SHADOWTEXT'S PROFILE

author=JayAMurphy link=topic=1247.msg50359#msg50359 date=1229030186
Kid, it doesn't take more to get a "rare" Pokemon, as there is one in every game, unless you speak of the event critters. At least, that's how I feel.

Depends how you define "rare" Pokemon. I feel quite proud of my team of legitimately acquired Feebas and Milotic, for example, even though I haven't replaced my Gyarados with her.

author=AeroGP link=topic=1247.msg49935#msg49935 date=1228807080
Shadowtext, you're completely off about the Uber tier.

Well yeah, I oversimplified it. Not every legendary is Uber and not every Uber is legendary. But there's a lot of overlap and I didn't feel like going into more details. Obviously they wouldn't just ban a Pokemon for being only available from events (be they in-game or real life) unless it made it too powerful for the OU bracket.

author=suzuricho link=topic=1247.msg49983#msg49983 date=1228852301
All Wobbuffet does is counter your playstyle. If you make it too predictable, then you should go down. I believe in punishing someone for not having something original. I don't understand why they'd ban the Wobby.

Wobbuffet doesn't counter YOUR playstyle, he counters ANY playstyle. He's a game breaker because if Wobbuffet is allowed then you would be insane to field a team that DIDN'T include him because he's more or less guaranteed to take down whatever Pokemon is out when he comes out.

He's banned for the same reason Mewtwo is. Because if you don't have him on your team when you're allowed to, you'll be playing at a disadvantage, because everyone else will.

By the way, you said you use Shuckle--how does that work out for you? I've never seen it played out before, but it seems like there's potential for a Shuckle to really mind screw another player, between Trick Room and that move that switches Attack and Defense. Too bad he doesn't learn any good attack moves to make use of an attack stat that, as I recall, would be higher than Cranidos. Epic glass cannon....it'd probably only work in 2v2 matches, though.

author=kentona link=topic=2622.msg49314#msg49314 date=1228508871
There are ALWAYS times when saves aren't available. Like mid-battle. For certain events, saving doesn't make sense, and will destroy gameplay.

The problem with ability to save all the time, is that it can allow for infinite do overs, or progressional accomplishments for something you'd intended to be a single task.

It also renders randomness pointless. Randomness is often inserted into games to provide some uncertainty and to freshen an otherwise tedious event (like, say, having a random value added to your damage in a fight, instead of always hitting for the same precise damage). But, giving Baldur's Gate as an example, when you tried to write a scroll to your spellbook, you had a chance to fail to copy. Either way, the scroll was destroyed. To get around that, you could save just before the attempt, and reload after if it failed, so even if you had a 99% chance of failure, you could successfully copy it, given enough time.

Or, let's say you had a dungeon. For every obstacle or whatever, if I had a bad outcome, or even just a less than ideal outcome, I could reload the savegame. In that way, I could just ace the game simply by undoing bad outcomes. It decreases the challenge and the risk.

Reliance on randomness to create challenge basically just makes your game a game of luck rather than a game of skill or logic.

If your player is masochistic enough to save and reload until he gets the outcome he wants rather than just playing the game properly, let him. It's no different from letting them save before a boss and getting to keep fight it until they get it right.

You're making the mistake of thinking you're competing with the player. You're not. Your job is to entertain the player and give him a fun experience, which often coincides with one that offers a challenge--but not always. At any rate, when it DOES coincide with challenge, it coincides with a real challenge based on the player's reflexes, intelligence, patience, and general skills.

Arbitrary limitations on saving don't offer legitimate challenge, they just introduce tedium into the system--the player can still go back and reload from the last save if he's not happy with the outcome, you're just making him go through a lot of crap he's already done to do it. The only "skill" that you have to have to deal with the challenge based on crippled saves is the skill to put up with the game long enough to get to the next save point.

author=CherryBomb link=topic=2622.msg49176#msg49176 date=1228431094
I dunno. If you want your game to be challenging, then I'd nix the auto-save. Auto-save nerfs difficulty many times, i.e. Half Life. Not fake difficulty, like insta-death or the like, but actual difficulty involving strategy and powerful opponents.

Difficulty that arises from having to do the same thing over and over because you forgot to save or died after doing it right the first time because of some stupid mistake isn't difficulty that's worth preserving.

author=CherryBomb link=topic=2605.msg49058#msg49058 date=1228372301
I never played any of this Saga nonsense. :(

How are 'plot' and 'story' different? I dunno what term to use, but when it comes to my stories/plots I tend to not plan them out completely before even starting a project. I kind of wade into RPG Maker and begin to build different things here and there and make it up as I go along. "Oh, this sounds cool." "I've never thought of something like this." "This sounds completely original. Oh wait, someone already did it." --Those are a few of my thoughts when putting together some story.

It seems nowadays that games, both professional and indie, have stopped their story development somewhere around when Final Fantasy became popular. There is so much of the same thing floating around that sometimes I really can't think of anything "new" because all I know how to do is 'edit' something previously made, contrive one or two 'unique features' and call it "rollloloz, custam gaem!"


...Uh, tl;dr: People copy what makes money too much.

The plot is the course of events that happen in a story, like "Three characters try to overcome an obstacle. The first two tell the evil thing that guards it that the characters that are coming later will be more tasty and are allowed to pass. The third one vanquishes the evil." Two stories can have identical plots and still be entirely different stories based on the personality of the characters taking part in it, the effect it has on them and even whose point of view the story is being told from.

As an example, the plot for basically every story that uses the monomyth as its basis is identical--an unremarkable young man sets out against an evil with a mentor (who has probably fought the evil in question before and who is inevitably killed) and a cast of allies. He fights the evil and is defeated and his mentor is probably killed in the process. He wallows in self pity for a moment but then overcomes his angst. He symbolically "dies" and is reborn, in the process going through an apotheosis (which is to say, he transcends normal humanity and ascends to symbolic divinity) and defeats the evil. It's such an old story that it forms the basis for the Major Arcana in the classic tarot deck. But even though you could probably name sixteen thousand stories that have that exact plot, they're different stories. Harry Potter, for all his similarities, is not Luke Skywalker.

And it's a really bad idea to not plan things out before hand. You need to at least have an outline of what's going to take place or else you're going to forget about plot arcs and end up with inconsistencies that really screw up the narrative.