I'm just going to say one thing about psionics: whatever you do with them, I'm only going to be interested if you have the five mental attack modes and the five mental defenses. If you ain't got that, you're talking about just another kind of magic.
@Noobacca , thanks for the interest. Unfortunately a combination of grad school and job hunting has left me little time to mod for the immediate future (although this is rather subject to change pending results of my job hunt.)
@chimeric , as fun as rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock psionics sounds, I'm rather leaning towards other mechanics in my mod. As SD said, it might be doable but it is largely complicated and certain offenses are just objectively better the (ones in the right of the table in which they are presented have been checks against all defenses than the ones on the left IIRC).
@subtledoctor , 2E psionics (much like 2E magic to a certain extent) is quite uninspiring. I'd much rather take hints from 3E, Pathfinder, 5E or even 4E (or stuff like Shadowrun/Tyranny/Pillars etc.).
Dude there's like 12 different psionics systems, just in actual D&D. Never mind the various offshoot rpgs. The system with those 5 attacks and 5 defenses is just one system among many - who are you to say which one a modder must emulate?
Using the original 2E rules for contact would be both difficult to implement and super boring to play - this is a combat game, why waste multiple rounds trying to use telepathy when you could focus on telekinesis or biometabolism instead, and just tear enemies apart?
I was talking about 2E AD&D psionics. 2E is what we are playing here, even with departures. As far as I know, that system was definitely laid down in Skills & Powers as a revision of the Complete Psionics Handbook, though there are probably rules strewn about. The rules for establishing contact, the attacks and defenses and so on were an attempt, a not very successful attempt, to represent psychic powers from fantasy and sci-fi literature. Subtlety is everything with mind games, hence those provisos. It's true that those rules would have to be changed very much to fit the Infinity games, even though I deny that these are "combat games." They are exploration games with lots of fighting. My point, however, was that there is something very special and wonderful about psychic interaction, it doesn't reduce to PPs (mana) or "tearing enemies apart." There are many more interesting and convincing books with psychic characters than with magicians, really. Psychic openness, sensations and exchanges are another layer to reality. We could, in some way, try to hint at that even in these computer versions. But if all you're looking for is another way to do bada-bing, bada-boom, then who cares if it's PPs or some other mechanics?
I agree, but the fact is Baldur's Gate and its progeny are not games that have ever cared about that kind of thing, except in the odd dream sequence or voiceover. They don't let you play with those subtleties... only watch or read them. Actual gameplay has always been about the application of violence in creative ways, not much more.
And that's why psionics wouldn't be interesting here. As I said, unless there are the attack modes, defense modes, or contact, or something similar, why bother? But the games aren't fighting games, they are just simple, that's all. The originals from 1998 and thereabouts. Remember how little "content" there was. Almost all of the stuff we are familiar with now, from interface tweaks to all those new creature types and spells and kits, were added later. The originals tried to let us play with subtleties where they could. They let us charm Mulahey and Tranzig and had a whole lot of other charm dialogue, though it still required a reload, and there were some quests with choices to make. It was just simple AD&D, and a simple kind of AD&D. But creative violence - that came later as the central point, in BG2. And now for years players and modders and Beamdog have assumed that this is the pivot everything rotates on, hence all those "builds" and whatnots... But I don't care about any of that. Let's show players how else these games can be played.
But it's true that I'm getting disappointed in people's responses. In the year that I've been a modder I've made some things that turn gameplay on its head or bring back freedom-adding elements from the pen-and-paper games, like initiative, but there were hardly any takers. Well, if they want to play it as a punching match, I'll just finish the current couple of projects and move on. Don't want all that advice from kjeron and Ardanis to go to waste.
You give way too much credit to the original games. The role-playing stuff - character definition by dialogue choices, charming people and getting information not otherwise available, etc. - was, by necessity, rare and completely static. A pale shadow of actual role-playing. Even the environment was too static - the game doesn't let you disintegrate anything other than living beings, it doesn't let your fireballs start fires, etc. And of course it was that way, because there was no feasible way to allow players more creativity in this engine.
The same goes for almost all computer RPGs before or since. How many modern games let you start fires with fireballs wherever you like? Are you going to snub them all on this account? Even Fallout, a paragon CRPG, usually just offered one or two variations on how a quest could be done. What a computer game can give always needs to be complemented with imagination, which is what role-playing is about. Instead...
So all of the creativity was funneled through encounters... how do you use magic, what tactics do you employ for non-magic attacks, and how do you respond to the magic and tactics of your adversaries? Here, the game presented you with nearly endless creativity, and mods increased that by an order of magnitude.
That "endless creativity" is like choosing the sauce for your French fries - and would you like our new chocolate mousse for dessert? Typical, predictable decisions repeated over and over again. You call picking a lock or solving a puzzle or a math problem, in real life, creative? There is only one way to do it, well, sometimes two, but they all have to hone in one the right result, otherwise they don't "work." Well, creativity is not about something "working" or "solutions." It's synthetic, not analytic.
You can't read thoughts, you can't do psychic surgery, you can't levitate or dream travel or astrally project... just like how you can't do those things with magic in this game.
Those things aren't possible fully or in the expected sense, but interpretations are open. Wide open. The art is in transposing: taking one idea in one medium and carrying it over to another in such a way that players will be willing to identify the one with the other. I could tell you how ESP can work with this engine, for example, but I won't. The important thing is for modders to try and bring their imaginations to the projects they make instead of settling for a little more BBQ and can I have pepper and salt, please.
Comments
@chimeric , as fun as rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock psionics sounds, I'm rather leaning towards other mechanics in my mod. As SD said, it might be doable but it is largely complicated and certain offenses are just objectively better the (ones in the right of the table in which they are presented have been checks against all defenses than the ones on the left IIRC).
@subtledoctor , 2E psionics (much like 2E magic to a certain extent) is quite uninspiring. I'd much rather take hints from 3E, Pathfinder, 5E or even 4E (or stuff like Shadowrun/Tyranny/Pillars etc.).
But it's true that I'm getting disappointed in people's responses. In the year that I've been a modder I've made some things that turn gameplay on its head or bring back freedom-adding elements from the pen-and-paper games, like initiative, but there were hardly any takers. Well, if they want to play it as a punching match, I'll just finish the current couple of projects and move on. Don't want all that advice from kjeron and Ardanis to go to waste.