DWARF FORTRESS

[manored]

If there was a dragon living in your backyards would you try to scare him away? :)

[Wolf-In-Exile]

This is the only game that lets you wrestle dragons, and WIN.

Adventure mode FTW!

[Sleksa]

This is the only game that lets you wrestle dragons, and DIE IN A HORRIBLE WAY

[Wolf-In-Exile]

But dying horribly is part of the fun!

I mean come on, how awesome is it that a Cyclops rips off your left leg, and then beats you to death with your own leg? Before it passes out and bleeding to death afterwards?

Oh yeah, ever kill someone by throwing articles of clothing at them? Lol.

[manored]

But killing someone by throwing clothes would be unrealistic, wouldnt it be? :)

[Michilus_nimbus]

But killing someone by throwing clothes would be unrealistic, wouldnt it be? :)

That were exactly my thoughts, until I tried it on Trepan.

[Erom]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooo...

[Zoombie]

I think my favorite thing about Adventure mode is when I asked for a quest and was told to find and kill an Etten that had slain one of my previous characters.

Revenge never tasted sweeter...or at least it would have if a damn giant spider hadn't jumped me. I. HATE. GIANT. SPIDERS!

I figured out that the best way to kill them is to whack as fast as possible and hope to the gods they don't web you. Cuase if they don't web you, you have a pretty good chance to parry their blows and counter attack their asses. If you counter attack and, say, slide your sword through their stomachs, causing them to vomit...

So, I think they need to work a bit more on Adventure, which is bleeding awesome as it is. All it needs is more polish, have the giant spiders be either less killy or at least slower, so you can run the hells away from em, and possibly some of kind of guns. Dwarves make guns right?

I haven't tried Fortress mode...cause it scares me and looks too complicated. I had a hard enough time getting into Adventure mode without any precious graphics to help me.

But Dwarf Fortress is a compelling example of how graphics can really hold back gameplay elements. It'd be hard/impossible to graphically show an arrow puncturing both lungs, the heart and the spine all at the same time...which happened to me once.

Hehe...I died really fast!

[Erom]

Dwarves make guns right?

Sometimes, but there is a very vocal "anti-warcraft-steampunk" group on the DF forums, and so far there isn't any gunpowder in DF.

[Sleksa]

nor will there propably ever be, as the dev team consists of one(1) guy.

[Saktoth]

Adventure mode was fun until i figured out that the best way to get your character strong enough to actually survive is to sneak around the wilderness throwing rocks in the air and choking skeletons (Note, you cant choke a skeleton, it doesnt breathe, but you still get XP). This has been the failure of every skill based system in every RPG ive ever come accross. Not one of them rewards playing the enjoyable parts of the game more than it rewards grinding (8x8 macro'ing in a ship in UO = ugh).

Then inflate error -0.

[manored]

No need to fear fortress mode: If you already learned how to tell stuff apart, then its easy like eating pie :)

[Zoombie]

Sometimes, but there is a very vocal "anti-warcraft-steampunk" group on the DF forums, and so far there isn't any gunpowder in DF.

Fools!

[SwiftSpear]

Adventure mode was fun until i figured out that the best way to get your character strong enough to actually survive is to sneak around the wilderness throwing rocks in the air and choking skeletons (Note, you cant choke a skeleton, it doesnt breathe, but you still get XP). This has been the failure of every skill based system in every RPG ive ever come accross. Not one of them rewards playing the enjoyable parts of the game more than it rewards grinding (8x8 macro'ing in a ship in UO = ugh).

Isn't that more a problem with realism than skill based systems? Most skill based RPG systems are done as such because it's supposed to be more realistic... well, in real life the most adventagious ways of improving a skill are generally NOT the most fun ways. That being said, skill based systems are just being poisoned by a preconception of realistic mechanic. Like pretty much everything else ever in gaming, you can find ways to make the system work if you approach it understanding the problem first. The problem isn't "skill based systems" it's that skill based systems are generally built poorly in gaming.

Just like war games, real war is not fun. So they dump alot of the realistic elements of warfare in order to purify the gaming experience, but still keeping the enough familiar and non intrusive realism will make the overall product better than just building the game in a vacuum. Things like physics and familiar weapon behavior don't degrade the quality of a game for the most part, they add far more than they take away. Even then though, if one weapon in it's most realistic form is overpowered we find a way to nerf it so that it doesn't ruin the rest of the game.

[Saktoth]

Precisely what i was saying, it is the 'the failure of every skill based system in every RPG ive ever come accross'. Not the failure of the skill based system itself. I much prefer skill based to class based systems. I just think they are poorly implemented, and its a shame.

Realism is a problem in many games in many systems. It must be realistic enough that the player can understand it intuitively but not enough that it ruins the gameplay.

I dont think thats the main problem with skill-based systems though. The problem is that it rewards mundane repetative tasks over actually using the skill for its practical purpose. Sneaking back and forward in DF and throwing rocks around the forest shouldnt be the best way to gain skill- you should get it for sneaking around goblin fortresses and throwing rocks at goblins. Which is really what the game is about, and where all the fun is.

[SwiftSpear]

If we could cause the growth speed of skills to correlate with the present danger, or multiply with rate of objective completion, then we would have a great system of rewarding/growing skills while still encouraging people to acctually do fun thing rather than just trying to grind their skills up. It might be kind of confusing for a game player "I tried jumping in the spot for 3 solid hours and barely gained any jumping skill, but all of a sudden when I was using it during objectives it started going up way faster than normal! WTF!" but if you're going to discredit a game for having complex systems for skill advancement, you're not really any better off playing a game that acctually tries to make itself fun than you are playing a game that doesn't.

[Zoombie]

I like Swift's idea. It reminds me of how RockBand works. RockBand has a point multiplier that increases every time you play a note without screwing up. Well, if you have a ton of notes in a steady rhythm, the multiplier doesn't increase very much. But if you have a few notes in a complex rhythm and lots of note changes, the multiplier goes up much faster.

So, in DF, if you throw a rock at nothing for an hour, you'd get, say, 2 or 3 points. But throw a few rocks at a Giant Cave Spider, you get 50 points or something.

I think that's in effect for some of the skills, as I got to 600/1000 by killing 3 cave spiders with my swords (As to how I did that: I got insanely lucky and they didn't try to web me), but I only had 400/1000 by killing about 10 kobolds.

But it could be that the kobolds, combined, took less blows than those Spiders.

[Zpock]

Or just award generic xp for killing monsters of similar lvl to the player and completing objectives like a certain popular game. It's impossible to get the satisfying feeling of cheating the system in that game now...

[SwiftSpear]

Or just award generic xp for killing monsters of similar lvl to the player and completing objectives like a certain popular game. It's impossible to get the satisfying feeling of cheating the system in that game now...

That's the point. It's not skillbased if you do it that way. Skillbased means that using specific skills practices those skills and makes them specifically better. So I don't gain intellegence for carrying rocks, and I don't gain gunplay from using knifes, and I don't gain agility for clunking around in huge armor. The skills you practice are the skills you improve at.

[BaNa]

So I don't gain intellegence for carrying rocks

I couldn't resist quoting that.