The Starting Rangers

[Imbunche]

So were these NPCs made by the devs, randomly generated, or were the skills and stats picked by the player?

Do we know if wasteland 2 will start out the same way with the party?

If they are randomly generated or such, would you prefer the second one to have fixed NPCs with their own histories and stories and personalities by the devs or just be the ones you imagine?

[Lucius]

The original party of rangers in Wasteland, Hell Razor, Thrasher, Angela Deth, and Snake Vargas were premade by the devs. They were the same every playthrough. As far as how Wasteland 2 will be, it's really anyones guess. Personally, I'd only want features added to the premade party that can be recreated by the player on their own created characters. In other words, no advantage to playing the premade party, just personal preference on rolling your own characters with the same possibilities as the premade party.

[Imbunche]

The original party of rangers in Wasteland, Hell Razor, Thrasher, Angela Deth, and Snake Vargas were premade by the devs. They were the same every playthrough. As far as how Wasteland 2 will be, it's really anyones guess. Personally, I'd only want features added to the premade party that can be recreated by the player on their own created characters. In other words, no advantage to playing the premade party, just personal preference on rolling your own characters with the same possibilities as the premade party.

I hope its fixed myself(For narrative purposes) but I can understand some people wanting to reroll different skills and such for their party.


Eithers fine ,but I prefer premade.

[Fargham]

The premade party gave you a VERY good idea of what you might be running into later in the wasteland. A party that was much better 'combat' oriented, usually ran into trouble when you realized you lacked someone with lockpick ability, or for some reason only had 1 medic in your party. At the same time, there was often a skill or two in each member that never got used, so taking and tweaking the premade members generally was for the best.

[paultakeda]

The original party of rangers in Wasteland, Hell Razor, Thrasher, Angela Deth, and Snake Vargas were premade by the devs. They were the same every playthrough. As far as how Wasteland 2 will be, it's really anyones guess. Personally, I'd only want features added to the premade party that can be recreated by the player on their own created characters. In other words, no advantage to playing the premade party, just personal preference on rolling your own characters with the same possibilities as the premade party.

I think it's a pretty safe bet it'll be similar. It's almost confirmed it'll be 4PC + 3NPC and I would not doubt that on start up you have 4 characters ready to play, pregen but possible to recreate via manual character creation.

I'm operating on this assumption until proved wrong by the devs.

[Proton Axeman]

The original party of rangers in Wasteland, Hell Razor, Thrasher, Angela Deth, and Snake Vargas were premade by the devs. They were the same every playthrough. As far as how Wasteland 2 will be, it's really anyones guess. Personally, I'd only want features added to the premade party that can be recreated by the player on their own created characters. In other words, no advantage to playing the premade party, just personal preference on rolling your own characters with the same possibilities as the premade party.

Those four were the same, but you didn't have to use any of them -- you could permanently disband any from your party, and optionally fill the resulting vacancies with custom rolled characters so long as you walked out of Ranger Center w/ 1-4 player characters.

There was an abuse in which you could transfer a character's inventory to others before disbanding him permanently, and even create characters just to take their gear and disband 'em.

[CaptainPatch]

... no advantage to playing the premade party, just personal preference on rolling your own characters with the same possibilities as the premade party.

I _think_ that the 4 pre-mades had a bit more in the way of Skill points than what their IQ Attribute scores would have suggested. That is, total Skill points available is = or < the IQ score. I believe one of the pre-mades had a Medic Skill of 2, which would have used 6 Skill points all by itself, plus he had a full spectrum of other Skills as well. So, taking the pre-mades gave you better Skill coverage than 4 sets of random rolls.

IF a player was prepared to spend a couple hours hitting the space bar, it _would_ have been possible to have all four PCs each with an IQ of 18. Die roll equals 3D6 = 18 happens on average once in 216 rolls. If the player also insisted on having double-digits on ALL of the other attributes as well, that would necessitate throwing out some/most of those IQ = 18 stat sets to get everything to IQ 18 _and_ everything else being acceptable. (Tried this just to see how long it would take just to get ONE "acceptable" PC; it took between 30 and 60 minutes, and even then, there were some 10s and 11s in the mix.)

[ad1066]

I'm playing through it again, this time using the pregens, so depending on how things go I may have to amend my assessment of them in the walkthrough.

-- Ben