PizzaSHARK

What's so hard to believe that men and women are physically the same despite looking different in a world where you can summon a big ass dragon out of no where just by singing songs? Real world physics rules was never important in any fantasy world, otherwise it won't be called fantasy. Actually, even with soul power being the explanation for all the overtly supernatual abilities of characters in Eora, women would still be less physically capable than men because their bodies are smaller and limbs shorter - assuming you have, like, a male Nappa and a female Nappa, their power level being the same doesn't matter. The male Nappa has longer limbs and can therefore exert more total force (due to leverage given via the longer limbs) than the female Nappa even though they both have... what was Nappa's power level, again? There's literally no way you can explain this away in fluff without explicitly stating that Eora does not have the same physical laws as the real world does, because at least as far as physical feats go (moving really fast, being really strong, etc) it's quite clear that they still operate on real-world physical principles. Maybe the guidebook goes into this, I don't have it. I'd think that fundamental differences in physics in the real world and Eora would bear mentioning in-game, though. Admittedly this is splitting hairs, but I hope it serves to illustrate the point - you can't have sexual dimorphism and say that the physical capabilities of the smaller creature are equal to the physical capabilities of the larger creature, assuming all other variables are equal (they both have a power level of 9000, etc.) SJW went from being a mark of pride to being a derogatory term not just because of Gamergate, but because a minority of people using that term to describe themselves had a tendency to take things a little too far. It's essentially the left-leaning version of the alt-right phenomenon and kind of ties into the horseshoe concept, since these descriptors are generally political as much as they are ethical (you probably won't see proto-fascists in left-leaning political circles, and an SJW would probably find themselves ostracized in a far-right political group, etc.)

Yeah, that's a severe problem with romance pacing. Five minutes of Maia in my party and she's already asking if I'm banging anyone. There are times when I wonder if my watcher has Aloth, Eder and Pally rotating shifts outside his door to keep the horndogs away. Gee it's almost like people sometimes act, swiftly, on impulse when they're physically attracted to someone. Also, anecdotal, but yours was too: Maia had been in my party for many hours of gametime before she asked me about that. Also also, because it's actually kind of important: the way in which that conversation plays out is actually quite witty, even if it's quite blunt. Anyway, I don't agree that anything described in these two posts is 'a problem'. If it was just one character, it'd actually be fine - Viconia in BG2, for example, will bang CHARNAME very, very easily because it suits her character design (she's a Drow priestess, basically top dog in Drow culture even if she's kind of a rebel and worships Shar instead of Lloth.) Her entire character arc, especially with Throne of Bhaal included, is about her learning how to be "normal," in the context of non-Drow races. If you have a whole boat full of randy omnisexuals that come onto the PC basically automatically (as opposed to there needing to be a spark struck first)... then, yeah, you have an issue.

Which is clearly incorrect, because "soul power" explains how... muscle fibers are more dense or whatever practical application of it you'd like to use. I didn't get the guidebook backer tier, so there's clearly stuff that I don't know because it's not explained anywhere in-game. Does it explain how "soul power" can violate the laws of physics? Or does it explain that Eora's physical laws are substantially different from our own, despite the setting being presented in a way that makes it appear to be pretty similar to our own aside from obvious things like souls? Nani A three foot Orlan cannot lift a six foot human off their feet, by their throat. It's quite literally impossible no matter how strong that Orlan is. Why are you telling me this? Because it's an example of where the game's implementation of fluff is unreliable, wrong, or just outright impossible. So where we don't have established fluff to cover, we should then assume Eora obeys the same basic physical laws as the real world does. Even if an Orlan female is every bit as powerful as an Orlan male due to the soul power thing, they still can't violate the laws of physics. In other words, certain actions are still just abstractions. But I'm not debating that with you. I was merely pointing out that you said something that you claimed you didn't say. Because I had not yet seen the post that talked about the guidebook explaining how I was incorrect...

Yeah, definitely. I think companions being more talkative is part of why BG2 is often seen as a high-water mark for old-school CRPGs while BG1 (which had pretty few interactions) is less regarded. I particularly like that companions in Deadfire appear to basically choose a dialogue option FOR you, and would like to see DLC or patches explore this concept more. Party choice should involve not just who you like the most or who has the most crunch value for your party, but also who makes the most sense to bring with you to town and who you should maybe leave back on the boat. Like, if you had an NPC that had a tendency to make jokes about short people and doesn't have the Wisdom Perception to realize when it's REALLY not a good idea to make such jokes... maybe don't bring him along when you go visit the local dwarf or orlan population.

Which is clearly incorrect, because "soul power" explains how... muscle fibers are more dense or whatever practical application of it you'd like to use. I didn't get the guidebook backer tier, so there's clearly stuff that I don't know because it's not explained anywhere in-game. Does it explain how "soul power" can violate the laws of physics? Or does it explain that Eora's physical laws are substantially different from our own, despite the setting being presented in a way that makes it appear to be pretty similar to our own aside from obvious things like souls? Umm.....have you seen what ciphers and wizards do? That's all soul-power, too. *NOTHING* about souls follows anything even vaguely resembling the laws of physics in our world. It's like the Force in Star Wars, or dilithium crystals in Star Trek, or how the **** the X-Gene works in Marvel. It's the bull**** that establishes all the crazy **** that separates Eora from the real world. Except fighters and other martials are explicitly said to be just "moving really fast" or "hitting really hard." They aren't creating energy or matter or using telepathy or other overtly supernatural powers, so their actions still must logically follow physical laws. A vampire in a White Wolf game can move at superhuman speeds and possess the physical strength to throw cars like they're linkin logs, but they still have to obey the physical laws of that world's universe. Unless you've got more of that guidebook that you aren't sharing, the same must then apply to fighters, barbarians, etc here. We could explore the physics of that fireball the mage is throwing, but trying to tie overtly supernatural things to real-life physics is usually a bad idea - SO PEOPLE USUALLY JUST ACCEPT IT'S ALL AN ABSTRACTION.

Which is clearly incorrect, because "soul power" explains how... muscle fibers are more dense or whatever practical application of it you'd like to use. I didn't get the guidebook backer tier, so there's clearly stuff that I don't know because it's not explained anywhere in-game. Does it explain how "soul power" can violate the laws of physics? Or does it explain that Eora's physical laws are substantially different from our own, despite the setting being presented in a way that makes it appear to be pretty similar to our own aside from obvious things like souls? Nani A three foot Orlan cannot lift a six foot human off their feet, by their throat. It's quite literally impossible no matter how strong that Orlan is. Why are you telling me this? Because it's an example of where the game's implementation of fluff is unreliable, wrong, or just outright impossible. So where we don't have established fluff to cover, we should then assume Eora obeys the same basic physical laws as the real world does. Even if an Orlan female is every bit as powerful as an Orlan male due to the soul power thing, they still can't violate the laws of physics. In other words, certain actions are still just abstractions.

Which is clearly incorrect, because "soul power" explains how... muscle fibers are more dense or whatever practical application of it you'd like to use. I didn't get the guidebook backer tier, so there's clearly stuff that I don't know because it's not explained anywhere in-game. Does it explain how "soul power" can violate the laws of physics? Or does it explain that Eora's physical laws are substantially different from our own, despite the setting being presented in a way that makes it appear to be pretty similar to our own aside from obvious things like souls? Nani A three foot Orlan cannot lift a six foot human off their feet, by their throat. It's quite literally impossible no matter how strong that Orlan is.

Yes. In fact, there is proof of the reverse - you can make both male and female characters with any combination of attributes and background. That's a gameplay abstraction to avoid the old "-4 Str" arguments. Men are quite clearly stronger than women for all of the kith races we've seen because sexual dimorphism is on full display and the males are noticeably larger than the females - this would directly translate to increased physical strength, longer reach, etc. It's silly to assume that the two sexes possess equal physical strength, on average, unless there's fluff somewhere that states that females have increased muscle fiber density or something. And even then, they'd still be at a practical disadvantage because shorter limbs would result in reduced leverage, even if their muscles were just as strong despite being smaller. Gameplay abstractions are just that - abstractions. Attributes themselves in Pillars are explicitly abstractions. Supposedly a Wizard with 18 Might is just really, like... mentally powerful or whatever, not a Duke of Swoletown. Unfortunately, in-game crunch doesn't line up with established fluff, because every single Might check I have ever seen in either game has been a straight up "use your muscles to do things" check. It results in unintentionally absurd interactions where a three foot tall Orlan can lift a presumably ~6 foot tall human off the ground, by their throat, and shake them like a rag doll in a dialogue option. Well which is it? You said one gender is clearly stronger than the other in spite of the abstractions and then you pointed out that the in-game might checks that contradicted what you just said. It's fine that you think it's absurd, but that's how the game world works. lol, what? No, I didn't. I specifically explained how gameplay does not line up with fluff and provided a concrete example of exactly why - I don't care how much "soul power" affects a person's physical strength, it is quite literally impossible for a three foot Orlan to lift a six foot human off the ground by their throat. You can be the strongest soul on Eora and you still cannot open a door if you need to have arms that are 3'6" in length and they are only 3'3", and so on. The point, then, is that gameplay cannot be used to support fluff because it's quite clear that gameplay regularly ignores or even violates fluff. I have no clue how you got "You said one gender is clearly stronger than the other" out of that. Yes, the in-game writing screwed up with it's use of the "Might" skill. This has been acknowledged as an *error* and apologized for by Obsidian. The "Might" interactions are not to be taken as reflective of the actual gameworld; they are mistakes. As for how soul-power and fighters work, this is what Obsidian said: "Though it may not look like it to see them in battle next to wizards and priests, fighters are just as able to tap into the power of their souls to devastating effect: accelerating their attacks to a superhuman speed, striking foes with such power that nearby opponents are knocked off their feet, and maintaining a phenomenal endurance that allows them to rapidly bounce back from even terrible wounds." That orlan is *actually* knocking down that ogre. It's not an abstraction; the orlan is *actually hitting that ogre* and *actually knocking it down*. When a fighter uses Knock Down, it's as much a soul-powered effect as Ningauths Shadowflame, and as such it has to obey the laws of physics about as much as Ningauths Shadowflame does. That Orlan is not knocking down that ogre because that would be PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE without getting into the realm of ****ing superheroes. Not "channeling soul energy to be faster and stronger," but "Superman utterly ignoring physical laws" superhero stuff. If this is a superhero setting, it doesn't do an effective job of selling it. And if Obsidian admits that Might interactions were used in error, why did they REPEAT that error for Deadfire? There are even more interactions, and they're all still "get swole" interactions.

Which is clearly incorrect, because "soul power" explains how... muscle fibers are more dense or whatever practical application of it you'd like to use. I didn't get the guidebook backer tier, so there's clearly stuff that I don't know because it's not explained anywhere in-game. Does it explain how "soul power" can violate the laws of physics? Or does it explain that Eora's physical laws are substantially different from our own, despite the setting being presented in a way that makes it appear to be pretty similar to our own aside from obvious things like souls?

Yes. In fact, there is proof of the reverse - you can make both male and female characters with any combination of attributes and background. That's a gameplay abstraction to avoid the old "-4 Str" arguments. Men are quite clearly stronger than women for all of the kith races we've seen because sexual dimorphism is on full display and the males are noticeably larger than the females - this would directly translate to increased physical strength, longer reach, etc. It's silly to assume that the two sexes possess equal physical strength, on average, unless there's fluff somewhere that states that females have increased muscle fiber density or something. And even then, they'd still be at a practical disadvantage because shorter limbs would result in reduced leverage, even if their muscles were just as strong despite being smaller. Gameplay abstractions are just that - abstractions. Attributes themselves in Pillars are explicitly abstractions. Supposedly a Wizard with 18 Might is just really, like... mentally powerful or whatever, not a Duke of Swoletown. Unfortunately, in-game crunch doesn't line up with established fluff, because every single Might check I have ever seen in either game has been a straight up "use your muscles to do things" check. It results in unintentionally absurd interactions where a three foot tall Orlan can lift a presumably ~6 foot tall human off the ground, by their throat, and shake them like a rag doll in a dialogue option. Well which is it? You said one gender is clearly stronger than the other in spite of the abstractions and then you pointed out that the in-game might checks that contradicted what you just said. It's fine that you think it's absurd, but that's how the game world works. lol, what? No, I didn't. I specifically explained how gameplay does not line up with fluff and provided a concrete example of exactly why - I don't care how much "soul power" affects a person's physical strength, it is quite literally impossible for a three foot Orlan to lift a six foot human off the ground by their throat. You can be the strongest soul on Eora and you still cannot open a door if you need to have arms that are 3'6" in length and they are only 3'3", and so on. The point, then, is that gameplay cannot be used to support fluff because it's quite clear that gameplay regularly ignores or even violates fluff. I have no clue how you got "You said one gender is clearly stronger than the other" out of that.

Yes. In fact, there is proof of the reverse - you can make both male and female characters with any combination of attributes and background. That's a gameplay abstraction to avoid the old "-4 Str" arguments. Men are quite clearly stronger than women for all of the kith races we've seen because sexual dimorphism is on full display and the males are noticeably larger than the females - this would directly translate to increased physical strength, longer reach, etc. It's silly to assume that the two sexes possess equal physical strength, on average, unless there's fluff somewhere that states that females have increased muscle fiber density or something. No, but there *IS* fluff stating that physical strength is related to your *soul power*. That's a thing. In Eora, might--including physical strength--is more closely related to soul power than anything. If your soul is strong enough, you *WILL* be strong enough. That's how a 4 foot tall female Orlan can knock down an Ogre. That's because it's a gameplay abstraction unless you're suggesting a typical Orlan can become literally superhuman (superorlan?) by getting really angry or something. Saying that it's a concrete example would mean Obsidian needs to put a lot more effort into explaining how "soul power" literally and flagrantly violates the laws of physics, or explain how Eora's basic physical laws are markedly different from those in real-world Earth despite them never commenting on something that would be so fundamentally important to the setting. So I'm going with the simpler "it's a gameplay abstraction" explanation. Your orlan isn't punching the ogre so hard they fall over because that would require an obscene, impossible amount of leverage and energy - instead, it's probably just a way to abstract them ducking between the ogre and tripping them or something.

Yep, a Codexer. Sniffed that one out. Man I took the bait hard.. What are you talking about? I'm saying that all the codex is is a bunch of forty year old neckbeards ranting and raving about change. ****, dude, I ain't gonna dispute that. You should see the ****fits people get into when someone suggests THAC0 is stupid and BAB is a much better, more logical system. That doesn't mean you can't find diamonds amid all the **** they're flinging. Even the ranty, ravey Pillars of Eternity reviews that came out of the Codex had valid points and complaints even if you thought the whole review, on average, was utter bunk. What exactly would you consider a varied character? Tekehu is a literal shark man and Xoti is a grim reaper with a southern accent. I don't understand. This game is based on the Renaissance era, People were super gay throughout all of history. The ancient Greeks and Romans banged anything that had a pulse. Hell, even pirates got some on the high seas, It was called "matelotage". Even then Eora is a completely different planet so just maybe cuture and society there is a little different then on earth. > People were super gay throughout all of history. I have to say, I adore this sentence They aren't wrong. I've always wondered what people think when they look at the Spartans, long held to be a prime example of super manly masculinity, and discover that buggery wasn't just seen as acceptable, it was encouraged and some books I've read on Ancient Greece/Sparta make it sound like it was more common for dudes to be banging boys than it was for them to be banging their wives. But yeah, that sentence is awesome. I'm stealing it for later.

Yes. In fact, there is proof of the reverse - you can make both male and female characters with any combination of attributes and background. That's a gameplay abstraction to avoid the old "-4 Str" arguments. Men are quite clearly stronger than women for all of the kith races we've seen because sexual dimorphism is on full display and the males are noticeably larger than the females - this would directly translate to increased physical strength, longer reach, etc. It's silly to assume that the two sexes possess equal physical strength, on average, unless there's fluff somewhere that states that females have increased muscle fiber density or something. And even then, they'd still be at a practical disadvantage because shorter limbs would result in reduced leverage, even if their muscles were just as strong despite being smaller. Gameplay abstractions are just that - abstractions. Attributes themselves in Pillars are explicitly abstractions. Supposedly a Wizard with 18 Might is just really, like... mentally powerful or whatever, not a Duke of Swoletown. Unfortunately, in-game crunch doesn't line up with established fluff, because every single Might check I have ever seen in either game has been a straight up "use your muscles to do things" check. It results in unintentionally absurd interactions where a three foot tall Orlan can lift a presumably ~6 foot tall human off the ground, by their throat, and shake them like a rag doll in a dialogue option.

There's always a conflict when it comes to romancable companion sexuality; if you lock it behind gender tastes you can create more nuanced characters by reflecting their personality in their romance, but you'll cut out gameplay options for segments of your players. If you make everybody willing to sleep with anybody, then you increase player opportunity and choice but cut out some nuance of story and character. It doesn't mean anything as far as SJW propaganda is concerned; it's just a gameplay choice. I don't want to assume what they're trying to say, but it seems to me that this could be construed as an argument against the "let everyone bang whoever they want" developer mentality that seems to be have become dominant since Mass Effect hit shelves (I realize ME did not have every character be a... whatever the word is for "will bang anything that shows interest," but they did introduce an entire race that was basically that and it does seem to be the first time people really got their knickers in a bunch over not being able to execute their headcanon "this character actually likes dudes/girls" stuff in-game.) I guess I just feel like, if you're going to bother to try and create nuanced characters and romances that are intended to be more than a few cute little lines and maybe an unbearably awkward softcore porn scene as a "reward", it's silly to excise one of the most important parts of an individual's personality to avoid offending a specific subset of players who refuse to play a character of the race/class/gender/whatever that their object of desire finds attractive. Isn't part of the appeal of CRPGs that they're very replayable and you are generally encouraged to play through multiple times with different classes, characters, etc? Yep, a Codexer. Sniffed that one out. Man I took the bait hard.. What are you talking about?

Oh, please. Codex at least has some valid points and constructive criticism in there somewhere amid all the ranting and raving. Usually. This post didn't really go where I expected. I didn't bother with any of the NPC romance crap because I have never, ever played a single RPG in the history of well over 30 years of gaming that did NPC romances in a way that wasn't cringe-worthy. It's just too hard to encapsulate a mature, complete feeling of an actual developing relationship in a game that spans a limited narrative and whose interactions the player has with other characters are just a series of branching if/then switches - I guess you could claim Witcher 3 did a decent enough job but that's because it's continuing stories from a series of novels and I'd call that cheating, so it doesn't count. I know a lot of people like them, but I've always found them unbearably awkward. I was pleased I was allowed to avoid romantic interactions with my party NPCs without the game forcing me to be a **** about it, though. Maybe Baldur's Gate II scarred me for life by presenting me with only the choice of an incestuous kinda-sorta mother figure, an unbelievably naive and fragile "elf slave, wat do?" paper cut-out, and an appropriately bat**** insane drow elf. Do people really get this upset over whether a character will or won't **** them in a computer game, or if their favorite waifu isn't as perfect as they want them to be? Of all the flawed things in Deadfire like the ship combat, the ship combat, the ship combat, Eder not properly reacting to my playing collecting stray animals like I'm trying to fill a ****ing Pokedex and having an entire room on the ship that might as well be "Eder's favorite place he refuses to ever leave," and the ship combat... "Xoti won't put out in the precise way I want her to," strikes me as really odd.

Yeah I don't see any indication that the Pillars engine can handle Z-axis stuff, but its complete absence mystifies me since even systems with relatively simple rules (such as 5E) still make terrain a relevant concern and often include spells or abilities or items that allow players to alter it to some extent. I'm not expecting or even wanting, like, XCOM-style cover mechanics, but at least some means of breaking line of sight, gaining simple cover bonuses, a high ground advantage, using low ground to avoid line of sight from enemies on slightly higher ground, etc would dramatically expand what can be done with the system. All of that is pointless if the AI wasn't changed to be able to make use of it, though - you'd just have the Pillars problem where allegedly intelligent and sapient creatures casually funnel themselves into a slaughter chute by lining up at a doorway with a tank planted in it while the Wizard and Druid place persistent hazard AOEs on the opposite side. Making resting 1/day or injuries take time wouldn't change anything. Players would just hit the Wait button until injuries are healed or the Rest button refreshes. You can't have a meaningful rest system without a game DESIGNED around permadeath/no saving (aka tabletop rules), or without making the narrative time-sensitive. It costs nothing to spend a week in a dungeon just twiddling your thumbs until you can rest again or your broken bones magically pop back into place... unless you only have three days (including travel time to and from!) to retrieve the macguffin before the quest automatically resolves (probably in a way that denies you XP, money, and a positive outcome.) The problem is that neither solution is going to be easy to cram into the system as it's currently built - you kind of need to build the game around these concepts, not paste them on after the fact. It's not that I don't think you can't make resting and injuries and stuff meaningful, it's more than Obsidian has clearly taken a number of big steps towards outright removing or minimizing the attrition-based gameplay concept... so it makes more sense to just cut off the vestigial bits (if it's not a big deal in regular gameplay, then it's also not a big deal to just remove it outright) than try and justify keeping them around because you want to appeal to the two or three Baldur's Gate grognards that somehow haven't been alienated already and would pitch a temper tantrum if you dispensed with a d20 cliche. I agree that as a concept multiclassing in Deadfire is overpowered. I agree that Pathfinder's hybrid classes tend to offer the best solution, or you could look into their Variant Multiclassing rules - you retain the save progression, attack progression, abilities and features, etc of the primary class, while gaining selected features of the secondary class instead of feats at specific levels. If you VMC'd a Fighter, you would get Bravery +1 instead of a feat, then you'd get Armor Training +1, Weapon Training +1, and so on. Your primary class loses no caster levels, no ability scaling or progression, etc - you just lose feats. You are effectively trading the open-ended customization and variability of feats for the set progression of a second class's features. In practice, this is rarely worth it (it might as well be "make Fighters more interesting/less useless"), but as an overall rules concept it can work very well Personally, I don't see the point in every class having a unique resource in Deadfire, other than it maybe being necessary for certain "recover spent resources" features. Making a Fighter/Paladin draw from the same power pool for all of their abilities would probably substantially nerf them since you could no longer use Disciplined Strikes for "free" while still spamming out Flames of Devotion, for example.

Yup, the ship combat is bad. Everything involving the ship is bad, really - food and water are so common and easily affordable and accessible as to be meaningless, same with medical supplies, morale, etc. Getting to 100 morale and keeping it pegged there is basically effortless (go find and kill one ship and then share out the coins and you're at 100 and will probably stay there without intentionally trying to lower it.) Some simple suggestions, to my mind, to make ship stuff better: - Scale resource costs with difficulty level. If I'm playing PotD, it's safe to assume I'm intentionally wanting to have the game bend me over a barrel. Instead of a full crew drinking and eating 10 units per day... make them consume triple that, and then triple the morale penalty for negative foods (maggoty hardtack and slimy algae-filled water is disgusting, dude) while leaving positive foods unchanged. Triple medical supply costs. Make repairs take more than one unit of supply per unit of hull and sail health. And so on. Sailing around is how you get access to some of the most powerful equipment, and you can get some of it literally as soon as you get your ship if you know where to go (and PotD is effectively NG+ for powergamers, anyway.) Make there be an actual COST to doing this. Similarly, this also means that easier difficulties would basically end up completely doing away with boat management crap, which is probably fine for them since they're just focused on the story and not the crunch anyhow. - Make ship morale weighted to always head towards 50. The closer it is to either extreme, the faster it recovers if you stop treating your people like **** and the faster it decays the faster you stop giving them really ritzy feed or knocking over enemy ships. Then again, morale doesn't appear to even DO anything other than give you a pat on the back if it's high or a chance of mutiny if it's low... so who cares, I guess? - Make damage to enemy crew reduce the number of enemies present during boarding actions, quadratically proportional to total crew strength remaining. Damaging enemy crew to 8/10 will not affect the number of crew present very much, but reducing it to 3/10 will remove a massive number of crew and a 1/10 crew will basically be just the ship's captain and a couple of mooks. It's ridiculous to fire tons of grapeshot at a ship and initiate a boarding action when it's down to 1 listed crew and then you're fighting a clown car full of generic mooks alpha striking you to death. - Add an auto-resolve option to ship battles for people that don't even want to bother with it. Compare various numeric stats between the two ships and assign damage etc accordingly to both ships. One button and you can move on. - Reduce the delay between command prompts in ship battles, and accelerate text speed. The ship battle system is serviceable, if not particularly deep or engaging, but it takes a LONG damn time to have an actual ship battle because of how much time is "wasted" between text speed and pauses. - Make enemy ships actually offer surrender, based on numeric values. If I run across a sloop while I'm sailing around a big galleon, they should just choose to surrender instead of fighting, if they can't flee. If I'm clearly winning a battle and they're on their last legs, it makes a lot more sense for them to fly the white flag than have their ship sunk. - Add crew and other special rewards to victories over other ships as an incentive to actually participate in the ship battle system when not forced to. Right now, enemy ships are largely identical... you get some money, random supply items, and maybe a cannon or something and that's it. What's even the point of it, unless they attack you first?

Except that this is only true if you were going to bother spending points on those spells in the first place. Many of the spells are either redundant, or simply not worth casting over something else right now, so you aren't actually saving anything. The missile spells already hit more than a single enemy, and they scale better than any of the other spells too. It's also better to outright kill an enemy than it is having 3-5 that are half dead roaming around (which happens aside from empower cheese). About the only time I could ever see it being worth switching grimoires over simply keeping the Vaporous 100% of the time is if you've already used up some of the bonus casts that it gives you from a specific tier, but not from another and you really need a specific spell. I've yet to encounter any sceneario where this happens though. I guess we'll see how things look though after the supposed balance adjustments. A bigger problem is that grimoires can only be equipped to quick action slots, so that basically means that in order to have a decent toolkit, Wizards can't use potions or scrolls or explosives or drugs or other consumables and Priests and Druids can apparently just get bent because they don't even get the option of grimoires. I'd really like to hear what the team was thinking with these changes, what they intended for it to result in and what gameplay goal it was intended to fulfill that the previous system failed to accomplish, because I can't understand any of it unless the point was "casters too strong, make them weaker." As for some spells being redundant or just bad, that's probably because it sure seems like Obsidian created the consolidated inspiration/affliction setup and then directly ported spells across as often as possible. It's why Priests generally feel really weak (most of the buffs they can provide are redundant because a lot of classes, and especially a lot of martial classes, can already provide them on-demand by themselves), etc. The balance changes can and presumably will be fixing a lot of that, though.

Druids are about what they were in Pillars. They're really strong, but I don't know if they're OP unless you start stacking certain spells (multiple Druids with Returning Storm stunlocking enemies, etc.) A blaster Druid is probably better than a blaster Wizard right now, I'm not sure if that's acceptable or not. TWS is always going to outperform everything else except maybe OWS (OWS is only competitive to some extent because of the massive amount of Hit to Crit conversion you can stack and because of how valuable that +12 Accuracy is when enemies all have +15 Deflection) unless TWS itself gets nerfed. Take a page from other RPG systems and give it an overall Accuracy penalty, offhand damage penalty, or even both. Pathfinder, for example, imposes a -2/-2 BAB penalty even with Two-Weapon Fighting (and it's higher than that if your offhand weapon isn't a Light weapon, which means lower damage) and only applies half of your Strength bonus to damage with the offhand weapon until you get the Double Slice feat at later levels. In Deadfire context, that'd probably be a -4 or -6 Accuracy penalty, or maybe a -25% Damage penalty while dual wielding. A damage penalty is easier to overcome, and would maybe be TOO easy to overcome, but an Accuracy penalty could make dual wielding so weak as to be unusable in PotD. Another solution might be to lower Penetration, since Penetration is so important in Deadfire. Nerfing classes is expected and will happen but my concern isn't that PotD is too easy or too hard, it's that it's too BORING because of how limited Deadfire's systems design requires it all to be.

That's specifically what killed my interest in trying self-imposed challenge runs, another playthrough with a completely different playstyle, etc - I didn't see how they'd REALLY be any different aside from maybe being forced to use specific gimmicks to work around the imposed challenges, etc. For me, it wasn't that PotD was too hard - I think while it's easier than Pillars PotD it's not really "too easy" - it was that PotD never really made me THINK, never really made me tackle encounters with wildly different approaches. Even Pillars, with its "craft Scrolls of I Win, spam Scroll of I Win against anything not immune to I Win" problem at least had enough encounters that made me approach things differently - the early encounters with Phantoms, for example (especially before they got nerfed to being "strong but manageable") required me to dramatically alter the way I was approaching fights up to that point. Some monsters still do that (Shades in Deadfire, for example, have that AOE attack on teleport so you're encouraged to spread out rather than bunch up like you did vs Shades in Pillars), but they're few and far in between. The comments about adding more enemies is what prompted this post, when normally I'd just stay quiet and find something else to play. I utterly adore everything BUT the combat (and ship combat, but that's a different post) in Deadfire, and it seems like Deadfire is suffering from being too limited in some areas (enemy AI is just too simplistic, to paint it in broad strokes) and from trying to be too many things at once in others. There probably should be a few extra bodies in some encounters, and enemies across the board probably need a fair bit more HP in PotD in general (particularly named NPCs/elite mooks), but if they think that just giving everything +25% HP and an extra 3 mooks in every encounter will "fix" PotD... they're wrong. Specifically to resting, I advocate basically removing it entirely (via removal of ALL per-rest abilities, items, etc - rebalance and retune them as needed based around being "always available") simply because the game is clearly MOST of the way there already. When I got empower points and saw they were per-rest, I scratched my head and wondered what argument in the design team resulted in that happening. I mean, they can keep in Injuries if they want, since they're effectively meaningless as it is, but if they're meaningless to begin with, removing them won't hurt anything.

It has nothing to do with wanting an easier game, it has everything to do with wanting a challenging game that is difficult not just because the player has the numeric odds stacked against them, but because they're presented a wide variety of tactical issues and problems that each need to be solved - often in different ways. 1 - Doorway battles were a problem in Pillars because the AI couldn't react to them appropriately. It makes sense for mindless animals to get funneled into a chokepoint. Sapient creatures would just back off and set up an ambush, throw a persistent AOE (Chill Fog, etc) at them, etc. If I wasn't clear enough, this assumes the game's terrible enemy AI gets substantially improved. 2 - It makes the game harder because the designers can then specifically create encounters that require or strongly encourage the use of particular tools. Was I not clear enough? If all you have is a hammer OR a wrench, everything has to be solved with just the hammer OR just the wrench... even if the problem isn't a nail, or whatever. You can't design a fight around needing Arcane Dampener to disable enemy buffs at specific times, for example, because you can't GUARANTEE that the player's Wizard has that spell available to them at the time they come across that encounter (they will either have to brute force it, go sailing around until they finally find a grimoire with Arcane Dampener, go back and respec their Wizard and then have to respec them AGAIN afterwards, etc.) 3 - I feel like you missed the point. Resting doesn't make the game "harder." It doesn't make it "easier," either. It's effectively pointless. If powergamers (or any player who realizes it can be done - even normal players will notice certain mechanical "loopholes" if they're paying attention during play) know that you can just rest to recover their empower points after literally every single encounter... why even bother having the pretenses of per-rest abilities, ESPECIALLY when the game has already gone to great lengths to mechanically separate itself from attrition-based rules systems? I think you missed the entire point of my post. It has nothing to do with "hard" or "not hard," it has to do with systemic design problems that are going to prevent PotD from being tactically interesting and nuanced.

Mods, if this is the wrong subforum, move it where it needs to go. None of the other forums seemed to be appropriate so I defaulted to here. So update 48 made it clear that fixes for Veteran and PotD were on the way (though we already pretty much knew that), and mentioned some new challenge modes. I'm not going to worry about those, because chances are any assumptions I could make about them would be wrong. Maybe this whole post will be invalidated by them, but I don't know that and I think that Deadfire has some very severe issues that need to be addressed, especially if they want PotD to reward/demand tactical planning and execution rather than "hit them harder than they hit you" (which is how Pillars was, and how PotD currently is.) So based off of the writing in 48, it makes it sound like their solution to PotD being too easy is largely just "add more enemies to encounters!" This will probably come with nerfs (can't wait to see Paladins, Rogues, and Chanters stop being better than everyone at everything), too. These changes will probably result in PotD being more difficult, but if your difficulty is just "overload the player to the point that they just do the same thing repeatedly from save until they get enough winning coin flips that they win the encounter, then repeat" is what the game turns out to be... is that really what players want? Is that really what you, as designers, want? And before I go further, let me be clear: Deadfire is probably at parity with Baldur's Gate II in terms of tactical depth, replacing the massive spellcaster dispel metagame with martials being able to do more than just run up and beat on things. It is NOT at parity with modded BG2 (such as Sword Coast Stratagems, the "Improved Tougher" line of mods, etc.) Personally, though, I feel like "it's as good as a 20 year old game," isn't really a success story - BG2 at least can claim that it was limited by technology of the time and being chained to the horribly retarded 2E rules, and we can rightfully point out that Obsidian was already bending over backwards to bring Pillars to life, so it's understandable that many of its rules and systems never felt fully mature. I don't feel like any of that applies to Deadfire. So moving on, there are several individual issues with Deadfire as a whole that will prevent PotD from being more than "it's the same as all the other modes, just with more mooks and everything has higher stats." Especially with the mention of AI being better, this makes me think that PotD is intended to be a much more tactical mode than the others, but it's simply not, because the game rules and design itself prevents that. In no particular order, these issues include: Lack of Terrain Interactivity and the AI's Capability of Using It While I'm not expecting Deadfire to turn into 5E or, god forbid, Pathfinder here, I think the near-total lack of the player needing to manage the terrain and its features is a serious problem. It was maybe halfway through my playthrough that I began to notice that pretty much every optional fight - and many required ones! - were taking place in something that was just basically a gorgeous, barren empty corridor or room. You'd see rocks and sand and stuff beautifully drawn on, but there wasn't any interactivity there. I couldn't use the rocks or bushes or trees to break line of sight, and I certainly couldn't order my guys to take cover behind them (nor is there any kind of simplified "unit receives a defense bonus if an attack crosses this obstruction" contextual bonus system.) Being on high ground, in the rare times it's even there, did not appear to give me a better field of vision, nor did being on low ground limit my vision. For all intents and purposes, the game world is as flat and uninteractive as a typical battlemap in tabletop - except while the DM will add obstructions, cover, difficult terrain, etc in a tabletop session, Deadfire obviously can't do that on the fly. This seriously limits the options the player has at their disposal (some of the bounties, for example, might be completely doable at much lower levels than "intended" if you could utilize rocks and bushes and trees to break line of sight with spellcasters or ranged attackers that, at that level, are probably too much to handle while you're busy with their melee buddies), and it also dramatically limits how inventive or interesting encounter design can be. Even if you designed nuanced AI that could, for example, have xaurips perform a fighting retreat when they're on the downhill side of a battle, you don't have rocks and trees and such they could hide behind and lay ambushes for pursuing players. Sand should be difficult for most people to move around on, especially weighed down with armor and belongings, yet it's as easy to move across as a tile floor. You get the idea - the world's nearly invariable lack of defining features is a serious issue and needs to be addressed... assuming we want PotD to be more about than just making the numbers be increasingly less in the player's favor. Spellcaster Spellbook Limitations Someone at Obsidian must play only martials in tabletop because jesus christ did spellcasters get smashed with the nerfbat between Pillars and Deadfire. I guess the concern was that by allowing them to cast per-encounter rather than per-rest, they'd be too strong... but given how hilariously overpowered dual wielding Full Attacking martials are, that seems misplaced. The limitations on how many spells most casters get to know SEVERELY limits the player's toolbox. As a result, the player is essentially given a choice between a hammer or a wrench early on, and from then on EVERY problem must be solved with that hammer or wrench, rather than picking the tool appropriate for the job. If you selected a hammer, you better get used to being forced to look at every problem like it's a nail, because you don't have a choice. Instead of the player adapting spell choice to suit the issue at hand, they're locked into a gameplay style that will result in literally every single encounter playing out exactly the same as any other... because they can't do anything else even if they'd want to. This is exacerbated by the inflated enemy stats in PotD strongly discouraging offensive spells compared to defensive ones. A buff can never miss, so if you only have one cast of a 3rd level spell and you've got a 25% chance of landing a damage or debuff spell... you might as well buff your party and drown them in autoattacks; this is exacerbated by awful base chance to hit against enemies in PotD, which further enforces the need to buff in order to be able to fight effectively (which also makes certain spells, like Devotions for the Faithful, practically must-have.) This means you're better off selecting defensive/"can't miss" spells at level up, meaning... you only have buffs and related spells in your toolkit, meaning you can't try to disable or blast the enemies even if you'd wanted to. I have no idea how this made it through beta without anyone calling it out on how short-sighted it is. It's arguably the single-worst design decision in Deadfire right now. It forces encounters to be limited (because you have to build them around being doable with everyone's artificially limited toolbox, meaning they can't be specialized to require certain responses), it forces player tactics to be limited, it's just... ugh. It's bad. It's maybe the only thing in Deadfire I can say is unequivocally, plainly bad. It's the Baldur's Gate II mage battle problem (you must have a mage, and you must know ahead of time what spells you need to counter the spells the enemy mage will be using to protect themselves - hyper-specialization combined with precognition, basically), but in reverse. As for a solution? Go back to Pillars. Priests, Druids, Wizards all get their full spell list at each level (discarding the annoying Grimoire system in both versions; it was just meaningless busywork in Pillars and it's just... really annoying in Deadfire for a lot of reasons.) They pick one spell as their feat/talent choice at each level, just like now, which gives them one "free" cast of that spell per encounter, reducing total spells per level by 1 to compensate if necessary. You still pick spells based on what you want that caster's specialty to be, but now you're not completely screwed if you run into an encounter your blaster mage is ill-suited for - and now you can actually design encounters knowing that all players will have the same tools available to them at all times! The Rest/Injury Mechanic is Designed for Attrition-based Gameplay in a Game That's Largely Done Away with Attrition-based Gameplay This is an example of the problems inherent in Deadfire's schizophrenic rules philosophies. On the one hand, Obsidian promised players that it'd be like a new Baldur's Gate, complete with expected mechanics and cliches - in other words, a d20 game in fact if not in name. On the other hand, Sawyer has mentioned in interviews his dislike for d20 and his affinity for class-less rule systems, and a number of things in Pillars of Eternity very clearly show this: attributes are much less impactful (being almost MMO-like in nature) and less clearly defined (Might is theoretically more like "spiritual power" even if it's only ever used as raw muscle strength in scripted interactions), everyone has the same base accuracy and is equally good with any weapon and armor type, and so on. Resting was a formality in Pillars, enforced primarily by the Vancian magic system and Health being a hard-cap on how long you could adventure before being forced to rest (I'd often just use console commands to give everyone the Health-healing per-rest abilities just to make things less tedious.) Spells are per-encounter and the Endurance/Health system is completely gone in Deadfire (a side-effect being that healing spells are actually worth using now, with the various CON afflictions clearly designed to prevent healing from being overpowered), but we've replaced Health with a more abstract Injury counter. And then we went and replaced per-rest spells with a per-rest Empower pool, because... I don't know. Arguments in the design team, maybe? Regardless, we still have a largely pointless rest system. Powergamers are just going to rest after every encounter and open with an empowered fireball to obliterate everything (or any number of other, similar things), and there's not really any real way to make resting a meaningful decision short of massive rule changes... because the whole gameplay concept of needing to spend time resting to recover spent resources is for attrition-based systems like d20. It goes hand-in-hand with Vancian magic rules, per-day abilities and items, and so on; you have to manage how often you're casting spells and using your limited abilities with gradually accruing HP damage that you have to spend limited resources on recovering from. While there are certain encounters where players can be knocked down or even killed in tabletop d20 systems, TPKs and player deaths are primarily from attrition; the party doesn't plan ahead well enough to be able to handle a string of bad luck (or bad decisions...) and it eventually gets someone killed. Deadfire has none of that. Everyone completely recovers, except for some meaningless Injury, after the end of every encounter. Encounters are completely binary - either you completely succeed, or you completely fail and have to load from save. There's no "cut your losses" response in Deadfire, like in a tabletop game or, theoretically, in the Infinity Engine games (though everyone I know would just load from save if someone died, because interesting and engaging characters in a single-player game don't usually mesh with the permadeath concept inherent to tabletop play.) The logical way to make resting cost would be to make the game narrative and quest narratives time-sensitive but that would be a major departure from the basic rules. Without doing major changes to the core game rules, it's probably best to do away with per-rest abilities, injuries, etc entirely. Make Empower a binary on/off state, rather than a per-rest points system since powergamers are going to be using it like a binary state anyway - and PotD is explicitly made for powergamers. These are just a few examples of the kinds of systemic problems that Deadfire faces right now. I could write more about detailed problems with each class or role, but since we know "numbers changes" are in the pipe, it doesn't make sense to really bang on about stuff that may get fixed in a week or two.

@Ninja, I think we're really far from having no sense. I never felt it that way in my playthroughs, until it was brought up here, on the forums. Obsidians approach lorewise has sense in the world they created, because of this whole soul reasons (apparently). As long as there is a diversity between characters with different stats this is not a big issue to me, or a issue at all. EDIT @Pizza, I think you confuse health with endurance - you can't magically restore health, only endurance. Thus no healing magic. Endurance is health in crunch. The END/HP system is just simply Obsidian's attempt to reduce the need for "finish encounter, cast healing spells, rest, continue" gameplay that tends to be rather common in the other IE games and many tabletop systems. You run out of END and you "die." It is hit points in everything but name and fluff.

So in other words: you don't want to play a game, you want to play make-believe. You can do that if you want, but don't expect others to take your views on character building seriously if that is your aim.There has to be a balance reached between the two. Average player (aka majority) is gonna fall in the middle on this. they want to role play and play a character ideal but still want to be effective, gameplay wise, without having to get too deep into (or worry about) the math and mechanics. My point being, what would be some exceptable middle ground changes that arent pure role play or pure power gaming? Thats where I have a hard time thinking what could be changed to make it better overall. Yes, I tend to build based on the character I want to play rather than for power gaming purposes. My geeky power gaming "munchkin" itch has long since been sated and now I prefer flexibility in design. A less optimal but more interesting character is simply more enjoyable to play. Unless one is playing with an entire party of custom characters, creating your PC purely for power gaming purposes isn't going to make a major difference anyway. You're just one-sixth of a team made up of mostly pre-built, non-optimized characters. Right, but this is a forum that largely caters to the power gamers, the people that want to know exactly how things tick. Going "well I don't want to power game!" here is kind of silly. Who cares what "average" players want? Give them an "automatically assign stats" button to go with the "level up automatically" option and they can focus on having fun. Pathfinder is not somehow hostile to roleplaying and "just want to have fun" players that don't obsess over eking 5% more throughput from their attributes, despite being a "Wizards must have Intelligence" system. You'd simply have an interface that goes "Strength is necessary for Fighters, Dexterity and Constitution are recommended!" and that would make everything accessible and simple for regular players (along with "suggested feats" buttons like we got in KOTOR 2 etc.) I'm not even talking about min-maxing when I say every build needs Might and Intelligence to be good. I don't min-max any of my characters. Doesn't make Might and Intelligence any less dominant. I would make offensive stats contribute less to defenses than the defensive stats. Might gives you a bonus to Fortitude, but you get more per point from Constitution. Resolve gives you more to Will than Intelligence, and you get more out of Perception than you do Dexterity (this one's tricky since both are arguably of equal importance for "get out of the way of the big fireball", and both are arguably offensive stats.) I don't know to fix Action Speed. It's a total mess and while I understand holding to turn-based concepts like rounds is kind of archaic for a RTwP game format, it makes it so much easier to understand and calculate things. "Haste gives you an additional attack per round at your highest attack bonus (full ACC in Pillars terms)" is so much easier to quantify and understand than "ADoM increases your action speed by 50% but you need to calculate how much you're getting from Dexterity and losing from your armor penalty to figure out what that actually means." I don't expect them to scrap the current system, of course, but it's unnecessarily confusing and seems like a questionable design choice. I do like the idea of actions starting immediately after completion (rather than a "cooldown" period), and Action Speed just influencing how long an action takes. Characters standing around staring at each other menacingly was always one of the downsides of the IE's RTwP system. IIRC the IE promise was about: Planescape Torment style storytelling Baldur's Gate style exploration Icewind Dale style engaging strategy and battles No-one ever said a thing about other stuff, like stat systems, gaining experience or level progression. It only delivered on the Baldur's Gate style exploration, though. The storytelling fluctuates between "pretty decent" and "bland", and Pillars has less tactical depth than any IE game except perhaps BG1 (which was a 2E game built for low levels.) They absolutely nailed the BG1 feeling of exploring random areas, though. I give Obsidian a lot of **** because I know what these people are capable of. They're industry veterans with phenomenal writers, game designers, artists, animators, etc. Pillars was such a massive ****ing let-down for me in so many ways and it's got me gun shy about Deadfire. I backed it because I have faith in the skill of the fine people working at Obsidian, but they really need to knock this one out of the park. They stretched themselves too thin with Pillars, and I really hope they go for a more Tyranny style "less is more" focus for Deadfire. If they want to add stuff after launch for us to explore and investigate (whether free or sold as expansions), I'm totally fine with that if it means the core product is more polished and balanced as a result.

Right, but Pillars like all of the Infinity Engine games is meant to emulate a tabletop environment. Baldur's Gate was practically an homage to tabletop and it just went from there. I'm not complaining about plot railroading etc, but more about how few options Pillars really gives you for handling encounters (or avoiding them), even compared to previous IE games. There was a great deal more tactical depth to major, carefully designed encounters in BG2 than there is in Pillars... but unlike BG1, Pillars can't make the excuse of "well it's only for low level characters, of course their toolbox will be smaller!" And this is with per encounter abilities in Pillars, something that largely didn't exist in BG2's 2E ruleset. Additionally, it's the responsibility of the content creator to ensure that no stat is a true "dump stat." If there are dump stats (like being able to run around with 3 WIS and get away with it), that's a failure on the part of the content's creator, not the game system - to an extent, anyhow. We know that Obsidian are capable of amazing things, yet Pillars is so disappointing in so many ways. If not for my adoration of the Eora setting and the certainty that Obsidian are capable of better, I would've just laughed at the idea of backing Deadfire. Pillars is a decent game, but it's so much less than what Obsidian are capable of. I really think they bit off way more than they could chew, maybe out of a felt need to recreate something on the scale of Baldur's Gate to entice backers for the kickstarter (I think they said something to that effect in the wonderful making of documentary.) Tyranny, in comparison, is a much stronger game in my opinion despite arguably even worse balance issues. They aimed for a small, focused experience and that's exactly what we get. Pillars is just... a mess, overall. Sorry, went off on a tangent there. This pretty much sums it up. In DnD, when you look at the stat spread of a character you can imagine what they are like. In Pillars, when you look at the stat spread you can see micro modifiers to other stats. Pretty much. There are many different ways to roll and develop a character in D&D, but ultimately the character's attributes heavily define not only how they play, but how you view them. Pillars stats are trying to cover so much ground each, and are sometimes applied inconsistently (as always "but Might is only ever used for physical actions!"), that they just don't have the weight that D&D's stats have... despite them operating much the same. I increase my STR to 20 from 18, I get another +1 to attack and damage with melee weapons - not really far removed from increasing Might from 18 to 20 and getting +6% damage/healing. I really think the way attributes interplay with feat prerequisites and skills is a huge part of why D&D stats feel more impactful. Divorcing skills from attributes (and making skills so few in number and so limited in effect) was a major mistake, IMO. I'm fine with mostly doing away with feat prerequisites (although I think there's value to feat trees to encourage character specialization and focus) and glad to see "feat taxes" gone. This pretty much sums it up. In DnD, when you look at the stat spread of a character you can imagine what they are like. In Pillars, when you look at the stat spread you can see micro modifiers to other stats. Because Wisdom is so much clearer than Perception or Resolve? Rename Wisdom to Perception and it's still more impactful than Pillars' Perception stat. As others have mentioned, Wisdom tends to be interchangeable with Perception (seeing as how Wisdom checks usually revolve around the character's ability to perceive and understand worldly or spiritual things), and Charisma tends to be interchangeable with Resolve (seeing as how Charisma activities typically revolve around a character's force of personality, although 2E rules also stipulated that Charisma was related to physical attractiveness as well.) Well, orcs and goblins are also well established fantasy norms, and yet you don't have them in PoE (which is a shame if you ask me). In fact, how about a subjective list of well established fantasy cliche norms not present in PoE? classes relying on a single attribute (e.g. INT for wizards) vancian casting traps and lockpicking only for rogues halflings orcs and golbins demons (and other entities from hell) eternal animosity between dwarves and elves dwarves can't be druids or wizards healing magic different pantheon for different races/cultures portals leading to distant places etc. As I said before - don't expect every system has to duplicate one another. You want to drink one type of coke forever? Try tea sometimes. - Classes still rely on a single attribute, or really pair, of attributes in Pillars. Those attributes are Might and Intelligence. Every single class, every single role, benefits from high Might and Intelligence and suffers from a deficiency in either. There's also nothing wrong with having a class requiring one stat for effectiveness (whether or not multiple attribute dependent classes are a good thing is hotly contested.) - Pillars still has vancian casting. - Disable Device and Find Traps being Thief/Rogue exclusives went away with 3E, particularly as you went outside just the core rulebook. - Orlans are interchangeable with Halflings. They're clearly the "short humanoid race bigger humanoids bully" race replacement. Different in fluff, identical in function. - Orcs and goblins are missing, but kobolds are present and are practically identical to their D&D iteration (reptilian, obsessed with dragons and all things draconic, often found worshiping dragons young and old, to the point of being food/sacrifices for them.) Where we'd fight orcs or goblins, we usually fight humans or more xaurips. Functionally not much different. - Strangely missing, to the game's detriment. Outsiders make for interesting, challenging encounters due to often possessing spell like abilities, resistances, and immunities. - That depends on setting. Many settings may pay homage to dwarves and elves not getting along due to cultural differences and have NPCs snark each other, but it's rarely animosity anymore. The further the setting moves away from Tolkien, the less likely you are to have elves and dwarves trying to beat each other up and more likely to have them just snark each other. - Healing magic is in full effect in Pillars, what're you talking about? - Again depends on setting, but in many settings there's just a single pantheon. Some races or cultures are predisposed to some deities over others, but this exists in Pillars too with seafaring cultures often paying homage to Ondra, someone from Readceras likely being Eothasian, etc. As mentioned, xaurips are interchangeable with kobolds. - Yup, as with the missing demons/devils, it's to Pillars' detriment. I wouldn't be surprised if we see it in Deadfire. Extraplanar activities are always a great way to change things up. Settings don't have to duplicate each other but when JSawyer (I think?) went on record as saying elements of Eora were essentially reverse engineered from the Forgotten Realms (Diet Tolkien) setting, it makes sense to analyze what was added and what was removed and think about why.