Character Building Tips

[Wyvern]

ooooooooo Welcome Violet!!!

Did I ever tell you what my father wanted to name me? He wanted to name me after both my grandmothers. I'm very thankful that my mom choose otherwise!

(I know this is a really silly, perhaps stupid, thing to post on the forum but being that this thread is about building character - er characterS - what the heck)

Wyv

[adam warlock]

Originally posted by Sazerac: [B]I agree, Wyvern, on the rogue...you have to have one for the spirit of the thing! I love rogues, and it's a mean shame that W&W was designed against them so badly, especially in the beginning when it's crucial. -Sazerac B]

designed against them? how so?

[Sazerac]

Ohhhh, Adam, I don't know....

(late Sam Kinison imitation here..)

maybe that you have to wait until you get to freakin' ISHAD N'HA before you can TRAIN them in ANYTHING! Or have them join a freakin' GUILD!! AAAH!! AAAAAAAAHHHH!!!

Okay, Sam Kinison aside (it's a joke, kids, for those of you who don't remember him)...that's why I said that. Why on earth Valeia didn't have a Thieves' guild? Makes no sense. Oh well!

I would have created a guild in Valeia, and had the first quest been the "Talk to Gorthius" quest, the second one be something with the Gypsies, and the third one the coin quest for the Serpent Temple. Or something like that. They could have done it!

If they had done the Serpin Coin quest in Valeia, it would have freed up one quest in Valeia that could have been, maybe, a quest to rob the Stout Mines treasury...a fitting Thieves guild quest, rather than just have it be something you stumble across arbitrarily.

Well, now, I'm rambling, so....but I could think of so many things they could have done with thieves in this game!

-Sazerac

[Wyvern]

Saz - agreed! It would have been so easy to have made a thieves guild and give them quests in the opening area - maybe they planned to do it but like so many things it got lost in production. I wish they would post a list of the things that got left out! lol!! (as if that would make me feel better! ha)

Wyv

[Sazerac]

Wyv: I bet Alzagor would have one! I know he's still around somewhere, because I saw a post from him the other day.

-Sazerac (getting ready to go to a chili cookoff...grab the Pepcid AC!)

[WizardMen]

Thx for the great info on characters.

Oh and what i mean when i say turn to crap is that the get beat up by even the weakest ppl and i just start to dislike them.

[alz]

I'm so pro-rogue, it's not funny Thieves always get pushed aside for the fighters and magicians. that's why I loved playing THIEF.

The base reason why Rogues weren't allowed to hit their guild until the second town is because we wanted each town to have something new added to it. A lot of the balancing issues bubbled up from not having time/anyone to test the game out with a fresh eye.

We brainstormed for almost a whole day (which is looooooong for company-wide meetings) on how to improve the Rogue and his thieving skills. I thought we came up with the elborate, but fun way of checking for traps, similiar to the one used in the old SSI Hillsfar game.

Anyone, including non-thieves, would get a base percentage chance of bypassing the trap without setting it off. If you had lockpicks (basic set, advanced set and superior set) you could jumble the locks and change your percentage rate, risking setting it off or completely disarming it. Then, people who didn't care, could just rip the chest open, others could take all the time in the world and slowly pick at the trap (which I liked). There was more to it than that, but I can't quite remember all the details.

We did have other features which I'm not sure made it in, like Stealth -- this made you almost invisible to other players (well monsters, since there's no multiplayer now). There was something like Backstab from the D&D system for assasinating people.

The Bard was originally in, then removed because it's hard to translate music into game mechanics (although Bard's Tale did a great job at that). It was switched to the Trickster (while I love bards, I thought the trickster class was a good alternative... very Loki-ish), so he'd be a thief-illusionist (then you'd get that stealth-feature thing coming into play). But it looks like Activision changed it back to Bard at the last second (or maybe HPI did after I left).

I wanted to see the thief class be just as important as the others, even throw in other features like wall-crawling or something. The original crypt (as well as the one I redid) had a THIRD passage in the Two-Urns puzzle -- a secret passage that only the rogue class could find and take

"Ugh, More T, More T!"
"I pity the fool who try to give more T than me!"

[Mr-Eiz]

bump

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