sleepofthejust

1. Metagaming in a RP context does refer to "player thinking about what character woudn't know", I meant it in a game design context where it is a seperate game within another game, e.g. any resource management system. Should've used a different word, but the point still stands that when you add something like this it should increase the decisions you make, not decrease them. 2. Whether you need them to win: I agree that this is a relevant choice that adds to your decision making, however as you've said, you very rarely "need" them to win. Instead a lot of the fun comes from using the spells in ways that synergize with your teamates or as part of a battle strategy, which you can't do because you might need them later. There's plenty of game decisions or strategies I don't need to use in order to win, but part of the fun is in trying to be efficient and explore the intricately designed battle system. 3. Judging the situation: I think I've argued that the binary "do I need this to win" is not a sufficient addition to decision making to offset the limitations it creates in strategy. Furthermore, based on what information are you "judging the situation"? You don't know what's waiting for you over the bridge or how far away the next rest area is. It would be a relevant choice if you had anything to base it on, but you don't so it just becomes easier to not use spells. After a whiule you could begin to guess how far each checkpoint is, or during a second playthough you would know in advance, but other than that you're judgement isn't based on anything because you don't know whats up next, you're exploring. 4. Spells are too good to be per encounter: I totally agree with you on this and I'm not suggesting they patch this change, but the spells are that good because they were designed for casts/day, not the other way around. My comments are about the issues in decades-old game design that we don't really look at because...nostalgia? I have suggested ways to improve the resource managment metagame and I think any of them would be better than the simplistic limitation used here. This system reduces your incentives to make meaningful decisions in battle and that's bad game design. Again, to be clear...really enjoying the game.

Maybe sneak attacks and crits should have flat damage rolls instead of multipliers. That way accuracy and damage speed become the relevant factors. That would probably be pretty hard to change though. Maybe if there were more abilities that reduced DR, that might balance things, making your fast characters explosive under the right conditions.

The attempt to streamline the attributes have only ended up making things more opaque. We all undersand what the developers intend for each statistic just based on the tooltip. However, the relative importance of different attributes can only be determined by having played the game. You can't know at character creation how important your endurance will be compared to your damage or deflection. They intended to get rid of dump stats, but instead what happened is that some stats (might) are so good that everything else may as well be dump stats. It wouldn't be that hard to fix; maybe critical chance is based on dex and crit damage on might. Maybe Constitution gives a % boost to armor DR (cause stronger people can wear bigger armor). Maybe one of the stats could add blanket status effect chance (resolve? constitution makes sense for knockdowns). Maybe perception increases your armor penetration (cause you can see the weak points). I agree that any stat increasing accuracy is probably too good unless you redesigned all the enemies and encounters. Also might's damage increase needs to get nerfed...sorry guys. Just to be clear, these are minor gripes, the writing is great.

Someone needs to explain the associative property to previous posters. Might adds %bonuses. Even sneak attack is a % bonus. So weapon speed does not matter. If anything, you're better off with slow, powerful weapons, because you can open battle with a big sneak attack. Easy thing would be to have sneak attacks bypasse DR, so daggers and weapon speed matter. You could do like 3rd ed. and have sneak attack damage be a seperate roll so that the character benefitted from multiple attacks, but that never made RP sense; you shouldn't be flailing about trying to get your sneak you should wait for your moment and hit.

People extoll the oldschool system of spells per day, because it requires "resource managment" and say that those who dislike it, do so just because it makes the game harder. I want to squash that right now. It was definitely designed for the sake of resource managment, forcing the player to choose between using something now and using something later; it created a metagame. The problem is, that metagame has a first order optimization strategy: don't use any spells in case you need them later. The metagame has an optimal strategy which is at odds with the original game to which it was intended to add complexity, making it useless. Several games have fallen into this trap and so many nostaligic people will support anything that reminds them of when we were kids. This. is. bad. game. design. Yeah, I said it. The thing is, it wouldn't be that hard to fix; maybe have spells per encounter tied to a stat, which could be debuffed. Maybe knocks on the head(critical hits) cause your mage to forget spells. Maybe you can use a spell once or twice per encounter, but if you use it twice you can't use it again until you rest. None of these is complex or any more difficult to implement than what's currently being done. Thankfully it's very rarely a big deal in this game because of the talents PrimeJunta mentioned as well as the late-game changes to casts/encounter (so I've heard). Just to be clear, I'm really happy with this game, but if we're bringing back decades-old IE design choices, we do need to be able to criticize them.