Starslayer_D wrote:Removing magical effects upon examine, I approve fully.
About removing the CR upon examine, I do ahve some thoughts, though:
I just fear that it will result in a lot of dead players who, upon encountering a cerature for teh first time, don't know they are in over their heads and get rushed by the mob.
The CR upon examine is a crutch, but it was put in for reasons into NWN. Mainly to allow people who haven't seen certain creature variants before to run in time.
EG given: You see a frost giant leader: Run, stand and try to talk, engage? 2 of three options can get you killed in one combat round, even at lvl 20. Without warning by examine, you won't even have option 1.
At least these are my thought about CR upon examine. Some may call it metagaming. I call it 'being nice ad allow people to avoid the death penalty by giving them cues the pure creature model won't be able to transfer. Unless someone goes over the creature descriptions and describes things like:
"The Frost giant before you carries a very wicked looking axe, Huge muscles and many scars betray the seasoned warrior. The dragon teeth in his neclace sure don't look like store bought."
Wich would be a good cue to run.
In place of such cues, and the fact that anyone may stumble into a place suddenly too tough (eg, lyncan caves, Cloudwalk, the mindflayer place, etc, etc. ) CR upon examine may not be ideal, but there are reasons for it's existence.
If it's removed, one might want to think for a removal of having to recover your corpse, and current high Xp death penalty, as trying to find out creature impossibility by experiment sure is going to lead to much more deaths than current state of things.
Please don't see this as a whine, just my thoughts about potential effects of CR upon examine removal.
my 2c
This makes sense to me, though I would much prefer the option of actually describing the cues in a creature's appearance that tell an adventurer how tough it is, rather than the "very" rough guide of comparative CR, which can get you killed as often as it is useful because different charcters have different strengths versus different creatures. The fact is that the creature models are not accurate in the sense that the exact same model is used for creatures with very different fighting abilities.
For example, Ursadin has encountered one variety of creature with the exact same model and name that has two power levels. One type he can handle fairly easily, another type generally results in a bloody half-ogre mess. Once he is in combat it is too late, since using transitions to escape is metagaming. As the engine is currently configured, he can fight those creatures all day and memorize what works against each type, but he will never be able to tell them apart because their models and names are identical.
Of course, I understand that the team does not necessarily have the time to replace the current CR guide with the cues that adventurers would use. The question would then be whether the comparative CR information is an imperfact substitute that saves the team a lot of time.
just my 2 cp
[edit] forgot to mention that I agree that all information other than CR should not be shown
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