ToEE: A Fatal Flaw, or Tales From a Noob Volume 1???

Hey folks!

So, I'm playing ToEE for the first time ever and am enjoying myself quite a bit. However, I'm a bit puzzled by some of the mechanics. Here's what I mean.

To finish most quests, are high stats in speech-related skills a necessity? I mean, even getting any progress at all in some of these quests seems impossible to my party. Maybe because I don't have high enough Bluff, Diplomacy, etc., so possibly many dialogue options are not being presented to me. Things just seem weird, though.

For example, every avenue in the game seems like it leads to a dead end! Okay, not every one, but a lot of them. I was adventuring in Hommlet for an hour yesterday, trying to tie up some loose quests, but it seems that every one is a dead end!

So, do I need to spend those points in speech-related skills next level up? I hope I can catch up and learn some of them, if it's not too late.

One thing I do like about the game is how every skill seems to matter. I have yet to see how they are all implemented, though, and I'm far from learning exactly how they all function.

Any tips/advice in this area would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Troika Games were heavy on choices and consequences - if you put all your points in Fighting Stats and Feats, you where good at Fighting, but thats it.

Fighting is important to stay alive, but if you want to create a better world, you also need Diplomats and Craftsmen; in ToEE you can at least spread the social skills among 5 to 8 people - a luxury that you won't have in Arcanum or Bloodlines.

If you play a Warrior, you have to live with the fact that you can't save everyone and that you can't see everything. Deal with it. At least you are good at combat. It's a chance for replays (not that I replayed the games).


You are not responsible how other people act. To get better results or to see some more ot the plot you have to make sacrifices, but they are usually not worth it.

Edit:

I don't know how far you are in the game, but you get some "evil" quests from questionable sources - to swing your sword at everything that moves might even be the better solution.

Originally Posted by Fluent
To finish most quests, are high stats in speech-related skills a necessity?

Is this way of thinking the result of combat-focused RPGs ion the past, notably Action-RPGs ?

And on the side of the developer as well.




I'lll never forget how Atari had treated Troika, by the way. Making patches for English-language TOEE only. Atari clearly showed the rest of the world that they weren't interested in the rest of the world.

To me it seems the first step would be to find a way to heal the son of Jakk the leatherworker. Once he's healed Jakk will convert to the St. Cuthbert, and then the miller and I think his son can covert to the Old Faith so the son can marry. And I think the barn quest has something to do with conversions too.

Thanks for the responses. I'll have to make sure to roll some definitive speech-related characters on the next playthrough.

That was actually my point, the dead end has nothing to do with your talking skills (I always have a high charisma diplomat). At least at the beginning, I don't know how the game evolves after that, don't know if it can sustain my interest for that long.

Well, I've already been told by an in-game NPC that gathering clues and rumors from the inhabitants of Nulb is going to take some advanced skills. I don't know how much I'm missing but I imagine I'm missing quite a bit.

The funny thing is, I almost always have a diplomat/speech character in games like this, but somehow I missed the skills and ended up taking other things for my characters. So, I have to try to make it up on the next level up. The good news is, my Rogue character, Harry the Halfling, gets a ton of skill points upon level up, so I should be able to make him my main talker in the party. We'll see.

I already noticed that the Gather Information skill is very important. You won't even learn about some possible quests in Nulb without a character who can gather the information. There's a lot of that sort of 'hidden' design in this game, and when it works in your favor it's fantastic. I'm enjoying the game quite a bit and it feels like I'm truly making progress in a pretty hard to handle game.

TBH, although I liked many things about ToEE, when you start to hit the boredom/frustration threshold it's time to move on, 'cos it's diminishing returns from there on in.

Ripper, I was thinking that myself, but then the game fired back and convinced me to stick around for awhile, as I finally started making some progress. It's a bit obtuse at times, and it sort of has the feeling that it *wants* to push you away, but if you stick around (or if you're a glutton for punishment, like me), then it actually does reward you a bit with some cool content.

I think a key to that was simply moving forward and and accepting that I won't be able to do every single thing and see every possible outcome in one play-through.