A gripe about sidequests and loot in CRPGs

[IcyCool]

My friend Ed was playing the orginal Baldars Gate PC game. He got to the point where you run into Drizzit and co.. He had the party thief pickpocket Drizzit. She got one of Drizzits magic scimitars, and Drizzit did not notice. Great AI there.

Bah! Pickpocket? A potion of Cloud Giant Strength, a little hide in shadows, a few backstabs and BAM! You've got 2 magical scimitars, a magical chain shirt, and a drow corpse to dispose of.

Then they went and patched that little problem.

 

[krunchyfrogg]

The grand list can be seen here

LMFAO!

 

[Steve Jung]

My friend Ed was playing the orginal Baldars Gate PC game. He got to the point where you run into Drizzit and co.. He had the party thief pickpocket Drizzit. She got one of Drizzits magic scimitars, and Drizzit did not notice. Great AI there.

You could even get quest items from their holders that way. Even if the item is the character's head as it is in one case.

 

[ssampier]

[rant]
I agree 100% with you. That is why I do not play console RPGs (I barely play CRPGs). I really
hate the dialogue in console and computer RPGs, bleh!
[/rant]

 

[Lazybones]

*cough* Neverwinter nights *cough*

Yeah, the crate/barrel thing has become a cliche about the original game. One of the first things I did when I started building in NWN was to delete all the default container-generation scripts, and the random treasure scripts on bad guys. All the stuff my players have is something that I put there on purpose. As someone else noted, it does require more work on the part of the builder/designer to handle loot that way.

With those removed, NWN actually has pretty good resources for doing loot (assuming it's all placed deliberately by the DM on creatures/in objects), with the exception that you can't "devalue" equipment. A rusty sword with a -2 for atk and damage is still full price. In one campaign I went so far as to mark all the cheapo gear (like stuff you'd take off a goblin) "stolen", and then have certain merchants that will buy that stuff at a big markdown. Part of the issue too is that you can't go lower than 1 gp for an item in NWN.

But there are >1000 community-made modules out for the game, including some with nary an uber-barrel to be found.

 

[Duncan Haldane]

one of the things that REALLY annoys me seems to have started with NWN. You kill some guy in Full Plate, weilding a 2 handed sword, and magic'd out the wazoo...

And he drops a dagger, 13 copper, and a lice-ridden wig.

Supposedly to "make it even."

Well, think about it...
If the full plate and sword became available to you every time you fought one of the guys, and they have the standard D&D value, you would become rich tooooooo fast.
Unless they build an economy that devalues them because there are too many on the market, in which case more NPCs should have them, so you should find more of them.....

Too, in NWN you were supposed to fight about 10 times the number of creatures you would in D&D to level*, so if you got full items off everything you would have 10 times the value a D&D character would have at the same level.

Maybe you should only fight animals with no equipment, so that you got everything they used - ie nothing.

The designers of these games do calculate the economies, the amount of time it takes to complete, the amount of fighting you would do, etc. Maybe not enough, but most of them do.

* so that you didn't finish the game too fast eg, imagine a D&D game, you have three fights a session, level every four sessions, average session is 3 hours...so, that's 1 hour per fight, 12 fight per level - if you had that rate of fights in NWN it would be extremely boring - it takes far less time to resolve a NWN fight than a D&D fight; if you instead you played the fights, say, one every 5 minutes, you would level once an hour. That seems way too fast.

 

[Vocenoctum]

My friend Ed was playing the orginal Baldars Gate PC game. He got to the point where you run into Drizzit and co.. He had the party thief pickpocket Drizzit. She got one of Drizzits magic scimitars, and Drizzit did not notice. Great AI there.

In Daggerfall, the watch was chasing me, so I was running backwards, pick pocketing them. Then you hit the town limits and they suddenly disappear as you change "maps" and don't notice when you come back into town.