Making the game more challenging: Avoiding Cheese:
Cowled_wizard
Member Posts: 119
Im not particularly fond of mods that increase difficulty, so i was hoping people would give me some insight as to how to avoid cheese in the game to make it more challenging. I know Everybody has their own definition of cheese so im hoping to get some feedback about what do people think is cheese and how to avoid it:
Here are a few of my ideas of what i think is cheese:
Preparing for a battle your pc didnt know was coming, preparing specific spells required for a battle that you didnt know would be required.
Line of sight abuse: in many ways
Dealing with a group of mobs one at a time (escaping so only one follows for example): With this i mean, you have to deal with the mobs all at once, the group being separated so you can easily pick them off sounds silly.
Exceeding summoning limits, having more than one planetar
Escaping demogorgon by going upstairs.. (so the prince of demons cant go up a stair??)
There are some specific spells that have some cheese involved (abusing AI) for example, if you cast web out of sight, since you do no damage, mobs dont attack, giving you time to cast several webs before cloudkill. I think this is cheese altogether and you should only cast web within sight.
Traps also have a lot of cheese. You know exactly where the mob will go and when? And as a personal option: A non magical trap can hurt mobs that are only hit with +3 weapons? For those reasons I dislike spike trap altogether.
In-out the room to cancel a spell cast is also cheese:
As an example: You go for the celestial fury fight. You could send a thief upstairs first but since the mage casts true sight or similar quite quickly, your toons would have to all go upstairs why? Staying downstairs means that probably some of the mobs involved wouldnt go down and you would have numerical advantage. So, the battle must be fought upstairs (most probably eating the trap). If your thief leaves upstairs before the mage casts his spell it would be an interrupt so you cant do that.
Clones using quickslot items: cheese (no more infinite scrolls of protect vs magic)
What about mislead using bard song? Cheese yes or no?
Here are a few of my ideas of what i think is cheese:
Preparing for a battle your pc didnt know was coming, preparing specific spells required for a battle that you didnt know would be required.
Line of sight abuse: in many ways
Dealing with a group of mobs one at a time (escaping so only one follows for example): With this i mean, you have to deal with the mobs all at once, the group being separated so you can easily pick them off sounds silly.
Exceeding summoning limits, having more than one planetar
Escaping demogorgon by going upstairs.. (so the prince of demons cant go up a stair??)
There are some specific spells that have some cheese involved (abusing AI) for example, if you cast web out of sight, since you do no damage, mobs dont attack, giving you time to cast several webs before cloudkill. I think this is cheese altogether and you should only cast web within sight.
Traps also have a lot of cheese. You know exactly where the mob will go and when? And as a personal option: A non magical trap can hurt mobs that are only hit with +3 weapons? For those reasons I dislike spike trap altogether.
In-out the room to cancel a spell cast is also cheese:
As an example: You go for the celestial fury fight. You could send a thief upstairs first but since the mage casts true sight or similar quite quickly, your toons would have to all go upstairs why? Staying downstairs means that probably some of the mobs involved wouldnt go down and you would have numerical advantage. So, the battle must be fought upstairs (most probably eating the trap). If your thief leaves upstairs before the mage casts his spell it would be an interrupt so you cant do that.
Clones using quickslot items: cheese (no more infinite scrolls of protect vs magic)
What about mislead using bard song? Cheese yes or no?
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Comments
Power Word: Reload
The game is inherently limited by being a scripted video game, and many of your examples are a consequence of that fact. To be fair though, your solution does seem the only feasible one: find your own, personal set of rules and play by them. There is little value in opening it to public discussion, you're only inviting controversy with very little constructive feedback.
I find it odd you refuse using the spike trap because it is non magical, in a world where you can easily find/buy a lot of +3 daggers, bolts, arrows, spears short swords etc. such as ToB, it is easily explainable that your traps hits monsters immune to normal weapons.
But i agree, traps are cheesy most of the time, i only use them when i plan on running away from an ennemy like drizzt or Sarevok and making him pass through the traps.
Anyways. @Cowled_wizard. Stuff that isn't intended behavior, like the quickslot thing, definitely. I'd probably avoid it even in a regular game myself as it just feels like bug abuse. I think limiting your use of rest is another good one. Realistically, you shouldn't be able to rest whenever you feel like and forcing yourself to conserve resources makes the game much more challenging. It also cuts down on the amount that you can abuse prebuffing (assuming that you sent in a scout first and therefore "legitimately" know the encounter is coming). And the biggest one, no-reload. Being able to reload as many times as you want makes it nearly impossible to lose unless you really screwed up so simply adding that condition will make things much harder. It will also force you to be honest about scouting encounters, if you're walking around and run into a mind flayer group by accident you can't just restore and start buffing.
I agree that changing rooms in a fight is pretty cheesy; ideally you should be able to run in and out and the enemies would react appropriately but even with SCS the AI is dumb about it. Invisibility is another one that the AI just can't handle. But you should be careful not to eliminate too many things or you might feel like you don't have any tactical options left. I would start by asking yourself what kind of playstyle you want and then build your rules from there. Alternatively, roleplaying it will cut out a lot of cheese automatically simply because it's unrealistic for your character to do. But do it properly, don't spend all your time thinking up justifications for your character to cheese
One of the things about line of sight poor AI is that it happens even without trying. Lets say you meet the adventurers in the sewers, and you pull your scout back, their tanks will go after you but their cleric who was casting a buff might not. The only way to make it fair is to actual stay in line of sight with all the evil party.
And even worse: They target your first pc on sight, which makes Viconia the ideal scout (65rm to start with).
Second situation: I say it's their own fault for ditching their cleric, just kill them as they come. You seem to have a very different view of "fair" than I do
I don't know if you use SCS though, that sort of problem doesn't crop up as often with the mod. For the best experience I'd recommend combining both mods and restrictions, because there's only so much you can do to limit yourself against the AI before it feels like you're handicapping yourself, and conversely there's only so much mods can do without making it feel like they're cheating.
Don't use it, and the game instantly becomes more fun.
It really irks me when some people bitch and moan about things like potential abuse of traps etc., or other minor things that aren't 100% in line with their precious paper D&D, to the point where developers decide to nerf it or "fix" something that doesn't really need to be fixed if you see the big picture.
And yet we still have stuff like sorcerers not needing any INT or CHA whatsoever, or mages being better at fighting than fighters because they have a multitude of ways to take zero damage with no drawbacks.
Similarly try playing with a druid as your sole divine caster to cut down on your buffs, or with an Invoker as your only mage to miss the great enchantment/charm spells ingame.
I wouldn't necessarily call using the above items or using a cleric or other mage cheesy or cheating, but they can make the game easier.
I do want to use robe of vecna but i have been thinking about not using any HLA.
The problem with the cleric or mage in the sewers is their target was their comrades, after buffing, their comrades and pcs are out of sight so, often they just sit there doing nothing. Its not a choice, it is an AI deficiency. I dont want to fight them in their line of sight because i want to RP a paladin but because i think it makes the game more interesting like that.
Ive also thought about limiting rest. For example, having to deal with Darnise keep without rest seems interesting.
I'm also thinking of only memorizing one of each type of spell to force better strategy in battle. I have to think about it first. I don't know if I can survive with only one haste per day. Also, resting often would reduce the challenge.
So I think for my next playthrough I'm going to avoid ever preparing for a fight. So no pre-buffing. No preparing encounter appropriate spells. No contingencies or spell triggers.
2/3 of bg1 Sleep is THE spell.
Note. Sleep wont make the game more challenging, quite the opposite.
Edit. Well it's not for me anyway. Never played a no reload game and probably never will.
When i see a companion cut to pieces i'm like:
What's the difference?