PizzaSHARK

For me, it was just that every time I started getting wrapped up in exploration and other elements I'd realize I'm just slogging through encounter after encounter that are virtually indistinguishable because they're largely taking place in featureless rooms and I do the same **** every single fight regardless of what I'm facing since it's literally all I *could* do. It's more than it's something I WANT to love, but it's just not there yet. I've had more trouble pulling myself away from Tower of Time than I ever did from Deadfire, despite that game's shortcomings. Maybe it's just a matter of having much higher expectations for a game with Obsidian's pedigree than a small indie dev I'd never heard of before?

Play a Transmuter.

This is SUCH a case of rose-tinted glasses. You think games released back in the day were (mostly) bug-free? Man, go ****ing watch some speedruns and come back and tell me that. Entire categories, entire GAMES, are built around exploiting bugs and glitches that never got fixed. Baldur's Gate II, for example, takes less than 30 minutes to speed run because of exploiting bugs and glitches. Games didn't ship without bugs, you were just ****ed WHEN they shipped with bugs and learned to play around them because patches didn't really exist in the land before broadband. At best, you waited for the publisher to ship new copies of the game (which may have included updates - but not very often), or you could call or write-in (as in, snailmail) and ask them to send you a floppy or set of floppies. Games are now also WAY more complex than they ever were back when. If you compare to all the moving pieces and variables and gewgaws in Deadfire to the entire Baldur's Gate trilogy, Deadfire alone MASSIVELY outweighs them - so OF COURSE it's going to have more bugs, that's just how it works. Now, Obsidian has their Bugsidian reputation for a reason, but acting like games back in the day didn't have just as many problems and bugs is a crock of ****. EDIT: On topic, I don't think the narrative is really that important for these games. I know Obsidian put effort into it, but Pillars didn't really get me interested in the plot past Act 1 (I enjoyed the Hollowborn thing and Gilded Vale), and Deadfire's narrative failed entirely to get me interested. I don't think the writing is bad, by any means, but I think that the emphasis on both games is the gameplay - as evidenced by the almost total impossibility of talking your way out of or around fights in Pillars and rather few options to talk your way out of fights in Deadfire, and every square inch of the game being crammed full of combat encounters. I take a pretty cynical view of early access, but if it were used as it's "intended" to be used (to gather feedback that will actually be acted on, and to gather bug reports) I think they'd benefit from it a lot.

That's how I rationalize my gaming backlog. I know any modern rpg is going to be in a much better state a year after release. I also know companies need good sales to keep going. Surely a flawed reason, but it's motivational! Well, I backed both Pillars and Deadfire. I really like Obsidian and I like to support their work (I also got Tyranny in the first week it came out, though more because I loved the game concept than because "I must support Obsidian!") but after two games that came out and just... didn't do it for me in launch week, I think I'll pass on backing Pillars 3 when it inevitably gets announced and just wait for the GOTY edition.

Wait. So you're saying you haven't actually played the game and you are basing this on hearsay even though there are an abundant number of posters who enjoy the game? You don't actually know how hard PotD really is or isn't? Hmm. Joe There's also a sizable number of posters that have severe issues with the game. It's not hard to then draw the conclusion that the game may not be worth buying in its current state, especially given how Pillars went from "kinda ****ty" on launch to "pretty okay" by the end of the White March DLC cycle. I like that "sizable". Keeps it ambiguous enough as to not commit to "overwhelming" but makes it sound substantial. I can find people who don't like just about anything for just about any number of reasons. If the overwhelming posts were complaints and the consensus was that it sucks, the position of "I ain't buyin'" might have more merit. It's just ridiculous to not buy something based on a subjective, yet most vocal, of opinions. That said, I will take a whole lot more seriously the people who have purchased the game and THEN complained than someone who sits on the sidelines and gripes. Like I've said before, my daughter didn't get to complain about some food until she at least tasted it first. But, THAT said, I do long for the days when there was a such thing as demo versions of games. I guess, however, that probably takes almost as much effort to develop and support as the full game. Anyway, I just think posting negatively about a game you haven't played is a waste of bandwidth and energy. Joe My point is that there are enough comments in either direction that you can reasonably make the conclusion that the game may have some significant problems. As it turns out, it does - though whether those problems are significant enough to make the game not worth buying will vary from person to person. The larger problem is that a game like Deadfire may take several hours before you realize it's not really what you were hoping for - long past the point you can reasonably expect Steam to give you the money back.

I like having a face to associate with the development team, rather than an anonymous blob - but it can backfire spectacularly, especially in the age of social media. I think it's clear he's passionate about his work, as are most (all?) at Obsidian. That doesn't mean the work is always top quality, though. Just look at any local Facebook, Craigslist, etc marketplace to find plenty of people that very passionately produce very terrible artwork, crafts, etc. I'll probably just hold off on playing Deadfire until after all the DLC's out. If it's anything like Pillars, not playing for the first ~year of the game's release is probably the smart choice.

Wait. So you're saying you haven't actually played the game and you are basing this on hearsay even though there are an abundant number of posters who enjoy the game? You don't actually know how hard PotD really is or isn't? Hmm. Joe There's also a sizable number of posters that have severe issues with the game. It's not hard to then draw the conclusion that the game may not be worth buying in its current state, especially given how Pillars went from "kinda ****ty" on launch to "pretty okay" by the end of the White March DLC cycle.

It was powerful in Pillars. It's not very powerful in Deadfire. Dex inspirations in general are pretty weak. +100% move speed doesn't really help much if you aren't actively moving around.

This isn't true. It's actually harder to balance the monsters in a per encounter focused system specifically because the developers have a narrower scope to work with. Any failure outside of that scope creates encounters that either 1. do absolutely nothing to challenge the player, i.e. wasting their time, or 2. are virtually impossible at their current level. The second problem, of course, exists equally in both systems. The first problem doesn't, as a chain of weaker encounters can still hold significance in the previous system, but not in Deadfire. More directly, in a per-encounter system every single encounter is completely binary - either it's a TPK, or the player wins. As a result, "trash" encounters are COMPLETELY POINTLESS because they aren't ever going to be challenging enough to result in a TPK, and anything that isn't a TPK in this system is a wash. So you either remove the trash encounters, leaving very large, very empty dungeons. Or you change every encounter to be tough enough to result in a TPK, in which case you're likely going to result in massive amounts of player fatigue - think of it if you were playing the Long War mod for XCOM Enemy Within, and instead of going back to base and spending some minutes fiddling with your strategic elements, kind of giving your mind a rest from the more intense tactical action... you just go immediately right into another tactical battle section. Or think of an FPS without moments for the player to "catch their breath." Honestly, I think attrition-based systems are a lot easier to design and a lot more forgiving of design flaws. Doing per-encounter without an actual DM to adjust things on the fly sounds like an exercise in frustration on both ends.

Ya, I think some folks take their obsession with certain kinds of roleplays and want that to trump effective game systems. Might is perhaps flawed, but it's a pretty elegant solution to the dump stat problem. Moreover, you don't even NEED high might to be a great Wizard in either the original nor Deadfire. Ya, if you're obsessed with fireballs and magic missiles, sure. But you can do fine just maxing Intelligence and Perception, and cursing your opponents into oblivion for the rest of the party. Except Pathfinder and 5E both eliminated the dump stat problem - 5E by making saves tied to attributes rather than abstract, derived stats (you make a Constitution or Wisdom or Charisma or whatever roll in 5E, not a will/save/fort save) and Pathfinder by tying skills to attributes and then making those skills important. So Pillars' meandering way of "fixing" the problem... had already long since been fixed. And understand, I'm only talking about d20 games because that's the majority of my tabletop experience - I don't have enough experience in systems like White Wolf's Storyteller System or the various d6 systems (Shadowrun, Dark Heresy, Savage Worlds, etc) to conclusively say how they do things. It's like Pillars (and Deadfire) tried to reinvent the wheel and ended up making a square instead of a circle, and each iteration they keep sanding down the edges - they're eventually going to end up with a circle, just through the most obtuse route possible.

Ha! You're basically repeating the criticism not a few beta testers (including me) came up with after playing the beta for some time. What was so wrong with PoE1 that you had to reinvent the wheel (pun intended) instead of improving its mechanics for PoE2? But Obsidian chose to comply with the criticism they received: DR/bypass too mushy, combat too confusing, endurance/health system too complicated to be grasped, talents feel bland, per-rest is no-no and a lot of other nonsense. So here we are. Enjoy! I like the armor rating/penetration system a lot better. Combat was never confusing - what were those people talking about? Health/endurance was also stupidly simple and clearly explained. Feats/talents felt bland, as did the entire class system, but that's what you get when you have at least part of the design team with a hard-on for classless systems yet the game MUST be Diet d20 to appeal to your backers. Per-rest is fine as long as you design the game around it, etc. I've said it many times before but Deadfire is like two steps forward and two BIG steps backwards. Many things are markedly improved from Pillars, yet the whole doesn't feel like it's really gone anywhere. Your post makes me glad I didn't pay extra for the beta access, though - what's the ****ing POINT of a beta if you don't listen to your testers when they tell you ****'s ****ed? I beta tested the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria WoW expansions and it was the same ****ing thing - dozens of people making concise, highly detailed posts with video/screenshot evidence to support their claims, showing "guys this **** is ****ed, you really need to rethink it" and then Blizzard just puts it in anyway and... surprise! it ends up being a huge ****ing issue (I mained a Warrior and we spent a considerable amount of effort telling them the fundamental problems of an ability like Colossus Smash, which basically removed enemy armor reduction and built Warriors around dumping all their DPS into a 6 second window, on Colossus Smash cooldown) that basically trivialized the first two seasons of PvP... in an expansion that marketed PvP as a major selling point.

I don't think people understand just how stupid the rest system in Pillars was. If you can exit the dungeon and go chill at an inn or restock at a vendor or whatever, then come back at your leisure and pick up where you left of - then there is no scarcity of resources. You can commit to SELF-IMPOSED CHALLENGES to refuse to take advantage of that facet of gameplay - but at that point you're arguing your personal interpretation of how the game "should" be played, rather than how it's ACTUALLY played. I think that's one thing Deadfire gets right, at least, although the addition of per-rest Empower mechanics and the continued existence of per-rest items and the existence of "per-rest" persistent injuries doesn't jive with the other gameplay elements. I don't think it's really possible to have a rest system that's meaningful when the player can just revert to save as if nothing happened. You can claim that Trial of Iron nixes that, but then we have to point out the MASSIVE number of problems a game like Deadfire has when you try to play it as a permadeath game.

Aye, and add to that the Temple of Eothas was in a frickin town, so resting up wasn't even a meaningful inconvenience. What made the shade area hard was not running out of resources, it was running out of Endurance when three shades simultaneously shot a bunch of giant icicles at you while a phantom kept your tank on permastun and a black ooze hurled giant balls of corrode damage from across the room. Those fights weren't hard because they drained your resources, they were hard because the enemies killed you, repeatedly, until you learned how to deal with them. The Temple of Eothas was difficult only if you went there immediately. I still don't understand the point of plonking a ~4th level dungeon in the middle of the first town when the player will have 2nd level characters and an incomplete party at most. Shades were uncommon and Shadows didn't have the ice bolt ability. You did need to either bunch your group together or keep your squishy characters far away, though. To me, the first REAL challenging fights were the two treant things in the corner of Magran's Fork (high HP, absolutely absurd damage output, applies Stuck on hit, high DR against common damage types...) and the "throne room" battle in Caed Nua. You had to manage not only Shadows, but also Phantoms - and Phantoms were very much OP on initial release (they received small nerfs in later patches.) You really had to find a way to deal with the massive amount of ice damage they'd push out on whoever they were attacking, since they were basically guaranteed to stunlock whoever they were fixated on. But see, that's the beauty of giving casters a full spellbook automatically - you could select the right tool for the job rather than having to hope you chose correctly when you leveled up 30 minutes ago.

I'm just impressed at how well they maintain character while still being able to discuss things at a relatively high level. I don't think the REAL Gromnir was quite that intelligent, given he was a Fighter and not a Mage... but we'll let it slide I'd have to check, but I believe dispositions increased the healing done and the burn damage dealt to vessels - same as it was in Pillars. backwards. is not a chicken and egg problem as there were an uncontested original when dave added his bhaalspawn to tob. this is the problem we got. am not certain if is working as intended. am at a loss regarding the point o' priestly favored dispositions if the mechanic is working as designed. HA! Good Fun! So you're saying that Gaider nerfed you for ToB? Were you some munchkinned out Kensai/Mage or what?

I'm just impressed at how well they maintain character while still being able to discuss things at a relatively high level. I don't think the REAL Gromnir was quite that intelligent, given he was a Fighter and not a Mage... but we'll let it slide I'd have to check, but I believe dispositions increased the healing done and the burn damage dealt to vessels - same as it was in Pillars.

Oh boy, more "difficulty" wanking. Protip: spamming Scroll of Paralysis is not difficult. Running into a "lol you lose" gimmick, reloading and re-selecting spells and consumables so you can now go faceroll the gimmick is not difficult. Gimmicks like that can be fun and force players to do something outside of their normal behavior, and so are ultimately a positive, but they can be over-used and they certainly aren't an example of "difficult." So let's cut out the "lol you're just bad" comments, okay? You've got some rose-tinted glasses going on here because the IE games were no ****ing different. Oh, sure, you had a chance of a random encounter while resting... so you just quicksaved and then kept quickloading until you rested peacefully. How is this any ****ing different from running back to the previous floor of a dungeon to go grab the camping supplies you weren't allowed to take with you, or going to the stairwell to take a nap in your nice fancy house topside before returning back to delving through the Endless Paths? It's not, but you tell yourself it is. There was no "dungeon diving stress" in the IE games. That's pure ****ing rose-tinted glasses. There cannot BE stress when there's no ****ing fail state. You can't run out of time to stop the ritual and fail your quest. The person you're going through the scary forest to retrieve a rare and sacred plant to make them a cure can't off and die on you because your party took too long getting there and back with the macguffin. You have unlimited saves and loads, so it doesn't matter if you **** up - you just load from save and try, try again. And, sure, you COULD do a self-imposed no-save challenge... but why, when the game is clearly built around "haha **** you" gimmicks that require specific answers? You can brute force your way through these gimmicks on lower difficulty levels, but higher difficulty levels demand the correct responses because you're at too much of a statistical disadvantage to just brute force it. Congratulations, you played 20 hours and now you're dead and have to start over because you didn't prepare "Immunity to This Encounter's Gimmick" spells before you entered the dungeon! That's your idea of fun? Permadeath/ironman games are a thing and it's a VERY valid way of getting that "dungeon diving stress" you erroneously claim is in the IE games, but the game has to be designed around that mechanic FROM THE START in order to be good, else you're just playing a self-imposed challenge mode that's apt to be frustrating more than engaging. I'm so sick of seeing people beat themselves off to the idea that Deadfire has moved away from attrition-based gameplay because "it was too hard" for players. Deadfire is the way it is because that's what Obsidian wanted to develop. Not every system has to be a clone of ****ing d20. First of all, this is all subjective, so I don't understand why you are getting so defensive. Could it be people like different things? Also, the fail-state of the IE games was having to re-load. It's the same fail state as Fire Emblem actually, sure if a character dies you can just keep going, but who actually does that? As well, Is this any different in Deadfire? The difference is, with POE1 you could load yourself into a bad spot with not enough supplies if you weren't careful, either having to do the shameful run back to town, or load a previous save, which again is the same penalty, a time penalty. You wasted your time by being bad. Now it is a free load before every encounter. To the dungeons that you are getting wrecked over and over again. That's when you have to make the strategic decision to rest and change your spells? I don't get your issue with that. Why would you keep reloading if resting is a game mechanic. Honestly, I feel you are more into action games. I have been reading your comments and it seems to me you didn't like managing the middle layer of your spells. That is fine, but IE had it even if you choose to ignore it, some of my favorite parts of the game were areas you couldn't rest in (lemme guess you probably just ran back to areas you could and called the game easy). You want to remove an entire game mechanic. Let me ask you this. You want every encounter to be difficult. That's your solution right? Well guess what, that means balancing for using symbol of Eothas every fight. That means you have to make every encounter difficult enough to force you to use that spell to be any sort of challenge. Do you not see how this will cause every fight to feel monotonous? You will have your set route of optimal spells you use every time because they work the best. Guess what too? You have your conditional AI system so now you literally could make it so you have to do nothing. I'm sorry, but I really don't see any enjoyment in that. As I said before if you want to blow your abilities without thinking there is another genre of game for you. I can't take you seriously anymore. You said you've been looking at my posts and yet you still think I dislike Vancian magic and attrition-based gameplay, or that I don't like "having to think," or I'm "more into action games"? I'd recommend not trying to armchair psychoanalyze people in the future - it just makes you look silly and doesn't make your arguments stronger. You said you've been digging through my posts? Go read them. I've already addressed everything you ask about and in probably more detail than it even needs.

Firaxis figured this one out with XCOM 2. The end result is that they made a ****ing stellar tool in ModBuddy, give players unrestricted access to assets (ModBuddy alone is like 50GB because of all the sounds, textures, models, etc it includes), and the files themselves are all written in "regular English" - there are basically tutorial files included with comments that explain what different strings and values mean, so you can mod the game even without ModBuddy (useful if you don't want a glorified Notepad++ hoovering up 50GB of space on your drive when you're just going to be editing some text files.) This meant that Firaxis could create the game they wanted to play, and if players felt it was too easy or too hard or lacking something - they can do it themselves. Darkest Dungeon is another game, this time by an indie dev, that makes modding fairly easy and therefore puts a lot of control in the hands of the players. Especially given how much modding improved BG2, I think that making a strong modding tool and making the game accessible to modders should be Priority 1 for long-term Deadfire plans.

Dispositions affected Holy Radiance when I played at launch. lol, people getting upset over Gromnir's way of posting. I've barely spent more than a few hours cumulatively on these forums since Pillars was launched and even I recognize a novelty account when I see one

I mean... you do realize that Chill Fog does small amounts of damage, has lousy Penetration, and the Blinded effect is largely negated by Perception Inspirations (which are fairly common)... right?

Oh boy, more "difficulty" wanking. Protip: spamming Scroll of Paralysis is not difficult. Running into a "lol you lose" gimmick, reloading and re-selecting spells and consumables so you can now go faceroll the gimmick is not difficult. Gimmicks like that can be fun and force players to do something outside of their normal behavior, and so are ultimately a positive, but they can be over-used and they certainly aren't an example of "difficult." So let's cut out the "lol you're just bad" comments, okay? You've got some rose-tinted glasses going on here because the IE games were no ****ing different. Oh, sure, you had a chance of a random encounter while resting... so you just quicksaved and then kept quickloading until you rested peacefully. How is this any ****ing different from running back to the previous floor of a dungeon to go grab the camping supplies you weren't allowed to take with you, or going to the stairwell to take a nap in your nice fancy house topside before returning back to delving through the Endless Paths? It's not, but you tell yourself it is. There was no "dungeon diving stress" in the IE games. That's pure ****ing rose-tinted glasses. There cannot BE stress when there's no ****ing fail state. You can't run out of time to stop the ritual and fail your quest. The person you're going through the scary forest to retrieve a rare and sacred plant to make them a cure can't off and die on you because your party took too long getting there and back with the macguffin. You have unlimited saves and loads, so it doesn't matter if you **** up - you just load from save and try, try again. And, sure, you COULD do a self-imposed no-save challenge... but why, when the game is clearly built around "haha **** you" gimmicks that require specific answers? You can brute force your way through these gimmicks on lower difficulty levels, but higher difficulty levels demand the correct responses because you're at too much of a statistical disadvantage to just brute force it. Congratulations, you played 20 hours and now you're dead and have to start over because you didn't prepare "Immunity to This Encounter's Gimmick" spells before you entered the dungeon! That's your idea of fun? Permadeath/ironman games are a thing and it's a VERY valid way of getting that "dungeon diving stress" you erroneously claim is in the IE games, but the game has to be designed around that mechanic FROM THE START in order to be good, else you're just playing a self-imposed challenge mode that's apt to be frustrating more than engaging. I'm so sick of seeing people beat themselves off to the idea that Deadfire has moved away from attrition-based gameplay because "it was too hard" for players. Deadfire is the way it is because that's what Obsidian wanted to develop. Not every system has to be a clone of ****ing d20.

I dunno, I think Might being weak for scrappers is kind of a problem because it means that pretty much every melee fighter or archer is going to max out Dex and Per - it's a similar problem to how most classes wanted to cap out Might and Int in Pillars because they were so good you had to be crazy not to pump them. Player damage across the board seems generally much too high, though, so maybe Might could become more valuable if you stopped, for example, letting Rogues get basically unlimited +200% damage attacks.

and thank goodness for the last minute change. with a turning wheel helwalker contemplative, Gromnir were casting pillars of holy fire which hit for 800 damage. can only imagine what woulda' been the result if might remained a multiplier as 'posed to additive. HA! Good Fun! Yeah, Might seems to be in a good place right now. It's still really valuable for classes that can't stack a ton of damage modifiers, but is less than ideal for those that can (Rogues, etc.) I think Dexterity is a little too strong, but I'm not sure how you could change it without making it as weak as it was in Pillars. If I had to make any changes to attributes, though, I'd find some way of making Constitution and Resolve meaningful. More HP doesn't really matter much when healing is so powerful and you don't have a Health stat to force an arbitrary limit on how much damage you can soak, hostile effects reduction doesn't matter much when Inspirations are so overpowered, and 1 Deflection for 1 stat is... less than an ideal trade.

I think the gap between players here is so big it's difficult to bridge. A lot of players, as you say, find it a 'chore' to prepare for combat, use their resources efficiently, and fight a big challenge every single fight. I don't say this as an insult - it's not my business to judge how you play. But as someone who gets incredibly bored and frustrated when I realise I could just win these fights not using half the available resources or spamming left click, I feel like my style of play has not been served well by these changes. To me, "making every encounter efficient" is the fun, and without it, I feel like I'm playing chess against a 3 year old and wondering why I'm bothering. Again, that describes a certain group of players, who are no more or less legitimate than others. I do wish they made the game easier to mod on this front, i.e. easy to edit variables for things like enemy HP, empowers / power sources per level, things like that. I agree that this gap, this divide, between players is indeed a very serious and problematic issue. Everything the OP said is pretty much true for me. There are a few hard fights (if you happen to take them on at the right time) on PotD but only a few of them. Otherwise you are just going through the motions to easily dispatch whatyever is in front of you. One well placed empowered delayed fireball or a an empowered returning storm is pretty much sufficient to settle any encounter in the game. And you can just roll on and do it again. If necessary. And it usually isn'ty necessary. I think there is a view that people who harp back to limited camping supplies, vancian casting systems and endurance/health splits are a small vocal minority of old timer IE fans that are overwhelmingly under-representative of the wider player community is something that needs carefull examination becasue I am not sure it fits the facts. * People railed over the system in PoE1 saying how tedious and restrictive and annoying it was * PoE1 is considereed a classic and sold 1m+ * Tyranny went for a cooldown/no friendly fire system presumably addressing this * Tyranny is not considered a classic and did not do that well * Deadfire has gone for something inbetween being seither the one nor the other * Deadfire is not (so far) being recieved as a classic and is not doing well What is one to make of this? Could it be that what people say on the forums is at odds with their actual purchasing decisions and playtime? I will venture a hypothesis: No matter what people say on the forums, however much they moan about restrictive casting and resting etc, in, for example, PoE1, what people actually want and expect from a game like this is a number of serious, deep, lengthy and especially dangerous dungeons to explore (dungeon in it's widest sense, levels can be above ground or whatever, but at least some proper classic dungeon delving of substance). Especially dangerous dungeons, The sort that engenders feelings of palpable dread as to what might lurk around the next corner or behind that door. That a key element of creating this sense of danger is that the dungeon (or level) is sufficiently long that once you get far enough in you get to genuinely feel like you actually might not make it out in one piece. That if they don't get that sense of danger then they are not happy, even if they don't exactly know why (i.e. that the removal of casting/resting restrictions etc is what done it), and as a result will complain even more bitterly than they did about the restrictions in PoE1. I advocate Path of the Damned being an entirely separate mode. Not a difficulty setting, but a completely different game mode. Maybe that's where they're looking to go with those Magran's challenges things, though, since they explicitly said that they'll twist game rules around. I don't think it's possible to make a single game, a single mode (with or without difficulty variables) that will please the "per-encounter prize fight" players AND the "per-rest attrition death" players. Too many rules, too many mechanics, are wholly reliant on one or the other and Deadfire, right now, sure seems like what you get when you try to please both crowds at once. Hence, I'd like to see PotD be a discrete mode explicitly targeted at pleasing the "death by attrition" kind of players. The sorts of changes I'd make would be too numerous to list in a little post and may end up being redundant with the Magran's challenge things, anyway. The problem is that stuff like ancient ruins filled with inexplicably functional and deadly traps, slogging through encounters that are only moderately challenging, etc... that's ALL attrition-based gameplay stuff. That group of orcs isn't dangerous by itself, it's dangerous because your Wizard had to burn a spell slot to disable some of them and it costs your Cleric spell slots to patch up the Fighter and Paladin (or they have to drink potions, use Lay on Hands, whatever) after the battle. I think that Pillars' Endurance/Health system and limited resting capacity was the right idea, although it needed more work (since it often felt like the player had no meaningful way of avoiding damage short of spamming super OP AOE disables or exploiting the AI's willingness to be funneled into killzones.) For a non-attrition based game... you don't want "trash" packs, you don't want pointless traps that do nothing but waste your time - you want just a chain of boss fight after boss fight after boss fight because if the encounter doesn't result in a TPK, it effectively cost you nothing. A game built for this kind of system wouldn't even HAVE resting, persistent injuries, etc. It might not even have consumables, because the entire point of it is that you have X resources to use in an encounter and it's explicitly designing every encounter with the idea that you will need to use all X resources to prevail - because those resources renew themselves at the end of the fight! I'd even revamp the crafting system to suit - dramatically increase crafting materials costs, but you get an infinite number of those items... but each quick slot may only have 1 item, which is automatically renewed at the end of combat. So you can craft a Major Healing Potion and then anyone you want may dedicate a slot to that Major Healing Potion, and they will always have 1 Major Healing Potion to consume in combat. If you put another one into a quick slot, they get two. And so on. Maybe you could offer options that cost EVEN MORE resources but now your Major Healing Potion II can now be used twice per quick slot, per encounter! You see where I'm going with this? Deadfire suffers systemic problems because Obsidian were not willing enough to dispense with d20 cliches and stand-bys... even though d20 is an attrition-based system while their homebrew stuff is very obviously not. So I think having discrete modes is the easiest solution. Have PotD cater to the attrition-based gamer, while regular is designed for the encounter-based gamer. PotD is not a difficulty setting - it would still use Story, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, etc as scaling - but a separate gameplay mode.

Can we just remove ship supplies entirely? Do they even serve a purpose?

Yeah. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Pillars was underwhelming and much less than I had been lead to believe it would be, but pretty understandable given the dire straits that Obsidian found themselves in - and they DID do a pretty good job of improving it markedly through patches and DLC. Deadfire, though... man, they delayed the release by a month and they let a ****ing MEMORY LEAK through?? I can understand dumb UI bugs, little **** like that that can even be kind of funny for a little while and charming in its own way (see: Bethesda Softworks games.) But gameplay-affecting memory leaks, the ****ing save-import function not working properly (or at all...), level upscaling not working... yeah. No more backing Bugsidian products til they show me they're willing to actually do some serious QA before pushing stuff out the door. I would genuinely prefer to wait another month for release to get a mostly "bug free" experience than to get the game on time, but with so many critical bugs that I might as well have waited a month before playing anyway.