planescape: torment (black isle CRPG)

[Scytale Anasûrimbor]

anyone played it?

for those that haven't, a bit of info

-infinity engine based, modified AD&D 2E rules, heavily dialogue based
-set in the planescape setting (duh)
-main character is a dude that revives, losing his memories, every time he dies, and ends searching the planes to figure out what the fuck he is and why he can't die, while coming across all the shit his other "incarnations" (ie those versions of himself that had a distinct personality shift after their last death) did, as they've been around for fuck knows how long. REALLY epic shit follows.
-some non-standard game mechanics, most done on purpose, such as no traditional fantasy races, only one sword in the entire game, alignment shifts according to your actions, class switching for the main character (with individual XP pools for each class), and extremely non-standard NPC companions (including but not limited to a floating skull, a celibate succubus and a rogue modron quadrone).

[Cainad (dec.)]

Heard a lot about it, but never got to play it.

However, your forum name, "Anasûrimbor", leads me to believe you've read the Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. Scott Bakker. Is this so?

[Reginald Ret]

Played it.
Loved it.
Never noticed the one sword thing, but now that you point it out: cool!
I like how every alignment/plane has it's crazies.

[Scytale Anasûrimbor]

@cainad: yup. gotta love the dunyain (although i only used the name because i had just read the books and needed a fake name to be invisible to certain people in facebook)

@regret: yup, you use it to cut someone's chains at a certain point, and then more epic shit happens 

[Cain]

Bought this a couple of months ago, but got sidetracked by Dragon Age: Origins.

Have fully modded it for my laptop though, and I hear it runs on Windows 7 mostly fine, so, we'll see how it goes.

Apparently, there are two schools of thought on Planescape: Torment.  The first school of thought says it is best written CRPG of all time.  The second school of thought says the first school are wrong, and that it's actually the greatest existentialist novel of all time, masquerading as a computer game.

Given what I know about it (the main character, the Nameless One, wakes up with no memory, that his alignment changes throughout the game due to his actions and that it is set on the planes, where ideas can be as dangerous as reality) the existentialist charge seems a quite accurate one.

Also, unusually for a CRPG, your wisdom, charisma and intelligence matter a LOT more than they do in similar games, to the point that you gain more experience for high wisdom, and high wisdom, intelligence and charisma give you a much wider range of options when it comes to dialogue...which the game seems to have plenty of.