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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    Our armors do have sex-based variants because we want people to be able to tell female characters from male characters. IRL, such armors are almost never shaped significantly differently, just sized and proportioned differently. Even our most cutting edge contemporary female body armor outwardly doesn't look much different from the male versions. In PE, they will be shaped differently to help the silhouettes read differently. Cadegund's concept reflects this as does the godlike concept Polina developed. It almost assuredly is not what an armorer would do IRL, but it helps distinguish the characters. It's the same reason why we marginally increased the size of war hammer heads. At the realistic size and proportions, they don't clearly read as war hammers, so a small amount of exaggeration was required.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    A patient player can do this in any IE game as well (barring areas you can't return to). I don't think our economy should be balanced around the expectation that players are impatient.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    Case-hardening is mostly done for surface protection. The steel underneath is usually relatively soft.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    In our lore right now, we have several grades of steel that are used in making metal armor and weapons. The most basic is Oromi, which we describe as having a case-hardened appearance. It is pretty bad steel and typically not used by anyone with any significant money. Wyflan steel is common and has a pattern-welded appearance. The "good stuff" is March steel, which has a modern steel appearance (consistent gray/silver). There are grades above March steel also, though we aren't sure how many different variants we will actually be implementing, visually or mechanically. We haven't yet discussed material variants for different material bases (leather, wood, etc.).
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    You can put items into the Stash anywhere and at any time (more or less), but to withdraw items from the Stash you need to be at a camp, inn, or similar location.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    Individual characters contribute space to the Pack (not the Stash, which is effectively unlimited in size). I.e., two characters will have less Pack space than six characters. However we wind up displaying the Pack, each character's section will be marked as "theirs" even though it's effectively a common pool of items. The main thing we want to avoid with the Pack is forcing the player to flip between six screens. BTW, you can carry overflow items without assigning them Pack slots or throwing them in the Stash, but it encumbers the entire party until you handle it. Encumbrance inflicts combat penalties, not movement penalties, so you can move at full speed while encumbered, but you're fighting at a significant disadvantage with no real upside because you can't access the Pack in combat.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    I would like to have the chants spoken continuously during combat but we'll have to test that out to make sure it isn't obnoxious. Roars will be loud, but phrases may be relatively soft, "charm of making"-style.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    We're about to implement the chanter, so details may change, but the basics are that chanters start the game with a list of basic phrases. Phrases are not individual words or ideas like "protect" or "fire", but full phrases like Aefyllath Ues mith Fyr or Thick Grew Their Tongues, Stumbling o'er Words. Phrases encompass a complete idea that is passively expressed as a magical effect in the area surrounding the chanter. Chanters do not use phrases on their own, only in the context of a player-assembled chant. A chant is a sequence of phrases. It can included repeated phrases, but phrases all have a linger duration that is applied after the phrase has completed, so linking the same phrase back-to-back undercuts the potential power of overlapping the durations of different phrases. Additionally, after a chanter has spoken a number of phrases, he or she can use a targeted roar. This is a special type of phrase, but it is shouted in a cone (always) in front of the chanter and can produce beneficial or harmful effects (sometimes both). E.g. the roar And Hel-Hyraf Crashed upon the Shield temporarily reduces the DT of all enemies caught in the cone. Roaring interrupts the chant, but the chanter will resume it a few seconds later. Chanters always have one chant selected (they are modal and exclusive to each other). They will always start chanting as soon as combat begins and always stop chanting as soon as combat ends.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    It's an understatement, honestly. A solid blow from a pollaxe (or poleaxe, if you prefer) could really devastate victims even through plate armor. Mail offered very little protection against it. Pollaxes: bad news.
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    Our spell effects will probably have a "flashiness" level of Icewind Dale 2. We can use a combination of 2D and 3D effects and Unity's effects editor is pretty robust. We won't be doing spell "cutscenes" like Torment, though.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    Not that this is a solution to the problems of forced positioning, but I always liked how the battles started in Final Fantasy Tactics. There are set number of valid placement tiles for your party members. You can put them wherever you want in those tiles, but you can't throw them all over the map.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    We are planning to allow you to set non-combat movement to the speed of the slowest party member. This option will be on by default. Our monk with Transcendent Suffering can already fly ahead of the party very quickly in open spaces.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    The horn arrangements often looked liked crowns or stag horns. That might be appropriate for a specific individual, but not for the "ordinary" cean gúla. The figures where the legs had very little cloth with them felt less "ghosty", but we knew we were likely to develop even more ghosty creatures, so we wanted the cean gúla to keep her legs and a mostly bare upper body so you could tell it was a woman. We also knew that the cean gúla was not primarily going to be a melee-oriented attacker, so we had Polina play down the size of the hands and change the pose to be more upright with the head bowed down.
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    PE flails are also fast melee weapons and would be a great alternative to bare fists.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    They're sort of a cross between traditional D&D monks and groups like the Flagellants.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    We'll probably do a lore update for them in the future, but here are the basics: * Centuries ago, one man founded the fighting monastic disciplines. He was an old warrior who had knocked on death's door many times and had endured numerous periods of captivity and torture. He discovered a method of mentally focusing on his pain to invoke power from his soul. When he left the service of his lord, he devoted his time to developing these techniques and teaching them to other warriors (in this way, he can be seen as a sort of cross between Ignatius of Loyola and Suzuki Shōsan). He believed that mortification of the flesh not only made warriors more powerful, but that it strengthened the souls of its practitioners, making it more likely that their souls would remain intact (i.e., not fragment) when they died. He advocated fighting with bare fists and without armor to emphasize a fighting monk's personal suffering. * Because the founder of these disciplines was old when he began teaching and died only a few decades later, there are now many different monastic orders. Some are more secluded, some are mendicant travelers, some are mercenaries. They all tend to believe, like their founder, that combat is the ideal path for pursuing their particular brand of mortification of the flesh. Some choose to pursue this in dedicated service, some become mercenaries or assassins, and others devote their lives to dangerous wandering and exploration. There are other groups that also practice mortification of the flesh, but they are not "fighting" monks. * Monks believe in the fundamental philosophy of mortification of the flesh, but different orders and individuals have wildly different takes on it. Some monks (and entire orders) are very religious, but the founder was not religious and the discipline does not depend on religion. Most monks see the disciplines as a method of self-improvement that can co-exist with (or without) religious beliefs.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    I suspect that players may game this system by having their monk character don armor in the middle of the battle, once the wounds limit is reached. I seem to recall you could do that in the IE games--albeit with the loss of a round. You can't change armor during combat in PE.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    I think that's a byproduct of 3.5 & 4E which Sawyers seems to be drawing a lot of inspiration from. Everyone can do everything with little to no efficiency drop off. I wouldn't characterize 3.5 or 4E that way. Both 3.5 and 4E can have huge efficiency decreases when a character is built or geared in sub-optimal ways. I think PE will be much more forgiving than (especially) 3.5 when it comes to build and gear choices as long as you're playing to the class' core focus. If players put their wizard in plate armor and have them immediately run into melee with pikes while their monks hang back and take pot shots with a blunderbuss -- well, yeah, in those cases, they're not going to do very well.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    Other than Wounds filling more slowly, there are no monk-specific negative effects from wearing heavier armor. Many of their special attacks last for a duration rather than a single attack, so if they're wearing heavy armor that decreases attack speed (or using a shield or two-handed weapon that attacks more slowly), they may have fewer applications of those special attacks. But if you need the shield for its Deflection bonus or a larger weapon for armor-penetrating capabilities, you can use them just fine.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    Monks have passive abilities as well. For example, Transcendent Suffering gives them unarmed damage and movement speed bonuses.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    Thanks for the feedback, everyone. To clarify a few things: * A percentage of damage done to the monk, after DT, is converted to Wound damage. If the monk gets hit for 100 points of damage, a big chunk of that is still sailing through. * Wounds are "buckets" of damage, so the monk needs to have that amount filled before they gain the Wound resource. * Monks start with a limited number of Wounds they can carry at one time. Once that limit is hit, additional damage goes straight through. This is one reason why wearing some amount of armor can be a wise strategic decision, even for a monk. * Monks' unarmed damage does increase as part of their Transcendent Suffering class ability. This makes their attacks competitive with other fast melee weapons, but their raw damage is nowhere near as high as something like a longsword or a maul. When fighting heavily armored opponents, monks can benefit from using other melee weapons (their special attacks still work with them). * While monks do have several active-use abilities, Turning Wheel exists to give the monk a passive bonus from fighting with Wounds. If you let a monk with Turning Wheel "ride" for a while, he or she will do additional fire damage on melee hits automatically. We describe monks in a way that makes them sound powerful because we want you to look forward to playing them, but they are not invincible! They also can't do a lot of the things that other classes can. Their strengths are in mobility, status effects on hits, and resisting/confounding status effects on themselves. They're intended to be melee skirmishers, but they lack the raw damage output of rogues and barbarians, they cannot "hold" enemies like fighters can, and they don't have the command/targeted buff capabilities of paladins.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    It depends on the actual effect of the ability. If it's the de facto caster tactic (as mstark described), either the comparable abilities should be stronger or the summons themselves should be weaker. Most high-end caster tactics (in 3E, anyway) rely very little on direct damage spell and instead go for summons or extreme status effects (often Will-based, since most melee-type characters have little chance to defend against them).
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    If we can afford to have the 3D models there in the first place (i.e., when they are alive), we can afford to have them there when they're corpses as long as we're not loading a bunch of new creature models in on top of them. If we wind up in some wacky situation like that, we'll probably make a script command to do a forced corpse cleanup on area load.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    This is my main concern with summoning. Tossing an additional ally onto the battlefield, even if all it's doing is soaking up attacks, is immensely valuable.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    I encourage designers to think of a player's responses in a naturalistic way, where the NPC's line and tone suggest a number of responses that seem to spring to mind -- not quite automatically -- but easily. I believe the efficacy of a given player response should depend heavily on the character to whom they are speaking. E.g. flattery and praise may appeal to certain character types, while others can only be persuaded through threats and abuse.
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