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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    It's a big enough jump that the question isn't rhetorical.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    That's reasonable, but we are in a thread where people are demanding that I have a comprehensive design of the spellcasting system spelled out in the forums three weeks into a Kickstarter campaign.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    No. I haven't though a tremendous amount about healing points, but that brings up an interesting parallel resource management behavior in RPGs. I've seen (and talked to) innumerable gamers who say they end games with inventories full of consumables: potions, wands, scrolls, etc. The most commonly cited reason they give is that they don't know when is/isn't a good time to use them. Also, because they often have no idea when they might get more, they don't want to run out. It's sort of the inverse problem of rest spamming.
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    That is likely more common, but isn't being "wasteful" something that's only appreciated in retrospect? I.e. conservation strategy is only strategic if you have some sort of understanding of what you're going up against. In most cases, you don't know how many enemies you're going to fight, how deep the dungeon is, or what spells any given caster has at his or her disposal. Is it "wasteful" to cast fireball on 6 lizard men? Is it wasteful to cast it on 4 lizard men? What if one of them is a caster and he's casting hold person? What if there are only 30 lizard men on the level?
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    Those are all great ideas for addressing backtracking and resting in a tabletop game. I have used many similar approaches in my own tabletop games. But this is not a tabletop game. It's a computer game that runs primarily through systems. We script a large amount of custom content, but scripting every location to react to the player retreating and resting would be like designing and scripting every area 1.5 times.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    No. The punishment is that they do poorly in combat. Assuming they survive the combat and have learned that they used poor tactics (or strategy), why does the player need to be punished again? This is pretty much the sequence of how this goes down from a player's perspective: * Player selects a number of spells for any number of reasons, thoughtful or thoughtless. * Player enters combat with enemies that are poorly matched to his or her spells. * The player realizes that a different group of spells would be better for these monsters. * The fight is rough, but the player survives. * The player decides to switch his or her spells to something more appropriate. If the fight is hard, they already suffered for the choices they made. When the fight is over and the player has made a decision to switch spells, why should he or she be punished again?
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    Do you think you should be able to get the full spread on not only the occupants of Dragon's Eye on each level but also their tactics and spell selection prior to entry? Even in tabletop games where my characters were loaded to the gills with divination magic I couldn't get that much detail. I.e. actual in-game metagaming could not fully prepare us for encounters.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    No it doesn't. Nothing about it implies that. We are talking about the Infinity Engine games and the experience that they created. Do you believe my representation of how players actually played the game is inaccurate? Am I wrong? Did people look at Dragon's Eye in IWD and guess, "You know, I bet there's... five levels to this place... lizard men with shamans, armored skeletons, blast skeletons, some cold wights, ghouls, a cleric of Talona, disguised yuani-ti casters, a mix of yuan-ti fighters and casters and... I've got a feeling there's a marilith at the bottom." and then do a point-to-point march through the dungeon, not only selecting, but conserving their spells perfectly so they never had to backtrack out? I feel like I'm describing what is a very common circumstance in the Infinity Engine games. People pay attention, make educated guesses, but ultimately are unable to know the full extent of the challenges they are dealing with. The only way they would be able to do so is through extraordinary prescience.
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    They don't refute qstoffe's point; they reject qstoffe's point as an answer to the question, "What is good about the experience of walking back to the campsite?" Instead of answering my question, he chose to answer his own, presumably, "What is good about not running out of spells?"
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    But it doesn't have a bigger punishment. It's a circumstance that arises all the time in IE games.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    None of these answers address the question I asked.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    Here is something I would like to hear opinions on. Take the following circumstance, which is not uncommon in the IE games and would be somewhat similar to the KotC "campsite" system in circumstances were you are not locked off from backtracking to a campsite. * You are in a location where resting is either prohibited or extraordinarily likely to result in an encounter. You do not know the location of the next campsite/safe resting area. * You have cast many of your spells and the ones that remain are not entirely appropriate for the encounters you are now facing. * Because you came from an area where you could rest and are not locked in the location, you have a cleared (by you) path back to the area where you can safely rest. * It will take you three minutes of real time to walk back to the camp, maybe thirty seconds to reconfigure spells, five seconds to rest, and another three minutes of real time to walk back to where you had left off. * Because you killed everything between you and the campsite, there are no threats between you and the campsite. In this circumstance, what is good about the experience of walking back to the campsite?
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    Then you will like our CRPG, Project Eternity, which has resting.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    Pretty much.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    I already have.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    I don't know where this topic came from, but I don't expect to use level scaling much, if at all, in PE.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    Thank you for reading what I wrote.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    They will not be. Dark elves are an old concept, but the dark-skinned "drow" are a Gygax invention. We have a few elven subraces, some of which will seem more familiar than others. In addition to the subraces, there is significant cultural division between separate groups even within one subrace. The elves that came across the sea with their human allies to settle in the Dyrwood encountered Glanfathan elves that looked almost identical to them, physically, but spoke a completely dissimilar language, dressed differently, had different values and customs, and lived virtually at a Stone Age level of technology -- all this despite abundant evidence that an ancient empire once stood around them. As a result, the elves who settled in the Dyrwood tend to feel much more kinship toward human neighbors, with whom they share a language and hundreds of years of coexistence, than the Glanfathans.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    I'm not going to rule out cooldowns and I'm not going to design the entire magic system on the fly over the course of three weeks. Both Tim and I want the magic system to feel expansive, powerful, and flexible. We want the player to have to make prep choices when selecting spells for active use. These things do not require a Vancian system, nor do they require the absence of cooldowns as a mechanic. As I wrote in one of the class threads, our goal with class design is not to limit the role of classes but to ensure that every class does have at least one combat role they can clearly excel in. This does not mean that wizards won't be able to cast protective spells, transformative spells, etc. It is likely that they will not be able to select from all of those things in the moment but unlikely that we will require the player to rest to change what he or she has access to.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    It isn't a goal of ours to limit a character's combat role by class, but it is a goal to make every character class have one role that it's easy for them to excel in. For example, most IE games (being derived from AD&D 2nd Edition until IWD2) effectively threw thief characters into the garbage bin, combat-wise.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    Knock and its old friends spider climb and invisibility are part of a classic family of spells that made rogue and thief players say, "Hey, why do I exist?" I don't believe their inclusion in pre-4E editions of D&D and AD&D was a great thing. That sort of spell design is good if you're making a game specifically about how awesomely powerful wizards are (e.g. Ars Magica), but I don't think it's good in a class-based system where the classes are supposed to have different strengths and weaknesses. Also, I think the high-level design of rituals in 4E is a good thing because allows casters to retain the ability to use classic spells like speak with dead with a time and material cost. It just doesn't force players to choose, daily, between the spells they use constantly and the spells they use once every three to five sessions (in tabletop terms). It's pretty rare that someone "expects" to cast speak with dead, so any occasion where the player would have a good reason to use it is likely to catch the player unprepared under normal pre-4E conditions.
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    I think it's possible to still make prep meaningful by allowing the player to switch between pre-built (by the player) suites of spells at a frequency that is less than "per rest". I.e. if the player can only use a subset of spells at any given time, but can switch between those subsets with a time penalty (or only outside of combat), that still makes the choices important without the system strictly being Vancian.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    In tabletop games, the "Vancian" systems do make strategic gameplay more important, but a lot of that is lost in a game with reloading. Especially if the choice of spells has a dramatic effect on efficacy (e.g. did you memorize dimensional anchor before fighting creatures that are constantly teleporting all over the battlefield), failure to select the "right" ones can result in catastrophic failure. In the absence of information required to make informed decisions, those choices aren't strategic; they're just guesses. After a reload, they're meta-strategic, but I doubt most players feel clever for making a retrospectively obvious choice.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    It's true that he armor is tailored for women, but it still looks almost identical to male armor because the only thing that changes are the proportions. The "Xena-inspired" description is hard to take seriously considering what the final result looks like. http://www.foxreno.com/news/ap/defense/army-tests-body-armor-tailored-for-female-soldiers/nSFBg/
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