jethro

If you reduce combat to an integer there is only one dimension left to go. If someone is only interested in max diff-dps instead of what tactics he can employ he will always find a build that has max effectiveness overall (while maybe ignoring the fact that there are more profound weaknesses against specific enemies, but lets not diverge on that tangent). I don't see this changed in any meaningful way in D&D. Sure, the attributes also influence non-combat skills, but all this means is that the wizard gets the skills that need high int because he already has high int. For the power gamer there is no meaningful choice involved and even the role-player is bound by the D&D rules to either let combat rule the attributes or play one difficulty level lower. When did you last play a low-int or even medium-int mage? My answer to this question would be "never". So there is this D&D system where one attribute build is essentially the one true build irrespective without any mitigation worth mentioning and I don't think it should be praised for that

Provided you are talking about PE we really don't know how radical their approach really is. A "viable build" could be still very far from optimal. It also could mean the character is only effective with a very specific weapon- or armour configuration or needs a very unusual combat tactic that isn't easy to find out. It could mean that you have to take specific traits or skills to make that build viable. I think the last example really is the best that could happen. It would mean character creation on the first play through is never a dead-end later because you can always learn the necessary skills while playing, but on replay or playing the next game chargen is very important to find different builds.

But they needed the KS money to prolong production time, otherwise they would have had to publish a much smaller game. At this point their assets/finanical maneuvering space must have been quite low. You are still mostly right, for a different reason: There is a good chance that the KS money was to bridge the gap until money from Dragon Commander comes in. The only danger is that whatever of Dragon Commanders winnings is spent on Original Sin is lost for follow-up projects. Those two titles have to pull in enough money to fund development of the next one or two games.

"way over the amount they'd planned". U'oh, that sounds like feature creep. Larian wasn't way over the initial KS amount, they can't just add a lot of stuff and expect to still have enough money to polish and test it. I'm not sure how expensive it is to add more quests, but I've seen a lot of bug-fix lists for RPGs to know that there seems to be a lot of potential to introduce bugs into quests. And bug-fixing costs.

I don't know how they will manage it, but I could imagine that they give you details of a quest or part of a quest and a character that is part of it. You get to design his name and appearance, background/class/race (whatever isn't fixed by the quest plot) and his dialog. Maybe you even can select one out of a list of characters. I don't think you will get to design a plot. That would really need too much background knowledge.

The year is 1875. A farmer gets told there are new horse-less vehicles coming out. The farmer is enraged and yells: City-dwelling idiots, I 'm too old to pull the cart myself! <rant>Some of you invent a system out of a single fact and draw conclusions from that. That is as reliable a method as any the spanish inquisiton had in their arsenal. And they found a lot of witches. Really, a call for more information would be the sensible thing I would expect from an intelligent person of the 21th century. Instead we show traits of lynch-mobs, alternate between doomsayers and fanboys with no middle ground. Is this how the new kickstarter model for game creation with user involvment will work? It will soon die out.</rant>

Well, one obvious choice it adds is that you can change your weapon if your feat/skill-selection needs a different weapon or you want to try a different tactic in a fight. Maybe less choice at chargen but more choice in the game. I'm someone who doesn't play a single game 20 times. That my characters were so specialized to one weapon class that it didn't make any sense to switch/experiment isn't an advantage then. Generally we still don't know enough of the system to make any conclusions about complexity. Possibly attributes influence skill and trait effects and the complexity comes from this. You probably would do much damage if you only put your points in that stat but you wouldn't hit anyone. Also you would be prone to fall for feints of your enemies and would be easy to charm/put to sleep. And your own special abilities like crowd control or damaging multiple enemies would be weak or fail a lot (20 damage to two enemies is more than 25 damage to one).

In other news... I like very much what I heard about the crafting system of being complementary with the loot system. Off-topic: Yeah, my 100th post. But I need to do something about my warning points, still at 0 ;-)

Lets look at one of your examples: You supply some weapons to people who will later help you because they are better armed and trust you. What makes this example cool and interesting is not that it is a fetch quest (you could substitute "give them weapons" with "help them in an argument with their landlord so that he doesn't call the city guards") or that you don't get xp or that it isn't mentioned in the quest log afterwards. No, the interesting thing is that you have to find and solve the quest for yourself without someone telling you the quest objective. It is sort of removing the exclamation mark of MMOs one step further. Someone laments he can't fight the baron without weapons or you just notice that they have no weapons, and it is you that decides that you have to do something about it. Wasteland 1 for example had no quests or quest log. You just did things to help people or get stuff without a clear marker what to do. This is IMHO what open-world RPGs are about and where they in reality fail because some hand-holding is needed for the majority of players to have fun and because they need so many quests that they fall back to simple fetch- and kill-quests. It is also very difficult to make a game where any logical action of your heroes has the proper consequences. It would be frustrating if you gave those peoples money to buy the weapons instead of the weapons themselves and they wouldn't react.

Torment had the advantage that inxile could use the fullfillment page for wasteland2 and adapt that. Some other projects have already fullfillment sites up, but you still don't have a game nor the physical stuff promised to you. Are you somehow feeling better because you gave them your t-shirt size ? (Most projects will try to save postage by sending all physical media in one go, so you will get your stuff when the game is finished irrespective of the opening of a fullfillment site) About the parameters of your item: I would guess they don't know themselves, because they are still designing parts of the RPG system. Case in point: The announcement and removal of item degradation. 9 months in, still at least 9 months to go.

From the privacy policy of KS: "Project Creators receive the email addresses of their backers if the project is successfully funded." From the help page: "If funding succeeds, funds go directly from backers' credit cards to the project creator's Amazon Payments account. There is a 14-day window for collecting and processing pledges. After that, you can transfer funds from your Amazon account to your bank account." "Interacting with backers. ... you can: Request information from your backers (mailing address, T-shirt size, etc.) to fulfill rewards." This all seems to indicate to me that there is probably no transfer of mailing adresses to the project. And giving out the amazon adresses would often be useless anyway: 1) Mailing adresses have a high probability of changing in the course of a year (12.7% in germany, higher in the USA), so most projects would have to collect addresses at fullfilment time anyway. 2) It isn't at all safe to assume that the one who paid is equal to the one who backed. Backer may have no amazon account/credit card and used a friends, the backing might be a present.

You gave them when you pledged. Not that I know of. kickstarter doesn't have my address (except as part of paying british projects but there it is for verification of the payment and is not recorded (if you believe ks is operating correctly)). Amazon knows my details but I'm pretty sure that amazon won't give those details back to KS projects (they would be violating EU privacy rights).

Lephys, let me rephrase your point: You want a non-generic hand-grafted intelligent quest (that we expect in good RPGs), a part of which is a simple fetch quest aka could be desynthesized into a fetch quest. But since all quests are compositions and/or derivations of such simple quests (fetch-quest, kill-quest, escort-quest) you probably will see many non-generic hand-grafted intelligent fetch-quests in PE that often hide their origin quite well. ;-)

What I don't understand: Without fullfillment site how can they already know your details that you want to change? Or did they already ask us and I forgot?

It's not that easy. Without a publisher they don't have a demanding nanny breathing down their neck, but they still have a finite budget. There is some leeway through company money, but that is probably much less than a publisher could supply. So they still have to meet a deadline

StickofTruth has no market? What parallel dimension did you come from? I expect it to be fairly successfull if they get the tone and the quality right (and that seems to be the case according to german games magazines who could play a beta-version already, AFAIK). Sadly the game was bought by Ubisoft and that probably means they will bind it to uplay which means I won't play it.

Good, concrete examples. How then, in your example, do you want the player to make an informed choice? It's possible you'll be ambushed on the way, possibly not. It becomes, again, very hard to balance. Obviously, some people pulled down their loot to the Severed Hand merchant; but what if the Severed Hand was randomly repopulated with orcs? It becomes a real hassle, a real gamble, and will mostly not be worth your very real lifetime. Again, it would become a no-brainer for me to frequent only the nearest merchants as long as they pay anything, and if I get low on funds, I'd simply curse the developers for their hair-raising design. Lets assume that the game is balanced on the average price of items (which is what I would expect as the obvious choice to balance to, which is also what a player would get if he ignored regional pricing in the game). This would be the same price items would have without regional pricing (trivially true, because that's the price the game is balanced to). That means you would be in exactly the same situation without regional pricing and could only curse yourself if you get low on funds.

Typical scene: I kill a group of monsters in the dungeon and there is loot that just doesn't fit anymore. Among the loot are 2 big but crappy wooden shields and lots of small potions and a valuable sword, for example. Even one shield would block more space in the inventory than the rest together. In such a case I often would leave the shields and go for the next fight. Especially if that would be the end fight. Especially if that was a low-level dungeon I had to go back to. Especially if going back to town would cost me much time. Because even if I have to go back to town eventually I want to make this round trip as few times as possible. Sure, but the thing is these aren't your only options

It is a trade-off decision between your time/effort and the gold you get out of it. If you backtrack from a dungeon to town to save 100 gold when the weapon in your hand alone is worth 40.000 gold, then yes, it makes no sense. Not for you as player, definitely not for the character you play in the game. Deciding whether to go back to town because of your limited inventory is just such a decision. And you have to do that decision in every RPG game I can remember at the moment. I also played RPGs where you could collect respawning ingredients for potions (DSA for example). By selling the ingredients or potions you can make as much money as you like. Again it is up to you to decide whether collecting 50.000 flowers to get that sword of nice hacking is really worth your time. I implied that I would not known the best place but had to make informed guesses. Which is possible if the discounts are fixed and dependent on regional circumstances like mining town, war-riddled, elven village.... Would a trained chimpanzee really know that arrows might be cheaper in an elven village? Sure, it isn't rocket science either, but neither are the solutions to many quests or the question which stat my fighter should increase. Just to make sure: Checking on the internet is the best way to spoil your fun on any aspect of an RPG if you are implying that(?). And that is the only way I can think of that you really find the *BEST* place, not just a better place. And are you as neutral about this as your wording would imply? I thought MMO is a swear-word here and ample warning to not even think about such a UI. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

A mechanic that is liked by a minority and doesn't concern the majority is still a good mechanic. We just differ whether it can be done without concerning the majority. That IE games had this "feature" and it didn't concern the majority is at least a good sign. I think they would sell, come back and grab more loot, sell etc. I have done this too on occasion. I still don't call it sensible behaviour and I payed the price. Game designers still put limits on inventory space and weight and don't pamper to my occational inability to make a sensible shortcut. And I learned from that. If the loot I had to drop was really valuable then it even could have been the right decision. But isn't that just the decision a player interested in this has to make: Is it worth the time and effort to not sell the sword or fill up on healing potions now or is it better to to do that in the next town? It is not only a time trade-off but also an inventory trade-off. And dependent on where he wants to go next and maybe what a detour would cost him. And only if he thinks a detour is worthwile does it cost the player noticeable time. The interesting part *for me* is the thought process to determine a better place for specific items (not neccessarily the *best* place). And the satisfaction when my assumption turns out to be correct, even if my profit is minimal. A different player may get his satisfaction from making a map of markets and really snooping out the *best* place for any sort of item. As I said a few pages before, it is a mechanic with a very limited influence on play, but easily implemented. Low gain, but also low effort. One could call it a flavor mechanic, similar to NPCs with believable work schedules Doing some fast-sell UI where you could sell or buy at the best price regardless of where you are would be something an MMO would (and did) do.

Oh no, please don't trust my judgement. I take that back, sorry. Rereading your old post I see that all you said was that managing your party stats is more widely accepted than managing where you buy from as a mechanism. This is not really surprising because the first is 100% accepted among role-players (no contest here) and the other is already disliked by you. But really that is a very weak statement. The same can be said about the stronghold, lots of skills, even classes, buff potions, healing potions, sub specializations, back stories, party size, cooking, crafting... Are cooking and crafting non-central mechanics? Yes. Are they not universally accepted? Yes. Do they get thrown out because of that? No. Uh, I wouldn't say so. In fact, in that case, you're simply shuffling the problem from one side to the other. If a game forces me to buy 100 crossbow bolts every 2 ingame hours, always going to the merchant that sells crossbow bolts for the lowest price could become a top priority. Hey, it was your idea. Note that non-unique items could also be weapons and armour. If the game has a slow progression curve so that half the game is spent in non--unique armour then people who want to play economy wizard can still save a few coppers. Generally, you can't change the mechanic to something that is applicable only once or twice in the whole game and expect this to be well balanced somewhere between inconsequential and over-important. Yes, but also most players are still applying sense to their optimizations. Sensible players will drop cheap loot in a dungeon if their inventory is full. Insensible player will go back to a merchant so that they have 100% of the money instead of only 90%. Sensible players won't go out of their way to go to a better merchant just for 10% more money for the same reason. But (to counter the obvious argument of why then include the mechanic) they might not sell a weapon in the mining city because they know their next stop is a war-ridden town. But that is up to them. Yes and in that example was a self-imposed restriction. I didn't contest that it was only an example. But it obviously is an example you find acceptable, *with* a self-imposed restriction.

From my standpoint it looks like you are trolling and misrepresenting our points more than once. Essentially it is the old problem of internet discussions simply leading nowhere. The "what is broadly accepted" speech is coming from you as speaker of the silent majority? <sarkasm> In this thread 3 people out of 4 are then vocal minority?</sarkasm> Not that that has statistical significance, but it looks to me like you are mighty quick to invent facts just for arguments sake. And again we have the hyperbole of "paying a king's ransom for rusty swords". This makes discussing with you a chore. About the point itself: I would put managing your purse and therefore selecting where to buy from squarly under "managing your party equipment" which seems to be an accepted optimization as nobody seems to push for removing merchants from RPGs (there is only a controversy about having unique items in stores for different reasons, not because of them making management of your equipment and purse possible) I didn't talk about your idea with applying prices only to purchases because it is a valid idea. Its biggest disadvantage is that it needs a game where you often buy non-unique items. In the older IE games this would have been mainly consumables and not much else. But at least for immersion purposes it is nearly equal. Lephy's point is simply this: The huge majority of quests all add to your income. Not doing any one of these will be a net loss of income. Are you then compelled to take them all and solve them in the way that nets you the maximum loot? The lure i.e. the carrot in front of you is there at least. You made the differentiation of a mechanic being central or not central to a game (discounting merchant prices as not central), but the lure is there in both mechanics. You seem to withstand the lure in gaming the quests but tell us you can't withstand it in (simply not that game-changing) merchant prices? In that example where you are playing on insane you obviously are compelled (by the same reason you give for exploiting merchant prices) to do any quests and trick the game in always giving you the best loot (and if it means to kill anyone with your lawful good party after doing their quest, so be it). But even you gave that example with a self-imposed restriction of only using magical ammunition against every enemy. Why can't you also restrict yourself to ignoring price differences?. And even if you drop any restriction why should game designers throw otherwise harmless mechanics out of the game to pander to the extremist end of an extremist playstyle? Wow, you obviously did not read my post about different party setups at all. BTW the analogy is flawed since, as you said, mages are wimps at low levels. That's one reason to run a F/T/C/M party instead of M/M/M/M, and that's not counting other DnD restrictions like class restricted skills Did I say anything about a MMMM group? This is again shoving a point to extremes. If you want to power-game in AD&D you would always select the strongest classes. Since AD&D classes are not optimally balanced you would try to select a party that could still survive the first levels but get to be overpowering later on (often possible because the difficulty isn't constant in most cRPGs). Or you could throw out weaker characters if you can acquire a mage later on in the game. If anyone would be compelled to take STR-based characters if STR had a slight advantage (as you said before) he would also be compelled to take any mage into his party in the later game and drop that ranger or druid even though he liked that ranger much better. I can't speak for others but I have never done something like this and the ROLE-PLAYING-game shouldn't be optimized for that game

We all know that in AD&D mages are low-level whimps but high-level overpowered. Definitely imbalanced. So why do people still have a ranger in their group instead of a second mage?

Your point (that no two players of BG play the same way is just as speculative, *obviously*. I didn't say that no two players play the same way. I said that there are players that have different styles. I didn't post any links, but anyway: If someone "wants to go down there", why not? It is a single player game. That is his play style. And it is distinct from yours who didn't even notice the feature. And what you didn't even notice was important or interesting *to him*. Now concerning the hypothetical situation of you playing on insane and those x% more money compelling you to adjust your play style because they might just make the difference. By the same argument this will lead you to save scumming and sleeping after every tiny encounter. What I really don't understand is how you have the willpower to set and follow the rule to use only magical ammunition but not the rule to ignore price differences ?

If you go to the trouble of reading my posts, you will see two points: 1. "if money is an issue in the game, the game is tough, and money can make it easier, you will be compelled to do what you can to get more money" 2. "if money is not an issue, your regional pricing will simply be lost on the player." Obviously, since I have said I have played the IE games on a higher than normal difficulty, and I didn't notice the difference in pricing at all*, we're talking about #2 here. * it's possible I actually noticed the difference, but just didn't adjust my playstyle (as there was no need). It's been some time. Your point (I'm tempted to say "obviously" too) doesn't take into account that different players have different tastes and play styles. You are a statistical basis of one. All we can glean from your experience is that at least one person was not adversely affected by regional pricing in IE games. If we now find someone who has noticed regional pricing and liked this attention to detail or even used it at least once we could make a good case that this can be a nice feature. One could argue that we have already found them because the wiki/forum links above show at least some interest. Your insistence that a good compromise between insignificant and too significant can't be found would only work if 1) money could be as closely balanced as the healing potions in a linear shooter and 2) the game was balanced on a player using the regional pricing instead of balanced on a player ignoring regional pricing and 3) that there wasn't any fine tuned (and in-game changeable) difficulty settings with which players can tune the difficulty to their play style anyway.