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Infinitron

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Everything posted by Infinitron

  1. Infinitron
    It's basically a reverse form of level scaling. See, if they had your party's circles determined entirely by their stealth skills, then at high levels the circles would become so small they'd completely disappear. That entire mechanic would be removed from play, and stealth would become a game based entirely on enemy perception levels. It's not the most elegant solution to the problem, but it is a solution.
  2. Infinitron
    http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...d=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post424534478 There's something I don't quite get here, though. If the radii of your party's circles are determined by the average perception level of the creatures on the level, then how are the radii of the creature's circles determined? Are they symmetrically determined by the average of your party's perception? That wouldn't make much sense, since they're not the ones trying to sneak up on you. Are they determined by the average of your party's stealth skills, perhaps? Are they based on each individual creature's perception? Or a combination of the previous two? It seems a bit silly overall - if you've got a level with twenty blind monks and an eagle-eyed elf, the elf's ability to perceive you is hurt by the monks' presence. But I guess his higher perception can compensate for that somewhat, if the radius of his circle is indeed influenced by that.
  3. Infinitron
    Well, "sitting duck" may have been an extreme example. But there was some satisfaction in the IE games when you interrupted a powerful spell with the knowledge that it was definitely NOT coming back.
  4. Infinitron
    A possible compromise here would be to make the interrupted spell unavailable for the rest of the fight in which it was interrupted only. That way you still achieve the tactical "spell loss", but without inflicting a lasting strategic penalty on the mage who was interrupted. A further variation on this would be an "interruption cooldown" that makes the interrupted spell unavailable for a limited time period that you can wait out.
  5. Infinitron
    A quote from Josh Sawyer: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3593502&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post424444483 Currently, no. If a spell or ability doesn't go off, it isn't lost but it has to be started over. I personally don't have much of a problem with this, since I don't think "spell loss" was a super-important mechanic in the Infinity Engine games and it was probably overly punitive (the mage already got hit AND failed to cast a spell, he doesn't need to lose it too on top of that). That said, this does remove the ability to "drain" an enemy mage of all his spells (by interrupting them all) and turn him into a sitting duck who can be safely ignored until the rest of the enemy party has been dispatched. Some people might miss that.
  6. Infinitron
    Psst guys, OP is a troll
  7. Infinitron
    I understand that. I didn't mean to suggest that high Might makes the Wizard too combat viable. But, that sort of supports my point, err... qualm? It seems to serve even less of a point for Might to boost the Wizard's physical damage, since it doesn't really make him any more viable. That's some strange logic; if high Might doesn't make the Wizard "combat viable", then you might as well go ahead and allow it to boost his physical damage, for simplicity's sake. Because neither high Might nor high anything else are going to make him combat viable. Or do you want no stat at all to boost a Wizard's physical damage?
  8. Infinitron
    It is you who misunderstood
  9. Infinitron
    Outright stunlocking would be pretty darn hard. The attacks that have high rates of fire (like wands and spell missiles) will likely have low base Interrupt values, so even someone with a high Perception wouldn't be likely to call a hit reaction often unless the target had a miserable Resolve. When you're fighting one on one, sure, but if we're talking about some kind of "lone tank boss" that you gang up on with your entire party, then the odds are much higher. By the way, this mechanic kinda reminds me of something I asked you about a while ago: http://new.spring.me/#!/JESawyer/q/455236323633025078 Only in the end it's hit reaction animations, not attacking or dodging animations, that prevent a character from doing stuff.
  10. Infinitron
    Concentration is similar to Concentration in 3E/3.5 (somewhat similar to Poise in Dark Souls) but it is for everyone, not just spellcasters. Concentration prevents you from playing hit reactions when you take damage. If you cannot maintain Concentration, you will play a hit reaction and your attack/reload/spell is interrupted. We're still defining the system (in fact, I was messing around with the formulae before I sat down), but that's the general idea. In the new scheme, Might affects damage/healing whether it's a single application or over time. Penetration is something we may or may not use in conjunction with an inherent Penetration value on weapons and other attacks that cause damage. I'm leaning toward "not" right now. Stunlocking - a viable tactic?
  11. Infinitron
    I'll answer this question. It's because people are used to simplistic RPGs where the only way in which characters can be different, other than social skills, is in how "good" they are at combat. So, if there are no dump stats, that must mean there's no way to make a character who's "bad at combat", therefore everybody is the same. That's what you get from decades of RPGs where the stat that affects your chance to hit and the stat that affects your damage are one and the same. We've been trained to think of Strength as the "good at combat" stat. "What do you mean my Fighter doesn't need to have high Strength? What kind of nonsense is that?"
  12. Infinitron
    I suspect there aren't many company forums where a moderator would be allowed to bellyache so loudly about one of their products and still keep his post. Good on you, Obsidian, I guess.
  13. Infinitron
    I think you may have misunderstood what he meant when he said that. "Stroking ego" means the character is designed around reacting to things that the player does. It doesn't necessarily connote wish fulfillment heroics.
  14. Infinitron
    Dammit you guys Don't you see? If it takes a high level character to fight dragons in Pillars of Eternity's system, then that means that, like it or not, you are not going to fight a dragon in this game's story. By defining the game as a low-to-mid level experience, they're already excluding certain types of quests and storylines and making the experience "incomplete" by a certain definition. You'll HAVE to import your character to the sequel to do those sorts of things. What Mass Effect did isn't relevant here because ME rebooted its character system for each game and there was no common frame of reference for Shepard's power between the games.
  15. Infinitron
  16. Infinitron
    Let me clarify, my post is primarily about game mechanics and encounter design, not story. They can make the story as "complete" as they want, but if J.E. Sawyer is designing a fully fledged character system then he needs to think about what he's leaving for the high levels, because AFAIK PoE is NOT going to reach the high levels.
  17. Infinitron
    The first Baldur's Gate game was unusual by modern standards, in that it was forced to restrict its content to things that a low-level AD&D adventuring party might encounter and plausibly overcome. You did not fight dragons in Baldur's Gate. You did not fight hordes of demons. You did not fight vampires, liches, or mind flayers. All of these "epic"-type encounters were saved for the higher-level sequel. Now, I'm not saying that Pillars of Eternity needs to be quite as "mundane" as Baldur's Gate was, but if Obsidian is planning to turn this game into a series in which characters are imported from game to game, then they need to pace themselves and decide which sorts of experiences are suitable for a low-level campaign and which are best saved for a sequel with a higher level party. And that goes for spells and abilities, too. Remember, a slow character development arc isn't just more satisfying narratively - it's also easier to balance. Things will always go wonky in a game where you have to account for characters who might range in power from Magic Missile to Mass Death.
  18. Infinitron
    Hey Josh: Do you envision the ability scores having diminishing benefits as a character levels up? As a character grows more powerful and gains more talents and powerful equipment, that +1 or +2 he got from having a high Intellect or whatever becomes less important, until eventually his ability scores are just an interchangeable relic of his early career.
  19. Infinitron
    I think you could quell some of the SIMULATIONIST OUTRAGE by renaming Intellect to "Expertise" or "Coordination"...but at this point, it might be funnier to keep it the way it is.
  20. Infinitron
    What about that bug? I can't see my pledge selected when in the Select Reward screen because it's showing me the non-Kickstarter set of pledges.
  21. Infinitron
    It is if you can't confirm your Kickstarter pledge, like C2B. Any news on this?
  22. Infinitron
    Gimme some K, bro.
  23. Infinitron
    The Wasteland 2 beta can also run without Steam, despite being available exclusively from Steam.
  24. Infinitron
  25. Infinitron
    Uh, before we turn this into another pro-Steam vs anti-Steam ****fest, the answer is: It's too early for that.
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