J.E. Sawyer

No. Awarding loot is not systemic.

No. It is, although Torment was not heavily combat-based.

Ultimately, it comes down to how people play the game. If players really do wind up avoiding combat all the time (I don't believe this will be the case), that's not what we're trying to encourage/reward. At the highest level, it is my sincere desire to allow people to play the sorts of characters they want the way they want to play them -- while experiencing enjoyable challenges in the game. If you want to play the game as a solo wizard in plate armor who talks his way past as many conflicts as he can, I think that is good/fine/great and would like to design mechanics to support that. If you want to make a party of orlan barbarians with hatchets who slaughter every living and unliving creature you see, that is also good/fine/great. But simply allowing something doesn't mean it's viable, and we do need to think about how our systems and content influence play styles and behaviors.

Loot isn't systemically connected with killing a target/any targets specifically. I don't think gaining experience points is the only reason why players engage in combat.

That is a logical association, but characters in D&D and many other games (including Project Eternity) also get better at doing things other than killing from experience points. As I wrote before, a large amount of experience in IE games (in many cases, the majority of the XP) comes from completing quests, which may or may not have any direct link to killing things. Experience points in the IE games (and in PE) are an abstraction. Player behaviors are always influenced by the rules designed for the game. I've tried to be forthcoming about the ways in which we are designing the game and the reasons for making the choices we are making. Kill experience wasn't "removed" (it wasn't ever implemented) to prevent anyone from outleveling an area. When XP is rewarded for killing creatures, quests solutions than involve not killing creatures still systemically encourage players to go back and kill those creatures -- or make players feel like they have completed the quest "wrong" because they didn't kill the target. The issue isn't necessarily one of balance, because often players will exhibit the same behavior even if the amount of XP gained from creatures is extremely small. The reason I refer to this as "degenerate gameplay" is because the player chose a non-combat solution but ultimately went back to using combat after the solution was selected because the game systemically provides an incentive to do so. When designers create non-combat resolutions and players select non-combat resolutions, I believe it's reasonable to assume they both created and selected those options because that's what they wanted to do. In PE, nothing will necessarily prevent the player from killing characters/creatures they avoided on a quest, but I don't think it's necessary to systematically reward them for doing so. As a side note, I've already explained to you once this week what I mean by degenerate gameplay. I don't believe I've ever referred to the people who engage in degenerate gameplay as "degenerates", nor have I insinuated they are doing something wrong or bad. They're playing the game in the way that the rules encourage them to play. Those rules are made by designers, so again, it's ultimately our responsibility.

To address JFSOCC's OP, while PE is not primarily a stealth game, we do want stealth to be an enjoyable and fun element of gameplay. Our mechanics will likely be much simpler than those found in the Commandos series (which I also enjoyed, BTW), but we do want to make it more in depth than pressing a button and having virtual dice roll in the background. Stealth will not be solely the province of rogues, though rogues will likely be able to more easily penetrate areas/avoid detection at close range than most other classes. Additionally, rogues may have class abilities that allow them to take advantage of stealth at the opening of combat (should you choose to use stealth for positioning rather than avoidance).

The safety buffer of a suspicious/investigation state was a welcome addition to stealth games. Two of my favorite stealth-oriented games, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Hitman: Blood Money, use suspicion states to a) push back against a player engaging in risky behavior and b) give the player an additional tool for manipulating AI. The consequences for a minor error were usually not game-ending. Saving/reloading to try different approaches or to attempt something you, the player, botched isn't degenerate at all. I'd say that's why save/reload is present in games. If players save/reload to perform the same action with the same level of proficiency and reasonably expect a different outcome due to RNG, I'd say that's degeneration. I don't think that's why designers put save/load in games and I don't think that's the way in which players want to engage the game. Earlier Hitman games had a much more "loosey-goosey" detection mechanic, so you could walk by a character once and set him off immediately -- but reloading would allow you to perform the same action in the exact same way and avoid detection.

All mechanics are contrived. Regardless of how experience is gained, PE is not a linear, IWD-style adventure. Even in Icewind Dale II, the majority of experience gained was from quests. If you chose to skip optional side quests (especially near the beginning of the game) the party could easily be lower level when they hit an encounter.

Pausing will always be available.

I think we've said this before, but the only things we're likely to scale with player level are crit-path special encounters and even then, only within a range of levels. E.g. take a boss like Sherincal in IWD2. Maybe you'll encounter her at 5th level, but it's possible you could encounter her at 8th level. If 5th-8th is the most common range, we'd scale around that, but if you encounter her sub-5th level, you'll have to deal with the difference. If you encounter her at 9th or 10th by some x-treme XP mining, it will be a little easier for you. The reason to scale the crit path special encounters is to allow for the fact that not everyone wants to do a lot of side content. Some people want to (largely) stick to the crit path with minimal side quests. When it comes to the optional/side content, there won't be any scaling at all. Rats in the cellar will still be rats and may explode from your mere presence and the dragon Chrysophylax will probably burn you to ashes if you mosey up to his lair at 3rd level.

In our current build, we already allow the game to either be paused or dramatically slowed. A while back, a number of people requested the "slo-mo" option because (among other reasons) some are micromanagers who wind up in a constant pause-start-pause-start-pause pattern every few seconds. The slo-mo toggle required virtually no effort on our end and seems to play reasonably well so far.

I think "the truth is somewhere in the middle" answers can be a bit hokey but, in fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle -- between BG1 and BG2, that is. BG1 had a lot of empty space and BG2 packed in the content like a can of sardines. We want exploration areas to feel like you're not tripping over quests and monsters every five feet, but there should be a rewarding amount of good content to find, even in "wilderness" areas.

It's mostly a mathematical/probabilistic benefit (IMO), not something that is likely to change your tactics.

If you assume that the 8th level fighter stands there like a doofus doing absolutely nothing, sure. I don't know how you think you're going to outpace the damage/health of the other fighter while doing sub-magic missile damage before armor comes into play.

The really brief version is to imagine a normal attack in AD&D, but if you miss, you inflict half minimum damage. Math and values can get shoved all over the place, but that's the fundamental mechanic. Whether you like the concept is separate from how well it works in practice (which really comes down to math/value specifics).

Do you think that miss effects on dailies were one of the things that people didn't like? I don't think that's accurate. As Homalakh and I have already stated, what players "should" understand and what they actually understand are not the same thing. If people actually understood probability, casinos would shut their doors tomorrow. It doesn't.

Gameplay degeneration isn't a pejorative commentary on players using it. When I write about gameplay degeneration, what I mean is that both the intended gameplay styles (from a design perspective) and the players' desired gameplay styles effectively go out the window because the system rewards some other method(s) of gameplay. It's not a gamer's fault for making use of an obvious loophole or method of min-maxing, but it is our responsibility (as designers) to try to align fun design intention with actually fun gameplay. If we design a system that rewards resting every 5', the gamer isn't at fault for using it. We put it in there! If we design a system that rewards savescumming, we (the designers) are the ones to blame. If we design an inventory system that rewards traveling back and forth to haul load after to load of loot out like precious grains of sand, again, we're the ones that built the system. My job is to give the player interesting challenges to overcome and a variety of tools to overcome those challenges. If their solutions to the challenges involve mentally un-engaging rote tasks or exploiting loopholes, I believe that most players don't like that. I believe most players would rather have us think about and eliminate loopholes and present challenges that allow them to overcome challenges in a "stand up" fashion. Another example is kiting, which has been brought up a number of times and is a pernicious problem in a lot of games. The steps we take to solve kiting issues will not be made to slap the hands of gamers we think are doing something "bad". If we allow and effectively reward kiting, then kiting becomes the low-bar for overcoming combat challenges, but it will be our fault for letting it happen. All of this stuff is really separate from the hit-miss/RNG conversation, which is really about normalizing randomness a step more than D&D does -- that's all.

How did people arrive at the conclusion that this system makes you more dependent on gear than A/D&D in the IE games?

Personally, HP values seem to be the least troublesome thing as they mostly serve a pacing purpose. More than keeping HP values in IE ranges, I think it's important to keep the overall combat pacing in IE ranges. I.e., it should take roughly the same amount of time to defeat enemies and complete combat encounters in PE as in the IE games. If we're not on 6 second rounds (we aren't), attacks and actions will likely happen more often than they do at low-level D&D (more comparable to mid-level D&D to start), which suggests that starting HP values will likely be higher. From my perspective, to paraphrase the late, great Aaliyah, HP ain't nothin' but a number. This is understandable, but I don't believe that the system we're currently using de-emphasizes the character relative to his or her gear. You still really want to hit, not miss. Building a character around 50% min damage is not really a viable long-term strategy. You still have to roll to hit; the consequences of a miss in this system are just less punitive than in most editions of A/D&D. A character's accuracy with his or her weapons and his or her defenses still play a large role in their overall combat efficacy. Gear will contribute to that, but as previously discussed, it's a mix of character and gear, not all about the gear. Yes, that is a consequence of normalizing ranges, so again this comes back to asking players the question, "How much chaos do you like?" In many cases, this is a personal preference. I have, for instance, seen people request elements like the fabled Ars Magica/Rolemaster botches and crits of old, which were wild and crazy. The most appealing suggestion I've seen so far is to maintain the idea of "glancing" hits but have more extreme outliers for full misses. That sort of a change makes the most sense to me as a threshold pushed out from your chance to hit, i.e. if you miss your attack roll by more than 50%, that's not a glancing blow, but a full miss. If your chance to hit is extraordinarily high, your chance of "really" missing is pretty low. If a bunch of scrubs attack an enemy with high defenses, they may "actually" miss much more often, with glancing blows being common and a few full hits in the mix. That's certainly a possibility, but the first step for me is to ensure that the way the mechanics work in game produce enjoyable gameplay. Terminology tweaks can come later if we stay with a given system. Yes. It's a bizarre meta-example because it's deterministic chaos. The behavior following a failure is certainly made very odd because of what they're trying to prevent, but often it's the reaction to the failure itself that is telling: many players simply don't understand how probability works. Without seeding, non-Ironman players would still reload, but they'd try the same action again instead of switching to something different.

I can't count the number of times I've seen players make a complaint in the vein that their XCOM units had 90% chance to hit and missed three times in a row. "Impossible!"

I've never suggested it was degenerate gameplay and I'm not sure why you would jump to that conclusion.

Many misses would likely be reduced to fractional Stamina damage and, by association, even smaller Health damage (we do track the fractions). Currently, our DT system has the same minimum 20% system as F:NV (excepting Crushing weapons, which currently do minimum 40%). Decent armor would turn that 3 Damage into 0.6 Stamina damage and 0.15 Health damage. Ten "missed" blows would result in 6 points of Stamina damage and 1.5 points of Health damage.

And I'm perplexed by Josh's comment. Many players (like many people) don't understand how probability works. There was a lot of complaining about XCOM's RNG including "field tests" to chart expected results to actual results. Unsurprisingly, the RNG was working pretty much as a RNG should. I heard the same complaints on IWD, IWD2, and NWN2, even from QA. After arguing with about seven testers about the probability of seeing a "near 120" result on 20d6, I pulled in Andy Woo, who has a master's degree from MIT focusing in probabilistic combinatorics, and they still argued with him. Love of RNG systems has always been perplexing to me because most players don't understand them very well. Many players see an 80% chance to hit, choose to attack, miss, and think that the world has been turned on its head. Not all, mind you, but many.

DT is applied to the damage done. So if the hypothetical longsword doing 6-12 damage has a miss result, it does 3 damage, which is then compared to DT.

This is actually the opposite of what it did. In the new XCOM, if you have a 95% chance to shoot and do 7 damage against a target with 5 health vs. throwing a frag grenade doing a reliable 3 damage, there's no real question that shooting is the tactically wise thing to do. If you miss, you didn't make a tactical error; the game randomly decided that you weren't going to hit. Similarly, it is not uncommon in XCOM to have three or four characters on Overwatch, trigger an enemy to run in front of them, and have every character miss their reaction shots. If you're playing in Ironman, you just live with the consequences, but you didn't make a tactical error. What people outside of Ironman do is reload and pick a different action because the tactically "smart" action has been pre-seeded to fail.