Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

Pfff... I don't know about you but I thought they were great in Fallout and Arcanum.

 

I agree..

"huh you silly guy me smash you down"
No capital letter, no commas or full stops, hilarious!
But I never seriously played with retarded characters, I always have good INT and Speech skill, and often good CHA too.

 

In Fallout and Arcanum, you only have one main character, which pretty much means if it's written, and you're low int, it gets used. In TOEE, if you don't like a -7 line, you just have another character talk. Also, given that 3.5 Int controls stats, and most parties have "face" characters, "dumb" lines only get called out for casual amusement if at all. This makes the reward for writing the lines pretty low, unless a party plays *all* stupid.

If we are considering cleaning up all dialog to have a certain consistency, it hurts to have to either break character by letting -7 int reuse 8+ int dialog or effectively double the dialog writing effort for very little return (based on percentage of dumb dialog that will be seen if party can choose to use dumb character or not to talk).

I'd suggest removal of all -7 dialog entirely (not necessarily check for barbarian dialog, though). If there's interest, someone could always make a Forrest Gump mod.

--thearioch

 

Incidentally, it might be amusing to have a level in which the PCs get hit by a trap that sacks everyone down to -7 int, then forces them to engage in dialog with NPCs on the level. But that would certainly be way, way outside the scope of the regular Temple or Keep modules.

 

It's true that since ToEE includes the party dynamic, it is unlikely that a low Int character will be forced into the dialog position. You can get some amusement value by putting in easter eggs that require the player to use a low Int dialog to access - for instance, you could have a small orc encounter in which the orcs will respect (and give special rewards to) a strong half-orc character. Since most 25-point half-orcs are barbarians with 6 Int, this means that the player would have to deliberately make that choice to pursue the low Int dialog. Still, with groups of 5-8 character,s, it's much harder to shoehorn in cases where an encounter hits a particular weakness, because *someone* in the party can usually cover for it. You really have to go out of your way to engineer such material.

 

In such as case, one would hopefully limit the maps which had this effect, and moders could focus on the dialogs for chars on those maps with a genuinely optimistic expectation that the dialog would be used.

--thearioch

 

Sometimes you know you have to get someplace a mile away. At a minimum, you hit 3 1/4 mile markers on the way.

If you don't have interesting nonlinear map choices, just make the map sequence linear. As long as the game overall has a good mix of linear and nonlinear, don't feel obligated to make each sequence nonlinear.

Besides, you can always break up any "monotony" by allowing a few branches (high Survival / Tracking finds interesting side map that avoids a straight-up combat map); select creatures with low spot/listen to allow all-sneak parties a way to avoid combat; etc.

Just because everybody has to go through the same physical environment doesn't mean each game/party will have the same experiences.

Baldur's Gate (et seq.) suffered a bit (in my opinion) with too many unavoidable scripted encounters, especially ones that involved a lot of triggered creatures joining the fight.

-thearioch

 

Whoa!
that map looks awesome, Gaear! :nosebleed

 

Whoa! That's really good Gaear!