Elerond

I writed down some of my thoughts about fatigue system earlier in this thread

One situation which I can think where this should happen is when party goes against enemies who have numerous ammount of gunpowder weapons as light armours don't give nearly any protection against them, so it would probably be better if most of the character in party have armour that can withstand punishment from oppening volley. This also means that I think that characters should not be able to dodge (at least very weakly) bullets. So best options against gunpowder weapons are heavy armours and invisibility. But as gunpowder weapons are rare, so players should be able to get infromation before hand where they probably will meet many enemies with them and so they can prepare their party accordingly against such threat.

I think mix of different naming types could be best way to approach this subject. Hide armours for example could be named after animal/s which lose their hide in making of the said armour, for example there could be wolf hide, boar hide and bear hide armours and this character same protection as what those animals have in the game. And viable hide armour could come from exotic beast like yeti. But I don't see any bad in that if wrought leather armour is better in end game than armour which is stich from hide without additional protective prosessing. If style will cost in protectiveness, then it will cost. But when it comes to naming wrought armours, in my opinon cultural naming is nice way to do that. Common versions of the armours should have common name, as most of the armourers can do them, but if armour uses special wrought technique, for example similar what was used in Damascus steel weapons, armour should have cultural name that tells orgin place of technique, or where traders buy most of the stuff that is made by using that technique (case of Damascus steel). Or name could came from art styles what are used in armour, like gothic plate. I like cultural names for things because they give setting more life and make armours and weapons sound unique from other systems. And one thing which I like lot is that if it is difficult to say for sure which of the armours is best as they all have things where they excel but they also have things where they don't have such fine performance.

I had to put this commercial here as it shows cutting and thrusting capacities, but you can also see its weaknesses and probably could deduce why it sometime better use finesse instead of raw power. End of the video you can see that great sword is also good throwing weapon

I loved in Overlord how your treasure chamber showed how much room that million gold coins really need Poor Overlord Rich Overlord

I think this depends how über other magic weapons in the game are. So in my opinion magic should improve muskets and other gunpowder weapons with same amount as it improves other weapons.

Fixed or slow increasing. In fixed sytem there could always be some methods to increase your attributes like manuals in BG, or perks and medical procedures in fallout, but increase should be very limited. In slow increasing system you could maybe get one attribute point per level or per multiple levels, character should never be able to double his, her or its orginal attribute value. In my opinion systems that uses either of this systems it's much easier to keep on balance and game designer don't have any need for such comical level scalings what you can see for example in TES IV: Oblivion, and this is because character will not chage god-like creature so easily (health points increase on every level can of course make you somewhat immortal in high levels as we are seen in Fallout 2).

Agree about armor, damage types and skills affecting fight. But how you make same fighting style for 2H sword and for rapier? You mean you will swing rapier same as you would do with 2H sword? not going to happend and its going agains your own philosophy. And again you just cant put out different damages on different weapons. A lot of people in cRPGs love to gather more powerfull weapons. If ''power'' of weapong doesnt exist it will be boring to finding still same stat sword only with different skin. You guys would be great at designing something like Demon Soul but this is old skool cRPG (mostly based on P&P) Rapier with 2H style, character probably will get mostly negative bonuses from that as rapiers are not usually designed to be used with two hands, but if character wants to be stupid then why not? And of course there can be better weapons, for example steel sword would give more bonus to armor penetration than iron sword. So good sword don't make character become a swordmaster, but makes swordmaster work much easier. There are P&P systems that have more complex and realistic combat systems than that which I designed in 5 minutes (so it's far from perfect). And in my opinion old school don't mean that you must follow in D&D footsteps, in my opinion when you design entirely new rpg system you should probably take account what things you love in old systems and what things in your opinion are ridiculous or could been done better and then try to do fix them.

That is probably true if there is no need to hit on specific area. But in fight you must take account what your opponent does and where you need to hit him, her or it. Because if you wave your weapons like weather vane you will probably die. If I design fighting, weapon and armour system in the game. I probably would take approach where every fighting style gives it benefits to blocking, dodging and attacking. Character could use weapons with different styles, but weapons will give plus or minus to styles benefits depending on how good they fit on that style. Each weapon should probably also have damage types what it can inflict (for example slashing, blunt, piercing, thrust). Armours should have damage thresholds for each damage type and they should give plus and minus points to blocking, dodging and maybe even in attacking. And damage which character can inflict depends about his, her or its attributes, skills and feats. So character's damage dealing ability would mainly depend about his, her or its know-how and equipment and fighting styles only gives character bonuses or minuses on different aspects. In my opinion such approach would give more realistic feel and it's relatively easy to balance.

They would probably try do same thing what they did when they got hit from flaming oil shot from siege weapon. Dodge and hope that they don't die.

I think that no major healing/resurrection/etc. spells is very good choice lore wide, as it always destroy my the suspension of disbelief when there is assassination of major npc or s/he dies some other way and world is on turmoil and nevertheless that same world is full of people who have ability to resurrect dead. For example why our character in baldur's gate didn't have option to take Gorion's corpse to candel keep where there are several priest who can resurrect people. Or why my priest character in Baldur's Gate 2 can't resurrect Khalid, and etc. things that have always bugged me in D&D and Forgotten Realms. Or why there is people dying in diseases when every town has priest with cute diseases spell, it just don't make sense to me especially when there is no explanation in lore (in games) why it is so. So fully support lores that say that magic don't have insta healing powers and it can't bring dead back to life. Because then it much easier to make believable world where bad things happen. But if magic has ability to cure most of the misesry from world without any great cost to its users, but they some reason don't do such thing, I can only think what evil bastards those mages and priest are.

Balancing those things out is still going to be tricky though ... a lot of the combat in IWD or BG could run 4-5 turns (especially at the start) ... if my fighters all drop to the floor with fatigue after 2 rounds it is going to force consistent tactics like missile attacks or other things ... as long as they can balance it so my fighters can last more than 5 turns of combat without passing out I will be okay with whatever they call the two statistics In BG and IWD your warrior can drop dead after one combat turn if enemy got critical hit on you (especually at the start). And with bad luck fighter will go down in couple turns even if enemy don't get any critical hits, so in my opinion it is big plus if they only drop unconscious istead of dead. Usually fights last several turns because both sides missed most of their attacks, but that had nothing to do with combat resource points.

Megaversal?

In my opinion subtraction is probably best method to use. Because this make it possible that there difference between dodging/blocking the blow and armour stopping it and I don't like pure percentage reduction as it means that armour can't stop even weaker blows fully (except when armour gives character immunity against certain kind of damge). Damage threshold and percentage reduction could also work, but in my opinion pure threshold system is better, because it tells outright how much damage armour can endure before it gives up and in my experience it make balancing damage dealers and protection easier. And if there is need for different damage types you can give an armour different thresholds for each damage type, for example chain mail could have damage threshold 4 against slashing damage and 2 against piercing damage (this with presumption that most weapons do damage with in range 1-10).

I vote NO for talent trees in PE. In my opinion they are stuff of more action oriented games. Talents in rpg's should be limited only by attributes or skills.

You haven't chose what will be your title

Isn't the point of Kickstarter specifically to avoid the pre-order legal issue by stating all the backer levels are donations? There was some long discussion about it in one of the Update threads pertaining to international stuff, but I didn't pay that much attention to it--as to specific reward levels, I suppose that could be listed as "gift" for customs, but I really don't know how that would work out ultimately. Legally, there were no purchases. It is, but for example here in Finland there was depate earlier this year about are kickstarter product rewards gifts, pre-orders or something else and this was because Finnish law don't recognize such thing as crowd funding. Reason for depate was of course taxing issue and it ended without court ruling as writer whose book funding caused depate returned funds, when she got funding from else where, so I don't know what Finnish court of law think about issue, but it is not as right forward as one would think. And I have told that Finland is not only country with such legal issues with kickstarter projects. But when we are speaking about foreing (from Finnish perspective) kickstarter projects our authorities don't care as long we pay VAT for product what we got. And how contracts will work is issue where we will haven't aswer until in future after first court ruling or law change (as it with all new things, goverment is always in the second train). And I don't know about that Legally, there was no purchaces part, because you can find this part from kickstarter's terms

The mega-dungeon would be a perfectly contained testing ground for mechanical purposes. The only item that Obsidian can't and won't allow for full testing is a full game based on dialogic content (as Adam's quote says), and that's great. With the sheer number of potential beta testers due to their KS add-on setup, I'm sure there will be leaks, and Obsidian probably won't be able to maintain power over an NDA. Even though we know the beta won't be the full game, there's still a huge range of what content would be available for testing--percentage of landscape quests, how much of the mega dungeon, etc. But it's too early to tell, not to mention everyone has a different level of spoiler-tolerance. For people who got a bundled beta key, no point in trying to decide before the late 2013/early 2014 beta period, I'm sure. For people who did an add-on and need to decide earlier whether to convert to something else.... um, well, decide your own tolerance, I guess? And even if more of the game is available than you want to spoil, you could always limit yourself to a specific area. In many countries you can't add conditions after purchace of the product and many of this countries view that product rewards from kickstarter are pre-orders, so in these cases Obsidian can't add legaly binding NDA anymore to their beta-keys, but I don't see why they would even have such needs as they openly share information about game and discuss it with us, which was one of the reasons why they wanted to PE via kickstarter. So if person has really low spoiler tolerance I would suggest that s/he keep away spoiler allowed parts of the forum after relase of the beta.

For me beta can't ruin the game, because I can see them as different experience from final product, and spoilers don't really bother me as in my opinion great plot gets better every time you experience it and you found new viewpoint for the story.

Combat resources Information tidbits what we have got from Obsidian, we know that they plan use at least two combat resources Health and Stamina. Where health represent characters overall condition, like how many wounds, broken bones, bruises characters has and these can be healed only by rest and time. And stamina represent characters how badly characters are shaken by hits which they have suffered, like hit to stomach causes character to be winded up, blow to head causes blurry vision for the character, so such damage which character will recover quickly if character can take short break from the battle. But started to think if there should be more combat resources than this two for example fatigue. My idea about fatigue is that character's actions like hitting, using soul powers, running, etc. will consume fatigue points and when fatigue point go zero character's actions would be slower or otherwise hindered or maybe they start eating stamina, as character tries to operate in state of exhaustion. So fatigue would represent character's exhaustion level. Adding fatigue as combat resource could also work as one way to explain why some characters wear light armor instead of heavy armor. As fatigue gives option to give armors an exhausting factor, for example full plate will stop nearly all damage from hits, but it will also double/triple amount of fatigue what character's actions fatigue cost. How combat resources should be determined? Usually in computer role-playing games characters get more health as their level rises which causes them to be some what utopistic god-like creatures that don't die from anything less than apocalyptic feat. In my opinion this is not the best approach to this question. So with more than one combat resource in use I would like to see that character's health would be quite constant through the game. I think that amount of the character's health points could be determined for example by character's constitution (or similar) attribute, using it with factor of one or two. So if character has constitution of 15 character could have 15-30 health points and only way to get more health points is by rising character's constitution or possibly by feats. In max level character should be able to have max double of health points compared to level 1. This way normal weapons from the start of the game will not become useless against character and this will lower need for utopistic high level magic items and they can be as rare as they should be. This system also makes armors to be more important as your character can die fairly quickly without one. Stamina point development in my opinion could follow health point development from other games and so in end game to knock out a character you probably need sleep or other spells, abilities or weapons that do great amount of stamina damage and otherwise character will fight to bitter end. Why stamina should increase if health don't increase, I come with this idea by watching boxers, as newbie boxers are usually pretty easy to knock out where professional boxers can much more hits in their head before they are knocked out, so my opinion is that one can get better tolerance against knock out via training and regular beat downs, but gut wound will be serious even for most trained and experienced characters. And if fatigue is added as resource it should have similar development with stamina, and you only need to look professional long-runners to see why. Armors Often in role-playing games armors are represented so that better armor will make hitting harder, which is not bad way to do it, but in my opinion it is somewhat over simplified way to do it. And I would like see rather system where armors absorb damage from the hits. For example plate mail could absorb 5 point of health damage and 10 points of stamina damage and regular broad sword could do d6 points of health damage and three times of that stamina damage, so only most deadliest hits from sword can penetrate through armor but half of the hits will cause stamina damage. And against critical hits armor don't give any protection as critical hit means that character was hit in such place where armor don't give protection. Addition to armor characters should have dodge ability which gives them change to avoid blows or make it harder to hit them. Dodging should cause loss of fatigue for character and so character can't anymore dodge blows when s/he is too exhausted to move. I am not sure if armors should cause additional hindering for dodging than added fatigue cost, because that is already very punishing for low level characters, but for high level character it may not be such punishment but I am not sure that it should be. That is quite enough for this time That was my vision which direction combat resource usage and presentation in PE should go, with some opinions about armors and dodging, but I am also interested about your opinions and visions about subject and combat as whole in PE, so be good and share them with rest of us.

I like more Värtinä when it comes to bands that sang songs that use Finnish folk song thematic style in them. But both are wonderful band and nevertheless I don't think that this kind songs or artists are good fit to Project Eternity, but one can always still promote them .

Yes it is possible to create destructable objects that are not pre-rendered, but it is also possible to create destructable objects that are pre-rendered, as you only need make destructable object different image from baground (a sprite). When you have destructable object as different image you can do another version of that image where object is destroyed and swap destroyed version of object to be shown when object's statuts is destroyed or you can do even destory animation where you have multiple images that illustrate destruction of the object and in game you show them as series of images in short period of time and it looks like object explodes or something like that (this way you quite easilly do trees that look that wind moves them or water which looks that it flows). But artists workload is added by every object which you want be destroyable, moveable and etc. able, which is reson why I think that such objects should be quite rare unless artist have too much freetime .

My opinion to on going depate is that when you have character which you can yourself define like in bgs or fallouts. Game should not need to know your characters motivations it should only react to what your character did. And even if npcs in game for some reason want to ask what was pc's motive to do things what s/he did, it should be made possible pc to give any motivation s/he thinks will best suite his or her purpose with said npc, this should not be necessary the real motivation behind pc's actions. For me defining my own character and deciding his or her motivations, goals and ways to acomplish them are those features which makes game to be a rpg. More this things a resticted in game less I feel it to be a roleplaying game

I liked AP's idea and general feeling to be James Bond style spy. Multiple options to solve thigns was nice too. What I didn't liked was boss fights, skill development and mini games. So my final vertic is that game is good, with some flaws, but should definetly give it a try, at least one play through,which take usually 20-30 hours.

So what, by your definition, wouldn't be lazy design? Having everything look exactly the same? Because that's what would happen if the designers went for functional realism. Going back to cars all we'd have would be a sea of Corollas and Lancers with the high end ones only being distinguished by their Nos decals (your diamonds and gold accents). You can do different looking things that are designed to function in their intended purpose. You only need to look how many different looking functional historical full plates or swords there are. If PE includes all of those designs they will have thousand different looking weapons and armours in the game. And you can distinguish better versions of equipment from weaker ones by saying that they use better materials and visualaising them using decorations that don't nerf their purpose. Here pile of rapiers that which all have more or less differing look. Here group of broadswords Here are several cavalry sabres And for example also poleaxes can have several different looks And nice picture which shows how sword design changed during middle ages.