KotOR Replay 01: Pre-boarding Rant

Start a new game, and first thing that happens is the game throws six doofuses at me. I get the differences between the men and women pretty quick. I got that far through public education. But the classes aren’t very well defined.

Soldier I get. BLAM BLAM HOORAY! Scoundrel is like a Han Solo then, right? Pretty certain there’s no spaceships. Hopefully he gets some sort of bonus to gambling (Note: he doesn’t. Pazaak is equally useless for all classes. But more on that in a future post.). So Scout would then be like…what? Wicket? Is this the forest yiffer hobo class? And where the hell is Jedi? I was promised lightsabers.

I’m being a little abusive here. I know damn well the classes—and most of the character mechanics—are based loosely on the WoTC Star Wars RPG. From what I recall Soldier and Scoundrel made it through pretty straight, and the Scout is a well-abused Fringer.

But jumping in without previous d20 experience? Befuddleville, home of the Bewilderbeasts. Especially going with the advanced character generation route. Getting a mental hold of ability scores and skills and feats is probably the biggest hurdle for anyone thinking of getting into d20 games. It’s  too many axes of weird shit. And the real summbitch? The machine god will not care if I make an inept one-legged goat-woman as my character. Doesn’t matter if it’s been two minutes or two hours, you don’t get a chance to re-roll. Screw up, and it’s back to Endar’s Perpetually Doomed Spire for you.

Luckily, my original play through in ‘03 went well enough, thanks to the old standby of Soldier/Fighter-plus-everything-passive. POW POW ZAP PUNCH JAB. During that game I learned that if I wanted to have real fun in quest lines, I only had to care one skill: Persuade. Everything else I could pretty well drag one of your NPCs around for. Landmines, computers, locks, wine tasting, whatever. The rabble can handle that.

Talking though? It’s all me. I could have had Frederick Douglas and Cicero three inches away, bored out of their skulls, pleading to get involved, and every damn Persuasion check would be through me. But I know how to manipulate most of the Bioware story machines now. Always max out the conversation skill. Oh, and I need to throw some repair in there, too. HK will need that. All told, that makes Scoundrel the big winner here.
Screw you, Scout.