Balancing issues...

I have seen a number of posts where people talk about how they create parties and when they will re-load games. Some of this in respect to new content I added and the difficulty level involved.

So I thought I would put up a quick note about how I am working to balance the game as I go along.

1) First of all, death is enevitable.

Some of your party should be dying in battles. If you will not accept a death here or there then you probably should avoid my mod as I am trying to get it balanced so that people in your party WILL die. That is the whole point.

You die, you get resurrected, you lose experience... that is SUPPOSSED to happen. If you re-load every time someone in your party dies then you are pretty much just cheating (which of course you are welcome to do, it is after all your game, though I would argue that you are cheating yourself because constantly re-loading when something doesn't go your way just means that the game gets easier and easier as you go on... you in-effect screw up the balance for the later game).

The economy and balance needs you to die and pay for services like ressurrection.. lossing exp also helps to keep the game balanced as you don't level up too fast then.

The best battles won are the ones where in the end you only have 1 or 2 of your party left standing. Those are the tough battles, you lick your wounds, get your people resurrected and move on.

2) Super heroes don't belong in TOEE. I see a lot of people playing with PCs that are basically super heroes with amazing stats. If that is what you want to do then fine, but really you are just cheating yourself by making the game easier and easier...

With this in mind I have re-balanced most of the NPCs that can join your party. A lot of them have stats that are of the super hero variety. No NPC with such amazingly high stats would be joining your party! They would be leading their own parties or sitting in their castles counting their massive piles of loot.

The party I use to test everything is generated by point buy, and that is the system I use for NPCs (though I often fudge and give them a few extra points, not a lot like Troika, but a few).

3) The original game was not a 3.5 game. It used a different rule set, and you can't expect to follow every letter of the original module. Some things NEED to be changed from the original as they are over powered in the 3.5 world.


Anyway, there you have it... you are welcome to play TOEE anyway that you want, and this isn't meant as an attack on anyone that plays this way...

I just wanted people to know where I was coming from when I made a lot of my changes or added new content.

- Livonya

 

I haven't counted the times the cleric has saved Elmo's dumb butt. He takes an awful beating and usually comes thru. I've went to the Inn to heal up and it took 11 days to heal. I've went back to Hommlet, the tower at the moathouse or the safehouse in Nulb with a party barely half-alive. What am I doing wrong?

 

A mod for me = house rules. I play ironman when not testing so having a wipeout is very annoying. But I wouldn't replay so much if it wasn't (I played for 18 hours before I beat Livonya's improved assassin with an ironman team. Clearing out the moathouse every time to die so quickly got a little painful. But the payoff was superb...)

As long as a mod doesn't feel like IVAN (roguelike where the point is to kill the PC) then I'm cool with it.

Livonya's mod specifically is awesome. I think, personally, we're now seeing more flesh on the bones of how this game was meant to be.

 

Liv i love what your doing and enjoy it being harder. i have to clerics and a druid in my party and they spend most of the battles healing people which is how i make it through the tough ones. if the npcs couldnt really hurt me and maybe even kill me it wouldnt be worth playing. though the revenge group usally comes for me at 4th level and i avoid them untill im at least 5th if not 6th cause they are that hard. keep it up Liv

 

Damn, now that is hardcore.

My goal is to try to get as many issues resolved as possible so I can play it in Ironman, but never using resurect is even crazier than Ironman!

- Livonya

 

Well...

...I only do the re-load thing if there is some catastrophic glitch that goofs up my game. Like something that just pisses me off...a character running the long way 'round on a move that runs him into the enemy (50 or so bugbears)when I'm making for the exit in a spell-less and wounded state. Otherwise, I take it and resurrect if needed. Sometimes, I think, well...I can go into just one more area...and damn! I get whooped. My fault, my consequences. But if I'm trying to rest and 17 copper dragons show up, well, that just ain't fair!

 

I'd be more willing to accept character deaths if the game didn't over-penalize the XP of characters who are ressurected. Being Raised should drop you to the halfway point of your previous level. ToEE drops you to the halfway point of the level before that. So you're losing an additional level's worth of XP more than is required by the rules.

My PNP RPG experience has always been if a character dies, unless it is in the service of the story, something went wrong. The player(s) made a mistake(s). If you make things too deadly, your players worry more about power-gaming and less about actually role-playing. I've only had one TPK in all my years of DMing and that was the party making foolish tactical decisions coupled with really bad dice rolling.

On the flipside, I make ressurection tougher to come by, as the party has to locate someone capable and willing to cast the spell in addition to paying for it. (And most priests don't have thousands and thousands of gp worth of diamonds just lying around for the material component, either.) If a party member dies, bringing them back is often a quest of it's own.

Of course, the role-playing aspect in PNP is missing from ToEE. In PNP you lose a character with a personality, history and goals where as in ToEE a collection of sprites falls over and stops moving. The latter isn't much of a tragedy.

Obviously, though, your mod, your rules.

 

To me, save/reload is cheesy.

But it's also the only way, sometimes, since the computer isn't a "true" DM.

I guess it depends on how deeply you're role-playing when you play. Personally, the fun factor in CRPGs for me is when they're treated as strategic combat simulators (which would help explain my rabid, intense interest in all things TOEE -- some folks, snottier than I care to be, have described this game as a really excellent combat simulation demo; and not an RPG).

I'll basically reload when I just can't get past a certain point without getting obliterated, or when the "hassle" of dragging-ass back to town to "reset" the party with some losses is just more chore than fun factor.

My 2c,
-- d

 

F9/f12

Quicksave/reset/reload, etc seems to be a common feature in a lot of games. In my wargames, step on a mine , your dead. Try again. I think most everyone uses F12/Quicksave a lot to keep track of the game. If you find yourself using F9 a lot then there might be a problem. The party maybe not strong enough for the task. If you have to do an encounter 4-5 times before you luck out and get by, hmmm. It's a real pain to replace dead pc and npc's on a continual basis. I seldom lose anyone now, but i've been playing the game for 7 months. A new player would have a tough time with Liv1.5 right from the gitgo. F9/F12? Just call it and evil necessity.

 

The ability to save and reload is one of the things I have always enjoyed about computer games in general and CRPGs in particular! If I don't want to play that way, I'll play in Ironman mode.

I try not to 'abuse' the capability, but I am not above reloading in order to try an encounter over to get through it without losing a character. I play with seven named save points, which I rotate through as the game progresses, and the quick save. It's a habit I've learned over the 20+ years I've been playing games on PCs.

Plus, I'm a cheap bastard and I'm not about to pay a king's ransom to have a PC resurrected! ;-)

 

I agree with Livonya, but I also will reload a game if something beyond my control happens that kills off some characters because the way points get a little screwy. What I think is kinda of funny is losing a PC at 1st or 2nd level and then having to carry them around for awhile. Then the rest of your group levels a few times before you have enough money to resurrect them. This is exactly how we used to play D&D back when I played alot in the 80's. It was kind of frustrating for that player, but it is what I would imagine it would be like until you had the coins to do it. Just like Kalshane said it is almost a quest by itself to find someone who could resurrect you after you managed getting the coins to resurrect.

 

I think that you already told what must be told. I would just like to add this:
some smart enemies, like the assassin that are specifically hunting for the party and, I suppose, lurking on them before an assault, must have some chanche to win, otherwise I guess that such an ambush shouldn't have any meaning.
But at the same time, I think that a good and well trained party leaded by a smart and capable leader must be able to defeat an enemy that has a Challenge Rating that doesn't go over the suggested limit offered from the DM table without loosing any man, even if all the party gets seriously injuried and will not survive the next fight.
Now, about the assassin and other liv's stuff, I agree with the fact that he (they?) must proofs challengening, but stuff like that the assassin always wins initiative and that always pops up near the weaker spellcaster is quite like cheating. Even if he has hig DEX and maybe the improved intiative feat and great hide and move silently scores, there must be some chance that some other party member rolls a 20 on initiative or that he gets spotted by some party member with spot and listen as class abilities. So I think that, if possible, the assassin should pop ups from the rear of the party accordingly with listen and spot checks.
I told my humble opinion
Augh.

 

I will see if I can't change that. Actually, it should be no problem to fix it.

- Livonya