I have a thing for playing weird types – I guess they’re just more interesting. I’ve come up with a little background story for them, and though I wish the game could somehow acknowledge that, I realize it’s completely unfeasible to implement properly between player-created characters, so I’m content with just having it all in my head. I suspect if somebody were to ever make a game consisting entirely of a very detailed character creation menu, I just might buy it. And enjoy it.

As for what the actual game is like, I’ll have to report back on that. So far it seems a little shallow but the new world map is fun, and the intro sequence sure was well executed, so I see some potential.

After playing quite a few (though far from all) CRPG’s on the market, I’ve developed a pretty good idea of what sort of character system I prefer. The main rule is that every upgrade to your character should be significant. The more important a new skill or ability is, the more I enjoy the game. I’d rather have a steady trickle of important upgrades to my character than sudden level-ups full of invidivually insignificant improvements.

Case in point: Compare Diablo 2 with a Dungeons & Dragons game such as Neverwinter Nights. In NWN, you receive a constant stream of experience points which don’t matter at all until you reach a specific limit which triggers a level-up, and then you get a broad range of improvements across all categories (skills, feats, spells, attack bonus, hitpoints). Picking feats and spells are interesting, since each choice you make is significant, but as for attack bonus and hitpoints, the progression is generally slow enough that you don’t notice a particular difference once you’re around level 5 and up. The difference between 50 hitpoints and 60 hitpoints can make a difference in a fight of course, but it doesn’t change the way you play the game.

In Diablo 2, on the other hand, you pick one ability per level, and it will always be important. Abilities really are abilities, they’re not slight improvements – since you only get one per level, each of them makes a difference. Sure, you also get more hitpoints and mana each level in Diablo 2, but the abilities are definitely the important part of levelling up.

As with many of my ideas about game design, this isn’t entirely my own, it’s derived from Warren Spector’s post-mortem of Deus Ex where he explains the four-level skill system: You don’t want the player to fail something because he only has 17 skillpoints instead of 18. You want him to fail because he chose not to upgrade a particular skill from level 2 to level 3. The fewer ranks a skill can have, the more significant the choice to upgrade it becomes.

Titan Quest has an interesting hybrid system, depicted on the right: Each level, you get 3 skillpoints, and then you have to choose between using them to buy/upgrade a specific skill or put it into your general skill mastery (your class) so it goes towards unlocking new tiers of skills. Upgrading your skill mastery also raises your stats, hitpoints, and mana, but the interesting part is how the system forces you to plan ahead – I’m still not sure if it’s best to reserve one skillpoint each level for your mastery or to focus on the skills until it’s time to put all your skillpoints for a couple of levels into your mastery (though I’ve been sticking to the former so far).

My favourite system so far is probably Dark Messiah‘s. Of course I’m a sucker for any action RPG ranging from Bioshock (more action) to Mass Effect (more RPG), but Dark Messiah seemed to take Diablo 2′s system and then refine it even further. My favourite feature of DM is its lack of level and experience points: Skillpoints are given out a couple at a time (often you’ll just get 1) for completing story objectives, with major objectives worth more skillpoints, and the cost for upgrading your skills is very low, with a max of 12 points to buy a last-tier skill, so every skillpoint you get counts. Compare this to most RPG’s that have to give you 10,000 XP at a time to make it count at the higher levels.

Of course the amount of experience or skill points you prefer to get at a time depends on your personal preferences. Getting 10,000 XP for a quest seems like better positive reinforcement than getting 3 skillpoints, but when you consider that even a single skillpoint in Dark Messiah is the equivalent of a level-up, getting 3 skillpoints becomes a huge deal. One of the best things about game design is that the discipline is full of choices without obvious options, and you almost always have to make your choice in the context of your game. If you’re making an MMORPG and you need to keep handing out tiny improvements across 80 levels of character progression, you’ll want to make your skills range from 1-300 or something like that. If you’re making a hack’n'slash game, you’ll want to award XP for kills so each defeated enemy counts towards the next level-up, and if you’re making an action-adventure game like Deus Ex where you’re rewarding exploration, you need to award a fair deal of points for each objective so you can give smaller rewards for discovering interesting places off the beaten path. And that’s not even considering the important question of whether higher skill levels should cost more points than lower (reward generalization) or all skill levels should cost the same (encourage specialization).

There’s no doubt that the reason I like Dark Messiah’s modest character system so much is simply that it fits the sort of gameplay I enjoy the most: No XP for kills, no gradual skill improvement, no levels, no grinding, plenty of freedom in how to approach your objectives. In terms of gameplay mechanics, it’s almost exactly the sort of RPG I’d like to work on. Which makes it all the more frustrating that I always get stuck at the spiders!

Titan Quest was released in 2006 to mixed reviews. To call it a Diablo clone would be about as fair as calling The Witcher a Baldur’s Gate clone or Call of Duty 4 a Quake clone, but TQ does fit snugly into what has been excellently called the “Third Person Looter” (TPL) genre. It’s a top-down game that allows zooming but provides no camera rotation(!), and the gameplay, like most games of its kind, is extremely simple:

• You move from town to town, slaying hordes and hordes of monsters in the wilderness in between by clicking on them at a carpal-tunnel-inducing pace.
• Monsters provide XP and drop items when killed and occasionally huddle around chests with more items.
• You pick up these items and take them to the nearest village where you sell the ones you don’t need and keep the ones you do.
• Occasionally there will be a boss monster that provides more XP and drops better items.
• You can also collect shards of charms and relics that can be merged into completed charms or relics and used to upgrade your equipment.
• Sometimes you’ll find recipes that encourage you to gather particular charms and relics and pay to have them crafted into specially powerful artifacts.
• In towns and sometimes in the wilderness you regularly encounter NPC’s with golden exclamations above their heads which give you quests to solve for extra XP and equipment.

In other words, pure hack’n'slash. There are no dialogue options and the story seems to pretty much be Ye Olde Save The World rubbish, though at least the Ancient Greek Mythology setting is pretty interesting. It’s not generally “my type of game”, it’s mindless killing and looting.

But it’s pure catharsis.

It has the same pull as certain FPS games in that you can just switch off your brain and blast gloriously through armies of enemies, but being a TPL game, it substitutes raw twitch stimulation with obsessive-compulsive item collecting and min-maxing. Like the Diablo games before it, it’s pure crack in game form. Usually that’s not enough – this game would never make it onto my top 10, and in a year I’ll probably have all but forgotten it, but right now it’s exactly what I need.

It also has a pretty good character system. When you create your character, you only choose a sex, a name, and the colour of your tunic (which can be changed later with purchaseable dyes), there are no real appearance options as far as I could see, and you don’t choose a character class or anything like that. The first time you level up, you pick a skill mastery (read: character class) from 9 choices and start choosing skills from the tree it offers you.

That’s a nice way to set it up, as you’ll have played for 5-10 minutes before that, so you’ll have a feel for the combat and a rough idea of whether you want to be a melee character, a ranged character, or a caster of some sort. A few levels later, you can pick a second mastery or just choose to focus on your first choice. Picking a second one will give you a new class name that represents your particular combination, for example I started out as a Hunter and picked Nature as my second mastery, which made me a Ranger. So far I’m concentrating largely on my Hunter mastery though, since I favour ranged combat over casting at the moment, and the only skill from the Nature tree I really want is the ability to summon wolves to follow me around and aid me in combat.

Equipment upgrades are slightly different from Diablo 2‘s socketed items in that they’re available for every item by default, except Epic or Legendary items, but you can only use 1 upgrade for each weapon, and you can actually retrieve either the upgrade or the item if you change your mind later (and if you’re okay with the astronomical cost of seperating them). I think I prefer Diablo 2′s system in that finding an item with 4 sockets was always a big thrill, but on the other hand TQ has more different types of upgrades, and collecting identical shards into complete charms or relics offers almost the same thrill as Diablo’s set items.

The main gameplay-difference between TQ and the Diablo series, however, is that TQ has no randomly generated levels. Instead, it has a huge hand-crafted streaming world, which is constructed a bit like a very wide corridor that snakes through a convincingly Greek landscape. While you play, it seems more like a set of connected arenas, like a row of pearls on a string with the occasional optional pearl dangling off another, but since the game streams its world, you can actually look at your map and follow your progress from all the way back at the starting village.

The lack of a procedurally generated world is both the game’s major weakness and its greatest strength over the Diablo games: Since it’s hand-crafted, it’s far more varied, interesting, and convincing than the often somewhat bland areas Diablo threw at you, but on the other hand it means there’s far less replayability. Since I’m still on my first playthrough, I’m not sure whether the boss characters are randomly spawned, but I think they are, and that would add an element of replayability; but it’s not quite the same as Diablo, where the world would be created anew each time you loaded up the game.

In conclusion, I think the mixed reviews are fair. It’s a solid game with excellent and well polished core gameplay, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of new ideas. As the PC Gamer UK review originally pointed out, even the nice character system seems pretty close to Guild Wars’ dual-class system. I don’t believe all games need to be extremely innovative, I believe there’s room for games that pick a genre and strive to be the best they can within those conventions, but it’s hard to give more than 80% to a game that has nothing new to offer the medium. PCG UK’s 70% for the original game was a bit harsh, but then I am playing with the Immortal Throne expansion, since Steam pretty much gave it away for free, and PCG UK did give that 79%, which seems far more adequate.

At $25 including VAT, I feel I got my money’s worth, and I really don’t think Iron Lore deserved to go belly up. I just wish I knew somebody else who had this game, so I could try out the co-op.

It was a good discussion, because it’s a topic you can debate endlessly: Which is better? It’s a matter of taste and context – either solution is valid, but either way has a tremendous impact on the nature of the game. But there are so many other topics to discuss about game avatars. In fact our debate originated from a quick discussion about whether or not it was worth the trouble to add a black skin to Trestkon in TNM, and why we never did it to begin with (we’re not racist, the thought just never struck us – we’re all white guys, and more importantly the real Trestkon is a white guy). Now Gelo just linked me to a really great little article about the stereotypical Tough Guy – in fact it’s quite possibly gone beyond stereotypical by now, it’s become a damn institution.

And this article is just so right. It even mentions JC Denton very unfavourably and yet I still think it’s just so true. Being a great fan of stealth gameplay (ie. a tremendous coward), JC’s badass personality never really lined up with my play style. I would creep through vents, hide in dark corners, quietly knocking guards over the back of the head and dragging their bodies away to locked rooms where they wouldn’t be found. And then I would go up to an important NPC and make like Rambo. It was inconsistent.

Shamus mentions Garrett from Thief as a good protagonist, one whose personality matches the depth of the gameplay, and who isn’t just a cardboard badass. One of the reasons I loved Thief 3 so much was that Garrett just resonates with me. He’s quite a bit more audacious and selfish than I am, of course, but an avatar doesn’t need to fit you perfectly to establish identification, it just has to get a few things right for you to build on.

So let me hear about your favourite game avatars, if you’ll take a moment to comment. Established characters or empty avatars are both accepted. Garrett ranks pretty high up the list for me, but the top spot is taken by The Nameless One from Torment – he was an established character in a way, but his personality was really up to the player. My TNO was a very sensitive and curious man with a helpful streak.

(This is quite unlikely to be the last post about avatars you’ll ever read here. It’s a good subject with plenty of room for discussion so I’ll probably talk more about it later. Especially when I take some time to analyse the way we’ve used Trestkon in TNM, which will doubtlessly be interesting as it seems to have changed a lot during the course of development.)

The interface is great, don’t get me wrong. It’s just really quite a lot like World of Warcraft, and I managed to get really sick of that game. The setting also fails to stand out, it’s a pretty standard fantasy world so far, but there’s still time for it to change and impress me. The character system shows a great deal of promise though, as I love the idea of maxing out your character at level 20 relatively early but then continuing to gain new skills forever (sadly I think they’re doing away with that in Guild Wars 2 because people don’t get it). I always disliked character levels.

I think the main reason to stick to Guild Wars (aside from the extremely attractive fact that it’s free to play) is the art in general and the character art in particular, as evidenced by the picture of my character to the left. While sadly not quite as fantastic as the promotional artwork (always strategically featuring beautiful CG women in badass outfits), the art in GW really looks astounding. It’s not significantly more detailed than World of Warcraft, but while Blizzard managed to craft beautiful artwork with limited resources, ArenaNet have created magic.

Expect more Guild Wars posts as the addiction grows in magnitude.

FYI, my ability scores are:

Strength: 10
Dexterity: 18
Constitution: 10
Intelligence: 15
Wisdom: 14
Charisma: 13

I would probably set my Con and Str to 8-9, as I am generally slightly less fit than I ought to be, but I could do 10 on a good day because I’m still riding high on being young (and as Morten points out, I have never had a hangover, in spite of getting drunk very easily). I think the Dex is accurate considering how remarkably well I tend to get out of fairly serious accidents (may it continue!), plus I used to be a pretty good marksman. The Int, Wis, and Charisma scores are all debatable

The Companion System
The main thing that attracts me to traditional RPG’s (read: Anything out of Bioware or Black Isle/Obsidian) is the companions. Companions are characters who travel with you, following you whereever you go, as long as you’ll let them, and fighting alongside you. At their best, these companions will sometimes stop to discuss something with you or each other or to tell you their opinion on current events (or each other). At their most simple and boring, they will just tag along and offer mostly irrelevant information about themselves if you care to ask them.

My qualified guess is that the companions were originally just included in Baldur’s Gate to represent the party dynamics of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing system, on which that game was based. The main strength of companions, however, is that they provide a persistent set of characters with which you interact throughout the whole story, and which will always be available for some casual character interaction if you need a break from all the fighting. In games the storylines of which rely heavily on the typical Tolkien-style journey-structure¹, which is pretty much all traditional RPG’s, the character gallery will usually change according to which location you are visiting at a given point in the story. This has the benefit of giving the game a large and diverse character gallery, but on the other hand, most of these characters barely gain enough screen time to define their personalities, and even then, most of that time is spent telling the player what to do next. This problem can be remedied by the inclusion of companions, persistent characters that follow the player from location to location, just like the party of the ring in The Lord of the Rings (even if they did split up at the end of the first book).

The main objective of this article is to give you my thoughts on how and how well these companions were implemented in Neverwinter Nights 2, and to outline my plans for how to improve on this system in the NWN2 module I’m working on, entitled The Walls of Northwood Keep (or WoNK for short).

The NWN2 Influence System
For Knights of the Old Republic 2 (henceforth KOTOR2), Obsidian Entertainment devised a so-called Influence system. This system was their attempt to implement a richer, more interesting type of character interaction. The premise was simple: The more your companions trust you, the more of their personal information will they be willing to divulge to you. Unfortunately I haven’t played KOTOR2 (yet!), so I can’t delve into how the system worked in technical terms in that game. However, my friend Mads explains that each companion had a value representing how much they trusted you (called Influence), and you could then exploit that value to turn your companions more towards the good or evil side of the alignment scale². Apparently this manipulation was automatic, the more Influence you had of a character, the less likely he or she was to object when you made a choice that conflicted with his or her alignment, and if the companion did not object in such a situation, his or her alignment would be turned a little towards that of the choice you made.

In Neverwinter Nights 2, Obsidian wanted to expand upon their original system by implementing the second alignment axis of Lawful/Chaotic from D&D. In some ways, however, NWN2 took a step back from KOTOR2. My humble opinion is that Obsidian did manage to implement the second axis rather well, but unfortunately they chose not to let you change the alignment of your characters. One might say that makes the name “Influence” somewhat of a misnomer. In fact the word “Sympathy” would serve better to describe how it worked in NWN2, because the only way to gain Influence with a companion is to agree with him or her and solve certain situations their way, following their advice. And even so, having Influence of a character does not enable you to actually change his or her discourse, only to delve deeper into their past and in some impressive cases to pursue a personal storyline (or side quest, if you will) of that companion.

Only in one case is it possible to influence the outlook of one of your companions, and that is thoroughly scripted and pre-planned, leaving no room for actual choice. Here, you are given a set of options for how to deal with your companion, and depending on your choices and the success of certain skill checks, you may convince him to see things a little differently – although that has absolutely no impact on his further behaviour for the rest of the game.

What I hope to do in WoNK is to bring back some of the functionality of the original Influence system from KOTOR2 and improve on it.

Companion Manipulation in WoNK
The Walls of Northwood Keep is a module³ for NWN2 which I’m working on with a small group of likeminded friends. It is the product of several months of game-theoretical discussions which have helped to bring out a number of concepts and ideas we wish to test in practice. One of them is the object of this article: Deeper and richer character interaction with more tangible and – hopefully – decently realistic consequences.

Forgive me if the article turns a little technical here, I’ll try not to delve into the actual programming of the whole thing. The only concept necessary to understand is that all information about the player’s progress must be stored in so-called “variables”; these may take the form of either strings (any amount of text), booleans (a bit which may be either TRUE (1) or FALSE (0)), or integers or floats, a number with or without decimals. The important type of variable here is the integer. The system I have worked out stores everything as integers on your companions, so they’ll always be right at hand. Four integers are necessary for my basic manipulation system, each presenting an aspect of a companion’s behaviour or discourse: Alignment, Sympathy, Influence, and Terror.

Alignment
Alignment is actually two integers, but let’s treat it as one variable for the purpose of this article. It isn’t something I’m storing manually on each companion, unlike the rest of the variables I’ll use, instead it has been built into the game and the means to read or change the alignment of a character already exists. As previously described, alignment here consists of two axes: Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic. Each axis goes from 0 to 100, but is usually partitioned into 3 more general alignments: Good, Neutral, and Evil, Chaotic, Neutral, and Lawful. This yields 9 possible alignments:

In my system, I use the alignment of a character for two things: Whenever the player makes an important ethical decision, I compare the alignment of each companion in his present company with the alignment of the player’s choice (specified by me). If the difference between these two alignments for a given companion is beyond a certain margin, that companion will object to the player’s chosen course of action. The player may then attempt to use Diplomacy⁴ to persuade his outraged companion of the merits of his choice. If the player wishes to do so, the difficulty of this task is determined by an index calculated from the difference between the companion’s alignment and the alignment of the player’s actions. In other words, convincing the humanistically minded priestess that killing the bandit leader was the only right course of action will be easier than to convince her that robbing and killing a rich merchant was the right and proper thing to do.

Sympathy vs. Influence
Unlike alignment, Sympathy and Influence are variables of my own invention, stored manually on each companion. These variables are an extrapolation of the original Influence variable, and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, the original NWN2 Influence variable is now represented by my Sympathy variable. My Influence value, then, is more akin to the Influence in KOTOR2. Allow me to explain.

Every time you make a choice that corresponds to a certain companion’s alignment, this character will gain a small amount of Sympathy with you. He or she has experienced that the two of you are likeminded, and this makes your companion trust you a little more; it stimulates an amount of loyalty towards you. If, on the other hand, you act in direct opposition to your companion’s moral disposition – if the saintly cleric sees you kill a puppy or if the tough bandit sees you go all soft and cuddly over same puppy, to pick some examples – he or she loses a bit of Sympathy with you. To avoid losing Sympathy with your companion in this situation, you may attempt to convince him or her that you’ve acted according to their discourse or that he or she ought to modify their discourse a little. If you succeed in your manipulation, the companion will not lose Sympathy for you, but instead you will gain Influence of him or her and his or her alignment will shift slightly in the direction of your actions.

Terror
Terror is a variable I have included in order to make sure you get the right responses from your companions. Terror represents a different kind of motivation for loyalty: A high influence of a companion will signify that you’ve taken care to explain your actions to him or her and that you’ve consistently managed to persuade and convince your companion to share your discourse. A high terror in a companion, however, will signify that you’ve used your power, your position, and possibly your charisma to intimidate and threaten your companion into obedience. The result of these two things will largely be the same, namely a high loyalty to you from your companion, but the dialogue will in certain situations change according to the difference between Influence and Terror. I am hoping for the opportunity to implement one or two situations where a character might act differently if he’s staying with you out of Terror rather than Influence, but it will depend on our projected storyline and how much time we have for such things in the end (alas, pragmatism demands its place among these plans as well).

Consequences of the Manipulation System
And this is the really important part, because what good are all of these fancy variables if not put to use? The player must experience the consequences of his choices and his actions throughout the game, otherwise all of this is mere window dressing.

We might divide the consequences of all this into two categories: One type of consequences is purely narrative and the other type affects gameplay. By far, most consequences will fall into the first category: The dialogue of your companions will change depending on the values of their Alignment, Sympathy, Influence, and Terror variables. Most obvious will be the difference between alignments: If you manipulate your devout cleric enough, she will eventually turn as cruel, cynical, and egotistical as yourself, and this will be reflected in her dialogue. She will no longer object to acts of cruelty and she may ridicule acts of kindness. If your influence value with her is high, however, contradicting yourself may cause her to question your motivations: “If you’ve been telling me for the past 3 months that killing puppies is the best thing ever, what’s the meaning of this tremendous donation to the local animal shelter all of a sudden!?”

The difference between Sympathy/Influence and Terror will also play an important part in the dialogue: If prompted to explain why the priestess is loyally following a Merciless Killer of Puppies, she may attempt to justify your actions on your behalf, or she may shy away from the question, too terrified to honestly reveal her real reasons for obeying you.

In terms of gameplay, there’s a limit to how much a companion will take from you. Lose too much Sympathy from a companion without gaining the Influence or Terror to make up for it, and you may find your adventuring party suddenly dimished. A lack of Sympathy may provoke a confrontation prior to your companion leaving you, whereas a high Terror value may cause your companion to slip away under cover of the night. Once a companion has left your party, this companion will return to his or her home, but will effectively be unavailable for the rest of the game.

Inter-party relations
You may think this is a lot of variables to keep track of, and a lot of dialogue to write. But there’s more. Mostly just to prove that I can, I’ve chosen to implement a second set of variables representing a given companion’s opinion of the other companions in the party. At any given time during the storyline, a companion may confront you to share his or her opinion of another of your companions. The nature of this objection will also depend on your Sympathy, Influence and Terror with your companions: A companion with low Sympathy for you may threaten to leave the group whereas a companion with much Sympathy for you will merely ask you to leave the offending party member behind. Inter-party relations are an important factor in determining whether a companion will leave the group; if the bandit in your group has a high Sympathy for you, which indicates you’re acting in accordance with his or her discourse, the priestess – who dislikes the bandit – may be more prone to leave the party if her own Sympathy for you isn’t high enough.

If the relationship between two companions in your party drops too low, the one with the lowest Sympathy, Influence, or Terror values will leave the party and travel home. However, if his or her opinion of you is still high enough that he or she will travel with you, that companion will agree to join you again if you kick the offending companion out of your party first.

Conclusion
I hope that this rather complicated system of variables and dialogue will serve to give the player a truly interactive and at least modestly realistic experience of character interaction. When a storyline becomes sufficiently interactive, I believe the narration must be borne mainly by the characters in it and a sophisticated system of feedback to the player’s actions. If a game provides total freedom for the player but fails to react to how the player administers this freedom, no story will exist and the game will merely be a big sand box. While I acknowledge that this can be fun and interesting, it’s rarely something that catches my interest and/or gives me lasting experiences.

But character interaction need not be linear or even restrain itself to branching dialogue, and I’m dead set on proving this. The core design principles behind WoNK are all object/event oriented, and so is the system I have described here: My aim is to provide a large array of flexibly interacting objects (that is, dialogue nodes) which may or may not appear depending on certain conditions. It is true that this system will require quite a lot of writing, but text is not very resource-intensive work compared to the creation of art or code assets, and I believe that I can create a believable range of responses without necessarily writing 3 versions of every sentence your companions may utter. All it takes is, I hope, some intelligent planning and a bit of help from the player’s imagination. We’ve also chosen to limit the amount of available companions to 5, hoping that this will allow us more time to flesh out each of them rather divide our attention between 13 different characters as Obsidian did. In fact I believe the main challenge will be to turn all these rather programmatically minded systems into a realistically organic narrative.

Next spring, you may be able to download one of the first truly interactive, almost entirely object-oriented storyline and play it in Neverwinter Nights 2. Or you may instead download a pile of bug-ridden, unrealized crap. Only time will tell.

¹ I realize Tolkien did not invent the journey structure, but I regard his works as some of the most consistent and prominent examples of such a narrative, not to mention the most widely known.

² Alignment being a term originally used in D&D (I believe) to represent the ethical values of a given character. KOTOR and KOTOR2, which are built on the Star Wars d20 system, operate with a single axis that goes from Good (The Light Side of the Force) to Evil (The Dark Side). D&D operates with a second axis that goes from Lawful to Chaotic, describing the character’s attitude towards rules and authority.

³ A module is the traditional RPG-term for a scenario or a campaign made with a certain ruleset. It’s not quite a game because the ruleset was already made by somebody else, but generally a module contains an original storyline and everything to go with that. The Neverwinter Nights series has adopted this term to replace the usual term “modification” .

⁴ Diplomacy is a so-called skill in the game that the player may invest skill points in every time his character gains a level of experience. Such skills can then be compared to a predefined numerical difficulty to determine whether the player’s character is successful at an activity related to that particular skill.

Ronja Thornskiold, Nord Guardian, with her horse Hrimfaxi.
Nobody really cares when or where it’s taken, it’s just a game FFS.

Okay, so… I’m just a guy, after all. Some clichés just can’t be escaped, I guess. It’s just that… I didn’t expect Oblivion to get THIS much more interesting just by switching to a female character. A young, attractive, blonde Nord female character. I like to believe the fact that she’s human and even Nord (the Oblivion version of Scandinavians) adds to the immersion and makes the game more interesting. But to be honest, that doesn’t really explain why I’ve suddenly started playing the game in third person and walking everywhere instead of running (hint: The character animation for walking females is really quite nice – I mean… it’s well made… it’s good craftsmanship! Ahem).

I considered myself rather mature, you know. I was clearly beyond such things as drooling over pixels, which is why I was never a great fan of Tomb Raider, etc. But now I’m actually spending time and gold pieces buying relaxed clothes for my character to wear when she’s just walking around town.

…

What is this, The Sims? No! It’s Oblivion! It’s an RPG! Men bashing each other with swords! It’s masculine! I should be adventuring the countryside, exploring ancient ruins, and KILLING BAD PEOPLE! Not dressing up my character like this is just some stupid Barbie game with stats.

In the picture above, though, she’s wearing the heavy raiment she received as a prize for becoming Grand Champion in The Arena in Imperial City. It’s the only really good piece of equipment I have so far [note: picture updated 05/06/06 with a more beautiful and fitting backdrop - still wearing the raiment, but now also holding a magical maze and a self-enchanted shield, the Shield of Thorns], as I’m not very high level yet. I created Ronja Thornskiold (“skiold” is an old way to spell “shield” in Danish) so I could play through the main storyline quests without getting my arse handed to me, because Seboomook is level 6 and has gained all his levels by raising his Speechcraft and Sneak skills. The plan is to complete the Mages Guild and Thieves Guild quests and generally go exploring with Seboomook and then do the Arena, the Fighters Guild, and the storyline quests with Ronja, who has been built to kick butt and look good doing it. While I did manage to complete the Arena quests with some effort, it was only after getting majorly sidetracked by three different dungeons upon emerging from the tutorial section in the beginning.

It went a bit like this: “Ah! Freedom! Blessed sun! Grass under my feet! Right, time to deliver that amulet to Jau– oh, I never did get around to checking out those ruins on the opposite shore with Seboomook, did I? Guess I could check it out…” [An hour passes] “Right, that was a cool dungeon, what a huge load of crystals they had lying around, those’ll come in handy later I bet. Well, time to go to Chorrol with that amul– is that a ruined keep or something up there? I think I should check that out before I leave…” [Another hour passes] “Bah, I hate undead! But the bandits were a piece of cake, mwahahah, you must all FEAR Ronja, Guardian of the North! Oh, right, that amulet, I gotta… bah, screw it, might as well go check out that cave down there, I’m clearly not getting to Chorrol today.”

What a horrible game this is. I guess that’s a compliment.

Seboomook the Khajiit Thief with his horse Nightmare.
Taken Sundas, Heartfire 23, 3E 433, before the gates of Imperial City.

If you’re thinking “What is a thief doing in heavy armor!?”, think again: Seboomook is wearing the equipment of Brusef Amelion, recovered during a daring “expedition” into his tomb. The cuirass, the gauntlets, the shield, and the helmet which has been unequipped for the occasion is all light armor. The sword is also a part of the set and is magical like the cuirass. The boots are not part of the set, they are the Boots of the Harbinger, and they too carry a nice enchantment.

When I tell you the horse is named Nightmare, I’m not just kidding either: Jim uncovered a console command for me to change the name of any so-called actor in the game, for which I will be grateful for a very long time. This newly acquired armoured horse (I saved up for a long time to afford that furiously fast black horse from the stables of Cheydinhal) completely makes up for me accidentally throwing away a powerful amulet uncovered from the ruins of Anutwyll. I really gotta learn the difference between unequipping an item and dropping it from your inventory. Alternately, I gotta learn to keep a ton of savegames in backup instead of just 5.

Next item on the wish list: A nice house in idyllic Chorrol. I love this game.

I have two characters on two different servers now. Condon is a currently level 4 human mage on the Defias server, Skronck is a level 11 troll rogue on Moonglade, on the verge of obtaining his 12th level. As I gain more levels above 10 with Skronck, I start getting worried about my talent builds and the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing. Luckily, the WoW community site has a talent calculator to remedy this! And thus, I turn to the three of you who read my blog (not counting Torsten who got me into this blogging business in the first place, and on whom I force my links every time a new entry is created) to help me figure out the optimal builds to use for Skronck and Condon.

Please, if you do not know WoW, feel free to ignore this post in its entirety.

If you’re an experienced WoW player, your help is much appreciated, here are the two possible builds I’ve put together for each character. Any type of criticism is accepted, even minor tweaks to make my character more useful.

Skronck’s combat build
Skronck’s subtlety build

Condon’s arcane build
Condon’s fire build

I will add pictures of my characters to this post for flavour once the goddamn FTP servers come up again. For fuck’s sake.