The most difficult mod I've ever played - with my tweaks of course

My 'normal' games function under the assumption that you were sired by Caine (it's really the only explanation that makes sense, since the package had to be mailed to Johansen months before you were sired, and the whole sequence of events was planned out from then, including them catching your 'sire' the very night of your embrace).

Anyway, I give my vamps access to lots of disciplines (you're not a vampire if you can't disappear), and adjust the exp table so you can actually use them all. To counter that I do two main things: First I up the damage of weapons, especially guns and katanas. Then I set it so the NPC's do the same damage that you do (default is they do 1/4 what you do, and that's before Kindred bonuses like halving bashing damage and counting guns as bashing). I also up the price of ammo to about $4 a round, more for the 'good' guns and a tad less for the automatics (since you'll waste more rounds).

Now to TFN. I decided to play a Baali. Because my exp table is upped, their exp bonus is a HUGE plus. So I needed to come up with a really good penalty to balance that. I didn't want to go the making things harder to learn route, as that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. What I came up with was making Baali Blue Blood with No_Rat_Feed turned on, and giving them a general -3 feeding penalty. This means they can get 2-3 blood points from a normal human if they leave them alive.

I also set the Masquerade to max at four. This way you never get the Sheriff's haircut, but you always have those bands of hunters lying in wait for you everywhere. The worst was pretty early on when I had a group of three of them with flaming crossbows and katanas waiting for me to leave my haven. You also get the Criminal Violations which set packs of cops with very deadly Glock's after your ass: pretty much any time you let three gunmen with clear shots at you you're dead (I've even experimented with blood heal as fast as 1% - they still kill you).

In short - Mad Kudos to the hunter system . I don't think I've ever had to reload so many times playing this game, and I've played just about every patch combination out there - Tessmage's, CE, CQ, Comp, all as they come and tweaked.

Maybe it will get easier in the later hubs when I have access to better gear and have higher level disciplines, but for now I'm pretty much always obfuscated (so I'm getting more than double normal blood loss), and feeding on every human I can find that I think might be in the shadows and hoping I don't get blocked in or surprised by a pack of hunters.

So I've always got the fear of Final Death around almost every corner, and the constant concern about my rapidly draining blood pool and finding food to keep it stocked so I have enough blood to use the disciplines I have to stay alive in combat. This is the first time I've also really felt the need to hang on to blood packs in case I urgently need some blood. I forget what I set my max bloodpool at, but I don't think it's ever gone above the low twentys, and it's been down below 6 more than a few times: ending a battle knowing you need to feed RIGHT NOW but if anyone sees you you're dead since you don't have enough juice to take on even a single cop, and hoping you don't frenzy and get yourself killed.

I wish there were more RPG's that could keep you on the edge of your seat like this.

Even though Mouser changed alot of the game mechanics for TFN 1.1, I still enjoyed reading his review of the game. In fact I love reading feedback/reviews of all kinds when it relates to TFN, especially when telling us what we did good and what needs some improving.

Zer0, if you want to make combat harder, just go to rules.txt and change the difficulty for defense and soak checks. Wit difficulty 7 for pc and npcs, even fights like the beachhouse can be quite interesting...
Normally it's 3 for the pc and 7 for npcs.

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Don't tell him that, man. Zer0 always wants to make combat harder.

I'm pretty happy with how combat is right now actually, no need to make that part of the game harder.

Zer0Morph wrote:

Even though Mouser changed alot of the game mechanics for TFN 1.1, I still enjoyed reading his review of the game. In fact I love reading feedback/reviews of all kinds when it relates to TFN, especially when telling us what we did good and what needs some improving.

I've gone back to playing Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BWP 11) for now - they finally got the upgraded Neverending Journey to work with all the other mods, and a few other upgrades here and there.

I think I may make that feeding penalty standard in all my games when I do play this again - whatever the mod. The game did get a bit easier for a bit, then harder again through the warrens. Chinatown always seems to devolve into a FPS, no matter what you try to do to it...

mouser9169 wrote:

Zer0Morph wrote:

Even though Mouser changed alot of the game mechanics for TFN 1.1, I still enjoyed reading his review of the game. In fact I love reading feedback/reviews of all kinds when it relates to TFN, especially when telling us what we did good and what needs some improving.

I've gone back to playing Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BWP 11) for now - they finally got the upgraded Neverending Journey to work with all the other mods, and a few other upgrades here and there.

I think I may make that feeding penalty standard in all my games when I do play this again - whatever the mod. The game did get a bit easier for a bit, then harder again through the warrens. Chinatown always seems to devolve into a FPS, no matter what you try to do to it...

Baldur's Gate!!!!! I haven't played the PC version of that game but I heard they're going to rework the original Baldur's Gate and bring everything up to date in the game. Pretty interesting.

Zer0Morph wrote:

I'm pretty happy with how combat is right now actually, no need to make that part of the game harder.

Please don't make it harder!!! We are vampires in this game, we're suppose to have superhuman strength to some degree. If you get your a$$ handed to you by a couple thugs on the street easily, how could you walk down the street with your head held high as a child of the night. LOL

aneumann01 wrote:

Baldur's Gate!!!!! I haven't played the PC version of that game but I heard they're going to rework the original Baldur's Gate and bring everything up to date in the game. Pretty interesting.

But the PC version of Baldur's Gate is the only version there is.

If you're thinking Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, that's a totally different game. The only thing they have in common is the setting.

aneumann01 wrote:

Zer0Morph wrote:

I'm pretty happy with how combat is right now actually, no need to make that part of the game harder.

Please don't make it harder!!! We are vampires in this game, we're suppose to have superhuman strength to some degree. If you get your a$$ handed to you by a couple thugs on the street easily, how could you walk down the street with your head held high as a child of the night. LOL

I partially agree. Our character is a mere neonate, but ultimately the main challenge shouldn't be combat (especially combat with kine) but managing your blood and humanity while upholding the Masquerade.

Dragatus, this setting is not only for kine, but for all npcs. And be assured, I don't intend to make something like this default for CE. In my own games however I'll keep the difficulty on an equal level for pcs and npcs, although not at 7, but at 5 or 6.

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Yes, I understand that. My statement was in regard to combat in general.

aneumann01 wrote:

mouser9169 wrote:

Zer0Morph wrote:

Even though Mouser changed alot of the game mechanics for TFN 1.1, I still enjoyed reading his review of the game. In fact I love reading feedback/reviews of all kinds when it relates to TFN, especially when telling us what we did good and what needs some improving.

I've gone back to playing Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BWP 11) for now - they finally got the upgraded Neverending Journey to work with all the other mods, and a few other upgrades here and there.

I think I may make that feeding penalty standard in all my games when I do play this again - whatever the mod. The game did get a bit easier for a bit, then harder again through the warrens. Chinatown always seems to devolve into a FPS, no matter what you try to do to it...

Baldur's Gate!!!!! I haven't played the PC version of that game but I heard they're going to rework the original Baldur's Gate and bring everything up to date in the game. Pretty interesting.

With all due respect to Zero and Malkav, Vlad at Blackwyrm and the guys at Spellhold Studios are some of the pioneers in RPG modding, and they've just kept getting better (though Vlad recently "retired" from gaming and especially modding). Right now, there is a workable, self installing (batch file base) setup that installs almost 400 separate mods to the game. Some of the mods are larger than chapters in the game, others add stores or NPC's with quests, while others tweak rules. If you're picky, there's a huge .pdf guide that explains every mod component by component so you can edit the file and install what you want. I recommend just going with the 'basic' install the first time.

If you really want to play the ultimate computer RPG, this is it (well, besides Hack/NetHack of course). For out of the box, I'd say the best may go to Planescape:Torment or Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, but PS:T was the earliest Infinity Engine game, so they couldn't do much with it, and I don't know of much beyond patching that's been done to Arcanum. I'm amazed at how much they were able to do with BG, since this was long before developers released toolkits - they had to reverse engineer and pretty much build everything from scratch.

I think a full playthrough takes about 200-300 hours, and you can't do everything in one go - some major choices preclude other areas, including the mods that go with them.

mouser9169 wrote:

aneumann01 wrote:

mouser9169 wrote:

Zer0Morph wrote:

Even though Mouser changed alot of the game mechanics for TFN 1.1, I still enjoyed reading his review of the game. In fact I love reading feedback/reviews of all kinds when it relates to TFN, especially when telling us what we did good and what needs some improving.

I've gone back to playing Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BWP 11) for now - they finally got the upgraded Neverending Journey to work with all the other mods, and a few other upgrades here and there.

I think I may make that feeding penalty standard in all my games when I do play this again - whatever the mod. The game did get a bit easier for a bit, then harder again through the warrens. Chinatown always seems to devolve into a FPS, no matter what you try to do to it...

Baldur's Gate!!!!! I haven't played the PC version of that game but I heard they're going to rework the original Baldur's Gate and bring everything up to date in the game. Pretty interesting.

With all due respect to Zero and Malkav, Vlad at Blackwyrm and the guys at Spellhold Studios are some of the pioneers in RPG modding, and they've just kept getting better (though Vlad recently "retired" from gaming and especially modding). Right now, there is a workable, self installing (batch file base) setup that installs almost 400 separate mods to the game. Some of the mods are larger than chapters in the game, others add stores or NPC's with quests, while others tweak rules. If you're picky, there's a huge .pdf guide that explains every mod component by component so you can edit the file and install what you want. I recommend just going with the 'basic' install the first time.

If you really want to play the ultimate computer RPG, this is it (well, besides Hack/NetHack of course). For out of the box, I'd say the best may go to Planescape:Torment or Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, but PS:T was the earliest Infinity Engine game, so they couldn't do much with it, and I don't know of much beyond patching that's been done to Arcanum. I'm amazed at how much they were able to do with BG, since this was long before developers released toolkits - they had to reverse engineer and pretty much build everything from scratch.

I think a full playthrough takes about 200-300 hours, and you can't do everything in one go - some major choices preclude other areas, including the mods that go with them.

I've heard of that game before. I'll look into getting it!

Zer0, if you're looking for a way to make the game harder, I'd recommend removing the Humanity bonus from dancing. Actually, you might want to look into removing other sources of free Humanity as well. One disapppointment I've had with the game from the very beginning was that there was absolutely no reason to spend XP on Humanity because it's soo easy to keep it high. TFN is better and I almost had to finally spend XP on Humanity (which would've been great), but then the dancefloor saved me from it.