Unfortunately, ECL is not really a meaningful balancing tool on a persistent world. Everyone winds up at maximum level sooner or later (and with the advent of adventuring EXP and writs, it's a lot sooner than it used to be). At that point, ECL adjustment has no meaning, since the only thing it does is slow down EXP gain. And really, effectively once your ECL makes up only about ~10% of your total adjusted character level, you don't notice your ECL penalties at all. The effect of this? Acquiring additional stats at the expense of ECL is a total nonsacrifice.
This is not the case in pen and paper, because a player character with an ECL adjustment will always be behind the party in level. He or she has effectively traded class levels for a better stat line, which is a meaningful tradeoff since XP is finite and handed out by a DM.
As a result, the ECL/stats system that works so well in a pen and paper setting does not work well at all on a persistent world. If the past couple decades or so of progression-style online games have taught us anything at all about the people that play them, it is that you will not deter people from mechanically superior choices by increasing the amount of game grind it takes to get them, you'll just increase the amount of game grind you see.
If the team decides, for whatever reason (aesthetics, setting appropriateness, whatever), that it is correct and appropriate for some races to be more powerful than the rest, that's fine. But they should not collectively pretend that ECL is an effective counterbalance, because it isn't.
This is largely related to the above point, so I'll group them.
I'm actually largely sympathetic to the viewpoint that gifts were a mistake. NWN is a game that, at its core, rewards players for doing a good job of assigning a finite pool of resources to fit the character they want to play. Gifts expand that resource pool. For the same reason, however, I think subraces that are more powerful than their vanilla counterparts are also a mistake, unless a meaningful drawback (read: not ECL) existst to counterbalance the bonus.
It was also inevitable that, from the moment gifts were implemented, that they were going to become essential. Again, because ECL isn't a meaningful counterbalance to the benefit of the gift, they are pretty much a pure positive. If one does not take every gift allowed to them, they become less useful and less capable not just in a pvp setting (though there is that too), but every time they would like to interact with the module. Failure to take maximum gifts means that one will be less effective at handling pve challenges when one wants to go out and do a dungeon or two with friends. It means that one's skill at swordsmanship or the potency of one's magic is measurably inferior to that of one's peers in a way that is shown and felt IC. It means that a character will qualify for fewer amazing epic feats, and will have fewer fun toys to play with as a result when they have finished leveling up.
And we've built 10 years of this server on the gift chassis. Pulling out the foundation can be done, but not without a lot of attention to collateral issues, and there will be collateral issues aplenty when you change something so fundamental as attribute pool availability.
RP aside (this is a subjective thing and I think reasonable people can disagree on how meaningful human blank-slate RP is as a boon), I think many parts of this statement are incorrect.Irongron wrote: ↑Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:29 amFirst, humans. Witn a free feat, extra skills? No negative stat adjustments and an rp setting that very much favours them (try being a dwarf and walking into Andunor) I don't for a moment believe that one left gift is crippling to them, and there is zero harm in letting this stand. It should also help reduce human UD outcasts a little now those gates have been opened again.
1) No negative stat adjustment: This is not as much of a boon as the people in the "humans are still good" camp seem to think. The reason is simple: Nobody takes a stat penalty that really hurts their character anyway. Let me use half orc as an example because they have not one but two stat maluses. You don't see half orc wizards for a reason. Instead you see half orc warriors with an int gift to offset the int penalty and a strength gift to magnify the strength bonus. The result: +4 strength, -2 charisma. On just about every warrior build, you could write this as: +4 strength. The charisma penalty is meaningless. Granted, their core racial package (darkvision) is a little weak, but that's why Arelith gave them 5% physical damage immunity and free ambidexterity and power attack. It's not quite as good in most cases as a completely flexible feat and a skill, but it's at least one useful feat on most melee builds and an extra bit of hardiness that's not available to any other race.
Consider as well that the point buy system has diminishing marginal returns on stat buy during character generation: past 14, stats get more expensive. This means that you're getting a +2 adjustment to a stat that's become very expensive to buy, and a penalty to a stat that's probably still cheap. That is very valuable when playing the resource allocation game.
It looks even better on races with fewer maluses.
The quick and dirty version is: nobody really suffers from their stat malus. They just don't pick a race that's going to penalize something that they need.
2) Free feat: I cannot off the top of my head think of more than 1-2 builds which cannot afford to lose a feat in order to improve their statline by +2 in their primary attribute. The couple that cannot are probably hard stuck as humans because without it, they're missing something crucial like expertise.
Assuming that nothing crucial is lost, +2 to your primary stat is immensely more valuable than a feat. If a build has any of: Great Attribute Feats, Epic Prowess, Toughness, Imp Crit, Item Creation Feats, Saving Throw Feats, or anything of less value than the above, it will be improved by correct selection of a race that gives +2 appropriate stat.
Generally, NWN prices the value of 1 epic feat at 1 stat point. Some of our strongest server builds right now achieve excellent numbers through a simple strategy. Amass as many epic feats as possible, take the ones with truly high value (epic weapon focus, armor skin, epic prowess, blinding speed/edodge, etc etc), then spend the rest to boost their statline further. On these builds, it's childishly simple to shift them off a human base to a favorable subrace.
With one notable exception, the divine-dip bard, every build archetype that I can think of had a better option than human before human was nerfed. Now that human has been nerfed, it's in the unenviable position of being in the spot where half-orc is in vanilla pen and paper, only it doesn't have the niche of still making a pretty OK thug regardless: It's statline is bad, its compensation for the bad statline is not really adequate.
3) Extra Skills: This point has some merit in an environment where humans have an equivalent number of gifts to other vanilla races. Under the current decision, however, the obvious way around this is:
a) Take a build you'd have run as human
b) Take a subrace with a favorable and highly valuable stat adjustment
c) Gift int, gift the primary stat.
There are usually some less obvious ways too. You can, as mentioned in 1), buy 2 less of your primary stat and get 2 each of 2 secondary stats (e.g. an elf buys 2 less dex than his human counterpart, instead buys 2 more con and 2 more int than he would as a human). You can find skills to jettison (painful but doable).
4) Humans often spend that extra skill qualifying for a unique race-based piece of equipment. The bonus skill, when stacked against dwarves, elves, and half elves in particular, is probably a little deceptive. Many human builds will find themselves spending that extra skill getting to the 30-35 UMD it takes them to use a race or class locked +4 weapon (moonblade, dwarven rune axe, etc), or for an armor like armor of the wilds. This was an intentional design choice to help alleviate the skill advantage: give races with fewer skills some 30+ UMD +4 weapons that will incentivize a full UMD investment from humans who don't want to pass up the +1 AB offered.
Finally, as may other posters have noted, the removal of the second gift has made humans incapable of running some builds, and bad at many others. Monk now cannot be played as a human. EDR barb, which needs 21 str and 21 con to perform cannot be played as a human. Spellsword and battlecleric are now miserably bad as humans. Paladins are quite bad as humans.
Humans were a solid 2nd or 3rd best choice for most builds that aren't cripplingly feat-starved before the change. Now they're resoundingly worse than their counterparts. I have strong reservations about the viability of building things as a human following the update, for the aforementioned reasons.
I will certainly not be playing another one, which is sad. I really like having a racially neutral canvas to write around, but many character concepts I enjoy playing are now astoundingly bad on the new human.