J.E. Sawyer

As a designer, why would I want to? If someone wants to play a traditional wizard, they'll bump Int and have big AoEs and long effect durations, which is cool and beneficial. If someone wants to make a muscle wizard, they can bump Might. If they don't like the idea of having a high Might wizard, there are five other stats for them to bump for their benefit. Tuning is easier when there are fewer/less diverse input sources. If Might is the attribute that affects damage for everyone, it's much easier for me to calculate how that feeds into the system than if every arbitrary type of attack/damage has its own attribute that affects it.

A normal wizard with a high Might marching onto the front line to try to dish out damage and take hits like a rogue or a fighter is on a road to Crytown. Don't get me wrong: if you want to have your wizard do some melee gish mix-ups, Might's a good stat to pump, but you still need a) to hit b) to avoid being hit and c) to roll with it f you do get hit. Wizards are generally bad at all three of those things. It's not an insurmountable thing, but if your wizard has a choice between casting a damaging spell (which they are accurate/good at) or swinging a mace while standing toe-to-toe with a barbarian (which they are not good at), it's usually going to be more advantageous use of time to do the former.

At worst it would be no worse than the original BG/IWD, where pretty much every hit called a reaction. In practice, it should never be that bad because you're making an actual check separately from being hit and if we make a "lone tank boss", that boss will likely have a gnarly Resolve specifically to avoid that situation.

It means "Brotherhood of the Five Suns". It's Vailian and is pronounced frehr-MAHS mehs kahnk swoh-LEE-ahs.

Outright stunlocking would be pretty darn hard. The attacks that have high rates of fire (like wands and spell missiles) will likely have low base Interrupt values, so even someone with a high Perception wouldn't be likely to call a hit reaction often unless the target had a miserable Resolve.

We will probably be working on a shader soon to make ghosts/spectres etc. appear more appropriately... spectral.

It's not particularly eye-catching in-game from the isometric perspective IIRC.

Concentration is similar to Concentration in 3E/3.5 (somewhat similar to Poise in Dark Souls) but it is for everyone, not just spellcasters. Concentration prevents you from playing hit reactions when you take damage. If you cannot maintain Concentration, you will play a hit reaction and your attack/reload/spell is interrupted. We're still defining the system (in fact, I was messing around with the formulae before I sat down), but that's the general idea. In the new scheme, Might affects damage/healing whether it's a single application or over time. Penetration is something we may or may not use in conjunction with an inherent Penetration value on weapons and other attacks that cause damage. I'm leaning toward "not" right now. I see. So perhaps interrupt and conentration go hand in hand? So far, a great idea. Yes. Interrupt and Concentration are opposed.

From the bottom of the last page, which many people may miss: Concentration is similar to Concentration in 3E/3.5 (somewhat similar to Poise in Dark Souls) but it is for everyone, not just spellcasters. Concentration prevents you from playing hit reactions when you take damage. If you cannot maintain Concentration, you will play a hit reaction and your attack/reload/spell is interrupted. We're still defining the system (in fact, I was messing around with the formulae before I sat down), but that's the general idea.

Concentration is similar to Concentration in 3E/3.5 (somewhat similar to Poise in Dark Souls) but it is for everyone, not just spellcasters. Concentration prevents you from playing hit reactions when you take damage. If you cannot maintain Concentration, you will play a hit reaction and your attack/reload/spell is interrupted. We're still defining the system (in fact, I was messing around with the formulae before I sat down), but that's the general idea. In the new scheme, Might affects damage/healing whether it's a single application or over time. Penetration is something we may or may not use in conjunction with an inherent Penetration value on weapons and other attacks that cause damage. I'm leaning toward "not" right now.

Most of the challenges I listed are logically obviated on successive playthroughs. If those elements were really as important to your enjoyment as you say they are, and so many of them manifest due to a lack of foreknowledge/familiarity, that doesn't add up. If literally "half the fun" of playing a bad build is discovering it's bad halfway through the game and you've played the game over and over and over, how does that circumstance (the discovery) even arise for you? As for attributes and bad builds, let me put it this way: in D&D 3rd Ed., let's say Str, Dex, and Con are the only three stats in the game. You make a fighter and you can have an 18 in one, 16 in another, and a 10 in the last. The things that fighter is good at will shift significantly based on how you place those stats -- but the character is still clearly a fighter. You may be able to make a convincing case that one build is markedly better than another, but they'll all give you different strengths and weaknesses. Now figure out a way to do the same thing for Int, Wis, and Cha in the core rules and that's essentially what we're trying to do for PoE. "No bad builds" is not the same as "all builds are equal" and "all builds are functionally the same". It means that if you distribute your points in different ways across our attributes for a character of any class, the strengths and weaknesses of the character will shift in interesting ways and still be viable. If you dump Resolve for your fighter, you will suffer. If you boost Resolve for your fighter, you will benefit. Some classes in D&D already do this better than others. Monks and paladins have a more difficult allocation of stats to consider than fighters. If you want to shift the difficulty of combat, we have a level of difficulty slider. The attribute system is not meant to be a covert way of haphazardly achieving difficulty. As for buffing, we're not eliminating buffing, but we are eliminating pre-combat spell buffing. Buffs in PoE have an opportunity cost because they're combat only spells. They're good and they're powerful, but when you cast them, you're choosing between buffing or engaging in offense or taking some other action against hostile enemies that are engaging the party. As others have already posted, aside from hard counters (which often require metagaming or prescience), most pre-buffs are rote actions. There's nothing strategic about it other than asking the question, "How many resources would I like to expend now to increase the power of my party members?" That is a choice, but it's not much of one.

There are a bunch of ways: * The success or failure of fights often hinged on a single die roll for powerful abilities. Besides metagaming hard and soft counters after a reload (which I'll get to, below), these were elements where the player's choices did not have a ton of impact; their success or failure mostly depended on the outcome of a die roll. In some cases, there's really a tiny set of hard counters (e.g. Protection from Petrification for use against basilisks). Most other tactics just shifted odds and asked the player to hope for the best and reload if/when the worst came true. Reloading is a part of these games, but I don't think anyone wants it to be a core mechanic for success. * There are many bad ways to build characters in virtually all of the IE games. Leveling was a little easier pre-3E, but you could make an absolute garbage character in 2nd Ed. very easily. Players should learn to play to the strengths of their characters, but with many builds, there was no strength to that character -- just a lot of suck. 6 characters * bad stat arrays = a slow but steady descent into a non-viable party near the late game. This was mitigated somewhat in the BG games since they were balanced around the companions, but it was a huge problem in the IWD games. * Pre-buffing alters the difficulty of fights enormously. About halfway through IWD's development, a QA tester (who went on to become a pretty well-respected developer) came up to Black Isle and was furious at the difficulty of a fight in Lower Dorn's Deep. He had been trying to legitimately get through it for 2 hours and hadn't succeeded. Kihan Pak and I loaded it up and beat it on the first try. He asked to see what we were doing. Naturally, we were pre-buffing for 5-6 rounds before we even went into the fight. Because there was no opportunity cost to using buffs, this was "the way" to get through fights, but it was tedious -- and for people who were not D&D veterans, it was not something they ever thought to do, which resulted in a full roadblock (see also: Burial Isle misery, which was also pretty easy for me and Kihan). * Hit points make the world go 'round. There are specific party and resource builds you need to maintain your hit points over several fights. If you don't use those party builds, you suffer enormously or have to backtrack and rest very frequently. This is one of the major reasons why we have a split Stamina/Health system for short term/long term damage (and why 4E uses healing surges). In PoE, getting knocked out takes you out of the fight, but when the fight ends, you're still in the war. In IWD, if you got super-slammed and weren't ready to devote your precious healing resources on getting that dude back into shape, you had to pack up and head back to a safe zone -- or rest on the spot and reload if you got an encounter, which isn't much better. Along the same lines, almost all character resources that were limited were per-rest, so if you used any of them it was a big deal. Per-rest resources are a big deal in PoE, but every class also has per-encounter resources as well. * Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing. There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing. Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious. And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for. A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat. * Stand-alone random rolls are pointless outside of an Ironman-style mode. Random resting encounters, rolls to learn a spell, rolls to pick a lock, etc. The player is better served by having those things be thresholds (or non-existent) and giving them tools to increase their ability to meet those thresholds. Failure to make a stand-alone random roll is not a failure on the part of the player; they just got a bad roll. You can get bad rolls in combat, too, but those are part of a big shifting soup of randomized results hat happen over time. Now, these are all things that clearly a ton of people adapted to and worked around. But it should be asked: was adapting to them interesting and enjoyable or just something that you did so you could enjoy the other parts of the game? If the latter, we should really try to find ways to not repeat those things in PoE.

I do not think this is an accurate recollection of events. There were problems with the loot tables but there was a lot of loot in IWD2 from beginning to end. We adjusted the stats of items in the patch, but we didn't dramatically change their distribution and I certainly don't remember adding anything.

There are markets within markets. We are making an RPG that has no claims to being "mainstream", but it's also not designed to be intentionally confusing or just plain obtuse. I know Gfted1 has concerns that he's going to get annoyed with the mechanics after a few hours and quit the game, but I'm confident that this will not be the case. We have taken (and continue to take) great pains to maintain a challenge for players without being oppressive or frustrating in the ways that the original IE games could often be. And of course, we are also providing a lot of options for people who want to adjust their level of challenge, as this is a very personal thing. If something does turn out, in practice, to be thoroughly unenjoyable for players, we'll change it. But challenge isn't something you inch toward, IMO. It's something you put out for people to deal with and pull back from based on feedback. If you like the idea of exploration, a reactive story with cool characters, and party-based tactical combat, I want to find a way for you to enjoy this game, whatever your specific preferences (and personal time constraints) may be. We won't be able to accommodate everyone, but we should be able to accommodate a lot.

I have a Gothic flanged mace and a schiavona. Maces, warhammers, and backswords are my favorite historical weapons.

It's pretty unlikely that a single character will be rendered useless fresh out of the day's first fight, but the reason why things like health (vs. stamina), maiming, and per-rest abilities exist aren't for tactical reasons (well, a little bit) but for strategic reasons. Adversity causes a player to consider alternate tactics and strategies. Without adversity, there is no reason to do anything differently from one fight to the next. If the composition of enemies changes or if the battlefield changes, those can promote tactical shifts. If the capabilities of the party members change, that can promote both strategic and tactical shifts. If one party member uses all of his or her per-rest abilities in a big fight, the player may have to rely on per-encounter abilities, standard attacks, and items for that character. If one party member suffers a lot of health damage, the player may shift that character's position in the party and change how he or she uses that character. In the example Gfted1 quoted, that character was not useless, but was vulnerable. I did position him differently, I stuck to using ranged spells, and I moved him or ran defensive interception when enemies were swarming. Even a maimed character is not useless, but they are much less effective. In contrast to the IE games, PoE is much more forgiving when it comes to raw luck and the long-term effects of individual combats. But yes, the expenditures and losses of one combat do roll over into subsequent combats if you don't rest. Even so, personal resource management is also much more forgiving in PoE than it was in the IE games due to the high number of per-encounter abilities and the function of our stamina mechanics.

This can happen in a 2nd Ed. fight just as (or much more) easily. I don't actually know if you backed PoE, but assuming you did, I've always been surprised; you haven't liked what I've said about the game from during the KS campaign on. That's perfectly fine, but I don't know why you would have backed it since you disliked so much of it.

Would you (everyone) say that the issues are a) overall game scope b) game difficulty or c) something else?

F:NV didn't support interjections because of the first-person dialogue system that F3 used. PoE already supports interjection and banter. E: Also, F:NV's companions averaged 591 nodes of dialogue, which is on-par with KotOR2, MotB, BG2, etc.

PoE's companions are going to have similar styles of transformation as F:NV's companions. When I designed the roster of F:NV's companions, each character had a central conflict that was defined for them. These transformations were not dramatic, but represented shifts in the characters' attitudes and goals. For Boone, it was dealing with his wife's death and Bitter Springs. There's no point at which Eric had Boone say, "You know what? I actually think the Legion is super cool now." For Raul, it was dealing with his past as a gunslinger, his failure to protect Rafaela and Claudia, and his concerns about being too old to be playing cowboy. Raul is fairly apolitical, and Travis' writing reflects that. Like F:NV's companions, PoE's companions are all adults who have enough life experience under their belts that they aren't going to radically change their interests and concerns within their span of time with the PC. That said, the PC can significantly shape how the companions work through their conflicts, just as they did with all of the companions in F:NV.

It is not one of my requirements and I discourage it unless it really makes sense for the character and situation.

I like virtue/flaw systems, especially in classless systems. I could see them working in PoE, but they would be out of scope for this game. Sorry.

All actions (other than movement) slow down, so you will cast fewer spells over the course of a battle or they will go off later than they would normally.

Correct. Any class can use any gear, though classes often have bonuses with specific types of weapons (e.g. wizards gain bonuses with wands, rods, and sceptres via their Blast passive AoE ability).

They form prides, but may be found hunting alone or in groups.