Sensuki

Shoulda just mentioned the word healing bro and I would have known exactly what you were talking about. After Sabotin posted I realized what I had done and posted this in my previous post. Looks like you understand the health system now though, I was just trying to explain it to ya.

I know I realized yesterday that I misinterpreted what you said. Edit button was gone by then.

Indeed, I wasn't taking healing into account though I was mostly just trying to explain the system to people as it seems there are a large number of people who didn't understand how it worked. My examples all use a specific amount of damage. For instance I said 100 damage and if you take 100 damage and you have 100 Stamina/100 Health, you have taken 25 Health Damage. Thought I did make the statement that you won't ever take more than 25% Health Damage in an encounter in an above post and that is indeed incorrect. Sorry about that. As far as enemies attacking downed foes, I do not believe they will even target them. I asked Josh Sawyer about this way back in 2012 and he believed that enemies should prioritize party members that are still alive. We are also not sure if downed party members take health damage from AoE spells, but you would assume so. On standard difficulty your characters can't actually die, you have to actually enable permadeath, so I'm not sure what happens then. But I believe AI will just target standing party members until the last one falls, rather than 'maim' a downed foe.

Just in case you were referring to HP as Hit Points, there is no Hit Points. There is Stamina Points and Health Points, which from the last known piece of information are gained at the same rate. Here are some quotes http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=8#post411377667 I *think* I see why you disagree, and that is because of this missing piece of information. Damage in Project Eternity is tracked in decimals so so if you take three points of damage, you still take 0.75 Health damage. Let me re-iterate. Let's say I have a Fighter with 100 Stamina and 100 Health Points, which based on the above (quote from January 2013, but no new info on that fact since) which states Health:Stamina are gained by characters at a 1:1 ratio is correct. The above info also states that for every four points of damage you take, you lose four points of stamina, and one point of Health. Damage is also fractional, as stated above, so there is no way to avoid taking Health Damage. Now if your character that has 100 Stamina/100 Health (which I will just refer to as 100HP) takes 100 damage in an encounter, then your character will be KO'd in that encounter and they will have lost 100 Stamina Points and AT LEAST 25 Health Points, because we do not know if on the terminal hit whether the damage that goes past 0 Stamina is still subtracted from Health, but I would think that it is. Most of the time that would equate to roughly 25% of total health damage, except in extreme edge cases where your character has 1 Stamina Point left and they take a lot of damage - let's say 40 damage and as a result they take 10 Health Damage. In this case the value is much higher than 25% depending on your total amount of HP (Stamina and Health Points).

That is the case yes. Josh Sawyer stated that units currently have the same amount of health and stamina. I will find the quote later as I have to go out. I am also not advocating the design decision as I have no problem with 1HK permadeath spells and the like.

I already stated that in my post in the very first line. Please read a bit more carefully. The Barbarian class loses health at a different ratio to other classes (ie, they lose heath slower and are therefore more durable over the course of an adventuring day). This is an exclusive Barbarian class ability and in Project Eternity there is no overlapping of class features (as stated by Josh Sawyer, the lead designer) so there will most likely be no abilities or talents that other classes can take that alter this ratio. It is not impossible that some enemies will be able to sap your Health at a different ratio to your stamina, but it is unlikely and if such abilities do exist, they are probably rare. Can you explain what you mean? Because you have a habit of quoting my posts and questioning their validity when you are obviously new to Project Eternity and do not have a full grasph of the mechanics. In one encounter you can only ever lose roughly 25% of your health, because you lose Health at a 1:4 ratio with Stamina. If you have 100 Stamina, then you can only ever take 100 Stamina damage in an encounter. This means that in one encounter, you can only ever take ~25% damage to your Health. At 0 Stamina that character is KO'd and out of the fight, when the fight is over they will get back up, their stamina will regenerate to full over a short period of time - but their health will not. Health is a daily resource. Stamina is a per-encounter resource. It is possible that if you had a character on 8 Stamina and they took 20 damage, that they would drop to 0 Stamina and take 5 Health Damage from that attack, rather than 2, but you'd have to ask Josh about that.

Since when are steam achievements impressive, let alone a good feature of the platform?

I think you're missing the point. Hardest/Path of the Damned requires you to manage your resources and is more taxing on your resources. Health is a resource and on higher difficulties, you will run out of it more quickly. The difficulty will be higher on a per-encounter basis, where you will take more Health Damage. The situation you describe will arise _WHEN_ the designers intend them to, such as areas with limited to no resting that you are trapped in for the duration of a quest objective, or when you mis-manage your resources. Easier difficulties require less resource management, and thus will probably not REQUIRE resting as often. There may also be instances where on harder difficulties resting spots are limited inside dungeons (until you complete the quest objective) and on easier difficulties they are not.

Stamina Damage is converted to Health Damage at a ratio of 4:1. If you have 100 Health and 100 Stamina, you can take 400 points of damage over an adventuring day before your character runs out of Health Points (not counting spells or abilities or whatever that alter this ratio). A character can be the equivalent of KO'd 3 times in an adventuring day (using the above example, take 100 damage per encounter over three consecutive encounters and drop in battle in each one) before they run the risk of becoming maimed (standard difficulty) or permanent death (standard, permadeath on - or expert mode ticked). You don't have to start worrying about that state until you've taken 75% Health Damage, which in my example would have been equivalent to 300 damage. That's when it becomes a concern. You will need to be more mindful of your health as a resource on higher difficulties. Eg. you might perform averagely in an encounter and lose more health points than 'expected' and find yourself low on Health with a string of encounters to go to complete a quest. This likely won't be too much of a problem due to the ability to back track to the nearest resting place or your Stronghold but I would assume that there will be some points of the game where you are 'locked' in the level you are on until you progress through it, like the Cult of the Unseeing Eye in Baldur's Gate 2 (it's been 6 or so years since I last played BG2 so I forget if you can rest there). Hardest/Path of the Damned will probably require you to rest a lot more often. EDIT: No, that L1 Fighter will drop in one or two hits, because after taking 20 damage, he will be at 0HP.

I'd also like to add that I believe the first gameplay video will be short, perhaps five minutes in length. They also have another 37.0 man weeks work on a Press demo scheduled for Production Milestone 6, and another one for the Beta stage. While Chris Avellone stated in his Rezzed Presentation that they are absolutely going to do a gameplay movie in the vein of Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2, because of the gameplay video being released with the backer portal (and perhaps even originally exclusively available at the backer portal so that new viewers have to visit the website to view it), I think the Obsidian Project Directors are a bit more conservative and have less to prove as a company than inXile and Hairbrained Schemes did. A five minute video in the style of a trailer - announcing the name of the game with some footage of the overall pillars of the game - combat, dialogue, scripted interaction, questing, exploring, looting, companion interaction etc will be more concise and leave people wanting more. A gameplay video in the style of Wasteland 2 might be better saved for the second video, as by then they will have most of the content completed and will be able to choose an appropriate side-mission that doesn't spoil the story, which Obsidian seem to be very protective about. In case you're expecting a 15-20 minute video, this might save you from slight disappointment. (I'd love to be wrong though )

Not wholly original I'm afraid. "won't fill yo ass up"

No, actually they are confirmed to be affected by Attributes. I stated in the OP that that information was from a quote, not a guess. That info is also on the Wiki which you quoted, the 8th footnote. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=15 For the record that is Josh Sawyer's something awful profile. The Project Eternity wiki doesn't necessarily have all the currently known information about the game. There's a lot of missing tidbits that can be found on various interviews, Josh's Something Awful posts in the Eternity Megathread there, posts on the OE forums aren't always added until months later and he also posts on a couple of other forums that I don't have access to (ie YCS/badgame or whatever it's called). Over at the RPGCodex we have someone who quotes some of those for us.

Because it's kind of like an MMO, people are essentially paying to win (buying more powerful ships to start the game with, so they don't have to waste heaps of time building themselves up ... which IMO is the whole point of playing something, but yeah I am not everyone). The Roberts Space Industries site also spams an email like every second day, if not every day (so annoying I blocked it out as spam) promoting these upgrades and stuff. Now they're selling Alpha slots and they are visualizing the number of remaining slots to increase people's FOMO (fear of missing out). They've definitely got some scum of the earth marketing people, that's for sure ... but it's working. I personally feel ashamed to have backed it, but I suppose the Single Player will be fun.

Knights of the Chalice 1.32 Absolutely lovin' it.

Well it was just Darren Monahan working on it for quite some time and I assume that was not his only job at Obsidian as he has lots of other obligations. I would also wager that he had not touched backend web dev for a while. I assumed they use PHP ... shoulda used Perl

Athletics is a skill. http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Class_skill

Now I remember where I saw Constitution - in a completed scripted interaction screen - the one from Josh Sawyers GDC talk.

That's correct yes, Attributes will be used often in Dialogue and in Scripted interactions - as seen here. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019755/Gathering-Your-Party-with-Project Attribute checks will likely just require you to have X score in the Attribute. It will be up to the area designer which attribute checks which dialogue or scripted interaction option, but they will likely receive QA passes to make sure that they are sensible. No doubt Obsidian have a design document covering which types of actions are governed by which attribute but it should boil down to common sense. I can't remember if Attributes are used as pre-reqs for crafting items or taking talents.

From what we know Stamina Regen outside of combat will be relatively quick, what that means I am not sure. But it does seem likely that it is possible to walk into the next encounter without having regained full health on a character that was KO'd in the previous one. I'd say it would be worth looking at previous games, such as Knights of the Old Republic 2 to get some of an idea of Health Regen speed, although it will likely be faster than KotOR 2 as it took longer to get places in that game without Force Speed on. I'd also like to add to Gfted1 - you won't really manage Health in this game. From what I've read of your posts you aren't really concerned about difficulty and generally prefer things to be pretty easy going. If you play on a lower difficulty (such as Easy) then you probably won't need to manage your "Health" very often at all. The Health system is actually very simple. You do not need to worry about your Health until you are down to 25% or less. This is the only time you will need to be careful, and even then if you do not have Permanent Death on, it's not a huge deal unless you get multiple characters down below 25% Health, you can always micro low HP characters to the back and have them use long range weapons to stay out of the fight (at a marginal efficacy cost). From the sounds of it, the area designers are going to be putting in regular exits back to the surface/previous levels in dungeons and probably more resting sites than are found in the game "Knights of the Chalice" which was one of the games that inspired this resting mechanic (and even in that game, apart from the areas where you do not get to rest for a while because there is no campsite, you can abuse rest roughtly as easy as in the IE games). If you rest at every opportunity you get, then you will likely very rarely run into trouble with your Health unless the area designer makes a specific area that is meant to test your resource management by not offering a rest for a while, or limiting the amount of rests at a campsite in a dungeon. This might frustrate you, but that is the point, and it probably won't happen very often. As long as you remember those few basic things, you will be fine.

As far as I know the only DRM related to Project Eternity is through Steam digital distribution. There is no reason to believe that the boxed copy will have DRM. Obsidian have also stated that there will be no additional DRM on the Steam version, so it is even possible you may be able to play the game without having Steam running - it's a request worth asking for anyway.

Link? Afaik, Health can only be replenished by resting in the dedicated rest spots. And yes, Id happily watch that mechanic die an inglorious death. Sorry I meant Stamina Regeneration not Health Regen And I was partially confused. I hadn't read the link for a while and I confused bonus healing with bonus Stamina Regeneration http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9059 Healing in Project Eternity is Stamina Regeneration though, so this might include passive Stamina Regeneration and Active Stamina Regeneration.

I was bored this evening and after glancing across the "Josh Sawyer on attributes" thread and seeing that it's still going I once again started to wonder what method would Josh Sawyer use to make attributes have balance and to remove dump stats. The first thing I did was make a list of the known (unofficial) attribute names Strength - from the RPGCodex Q&A with Josh Sawyer earlier this year, he revealed that at that current state in time, there was an attribute that governed Damage and bonus healing. The reason I think this is Eternity's Strength Attribute is because in other posts he has implicitly mentioned that Eternity also has a Constitution and Intellect attribute. One of the pillars of Eternity (get it) is familiarity. The familar attribute that governs damage, at least, melee damage in most games is Strength and since all damage is governed by one attribute and Josh Sawyer has explicitly stated that his attribute design is not simulationist and people may find it weird, I believe Strength to be the most likely name for that attribute and I even think that Josh said that there was an attribute called Strength somewhere recently, but did not say what it did. Unnamed Attribute - from the RPGCodex Q&A with Josh Sawyer earlier this year Josh Sawyer mentioned that an Attribute governed Accuracy. He did not mention that the attribute governed anything else, it is possible that something has been added with Accuracy to make an Attribute or the Attribute only governs Accuracy. Constitution - Josh Sawyer mentioned this Attribute in a post somewhere, it might have been on here, or on Something Awful. I will not bother linking it but if you do a search, you will likely find it. It is also possible, but unlikely that it was named in an interview - but if my memory serves it was a forum post. We do not have any information on what Constitution does, but I will take a guess later in the post. Intellect - this attribute was mentioned in a forum post as well, possibly in the update thread that revealed the Vithrak. We also do not know what this attribute does. Constitution and Intellect were also implicitly named, not explicitly. You will not see Josh confirm these until attributes are semi-finalized. After reading every single post Josh Sawyer has made since September 2012, and every interview he has done, I think I am starting to understand some of his design principles. I believe that his attribute design revolves solely around 'combat efficacy' - stats that increase the efficacy of a character or monster in combat. I have come up with the following list of combat stats that are (confirmed) or might be related to character attributes, most of these are confirmed, some of these are not confirmed, but are likely. Confirmed combat stats - Damage, Healing, Accuracy, Deflection, Fortitude, Reflex, Psyche Likely combat stats related to Attributes - Hit Points, Action Speed +Damage - increases the the damage of all attacks +Healing - increases the stamina regeneration of a character (assumtion: includes passive stamina regen and maybe gives bonuses from spells/potions etc) +Accuracy - increases a character's chance to hit with all attacks, abilities and spells that explicitly or implicitly target other units. Subdivided into Melee and Ranged Accuracy (not explicitly, but there is a distinction for the purpose of some classes, and probably other things) +Deflection - increases the character's Deflection score which governs a unit's chance to be hit by physical attacks (not sure about touch attacks) +Fortitude - increases the character's Fortitude Defense which governs a unit's chance to be hit by Fortitude attacks such as Poison or Disease. +Reflex - increases the character's Reflex Defense which governs a unit's chance to be hit by Reflex attacks such as Fireball and Lightning Bolt spells (and possibly touch attacks). +Psyche - increases the character's Psyche Defense (same as Will in D&D) which governs a unit's chance to be hit by Psyche attacks such as Charm or Confusion. +Hit Points (guess) probably governs additional Stamina Points and thus Health Points - may not act like D&D and may not actually increase per character level but may in fact be a flat bonus like other games. Also may not be necessary for Project Eternity and actually may be a superfluous mechanic as HP could be governed by class alone, also could simply be handled by Stamina to Health Damage Ratio, but since that is currently a Barbarian exclusive stat, it is unlikely. +Action Speed (guess) - My guess is that there will be a 'stat' that governs Attack Speed, Cast Time and the cooldown (downtime) between when character's and monsters play attack animations and cast animations. The last known information was from a post here on the forums by Josh Sawyer, where he said that attack speed currently (at that stage in time) only affected the speed of the attack animation and not the downtime between them, however he also said that was something that will probably be changed, so it is likely that by release that "Action speed" shortens the downtime between actions in combat. There may also be other 'stats' that are governed by Attributes, but I cannot really think of anything major. Other than maybe Effect Duration I can only think of very specific use cases that could be handled by Skills (all skills in Project Eternity will give a combat bonus to the character) or Talents. This gives me a list of 7 confirmed stats and 2 very likely stats. The Theory This theory assumes that there are at least SIX Attributes because D&D and the IE games had six attributes. That is not to say that there will be six attributes in Project Eternity (Pillars of Eternity now I guess) and there may in fact be more, but six is the likely _minimum_ number of stats based on a specific quote from Josh Sawyer on Something Awful - "No Attribute affects multiple defenses". We get six from an attribute for damage/healing, one for accuracy (which may be tied into something else) and four for defenses. Because of this distinction we can assume that all elements that make up an attack in Project Eternity - Accuracy, Damage and Action Speed are also separated. Following these supposed rules I can come up with the following likely scenario: Strength - Damage, Healing Attribute #2 - Reflex, (Action Speed) Constitution - Fortitude, (Hit Points) Attribute #4 - Accuracy (+something?) Attribute #5 - Deflection (+something?) Attribute #6 - Psyche (+something?) One of the unnamed attributes is called Intellect. I am not sure which one as the attribute system is gamist, so your guess is as good as mine. If the attributes all follow D&D naming conventions and Charisma has been dropped then I would go with Psyche, If Charisma was not dropped I would go Deflection. If Action Speed and Hit Points are not governed by Attributes, then every attribute must control one combat stat except for Strength. The effect of bonus healing from Strength would probably be negligible outside of combat, but it's placement with damage might even be solely to give the Fighter class a reason to bump the Damage stat as it would benefit their longevity in an encounter because they are the only class that gain stamina regen in combat and they are not a high damage dealing class in Project Eternity, other than their efficiency with disengagement attacks. So without bonus healing, taking Damage on a Fighter might be inefficient. If Action Speed and Hit Points are governed by Attributes then I think there is at least one other combat stat that is missing from my list because I cannot imagine Fortitude, Reflex or Psyche to be the only thing goverened by an Attribute unless they are all the only thing governed by an Attribute. In my above example Psyche is on it's own. One thing I can think of that is *possibly* attribute related is Effect Duration. This would be useful for *most* classes as most classes do have abilities and spells that have effects, but the duration bonus would have to be finely granular as to not be OP. As far as I know, the Fighter does not have many abilities that have effects, but Fighters have a low Psyche Defense, so bumping the Attribute that governs Psyche is not a trap choice because it is strengthening that weakness, like a High Wisdom Fighter in D&D. It is also not impossible that every Attribute governs a High Efficacy combat stat and a lower efficacy combat stat, of which case Bonus Healing, Hit Points and Effect Duration (and undetermined others) would be lower efficacy combat stats and Damage, Accuracy, Deflection, Fortitude, Reflex and Psyche are high efficacy combat stats. This would also be in line with Josh Sawyer's fixation for unified mechanics, but it is possible that Accuracy and Deflection have a higher weight than other combat stats in the game, due to Accuracy being used for every single attack in the game and Deflection probably being the most attacked defense. It is also possible that the Character Attributes have the exact same naming conventions as D&D, so we might end up seeing thing such as characters with high Wisdom being more accurate in combat. I would finally like to remind everyone that this is just a theory and much of this information is assumed from the face value of quotes. It is also likely that some of the information in these quotes has now been changed, and that I am basing some of my assumptions of out of date information. EDIT: Changed all references "Stamina Regen" to "Bonus Healing" as per the actual quote on the Damage stat - http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9059

Oh yeah, by the way - Strength affects Stamina Regeneration rate, so it may not be *as* instant as you think.

Well, a lot of people don't realize that there is a gameplay video coming, or have not seen enough evidence to believe it - many people just want the the feeling of a full proverbial a-hole (fulfillment, confirming pledges, addons, even upgrading to a higher tier).

Gameplay video. Chris Avellone revealed that they had a gameplay video coming with the backer site in his MIGS presenation and in Update 67 there is 37.0 (man weeks?) worth of work on a "Press Demo" in Production Milestone 3 which is either the current or just previously past milestone. I'd say there would be a bit of schedule rubber banding atm as by my calculations they should be a week into Production Milestone 4. It is possible they have chosen to continue Production Milestone 3 until the end of the year (thus making it a bit longer than 6 weeks) and that would make sense because they are after all currently working on the Mega Dungeon, with Twin Elms slated for Production Milestone 4.