules no fun at all.

I prefer the style of module that isn't overly centred around the PC, so that any character regardless of level, race, alignment, etc can slip into it and have as much fun as any other character would. That way, if you're a level one character you can do the demeaning "rats in the basement" quest for a pittance, or if you're a level 20 character you can turn down the crappy jobs and instead choose the "deadly rogue dragon" contract. Sure, you might have some sort of central storyline to give things a start and an ending, but it's the middle bit where all the fun occurs.

Games are supposed to be fun, first and foremost. It doesn't matter how good the area designs are, or how well written the NPCs and dialogue are,  or how innovative the main storyline is. A module that isn't fun to play is hollow in my opinion. It's just a whole lot of pretty wrapping with no gift inside.

[Eguintir Eligard]

no dann u dont get it, so I don't see how that turned into 3 paragraphs of whatever that was.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

Fun comes from gameplay, how the player plays out each individual episode within the game. You can have just as much fun pushing a cart down the railroad as you can puttering about a sandbox, that's not the issue here. Games are a complicated interplay between choices and limits, and as a game designer, the hard part is not giving the player more choices, but giving them interesting limits based on those choices. The plot usually ends up being about the characters trying to overcome those limits, and gameplay likewise often comes from the player trying to overcome more basic limits, like dealing more damage or avoiding an enemy.
The less a designer knows about a PC's abilities going into an encounter, the less they are able to design meaningful and interesting limits, as well as obstacles for the player to overcome. Maybe an ideal encounter script would size up a party's classes, abilities, and memorized spells, and then custom-craft a set of monsters to exploit any weaknesses, but that could quickly become frustrating for the player, as every planned strategy eventually becomes self-defeating. That's why you need an actual, human DM to manage things like that, to walk the knife-edge between challenge and futility.
BTW, I've played a lot of open-ended, sandbox-style games, and the more you play them, the more senseless they become. The journey is important, starting one place and ending another, getting lost and getting found. Give the player the freedom to make their own story, and you get an inane power-trip that slouches into boredom. A good game challenges the player, pushes them, forces them to rethink themselves. A series of scaling encounters ain't that, it's just a way for the player to repeatedly prove that they're better than a bunch of computer-generated mooks, with increasingly impressive hit-die.

[Dann-J]

Eguintir Eligard wrote...

no dann u dont get it, so I don't see how that turned into 3 paragraphs of whatever that was.

Then we're in agreement - I have no idea what you're talking about.

[mungbean]

PJ156 wrote...

Or just throw in an asexual orc female.

Everyone, of every level, is equally disgruntled.

Job done!

PJ

 I think we've got our adventure background here folks...
The last thing you remember was checking the farmhouse perimeter as you groggily awake, bound and gagged in a dark cavern with a large, matronly looking Orc Shamaness grunting in your direction. You can't tell if she intends to eat you or worse...
She says, "Me want baby."

[Eguintir Eligard]

Then I suggest re-reading Mungs first post rather than soapboxing on what I say. If you want a story to not be "overly centred around the PC" then you shouldn't be playing an epic character. Hence the term "epic levels" rather than "slack-jawed onlooker" levels and "I'm level 25 but I stay in my house so nobody knows about me" levels.

Level 25 monsters don't belong in level 5 environments. Neither does a level 25 pc. If you can't get that, I can't see how there's any point because I don't get the sense you are trying to understand. You are springboarding on something I say to go on about what you like. What you like and what I like isn't the discussion, the discussion is that you can't cookie cutter monster x for monster y over inumerous numbers of levels.

Modifié par Eguintir Eligard, 29 août 2011 - 02:21 .

[The Fred]

There are, however, environments which could easily be *either* L5 or L25 environments.

[M. Rieder]

mungbean wrote...

 I think we've got our adventure background here folks...
The last thing you remember was checking the farmhouse perimeter as you groggily awake, bound and gagged in a dark cavern with a large, matronly looking Orc Shamaness grunting in your direction. You can't tell if she intends to eat you or worse...
She says, "Me want baby."

Okay, consider me traumatized...

[M. Rieder]

Eguintir Eligard wrote...



Near epic? where??
I have yet to play a campaign that even cleared level 10 and I hit all the top ranked ones at some point.

I think I hit 12 or 13 on Last of the Danaan, but that was with pretty heavy XP mining.

[M. Rieder]

I think that there are certain quests and story types that could lend themselves well to scaling. Dungeon exploration and area clearing come to mind. The settings would have to be generic and the story lines would have to be incredibly generic if you wanted to scale to a wide range of levels.

I am not sure how one would go about making a whole module this way. I suspect things would become repetitive quickly and I doubt many people would like it. In my opinion, story is king. It doesn't matter if you are story driven, or sandbox, you still have to have compelling plots and dialogue or the module becomes one dull hack and slash. Making a story that is plausible for a 1st, 10th, or 20th level character is not possible.

[kamal_]

You could just run players through the same few maps, call them different places, and spawn different enemies. You're not making a AAA RPG!

[Arkalezth]

Dragon Age 2 did that, and it's not an amateur module precisely...

[kamal_]

Arkalezth wrote...

Dragon Age 2 did that, and it's not an amateur module precisely...

You missed my winking smilie

Modifié par kamal_, 29 août 2011 - 08:22 .

[The Fred]

There were some varied opinions about it, but Infinite Dungeons for NWN1 scaled for pretty much any level. I never played it myself so I can't vouch for how successful it was, but it had something of a storyline and whatnot, though I think it was mainly hack-and-slash.

[Arkalezth]

kamal_ wrote...

You missed my winking smilie

Yes, I missed it. Anyway, I remember a few repeated houses in PoE, but at least the NPC's comments were funny: "This place reminds me of X's house."

Modifié par Arkalezth, 29 août 2011 - 08:29 .

[The Fred]

A lot of real-life houses are basically flat-packed prefabs, though. They don't talk about the "traditional two up two down" and suchlike for nothing. Think tennement blocks and whatnot.

[nicethugbert]

For me, the important thing about levels is simply the change it provides. You get to explore new powers, etc. Levels are unrealistic and, if you pay too much attention to them, anti-immersive. I've managed to enjoy D&D computer games like NWN2 and non-D&D computer games like DA2 and ME2 by not expecting realism from the character building systems.

I've had to lower my expectations to enjoy computer games over the years, but, it's getting tiresome. The graphics improve but still every computer game world comes across as a card board cut out, some more clunky, some less. But, if computer game worlds were entirely interactive then imagine the drudgery of having to explore each and every barrel and box.

A good cinematic experience without drudging interaction is about the best one could hope for in a computer game.

Modifié par nicethugbert, 30 août 2011 - 02:32 .

[Haplose]

M. Rieder wrote...

Eguintir Eligard wrote...



Near epic? where??
I have yet to play a campaign that even cleared level 10 and I hit all the top ranked ones at some point.

I think I hit 12 or 13 on Last of the Danaan, but that was with pretty heavy XP mining.

I think I hit level 15 there. But I was pretty thorough... and also maybe some waves didn't want to end without the journal commands to help. Now I'm a bit worried that if I continue to Unvanquished with the same character.. won't it be somewhat boring?

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

@Haplose: Part of the beauty of non-scaling encounters is that level variances (starting a few levels higher) tend to even themselves out over time. Without too much grinding, The Danaan Unvanquished gives about 60,000xp, enough to advance a level 12 character to level 16, or a level 15 character to level 18, maybe less depending on how the xp from kills curves downward.

I'm doing a test run right now with a level-12 character, and getting beat pretty badly. Started with a level-14, for speed-runs, tends to give more balanced fights. A level-15 character would probably seem more properly heroic. Besides, once you've got 100+ hp and decent BAB, each additional level doesn't change all that much. The only real change is getting camouflage with 13 levels of ranger, or doing a bit of multi-classing.

To get back to the main topic, having set-level encounters gives different PC's different experiences. The low-level PC's can squeak by, using guile and stealth to avoid tough fights, and high-level PC's can charge in and dominate the battlefield. If everything scaled, each PC would get pretty much the same experience.

[The Fred]

Kill XP is lower for higher-level characters anyway. Whilst I wouldn't expect a lower-level one ever to catch up with a higher-level one, that and the increasing amount of XP needed to gain the next level, the two probably asymptote towards equal, if the game is long enough. Obviously there will be a big difference between L1 and L5, but between even L12 and L15, not so much (HotU more or less advertised itself as ideal for L12-17s).

[kamal_]

When the idea of a community project was first brought up, I'd offered a plotline that began at/near epic. The projects current plotline was preferred. I'm not sure where that stands since my only contribution was some random encounter maps, but I believe you wind up at/near epic.