/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5438901
>yah we came from a claim saying that BG was stupidly easy
I never said that. Besides, keeping a manual with you to look up arbitrary details about the rules of wizard chess isn't my idea of hard. It's just tedious.
>you shouldn't have to spend time to understand it
That's not I'm saying, although I suppose I expected this frustratingly trite response. The point is about the lack of payoff for memorizing arbitrary rules.

>Not every game has to be perfectly intuitive to be able to grasp everything in 4 hours.
Of course not. But aspects that aren't intuitive should either have a good reason or you need to simply admit that it's a weakness in the game and move on.

Most of the mechanics in Baldur's Gate are intuitive and clear. There's some awkwardness under the hood due to the tabletop roots, but it's not bad. Thac0 and Armor Class are entirely cosmetic issues. Saving throws have some issues wrt mapping specific threats to save type, but as a general mechanic they're still based on the intuitive principle of having a base+modified evasion value for special effects. The rules about combat rounds are theoretically awkward but the Infinity Engine does a fantastic job streamlining this into real-time. In all of these cases, you can make decent decisions intuitively or you can study the details in order to min/max and optimize.

It's really the immunities, dispels, and counter-spells that stick out like a sore thumb as being both an unavoidable and arbitrary with minimal payoff. And by arbitrary, I'm talking about things like the level cap on Minor Spell Turning. Why is the limit 4th level? (or is it 7th? sources conflict on this). Why is there no spell with a limit of say, 6th level? These are just arbitrary details you need to memorize, or else you need to keep the manual open next to you while you're playing so you can look up this shit every time you need to know something.