jethro
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Posts posted by jethro
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Or the devs will build a system that (typically) reaches its "cap" near the end of the game? This isn't AD&D
What has that to do with AD&D? That there is more xp available than necessary is because some people play fewer side quests but still need enough xp to finish the game.
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Any implementation of cooking food during rest? Taking the approach from Dragon's Crown, cooking and allocating food to the respective party members would give them temporary bonus depending on the type of food given. Some party members may prefer one kind of food over the other.
Sounds very much like micro-management.
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Imagine having to do candlekeep chores every time you started a new game.
In a kill-xp game this would translate to always have to kill the rats in the cellar to get some xp. Wouldn't it be nice in further playthroughs to just let the street urchin into the cellar because he likes to roast them on a fire and get the xp anyway ;-). Or to just convince whoever gave you the task that you did it.
From what i hear the xp system is implemented to prevent powergamers from killing everyone once they complete the quest, but you could easily fix this by simply taking away the majority of the xp from the quest giver after the player completed the quest. After all, xp is subjective.
No, the xp system is implemented because this RPG will have multiple solutions to any quest, usually one of them will involve killing anything that moves and others will be done by stealth or diplomacy or trickery. To have all the solutions be equal for the player is virtually impossible if kills give xp but quite easy if you just have objectives and give xp for that.
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Probably there is a class that will be good at using a gun
Also I don't see that 3/3 rule of yours as some sort of balance or optimum for a game. If this game puts much of its tactical intelligence/difficulty into how you position your party then ranged combat gets in the way because it is relatively position-independent.
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I can accept that Obs thought it was outside the budget (with all the other things planned), but I would have traded this for most of the stretch goals we got.
Going down to 4 classes and losing alot of additional content and the megadungeon? That just goes to show that people have different opinions. I'm much happier with the extra classes and game content.
My bad, ambiguous statement. "but I would have traded this for (almost?) anyone of the stretch goals we got."
I didn't look them up to make sure that there wasn't one I would value higher, but I can't think of a single one I wouldn't trade for the better map
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Yes, I know, but my point was that party buffs are great, but most people who choose to play a warrior class (or any class for that matter) in a crpg as their player character, are going to also want to be fairly proficient at opening a can of whup ass when in combat. It would be a bit odd to be the hero of a story (and paladins are likely to draw the hero wannabe types) and walk away from a game thinking, "gosh, I remember the time I buffed the crap out of the party during that epic battle with the lich!", instead of, "gosh, I remember that time the time I destroyed the lich with my special attack as my party members rallied around me."
I'm not saying it's impossible that Obsidian has included such abilities; just that Josh Sawyer's post worries me that balancing and roles might lead to a class like the Paladin being fairly flavorless as a player character for those who would want to play the heroic leader type.
If every class has to whup ass in combat equally to every other class, why have different classes at all? Sure, there are different damage types, but to really have *tactical* combat you need a little more difference between the classes. If you can't identify with someone not having the most damage output, your choices are limited anyway.
You also hopefully know that a leader, heroic or not, is there to lead and direct his comrades, not to hammer on some enemy/enemies and ignore the rest of his troope (except in chinese heroic movies, where the generals do just this).
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2. In case you haven't noticed, games tend to have inaccesible locations for various reasons. Evidence everywhere.
All that AGX-17 is saying is that inaccessible locations can be created in FO style maps too (see Arcanum for examples). You can prevent access to places and portions of the map through impassable mountains or rivers, through locations that only can be found after some event, through simply putting impassable walls/stone heaps/doors in your way.
Yes, this is more effort, with balancing as well as with providing appropriate NPC reactions before some event happens. But it also opens the world up tremendously.
I can accept that Obs thought it was outside the budget (with all the other things planned), but I would have traded this for most of the stretch goals we got.
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It'd be nice if the inns give certain bonuses that the stronghold can't. Especially if you have to pay for the inns - higher cost, better bonus. Perhaps even the campfires give a certain bonus that the stronghold can't.
You have to pay for the stronghold too. And probably pay through the nose. So why would it make sense to give bonuses to inns and campfires?
Since you keep a bonus until you rest again your idea would mean that you always have some bonus on. Which wouldn't be a bonus, just the normal state.
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I agree with Valorian. Which items a bandit drops really only matters if its an item that someone in your party is going to equip. Otherwise it goes in the backpack or get's sold. That means most normal bandits will have equipment that only gets sold. So what the bandit leader has is probably going to be the only thing of importance, and it would mean that Obsidian would have to design a lot of different types of bandit leaders if they are going to give them different items. I think random magic items are best kept to chests and the like.
I think most RPGs don't drop everything an enemy should logically have on him. So archers might have some arrows but no bow, except for maybe one or two. Fighters usually didn't drop their (mediocre) sword, neither did they release to you all the armour they surely had on them. It may not be ultra-realistic, but it keeps money low and avoids packratitis.
@Sabotin:
Good point. But with randomness of enemies there are a lot of solutions possible. There is not just 1) all 10 enemies have completely random weapons and 2) all 10 enemies are swordsmen
There is for example:
3) All 10 enemies either are swordsmen, archers or pikemen
4) Enemies are *predominantely* either swordsmen, archers or pikemen. This might lead to a party of 7 swordsmen but 2 archers and one pikeman.
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Furthermore, and I hope i'm not being presumptious, do you envision returning to the same areas and situation if you should happen to develop a sequel? The reason I ask is that so few gameworlds now seem to favour slow iteration, where our actions are seen to have occured and the theatre of conflict changed with our passing.
I'm guessing you are talking about a future PE2, not the expansion. To see at least some of the same areas (especially towns probably) a few years, decades or even centuries later would be a fantastic idea. This is not just a gimick because it makes the player connect much more to the history of the country.
The only problem is if PE has wildly different endings it could make it difficult presenting a unified future for all the diverging histories. Naturally that depends on the impact the player has on the environment. But if for example he can decide if the king dies or is overthrown that should change history books in PE2.
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ex. it takes 100 points to max out crafting a rapier, it takes 200 points to max out rapier use, the best rapier you can find is a +5, at 200 points in rapier use you get +4 to THAC0 and damage, at 100 points of rapier use you have +2 to THAC0 and damage, if you max out rapier use your total THAC0 and damage bonus is +9, therefore the best rapier you can craft should be a +7.
Dangerous. The problem with rapiers is they can be transfered. So someone else crafts that uber-weapon, but the fighter with THACO+9 gets the rapier. This might unbalance the game even if that other party member is slighty weaker for it.
Because of this and other reasons I really like the ideas of either making crafting not depend on skill points or having crafting not the same things you can buy or find.
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It's easy to know how to do something, and completely different to be able to do it well.. Even if I tell someone how to perform open-heart surgery, that doesn't mean they're going to be able to do it without screwing it up. Better yet, look at sports.
No, not sports. That is muscle memory. That is training your reflexes, automatizing reactions. That was what I was driving at. There are skills like that and there are other skills. I have learned tennis, piano and computer programming and the first two are totally about doing the same things over and over to train your reflexes. The third is knowledge based and totally different. Sure, you train that too to some extent, but mostly it is defined by your talent, memory and lets call it symbolic intelligence. Many people couldn't master it irrespective of how much time they would invest, some understand it without much effort.
I'm just saying that in my opinion blacksmithing was very much a skill defined by secret knowledge and not at all comparable to sports or martial arts.
Also, to clarify, I'm not talking about "mastering smithing" as in "getting to where you don't make swords incorrectly." I'm talking about completing the forging process in the absolute highest-quality fashion in existence.
For me a PC in an RPG is, when he maxed out his blacksmithing, not able to forge like the best blacksmiths in the world. But you don't need to make the best damascus sword if the rest of the world has to forge mostly with lesser steel or even iron. You still will find better legendary items from masters long gone in caves or in the hands of your arch nemesis, swords that are more deadly as well as products of art. But for your blacksmithing skill you have talked to numerous blacksmiths, some of them masters of their art. And for some reason (you being in the guild for example AND saved their home town) they told you their secrets and trained you. Now your technique may not be the best, but through your travels you found many tricks and new materials and could combine some of that, making your weapons rivals in effectiveness to the works of other blacksmiths. Your weapons don't work as adornment for a nobleman, but in a fight they are the equivalent of masterwork weapons.
So, maybe you can even make the equivalent of a Damascus steel blade, and get quite good at it, but there should still be someone out in the world who can make something completely different.
Absolutely true. The PC should never be able to make better or even comparable weapons to the best found in the world. He also shouldn't be able to make anything.
I think it's a bit cheap to simply allow your character to just so happen to be the world's greatest prodigy at whatever it is you choose to do, just so the player never has to deal with any kind of limitation. Sure, it's really cool and fun to be able to craft the most legendary sword every heard of in the history of the fantasy realm, but it puts a bit of a damper on all those thousands of years of history and legendary figures and craftsmen when you read about some blade that severed the heavens, and your character just shrugs and says "Yeah... I can consistently make those now, because I'm really good at forging."
The thing is, if there is a blacksmithing skill and you have to put experience points into it, then yes, your PC must be the one to do the smithing. That's at the core of the system we accepted when playing RPGs.
If blacksmithing is instead not a skill but just you buying and collecting knowledge fragments from all over the world which you bring to the blacksmith you hired for a lot of gold? Well, then that is excellent because I can think of better skills than blacksmithing an adventurer would be interested in.
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Well, to put it simply, you're pretty much using all those other skills the majority of the time (you're battling, healing, speaking, deciphering ruins, etc.). Then, you spend 5 minutes at a forge here and there, and somehow you're mastering smithing. "I made like 5 iron swords! NOW I KNOW HOW TO EXPERTLY FOLD STEEL!". So, the time abstraction isn't NEARLY as extreme with swordsmanship and healing and language knowledge as it is with crafting, typically. As far as starting as a sort of novice and going all the way to master.
What really made someone master blacksmith? I have as much idea as anyone here but I doubt that it was something that needed thousands of hours of training. I guess that blacksmithing consisted of mostly secret methods that were handed down by father to son or by guilds to their members (guilds did mainly exist just to control the practice of a craft). Now if some boy got apprenticeship with a blacksmith it didn't mean that he now was practicing the skill at the forge for hours and hours. No, he was the cheap labor who had to keep the forge heated, bring water and coals... After a few years he got better and more important tasks, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they were complicated or an art form. He would also naturally learn by watching the master, but again it doesn't mean it was complicated stuff, it was just trade secrets that a blacksmith just wouldn't tell you even if you asked nicely.
Is there any indication that that could be true? Well, at a certain time weapons made out of damascus steel had a nearly legendary reputation. Naturally even damascus swords came in different qualities, but obviously it was the manufacturing process that made those weapons legendary, not the individual blacksmith. Another example: The norici were a celtic tribe that delivered their steel to the roman empire and were an important factor to the military successes of the empire. It surely wasn't a tribe of exceptional artists, it was mainly their secret knowledge that kept them in bussiness. Roman blacksmiths surely put in 10k hours as well to be metallurgy master, but still they couldn't compete with that tribe.
I don't dispute that there also were some things you would learn by doing, like knowing the correct timing which is difficult to describe in a book. Or that there is an art in creating weapons that also look good. But just assuming you find someone or some book that gives you all the knowledge you need, I would not be surprised if you could master blacksmithing with a lot less effort at honing your motor skills. And if the correct timing is in question you could always make ten swords with different timing and keep the best. It also might not look like the finest sword but its damage will rival one if you just have the right steel.
"5 minutes at a forge here and there" completely ignores the fact that there is a lot of time between adventuring that isn't used for adventuring. How else could the thief master thiefing, lock picking and trap disarm? This downtime is never simulated in RPGs but it's there. Speaking with nobles for example needs you to know and train etiquette, making small talk is not a skill you can train with the dwarfen fighter at the camp fire. And to learn healing might be possible in a war with enough "raw material" that dies if you do something wrong, but if you don't want your team members to change every week you better learn the trade while making stop-overs in towns with healers available.
Then you get to crafting. "Want to make a weapon? You can only make an iron dagger. You need 3 iron ingots, and some wood. Yay, now you got better at crafting, and now you can make a BRONZE dagger! Ooooooh! You need 3 pieces of bronze, and some wood. Yay! You're better at crafting! Now you can make an ornate bronze dagger. Yeah, you don't even get to decide HOW it's ornate. It's just one thing. All people in the world who want to make an ornate dagger put this SAME design into it, with this exact same recipe and exact same components. They even work the metal the exact same way, and use the exact same forge tools."
Like I said... it's no wonder crafting has such a bad rep.
Yes, this is the crafting horror story. The Thaumcraft method might be a way out by bringing some decisions into the collecting of raw materials. But I would guess those decisions are still not that interesting when crafting is just used to make the few weapons that you didn't find somewhere else, only if it is used to generate consumables like arrows or potions it could be a noticable improvement (because you have much more to craft resource management becomes important).
I still hope for some more mystery and experimentation to occur when crafting stuff.
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Here's a scenario. You're "adventuring" and you come across 2 piles. The 1st one has a bunch of plain old non-magical equipment, while the 2nd one has a bunch of unique-looking magical equipment. 99 out of 100 gamers will walk right past pile 1 to get to pile 2.
Getting what you want is not always good. After equiping all the armor and weapons in pile 2 you encounter 10 more piles, all with stuff weaker than pile2. Instead of being happy at finding stuff you just feel bored.
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Skill that I though that master smith needs are forging, etching, drilling, metal lore (knowing how different metal react, melt, bend, oxidize, harden, etc.), hardening, leather works (cutting, stitching, etc.), designing, measuring and balancing products for use (because hammer, sword, etc. is quite useless if it is balanced wrongly). And there is probably much more skills that master smith needs to learn. Many of this skills have common elements, which is why I estimated that it would probably take 20k-40k hours to master them all, but that is only uneducated guess.
Common sense should tell you that you don't need 10k hours to master cutting leather. And just by dividing blacksmithing into subskills you multiplied the hours needed to master it. If I put blacksmithing and some other skills together and create the artisanry or handicraft skill (which would take 10k to master), obviously blacksmith is only part of it and we are talking about 2k hours to master blacksmith. It's the same fallacy just the other way round
But lets get back at cutting leather. Lets say those 10k are really true for everything. If you put in those 10k to be master leather cutter, you probably won't make better leather straps than someone who practiced only 5k hours. You might be a few milliseconds or seconds faster. That still counts for something if all you do is leather cutting all day long. But if you want to create a sword, those seconds you saved while cutting the leather straps will not make this sword any better at cutting people.
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Why should all large quests follow the same mould? WW2 had a "happy" ending too. The worst Obs can do is to limit the variation in quest structure and tone.
WW2? I assume you mean Witcher 2 and there is no happy ending in that game. Just degrees of ****ing up the world, with any happiness being derived from the player's own interpretation.
No, I really meant World War 2. Even in reality there exist happy ends. Sure, it also was the beginning of the cold war and not "all is well and they lived happily ever after". Nobody wants cheesy unbelievable fairy tales. But the player has to get the feeling he achieved something. For himself (as in Torment) and/or for some part of the world (many other RPGs).
I played Witcher1 and my choice between the two warring factions was to not choose a faction because I didn't like both of them. If the choices are between pest and cholera the danger is that the choice becomes ulitmately meaningless to the player and he looses the incentive to choose at all. Hard choices are necessary but only as one ingredient of many.
That's life. You can only do so much to make people happy. Hard choices should be the only kind of choices available for large quests that change the world. Inevitably, someone will suffer as a result of your actions. Obsidian captured it quite well with Fallout: New Vegas. You can orchestrate events to create a least horrible scenario, but there is no way to save everyone or make them happy.
I'm not speaking about extremes (as in save everyone). If for example a war is on the horizon and you set out to prevent it and achieve only to shorten the war by a few years because you helped one of two equally despicable sides to win fast and eradicate the other side together with the innocent population, THAT is not what I would consider a satisfying ending. If instead all you wanted to do was rescue your small sister it could still be a satisfying end even if meanwhile and after a lot of bad stuff happened. But at least in a game you should have the sense of having achieved something that is not just the choice between two evils.
well there are many kinds of happy endings but they rarely happen in real life . world war 2 take this war many many humans died doing that war , a lot of down hill but the end of the war was good but what happent in that war was not that great so a happy ending i dont know if you can say something can have a happy ending after million on millions died.
You say "but the end of the war was good". See, that is a happy ending. It says nothing about the beginning or the middle where lots of bad stuff can happen.
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the idea is that you could use a sling with a cannonball without needing the strength to do so. and as far as speed = momentum/mass goes it is you are right, if the mass gained is considered to be at rest then the cannonball would decelerate rapidly, however if the mass gained matches the velocity of the original object then it wouldn't decelerate rapidly.
"mass gained matches the velocity of the original object"? You can't compare mass with velocity. But granted, even if the velocity drops you might get to apply the advantage of the sling (which produces a higher momentum than a simple throw with your arm because of higher velocity).
Permanent magic effects are probably the best source of paradoxes you can find in magic systems. Because you get the magic effect for free.
now consider that heavy objects are pulled from bags of holding all the time, yet they never fly out of people's hands while trying to accelerate to the earth's rotation, and they also don't unbalance people currently balancing more so than if they had already been holding the object.
True, this seems to indicate that momentum is not conserved. Or ... Magic ;-).
let's get another example of siege weapons and magic of extra strong effects:
a ballista and a shrinking spell
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loading the pocket ballista takes a move action, then uttering the command word a free action and firing it a standard action, and thus you achieve damage well beyond what normal weapons can do.
You forgot that shrinking the ballista is part of a load/fire cycle. Now your ballista does some more damage per minute but wastes a lot of mage spells that could be used to deal damage directly.
this is basic stuff, i'm sure i could come with far more complicated things, but the point is if you have a free form system you need it to have some grounding in reality otherwise people might make leaps you didn't intend, logical or not. disassembling a magical sword to get the magical blade then using it to make another magical sword with the same blade (and thus the same type of sword) would make more sense, but probably not result in what the OP wanted with the free form system (a glorified KoTOR system).
Because magic breaks laws of physics you have hundreds of paradoxes for free. A grounding in reality doesn't help, you left it already. The only solution is constraining what you can do with magic. A game master in PnP sessions does this automatically, he either accepts an idea or he just says no. If you don't constrain, then magic becomes unbalanced as can be seen in Oblivion (or Skyrim?) where combination of spell effects simply leads to overpowered spells. But as long as people have fun with being overpowered it works for bethesda
). But cRPGs are never really completely free form, most paradoxes are simply avoided by the limits of the program.-
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Wait, where did I say "that among backers IWD fans are as numerous as Torments". Did you mean to say BG? I never believed there are more IWD fans here. As for the polls, 77k in KS versus 200-300 voters in the polls is not worth considering in my opinion.
IWD, in your own words had the best gameplay. Torment stands for the importance of story and alternate solutions. BG2 is somewhere in the middle. If we want to assess the importance of features it makes sense to compare the popularity of those games among the backers. Or ask for the features themselves, see the poll about gameplay versus story: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61810-gameplay-or-story/?mode=show
If you just disregard any statistics I can come up with without bringing your own, well, end of discussion. Political voter polls are done with a far smaller percentage of the populace, to not even acknowledge a trend is childish.
Also when I say that Torment fans are the loudest, I mean that in the way, that in any discussion they will always make it know that P:E is the best game ever made.
If most people are not of your opinion, they always look like the loudest gang.
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-How many people voted in that poll, and how many people were in the kickstarter, as I said Torment fans are, in my experience, the loudest.
A poll can be representative even if you ask only a part of the people. Even the loudest people have only one vote in a poll. Now just some polls to show what people on this forum think (and I give you my word these were the only ones I found, I didn't dump any that showed contrary evidence):
First a poll to show that people on this forum have played all the ID games somewhat equally:
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60755-which-infinity-engine-games-did-you-play/?mode=show
Now the polls about preference:
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61810-gameplay-or-story/?mode=show
Now a poll about what brought the backers to PE. It is a bit representative of what money Obsidian would have lost if they didn't court the corresponding people:
Now polls can mislead, if the question is leading, if only an unrepresentative cross-section of relevant people can vote or is incentiviced to vote or too few are asked. None of these seem to apply, at least not that totally wrong results would come of it. If you still believe that among backers IWD fans are as numerous as Torments (the only relevant demographic in this discussion), I don't know what to say, except bring some evidence, any, even one link please.
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@jethro
The Firkraag story with the finger of death is probably a stroke of luck(or he is lying), as for the other stories here they only happened at a high character level (near the end of the game) or they just used a guide. Now why do I say that, lower magic resist is a level 6 spell that costs 10000 gp and can be bought at only one place (early game) and drops only once later in the game. On my first playthrough, many winters ago, I fought him the first time I met him (I thought that the quest was set up so that you either fight him or **** out and move on(can't come back)) now my whole party was low level and the best tactic I came up with was to summon the maximum amount of beast as cannon fodder and rotate my characters to beat him to death. That was hard as balls and took me a "few" reloads to make it work. I needed to figure out how to position my casters, where to put my archer and how long can my paladin, fighter, and cleric tank him and not to mention the per-buffing of the party. So yeah you could make it easy, I know I did on my later playthroughs, but for me it's that first fight that I remember when I think about Firkraag.
Yes, but do you remember it because you got lots of xp or because it was a legendary fight? And I don't contest that finger of death may be great luck. There is still the question what xp to give the player if he had that luck?
But maybe the best example that I can think of that demonstrates my point, is the hardest enemy in the game (except for the undead lich) the imprisoned one. You had 2 options, you could kill him which was hard to do, or you could read helms scroll and just imprison him again. Killing him gave 100k xp per character, reading the scroll gave you 80k xp per character plus 25k global xp. Would you argue that reading a scroll is the hard thing to do?
No. Would you argue that your victory tasted bitter at that time because you thought of all the other players that got the same xp for just using the scroll? Which you normally shouldn't even have known about?
I don't know, a lot of people here think that Obsidian is going to make other options for playing through a quest smart and complex, but I fell that they are going to be simple fetch quests that will put you out of your way for a short while and some dialog option that you need to pick, which for anyone who reads the text is easy to figure out and of course let's not forget sneaking by. The sad thing is that, this kind of a game is already being made (Torment), which to me (and lots of other people) was the worst of all the IE games (had a great story line, but the gameplay was atrocious). Why force this game in to the mold of Torment, instead of focusing on what made the rest of the IE games great.
Look at the statistics that were posted, IWD (which had the focus on combat) was far behind BG and Torment when the backers were asked about their preferences. And BG also had multiple ways to solve quests. Obsidian tries hard to be please everyone with PE, and everyone will have to accept that it will not be exactly what he wants. If Saywers RPG system works and PE is as good as we hope, you should have epic tactical hard fights but you will have to accept that others could solve some fights differently, probably even with just one dialog option, and get the same xp for it. That's the compromise. Torment-fans will have to accept that the story won't be weird with philosophical undertones in texts of epic lengths in a strange world but a rather conventional fantasy story. Without that compromise PE would have to be built with a lot less money.
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What you are describing would need to be extremely convoluted to require the same amount of effort and I really doubt it that they have the time to give every quest that treatment. Also if those things are more difficult to accomplish then fighting, you should get more xp for the harder action. I am not a proponent of fighting, but that more difficult actions should garner more xp.
Ok, we are in the same dimension ;-). But I think this "difficulty-xp" (lets call it that for the moment) has a few problems:
1) A technical problem: If we assume different ways to solve the problem AND fighting isn't always the most difficult way then we still need objective xp (to award more xp to that solution instead of the kill) but the program has to evaluate exactly how you achieved the goal (this is not always easy) and each solution has to be judged concerning the difficulty level (just lots more work for the devs).
2) What constitutes difficulty is a very subjective thing. An example: One solution might need you to select the correct one out of 4 dialog options. The correct one might be to appeal to his family honor instead of to his own honor, his love for his country, or to his friendship. The only hint is a painting showing his family over the chimney where other people of his wealth would put an expensive art painting. Now how difficult is noticing this compared to killing Firkraag? After all, it still is only one simply dialog choice and you could hit it by chance in 25% of all cases. But it is something I would expect Sherlock Holmes to notice but not the average gamer. Maybe 1 out of 100 might connect the dots. To kill Firkraag, if I believe Eleronds finger of death story, the change is more like 66% on each try.
What is if your finger of death succeeds and you kill Firkraag with this one spell, lucky as it may be? Should the game reduce your xp because you had it easy in that fight? If not, why should the other player who needed much more than one spell to convice that dwarf now get less xp than you?
Maybe Firkraag wasn't so difficult but you just didn't find the right way to fight him. So you needed 15 minutes real time and all your resources and you kill him with your last fighter at 5 health. Should the program reward you for that? Surely not, you could have cast X and done Y and the fight would have been much easier. So how should the designer judge this fight of yours?
4) Are we judging the player or the player character(s)? Normally I would say the PCs, because they get the xp for what they are doing, not the player. And for example persuading a dwarf is (while the player just selects the persuasion option) in-game a long discussion where the PC doing the talking is carefully flirting around the subject and hinting at possibilities. That lockpick check on the safe the player starts with one keystroke is in-game 5 minutes of hard work for which the character had to train hundreds of hours. Lets not even talk about a stealth solution. So if we judge the character you would be surprised how often killing would be the easy way out for your party of trained killers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be more of the opinion that we have to judge the player instead. But most fights are trivial. Attack the healers first, then mages, keep your clothies out of range of the enemy, 90% of fights could be done by 15 year old kids. Finding that picture from the example above and making the correct deduction? Not a chance in a million for a 15 year old. Now, do you like to be judged in your gaming? Maybe the designers thought fighting that dragon is easy and the deduction 10 times as difficult. You feel so proud killing that dragon, but sorry, player, the designers tell you, you took the easy way out. Think about it, should the game designer judge you? Especially if he has different ideas about what constitutes difficulty? Is this an exam or a game?
5) The meta-gaming conundrum: Lets assume you as the player don't want to loose out on a lot of xp. How do you know which solution gets you enough xp? You find the dwarf, he offers to collapse the cave. Did you do enough to satisfy the game designers? "Oh no, it seemed easy. Too easy. Maybe I should sneak in and out of the cave a few times before letting the dwarf do his deed. That enough? Oh, crap, lets play it safe and kill that dragon". Maybe the designers thought the dwarf quest was the difficult one. You'll never find out.
6) Lets assume fighting is really the most difficult way. Everything else is just multiple-choice easy crap. And since we have difficulty-xp only the fighter gets maximum xp, someone going for diplomatic solutions would get a fraction of that (a situation not too different from many existing RPGs). Now how to balance this? If we balance for the fighter path the diplomatic path becomes impossible because soon the diplomat is way behind the fighter in xp. If we balance for the diplomat or something inbetween, the fighter will soon feel underwhelmed because his fights get too easy. This is it. If you want difficulty-xp and you think fighting is the most difficult thing, forget multiple solutions. The game designer can't balance that. So either forget difficulty-xp or forget multiple solutions. Or do level-scaling of monsters AND other solution difficulties. But really, nobody wants level-scaling.
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But then no one would see the point in reloading the game an x amount of time in order to figure out how to finish a very hard battle, if they can just click through some dialog and end up with the same result, that is just poor game design.It's not bribing if it's equal to all options. Killing Firkraag via combat, poisoning his food, collapsing the cave etc. all should give the same XP as they are all ways to deal with the objective " stoping Firkraag". ...
Assume you are playing PE. You want combat so you will set difficulty high and put your xp into combat skills. Now, even if you knew there was a way to kill Firkraag by dwarf you never would be able to persuade him with your abominable social skills and you never could execute the thiefing quest the dwarf expects you to do as pre-payment. So YOU only have one option, kill Firkraag yourself. Your only solution is to try and die until you succeed, as you wished.
Again I will go back to Firkraag, you can let him live and that is the easier option, or you can (I'm gonna go full role playing mode here) kill him and stop him from committing any other evil acts. Another example is Dark Souls,
Note that Firkraag exists in a game that has kill xp. In an objective xp game avoiding Firkraag completely should not give you XP as well. Only if you deal with Firkraag (ANY way you can) would you get xp for the objective "Deal with Firkraag".
Dark Souls is a hack&slash, there is nothing except combat, there are no alternative ways of dealing with enemies, it's a simple combat simulator. Many people would say DS isn't even an RPG because there is no role-play at all (since I only read about DS and not play it I hope I don't misjudge it here), the only RPGish thing seems to be the xp system. There is no need to do an objective based xp system in DS because you don't have different methods to reach an objective. Even if there was an objective based system, you wouldn't even notice because the next objective is always to kill the next enemy!
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... say one that is large enough to shoot cannon balls, which slingers did in fact do such things, so it isn't impractical...
So you think that a cannon ball would keep his speed after leaving the sling of holding and so do much more damage than a simple sling ?
Wouldn't it be more likely that as soon as the ball regains it's normal weight, its speed would drop dramatically because of momentum conservation. Because speed = momentum / mass. Higher mass, lower speed. Or better said the same speed as if the sling of holding were a simple sling.
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Killing Firkraag was an objective in a quest and that was not my point, my point was that in P:E you could hire a dwarf to collapse the cave and kill him and that would give you the same xp as going in your self and pulling up you sleeves.
What a plan! Every adventurer, every RPG player would be proud to have executed such a clever plan (I assume it wasn't easy to find out the cave could be collapsed and finding a suitable dwarf. A well made RPG will not make one solution trivial when the other is difficult). Do I really understand you correctly that for you it isn't anything more than the whimpy solution? <...incredulous silence...> If yes, we live in different dimensions
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). But cRPGs are never really completely free form, most paradoxes are simply avoided by the limits of the program.
Update #66: Double Whammy
in Pillars of Eternity: Announcements & News
Posted · Edited by jethro
Let us remember that buffing as a game mechanic isn't all that desireable. In small doses and as a limited option to use before fights you anticipate as difficult it is okay. But in many RPGs it either became a ritual before every fight or was ignored completely because it was so repetitious.
Granted there are ways to make the concept slightly interesting by providing buffs that help only against specific enemies and you have to think ahead what monster is likely around the corner. But for example a stamina-buff is never specific and just a bad method to keep the player occupied without giving him something fun to do. In general it is hard to make buffing fun. Do we agree on this?
Now we are talking about ideas to make food interesting by (amongst other things) giving us small buffs. In other words, bending a basically uninteresting daily task into something interesting by adding buffs which are tending to make a game less fun on average. That is not the right direction in my opinion.
Other tangents to make cooking interesting may be ingredients-gathering or finding/creating recipes. If you are getting a deja-vu, you are right. We usually already have potion-making/herbalism and crafting in games to fill these niches aka to employ these mechanisms. So cooking would be somewhat redundant and only interesting if potion-making or crafting were very limited or had somehow fundamentally different mechanisms.
If you see some other way to make cooking interesting, fine. But the buff-road is the road to hell paved with good intentions. (Did that sound dramatic enough? Good ;-)