PsychoBlonde

Subtle I ain't. But don't worry, being loud is part of my personality, it doesn't mean this particular issue is driving me any more insane than anything else does. Granted, it is annoying when I say "Just a heads up, XP for questing doesn't let everyone play however they'd like" and the response is "Y U WANT XP FOR KILLZ NUB?!?" I don't. Heck the only MMO I've ever really liked is DDO, which only gives out xp for . . . questing. (Granted, a "quest" in DDO is not like a "quest" in most other games.) I don't even particularly care if *this* game decides to support my brother's playstyle. Sure, there will be other games. I just want people to be accurate in what they say.

I'm not sure that examples of poorly implemented difficulties are a reason to create several dozen toggles (each of which creates its own set of implementation problems). I also think that whining about games being too hard or too easy and expecting the devs to allow for every. single. potential. option. is really absurd. The difficulty slider only really exists to make the game easier for people who aren't having fun. (That and apparently to stroke the egos of twits who think they've accomplished something by playing the game on the "hardest" setting.) If you want a REAL challenge, do something like playing the game without healing potions or without ever donning a magic item. And, with these sorts of self-imposed challenges, you can customize them exactly how you want without trying to make the devs read your mind and cater to your personal preferences. Want mobs to do more damage but not have more HP? Take off all that armor. Or dump your con. Want them to be tougher but not stronger? Use only the weakest weapon in the game. Making the game harder depends mostly on you.

But I wanted a high-rise apartment. With a pool. On the roof. Actually, that'd be more like a penthouse. Nvm. Really, though, I don't see how a castle is inherently more interesting than a house. Houses get termites. And ants. And raccoons in the attic. They get invaded by the police. They get burglarized. They get burned down. People try to buy them off you so they can put in a new housing development. The neighbors put up a new fence that crosses the property line. The basement can flood. Plenty of interesting and annoying stuff can happen with a house, particularly if your adventuring buddies all live there with you.

The thing with this is, if you really truly aren't ANY better than the dudes giving you the quests, WHY aren't they DOING THE QUEST THEMSELVES. They lazy? The whole world is nothing but lazy arseholes? THAT would make for a great game. Your mission, if you choose to accept it . . . get these lazy arseholes to get off their bums and GO DO SOMETHING. Actually, that would make a great quest option--have a quest or two you can complete (and get the xp for!) by convincing the person to go do it themselves. :D Oh, and having better strategy and tactics means you're special--you're a good strategist and tactician. If you mean that you don't want to be special in a purely mechanical way--you don't have extra hp and better armor, etc. This can be true. But you're still not interchangeable with Man on the Street.

Implimencations? Is that like, implications combined with implementation? BEST. MISSPELLING. EVAR. I salute you. Anyway, my personal preference is for your chosen race to impact both story and gameplay in some way, especially since AAA games don't do this kind of thing any because they'd rather have 100% voiceover. If they let you play a non-human, it doesn't matter, and if they don't, you're stuck playing a human. (I'm looking at YOU, Dragon Age--I love those games but they need to make up their freakin' minds.) How, exactly, this is implemented is up for grabs. I prefer it when the gameplay/mechanical differences are somewhat significant, but not overwhelming--a dwarven sorcerer, for instance, is just not going to have the spell DC's, but they will have a lot of HP to help make up for that. I don't want there to be a case where, if you choose to play a dwarf sorc, you're HOPELESSLY inept. That would suck.

Not to mention the fact that it is incredibly hard to tell what actual mechanical effect the spell had. Sure, it may LOOK all cool and epic and junk, but then it does . . . 20 points of damage?!?!? SRSLY?!?!?! I will stipulate that if they intend to put that kind of thing in the game, the effect of said spell or ability ought to be *YOU WIN THE COMBAT*. And then they need to be sure there's some way to prevent it from going off. If they want to have an epic effect cut scene, make it be part of a sequence where you, like, have to stop this massive ritual spell from going off by killing the ritual casters or something, and if you don't, EPIC CUT SCENE BOOM YOU DIE. THAT would be cool.

I don't necessarily WANT xp for EVERYTHING. I'm saying that IF (notice that IF) they WANT you to be able to play the game in ANY way you want, then they ALSO need to give you XP for doing WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO, regardless of whether that completes a quest or not. OR, if you don't have xp or levels, you can still play however you want because that entire aspect is completely removed. I don't understand why you people find this so hard to grasp. Do a mental exercise. Imagine you're my brother playing Arcanum. He was like 8 years old at the time, and his reading skills and comprehension was not such that doing the quests was a particularly enjoyable activity to him, but he LOVED the combat. So, for him, the best way to play the game was to run around the map and do random encounters until his characters had godlike proportions. THEN he could run around and do the quests and have fun at the incredibly random variety of results he got (and very often failing the quest completely) because he didn't really read the text that much. Now, take this brother of mine, and project his playing interests and style onto a game where the ONLY way he could level his characters was by doing quests and completing them successfully. Would he have fun? Probably not. Too much reading, not enough fighting. NOW think about what the devs said. They want you to be able to play however you want. That really OUGHT to include BOTH my brother the fanatical quest-avoider-and-failer and me, the fanatical quest-doer, right? Except the WAY in which they talk about including both of us ACTUALLY excludes my brother. I am not SAYING they HAVE to build the game for my brother AND me. (They have to build if for ME.) I am saying that, IF their goal is, in fact to include both my brother and me, then the mechanical decision they have declared does not, in fact, accomplish this. Sure, there are other games out there. But the devs have SAID that they WANT to accommodate his playstyle IN THIS ONE, and they are NOT DOING THAT. This is what I am pointing out. I'm not saying they HAVE to accommodate him. I'm saying they need to be aware that they are NOT if this is, in fact, their GOAL. There is no "only" alternative That doesn't mean there is no only "solution". See the IF there? IF you want to accomplish a certain goal, you have to do certain things. Alternatives mean you have different GOALS. If you're going to try to be a smartass, you might accomplish it better if you do some thinking first.

They said that's the plan in the video on update #7.

Um, no. Not even remotely close. I'm not asking for quests to NOT reward xp. I'm saying that rewarding xp ONLY for doing quests does not in any way, shape, or form allow people to play in whatever way suits them even if they can hypothetically do the quest in a dozen different ways. They still HAVE to do SOME quests in order to get xp and to level. This doesn't even necessarily mean that you HAVE to level to finish the game--they could make a game where you can finish the whole thing without ever once acquiring an experience point. What it does mean, is that you cannot get xp or level by running around killing monsters or stealing people blind or any of the other myriad fun activities usually present in the game unless these activities also happen to be quests. I'm not saying "don't do quests". I am saying that you ought to be able to CHOOSE whether or not you ACCEPT a PARTICULAR quest, to which you replied that it's absurd and stupid NOT to accept EVERY SINGLE QUEST because the devs HAVE to make it so you can get something you WANT out of it otherwise they're bad devs who don't know how to design a game. To which I said, in essence, this is absurd. There's no reason why the devs shouldn't be able make a quest where the only endings are nasty things that you, the player, may not want to play through, in which case, if player freedom is your design concern, the player ought to have the ability to just reject the entire quest outright. Giving out XP ONLY for doing quests does NOT allow you to play "however you want" because you HAVE to do quests in order to level. You CANNOT level via any other means than DOING QUESTS. If they REALLY want you to be free to play "however you want" (within the constraints of the game physics, of course), they need to give out XP for any activity that is a part of the game regardless of whether it fits in a particular quest or not. Turning EVERYTHING into a quest doesn't solve this problem, either, it just makes the game needlessly convoluted by jamming EVERY activity into some sort of quest box. Or, alternatively, they could remove leveling as a mechanic altogether. I'm not arguing In FAVOR OF people NOT DOING QUESTS like playing the game is some kind of gamer protest movement. I was pointing out that if some random person wishes to play in such a fashion that they NEVER EVER IN ANY WAY incur ANY kind of NEGATIVE consequences on ANYONE, that they always get EXACTLY what they want as if the game universe is their personal playground, AND they're confronted with a quest where if you accept and do the quest, you GET a negative outcome, they can still practice their "agency" and get what they want by NOT DOING THE QUEST. It is only metagaming if they a.) know this in advance and b.) choose it for those reasons. But here's the thing--somebody who wants to play like that is going to be metagaming ANYWAY. As long as the game ALLOWS for other people to play in a DIFFERENT way, the game itself is NOT forcing anyone to metagame. Therefore the game mechanics themselves are not "metagaming" regardless of whether any given player decides they want to metagame or not. EVERYONE gets to play how they want to play, nobody is restricted because you CAN'T refuse a quest and you CAN'T level except by doing quests. Basically, what you are arguing here is that people OUGHT to be FORCED to do quests in order to level, because anything else is a.) bad game design, or b.) metagaming. Which is flatly ridiculous. I am responding to the video update where they stated, specifically, that they are putting the XP strictly at the end of a quest BECAUSE this should fix the problem of having vastly disparate rewards for people playing in different ways. All I am saying is that they are not solving the problem they think they are by putting all XP at the end of quests. I don't think rewarding XP only for quests is a BAD thing necessarily, any more than I'd object to a game where the only thing that grants XP is murdering tons of dudes. I probably wouldn't PLAY that game because it wouldn't interest me, but I'd never say "this is an invalid way to design a game". It's not invalid to create a game in which you have to do every single in-game activity to complete it, either. The only invalid thing is saying both "we will let you play however you want" AND "we're only giving out XP if you complete quests". These statements are mutually exclusive--they cannot both be true.

It wasn't always high-level spells. Fire and Ice was 4th level. I think one of the 2nd level spells had an animation like this. I'd always use these spells to freeze enemies so it was easier to target them with Call Lightning. If you had characters throw both spells simultaneously it was like getting a free Hold Monster that prevented them from moving out of the area of effect. So broken. :D So, yeah, I expect we won't be seeing this again.

It sounds kind of like we're going to have Greek-style gods in the sense of meddling, quarrelsome, vindictive, not-necessarily-benevolent super-powerful entities. This sounds fine to me, but this sort of situation DOES prevent you from having actual RELIGION in the game. Oh, sure, people obey the gods, worship the gods, follow the gods, hide from the gods, curse the gods, occasionally Overthrow the Gods . . . but they don't really BELIEVE in the gods. It would be like BELIEVING in sauerkraut. So you wind up with a deity-infested but also incredibly secular world where people are matter-of-fact about all kinds of weird magical happenings I don't have a problem with this--I like it when people are matter-of-fact. It might even be an interesting reversal if your average clergyman is a completely non-mystical hard-headed practical dude, while your crazy mystics are atheists.

I think the poll just has some granularity unexplored. A person doesn't seem some magical boost of godly selection or lineage to be not a regular joe. He could just be the try-hardiest joe on the planet. As much an everyman as John McClane. The guy with guts. Yes, indeed, and it can actually be extra fun if your "extraordinary" quality consists of "is willing to actually go out and TRY FIGHTING instead of sitting here on his ass bemoaning how hopeless it is". If most of the people in the world stand in the same place day in and day out asking passersby for help, you're extraordinary just because you can MOVE. If you're not extraordinary in some way, why aren't they doing the quest themselves instead of paying you to do it?

Indeed. I also hate it when good is "save the baby" and evil is "kick the baby". I can decide for myself which choice suits me, thank you very much, I don't need the Invisible GM Nanny handing out points for it. Now, if you're asking a question like "do you want people to be able to run around kicking babies or do you want babies to be un-kickable", then, of course, let them kick the babies and eat old granny for breakfast if that's how they want to play. I don't, but that doesn't mean I need small children and old grandmothers to be immortal and indestructible. In this respect I do want there to be "good" and "evil" options. And I think it should affect you in the sense that if you murder old granny and eat her, the townspeople are going to look upon this unfavorably. Or possibly favorably it it's Cannibal Town. But it shouldn't give you bonus stats. Games with karma meters are always so SHALLOW.

No, the definition of metagaming is "gaming in such a way that you get the consequences you want while ignoring what you have to do to get there". It is metagaming, for instance, to murder a particular NPC not because you think it'd be fun to kill them or because you think they deserve to die, but because that's the only way to get the Vorpal Greatsword. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just wanna swing around the Vorpal Greatsword.) I put "win" in sneer quotes because I was referring to the concept of "winning" as meaning "get the happy ending where everything is sunshine and bunnies and singing tra-la". If you have a quest where doing the quest means some kind of tragedy is going to occur, you cannot do this quest and still "win" in this fashion. So, yeah, if you are obsessed with always being The Bringer of Perfect Happiness, you can't do this quest and accomplish that goal, so you will probably a.) do the quest, b.) observe the endings, c.) load a saved game and NOT do the quest. That would, indeed, be metagaming. However, there's nothing in the nature of the quest that FORCES you to play that way. You could a.) do the quest, b.) observe the endings, and then c.) say OMG that's HORRIBLE and then d.) do another quest. Which is not metagaming. You could a.) not do the quest because you don't like the sound of it. Also not metagaming. You could a.) do the quest, b.) observe the endings, and then c.) HAHAHA FEEB d.) loot the corpses. Not metagaming. There isn't necessarily any metagaming involved. And, it doesn't necessarily remove player agency if it's occasionally *impossible* to rescue the hostages. Granted, it does if you present the situation in such a way as "your options are: rescue the hostages or join the bad guys" and when you choose "rescue the hostages plzthx!" the game goes "AWW YOU FAILED SUCKA!!!!" THAT removes player agency. But if the choices are, instead: "join the bad guys or kill the bad guys, but the hostages bite it either way", you still have agency, you just . . . don't maybe get the precise results you wanted. And that's okay too. It doesn't have to be a game where nothing bad ever happens.

But you still have to complete objectives. It doesn't matter if you have 40,000 different ways to jump through the hoops if you still have to jump through the hoops. What is it to you if my little brother wants to cap his character by doing random encounters? How does this detract from your gameplay experience in such a way that you INSIST on ACTIVELY FORBIDDING his style of play because well, he COULD do the quests in a variety of different ways? He doesn't want to do the quests right now. Or, let's imagine that they take into account that sometimes It's fun to fight stuff. So they put in a quest like "kill X bandits to cripple their operations". How is that different from just giving you 20xp per bandit kill? Actually, it's worse because what if you kill 20% of X and run out of health potions or get bored? You've just wasted 20 minutes for no reward. Or, if they decide not to put in XP for kills, they need to give you SOME kind of reward (loot) or there's no gameplay point to killing stuff, so a combat monster is a pointless character. But then how is the pacifist persuader character going to get THAT reward? So now playing a pacifist persuader is going to lag behind the combat monster. Handing out XP only for finishing quests is not the solution to this problem as the devs seem to think it is. It is an alternate version of the same problem. The only ultimate "solution" if you want to keep XP and leveling is to hand out XP for everything and let people *really* decide how they feel like leveling at any given time. Or, you could dispense with XP and leveling entirely, and let the direct rewards of the activities (loot, new spells, money, casual sex, whatever) BE the reward. Granted, you could also just say "we're designing a game that's about questing, so we're going to make you do the quests to progress". That's perfectly fine. It's 100% accurate, too. What's not accurate is saying "we're going to let you play how you want to play" AND "we're only giving out XP for completing quests". Those statements contradict each other.

The only alternative is having quests that don't give any XP at all (including making all quest monsters accessible without taking the quest), which seems like a much, much worse idea. Or, they can have a level cap that you can hit by only doing, say, 50% of the quests. Or they can make it so it doesn't really matter what level you are as you progress down the main story line. Granted, there are tradeoffs with these options, too. But there is no "only" alternative.

They don't have to. Is there some law where the protagonist should ALWAYS have a way to "win"? No. It's not metagaming unless you're obsessed with ALWAYS "winning" instead of experiencing the story that's out there. I'd like a fair variety. I don't have to always save the hostages.

If saying that quests should accord agency is being arbitrary, it's an arbitrary I can live with. I don't think "agency" equates to "I must be able to have every possible situation work out in a way that suits me". There's nothing removing my agency by putting in quests with horrible results no matter what you do after you take the quest--you still have a choice. You can skip the quest. But you can't tell stories like I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream If there must be a possible happy ending. If you're precluding the existence of an entire *category* of storytelling, then you're not talking about bad design or flawed design any longer. You're talking about what you like and don't like.

If you can't be bothered to actually read the post, you may not want to bother replying, either, because this has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with ANY of the observations I was making. My concern is that everybody likes to play in a different way. For instance, I have a younger brother who played Arcanum, and you know how he leveled himself up? He ran around doing the random map encounters until he was level 50 before he did ANY questing. No, I'm not kidding. That's how he wanted to play. If you ONLY get XP for doing ONE thing--completing quests--then you can ONLY level ONE WAY. And if you need to level to finish the game, then you HAVE to do quests. The game is channeling you into playing it a certain way. I'm just pointing this out. Did I mention it was a "deal-breaker"? No. I'm not complaining--I'm one of those people who compulsively goes and does EVERY QUEST and explores EVERY CORNER of EVERY MAP. I also hate grinding kills. It's boring as snot. This sort of thing suits my playstyle perfectly--I will get 100% of all the XP available in the game. That doesn't mean it suits other people, though, and I wanted to point that out. I don't see the point in limiting people in what they can do to level. I'm not even sure that the whole xp/leveling dynamic is an essential part of the gameplay experience. I don't care about other people's time vs. reward--if someone can figure out a way to "beat" the game in 20 minutes, more power to them. I do care if people with limited time but a desire to explore the entire game feel like they're pushed into playing certain builds or in certain ways because there's a radical functionality imbalance.

I'm not really sure I see the problem here. I don't know that they're building a game to be ideal for players looking to start up a shop and being farming. I think it's perfectly reasonable to establish a game with the assumption players will be adventurers doing quests. As opposed to adventurers exploring the countryside or adventurers seeking out ancient secrets or adventurers slaughtering bandits. I didn't say "they should reward you for non-adventuring activities like taking a crap". I said that if you only get XP for doing quests, they are forcing you to do quests. Which is 100% accurate, and you're NOT getting XP for crafting or fighting or exploring or stealing shopkeepers blind *unless they make those into quests*. Google the words "speed run" and the name of any RPG. Or "pacifist run". Just because they don't matter to you doesn't mean they don't matter to other people. And many, many people have actual jobs and lives so the amount of time they get to spend gaming is strictly limited, so the quantity of the game they can see in a given time is of vital importance to them. If you insist that all quests must adhere to this model, you're enforcing arbitrary limitations on what kinds of quests can exist. Every quest doesn't HAVE to be a complex opportunity for betrayal and redemption. This is a *type* of design, not *bad design*. It means, for instance, that you can't ever design a story where the consequences are ugly and evil no matter what you do, and the only way to "win" is not to play.

They haven't said too much about crafting thus far, but I have a thought--you don't often have instances in games with crafting skills where NPC's ask you to make them things, well, except as part of the "crafting tutorial" mini-quest. And that one guy in Skyrim who kept asking you to enchant his sword (but, of course, you couldn't actually do this). If they do have crafting in Eternity, I'd like to see it expanded more as a role-playing factor. Need to support the besieged fortress? They ask you to make a ton of health potions. Need to gain the guard captain's favor? Enchant his sword for him. Could be cool.

It's interesting to hear the devs talk about implementing a system whereby you get XP only for fulfilling objectives, because this is (largely) the system that Dungeons and Dragons Online has. The trouble is, depending on how this is implemented it can be JUST as broken as the "XP for kills" system. Personally, I think the best system is one in which you can get xp for doing ANYTHING, and you, the player, get to pick whatever way is the most fun for you to level. Like decimating hordes of kobolds over and over? Fine. Go level up that way. Like solving puzzles and disarming traps? Fine. Go level up that way. Like crafting? Fine. Go level up that way. XP for quest objectives is NOT a system that lets people do whatever they like in order to level their character--it is a system that FORCES you to QUEST in order to level. And, here's the thing, it is NOT equivalent if one character build can sneak past all the enemies, snag the Quest Item, and sneak back out, while another build has to hack their way through all those enemies. In terms of time invested vs. reward, the stealth method is absolutely superior. Granted there may be some difference if the non-stealth person REALLY LIKES hacking things up, but ultimately it's better to be sneaky in this system than to be a combat monster. Stealth becomes "OP", in that you get the most bang for your buck this way. If one method of completing a quest is drastically less time-consuming than others, there need to be extra benefits for the time-consuming methods. If you fight instead of sneak, you get loot, for instance. It'd be fine if the sneaky person can simply pickpocket all the enemies if they want the loot--that's time-consuming, too. And they might not be able to get some of the loot via this method unless their skills are INSANE. It may be advisable to put in actual (optional) objectives that involve finding odd little nooks and crannies or simply killing X creatures, so people who enjoy exploration and combat can get some benefit from those activities in addition to just plowing through the quests in the most efficient way possible. Not to mention that this sort of system rewards doing All Teh Quests, so you won't EVER want to reject a quest because that means turning down XP. Of course, they could put in a ton of quests that are mutually exclusive (or potentially mutually exclusive depending on how you handle them), but this is yet another bit of externally-enforced arbitrariness and needs to be carefully handled. Also, you may start doing what DDO does--put in roadblocks that cannot be circumvented except via one method. You can't insta-death them (they're immune). You can't sneak past them (the door can't be opened until they're dead, although I don't understand how that lever knows whether the monster is dead or not). Or, you have to gather your entire party at a certain place in order to proceed, stealthy and non-stealthy party members alike. Not to mention their whole "dungeon alert" mechanic. DDO is a fun game (well, fun for me anyway), but stealth is seriously under-utilized because the functionality is EXTREMELY limited. There's an actual level 2 quest called "stealthy repossession" where you can actually FAIL THE QUEST by killing mobs, and still people don't stealth it (not least because it's INCREDIBLY tricky to do so), they charge straight through. Arbitrary roadblocks are a big no-no, and keep in mind, if you have to be a certain level to progress due to limitations on what skills you can have or how high they can be, that is now an arbitrary road block that forces you to complete X number of quests. However, if you make the entire game scale to avoid this, you've now removed the challenge, which a lot of people also won't like. This is a serious and perhaps unsolvable problem. Granted, you don't HAVE to have these kinds of issues, but you do have to think about this kind of stuff in way in advance if you don't want to have them. Personally, i think trying to "balance" all these various factors (and others I didn't mention or think of) is going to turn out to be impossible. You are going to force people to do SOMETHING they may not enjoy (or at least, encourage them so much that anything else looks absurd) I think it would be better to literally let people level however they want by handing out XP for EVERYTHING--grinding kills, crafting, exploring, questing, chatting people up, every active thing they do. If, for some reason, you want to limit the ultimate possible power of someone who chooses to take their time and do, literally, everything, have a level cap. Or, you could try an even more radically different method: don't have levels or "XP" at all. This doesn't have to make the game less fun, nor does it have to mean that your characters don't get cooler as the game progresses. I did this to myself by accident in my most recent playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins. I was bored with having only a few abilities available at the early part of the game, so I used the console to give myself extra XP. However, I typo'd and gave myself an extra couple 0's which gave me enough XP to hit the level cap. I laughed a bit, and then decided to just go with it. I cranked the difficulty up to NIghtmare. And, here's the thing, I'm having a LOT of fun. The fights are interesting and challenging. I still get better from finding items that grant character points and from finding/buying better items. And, since I don't have to worry about trying to squeeze out every bit of XP I can get, I'm completely free to play the way I want to play. If I want to do All Teh Quests I can. If I want to skip some (I don't, but that's because of How I Am), I can. Just some thoughts.

What makes you think that HP represent "wounds"? This is an abstraction, after all. It is not necessarily true that 1 hp = a paper cut while 10 hp = a big gash. Maybe you don't even get "wounded" until you hit zero--it's not like any hits prior to that reduce your combat effectiveness, whereas even a small gash can do that. But what about the animated blood sprays, you say? I dunno, but non-lethal injuries shouldn't spray like that anyway. Call it artistic license. I'm just saying that complaining that you shouldn't be able to restore your HP in 2 seconds because a slash takes weeks to fully heal (although, depending on the injury it may not interfere with your activities much--or it may cause you to be crippled for life) has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with your mental assignment of what the abstract concept of HP "really" represent--when, in fact, there are no "real world" parallels here. I prefer not to have instant post-combat restoration simply because I like having to consider the effects of resource attrition over the course of several fights. Consuming health potions or using up healing spells is attrition too, whereas if you squeak through a fight with 1 party member still standing then everybody instantly gets up and restores all health/mana/stamina (apart from some totally insignificant "injuries"), that's not really attrition. It's as boring and degenerate a system as resting after every fight. So the question here isn't about some hypothetical realism vs. some other hypothetical non-realism. The question is: Do you want attrition of resources to play a major overall strategic role? or Do you want a system where resource conservation is unimportant and you're free to go "all in" at all times? I prefer the first, not least because when you have extended attrition, those little pointless fights (for which we will NOT BE GETTING XP, remember) can still be important even if the mobs have NO CHANCE of DEFEATING you--because dealing with them depletes resources you may want further down the road.

Or, it could be a situation like in feudal Japan where it was considered unclean to handle a corpse and if you do it in public you've marked yourself as a member of the unclean underclass (or an unclean foreigner) so people will treat you like dirt. Or, maybe if you demonstrate skill in picking locks, the local constabulary will be highly suspicious of you as a potential criminal. Or, if you're fastidious about cleanliness, the Inquisition will think you're a Jew. There are a lot of these things you can do without falling back on some "Magik R Evul" trope.

Actually, having large bonuses that don't stack make this a lot easier. Are you wearing a strength item? Yes. What's the plus on it? +6. Well, this one is +7. Will I do more damage if I take off the +6 item and put on the +7 item? Yes. It's a very simple comparison. Or, you can have something like this: All right, I have 4 items that add to strength. One is +2, one is +1, this one is +3, this one is +18%. Here's a new item that has +2 strength on it, but I'll have to take off this other item I have which is +7% crit. Will I do more damage overall with this setup or that setup? In DDO the stacking bonuses are generally both small and obvious. So, worst-case-scenario, you'll have a +8 strength item, a +1 exceptional strength item, and a +3 insightful strength item. It's REALLY straighforward, the only difficulty is finding places where you can slot all 3 of those bonuses when you also want +threat generation and heavy fortification and +intimidate and deathblock and +dex and +con and +hp and +resistance and +armor and . . . you get the idea. But figuring out WHICH bonuses you have is really easy.