Zorfab

No they are not. Rests are unlimited because the game does not punish or ban you from going back to a village or city and buy more of them.

D&D games of later iterations simply made most spells last only a short duration only and GM limited the resting by making sure there were downsides to doing it and you have to live with the consequences of your decisions. More than one party met their demise by resting in a wrong place and getting ravaged by a random encounter or ambush when their resources were not regained yet. Here the first one is true and second one is not. I`d be fine with pre-buffing if rests and thus buff spells or spells in general were actually a limited resource.

AD&D in both iterations (especially 1st ed) was an incoherent mess, filled with exceptions to rules. Ran it for 10 years or so. Also did another few years for 3.0 and 3.5, which are ok games for most part but still inflexible in terms of genre and filled with unnecessary crunch-fluff such as bazillion prestige classes. Best thing about 1e and 2e is the style, which it oozes. Both in prose and even in the cool old-school art in the books. These days I use GURPS for pretty much everything else except Shadowrun, which is run using its own system. And that is mostly just because there is so much stuff to convert that I save the effort for other settings.

The meaningful alternative is to reset the dungeon if player retreats (for example, Souls games) and teach them how to play better through this. Or make the inhabitants organize superior defense next time he returns (mostly seen this on pen and paper games, unfortunately). Or make the quest fail, because villains left the dungeon and took the important loot with them / killed the virgin / nuked the village with a ritual meteor spell. Or locking the party in the dungeon and forcing them to deal with it using the limited resources they have + whatever they can scavenge from the location (like old school Dungeon Master games, where you have to eat and drink, which means scavenging by advancing in the dungeon and killing monsters for food). Consequences that actually matter.

Unfortunately the supplies end up being pointless due to the static nature of the dungeons (at least everything I´ve seen so far). Going back to village for more supplies is just a minor nuisance, equivalent of few savescum-rests from other games with random encounters thrown in for resting in dangerous area. The way it would actually work was if party was locked in dungeon and could not retreat before either completing it or perishing horribly in it. If you actually HAD to think about using the big per rest spells and abilities, and potions/consumables.

Gave me an good excuse to delete my ultra-boring hard (too easy) playthrough in its entirety just now. Even better, I actually managed to find one of the real endings by massacring everyone I found in defiance bay before deleting the whole thing. There is at least one plot critical character there if you haven´t tried it yet.

76 deflection is pretty low for a tank. You can get 110 easily with fine large shield, hatchet and defensive abilities/talents before any buffs.

3rd edition spells have casting times of one action or one round, excepting maybe a very few spells. Pre 3e spells have casting times of segments. One segment is 6 seconds. This allows for interrupting spells and kept magic users from being gods. In 3e, spells are almost never interrupted because you had to ready an action to do so and you were almost always better to take your normal actions. Don't call me crazy and blame it on house rules until you've actually read the rules. Not quite. Segments are a AD&D 1st edition thing. 2nd edition had three different options for initiative systems: http://merricb.com/2014/07/01/initiative-in-add-2nd-edition/

The article is written by Josh ... Basically as soon as they see the letter combination "Kotaku" their brains switch off. Extremely amusing to see, of course.

1. Broken stealth mechanics that need to be changed to individual stealth. - True, plus I do not like how scouting is also tied to perception, which makes me crawl everywhere using double speed so I don`t miss hidden stashes. 2. Not being able to drop items out of inventory or on to the game world ground. - With the inventory mechanics they chose, it doesn`t matter. Divinity handled this issue very well though, and integrated item manipulation to their gameplay. Half-assed option to drop items but not having any function for the dropping would actually be the worst choice. 3. Seeing all npcs in the game world walk but you cant unless its a game movie scene. - Don`t care about walking, but it is funny omission nonetheless. Would probably be extremely easy to implement too since animation is already in game. 4. No options to bash open or break locks on chests , doors, or cabinets. - This one is definitely something that is missing. You even have prybars in game that would be great for this. And game even has fatigue, so you could just let players to open some doors and containers with it and suffer fatigue depending on their athletics skill level. 5. No ammunition for ranged weapons. This is very strange. - I prefer D:OS mechanics, where normal arrows are free of charge, but special arrows are consumables that you can use in place of regular attack. Actual arrow stacks and such are much better for survival / RPG games that have very lethal combat and force hard choices on what equipment to carry and what to leave behind (this using systems that are actually pretty realistic, like GURPS or something like that). 6. No option to pass time. - True, and should be implemented. Would also be very easy to do. - I`m also finding that limited rests are not so limited. Almost all locations are static and stay as you left it if you bail out to get more supplies from city inn and return. It just wastes time when it is done this way. Game should feature a possibility of failure or bad consequences if you leave in mid mission, like enemies completing their objective or reinforcing their troops heavily. This would be great way to implement more alternative plot paths as well. Alternatively, you should not be able to leave until you are dead or the mission is complete.

Yeah, that happened to me in the last few fights. I didn't even give him Defender Mode, and he's still holding off like 4 enemies at a time while my PC Wizard and Aloth tag-team stuff from afar. MY PC Wizard actually switches to a 1-handed Rapier to help out once the enemies are thinned out a bit (that and I like using as much short-range magic as possible... just my style, 8P). I think maybe a few tuning passes are in order, to make things a bit less swingy? I don't have an issue with party setup A making things easier than party setup B. But, there are some things that seem way easier even on Hard difficulty than they're meant to be. I get things being not uber-hard if you do it right, but... some stuff's been just passively unworrisome (such as 4-5 things clawing at Eder, but don't worry... he's fine for like the next 6 attacks with me not actively making him fine). Really, the only thing that's been HARD hard were the first bears I fought. They pretty much laughed at Eder's armor and Deflection values. Of course, that was at Level 2. *shrug* Eder is amazingly good tank after a while (level 4-5). You can push his deflection close to 120 before buffs with enhanced large shield and some feats and at that point most enemies can barely touch him with most attacks. Probably could stand getting beaten alone for minutes or indefinitely if his weapon drains endurance... You can send him to room alone, pull all aggro and shoot the enemies to back with heavy ranged weapons in most encounters. That`s why no matter how sucky your party is most of the fighting becomes a breeze at that point.

First truly interesting companion I´ve seen is Grieving Mother to be honest. Rest range from meh (Aloth, Eder) to ok (Durance, Sagani). Druid dude did not seem very interesting either and Kana is the humor companion or something. Haven`t seen the last one yet.

But you are not supposed to be able to make really inferior choices in this game. Did devs fail in their intentions in your opinion?

Yes, the attributes in PoE are strange and are there only because devs wanted to make choosing them mechanically difficult. It`s decidedly computer game / tactical game system and not something that would bend easily for pen and paper tabletop RPG use. By the way, GURPS does NOT use percentile system. It uses 3d6 for success rolls, which gives you a nice gaussian curve for probabilities. That simulates task difficulty better than d20 or d100 systems, which have linear probabilities. System also assumes that if your skill is 10 above the basic task difficulty, you are going to succeed with it automatically (routine tasks give at least +4 to roll, so anyone with a skill of 16 is skilled enough to qualify for this).

There is one difference though. AD&D was an unmitigated disaster on that account and GURPS is a sterling success. I`ve played and been a game master on both systems extensively so I have a good idea on what these systems are all about. GURPS is a great system out of the box for realistic games and can be easily streamlined to simpler forms for fantasy games as well (Dungeon Fantasy series of supplements + Thaumatology Ritual Paths).

Agreed that numeric value should replace or at least complement the fast/average/slow description.

It´s just that some abilities are far better than others. Stuff like Priest Holy Radiance: This "one use per fight" power basically renders most undead encounters to non-encounters. As soon as it is activated your characters get healed and the undead take a lot of damage and die and the AOE is insanely large. And you can even boost that damage by 20% with a feat. Chanter has that triple skeleton summon, it`s very potent early on. I haven`t really played with crowd control that much yet, but apparently Slicken is also so potent that it borders on broken on some fights.