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Name three things you don't want in a new D&D game

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  • SkatanSkatan Member, Moderator Posts: 5,352

    Skatan said:

    I'm from a country not far from you, @buttercheese, and the DnD's version of the basilisk is the same as I'm used to.

    Shhh, you can't just say that >.>
    I was incorrect. I googled and read up on it and apparently I have been too influenced by modern day games and movies. Had no idea about the cock/rooster part of the original basilisk.
    Buttercheeselolien
  • joluvjoluv Member Posts: 2,137
    I only did light reading, but it looked like as of first century AD, the basilisk was being described as just a serpent, and the rooster stuff didn't come in until hundreds of years later. But then I saw something else saying the Egyptians associated it with the ibis, so maybe that was an earlier myth?
    Buttercheese
  • FardragonFardragon Member Posts: 4,511
    1130210 said:

    1) GENERIC CHARACTERS, (see Neverwinter Nights 2).

    2) No interesting sub-races

    3) Stupid main plot*

    *I hate main plots in AD&D where your main character is just a normal guy. How does that make sense? Baldur's Gate is special to me because the main character is really unique. Also, look at Pillars of Eternity. The main character in that game *is* very unique.

    The PoE protagonist is just a normal guy until he falls into a vat of radioactive waste and gains superpowers.
  • KamigoroshiKamigoroshi Member Posts: 5,870

    You know what I don't want in the game?

    Gorgons as well.



    I mean, not just is the name completely misleading, but they are also annoying to fight.

    I always questioned why they are called "Gorgons" in D&D. Especially since they are pretty accurate depictions of Catoblepas from Ancient Greek mythology. True, its real-life mythos counterpart has a poisonous breath and a gaze of death instead of that petrification thingy. But everything else is basically the same.
    Buttercheese
  • GloatingSwineGloatingSwine Member Posts: 18
    edited August 2016
    Kai Leng

    Now, obviously I'm not talking about a specific tryhard space ninja, but about the trend in DMPC generation that he represents. Also visible in Aria T'Loak, or The Illusive Man. Avoid characters who the writer is deeply and sincerely impressed with, and who they can't help but tell us repeatedly how amazing their character is. Using other NPCs as mouthpieces to tell the player how badass and wicked keen the NPC is and then giving the player absolutely no way to express an opinion with their own character other than agreeing wholeheartedly with the writer.

    The only response the player can give to eg. Aria is to buy in to her attitude. The response the player probably wants to give by the time they meet her is "if the game engine did not prevent me from drawing my shotgun you would be wearing your own brains by now, do not give me any lip".
    KuronaDJKajuruSkatan
  • AdulAdul Member Posts: 2,002
    1. Quest markers
    2. Full voice acting
    3. Linear area design
    mlneveselolien
  • FardragonFardragon Member Posts: 4,511
    Just one more thing I don't want. I have just been replaying the NWN2 OC, and have noticed several occasions where advances in the plot have no relation to what the player has just been doing. For example, I have just failed to prevent a villain obtaining part of an artifiact. I report to the questgiver, and he says something like "nevermind that, we have discovered that a different villian is about to complete an evil ritual in a location that hasn't been mentioned before even though you must have passed it several times, I will mark it on your map."

    Thus there feels like a lack of agency on the part of the player. Complete this unrelated task and we will let you watch the next episode of our non-interactive TV show.
    Skatansemiticgoddess
  • GenderNihilismGirdleGenderNihilismGirdle Member Posts: 1,353
    Three things I don't want in this game:

    1. Beamdog caving to the people pushing their anti-LGBT agendas on a setting that canonically has LGBT characters in in, and has long before Siege of Dragonspear was an apple in Beamdog's collective eye. FR is a setting that lets people play out not only the fantasy of being a mage shooting fireballs, but the fantasy of being who they are or want to be without the vitriol leveled at them in the real world. That's escapism that I like to take part in as the B and the T in LGBT, and I headcanon as many characters as cisgender as I do transgender at this point, knowing full well even if my trans characters were "clockably trans" in the Realms it wouldn't be as big a deal as it is in the real world when I go outside. I like that Ed Greenwood makes a place for people like me in his fantasy that is accepting, and I don't like revisionist fans trying to claim Earth history should supplant the history of the Realms. Stick to the established lore of the setting and the creator's intentions if you're working in the Realms, and give all of us some companions and NPCs we can identify with, rather than just those the bigots of this world can identify with.
    2. Full voice acting. Just a smattering gives us an idea of how they speak and quirks of their speech, and then the writers aren't constrained by VA budgets, which produces better writing.
    3. Gotta agree with the OP on their point 3, no multiple camera angles or first person views, keep it isometric. I really liked Daigle's idea of using the Divinity: Original Sin (or D:OS2!) engine and then locking the camera so it replicates that BG feel, that would make a beautiful game.
    shawneNonnahswritersemiticgoddessBelleSorciere
  • shawneshawne Member Posts: 3,239

    Stop trying to justify your desire to do violence to LGBT people in a fantasy game by appeals to historical realism. Fantasy with a heavy emphasis on historical realism doesn't even need to share every single facet of real-world historical realism, the only genre that does is alternate history fiction and FR (and Baldur's Gate) is not that. Your arguments are disgusting, and if you can abstract away the historical violence people like me have felt until it becomes something you want as an option in a video game so bad you'll make repeated arguments for it in a fantasy game that does not share that history of violence, there's something seriously wrong with you.

    What'd I say? They always tell on themselves.
    GenderNihilismGirdlesemiticgoddessBelleSorciereConjurerDragon
  • ConjurerDragonConjurerDragon Member Posts: 110
    edited September 2016

    ...
    Because it's fantasy, and the fantasy of Ed Greenwood doesn't include burning LGBT people at the stake because, unlike your fantasy...and that says a lot about you as a person, same as Ed Greenwood wanting to including his real life friends, including the ones who aren't straight, in the RPG world he created says a lot about the compassion and love in him that he always has win out in his campaign setting.

    So you are saying that the fantasy of fighting, murdering and stealing your way through the realms e.g. in BG EE as a Bhaalspawn, wading through the corpses of literally thousands of human villains and monsters for reasons like a quest, wealth, robbing them blind or even without any reason, and - if playing an evil group - other NPC’s too, is good and fine for you and is even cherished by having Steam achievements for killing 1000 creatures of all sorts, but once someone enters the scene who states that he belongs to a special group he is immune from that same treatment that all others can face? Are the people you try to protect from being treated like all other humans or fantasy beings in games so fragile and unable to live that they have to be treated like immature children and be exempt from being treated like everyone else in a game?

    Stop trying to justify your desire to do violence to LGBT people in a fantasy game by appeals to historical realism.
    I don’t have the specific desire to do violence to whatever daily abbrevation is the one used for special groups. I just don’t want them to be left out and instead be included in the story of games like everyone else. If everyone else can be stolen from, cheated, killed by the PC, then not being able to do the same to special people means excluding them from the story and setting them apart doing so. I would oppose your attempt to support a form of Apartheid in games for any group of people regardless if it’s because of colour or your own definitions.

    Fantasy with a heavy emphasis on historical realism doesn't even need to share every single facet of real-world historical realism, the only genre that does is alternate history fiction and FR (and Baldur's Gate) is not that.
    Sure, a fantasy setting is not historical Earth. You can say that nothing that historically exists on Earth *needs* to be part of a fantasy setting. Not even LGBT people if you think about your own argument.

    Your arguments are disgusting, and if you can abstract away the historical violence people like me have felt until it becomes something you want as an option in a video game so bad you'll make repeated arguments for it in a fantasy game that does not share that history of violence, there's something seriously wrong with you.
    Really? Violence in a fantasy game against fictional characters triggers you *but only if they share a trait that is part of yourself*, while the same violence against other fictional characters in the same game that are different from you is embraced as being fun and part of the game by you? Seems like you are something like a fictional racist and bigot who lacks empathy for other fictional human and other beings then, if I may do the same level of guessing your mind that you tried.

    I don’t mind if a game allows either to treat special people in the same way as everyone else (e.g. they can be killed too) or if a game doesn’t even have some of those people (according to your own argument a fantasy setting has no need to share any part of the real world).
    However if they are included I feel that they should be really included and treated as good or bad as everyone else. Only in that way would they become part of the gameworld and the story and not stand out as signposts advertising something that seems not to fit in the game because it does not follow the same rules as the other NPC’s in the game.





    semiticgoddess
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903

    @ConjurerDragon: I don't like the way @GenderNihilismGirdle made that point--it's very accusatory and unkind, to say the least--but for what it's worth, nobody here is advocating that LGBT characters should be treated any differently from others. Nobody is claiming that Mizhena and the like should be immune to the violence that is a standard part of the D&D world.

    In fact, @GenderNihilismGirdle was arguing the precise opposite. In a nutshell:
    1. It's true that LGBT folks got discriminated against in our own history.
    2. D&D can reflect our history (for example, premodern speech patterns), but it it doesn't have to (for example, high literacy rates in Faerun).
    3. Therefore, it's fine for LGBT folks not to be treated differently from straight people in D&D.

    It's worth pointing out that this doesn't relate to anything @ConjurerDragon has said. He or she hasn't advocated for including anti-LGBT sentiment in D&D. I've only heard one person advocate that.

    Siege of Dragonspear, to its credit, neither contains homophobic sentiment (there's no option to treat trans Mizhena any differently than cis-gender Belegarm), nor does it shield LGBT people from violence (see Dorn, Glint, and Hexxat).

    As for me, I wouldn't like to see anti-LGBT sentiment in D&D for the same reason I wouldn't like to see racism in D&D: because it feels too real. Unlike people killing each other with swords, that's something that actually happens in my own world.
    GenderNihilismGirdleNonnahswriterSkatan
  • shawneshawne Member Posts: 3,239
    edited September 2016
    Arguing with bigots is really a complete and utter waste of time, but hell, let's try it one more time:

    So you are saying that the fantasy of fighting, murdering and stealing your way through the realms e.g. in BG EE as a Bhaalspawn, wading through the corpses of literally thousands of human villains and monsters for reasons like a quest, wealth, robbing them blind or even without any reason, and - if playing an evil group - other NPC’s too, is good and fine for you and is even cherished by having Steam achievements for killing 1000 creatures of all sorts, but once someone enters the scene who states that he belongs to a special group he is immune from that same treatment that all others can face? Are the people you try to protect from being treated like all other humans or fantasy beings in games so fragile and unable to live that they have to be treated like immature children and be exempt from being treated like everyone else in a game?

    So, there's this thing called "facts" that's kind of tripping you up.

    1) All those thousands of villains and monsters you kill? Typically attack you first. Even if they don't, you have a reason to kill them - a quest, wealth, items, etc. If you don't have that? The game punishes you by dropping your Rep. You have no more reason to attack Mizhena than you would any other merchant, except if you assume bigotry because she's trans. Which really says more about you than it does about her, Ed Greenwood or D&D.

    2) You can actually kill Mizhena, because she's just like any other NPC in the game. You'll get a Rep drop, and the rest of the camp will go hostile. But of course, that's not what you want. What you want is to be rewarded for it. You want the world to react as if you did a good thing. And for that, you can take your faux-concern and your BS arguments and log right the hell off.
    GenderNihilismGirdlesemiticgoddessBelleSorciere
  • ConjurerDragonConjurerDragon Member Posts: 110
    edited September 2016
    shawne said:

    Arguing with bigots is really a complete and utter waste of time,

    That is so true. But I will read your post regardless of your attitude.

    So, there's this thing called "facts" that's kind of tripping you up.
    Are you aware that setting something in " " gives it the meaning that your "facts" are not really facts?

    1) All those thousands of villains and monsters you kill? Typically attack you first.
    Often, yes sure. But how often depends on how you play the game.
    Playing e.g. anyone having thief levels in BG EE it’s within character to go pickpocketing or emptying chests in houses to raise some funds. The just citizens that go hostile when they discover your failed attempts at stealing or removing their valuables only react to you when they attack.

    Even if they don't, you have a reason to kill them - a quest, wealth, items, etc. If you don't have that? The game punishes you by dropping your Rep. You have no more reason to attack Mizhena than you would any other merchant, except if you assume bigotry because she's trans. Which really says more about you than it does about her, Ed Greenwood or D&D.
    That is a very narrow view of the world.
    Nearly every despisable action can be justified by reasons. Those reasons don’t need to be very reasonable or make sense but people actually act upon them in games and even in real life.
    Racial hatred between elves and orcs, dwarves and orogs, dark elves and any surface dweller, political reasons when soldiers of Amn fight those of Baldur’s Gate because of some rumours and placed hints of invasion, religious hatred between devout followers of fictional churches that are so deeply opposeed to each other that they would harm their opponent in every way and despise the way of life the other church preaches (e.g. a follower of Gruumsh certainly would not cherish the life of a follower of a LG deity) or the cultists in Ulgoth’s beard who would sacrifice *anyone* not sharing their view of the world. In practical, general terms people tend to fear and fight everything different.

    That’s o.k. to you, but you want a special group to be
    - part of the gameworld
    - make their specialty public, and at the same time
    - be exempt from being loathed because of their specialty by other members of the gameworld that don’t share their specialty.

    To give an example you wouldn’t mind having Viconia jailed for life or killed on sight just because she is a darkelf from the underdark (that’s part of the game and the setting), but heaven forbid anyone lifting a finger because of a Paladin upholding the godgiven virtues of Family and Order assaulting a group of people that have betrayed that picture of fantasy society by porking trees in the night or whatever suits them.

    2) You can actually kill Mizhena, because she's just like any other NPC in the game. You'll get a Rep drop, and the rest of the camp will go hostile. But of course, that's not what you want. What you want is to be rewarded for it. You want the world to react as if you did a good thing. And for that, you can take your faux-concern and your BS arguments and log right the hell off.
    What is good in a fantasy setting? A LG PC would certainly give a very different answer to a CE one. And the gods in FR would give very different answers too. Even the darkest evil creatures certainly would not describe themselves as the scum of the earth and vile but being misunderstood and their actions justified and good for their vision of the world.
  • GenderNihilismGirdleGenderNihilismGirdle Member Posts: 1,353
    The things people rabidly intent on doing violence to us in video games will equivocate with transness to press their agenda, I tell ya...and the demand that their in-game violence be excused from the norms established by previous games in the series as regards in-game penalties! Yikes. Trans folks can't be "special" until someone wants to slaughter one without penalty, then they get to be the exception to all the other NPCs you take a rep hit for killing...

    I'm out of this particular mess and the gross implications on the one side of it. Anyone who still wants to get venomous e-spittle on them can wade in as they like, I'll be over here standing beyond the outskirts of the ranged attack radius tho
  • NimranNimran Member Posts: 4,875
    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.
    Buttercheese
  • recklessheartrecklessheart Member Posts: 692
    What I don't want:

    1. Lesbian Vampires
    2. An overabundance of gimmicky jokes, and constant joke-y dialogue options that are not in the least bit immersive
    3. Monstrous races as joinable NPCs
  • JumboWheat01JumboWheat01 Member Posts: 1,028
    Nimran said:

    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.

    Telling people on the internet that something isn't a big deal suddenly makes it into the biggest deal the internet has ever seen. It's a weird place like that.
    NimranSkatanRaduziel
  • NimranNimran Member Posts: 4,875

    Nimran said:

    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.

    Telling people on the internet that something isn't a big deal suddenly makes it into the biggest deal the internet has ever seen. It's a weird place like that.
    Oh no, what have I done?!
    semiticgoddessSkatan
  • BelleSorciereBelleSorciere Member Posts: 2,108
    Nimran said:

    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.

    It actually kind of is a big deal, esp, to people it directly affects.

    It might not be a big deal to you. If so? Congratulations. Now move on, since it clearly holds no interest for you.
    semiticgoddessGenderNihilismGirdle
  • mf2112mf2112 Member, Moderator Posts: 1,919
    edited September 2016


    That’s o.k. to you, but you want a special group to be
    - part of the gameworld
    - make their specialty public, and at the same time
    - be exempt from being loathed because of their specialty by other members of the gameworld that don’t share their specialty.

    Do you know of anything canon that indicates that trans folks (of any race) are a "special group" in Faerun? Is there anything in Faerunian history that indicates a reason why trans folks (of any race) would be loathed in Faerun? Any books, writings, blogs approved by Wizards of the Coast? If not then I would have to say that your arguments there don't seem to have solid basis.
    semiticgoddessGenderNihilismGirdle
  • JumboWheat01JumboWheat01 Member Posts: 1,028
    Nimran said:

    3. Perpetually dark and gloomy atmosphere. I prefer games with some levity rather than constant doom and gloom (again, not really a problem for Beamdog, as they have proven their willingness to include funny moments in their content).

    This is something I wouldn't mind seeing in more games in general. A lot of games are dark and grim these days, something needs to exist as a mood breaker. Like Snarky Hawke in Dragon Age 2. The world's going to crap, but he's going to keep a smile on his face.

    Even better if, like the example above, they make it a more "optional" choice. Let the grimdarkers stay grimdark, let others who want something lighter have something lighter.
    deltagoNimranGenderNihilismGirdle
  • mlnevesemlnevese Member, Moderator Posts: 10,214
    deltago said:

    Nimran said:

    Nimran said:

    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.

    Telling people on the internet that something isn't a big deal suddenly makes it into the biggest deal the internet has ever seen. It's a weird place like that.
    Oh no, what have I done?!
    It's no big deal.
    This was pure evil... Congratulations! :)
    mf2112lolien
  • deltagodeltago Member Posts: 7,811
    mlnevese said:

    deltago said:

    Nimran said:

    Nimran said:

    *casts Facepalm Self* How many times will people continue to bring this up? It's really not that big of a deal.

    Telling people on the internet that something isn't a big deal suddenly makes it into the biggest deal the internet has ever seen. It's a weird place like that.
    Oh no, what have I done?!
    It's no big deal.
    This was pure evil... Congratulations! :)
    Yes yes, I am the most evil person on the forum. No need to remind me every time I concoct a diabolical message.
    mlneveselolien
  • NimranNimran Member Posts: 4,875

    Nimran said:

    3. Perpetually dark and gloomy atmosphere. I prefer games with some levity rather than constant doom and gloom (again, not really a problem for Beamdog, as they have proven their willingness to include funny moments in their content).

    This is something I wouldn't mind seeing in more games in general. A lot of games are dark and grim these days, something needs to exist as a mood breaker. Like Snarky Hawke in Dragon Age 2. The world's going to crap, but he's going to keep a smile on his face.

    Even better if, like the example above, they make it a more "optional" choice. Let the grimdarkers stay grimdark, let others who want something lighter have something lighter.
    One of my favorite lines in that game was:

    When Hawke found the viscount's son's corpse and the viscount was grieving over his son's death, his line was "Well, it can't get much worse. Not tonight anyway. It's really late."
    mf2112JumboWheat01mlneveseGenderNihilismGirdle
  • JumboWheat01JumboWheat01 Member Posts: 1,028
    I dunno, have you ever heard the lines Snarky Hawke gives after that scene if he's alone at the time? Look it up, trust me, it's a thing of glory.
    Nimran
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