What's so bad in that? It's obvious. Just like arrows are not very good versus skeletons. That's, so called, RPG common sense.
My problem doesn't stem from the farily logical resistance to bladed weapons, and damage it incurs to said weapons, but the fact that the player is forcefully herded through an area populated almost exclusively by Ore Golems.
The guts of my statement was concerned with interesting distinctions between weapon skills, granted Arcanum had a universal Melee skill so the situation with the Ore Golems wasn't going to screw the player on account of character choices (unless they were non-combat focused
).
But, what I would like to see in an RPG is the dynamics changing according to "so called RPG common sense." In a party based RPG, you're almost certainly going to have players who are weak against skeletons or Ore Golems, but you're probably going to also have characters who can easily defeat them, and so it
does become an interesting dynamic to work with.
As a brief aside, I ran a campaign where the players' major enemy faction was dwarves. Against dwarven defenders, I created a dynamic where a player facing up to a dwarf's shield was never going to get a hit on anything less than a critical. In fact, it quickly became clear to the players that the only way to defeat these dwarves was to attack from the rear, but this point wasn't lost on the dwarves either, so they made every effort to keep the player characters within sight. As someone fighting a losing battle is apt to do, my players started to curse, at which point I made them roll an appropriate speech skill. A decent roll was deemed to be a grievous insult against beards, which infuriated the defenders to the point where they all focused their energies on the player who had offended them so, providing opportunities for other players to out maneuvre the stumpy little fuckers.
The same situation would never have worked in an RPG focused on a single player, and Arcanum's solution of "turn around, travel for days to the nearest town and pick up a weapon that isn't a sword" was acceptable, but only barely. Forcing an archer into melee combat against a skeleton is reasonable in a system such as D&D where a ranger is also proficient in melee combat if only because of base attack bonus. You could argue that it doesn't even require that, the archer can just make a concerted effort to keep his distance, but that's not a particularly interesting tactic either.
What's the solution? There is no universal solution, and implementation is far simpler in a P&P system where imagination rules, but just as food for thought approach these situations in your own RP style:
* An enemy that can't be harmed by a blade, but seems overly interested in the pools of blood you shed when it hits you.
* A perilously poised strew of unstable rocks high above a group of skeletons, something that is likely to go unnoticed by anyone without the keen eye of an archer.
* An animate pile of rocks that bluntens your blade if you strike it with the edge, but does not seem able to regather any pieces that become seperated.
Morrowind was awful and I didn't put it as an example.
I know you didn't, but it seemed like a comment that might actually be something close to the original topic (or not, I can't even remember what thread I'm posting in, heh)
True, actually. But hey - it actually allowed you to avoid most fights altogether, if you are not very good at it. Not altogther, of course.. there were some fights that you couldn't avoid, but still you could manage to complete about 90% of the game wihout a single shot.
And all it would have taken for the other 10% would have been the ability to kill Gunther and Slutguts in the first two missions and simply say "Er, they didn't make it..." But of course that would have been quashed by the supremely idiotic plot device that everything you see is visible to your superiors. It also made things pretty fucking difficult if you'd focused on non-combat the whole game, and had little hope of defeating either biomech.
Personally, I consider Thief and System Shock 2 to be far superior games, simply because they focused on making the fewer options they provided that much tighter in implementation. System Shock 2 had no character interaction beyond a brief moment on the MedSci deck, and yet it still managed to flesh out a good many characters and narratives based on them. It also worked within a setting that actually benefitted from a lack of "living" NPCs. Thief's light gem was enough to make it superior to Deus Ex.
I just don't understand why some people get pissed with an RPG that has action/stat combat, and in their rants about it they completely ignore the other side, the actual roleplaying value and other more important RPG elements.
I'm not all that fussed myself, I'm willing to play just about anything, although RPGs are my firm "favourite" despite the fact that most don't measure up to the standards I have for them. I think the biggest criticism is that action based gameplay is a hurdle for some RPers, but in recent times there seems to be a large group rallying behind "the major component of your game offers neither mental nor reflex challenges."
It's sad, but I think most people are becoming accepting of the fact that CRPGs just don't provide the important RPG elements, and just want to make the best of the elements that
are offered.
