J.E. Sawyer

I personally don't have a negative reaction to hitting 100% of the time. Mechanically, the "all-or-nothing" D&D hit/miss system can easily change the outcome of a fight based on a die roll even when the players/DM are performing the most tactically sound action. Our revised crit/hit/graze/miss system still allows for that possibility, but it is much less likely, especially over a series of rolls.

We're intentionally designing advancement-related upgrades to feel "chunkier"/more coarsely granular.

Wounds are unique to the monk class. They're a resource used to power their special abilities. This sounds like pure benefit, so more damage received = better than -- but that's not really the case. Wounds have to be "spent" within a certain amount of time or they will be applied as damage. If Wounds are spent, that stack of damage is gone for good. If Wounds are acquired faster than the monk can spend them, It Is Bad. If a monk absorbs their maximum amount of Wounds, damage above that amount is applied normally. So it's not always the best idea to just strip every monk naked and flip off demon lords at point-blank range.

What weapons you ready and use at any given moment is one choice among many. If combats consisted of one PC fighting one enemy, yes, the choice would be pretty minor. There are many additional factors to consider. Among them: * Switching weapons plays a weapon switching animation. It's not instantaneous. * There is an efficiency gulf "under the curve" even among weapons that are good against an armor type. Within a given armor type, DTs can still cover a large range. Against a target in mid/high-DT light armor, using two hatchets can result in a 30% damage loss vs. using a greatsword. Against a low DT target, the relationship is reversed: the faster weapons doing less damage per hit do damage much faster. Ultimately, avoiding the "bad" damage type is only one part of the efficacy equation. * Not every character is ideal for facing every type of enemy. Tough Fighter might have a maul, but Tough Fighter may not be the right character to stand in front of a cipher in plate armor making short-range Willpower attacks. * You can't control every element of positioning. Characters often wind up in circumstances they are not ideally suited for and enemies are often placed (or enter an environment) in ways that foil good plans. Adapting to circumstances may involve having a nearby character switch weapons, but it may be better/more efficient for a more distant character, who is already well-equipped and a better counter to the attack, to cross the battlefield. If fights consisted of characters with identical armor types, that would devolve pretty quickly -- much as it can in standard D&D when you get attacked by creatures with matched DR types. In yesterday's Pathfinder game, the party fought against two skeletons (DR 5/Bludgeoning). Pretty simple fight. Replacing a skeleton with a zombie in the fight (DR 5/Slashing) would have immediately changed how the party chose weapons, targets, and moved on the battlefield. It's not exactly the Battle of the Bulge, but complex scenarios are often the accumulated questions posed by simple problems. TL;DR: What weapon type to avoid against a given enemy is just one consideration among many.

You're not reading it correctly. Here's an example: Bad Guy hits Cool Monk with a sword for 21 damage. Cool Monk has 5 DT, so 16 damage gets through. Of that, let's say (arbitrarily, this is not based on any formula we've devised) 5 points are converted to Wounds. Cool Monk takes 11 points of Stamina damage and 2.75 points of Health damage. The 5 points converted to Wounds have no influence on Cool Monk's current Stamina or Health.

People proposed various character concepts ("dodgy" ones) that didn't seem as mechanically sensible in the system without a full miss state. I think supporting character concepts is important, and with miss at the bottom end of graze, the underlying math doesn't change dramatically unless the Accuracy and target defense are way out of line (i.e. Accuracy is much lower than the target defense). In such cases, the attacker is extremely outclassed anyway. It's not like D&D where a 50% chance to hit also means a 50% chance to completely miss. Dodgy characters will increase the chance that attackers miss them, but in most cases they're still going to be grazed a lot.

Yeah, Commando on C64 was a lot of fun. Our stealth system isn't going to be an incredibly intricate, elaborate system, but it will be more involved than pressing a button and hoping that the RNG doesn't make enemies see you. We really don't view it as the easy way out. We want it to be gameplay on its own that requires observation and adaptation -- especially if you're actually using it to move through unaware hostiles. If you want to use it for light scouting/pre-combat positioning at range, it should be commensurately less risky.

We haven't worked out their higher level abilities, but Tim and I have discussed the basic idea of monks as attack absorbers/modifiers, so something like spell/magic resistance would not be out of line with what we're thinking.

Talents are our equivalent of feats. In addition to gaining them through leveling (currently every three levels), you can also gain talents (often unique) from quests and story/NPC interactions.

Monks convert a portion of Stamina damage, pre-subtraction from their own Stamina total, into Wounds (their resource). Their actual Stamina and Health are not higher than normal, but this class ability effectively makes them more durable -- until they have maxed out the number of Wounds they are able to absorb.

You probably won't know their numerical defense ratings by looking at them in normal circumstances, but you will get the IE-style broad health ratings as well as the armor type of the target. Some of these will be learned through interaction and then not require the tool-tip. E.g. you learn early on that brigandine is classified as heavy armor and every time you hover over a character in brigandine, their tool-tip says "Heavy Armor". Eventually, when you see a guy in brigandine, you can safely assume that he's in heavy armor and deal with him accordingly. If you encounter a weird rock monster you might not necessarily know what type of armor it "counts" as until you use the tool-tip, but that's not too time-consuming.

A shield would increase defense against a touch attack. Glances and hits would work the same way. Ultimately, all attacks, regardless of the source, feed into the same mechanical system. You always have a derived Accuracy for individual attacks and the targets always have four derived defenses: one for blocking and dodging direct melee/ranged attacks, one for body shock/resistance, one for evading AoEs, and one for mental attacks (essentially AC, Fort, Reflex, and Will). A given attack always has one opposed defense and the results always break down in the same way: crit = 150% max damage/duration, hit = normal damage/duration, graze = 50% minimum damage/duration, miss = no effect. Your Accuracy doesn't inherently drop down per-attack as with 3E BAB. While attack speed can increase, it will not increase in the large leaps and bounds that it did over the course of the IE games, going from 1/round to potentially 5+/round.

PE wizards don't have a large inherent Accuracy gulf when it comes to melee attacks. In 3E/3.5, one of the reasons why AC becomes so inflated is because high BAB characters are making multiple attacks with -25% (typically) chance to hit per additional attack. In PE, some classes will have inherent (or purchased) Accuracy bonuses with certain attack/weapon types, but those bonuses will typically be static as levels increase. If a fighter and a wizard's melee accuracy are separated by N points at first level, they will likely be separated by something close to N points at higher levels (not accounting for optional specialization from Talents, better gear, etc.). A separate touch AC isn't used in PE because armor doesn't directly contribute to standard melee/ranged defense (though shields do).

Cooldowns in the sense that most people use them were never really in. Per-encounter and per-rest will likely be the two common types of use limitations. A fighter's Surge would likely be (and is currently) per-encounter.

Stamina currently regenerates (very slowly) in combat, but we're likely to switch it to being post-combat only and very rapid. You'd have to rely on Stamina-healing abilities (e.g. the fighter's Surge [self only], priest's Recovery [AoE, lesser amount], or paladin's Revive [unconscious ally only, but immediately gives a big Stamina boost]) in combat, but would regain Stamina quickly once the combat state ended. Some abilities or talents may help ameliorate the deficiencies of a certain damage type vs. armor, but our system doesn't reward hyperspecialization as in 2nd Ed. AD&D Combat & Tactics Mastery rules or 3E. I.e., you can't really be "heavily invested" in a specific type of weapon. Our specialization groups always bridge damage types, so if you have access to equivalent gear, there's not a negative incentive to equipping another type of weapon. If you really want to have "the sword guy" who never switches to non-sword weapons, you're going to have to be more selective with what enemies he engages. In circumstances where every enemy is resistant to slashing weapons, you're going to be at a severe numerical disadvantage. One of the keys to designing good tactical encounters is to occasionally diminish a certain tactic so the player has to seek other approaches. If we allow you to build a big enough hammer that everything can be treated like a nail, that tactical element becomes irrelevant. That said, our approach is not to say, "This is the tactic you must use now." as much as, "This is a bad tactic to use now." We believe the latter opens up more possibilities for the player than the former.

I believe what I wrote before: a 150% max damage crit is not devastating. If the target had no armor, you'd be doing 21 damage on a hit vs. 9 (on average). 8 damage is a big jump from 1-2, but you're still doing less than average damage vs. a 0 DT target. Depending on what the circumstances are, you could achieve a similar (and more reliable) bump in damage over DT by using a two-handed weapon. If that's your damage when using a two-handed weapon, then yes, crits are pretty handy, but you're in a weird and uncommon circumstance.

Yes, there will be a combat state. Also, to build upon the previous comment re: crits when armor is high: crits do make a larger difference when armor is high, but they're effectively helping you to dig out of a hole. The most damage you'll do is in a situation where the target has no DT and you score a crit. Once DT starts being applied, your damage goes down linearly per-hit until it hits the minimum threshold. If you're already being maxed out by DT, a crit can help you bump out of that, but the best case is still going to be worse than if the target were wearing no armor.

Against targets with high armor, 150% max damage is a huge difference compared to a normal hit. If your damage is being outclassed by DT, yes.

It hasn't currently had a big impact on "fun feel" in part because the target Accuracy/defense values are pretty close in our test level. Personally, I don't think it will dramatically change the extreme imbalance situations because everything's skewed in either system. Attacking a target with high defenses in the hopes that your low Accuracy grazes will wear it down wasn't much of a viable strategy before; it becomes less so in this system.

PE's crits are not currently ultra-devastating because it's 150% max damage and the damage ranges are smaller than they are in A/D&D. Crits are still powerful, but don't compare to a 3E max damage greataxe crit.

Even when an attacker's Accuracy is completely outclassed by the target's defense, there's always a 5% chance to score a (normal) hit. In the opposite direction, even the greatest Accuracy advantage still allows a 5% chance to graze.

PE will have control-loss effects (stuns/roots/charms), though their durations will probably not be as long as A/D&D counterparts (which are often really, really long). Last week, we implemented a full miss mechanic at the bottom end of graze, as I described earlier in the thread. It's really an "out of bounds" effect and doesn't occur often unless the difference between the attacker's Accuracy and the target's defense is large. This would allow you to build a "dodge" or "block" oriented character that boosts avoidance and that was the primary motivating factor in introducing the mechanic (supporting a character concept). Damage is still pretty heavily normalized since misses are the exception and only start becoming more common as full hits become less likely (which also makes critical hits impossible). At the other end of the spectrum, if the attacker has a large Accuracy advantage over the target defense, misses become impossible and critical hits become more common. Think of Accuracy vs. defenses as being a sliding window where perfectly matched values result in a small chance to fully miss, a small chance to critically hit, and large chances to hit and graze. As the Accuracy and defenses move out of alignment, the worst and best cases shift in a directly proportional fashion. The typical "attacker is outclassed" situation will result in a lot of grazes, some hits, some misses, no crits. The typical "defender is outlcassed" situation will result in a lot of hits, some crits, some grazes, no misses.

Some of these are design-driven answers, so I'll answer a few. We're starting out with one basic attack for each weapon type with variants as a lower priority. Making all of the weapon attacks unique/good is more important (IMO) than having variants. Also, a lot of our animation time is traditionally spent on creatures, and I think having a large bestiary is important. On Black Hound, we put a lot of effort into standard melee variations and I don't think it would have had as large of an impact as additional creatures/creature animations. I'd like to have special death animations and that's something Dimitri, Mark, and I have discussed, but not in detail.

Players making five trips in and out of a dungeon after clearing it to haul all of the loot out.

Loot in IE games (and PE games) is typically hand-placed with very little randomization involved. I.e., it is not systemic. Some loot is in containers, some loot is given as quest rewards, and some loot is on creatures. Not all creatures carry loot. In Temple of Elemental Evil, on the fourth level of the temple, there's a massive fight before a room containing treasure chests with molds/jellies/puddings. You don't have to actually do the massive fight to get to the treasure chests (and if you're sneaky enough, you don't have to fight the critters near the chests). However, Hedrack, the high priest, carries several nice items. If you want to get those items, you have to weigh your own personal material cost to get through the fight against what you will get out of it. The important thing is that there's a decision to make. In terms of gaining loot, it's not a no-brainer. Hacking terminals in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is pure benefit. Killing every hostile creature you detect in Icewind Dale is pure benefit. You always get something out of it and you are implicitly short-changing yourself when you pass up an opportunity to do so, even when you don't particularly want to do it for any other reason. That's because the rewards are systemic, universal to how the game works. You can systemically micro-reward every action the player performs and attempt to balance all of these things relative to each other, or you can back the systemic rewards out to something that is less specific, more abstract, and easier to balance overall. For us, quests are pure benefit. Completing objectives within quests are pure benefit. At a high level, pursuing objectives and completing quests comprise a huge amount of what you're focused on doing in the IE games (and will in PE as well). E: Bonus picture of my halfling thief robbing the temple and avoiding the massive combat.