Experience with D&D before playing BG2

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Did not even know D&D existed before stumbling across this place in search for a walkthrough for BG2. The AC and THAC0 thing was a bit confusing at first - normally higher is better, but here lower was better - but looking at the differences between various armors it wasn't hard to figure out how BG rated the AC thing. The rest wasn't that hard. I did then and still do now rely mostly on melee combat and consequently my first character was a fighter: you hit stuff and it dies. Not overly complicated as such.

My first try at a magic user was a solo sorcerer. I don't like to micro manage everything, so in a party, mages were generally only throwing rocks or sharpened objects at people, so in order to reduce the micro management, I did away with the party. And did away with the memorising of spells through a spellbook, which I find rather bothersome. Spell selection I mostly did by the guidance of some of the posts here and some guides. The rest I learned through playing for myself and trying things out.

The whole HD thing is still rather opaque to me, though. They should've either not mentioned it at all, or have made it so that you could somehow glean in-game what a monster's HD is.

As an aside, it is interesting how many people in this thread have been members of SP for a long time but have really low post counts. I guess this thread is somehow very successful at drawing out the lurkers among us

 

There was no need to show in game the HD of the various creatures. You only need to know this for a few spells as it is. By showing how badly wounded a creature was from physical damage, ex... Badly Wounded, you could gauge the HD from there. If you dealt 50 damge to a creature and it's status was showing as Injured, it was pretty easy to approximate you were halfway there. It would be obvious that your spell that only affects 4 HD creatures wouldn't work on that creature. Though I can say that I never looked in a creature file to see if they were consistent with the PnP game when assigning various HD to the creatures. I would think they stayed close to the PnP game.

 

I agree that there is no need to display HD of creatures anywhere in the game to show their strength. You'll find that out the hard way anyway. My gripe with it is that it is used in the spell description, but it not used anywhere else in the game, nor is it self-explanatory. I think it was at least half a year before I even learned that HD stood for Hit Dice. Which doesn't explain anything either, but whatever.

Interesting that you chose jRPGs as an example of intuitiveness. I've only ever played a bit of Final Fantasy 8 (I think, it was the one after the curiously popular one), but intuitive was not what I would use to describe the gameplay mechanics. There have been few games where I've been even anywhere near as confused as to what the chuffing hell I was doing than in doing combat in that game. Even though it is one of the most popular jRPG series there is.

 

Do HD dependent spells function in the same way as HP dependent spells? I thought (though obviously not an expert) that HD was a starting stat as such. I know a dragon will fall to Power word: Kill if it's injured enough, can it fall to Death spell or can that never affect it?

Even if it can, there's still no way of judging starting HD.

 

It also took me a while to understand what HD was, but I never took it against the game. Not knowing everything about it was what had kept me hooked in the first place. Considering the stuff that has come to pass because BG2 wasn't as simple or direct as a game like Diablo 2, then that kind of "user unfriendliness" is not a bad thing.

I don't think trying to "standardize" everything is healthy if what you really want is "new" stuff, "unique" stuff, "special" stuff, "challenging" stuff. Nope, there should be limits on that.

 

My experience was limited to just BG1 beforehand as well. However, the relative simplicity of the first did not prepare me in the least bit for the higher level spells and as a result BG2 was far more difficult than it should have been.

At the same time, that is part of the fun. Just learning the games was exciting.

My favorite party then too, an Avenger, Minsc, Valygar, Jaheira, Aerie, and Imoen... I say favorite party only because having 5 people cast 'Armor of Faith' (or whatever it is) was REALLY cool looking

 

I've actually used BG2 to figure out how stuff worked in PS:T, so I'd rate it quite user friendly. It was almost fun going "Wait, what, how do I stop Confusion? Dispell trial and error!" or trying every weapon I had until something hit the other side. Oh and the revelation of just how useful Haste actually was...

Only realised what 1d6 and 1d12 meant when I saw how dice bots work. and I still have to remind myself what THAC0 and HD and the like stand for...

Planescape splats helped with the basics (at least the fun ones).

 

HD, Hit Die, was 2nd Edition term or method used to determine the Hit points of creatures. PC hps were level based, creatures were racially based. Ogres, for exeample, were a 4+3 HD creature. Basically that meant that they recieved 4d8+3 Hit points at creation, meaning they would range from 7-35 HPs. Goblins, IIRC, were 1-1 HD, meaning they received 1d8-1 hps. Though 0 starting hps was an impossibility, obviously. Dragons were in the teens to twenty HD ranges, dependant upon age group. The Tarrasque had a crazy high HD, I don't remember it offhand, though somehting like 50 comes to mind, it's been a while.

If a BG2 spell was dependant upon HD, like "Sleep", (which I believe capped out at 4+3 HD) and you were fighting creatures that perished after taking 10 HPs of damage, well, that tells you something. If they perished after 50 HPs of damage, that also tells you something. It was easy to figure out. Spells that were dependant upon creature HPs have nothing to do with HD. Like the Power Word spells. Though they were also easy to determine. If you did 60 points of damage and the creature was showing as "Badly Wounded/Injured," it was going to drop at 80-100 pts of damage. Just use the damage taken descriptor on the creature to figure it out. It just took a little patience for those not in the know. So, no, the Death Spell wouldn't affect a Dragon, even if injured, but a Power Word could.

Personally, I like that part of new crpgs. Figuring out the game mechanics is part of the fun.

 

Thanks for the explanation, Blades.

I didn't really get the mechanics behind HD and HP before now.

Not that that has prevented me from playing a D&D based CRPG.

But agreed, figuring out the game mechanics of CRPG's is fun.

 

I've always enjoyed it. I didn't really understand that fella's stance about everything being so horrible with no info listed to walk you thru the entire game. Who needs it? Tinkering around with Wizardry 8's system was great fun!

 

I don't take it against the game either, I just think that it's bad form to use abbreviations and mechanics and never once even vaguely explain what it actually means. And that is not limited to just game mechanics.

This has nothing to do with simple vs. complex games either. It's not like I'd only played simple games or games where everything is chewed out for you. A more correct comparison than to Diablo 2 would be to compare it to Fallout. In Fallout I never had the experience that there was something in the game that I just could not figure out in-game.

If it was only hitpoint related, then why didn't they just tell us that? That would've been a lot easier to understand. I can figure out the 1d8 dice thing myself, 4 HD is a lot more obscure. This is also the first time that I see an actual explanation of what the term actually means. I had no idea that it was related to the creatures hitpoints, either. Not for any particular lack of patience, though; I treated those spells for what they were: magic. Sometimes it worked, and most of the time it didn't.

I'm not entirely sure on one thing in your explanation, though. Is HD a creature property, which is always the same for the same creature, or is it based on the current hitpoints?

These kind of mechanics should clear to understand, as they are the basics. Other mechanics, of the cheesy kind, have my interest. Project Image cheese. Robe of Vecna + Amulet of Power + Time Stop + Improved Alacrity kind of cheese.

These things are like bunny-hopping and rocket jumping in Quake: a lot of fun

 

Yes, it is always a non-variable creature property that is the same for all creatures of that type. In a creature's profile from the Monster's Compendium sourcebook, they would list somehting similar to the following format. This would be an example from the creatures page.

Creature Name: PC Eater
AC: 4
Thaco: 17
Hit Dice: 4
# of AT: 2 claws or 1 bite
Damage: 1d4/14d(claws) or 2d6 bite
Habitat: Forest/Jungle
etc....

The HD of 4 in my example is for a generic PC Eater in this case. It was up to the Dungeon Master to decide the actual hitpoints, using 4d8 as the basis. So the computer would randomly generate the HP from the formula for 4d8(4-32). If your your spell only affected creatures with less than 20 hps, some PC Eaters could be affected, but some might not, depending on their HP total. If your spell affected all creatures of 4 HD or less, all the PC Eaters would be affected. HD and HP can be a little confusing at 1st, but it really is simple to grasp. I'm sure the game developer assumed a smidgeon of game mechanic knowledge from the players. D&D rules are very accessible for everyone to see in the gaming world.

 

Not always. Fallout was complicated enough without having terms like HD, which you only had to test a few times. Perhaps if it had been something like an unexplained"SM" (spell memorization) instead of HD, then things would have been different.
In hindsight though, even if someone told me what HD meant I doubt it would have helped. It would if I had known the HD of the monsters I'd be fighting, which I don't. I'd still need to test it out - which is conveniently what I should have been doing anyway.
I don't even think keeping those terms had been intentional. Looked more like it was something carried over from BG1. I was also frustrated with terms like HD when I first played, but only for a little while.

Both. It is determined from the start and it should stay that way. Unique monsters will most likely have better stats though. A d8 is the standard HP gain for monsters apparently (if you take character leveling as an analogy), so 1d8 is one hit die (lol) and hints to a level 1-ish creature. There are exceptions, probably.

 

I thought from the above you were saying that HD based spells were influenced by the current HP of the monster. Hence why I was getting confused, I thought I had the thing worked out.

I've no problem with games having hidden depths if you try new things but I do think they should explain the basic mechanics of things and if you need to work something out you should be able to. As a comparison, Final Fantasy games have included spells that will kill monsters with a level divisible by 3 or 4. Level is a well known concept in the game, not like HD. Also, the low level 'Scan' spell let you figure out what level a monster was as well as providing you with other information about it. There's no equivalent for BG short of buying the tabletop books. I remembered being very surprised Death spell affected Umber Hulks, it didn't work on plenty of monsters I would have considered tougher.

Disgaea is a good example of a game which includes some pretty funky features if you experiment and play around. They're not basic things though and once you've discovered them it is clear what they are.

 

Old timer here, having both Dungeon Mastered several longish D&D tabletop campaigns (in the late 80's) and played most of the Gold Box games.

Figuring out the system is half of the fun with new games, although I DO prefer games that are complex enough that you kinda need at least Excel to figure the tougher parts out. See for example the various DPS spreadsheets for World of Warcraft. D&D is peanuts, but here it's simplicity over accuracy since it's designed for tabletop play, not for computers.

 

Actually the concept of Hit Die was in the original DnD ruleset (the graybox, first edition, or whatever you call it). It is core concept along with saving throws and hit points.

 

It was all explained in the manuals. Which were included on the CD.
Historically, that is where most things were explained in games. It was only in recent years with the prevalence of CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs that it became possible to include such information within the game. Even then, most companies did the in-depth explanation of things in the manual, and just provided the bare minimum on-screen to "encourage" people to buy the game instead of pirating it. That way, if you pirated it you'd be confused and get less enjoyment since you wouldn't have the documentation to explain things. It was only recently when companies decided to cut costs by including the manuals as PDFs on the media instead of including a printed manual that we started to expect things in-game.
Historically it just wasn't possible due to space and memory limitations, and hasn't completely caught on yet.

 

i had never played d&d before playing the bg games. I figured the stuff out by myself though. It really isn`t that complex.

 

Yep, nice and easy is D&D. Imagine tyring to figure out a Rolemaster pc game, with no prior experience? That would be a definite challenge.

 

Wouldn't the game take care of all the tables and critical hits?