What do you consider cheese?

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Ignoring the difficulty, playing only with charname and Viccy seems interesting.... specially if you're romancing her. Hmm... ideas.

 

I hate soloing fighters for the very reason that getting charmed or mazed is a game ender.

 

@HB:
Even that would be cheese, oddly enough of a higher level. Asking the question again, slightly different this time: Do you think a DM would allow you to play a whole entire campaign over again? Not a friggin' chance.

@Daie:
Some Dominations can be game-ending if cast on the main character. In particular, the ones of the psionic Athasian halflings in the Planar Sphere have given me no end of grief. This is also a form of cheese; one of the few that the computer uses against you.

 

@Hethan- That was the idea. Plus, I'm kicking bottom already, and I'm only in the Underdark.

EDIT: It's not very difficult either. I'm actually finding it difficult to adjust to a full party again. You can keep control of a fight so much easier. Plus, lots of summons help. Viccy summons Elemental Princes, Charname summons PLanetar. Problem solved, and they both level up insanely fast, though not as fast as a solo. Still, I want interaction, dammit!

@Fel- A Lich did it.

 

The robe of vecna, everybody says its a large cheese, atleast for being a merchant bought item. I have the planar sphere mod and took it out of the shop and stuck it on the Vecna's Shade. That guy was a pain to kill.
@Fel
A few well placed fireballs and insect plagues will take care of that no problem.

 

Fel - so what would a DM do if your character died? Unless you had access to some sort of resurrection (which the game engine does not allow if it's the PC), you have no option other than to start from the beginning, or pack up the game and go home.

 

This game can't be compared to PnP. A real dungeon master would never put you up against the kinds of fights that are common place in BG2. Take one of those little Beholder units. The dice rolls alone would take hours. I knew a guy who was a big BG2 fan who tried to DM. He set it up like the fights he'd seen in the game...the players made it half way through a fight with a kobold fight that would be pretty standard in BG before they quit and told him to try again. BG may follow the same mechanical rules as PnP but the similiarities pretty much end there. If you count cheese as anything that a good DM wouldn't do then this whole game is cheese (well except for that little mini-game in watcher's keep).

 

@Daie:
It's was only an example. It's the spell that does it, rather than the creature.

@kip:
Well duh. If you've got a party that works just fine (and you've even got others to take the domination hit for you), but when you're soloing it's a whole other ballgame. You may not have access to those spells, or any at all in some cases, and those are the only times they've given me trouble. But when they do...

@HB:
You really have no clue how PnP works, do you?
/me adds it to the long list
If your character dies, and cannot come back, both of the options you've outlined are some of the stupidest I've ever heard; they're not even options at all. You can't start from the beginning because it's not fair for the other players (or the DM or the dead player, for that matter) to waste their time by redoing everything. And just packing up and going home isn't fair to the player whose character got killed.

What most DMs do in that situation is to have you roll a new character, a level (or more, if appropriate) lower than the party to join up at some point. The story keeps going forward, and noone is inconvenienced; the other players play while you create your character, and you work your way in at a story-appropriate time.

The permanent death of the game engine in fact counts as cheese, because it would never be that stupid that you couldn't just drag the body back to a temple. Certain spells like Disintegrate should maybe have that effect, or severe death (i.e. chunking), but never something so easily reversable - which you can even just wait out! - like Domination.

EDIT: @gg:

That's like saying that I can't compare apples and oranges. While it's an easy thing to say that you can't (and quite a cliche as an example), it is very easy to do. I could compare the color varieties (oranges are orange, while apples come in a wide variety), tastes, etc. Saying that one is better than the other, OTOH, is what you can't do, and what the cliche is really supposed to mean.

The beholder units have been done (by myself), and the dice are not the issue; if your DM is averse to dice rolling then he should ask himself if D&D is really the game for him.

Three things:
1. Those are some pretty insolent players.
2. Trying to play anything directly off of a computer simulation is a mistake. You've got to fly a real plane a few times before they'll make you a pilot, regardless of the amount of time spent in the simulator.
3. Some people just suck at DMing. The kobold fights in BG2 are perfectly reasonable (with the possible exception of Fire Arrows, but that depends on the setting), and if he couldn't pull it off then that's his problem, not the game's.

Actually, one of my gripes is that it doesn't follow (all) the same mechanical rules. But the roleplaying and story makes it somewhat forgivable.

A good DM wouldn't make an involving story? A good DM wouldn't make interesting NPCs? A good DM wouldn't give you challenges scaled to your probable level?

[ June 21, 2006, 23:22: Message edited by: Felinoid ]

 

It would take a very inexperienced/clumsy DM to shower the players with so many overpowered items. New DMs often do that, setting the players against big bad bosses and tipping the scale by giving the players some magic items designed to counter the monsters' abilities...

A computer game like BG2 can't really compare with Pnp. In a real RPG your (and your DM's) imagination is the only limit.

Cheese is that feeling you experience when killing the fun out of the game.

When you play BG you are on your own and what matters is whether you have fun or not: powergaming, challenges, solo RPing... anything goes (a matter of taste really)

 

@Fel
"That's like saying that I can't compare apples and oranges. While it's an easy thing to say that you can't (and quite a cliche as an example), it is very easy to do. I could compare the color varieties (oranges are orange, while apples come in a wide variety), tastes, etc. Saying that one is better than the other, OTOH, is what you can't do, and what the cliche is really supposed to mean."

What you're saying doesn't really touch on what I meant. I might have been unclear. Of course you can compare (in its most basic meaning) BG to PnP. I could also compare it to Final Fantasy, or Resident Evil, or Skating games, or real skating, or an orange (An orange can't be played on a computer, BG is less tasty than an orange and far less nutritious, if you tear apart an orange it still serves its purpose, not so with BG, ect.). The point is that using the same criterion to judge two seperate things doesn't always work and I think BG and PnP are one of those examples.

Of course one beholder wouldn't be unreasonable to roll (they wouldn't exist otherwise), but SIX! Aside from the fact that if my DM dropped me and my friends into a fight like that at the level you are when you face it in BG2 we would tie him down and take turns punching him in the sack, aside from that we definetly wouldn't sit around waiting for him to tabulate a couple dozen dice rolls every round. You can't just say "The DM is god and if you think his campaign is more tedious than fun that's your problem." Furthermore, the game couldn't reasonably be ironman'd the first time through. I think it'd be a pretty safe bet that nobody beat Kangaax the first time they fought him (unless they consulted a guide or thread). How could you? There was no way to know he was going to turn into a demilich and start throwing uninterruptable imprisonment spells! I think the way you can tell that you can't compare the two by the same standards is this. BG2 is a great game but if you took every aspect of it exactly and transposed it into a legit PnP game, it would suck really really REALLY hard.

 

You didn't read what I read about beholders, did you? Well, I suppose I can't blame you; it is on the first page and that would take effort. Anyway, beholders are singular. They're fiercely territorial, and most certainly do not put up with other beholder-kin races. So seeing six of them just chillin' and waiting for you would NEVER happen. Even a hive mother (ALWAYS singular to an entire area) with a brood keeps them separated so that they don't fight.

That's right. Having the players walk out because of a boring campaign is his problem, not yours or BG's. It's hardly fair to blame a computer game someone played for their poor DMing.

No it wouldn't, because, quite simply, doing that would be impossible. As I said, BG2 breaks so very many of the rules of PnP. So incredibly much is off ruleswise (especially on the kits) that it's not even funny. You simply could not take all the mistakes and deliberate re-draftings in BG2 and call it a legit PnP game. That doesn't mean that some things aren't spot on, though, and as such the game can be compared somewhat to PnP. Even the places where it's off can be compared as examples of what is different.

 

Well the game engine also doesn't allow you to 're-roll' a new character when you die, so reloading is the only viable option, and therefore not cheese.

 

You're missing the point. There being no other options does not mean the one you have is not cheesy (a very low level of cheese, but still). And people don't reload only when the main character dies, either. Well, you might not, but you're a...special case.

EDIT: I'd say that's a little of both, really.

[ June 22, 2006, 01:52: Message edited by: Felinoid ]

 

I only reload when my main character dies, but seeing as that is about every five minutes, you might view that as cheesey, or just incompetence.

 

I don't know about you, but when I play a computer RPG, I treat it as a computer RPG and don't have tabletop RPGs in mind. When I play tabletop RPGs, I treat them as tabletop RPGs and don't have computer RPGs in mind.