WHY CAN'T HALFLING PALADINS WIN?!

[Juho Pohjalainen]

I have just vented by screaming and bashing things and managing to
hurt myself pretty badly. And I still feel angry, so now I'm going to
rant at you as well.

WHY?!

THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE INFINITELY SUPERIOR TO KOBOLD PALADINS, WHICH
ARE GODLIKE TO BEGIN WITH. THEY GET +2 CHA (whereas kobolds actually
get a penalty) AND +4 LUCK, SO WHEN YOU COMBINE DIVINE GRACE WITH
UNEARTHLY LUCK, THEIR SAVES ARE GODDAMN INVULNERABLE. EVERYBODY LOVES
THEM AND I CAN DIPLOMANCE MY WAY THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE DUNGEON.

SO WHY IN THE FUCKING FUCK CAN'T THEY FUCKING WIN THIS GAME?! THEY
FUCKING KEEP DYING! I HAVE EVEN FUCKING SAVESCUMMED USING THE GODDAMN
SHIT UNFAIR "recover a crashed game" OPTION FROM WHICH I CAN RECOVER
MY GAME FIVE SECONDS BEFORE I DIED, AND I STILL CAN'T GODDAMMIT WIN!
SOMETHING FUCKING SHIT ALWAYS FUCKING HAPPENS AND FUCKING KILLS ME
DEADER THAN DEAD AND WHENEVER I TRY TO RECOVER THE "CRASHED" GAME IT
FUCKING CRASHES ITSELF OR SOME SHIT!

I HAVE TRIED LITERALLY DOZENS OF TIMES! I'M SUPPOSED TO BE A GOD OF
THIS GAME!
WHY
IS
THIS
SO
GODDAMN
FUCKING
IMPOSSIBLE
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeedMe

[Journeyman]

Hmm. Random speculation: if your saves are already "high enough"
from being a paladin or a halfling, you don't get much more from
making
them higher. In other words, there's a point where high save numbers
reach a level of diminishing returns, because there's not a lot in
Incursion
with really obscene save DCs. (Yet.)

And, as I've said before, I'm sorry the game is that frustrating to
you,
being very sincere here. I don't want it to be an embittering thing,
but
sometimes miss things that really aggravate the players. If you have
any specific suggestions for things you find cheap, let me know and
I'll design-brainstorm on them.

My sympathies on the unrecoverable crash. I am right now (well,
later tonight) going to be coding debugging and unit testing tools
that
will help make the game more stable in the long run.

[Juho Pohjalainen]

It doesn't usually get that frustrating (not once I got the hang of
it), and I tend to be a pretty calm person for most of the time, it's
just... ARGH.

[Elethiomel]

> SO WHY IN THE FUCKING FUCK CAN'T THEY FUCKING WIN THIS GAME?!

Challenge accepted. I'll be playing halfling paladins in my free time
the next few days. See how far I get.

[Frumple]

Mara worshipping diplodin probably wouldn't have much trouble. Get
ahold of a sling and top off yer luck and all is well.

Kobold pallies top halfing pallies due to kobold paladins basically
having the best bloody holy mount in the game, though. Dragonfly is
freakishly fast. Honestly, kobold's probably one of the better paladin
races for precisely that reason, which is fairly odd (them being a
generally evil race, et al.).

[Frumple]

Yikes. Then again, the things may be cursed. My first try's still
alive (due largely to the ridiculous find of a +4 greater invuln'
armor on dlvl 2), but the poor bugger's being bounced around like a
ping pong ball.

Constant problems with quelling/offering terms (Haha, _one_ dude turns
neutral. The rest turns 'formerly peaceful'. Hahalignmentha. Been
happening more often than not; literally.), serious alignment issues
(Forgot to turn off complacency. My loving mount has turned both my
good and lawful levels to 'haltingly'.), Mara's pretty much stayed
pissed at me since dlvl 1 (It's amusing though; my halfing racial +
pallie grace is basically ignoring her degeneration punishments.),
only _just_ got over identification problems (Bought ID wand from the
store; found another about a level after that, hah.), my mount(s) keep
dying (Though I've been using animal companions as much as sacred
mounts. S'a nice starting perk.); I've just been generally getting my
tail kicked.

Been one of the most beat upon characters I've had in a while that
didn't get outright killed, even though it's ran out of healing
potions about three times (Lay on hands kept me going), been out of
dimdoors for the last three dlvls, hit below 10 hp probably four
times, etc, etc, etc. It's been violent.

And now a trapdoor down just dumped me into a chasm. Hello dlvl 8. My,
what FREAKING HORDES you have. It's been awhile since I've seen 20-30
guys stuck into two rooms.

[Elethiomel]

Looks like you'll beat me to the punch, Frumple. I got Dragon Age
Origins in the mail since I made my post so I haven't been able to
play more than 4-5 games with the one starting set.

[Frumple]

Nah, that train wreck's only about an hour, hour anna' half, worth of
effort while waiting on a talk to start up, I think. I've pretty much
paused for the day after that landing... mostly because the only way
out of the corner of the dungeon I'm stuck in is through a brown mold
infestation (Molds + Fire Elementals = Multi-thousand HP roadblock.
The pain keeps coming.) and I'm not really sure what to do next. You
can still catch up, kehe.

Would be nice to be able to play all these new fangled games coming
out, though, but poor comp specs are one of th'major reasons I stick
to RLs as much as I do, heh. S'the thing any good, though? I've
vaguely seen some degree of anticipation for it... I think. Don't keep
up with mainline commercial gaming developments much, yeh. Sillily
high system reqs means Frumps left out, most of the time.

[Elethiomel]

On Nov 20, 6:08 am, Frumple <sakkaku.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 19, 7:59 pm, Elethiomel <terje...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Looks like you'll beat me to the punch, Frumple. I got Dragon Age
> > Origins in the mail since I made my post so I haven't been able to
> > play more than 4-5 games with the one starting set.

> Would be nice to be able to play all these new fangled games coming
> out, though, but poor comp specs are one of th'major reasons I stick
> to RLs as much as I do, heh. S'the thing any good, though? I've

It is. I find it's much more the spiritual successor to the Baldur's
Gate games than NWN (or NWN2) ever was, despite being set in a
separate, original to Dragon Age, universe. It's a bit heavy on the
hardware, but not nearly as much so as many other recent games. If
you're wondering if your computer could run it at all, the character
generator should be available for free if you sign up on the "bioware
social site", and is the actual character generator from the full game
just extracted and published for free, so it runs on the same engine.

> vaguely seen some degree of anticipation for it... I think. Don't keep
> up with mainline commercial gaming developments much, yeh. Sillily
> high system reqs means Frumps left out, most of the time.

I keep up with some. Generally the proliferation of quick-time-events
(AKA Press X Not To Die) and "consolification" of most recent games
has made me wary of buying any. I stick mostly to independent stuff
and Bioware, with the occasional foray into an MMO that catches my
attention.

That said, I have some suggestions for independent (and/or old) games
with reasonable system requirements that I like (Apologies if you
think some of these are insultingly obvious games that everyone's
played, but if you've already played some of them I am certain they're
worth a replay ;) ).

Sword of the Stars is an excellent 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit,
eXterminate) space game featuring turn-based empire building and fleet
movement and pausable real-time tactical combat (pause is mapped to
the pause key on the keyboard, which is surprisingly unintuitive),
with a demo: http://sots.rorschach.net/LHI_CE_DEMO

Jagged Alliance 2 is a turn-based squad level infantry tactics game
with modern weaponry packaged in a pausable real time resource
management game; you are hired to run a team of mercenaries that are
going to free a small South American country called Arulco from an
evil dictator, Deidranna. As you go you hire mercs, assault towns,
train militia to defend towns, convince miners to work for you rather
than for Deidranna (so you get some income), buy gear from Bobby Ray's
Guns and Things (an internet store selling military grade hardware)...
It has an odd mixture of humour with some serious themes. Available on
Good Old Games; http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/jagged_alliance_2
(http://tinyurl.com/yk5sxuo if Google breaks the long URL) and since
the source code (but not the art assets) was released, the community
has made the 1.13 patch, which massively expands upon weapon selection
and customisation, as well as some new challenges to go with the
better guns: http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=236228&page=1#Post236228
(http://tinyurl.com/ygrwl47).

I mentioned the Baldur's Gate series above, and if you haven't played
it you should. BG1, BG1: Tales of the Sword Coast, BG2, and BG2:
Throne of Bhaal is a massive quest taking one character from humble
beginnings to realm-shaking power. A number of mods are available to
play the first game using the second game's engine to enable all the
excellent changes like the ability to play at higher resolutions. Con:
It uses AD&D 2nd Edition as its base so you may find it hair-tearingly
unintuitive. I couldn't immediately find where to buy them online, so
you'll have to search those out yourself if you want to. In the same
vein, Planescape: Torment is an incredible story in computer game
format, and if you're a goon you can follow ShadowCatBoy's excellent
Let's Play of it in the LP subforum at Something Awful (now closed to
non-members, sadly); or you could play it yourself (and as a bonus
there are mods to run it in the BG2 engine now for increased
resolution and better effects).

Point and Click adventures, like the Monkey Island series (especially
the first two games; I kind of agree with Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation
that the ones after that are derivative of the first two and not as
good, though he put it rather less Safe For Work) are a special kind
of game that may or may not appeal to you. I find them great, you
might not. The first one has a remake, but I don't know its system
requirements.

The original Pirates! is really dated, and the remake is kind of
mindless but still entertaining, and not too heavy on the system
requirements.

Battle for Wesnoth is a free tactical turn-based strategy game on a
hex map: http://www.wesnoth.org/

I did not include any roguelikes here, as I assume you already know of
all of the popular ones. My two favourites in that genre are Crawl and
Dwarf Fortress, though Incursion could quickly take the throne if it
lives up to its promise.

(see, I'm at work, which is why I have time to write huge posts; I
can't play Dragon Age Origins at work.)

[Frumple]

Hehe, not insultingly obvious at all... but I've played the the lot of
them, barring the monkey island series (I'm crap at PnC games. Pixil
hunting gets on my nerves, mostly.). Most to the point of beating or
nearly so, too, which is a rarity for me (Read: Dez gud wuns.).

It's not so much that I _don't_ play nextgen-type games, just that
I've got a good 5-10 year lag between 'when I play' and 'when it comes
out'... when they're 3d,at least. I only recently bothered to give the
Homeworld series a serious try, ferex. 2d or 2.5d games are an
entirely different story, though. I've, ah... sampled... what's
probably a majority of (english) games within my preferred genres
(Most TBS and RPG style games, really, with a good bit of realtime
dabbling, but I'm not too good at that. Don't have the twitch needed.)
that are non-3d... and I say majority with a disturbing amount of
literalness, at least back to 2002 or 03 or thereabouts. I'm
freakishly close to 'caught up' with the entirety of the english
output for TBS and RPG console games up to just before the PS2 point.
HotU was an old friend, and HotUD is a new old friend, heh, and I
largely keep on top of emulation developments, especially in the fan
translation sector (Some simply amazing work there, by the by.).

So let's see if I can remember some notables, kuhuhu, however much
this entirely derails the original point of this discussion. Though
something else running around in my game did manage to clean up (most)
of that fungus infestation. Pallie's moving around again, yay.

First comes to mind, easily, is a gem called Spellcross -- a quick
search on hotud.org can find an excellent summary on it, though
finding the actual game is more difficult these days. Short form,
though, is that it's one of the very, very few turn-based strategy
games that even remotely comes close to matching the original X-Com.
For folks that haven't played the original X-Com, note that this is
_incredibly_ high praise... and get around to figuring out how to get
X-Com to run on your OS, so you _can_ play it.

There's a particular console game that, I think, came out for the SNES
and a few other systems (Definately the Saturn as well.) called Chaos
Seed; if you can stand to trudge through moonspeak, you're in for a
helluva' treat. The shortest explanation I can come up with is Dungeon
Keeper meets Seiken Densetsu (Or Secret of Mana, if you prefer) meets
Feng Sheu. It's disturbingly incredible.
Actually, though part of me's always troubled when I just plug the
site, when it comes to older console games -- especially for the SNES
-- I always have to mention AGTP (agtp.romhack.net), one of the most
prolific fan translation groups still active. They've got over 60
games shifted over into english, better than half of which is a fair
concentration of distilled awesome.

There's Metal Fatigue, which is largely a sort of mix between a C&C
clone tossed in with a Total Annihilation clone... which is saved, so
to speak, entirely by the major premise. GIANT ROBOTS! It is in fact
one of the annoyingly few RTS-style games (games period) that involve
gratuitous amounts of MEEKAA COOMBAAT. Arms fly off, get reattached,
pilots gain XP, there's a whole set of awesome to this'un -- you don't
even need an emulator (DOS or console) to get to run on XP+!

Though on the roguelike front... yeah, I've played, uh... most of
them, barring the majority of the 7d stuff. I've got both roguebasin
and roguetemple RSS'd, heh. I'm oddly not fond of crawl (Though
terribly fond of Zot defense.), but Dwarf Fortress is Dwarf Fortress.
Pretty much anyone who can get past the interface (I can) is
irredeemably hooked on it, to some degree or another (I am). Recently
I've been playing Elona a lot, which is kinda' a roguelike-light in
some senses (No permadeath, decently powerful allies, ways to pseudo-
break the system, etc.), but has a lot going for it.

Actually, those are the only ones right at the top of my head, heh.
There's a bloody lot _more_, of course, but I'm sleepy ^^. General
recommendations, though... romhack.net, HotU (hotud.org, now, is one
of the better revivals, imo.), generally just trawling through the
pair of them will let you hit an incredible volume of the incredible
games of what's become(ing) the gaming 'yesteryear'.

[Elethiomel]

On Nov 21, 6:22 am, Frumple <sakkaku.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hehe, not insultingly obvious at all... but I've played the the lot of
> them, barring the monkey island series (I'm crap at PnC games. Pixil

Well, at least I got some time to pass at work :D

> It's not so much that I _don't_ play nextgen-type games, just that
> I've got a good 5-10 year lag between 'when I play' and 'when it comes
> out'... when they're 3d,at least. I only recently bothered to give the

http://www.xkcd.com/606/ ;)

> HotU was an old friend, and HotUD is a new old friend, heh, and I
> largely keep on top of emulation developments, especially in the fan
> translation sector (Some simply amazing work there, by the by.).

Thanks

> So let's see if I can remember some notables, kuhuhu, however much
> this entirely derails the original point of this discussion. Though
> something else running around in my game did manage to clean up (most)
> of that fungus infestation. Pallie's moving around again, yay.

Good to hear you're advancing your pally.

> First comes to mind, easily, is a gem called Spellcross -- a quick
> search on hotud.org can find an excellent summary on it, though
> finding the actual game is more difficult these days. Short form,
> though, is that it's one of the very, very few turn-based strategy
> games that even remotely comes close to matching the original X-Com.
> For folks that haven't played the original X-Com, note that this is
> _incredibly_ high praise... and get around to figuring out how to get
> X-Com to run on your OS, so you _can_ play it.

And use X-Com util to make sure the difficulty is consistent (there's
a pretty bad bug in the original X-Com that never got fixed that makes
the difficulty reset to easy every time you load a game, no matter
what difficulty that game was started at) and give tanks some armor so
they're not totally useless. I realise I left X-Com off my original
list and that was a grave injustice. I've probably finished X-Com more
times than I've finished any other game.

> There's a particular console game that, I think, came out for the SNES
> and a few other systems (Definately the Saturn as well.) called Chaos
> Seed; if you can stand to trudge through moonspeak, you're in for a
> helluva' treat. The shortest explanation I can come up with is Dungeon
> Keeper meets Seiken Densetsu (Or Secret of Mana, if you prefer) meets
> Feng Sheu. It's disturbingly incredible.

Hmm, I do not understand moonspeak. How hard is it to find
instructions for it?

> Actually, though part of me's always troubled when I just plug the
> site, when it comes to older console games -- especially for the SNES
> -- I always have to mention AGTP (agtp.romhack.net), one of the most
> prolific fan translation groups still active. They've got over 60
> games shifted over into english, better than half of which is a fair
> concentration of distilled awesome.

Thanks for the tip!

> There's Metal Fatigue, which is largely a sort of mix between a C&C
> clone tossed in with a Total Annihilation clone... which is saved, so
> to speak, entirely by the major premise. GIANT ROBOTS! It is in fact
> one of the annoyingly few RTS-style games (games period) that involve
> gratuitous amounts of MEEKAA COOMBAAT. Arms fly off, get reattached,
> pilots gain XP, there's a whole set of awesome to this'un -- you don't
> even need an emulator (DOS or console) to get to run on XP+!

Intriguing! I loved Total Annihilation, by the way.

> Though on the roguelike front... yeah, I've played, uh... most of
> them, barring the majority of the 7d stuff. I've got both roguebasin
> and roguetemple RSS'd, heh. I'm oddly not fond of crawl (Though
> terribly fond of Zot defense.), but Dwarf Fortress is Dwarf Fortress.
> Pretty much anyone who can get past the interface (I can) is
> irredeemably hooked on it, to some degree or another (I am). Recently
> I've been playing Elona a lot, which is kinda' a roguelike-light in
> some senses (No permadeath, decently powerful allies, ways to pseudo-
> break the system, etc.), but has a lot going for it.

Dwarf fortress is a sometimes-obsession with me. I come back to it
approximately once a year for a month.

> Actually, those are the only ones right at the top of my head, heh.
> There's a bloody lot _more_, of course, but I'm sleepy ^^. General
> recommendations, though... romhack.net, HotU (hotud.org, now, is one
> of the better revivals, imo.), generally just trawling through the
> pair of them will let you hit an incredible volume of the incredible
> games of what's become(ing) the gaming 'yesteryear'.

I'll definitely look into romhack.net, as I can run SNES and NES games
on my DS.

[Frumple]

Well, minor update on the pallie attempt; at the mo', all that's left
is sneaking my way into the gobbo camp, which is ~1 level down. I've
hit dlevel 14, but the initial room is, uh... impassible, so it's back
up to 13 to hunt down another set of stairs. I've actually been taking
the occasional screencap, that should tell folks just how much trouble
this run as been, so... check 'em out. Once I sneak my way into the
camp, it'll be a quick Dark Crossing and a smite or two and Murgash'll
be dead -- the character's absolute and total overkill for the camp at
this point.

The order as taken is FUN TIMES, Not Shown - [...], and the delightful
Where's Paldo. (Can you spot the halfling paladin? Also, it's that
initial room on dlvl 14, heh.) In any case, the mess you see in all of
the pics have been par on course for every level since about 9.
Fortunately, whatever causes my quelling/offering to be so impotent is
also causing entire levels to implode in delightful homicidal chaos.

Mara is ecstatic (Favor level 8, for all that she's been angry at me
90% of the time, thanks to my loving mount.), and I've sacrificed my
way from halting good, lawful, or both, to flawless embodiment thereof
at _least_ three times. Protip: Easiest way to bring your alignment
back up is apparently sacrificing to a good god. Mara and hostility
issues with the AI groups makes said sacrificing almost too easy --
I've hoovered two levels of corpses already, and almost ate through
another.

Interestingly, I learned two neat things about Mara worshipping --
ally kills are acceptable sacrifices and, more interestingly,
creatures that bleed to death via bleeding inflicted with wounding
weapons _also_ count. As my main weapon been a +5 holy/smiting/
wounding for a while, that's working out _really_ well for me, hohoho.

[ellipse]

I got a hell of a starting character, but wound up having to go into
Wizard Mode due to a bunch of blue jellies, a kyrie mage, and one too
many game crashes.. I decided that I was more interested in seeing
what a halfling paladin could look like if she made it through the
game, so ran Murgash over while everyone was paralyzed. I have her
"victory" dump, if anyone is curious to see what a halfing paladin is
potentially capable of.

I also have two saves of this character - one done immediately after
the game began, and one done right before going into Wizard Mode,
which I'll happily upload, if anyone wants to attempt playing through
as her.