Gatt9
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Posts posted by Gatt9
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On the KS comments section people tend to be fairly respectful to OE folks. Why? Well, as a backer, you know Obsidian will have access to your name and address at some point. Honestly, any future things like that should focus on stripping away anonymity. That may not eliminate the stupidness but it should reduce it.
I'd actually argue that it's an even better arguement for why people under the legal age should not be permitted to access any kind of forum on the internet, their accounts should be locked to read-only. They also should be segregated into under-age multiplayer realms, as X-box Live readily demonstrates countless reasons to do so.
I'd make the case that the reason why Kickstarter's comments forum is so polite is because the majority of people there are adults since it requires a creditcard to participate, and the chat was a cesspool because the kids could access it.
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Take, for example, Dragon Age Origin's Deep Roads segment. That slug fest of an area is barely tolerable with exp gain, because you are at the minimum progressing your characters for each darkspawn you kill. Without exp gain, it is unbearable, because it becomes just a tedious chore that you have to do to get to the next objective of the game, which is several hours off.
In addition to what has already been said about no one suggesting to remove rewards for combat oriented tasks in general (where does this idea even come from?), I find it funny how you talk about not wanting to discuss degenerate cases and then go on and suggest a degenerate case of your own: hours long grindfest that adds nothing to the game. How is "something is good because it makes ****ty parts of the game marginally less ****ty" a good argument?
Fine, then a better example is wilderness exploration in Baldur's Gate - no objectives involved but your own curiosity and desire for adventure, with exp and loot from slain monsters / cleared dungeons being the only rewards for doing so. How do you script combat objectives into exploration without making it feel artificial and rail roaded?
Well, if you get experience for exploring or finding Interesting Locations, then there you go. Or there's a bounty on gnome-ears. Or there are people you meet in the wilderness that supply quests, items, interesting interaction, etc. Maybe there are trails you find that people with Survivalist skills can track and find dens of bandits.
There's many, many ways to make wilderness exploration interesting and useful as a game mechanic. The fact that you can't come up with them doesn't mean they don't exist.
At that point, you've introduced extreme amounts of complexity in order to achieve what xp/kill already did, or introduced even more degenerate gameplay than xp/kill caused.
-Experience for exploring results in consulting gamefaqs to find the point you need to stand at to receive a xp and doing nothing more than that.
-Bounty on gnome ears (And the whole "Objective" based arguement rewarding killing) is introducing additional layers of NPC's, quest tracking, writing journal entries, and art just to finally end up with what xp/kill does.
-Survivalist skills not only ends up doing what xp/kill already did, but now you've introduced extreme levels of min-maxing as skill choices are now a question of "What skill will yield the most additional experience over time?".
There's no need to go through all of this just to achieve what xp/kill already does, with far less complexity. This whole thing is introducing hundreds of lines of extra code and objects simply to end up with what you can do with less than a dozen lines of code, all of it just because someone somewhere might exploit in their single player game or someone somewhere might grind in their single player game.
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So far, PE is offering some interesting and exciting changes to accepted rpg mechanics. Here are two I find interesting.
1. Hitpoints are now a two tiered system: stamina and health. This attempts to offer the benefits of regenerating health in stemming rest based save scumming while attempting to maintain a system that allows for attrition. Curative spells are largely gone as well.
2. Spells are now based on a mix of regenerating spell point system with higher level spells requiring rest to regain. In other words, all wizards are sorcerors who regen spell points on the mid and low level spells while still having to rest for the "big guns." Spell "sets" can be swapped at a cooldown cost.
What I see here is an attempt to take the benefits of more modern systems and marry them to the virtues of older implementations of said systems. Frankly, I love this. Sure, how rest is handled in this game is very important to the viability of all this. Still, this is exciting stuff.
When Avellone was interviewed by RPS, the interviewer seemed overly negative. To RPS, PE seemed to be simply a return to simpler times and nothing but a child of nostalgia.
When I look at changes like those above, however, I see something different. PE has the potential to move the genre forward in some significant ways. It can maintain deep, strategic gameplay while also minimizing tedium and annoyance. Can a rpg maintain the importance of rest and attrition while avoiding abuse of the rest or save/load? Can one keep the strategic planning of 2e dnd while avoiding the constance hassle of constantly memming/resting for a series of spells to take down necessary spell protections/etc? Few mainstream games ask these questions because the answers do not matter to their bottom line.
I was once told its not what you do but why you do it. I think there is truth in this. The PE team is not trying to hit a metacritic score. They are not trying to hit an ESRB rating. They are not trying to ensure they land on Walmart shelves. They are trying to make a great rpg for US. I think that vision will be evident in the final product.
I also think they may well impact the industry as a whole. How awesome would that be?
Maybe that is why I (we?) donated to this thing. What do you guys think? Will PE change how other cRPGs are made in the future? Or is this the last hoorah for real party based cRPGs?
PE won't change how other games are made.
You have to remember, these changes are not occuring because they make for a better game. They're occuring because some players might click the "Rest" button after every battle and then complain because they clicked it too much.
That's not a good reason to change mechanics.
Further, one could easily argue that these are derivatives of Console game's health regeneration and cooldowns, so PE can't really change anything by using a system that's commonly used already (And disliked by a significant number of people).
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Need to read carefully. In the latter quote, I'm talking about a very specific case of choosing exp gain over 'roleplaying' - slaughtering townsfolk after helping them to get what little exp / coin they have. In the former, I'm talking about the feature of exp gain via monster killing in its totality. Personally, I don't do the former. However, I do enjoy getting rewarded for monster kills and exploring the entirety of a dungeon / combat area rather than just those areas that have to do with my objective. When I put in the effort to kill a monster, I want that to count.
What I'm trying to point out is that you're talking about how important the XP is to people, that the reward is critical, that it's how human psychology works. And I agree. But if this thing is so important to people, do we think that it suddenly becomes unimportant to them when they're wondering whether they should go back and kill the guards after sneaking into a castle for the extra XP. If it's so important to players, if it's an inherent part of human psychology, then it's going to affect how people play.
Now I agree with you that if the game is about killing monsters, then it makes sense to get XP from killing. It makes sense in Diablo. It makes sense in ADOM. But the developers here have said they want to make a story focused RPG with strong noncombat abilities. That doesn't mean that combat isn't important - it's very important. But it's not a game where the player is encouraged to slaughter everything they see, like those games are. They can still do that - but it's not elevated above other options.
We arrive right back at the original point here.
Why should we be policing how Player's play the game? What right does anyone have to declare that "You're doing it wrong and we're going to stop you!"? How does it affect anyone but that Player if he/she decides to go and do that?
As I said before, a Player might decide to Save/Load to get the optimal results from a random roll, should we remove saving and loading from every game from now on? A player might consult a guide on Gamefaq's before playing, should we decide to install a virus and kill his copy of the game if he consults an online guide?
That's where this slippery slope leads. This is an effort to force Players to play in the way that some subset has determined is "Right", and to make sure they cannot do it "Wrong", even though it not only doesn't affect anyone else, but no one else will ever know if they did.
This is hands down the worst rationale I've ever seen for a design decision in 30 years of gaming. Removing a mechanic and replacing it with nonsense simply because someone might choose to exploit his personal copy of the game.
And the worst part of it is...
boolean completedGuardQuest;
if( completedGuardQuest && guard.isKilled )
guard.xp = 0;
There. It's that easy to prevent someone from going back and killing the guards for xp after the quest is completed. That's why this is purely "Play it my way!" and there's no rationale justification for it. Because if the issue really is that "People shouldn't be rewarded for going back and killing the guards", it's far less lines of code to address that use case than I have put in this entire post.
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In stamina/health system, stamina represent how dazzled character is by hit and health represent how much actual physical damage hit made. And when you add that there is no magic cure for physical damage.
This can be represented by conditions. No need to break health system of IE games that is not broken.
In health/stamina system you have similar health system from IE games (character has number of health points which each enemy's hit eat some and when they go zero character dies)
Addition to this you have stamina system. Character has number of stamina points which each enemy's hit eat some and when they go zero character is knocked out.
Each enemy hit causes damage to both health and stamina, but usually more to stamina.
Stamina system also allows more flexible condition system. For example sleep spell could great ammount stamina damage and therefore it isn't any more save check spell, but damage spell. And those characters with more stamina have better resistant against such spells.
So it is mechanic that don't destroy anything but add more possibilities using easier approach to things.
You're assigning different qualities to the same thing.
Since Stamina now performs the function of health, Stamina becomes health. This gives us Health A and Health B. Health A regenerates, very rapidly it seems.
This would be in contrast to a system in which Stamina and Health are functionally different, running out of stamina doesn't incapacitate the character. Damage does not reduce stamina. Further, the system does not need changed to achieve the stamina effects you describe, they can be implemented perfectly well without turning Stamina into regenerating health. Introducing Stamina-based effects does not require Stamina to become functionally identical to Health.
So it does destroy things, specifically, it introduces a mechanic that is heavily used by Consoles for no reason other than so that some subset of players don't have to press the "Rest" button because they hate pressing the "Rest" button. That's really not a good reason to alter a perfectly functioning system.
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Re: XP awards - the designers have every right to set the tone and feel of the game by eliminating combat XP. Furthermore, eliminating combat XP will make balancing much easier (without resorting to the hideous auto-scaling crap), because they won't have to worry whether the player is level 5 or level 15 because he spent three weeks next to a rat hole killing ratsies. Yes, 3.x scaling XP is not bad, but it's not a perfect solution because when rats stop giving you XP, you'll just move on to the orc spawning spot.
1. It doesn't make balancing easier. It's just as easy to add the xp of everything on the main path, and main path + sidequests, to get a reliable range of what level the vast majority of players will be at in a system that includes xp/kill.
2. They don't need to worry about whether or not the player spent three weeks killing rats. That's the Player's problem. Their job isn't to guard against some subset of Players who'll exploit the game at the expense of the Players who play it as intended. If someone chose to do that, let them, and don't worry about it. Someone somewhere might also choose to use save/reload, should we take out the load button because someone might abuse it?
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^The irony is strong in you, padawan.
it drives me nuts that people say use this from that game or i want it like this ...not my cup of tea...
What is wrong with doing things new?!!!... New system etc ...Innovation and progress not borrowing....
It drives me mad some comments on this thread ...Deus Ex mechanics, Icwind ****ing Dale etc...
Might as well just repeat them all ...
Obsidian is doing something new in old format to make relevant ...
they should be allowed and celebrated ...!!!! not encouraged to do copy and paste ....
The problem is simple.
This is "Design out a playstyle I don't want people to play", which is a really terrible reason for a design decision. If someone chooses to take the playing field you give them, and degenerate it, so long as they aren't affecting anyone else's game, why introduce highly questionable design to obstruct it?
For a better example, many people over the years play D&D as a "Munchkin", so the reasoning behind this design means that D&D should no longer allow any character to have 18's in their attributes, and no character should be allowed to have more than 1 magic item.
It's a playstyle choice, some people choose to exploit the system, that's their choice. Rather than punish everyone else who plays by the rules with a highly linear system that removes all reward from one of the primary activities in an RPG, let them exploit if that's what they want. Designing everything around how a subset of Players might exploit a single player game is a very bad reason to do anything.
This isn't a choice being made because they feel they have an idea to improve the game and the genre, it's an choice being made because someone somewhere might exploit the implementation in a CRPG.
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Why does killing 100 kobolds in a dungeon, gaining 10XP per kobold make a great game, but getting through that dungeon whatever way give 1000XP make the combat useless and worthless and totally change the basis of the game. Anyone?
You spend thousands of hours designing a fun, interactive, and in-depth tactical combat system involving dozens of classes, hundreds of abilities, attribute interactions, perks, equipment & status effects, etc.
Your basic game design discourages the player from ever using them because it's faster / safer to get through the game without ever fighting.
...Fail?
Yup, exactly.
If there's no point to combat, then the best path through the game is to never bother entering combat, since combat risks losing progress which equates to losing your personal time. Since spending your time, risking loss of time, and managing to direct your party to succeed in combat is now unrewarded, and has only negative consequences, it's strictly better to avoid combat and just run your party to the end of the dungeon as fast as possible.
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Really glad to hear we have a goal based XP system. Means people can play the game as they like without ending up 2 levels down at the end of the game.
Liking the sound of the stamina system, will be interesting to see how it plays out with people having to manage their health resource aswell as stamina
Actually, it doesn't. It means you have to play it in the linear order predestined by the Developers, with no hope of ever doing anything outside of that order. Now, the only way to do a level 10 quest, is to do the level 5 quests, you have no other option.
It reduces choice, introduces pure linearity, reduces any reward for entering into combat, and much no sense at all.
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What it comes down to for me is:
Kill based XP = You need to kill everything
Objective based XP = You can play how you want
I prefer to avoid combat in RPGs because its mostly boring and I'd rather get on with the story or quests, so Objective based fits my playstyle better.
In other words, For.
You've made the false assumption that you have to kill everything if you receive xp/kill, this is not true, xp/kill doesn't mean there isn't other ways to get xp in a well designed system. I'm really not sure why people keep jumping to this conclusion.
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I'd just like to point out that over the last two pages, the complaint has shifted from "Combat is too punitive!" to "There aren't enough consequences for combat!"
I love gamers.
Oh god, you're right.
(1) No healz?! No rezzes, and possibility for maiming or permadeath?! WTF and with objective xp only, why bother with combat!
(2) OMG stamina bar regens in combat and classes can spam soul powaz to heal it? NERF
And this, folks, is why mechanisms shouldn't be discussed in a vacuum.
You should probably take some time to think this through. It's really not complicated, there's no mystery here.
Why do you think there's little healing and no resurrection? Because the intent of the system is to make sure you actively have to try to die. The auto-regenerating Health A bar is so that people don't have to "Rest spam" to regain spells, same thing as the cooldowns.
Everything here is being done so people don't have to press a little "Rest" button and wait 30 seconds, because some subset of Players rest after every battle.
Which means, we're now designing 3 systems (Healer class, regenerating health, spell cooldowns) around a subset of players who press the Rest button frequently and don't like pressing the Rest button.
So seriously, how is this anything but bad design being dictated by a subset of Players? Remember, before you answer, this is the very same path that lead us to modern "RPGs" where everything's fully voiced, dialogue is minimal, dice rolls are replaced by player skill, level scaling, and no exploration.
Because all of those things were dropped because a subset of players complained about them.
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Yeah, the talk about regen Stamina making things easy seems a bit much. Look at it like this - without taking the time to rest and recover your health (which'll probably require finding a safe and secure place, not to mention the actual time it could take to recover - which could be a pain for any time-sensitive quests) you could be at full Stamina but with only 3 health remaining.
Now remember Sawyer's example with the fighter? Namely how he took a lot of Stamina damage and about 5 Health damage? What do you think would happen if that fighter only had 3 Health when hit by those attacks?
Reverse your example. What would happen if he had 3 stamina when hit by those attacks? Same general result. Health bar A hit 0.
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I'm quite impressed that reading seems to be such a problem. Tamerlane got it right. You will still need to rest to "cure" health dmg which u will take with each hit taken. They additionally said that running around with low health but full stamina will get u killed.
One of the reasons why they would like to implement the stamina bar is that they want to reduce the need to rest after each battle to heal back up to full health.
I guess we will just have to wait and see how their idea works out in the _actual_ game. Don't misread their idea's/answers and spread those false interpretations. With our pledges we've put our faith in them - let's keep it that way and believe that they'll deliver a great game!
Reading's not a problem. It's a very simple system. Health A and Health B. Just because they call one health bar "Stamina" doesn't make it functionally something different.
The "Stamina" bar performs the same function as a Health bar, just because there's a backup Health bar doesn't make the first one anything different. At some stage, why even bother having either bar, just remove them both since we're going to remove inconviences. If clicking a rest button is so inconvient that we'll design it out, why not take the next logical step and design out Health entirely, because it's inconvient to have someone fall unconcious.
We don't really need to wait and see how this works out, there's really no mystery here. It's a regenerating health bar called "Stamina".
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Just thinking out aloud, I'm picturing a scenario where to get between two different area, you must navigate a tunnel full of foes. There's no real point to the scenario, just that the concept of it amuses me.
You sneak through to the other side, 1000xp
You kill some or all of them to get to the other side, 1000xp
At this point nothing is contentious, what is, and what the topic of this thread is, is whether you can claim both of those XP blocks in the same playthrough. But that discussion has come and gone for me, what mildly amused me is the image of you then sneaking back through the same tunnel to get back to the first area.
Now "realistically", this "should" be worth another block of XP, the quantity doesn't matter. Maybe after enough repetitions it'll become like taking candy from a baby and award nothing. But I wonder, would a "traditionalist" who claims that on the basis of realism, you should be rewarded for killing those enemies after they've been bypassed, see anything wrong with the notion of repeated XP rewards for sneaking past those same foes? After all, you're doing/accomplishing something and should be rewarded for it, no?
Absolutely, but probability states this will end sooner rather than later. Since each creature is going to roll against your sneak skill, the probability of failure increases quite rapidly. Probability of the first event * the probability of the second event * the probability of the nth event, with each creature representing an event. Assuming that in the very worst case the monster needs to roll a 20 to see you, you'll roughly make it past 19 critters before being discovered. It does downhill pretty quickly from there.
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XP only for completing objectives - and regernerating health?!
Well, Project Eternity is now turning into an action RPG. lol Might as well name it "Call of Eternity", it already has guns! haha
Yup, old school RPGs are truly dead, you heard it from Obsidian - the guys that wanted to revive the genre. ^^
It's kind of funny watching the devs play D&D, I think a round of "Call of Duty" would have been more appropriate.
I'm outta here!
Where is regenerating health?
The stamina bar is now functionally equivalent to health, because damage is subtracted from stamina instead of health until stamina is depeleted. Stamina regenerates after battle. So basically, we now have a regenerating health bar called "Stamina", and a backup health bar.
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I'm not going to try to convince anyone to reduce his pledge, so keep in mind that I'm not saying that in response to you, but if you truly feel that you won't enjoy the game as much, you have the right to reduce your pledge.Sadly after hearing more details such as the game being anti-combat oriented and more of a puzzle solving thing, I've decided to reduce my pledge from $72 to $25. I was expecting something similar to the old Infinity engine games. Not some anti-violence oriented puzzle game as this sounds like it is going to be. While I hate pure hack n' slash that some "action rpgs" these days are, I do enjoy the excitement of combat in RPGs like the Fallout series, Knights of the Old Republic I & II and the old Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale games. I guess I am thankful for this critical bit of details now before I pledged too much support for a game that I am no longer sure I'll be interested in playing.
Still, I wish the folks at Obsidian well. They have made several great games that are among my favorites.
However, where the hell did you see that the game would be anti-combat? Really? The way experience is doled out to the player has absolutely nothing to do with how much or little the game is combat oriented. It's simply misguided to equate objective oriented xp with a less combat oriented game. In fact, I think the combat has received the most attention so far and they're creating a game that is clearly intended to combat centered. The story will still be great, I'm sure, but the combat is the focus at this moment. They've already said that you won't be able to complete the game without at least some combat, for instance. This idea of Obsidz downplaying combat is a red herring.
In Baldur's Gate at one point I came upon a village of some critters, Gnolls I think. I had a reason to go spend an hour cutting my way through them, my character progressed as a result.
If Baldur's Gate used this system, it'd be entirely pointless. Why bother spending an hour killing the Gnolls if in the end, I didn't gain anything.
"Objective based" xp only downplays combat because it removes the reward system from engaging in it, making it pointless to enter into any combat that doesn't have an "Objective" assigned to it.
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what the hell, isn`t the point of an rpg to be able to roleplay the character the way you want to?
You can still roleplay your character the way you want to. The only difference is that the game will not be rewarding you for doing things for which no sane DM would ever reward a player.
Actually, a sane DM would reward experience, because the Player took seperate actions which would make him more experienced.
This is just trying to dictate playstyle, instead of making a solid RPG system. This is "I don't want anyone to have more experience than me because they did more stuff", there's no logical reason behind it. If I go write code, I get better at writing code, even if I didn't give the code to some random person.
If my character kills critters, he should get better at killing critters, not by reporting back to someone and saying "Yup, I killed 5 critters!".
Can anyone give me a single reason for this system that does not amount to "I don't want people to play that way"?
Did you read the thread?... I don't understand the point of ignoring what people are saying.
The reason for making it objective based is that it's easier to balance the game. Since the devs are handing out the xp they can see what levels people will be at throughout the game, and they can balance they see fit to make mostly everyone's gaming experience fun. With grind though, while it's not impossible, it's much more difficult to balance the game out. It generally ends up with the player having to kill enough enemies to get an orbutrary amount of xp so they can catch up with the pace of the game, or they exploit the system and become overpowered and make the game dull since there's no challenge. Of course you can figure out some balance to this, but it can get convaluated (see oblivion, fo3, new vegas, skyrim).
We can also assume that since the game is being designed around objectives, there won't be massive amounts of enemies that won't give xp to you. Of course this part is only my speculation.
Now I really want to hear some examples people have of systems that use grinding well.
I've read the thread. I've also read the intent behind it, because as I said earlier, there's no logical reason to choose a nonsensical implementation over one that makes sense. Not trying to flame, but you're illustrating that the intent is exactly as I said, "I don't want people to play that way".
-It does not make it "Easier to balance the game", balancing the game is trivial. The developers can easily add up the experience attained by following the primary path, and the primary path + side quests, and compute the min/max xp range. All they have to do is add each xp reward for each possible action to a spreadsheet as it's added. Then all they have to do is make minor tweaks to the xp rewards in order to get everything to where they want it.
-"make mostly everyone's gaming experience fun" is a strawman arguement. You're determining what makes a game fun for everyone.
-It's not harder to balance the game with people grinding, if they choose to grind, let them. It's their problem. There's no reason to dictate to people "You cannot play that way, it's wrong!".
-Your next statement is another strawman. You don't force people to grind. You balance the game for a point in between "Main path only" and "Full completion run".
-Then you are dictating what's fun for everyone again. You cannot say whether or not it makes it dull for people who choose to grind, in fact, logically it's quite the opposite. People grind because it enables gameplay they find fun, some people enjoy being overpowered.
-Using anything from Bethesda as an basis isn't a good arguement, they've demonstrated time and again they don't know what RPG's are. One of the most glaring examples is their inability to add any meaningful dialogue or noncombat skills. Additonally all of the games you note are Player Based skill, and by definition, not RPG's.
-You are making multiple false assumptions. Just because xp/kill exists doesn't mean that grinding exists, and if grinding exists, that doesn't mean it's mandatory. I can easily design a dungeon for you using any edition of AD&D/D&D that rewards xp/kill, and xp for actions, that does not include grinding. I can even do so with an entire campaign. You are equating xp/kill to grinding, and that's a false assumption. One does not logically lead to the other.
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what the hell, isn`t the point of an rpg to be able to roleplay the character the way you want to?
You can still roleplay your character the way you want to. The only difference is that the game will not be rewarding you for doing things for which no sane DM would ever reward a player.
Actually, a sane DM would reward experience, because the Player took seperate actions which would make him more experienced.
This is just trying to dictate playstyle, instead of making a solid RPG system. This is "I don't want anyone to have more experience than me because they did more stuff", there's no logical reason behind it. If I go write code, I get better at writing code, even if I didn't give the code to some random person.
If my character kills critters, he should get better at killing critters, not by reporting back to someone and saying "Yup, I killed 5 critters!".
Can anyone give me a single reason for this system that does not amount to "I don't want people to play that way"?
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Check the latest update from JES. I will just sit here with my popcorn and watch the furious reactions.
Yup, regenerating health is in. Now we're just going to call it stamina, and health is now "Backup health". Bad design decision IMO, way too much trying to design out how some subset of players exploit the game.
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XP when finishing objective like Bloodlines was PURE AWESOME. <3 And it is a far better cRPG mechanic.
It's completely nonsensical. I can kill 100,000,000 goblins and not get better with my sword. Hand a guy a magic marble and suddenly I'm better with my sword.
It's terrible design.
The correct solution is to give experience for any action where it makes sense to gain experience doing something, this is just designing around the possibility that someone somewhere might choose to grind and someone else doesn't like it. It's a very bad decision.
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This poll is somewhat flawed. The first option should be just YES or NO. After that a second question, if YES then pick one the X options.
Anywho, I like what Tim is putting forward. It is basically a variant of the 4E rules for handling magic and abilities - At-will, Encounter and Daily powers.
I agree with the first sentence.
But I'd question the wisdom of using 4th edition D&D as a template.
The issue continues to be that one group wants their mage doing something at all times, the other wants the mage to be a tactical nuke. There's no resolution to this, there's no middle ground. The mage class will either have to become identical in damage and effect to the fighter in order to retain balance, which then makes him fairly useless when you could simply have a fighter with far more health,, or we need to not try to design around Players who try and exploit the system and approach every encounter with maximum firepower.
This is an incredibly slippery slope, if we start designing around what a subset of Players do to min-max, we're going to end up in a very dark place when we eventually get around to designing out the Munchkins as that'll end up eliminating Magic Items from RPG's.
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Two points to make...
1. The poll is biased. There's no option for "Encounters should be approachable through either method", indicating the intent is to avoid the middle ground and try to turn it into a "Black and White" question.
2. The intent appears to be to force a playstyle upon people instead of letting the Player play in the style he prefers. The ideal resolution is to let the Player decide how he wants to approach situations, this is intended to try and dictate non-combat playstyle.
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When people get so set in their notion of 'fantasy' that the simple idea of a weapon they're not immediately familiar with from prior 'fantasy' becomes profoundly uncomfortable, I think it ceases to be fantasy altogether.
If someone's idea of the 'fantasy' genre is so strictly defined as that, I want nothing of it. I'll instead go to authors and artists whose writing offers invention and imagination. Not authors who don't stray too far from what elves are supposed to be like or what fantasy weapons are supposed to be like or what fantasy creatures are supposed to be like.
That's just the dirty sense of 'genre' at work. When everything becomes generic. When an imagined world doesn't exist any more to stimulate the imagination, but just to retell a tale we've heard before, with characters we've seen before, in a setting we've visited before.
Worse yet is the idea that if the chronology of a fantasy work's history doesn't exactly reflect the chronology of the history of medieval Europe, it's in error. I'm fond of alternate history and historical fiction. But so far as I am aware, this is not a historical fiction game. So for those who object to the characters of Project Eternity's world using firearms because the Dutch weren't using firearms until 50 years later, or what have you, I just have nothing to say at all. It's hilarious, really.
I find the phenomenon of a "shared fantasy" (or, in the case of those who believe in it a little too strongly, a "mass delusion" might be a more accurate term) to be fascinating, personally. It's easy to see how it can come about, with (for example) papa Tolkien ultimately being one of if not the single most influential creators of modern fantasy, and with media of every stripe conforming to the general ideas laid out (some elves have big droopy ears, some don't, but Elves Have Pointy Ears!!!), but I also find it vaguely disturbing at how many people buy into it without even realizing... until someone comes along and tries to change one of the more basic tenets of the faith. We see it with elves, with guns, with Monks... even with how magic is supposed to be, of all things.
Keep in mind though, you have a subset of LARPSers (Or "Roleplayers" as they increasingly call themselves), with an extremely unhealthy attachment to their interpretation of medival times. They think it's like movies, everyone's clean, no one has bugs covering them, everyone has enough food and isn't starvation thin, everyone has teeth, they all speak in olde english unless they're 3ft tall in which case they speak in scottish, etc.
This subset is fantastically intollerant of anything that breaks their fantasy. I've seen tantrums at RPG games and LARPS events where someone literally flips out because another person didn't speak in Olde English and they're "Breaking my immersion!". I saw one guy in Star Wars Galaxies go on such a epic profanity spewing tantrum because he accidently learned the wookie language that he was permabanned on the spot. I remember reading about an Ultima Online server where you weren't allowed to log off if anyone else was on the screen because they might see you disappear.
It's a disportionately noisy subset that generally misrepresents their real issue, which is "Immersing" themselves in their fantasy, generally trying to hide behind some other explanation. The only way to really identify what the issue really is, is to engage them in a discussion of the boundary between Character and Player, at which point you'll discover that their goal is self-insertion and not playing an RPG.
Magic actually is a playstyle issue, not a "Holy Cow" issue. You generally have two groups, one who wants a mage to be contributing at all times and the other who wants the mage to be the tactical nuke brought out only when needed. If you work your way down to people's root problem with the systems, that's really where most of it ends up.
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Do you think the developers could take this kind of design challenge?
I personally thought the approach Dragonlance took in the last set of novels toward undead was great. The story went that the God of Undead was seducing people with the promise of immortality and eternal beauty, but at a very heavy price (They were essentially mindless vampires).
It's a direction I think could be explored to great effect, rather than portraying the God of Undeath as wanting dominion over skeletons, portray him as a seducer that strikes uneven deals.
The Undead have many different avenues that could be explored: Revenge, Anger, Insanity, Betrayl, results of a massacre, Curse (Like Lord Soth), etc. There's enourmous room for this theme to grow.
Are you for or against gaining experience points only for completing objectives?
in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
Your conclusion doesn't match your premise. You failed to identify how much experience the Druid would have yielded in the xp/kill system, and you're just stacking the deck by using arbitrary values designed to fullfill your premise in vacuum.
Plus, also came up with a really unbelievable scenario, knowledge of the woodlands lets you talk to animals?
Again, premise doesn't match the conclusion. First, you fail to acknowledge that in a well designed system, you would be awarded xp relative to the difficulty of intimidating the thugs, if not being outright awarded the same xp value as if you had killed the thugs.
Second, you seem to be operating under the idea that xp/kill being present precludes the ability to award experience for anything else, which is a logical fallacy.
First, it's object oriented, if written in anything other than C, so you don't load a script. You call a check on the event.
Second, you're not seriously trying to suggest that executing an if statement on a modern processor consumes any significant amount of resources are you? Especially since combat is a pretty large series of if statements.
Third, the objects are already in memory and the if statement doesn't introduce any new variables, as the quest-completed flag is already present as well. So it won't use any more RAM than is already being used. You're checking the state of the flag, the state of the guard object, and then setting the guard object's xp int value to a new one.