51 respuestas en este tema

[Arkalezth]

You're probably long gone now, but anyone else who is having problems with the overland should read this.

I don't think it's a matter of him having problems, rather than just not enjoying some things.

Anyway, to be clear, and as far as OLM duties go, you only need either hide OR move silently, as they both have the same function. Same goes for spot OR listen. Survival doesn't increase speed, it just lessens the penalty when travelling through swamps and other "slow terrains". Also probably worth mentioning that the hidden stuff you can find with (IIRC) spellcraft and lore gives you XP, as opposed to whatever crappy items other skills give you, so those two skills are also good to have if you have points to spare with your OLM leader.

Just talking about the OLM there. Of course, if you want to use stealth in combat, you should raise both stealth skills.

Another mod to consider (though I've personally never used it) is this: http://neverwinterva...reservation-mod

[Tchos]

Since I don't have a character with both high spellcraft/lore and high survival/hide/etc., when I'm just trying to get somewhere, I'll use my stealthy character, but when I'm exploring, and there aren't any monsters around, I'll switch to my wizard to find the fancy spell stuff.  Then if a monster shows up, I switch back to the other one to avoid them.

[GCoyote]

Since I don't have a character with both high spellcraft/lore and high survival/hide/etc., when I'm just trying to get somewhere, I'll use my stealthy character, but when I'm exploring, and there aren't any monsters around, I'll switch to my wizard to find the fancy spell stuff.  Then if a monster shows up, I switch back to the other one to avoid them.

Sometimes when I switched party leaders on the OLM I'd get two avatars on the screen with different movement speeds. That would resolve itself at the next module load but I always expected the game engine to crash or some disaster to occur.

[Tchos]

I do remember something strange like that happening a long time ago.  I'd forgotten about it.

[BoardGuest808888l]

Not everyone likes SoZ, but for me, this is the best of NWN 2, perhaps one of the best of its kind from Bioware.

The sandbox experience is quite nice. Just like in older TES games, there is story there, but subtle and complex, one that you might not get in the first playthrough or so. The quests are more interesting than other games as they allow choices and different approaches.

The characters creation and NPC cohorts are refreshing. Now you can make your own story with all the crazy things you can muster and no longer have to deal with sociopaths like Qara, pests like Bishop or jerks like Gann.

The concept is you as history, not a mere object to be played by gods and to make a story. You're the one that make changes and whatever feats you do, is yours, not railroaded to you.

And your characters do have actual impact on the game, sometimes subtle, but at another time quite game-changing. In is easy to get immersed with such once you invested yourself in SoZ. At it makes sense too.

And OM is great. Well, it is great if you actually like grinding and muling like me. But that's the point of playing sandbox anyway.

About the only thing that requires more work is the crafting system, which is a mess. I think there are some mods which deal with this. With these mods installed, SoZ becomes nearly perfect game.

[Arkalezth]

How is SoZ's crafting system a mess? There's personal preference and all, but I find it to be much simpler than the other OCs.

[GCoyote]

My two cents:

OC Crafting, follows concepts medieval alchemy pretty well and is simple enough once you download a master list of recipes from the vault. My main criticism is the required levels for many items are a bit low.

MOTB, the simplest system, most of the necessary information is stored on the essences. Limitation, not as much variety in Wondrous Items so you still need to access the OC system.

SoZ, easier for the builder to control crafting by making the availability of specific recipes contingent on what stage of the adventure the player has reached. IMO, using recipes instead of molds for things like Armor makes much more sense. Once you know how to make a dagger, you know how to make a dagger. OTOH, I did try to make some wondrous items using the SoZ system only to find that there were not enough of some creature parts to complete the item without resorting to the console.

[ColorsFade]

I played SoZ when it came out in '09 and I remember hating it. It didn't feel like a D&D adventure, it felt like a slightly different version of Civilization or some kind of traders game. The overland encounters were annoying (losing buffs, boo) and the "dungeons" you went into were little more than one-room areas. It all felt shallow and half-baked. 

 

But as I look back on it, it seems like more than anything SoZ was for builders, and the campaign was really just a way to show off the new shiny things to play with. I'd have been okay with that if it would have been marketed that way. 

[BoardGuest808888l]

How is SoZ's crafting system a mess? There's personal preference and all, but I find it to be much simpler than the other OCs.

Well, the basic idea is quite nice, but the way it was implemented left too many bugs and things that doesn't make sense. Let's see what we got there;

-. Not all the recipe works. You need to check one by one which ones are actually working and which ones don't. This is obviously bugs.

-. Not all the needed ingredients are available. Some you can get in infinite amount, some only by luck and some is nowhere to be found. For ex.; how in the hell we're going to get the likes of treant twigs when there's not even one treant to take it from ?

Demon spider leg is another example. You can only get this if you're lucky to find demon spiders in Samarach and is skilled enough to actually catch them before they disappeared. There is no second chance.

On the other hand, you can find tons of creature parts from traders and hunters, most of them aren't included in any recipe. Clearly these are oversights.

-. You can get essences of all kind, but there is no mortar and pestle anywhere to process them, no leather/iron ingot either. So you ended with lots of essences but no matrix to contain the enchantments.

-. Price for enchantment doesn't make sense. Say, you make a Ring of Fire Resistance, that costs about 9,000 gp. But you can also enchant a random ring with exactly the same enchantment for 3,000 gp. If you actually make such items, it's like you're cheating yourself.

-. Price for weapon enchantment is so prohibitively high at early levels when it was needed most. Yet after certain stage in the story, you get practically endless fund and matrixes for such enchantments, allowing you to make like, unlimited supplies of insane weapons. In OC, you might make at most 4-5 really powerful weapons, while in MotB, you might make perhaps 1-3 end-game level weapons. But in SoZ ? You can literally crash the artifact market of the whole Faerun.

[GCoyote]

As you say, these are primarily matters of poor execution. The SoZ system as designed has a lot more built in flexibility. For example, two recipes can have the exact same physical components and spell but produce different items. That makes it possible to create any recipe you might need for a module without having to check to see if any other recipe uses that combination of components.

To see the SoZ system with fewer bugs, try Legacy of White Plume Mountain, available on the new vault. It also allows you to use the OC system so you can see both in the same setting.

[BoardGuest808888l]

That campaign looks nice. I'll give it a try. Thanks for your recommendation.

[Arkalezth]

I played SoZ a few months ago and I don't remember having any problem with crafting, at least with the "main" recipes (weapon and armour enchantments, +ability items...). I guess the problematic ones are those I didn't bother with.

I personally don't find weapon enchantments prohibitive at all. You can get money pretty quickly, you don't need any ingredients other than gold, and any enchantments other than +1 enhancement (which costs 1000 gold) aren't exactly the usual at low levels.

To see the SoZ system with fewer bugs, try Legacy of White Plume Mountain

FWIW, that module has a reputation of being buggy, actually. But in my experience, other than one or two optional (and thus, avoidable) areas that crash the game, you should be fine.

[GCoyote]

... FWIW, that module [White Plume Mountain] has a reputation of being buggy, actually. But in my experience, other than one or two optional (and thus, avoidable) areas that crash the game, you should be fine.

Good point!

BoardGuest808888l, Make sure you read the user posts below the module files. You should see a mention of which areas crash and other tips to avoid trouble.

Enjoy!

[Clangeddin86]

The only thing that disappoints me of SoZ is the lack of epic content (you could consider Zecorian an epic level challenge for level 21s or so, but that's it). I wish it would have lasted longer up to level 30.

 

Probably the biggest issue with SoZ, though, is the amount of transitions between overland map and encounters/dungeons that also have the bad side effect of stripping you of "long" duration buffs pretty quickly.

Another problem is the way skills in overland are dealt with, you have to switch characters continuosly to get advantage of all your party's skill, it should have been something along the lines of "party's highest X skill is Y from Z member" and use it automatically without forcing you to switch all the time.

For me it was no big deal, but I can see how it turns people off.

 

Overall, it's an expansion I really enjoyed. I can say that NWN2 is a game that completely satisfied in me in nearly every "stage" (OC, MotB and SoZ, all liked it. I did not like Misteries of Westgate). The same thing I CANNOT say for NWN1 (Ugh, the OC was truly garbage, Shadows of Unrentide was so-so. Hordes of the Underdark was really the redeemer there).

[Tchos]

I definitely agree that the whole party, and not just the lead character, should logically have contributed to skill checks on the overland map, but I understand they did it this way so that different play styles (choosing a fighter versus a ranger as leader, for example) would lead to different results.  As for the stripping of the buffs, I think the mechanical reason is that it prevented things from interfering with the scale of the characters on the map, but it could be somewhat justified because the time spent on the overland map represents a much longer span of time.  Of course, it could be assumed that the party would recast buffs before entering the destination, so they shouldn't be stripped.

[kevL]

there's an odd thing going on with those sizing effects. It is an "effect" -- but when I looked some time ago, there isn't a constant to specifically remove it (or something like that). So perhaps they opted to use the blanket 'remove all effects' just as a quick catch-all. On the other hand, the characters can be resized using not an effect but the actual setting of their x/y/z size parameters; then you'd have to keep track of what they were originally, to set them back properly.

I actually went through and removed most of the de-buffing (along with ~2 billion gold bars..), but they still get removed when switching from one module to another, which happens fairly frequently. Two things strike me as lacking in SoZ besides the debuffing.

One is that the dungeons aren't nearly large enough; they're just one level quick-in, quick-out. That was a consistent downer for me 'cause after all that overland stuff i Love to dungeon crawl. The other is that the overland area should have been subdivided geographically (think, large triggers) and given variables to track how effective the Party is in combatting the alien menace wandering monsters in various locales. So, after whacking in a general location for a while you'd get to travel peacefully -- until said variables auto-increment to prior degrees.


The end-fights were totally epic for me and if I choose to play an official release again it'll be SoZ first.

[Arkalezth]

As for the stripping of the buffs, I think the mechanical reason is that it prevented things from interfering with the scale of the characters on the map, but it could be somewhat justified because the time spent on the overland map represents a much longer span of time.

 

Not buying that justification, because then you'd think characters would also rest and refresh their spells per day at some point during their journey. They don't.

 

There's a mod to prevent the buff-stripping (here). IIRC, bards still need to reapply their inspirations, which IMO makes them a pain in the ass to play in this module. It's a shame, because they'd be a great addition to a SOZ party otherwise.

[Tchos]

Not buying that justification, because then you'd think characters would also rest and refresh their spells per day at some point during their journey. They don't.

 

They can, though, because you can rest on the overland map, with risk depending on your location.  It would just be up to the player to press R.  The amount of automatic action vs. player agency gets complicated, but I still agree it shouldn't be stripped.

[GCoyote]

I agree with Tchos' assessment having done exactly that, lead with a stealthy character when I want to avoid combat, a fighter if I just need a couple XP to level up, or toward the end, with the Fearsome Roster feat just to enjoy watching monsters running away in panic at our approach. 

[ColorsFade]

One is that the dungeons aren't nearly large enough; they're just one level quick-in, quick-out. That was a consistent downer for me 'cause after all that overland stuff i Love to dungeon crawl.

 

Yep, that was the biggest issue for me as well. I kept thinking, "The next dungeon will be epic", and it never was. 

[kevL]

I kept thinking, "The next dungeon will be epic", and it never was.

yep, nailed it

[BoardGuest808888l]

I played SoZ a few months ago and I don't remember having any problem with crafting, at least with the "main" recipes (weapon and armour enchantments, +ability items...). I guess the problematic ones are those I didn't bother with.I personally don't find weapon enchantments prohibitive at all. You can get money pretty quickly, you don't need any ingredients other than gold, and any enchantments other than +1 enhancement (which costs 1000 gold) aren't exactly the usual at low levels.

Exactly. This was also what happened in my game. So, we got tons of recipes, but only a handful that actually did something that we wanted. The vast majorities of the recipes were there just cluttering our bags. It was highly inefficient, if anything.

I once rolled a gnomish artificer of sort, going from town to town, collecting animal parts from the wilds, in order to create some items and....it didn't work. That means if we simply use crafting as tool to get more powerful, we can. But if we tried to role play it, won't do. So much potential lost there.

As for weapon enchantments, I was actually hoping we could get at least +2 or +3 weapons even, as early as possible. +1 weapons just won't cut it.

[GCoyote]

IIRC the SoZ holiday expansion mod includes a couple of areas with OC crafting benches and molds. I have not done that but the new areas do add replay value to the SoZ campaign.

Hope that helps.

[Arkalezth]

Exactly. This was also what happened in my game. So, we got tons of recipes, but only a handful that actually did something that we wanted. The vast majorities of the recipes were there just cluttering our bags. It was highly inefficient, if anything.

Not saying I disagree, but to be fair, this isn't so different than pretty much any other module or RPG out there that throws tons of useless junk at you all the time. You can normally sell it, unlike recipes, but you can also refrain from picking up or buying useless recipes. I don't think I had many memorised recipes besides the truly useful ones.

As for weapon enchantments, I was actually hoping we could get at least +2 or +3 weapons even, as early as possible. +1 weapons just won't cut it.

We'll have to agree to disagree then. +2 is fine by level 8-ish, and while I don't remember where that recipe is found, you can craft +1 +1d6 weapons pretty quickly if you want, which I'd call overpowered at low levels. There's also a +2 weapon you can find right away, as well as a few +1 +1dx soon after. I think +1 does cut it, but you aren't limited to it for long.

[GCoyote]

Actually you can sell recipes to some merchants. When the store inventory is open, just open the recipe book and drag the ones you no longer want over to the merchant window. They aren't worth much but it does help to tidy up your recipe books a bit.

 

And an have to agree with Ark' on the weapons and armor. You have more than enough recipes for the challenges presented provided you have a reasonably well designed party. Since most recipes can be applied to any weapon or armor, you should be able to craft enough custom gear for even some fairly bizarre character combination.

 

Again, the Holiday Expansion Pack includes a wider selection of gear and higher level items as well. Try it with that install and it may be more to your liking.