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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    We don't really have the concept of "rounds" since we're working in real time, but certain weapons are inherently faster than others. Weapons like daggers, stilettos, rapiers, hatchets, clubs, and flails (think of these last two as being relatively small-- no caveman clubs or Witch-King flails) are "fast" one-handed weapons and attack more frequently than larger/heavier one-handed weapons like swords, maces, battle axes, war hammers, etc. Two-handed weapons are slower than their one-handed counterparts. In terms of basic mechanics, the primary trade-off between fast weapons and slower weapons is between damage per hit and damage over time. If the target's DT is low, the low per-hit damage of a fast weapon is not particularly important because your attack rate racks up the damage quickly. If the target's DT is high, low per-hit damage is a bigger problem and the slower attacking weapons become much more efficient. But because DT is a value, not an absolute property associated with a type of armor, the applicability of weapons can shift as your character and his/her gear becomes more powerful. I.e., a DT that is problematic for Capt. Dagger at low level will mathematically become less relevant as your per-hit damage increases due to character/gear advancement.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    We're not making a realistic simulation. "Is this realistic?" is a question I try to answer after I have answered, "Why would anyone want to use this?" If I haven't answered the latter question, the answer to the former is pretty irrelevant. I've previously explained the basic mechanical distinction of low damage, high speed weapons vs. high damage, low speed weapons. Even if you're using a good damage type against the target's armor, you may still be operating at (significantly) suboptimal efficiency due to the difference between your weapons' damage and the target's DT. If the target has relatively high DT, using low damage, high speed weapons is inefficient. If the target has relatively low DT, using high damage, low speed weapons is inefficient. Additionally, every base weapon type has an advantage that is not necessarily unique, but is not shared by most other weapons. The examples I have given previously are the pike's extended reach and the flail's ability to negate some of the defensive bonus of a shield.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    The picture from the update is actually a somewhat poor example for this reason. There are two steps we're taking to address this: 1) doors placed in levels (other than double doors) will always have their hinges on the far side of the scene (i.e. "up") 2) doors always open away from the character opening it. We may also implement a third element (but we hope it won't be necessary): a force movement input (e.g. through a key toggle) that ignores context sensitive actions at a location and would allow you to get as close as the collision/pathing permits.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    Rogues have bonuses to opening locks, but other classes can take that skill as well. We won't include spells or abilities that make invested skills obsolete.
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    No one has to play a character class or race they don't like, but we're also not going to omit them because someone doesn't want to play them.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    There will absolutely be circumstances where using a certain weapon, weapon type, spell, spell type against a specific enemy will be a tactically inferior choice, just as there is in A/D&D. The reason you have a party and the ability to switch weapons, spells, abilities, etc. is to allow you to adapt to the tactical requirements of different battles. In 3E/3.5, if you have a character equipped with a mace and a character equipped with a longsword facing off against a zombie and a skeleton, insisting on attacking the skeleton with the longsword and the zombie with the mace will almost always be a bad tactic. Insisting on casting sleep against them is a bad tactic. If you cast Reflex-based AoE damage spells against rogues and monks, that's usually a bad tactic. Casting fireball at a red dragon is a bad tactic. If a tactic is never circumstantially bad, that's the death of tactical challenge. Why think of something else to do when the thing you've always done works just fine? But just to make clear, in contrast to A/D&D, PE's weapon types will not be strategically inferior, i.e. bad even in the absence of context. There are a ton of weapons in every edition of A/D&D that are flat-out terrible on paper compared to other weapons. In 3E/3.5, it's usually Simple weapons, but there are plenty of Martial weapons that most people would never take. For example, why would I use a Heavy Mace when I could use a Morningstar? The latter weighs less, does the same damage, has the same crit range/multiplier, and two damage types (B/P vs. the Heavy Mace's B). Why would I use a Greatclub when I could use a Heavy Flail? The Heavy Flail weighs 2 lbs. more but has a higher crit range and has bonuses against disarming and when making trip attacks. So if you want to make a dagger-wielding character, even a dagger-wielding fighter, that will absolutely be a viable choice in PE. If we do our jobs well, it should be roughly as viable -- and vulnerable to tactical challenges -- as a fighter who uses longswords or a pike. I wouldn't say that's usually the case in A/D&D. But there will be cases where Dagger Guy is going to run into problems against a particular enemy -- just as there will be for Longsword Guy and Pike Guy.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    Monks are a character concept inspired more by supernatural fantasy than reality. One of the general fantasies of the class (in A/D&D and elsewhere) is that they are unarmed dudes and ladies who at some point in their career can run at Mach 2 up to a bad guy in plate armor and quivering palm his internal organs.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    Many people in the world tend to think of them as vermin and assume they are harmless based on their appearance. Their reputation isn't based on how they look.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    Woedica is actually a (sur)name (on Earth, I mean).
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    Mortals in Project Eternity share many traits with mortals on Earth.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    We've already answered these questions internally and given some of those answers to the public in updates. The public won't ever get all of our answers because the people in the world themselves don't know the answers. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/328976 A Lottery of Souls The world belongs to mortals. As time has progressed, mortals have lifted themselves out of ignorance and into ages of increased self-awareness, harnessing the power of their own souls to amazing effect. So... why worship the gods, anyway? For many mortals, worship is a matter of respect and tradition. They consider their gods (or, in some cases, all gods) to be their creators. They follow the guidelines of religion because history tells them that the gods have punished individuals -- and entire nations -- for ancient episodes of religious disrespect and dismissal. For others, religious worship is a matter of karmic self-interest. Often, people believe that if an individual's soul arrives in the realm of a pleased god, the god will place that soul into the body of someone who will have a good life. To such believers, choosing to not worship is to risk spiritual confusion and aimlessness in the afterlife. They speculate that the faithless are entered into a "lottery of souls" from which many will wind up no better -- or much worse -- than they did in their last life. Some of the same faiths also believe that religious apostasy or lax observance is a cause of soul splintering upon death, which many consider to be an even worse fate. Gods for All Seasons People worship many gods, but usually the ones who are most associated with their way of life. Farmers may worship gods of light, growth, or storms. Warriors worship gods of battle and fortune. Though some faiths are exclusionary, most people will say a prayer to any god when the circumstances are right -- farmers praying to a god of battle when their lands are invaded, warriors praying to a god of growth when they're starving in the wilderness. Sometimes the same god -- or gods -- may have a different identity in a different part of the world. The most notable is one of the most widely honored, if not warmly embraced. Called Berath in Aedyran and Cirono in Vailian, it is the god of cycles, of doors, and of life and death itself. People commonly place or carve the figure of Berath in doorways, windows, and other "portals" from one place to another, figurative or literal. In Eír Glanfath's ruins, explorers have discovered two common figures, Caoth i Bhád and Bád i Caothaí (Life in Death and Death in Life, respectively), semi-skeletal female and male figures who occupy positions opposite each other in doorways -- like a twinned display of the split aspects of Berath/Cirono.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    Start saying "bird" but don't say the "rd". That's the mouth position for ö. Wö-di-ka
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    Boudica was one of the name-inspirations due to Woedica's bitter fall and exile. Old English has the /w/ sound, represented in the early post-futhorc Latin-based alphabets as ƿ and eventually as w. OE diphthongs are notoriously confusing and difficult to pronounce, so for simplicity's sake, the oe should be pronounced like the Danish ø or German ö. The d is standard Germanic, the i is short, hard c, long a. So it's pretty much pronounced how it looks, with the exception that the "oe" sounds like the "i" in "bird". We probably won't be using ligatures, macrons, or special characters like thorns and eths in-game.
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    They were not. There are two major aumaua-dominated cultures in the world, one that is closer to the Dyrwood (but still not that close). Their clothing looks very different. When Polina made her first full-scale aumaua illustration, he looked so out-of-the-ordinary that the physiology combined with the outfit and equipment made him seem like he wasn't part of a fantasy setting anymore. Personally, I thought it was pretty cool, but we did additional illustrations of aumaua who had culturally integrated into Aedyr/Dyrwood/Readceras/The Vailian Republics. Ultimately, aumaua characters in the game can be geared in the same outfits that other characters can use, so we wanted to make sure that they were physiologically distinctive even in "normal" gear. Orlans are fairly isolated (more by choice than by anything else), but many have integrated into the colonial settlements of the Dyrwood. Aumaua actually have a lot of contact with other races and were some of the earliest long-range coastal explorers in the world. "Nearby" aumaua have stylistic visual elements taken from Japanese and various Polynesian cultures, but their cultures themselves are not based on Japan, Samoa, Maori, etc.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    Blue/red is a less common distinction than green/red but it's still pretty common and retains the near-universal "red = not your buddy" element.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    Tim and I, who are both color blind, would prefer to not use green/red for allied/enemy colors.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    You should be able to complete the game without using any character of a specific class, though certain parts will be more difficult if you have a spellcaster-free party. As a side note, the history of European witch-hunting was my main focus of study in college. Catholic (and later, Protestant) ideas about and stances on magic are nuanced and have changed a great deal over the centuries. From Eymerich's distinctions between latria and dulia invocations for demonic aid to Kramer and Sprenger's writings (which were generally denounced by the clergy but popular among citizens) on maleficia as a separate, dark form of Satanic magic, ecclesiastical and lay writings on the subject cover a large spectrum.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    I've tried the system with many different ranges. If the range is the problem (it doesn't seem to be), the larger problem is scaling. I really don't like systems that terminate their scaling, which is why I'm avoiding DT as a percentile reduction. I've tried lots of values for weapons, for armor, for DT bypass, for MDTDT, linked or unlinked to damage types/handedness/speed in different ways. I think the model itself has too many input variables/factors to be elegant and clear. I had another idea last night that I discussed with Tim this morning that I'll be playing around with. I think it will be more intuitive than either system I've talked about, but I want to play around with it for a while.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    Well, we're going to try this system out, but I do admit that I'm not 100% sold on it. I was really having a lot of trouble working out the wide variation in values in the original system (I made a post with the spreadsheet on the previous page) after adjusting formulae and values for weeks. If we do "go back" to the original system, it will need to include some remedies for communicating relative damage in the interface. At the high end of the DT spectrum, the decrease in damage is 90% over initial values for fast Slash/Pierce weapons, the worst of those (the fast Pierce, e.g. Stiletto) being less than 1/6th the value of the ideal weapon: the two-handed Crush (e.g. Maul).
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    We're still playing with the relative size of characters on screen. Adam and I both agree that they are too small at the current scale, so we will be trying out a closer view soon.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    The color-coding is for relative values, which requires some metric for comparison. There is something similar I'd considered where you would receive an indication of whether your weapon's damage was hitting its minimum damage through damage threshold. That lets you know that piece of information, which is helpful, but it doesn't help indicate the efficacy of any other action.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    To give a more concrete example of how the original armor system could theoretically scale well but wind up in "What should I do?" circumstances: The first table assumes you are equally proficient/damaging with every weapon, i.e. the weapons all do their "base" damage with no modifiers. Relevant information: DMG* = Damage Multiplier, per hit Min/Max Dam = What it says, currently set to identical values to make editing easier. Values are arbitrary, differences between values are not. Rate = Attack rate, though if it says DWF = 2, that means they can strike at twice the rate. In practice, two "fast" weapons will attack three times for every two times a pair of non-fast weapons attack, and three times for every one that a 2H weapon attacks. 3:2:1. DT- = How much DT is negated by the weapon as a base value. This scales with DMG* to prevent the value from becoming irrelevant. Piercing weapons only. MDTDT = Minimum Damage Through Damage Threshold. Multiply this by the initial damage to determine the minimum amount that will get through armor, no matter how high the DT. Proportionally increases with weapon size and is doubled for crushing weapons. DWF = Dual Wield Factor. 2 = Yep, they can be. As the spreadsheet hopefully indicates, things scale pretty much as you would suspect, but it is a graduated process. At the very top and very bottom ends of the spectrum, the right tools are pretty clear... assuming all of your DMG* are equal. The second table shows what happens when a small range of DMG* variability is introduced into the equations. As the DT rises, it still kinda sorta holds up, but there are aberrations: Fast Piercing weapons are much more dominant in the mid range from a 20% increase to damage and an additional 4 points (20% of 20) DT bypass. In some cases, the differences are minor, but in other cases, it makes a significant difference. And ultimately, those DT values at the top and the names that correlate with them are base values. When you see someone in mail, you don't know that mail has 30 DT. It may have 35 DT. Or it may have 40 and the target is wearing a ring that grants +5 more DT. To be clear, I think this is a neat mathematical system and it's fun to play around with in spreadsheet, but I think it does pose some problems for players who are making tactical choices in a 6 vs. 6 (or more) scenario. I'm also not saying that the problems can't be solved, but I had tried a number of approaches and wasn't coming up with very satisfying solutions.
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    Monk unarmed weapons will grow in power as the monk gains levels, roughly matching the power increase seen by other weapons. The bonuses received by their unarmed weapons are not applied to standard weapons they wield. The main limitations of the monks' unarmed attacks are a) unlike standard magical weapons, they don't have branching magical effects unless the monk buys optional abilities for them and b) unless the monk is able to buy alternate damage types for them, the unarmed attacks all do crushing damage, which means those attacks will sometimes be inefficient.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    Yes, monks can use any of their abilities through equipped weapons or through their unarmed attacks.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    Monks can use any weapon they like to perform any of their attacks; their unarmed weapons are simply another option.
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