Bigbies

[*MadPorthos]

QUOTE (The_Tarot @ Aug 21 2010, 12:43 PM)
1) Non-casters scale better with available equipment.

2) In a setting in which magic is as common and routinely used as is putting on pants in the morning. and in a PW where money is pretty easy to get a hold of.

1) You probably mean only "pure" casters without melee capabilities, because that is very much untrue. Anything that helps a non-caster compete simply makes a hybrid melee-caster even more powerful. That armor can be worn by clerics, bards and EKs as well, which then have their own spells AND the immunity.

2) I think magic and gold have become too common and easy to get hold of then. We planned this place as a low-gold world, hence the 200 gold limit on merchants, but it seems this has failed spectacularly.

I've some experience of servers where gold is truly out of control... where 40th level characters, in NWN1 servers have 10, 20 million gold... and custom magic items can cost 8 million in "creation costs" alone, plus gain curses and negative effects. A horrible amount of immunities were around too. I'm not there anymore. I'm here.

When my 30th level characters struggle to have 5000 -15000 gold, due to costs, I'd say actually you succeeded. Yes, some merchants have 200,000 or more gold, but it's precisely because they are merchants and are having the earnings of dozens of others funnelled into thier coffers. Same with enchanters, thier income CAN be phenomenal, because they have goods that many want. This isn't a failure of gold limiting, it's an economy. Maybe not ideal, maybe imbalanced, but it actually works close to what the dungeon masters guides of PNP say it should work as... the increasing costs of maintenance, purchasing magic items, spell research etc, should eat up much of an adventurers funds, but eventually as the adventurers get to be 20th level, more... they build capital.

In PNP, players then spend that on planar travel, more magic, titles, homes, castles... maybe thier family or the like. Here, it accumulates. Especially if you're an merchant. Remember, buy low, sell high, can't go wrong. If you feel the 200 gold limit failed, I'd say what failed was that you can't extinguish greed, even for imaginary gold. The plausibility of every item, even the greatest value, selling for 200 gold to merchants, strains belief, but even more odd is seeing that people do just sell them for that... you can find great items folks don't bother to sell, cause a merchant says, I got a dozen of them purple bastard swords, I'll only give you 500...

But that's digressing. Point is, you succeeded better than most have a right to expect.

[*The_Tarot]

This isn't a NWN1 Server where players can have 10 million gold on hand. You don't need that much here. Finding an enchanter to make you things usually isn't expensive.
and after that. What else is money good for? Consumables.

If it had some other uses, if money had more value. Then I can understand the problem with equipping non-casters with tons of consumables.
.
During the Carnival the "Random Magic Item Creator" was introduced to siphon all this gold people have been stockpiling (It also gave money some value. People wanted to gamble!) Mostly from merchants, Regardless, The first day the NPC was put in. He siphoned one million from the server. I'm curious about how much he took total after the following days.

5000-15000 is usually where my character stands as well (currently 4500 or so) and yet still can afford the luxuries of having consumables. Including stacks of various backup scrolls, 100 +10 Healkits, Potions of Sequencers and the like. He's no enchanter, nor merchant.

Junk items/scrolls drop frequently enough to fund anyone.

All characters in the Planescape setting are faced with one reality: Adapt or die.
and that is done pretty well here too.

If magic is the only way to stay alive in certain situations then it's going to be utilized by both casters and non-casters alike. If a planeswalking solo-Fighter with no magic what so ever is hopping around the Cage, and hears chant about people frequently falling into a Portal leading to the Elemental Plane of Water and drowning. He'd be damn stupid not to go to an potion brewer and get himself a Water Breathing potion as back up. The same can be said about Pit Fiends using Bigbies.

[*Ravel's Heart]

A long time ago on another server, I wrote a long post comparing a pure caster with pure fighter solely as a melee character. Buffed and equipped, the mage had a higher attack bonus, higher damage, higher AC, DR, and higher saves. The fighter had a slight advantage in hp, but that was about it.

It was a really long post. I have to idea why I bothered with it. It seemed important at the time.

Anyway, the reason for it is fairly straightforward. As a broad generalization, when casters advance, they get spells. As fighters advance, they get feats.

The main difference between the two is that you can have a dozen spell effects active simultaneously. They stack. Many of the fighters' best feats do not.

I have never really understood why that is, either. Why couldn't a level 25 fighter knock someone down and still get his other five attacks for the round, but on a prone target? If he has improved combat expertise, isn't he always a combat expert? Why can't he have ICE active, and be in parry mode? Why can't his parry attacks be knockdown attempts (maybe with a higher level of difficulty)?

That comes down to a decisions made by WotC, and I don't have a real problem with it, honestly. On the one hand, I can understand people's frustration with it, but on the other, no one is forcing anyone to play any race or class combination. If you are not having fun playing class X for whatever reason, don't play it.

Another thing I once did (again for reasons that retrospectively seem unfathomable) was to figure out the number of possible race and class combinations there are in NWN2. The number was well over 100 million, or far more than anyone could ever play. With that much freedom, it seems reasonable that you can find something that you'll have fun with, and that is the entire point of this game.

So, get out there! Have fun! Create! Interact! Create strange, awkward combinations that no one in their right minds would create. Why not?

This is especially true in view of the fact the CvC is so rare here. Despite some of my PCs best efforts, I can almost never get anyone to "drop the gloves", so to speak. As far as I am concerned, that is a great thing.

Oh, and as a reminder...



...casters need consumables, too!