J.E. Sawyer

We have a lot of "best of" party stats and individual stats for you to pick through. Most of them have been hooked up and it's interesting (and helpful) to see how things shake out over time. E.g. a cipher with an arquebus currently is the most brutal damage dealer over time.

PoE's shop is more like Fallout's in that you put items on either side of the "table" and use copper pieces to make up the difference.

How much randomization we have will ultimately depend on the density of unique item placement. I think I gave an example before of two maces or morning stars of middling power that had enough overlap that they could be randomly interchanged. Additionally, our crafting/enchantment system does allow you to modify weapons -- even unique ones. So if you have a specific group of bonuses you'd really like to have, you will probably be able to make that happen.

It is not like many things in the game. E.g. hit point loss is typically arrived at via the comparatively slow aggregation of rolled hits that normalize over the course of many attacks. A vulnerable character standing in a bad position is a tactical problem for which there are many potential solutions that can be arrived at over a longer timeline. This is why many A/D&D players often say that 4th-12th level A/D&D is the "sweet spot" for challenge in encounters. From 1st to 3rd level, combat is extremely swingy. The player's tactical decisions have less influence on life and death than the die roll. For practical purposes, a wide variety of standard attacks at low levels are death attacks (or at least incapacitating attacks) for many characters. In the mid- to upper-teens, A/D&D combat is dominated by attacking an enemy's weakest defense with an incapacitating status effect or overwhelming damage hit (e.g. in 3.X, a fighter's Will, which is notoriously fragile). The best defense? Hard counters vs. specific status effects or damage types, which are extremely difficult to plan for. Combat scenarios that build around hard counters turn into puzzles for which there are not good solutions if you don't have the hard counters prepped (assuming you have access to that hard counter at all). Where I draw the line are single-check long-duration incapacitation effects against which hard counters are the only practical defense. Their effects on combat and the immediate aftermath promote reloading and metagaming more than in-the-moment adaptation to temporary or progressive incapacitation. Yeah, you can lose a fight via progressive aggregation of damage over 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This is a different type of problem with a more diverse variety of solutions than a fight you lose (or win a Pyrrhic victory) in 12 seconds because a basilisk waxed two party members as soon as you came around the corner.

They do in tabletop. In a game where you can reload, such as ours (excluding Trial of Iron), they don't create fear as much as annoyance. For many players, getting sacked by a Disintegrate effect simply means a reload and a metagame revision of their prepped defenses. In the second attempt, what would in tabletop induce fear isn't even an annoyance; it's simply obviated by a hard counter. BG's Protection from Petrification is a 2nd level wizard spell and grants blanket immunity. If you have a wizard and have that spell prepped, BG's fights against basilisks are trivially easy. If you don't, they become as swingy as most low-level BG encounters. Challenging in the sense that there's a good chance you won't get through them, but not particularly interesting since the individual die rolls have such a huge effect on the outcome.

On this general topic, I recently picked up 13th Age and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the base d20 modifications in their game are similar to the sorts of things we were doing in Pillars of Eternity. The mechanics are not always the same, but some of the goals seem to be. The way they handle paralysis/petrify/death is pretty well-suited to tabletop turn-based play. When the character gets hit with one of the "you're out" effects, they get to take one more action before they're effectively barred from performing more actions. However, on their turns, they continue rolling saves. It's only after they've failed a series of saves over many rounds that the effect becomes permanent (or at least for the duration of combat in the case of paralysis). The potential danger is similar and the biggest penalty (the character being removed from combat) is still present, but it feels less like a sucker punch because a) the victim can still react to it (once) after being hit b) the players still perform an action on their turns (roll a save, as with ongoing effects in 4E) and c) other characters can also intervene before the victim passes the point of no return. Surprise! Death saves I think usually feel like Jedi Outcast snipers. They don't test your gaming abilities as much as they test your patience, since a lot of your success depends on trial and error followed by metagaming hard counters to learned threats after a reload.

There are a couple of thrown "kablooie" weapons. They don't use a special skill, but the character's normal Accuracy (class base + [{level-1} * 3] + Dexterity), sometimes with a modifier from the item itself.

Our companion portraits are all separate from the PC portraits.

Our dungeon/interior corridors have all been designed with full party navigation in mind. You won't find anything as narrow as Firewine Bridge in Pillars of Eternity.

There were a limited number of those and we have accounted for all of them but one. One of the inn backers has not responded at all, unfortunately.

I asked Rose to contact everyone, if possible, even if the note I left was, "No problems, should work as written." That said, there are a lot of backers, so it may take a while.

I think you have a skewed understanding of gamer and dev capabilities. I didn't intend that statement to be awe-inspiring; many devs are not particularly great at playing games. On the other hand, there are literally millions of players who are also average to bad at playing games. Some devs are much better than the average player, but there are certainly a lot of players who are better than we are. Players outnumber devs by an enormous ratio and eventually many of them wind up putting much more time into playing the finished game. I also didn't go straight into being a dev. Before I started at Black Isle I had been playing AD&D and other C/RPGs for 14 years (going on 28 now), often in min-max-friendly campaigns. Devs aren't always the best players but that doesn't mean we're all clowns.

I'm going through all of the submitted items now. Few issues, overall. Thank you to everyone who has submitted their content already. Rose should be getting back to you with any questions or problems soon.

Skills almost always require their own distinct subsystems. Conversely, 3.X feats almost always feed into existing systems/subsystems (specifically, combat). Because combat is such a big part of most A/D&D games, it's easy for those elements to get heavy use. Compare that to "Ride" or "Perform" or "Knowledge: ________", which are all skills that either require their own (massive) set of rules and assets to work in a CRPG or necessitate creating custom content with each use (e.g. in dialogue).

Equal participation and contribution is a good goal, I think. When "skill stuff" is going on in 2nd/3.X, the non-skill characters (and the people playing them) sit back while the "skill characters" do their thing. When the "combat stuff" is going on in 2nd Ed. (especially) and 3.X, the skill-based characters roll in vain to make puny jabs at the enemy. Rogues seemingly get some nice damage output from Sneak Attack but the fact is that the RAW frequently shut that off when encountering any enemy that is immune to crits (a lot of them). I think it can lead to a boring pace in tabletop gaming especially because half of the party is either literally not participating (the rogues are sneaking now, the fighters are standing around waiting for them to be done) or only marginally participating. There's really not much to "cooperate" on outside of the adventure as a whole. In practice, rogues can sneak, fighters can't. Fighters can do damage to almost everything and take hard hits. Rogues can sort of hit some things hard and cannot be hit hard at all. Wizards can (eventually) do almost everything. Rogues being skill-based characters would be a lot easier to swallow if wizards weren't capable of trivializing many thief skills with even low-level spells (or potions/scrolls made/bought of those spells). I also don't think a lot of 2nd Ed. classes are particularly diverse. 2nd Ed. rangers are only marginally differentiated from fighters, for example. Most of the diversity came from kits, which could be really wildly varied -- but were also not core.

And it was something I've tried to consistently call out as one of our three foci for the project: exploration of beautiful environments, a reactive story with equally reactive companions, and party-based tactical combat.

Outside of thieves (rangers and bards a little) skills weren't a focus of the IE games until IWD2. Specifically, if you weren't playing those classes, you didn't even have skills. And in IWD2, a lot of them wound up feeling redundant or useless. If our options are to include a huge number of skills to make characters feel diverse (without making good use of them) or to have a small number of skills with heavier use and less per-character diversity, I think it's better to go with the latter.

No. Druids' forms are costly on their own. Making sex-specific variants would be an even larger investment of time.

There are not many, honestly. We'd rather have a small number of skills that get a good amount of use than include a bunch of skills that wind up neglected.

Sorry, it's still Might.

D&D started out as a miniature skirmish game (Chainmail) so it's not inappropriate for any edition of it to have a heavy combat emphasis, IMO.

Yes. We have previously given details about our skill system, including how Stealth works. As a recap, all characters can invest in the Stealth skill, though certain classes (like rogues) have a head start in that department. You can have characters sneak individually or as a group and the gameplay consists of navigating the Stealth-based radii of your party members around the detection radii of potential enemies. Enemies have two stages to discovering a sneaking character. The first causes them to investigate. Once they get close enough (IF they get close enough), they will fully realize the threat and typically start combat (sometimes dialogue). In both of our class pair updates (rogues + rangers, wizards + druids), we've called out what non-combat skills each class emphasizes, but yes, the skills are largely class-neutral. Dialogue options are also largely class-neutral. Most threshold-based options are opened up based on the character's attributes -- using Perception to notice something, Resolve to threaten someone with scary intensity, Strength to intimidate someone with brute force (or just to smack them around a little), Dexterity to swipe something, etc. Picking these options is not always a path to success, but the attributes are what open them up. The same applies to class-, race-, sex-, or background-based options that pop up. We decided to avoid dialogue skills since it pushes characters to invest in "the dialogue game" or miss out on a ton of enjoyable content. By using as many basic elements of the character as we can to shape dialogue, we keep dialogue open to all sorts of characters, from meat-head fighters to sassy wizards and everything in-between. Attribute-based checks worked well in Planescape: Torment and we think it will work well in PoE as well.

Paladins in PoE are not all religiously-affiliated as they are in A/D&D. The paladin companion, Pallegina, is associated with a secular political organization. There are "traditional" paladin orders in the world like the Shieldbearers of St. Elcga, Kind Wayfarers, and Fellows of St. Waidwen, but there are also mercenary paladins (Goldpact Knights), battlefield ravagers (Bleak Walkers) and all sorts of other groups. Without exception paladins are always zealously devoted to their chosen cause, but their chosen causes and codes of behavior are quite varied.

On regular attacks, fighters do have more consistent damage output than rogues due to two things: a) Weapon Specialization and b) Confident Aim. They hit more often and their average damage is higher. Rogues are really offensive powerhouses but without shoring up their defenses they can go down quickly. Paladins can also spike damage a bit through Flames of Devotion and Sworn Enemy but yeah, overall they are support-oriented. That said, they do benefit from their own auras, which is nice. Barbarians are the best at dealing damage to groups at close range. Like D&D barbarians, it's hard to give them the Flanked condition so it's safer for them to take on multiple opponents. Their Carnage passive ability lets them progressively melee-AoE groups to death. And of course, they can Frenzy. We still have a lot of tuning to do, but I genuinely enjoy playing all of the melee-oriented classes for different reasons. As a fighter, I miss the rogue's ability to spike someone really hard when I need to. As a rogue, I miss the fighter's ability to hold a line, self-heal, and actively avoid/passively absorb seemingly endless damage. As a barbarian, I miss the fighter's longevity and "stickiness" as well as the paladin's support abilities, etc. When you play these characters, we want you to feel very happy with the abilities your class has, but we also think it's important for you to recognize that other classes have things to offer that your class lacks. It makes those other classes feel valuable in their own ways.

That is likely. Talents are still somewhat nebulous now, though they will be getting less nebulous in the very near future!