ShadowTiger

Here are some good examples of games that have this feature (2nd half of list): http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalletOfHolding I think it is a good idea, especially if it is mostly automated for you when you are in a civilized area.

I think that the key to making a deep and interesting fighter class is to have a combination of mechanics. I have seen "spell-like" abilities such as cleave and whirlwind as well as "stances" that give you a passive bonus. There are also "shouts" and "auras" to boost your party or inhibit your foes. The problem is most games don't give you enough choices or variety, so it gets stale pretty quickly. I think that it would be more fun to have a realistic fighter class where you go to actual experts in the world and train under them to gain new stances and techniques that can be used during those stances. So you have to find NPCs, convince them to train you, and then potentially do quests for them in order to unlock new abilities. You can either dedicate yourself to one instructor (or one style with multiple instructors) or you can be a mash up fighter who mixes different styles together. Then combat should revolve around switching your stances in order to adapt to your situation. For a very generic example, lets say you have four stances and 5 techniques. Balanced Stance: No bonuses or penalties, but you gain access to a large number of techniques Offensive Stance: You move at normal speed but your attacks have a higher chance to hit. Defensive Stance: You move 25% slower and your chance to block is increased. Charging Stance: You move 25% faster and your attacks do bonus damage if they hit. Techniques: Shield Bash: Defensive or Balanced Stance only. Stun an enemy with your shield, interrupting or delaying his next action. Cleave Attack: Offensive or Balanced Stance only. Hit all enemies in a 160 degree arc. Crippling Strike: Offensive or Charging Stance only. Slow an enemy by 50% for 1 second per damage dealt by the attack. Distraction: Offensive, Balanced, or Defensive Stance. The enemy makes an intelligence check. If it fails, its defense is lowered for a few seconds. Knockdown Strike: Charging Stance only. The enemy makes a strength check or is knocked down by the attack. The more damage dealt by this attack, the higher chance of success. You could also do cool things like have it so there is a cooldown for switching stances and you have to go in a certain order. For example, you can't go from balanced directly to charging, you might have to go balanced -> offensive -> charging And if you wanted to go back to defensive stance you might need to go charging-> offensive -> balanced -> defensive, or else suffer a penalty from the sudden shift in momentum. This would allow offshoot stances, so there might be a special charging stance (say, charging elk stance vs charging bull stance) that lets you go directly to balanced stance, but maybe has less access to techniques as a trade off. This is something I came up with but never had a chance to get feedback on. Any thoughts?

I personally don't like slomo at all but its great to have more options while you play!

I think the best way to set up the economy is to have magic items be very rare and exclude them from the economy. Nobody buys them except eccentric collectors who have lots of money to spend, and nobody sells them because they are too valuable. You have to do quests or steal/kill to get them. That way the economy is just there for the first part of the game, just like in Baldur's Gate where after chapter 2 or 3 you shouldn't need to buy anything ever again. A new spell scroll or some magical ammunition might be nice, but your weapons and armor are pretty much set, only to be replaced by magic items you find while adventuring. Basically gold should be used for consumables only. Anytime you can buy items, it upsets the balance of the game. You can really twink yourself by selling off all the loot you find/steal in order to get one high level item, making the rest of the game too easy. However, if all the items are being heavily coveted/guarded by their owners, then you come to appreciate each one you earn much more.

I dislike games that don't give me full control over party members. I always play with AI turned off if possible, or else I take away potions and other items from NPCs so they can't waste them.

Arcanum has missing, interesting criticals, called shots, and a fatigue system that allows you to knock enemies uncontentious if they have too much armor/hp. However, being unconscious is not necessarily a defeat since you can recover and rejoin the battle. You can also get disarms and disarmors on a critical hit/miss. I don't remember it ever being a problem, it makes the combat interesting because of the chaos that occasionally ensues. It worked out well in that game because you got multiple attacks, at least 2 every turn if not more. So while sometimes you would waste your turn missing 3 times in a row, if you put points into your relevant combat skill you would usually hit. In that game hitting is pretty frequent, but damage is usually not too bad unless you are fighting with/against a bruiser. There was also a wealth of healing potions/spells that didn't take up your whole turn, so thats something to consider as well. I just wanted to bring up a game that is relevant to some people's discussions that maybe they have never heard about. I am okay with deterministic combat in a strategy game, but in an RPG I prefer more dice rolling. I think there is too much focus on specific mechanics when really the deciding factor of what is fun and what is not is simply getting the right ratio of ingredients. That requires playtesting and tweaking more than anything else. I think the idea presented so far is fine and should work out great.

You inspired to me to mess around in photoshop for a little bit. Its just a work in progress, but do you think you would like the final product?

Giant Wasps are not uncommon in fantasy games, they are a pretty cool enemy to fight. Giant flies are kind of lame if you ask me... Flying enemies seem like they take lots of extra animation work while looking weird hovering only a few inches off the ground. If you aren't going to have a Z axis I would avoid having any enemies whose predominant movement mode is flight.

Well, dispelling illusions should be intelligence checks and once someone succeeds it should be charisma checks to help your party members figure it out. Obviously dispel magic works just fine and is the principle method of removing illusions in many games. I think that illusion is thought of in a very mechanical way these days instead of a conceptual one. So if you look at modern D&D, an illusion spell either makes a creature run away from the caster or attack an ally, something specific like that. These are really easy to put into the game since they are limited in scope and very specific. Conceptual illusions are very vague and require detailed artwork to really appreciate what is happening, either to visualize the illusion or have reaction animations on the victim. I see an illusionist as a controller, someone who doesn't usually kill people but tricks and disables them. I guess you could trick someone into running off a cliff in fear of an imaginary monster but usually you would mess with their minds and then walk right by them to your destination. Maybe if you were really sadistic you would make yourself invisible to the enemy and slowly kill them with your dagger and relish their frustration as they tried to figure out what was attacking them, or laugh as they assume they are being attacked by their greatest fear. In a combat oriented game, illusions are not really the best thing to load up on. They also have a flaw of being useless against some enemies or some situations where direct damage spells are more universally effective.

I think a big problem in a non-grid based game is how you define the movement space. Do you have thousands of little pathfinding nodes, which seems like what the infinity engine used? There are tricks you can use to put simple pathfinding queues into the terrain to help the AI decided where and how to move. Pathfinding is the biggest issue in terms of performance, I have heard some estimates of it using 50% of the CPU utilization. Thats why I made a really simple movement system that generally goes in a straight line but can navigate around walls pretty well. It still needs a little bit of work, but you really don't need to check every possible option. A human wouldn't stand and look down 2 paths and decide which one is shorter before running to attack someone. A human would just pick one, probably favoring the right side, or the side that has the least obstacles so they could run without tripping or something like that. This is an opportunity to make it smarter with simple tricks. Make the monster look for other monsters. If there is some combat going on, the monster should either go help, maybe because its blood thirsty or maybe because it is curious. A smarter monster might go the other way to flank from the side, or run back to get reinforcements. It is much faster to only pathfind for one monster and have the other monsters use his results. This is especially true if there is a leader in the party. So basically, if you focus on how humans make decisions (a psychology degree helps here) then you can find lots of shortcuts to make your AI make human like decisions faster. The problem is if you are trying to make an inhumanly perfect AI that can match up against a player who can freeze time to think. That is impossible and should not be the end goal (the devs are smart enough not to go down this path of course). If you don't use the pause feature, the human should be at a disadvantage. One of the only reasons why my AI is beatable is because the game is slow paced. Originally we tested it at 5x the current speed and none of us could win, even though it has some major flaws (due to being incomplete). I guess one reason is that Kiting is a core feature of our game and our AI can do it very well. Also, you can't pause the game to think, so that is an issue. The way I set everything up is very ad-hoc. I just use weights for all the AI decisions. I made up arbitrary numbers and tweaked them a little bit. A standard melee attack is worth points equal to the damage it does. If it is AOE, add to it the range of the attack, perhaps using a multiplier. So you do 1-8 damage, your threat value might be 8 for that, +20 for your hit points = 28. If you have 10 hit points, but can cast fireball for 3d6 x 16 spaces, then your threat value might be 44 or 172 depending on addition or multiplication. You don't have to do any math if you don't want to. You could just give the monsters AI tags like "hates wizards" or "bully: targets enemies who are small stature", "bloodthirsty: targets closest enemy but switches to nearby enemies that are wounded". This is something that should be done anyways. Fighting a group of ogres and fighting a group of goblins should feel totally different in terms of enemy tactics. In most games the player behaves differently based on what monster it is, but monsters always behave the same. I would love in P:E for every monster to have their own behavior profile, as well as individual differences, such as this goblin is afraid of fire, and this goblin likes to flank. The nice thing about personalities is that they make the game more fun and realistic, but also are much easier to calculate then the best possible target to attack, either to kill the player efficiently or to make sure the battle isn't too hard. (You might want the AI to avoid twelve goblin archers from ganking the wizard in an ambush). So by combining all these techniques together I think its possible to make powerful AI without having to break the bank on performance. It does require lots of careful thought and planning and lots of creativity.

It looks like maybe this npc was added in the expansion pack and you have to do a few quests first. In Arcanum they had a few NPCs that wouldn't join you if you weren't a certain level, and they were usually connected to main story quests..

There is a "trick" where you steal items and sell it back to the same vendor for unlimited amounts of money, but I don't do that. Drinking a potion of master thievery is an intended feature of the game, though maybe they didn't expect me to have a pure rogue instead of a dual/multi class. The main issue is vendors not having a limited amount of money to buy your items with in this case... Arcanum did a good job with this and having wares/money replenish every once in a while.

I just wanted to say that there should be no performance limitations when writing AI. I wrote my own AI for a tactical RTS game that is an MMO so it is designed for hundreds of games to be played on one computer at the same time. I haven't finished the AI yet, but I have lots of ideas for making it feel human with some really simple decision making... because most of the time we act on our gut and don't evaluate all the possibilities. Pathfinding is an issue, but it can be avoided by using various tricks. Pulling is very easy to avoid by having monsters call for help, I would be surprised if this wasn't added to the game. The main issue that allowed pulling was a limited LOS in baldur's gate for example. If you only revealed one kobold in the mines, you could attack and kill him, and the kobold behind him wouldn't see you until you advanced further. In addition, sometimes monsters get caught in a choke point and line up, allowing you to take them one at a time or to kill them with a lightning bolt. Level design is very important to fix this. Kiting is only avoidable if you balance the movement speeds carefully and design the levels so you can't fire upon melee enemies who can't reach you. I think this is more of a design issue than an AI issue, though you want to avoid flip flopping.

Personally, I think skills should be used an equal amount of the time. It might be overbearing to say every skill occurs in exactly 100 dialogue choices each, and leads to you acquiring 25 items, 25 combat avoidances, 25 improved rewards, and 25 pieces of information. However, a structured system like this would ensure that all skills are equally useful. Rather than being balanced, I think good flavor for the skill uses is very important. I think certain skills should be more useful if you are dealing with the thieves guild compared to the church. The skills you choose should be thematic and not just mechanical. To balance usefulness, i think internally they will probably have some sort of point system where you look at how often you can use it. If it is dialogue only, then it should be given higher rewards than something which can be used all the time to craft items, for example. Then again, if crafting components are rare and dialogue skills are used all the time, maybe the weights should be reversed. I do hope they try to spread item acquisition across all the skills so you don't get "combat avoidance" skills and "treasure acquisition skills". The reason being, I want to kill all the enemies, combat is the best part of the game for me. It is kind of annoying when you get a dialogue option that uses your intimidate or diplomacy skill and all it does is avoid the battle... I was hoping something more interesting would happen.

Well, he just answered this question... but how much do you want to export the strategy to outside of battle and how much should it be about how you spend your precious few actions/round? I think some basic things like bring fire resistance to kill the dragon is great, as well as send the hammer guy to fight the earth elemental while the dagger guy goes and stabs the wizard. I don't really want to say, gosh, this next area has a bunch of heavily armored guys with swords, so I am going to wear X armor and wield Y weapon on all of my characters. That is just tedious and lessens the fun/challenge. I also choose my gear based on role playing and not really on what is optimal (though I optimize every other aspect : P ) So I would say, minimize the amount of pre-battle prep you have to do and focus more on whats going on inside the battle. Let most of the outside strategy be constrained to elemental resistances or avoiding status effects.

I don't think level scaling has much to do with grinding or pacing... I think those are level cap issues, see my post in that thread. Level scaling is really only covers the difference between an encounter at level 1 and an encounter at level 10. Are the enemies the same, is the challenge the same, are the rewards the same? I think this is really easy to figure out. It would not be the end of the world if everything was static, that is pretty much how BG 1 was (afik) and it worked great. The reason it worked great is because there were lots of challenging enemies. So if you accidentally walk into an ankheg's nest or a den of basilisk, you die horribly, you reload, and you come back leveled up with the necessary gear to survive. Encounter scaling to a small degree is fine, but it does dampen the feeling of your character improving. In most RPGs, your characters are extraordinary. You are the child of Baal or one destined to save the world, save an entire plane of existence perhaps. You should be able to go back and kill people who pissed you off now that you are all high and mighty. Good difficulty options helps greatly here. I would love to have a little level scaling slider, an encounter scaling slider, as well as the raw damage and health bonus sliders so that I can tweak the battles to just the right level. Also, there are some creative ways to do encounter scaling. It could be simple things like, if you don't complete a certain quest, then all the bandit encounters start getting tougher. If you don't go fight the boss of a certain main story quest right away, maybe he starts recruiting body guards, or starts setting traps in his lair. It would be cool to have a little sense of urgency when we decide what order to do quests in. In baldur's gate 2 there are many NPCs who claim to have urgent missions but you can wait months to do them with no penalty. This system could be a nice way to balance things out without punishing the player for managing his time badly.

I just thought of something that could work. If we put scaling aside, one of the issues is that players who do all the side quests in RPGs often make themselves really powerful, so when they finally go and do the main quest they are over powered. Players who rush through the main quest and never go and do side quests are usually under powered and will have difficult in some areas. The developers can balance the game by making the main quest really easy, like in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but that is really annoying for players like me. Obviously you can't do the opposite, where you say, sorry you died, go level up a bit. Some games have things like "You are too inexperienced to do this now," there is actually an NPC that says that in Icewind Dale. I think this is a decent way to go. You could also force the player to do a few side quests before progressing to the next part of the main quest by making up an excuse why its not ready yet. We need to martial an army! We need to investigate these clues first! We need to wait for the king to come back from his trip first! In any case, I think that the game should probably have multiple level caps. So lets say the game is split into 5 acts, maybe each act should have its own level cap. That way if you are doing EVERYTHING you don't reach level cap 40 or 50% through the storyline and feel your character flat-line. You will have a series of plateaus but you will eventually reach the next area where you can level up again and experience challenging battles and character growth again with multiple level caps. I think this is a good compromise to keep your characters on track and keep the difficultly balanced without sacrificing one playstyle or another. The key will be deciding how many level caps and how to explain it to the player. It makes sense in 4th edition DND where you have Paragon and Epic tiers. You could easily make it so at a certain part of the storyline at 1/3 and 2/3 completion you get to advance your character to the next tier. If you split the game into 5 acts, and you don't have multiple tiers of character progression, then you may have to resort to story based obstacles like you need to find vials of dragon's blood that you drink to improve your powers. At the end of each act you kill a dragon and get a new type of dragon's blood to drink. This type of thing could work but puts a strain on the writers to make it believable, coherent, and not seem contrived. So for you people who feel strongly either way, how do multiple level caps sound to you? You could potentially have it uncapped for the last act.

First off, the most important thing is to avoid the economy breaking. The main issue I have is with rogues. In baldur's gate 2, I drank a potion of master thievery and a potion of mind focusing or whatever for a large bonus to pick pocketing and stole enough gear from merchants to basically twink myself in the first hour of the game. Similarly, if there are tons of items hidden around and guarded by locks or traps, it can be somewhat unbalanced. Part of the problem with pickpocketing is that if you succeed you get great rewards, but if you fail, you get a game over basically. I think they need to think very carefully about this system and how to avoid unbalancing the economy. There is also going to be a crafting system if I remember correctly, that can have huge implications. In many games, crafting is pointless because you get the best items from loot drops and usually an item that took lots of saving up to build is obsolete after a short while. On the other hand, you probably don't want parties to be 100% self sufficient either, so finding a good middle ground will be difficult. In terms of stores though, I think there is a simple way to make it interesting but not overcomplicated. Have each merchant generate an inventory, perhaps static or maybe randomly decided based on what type of merchant and how wealthy of an area it is. Then have it so that as you buy items, the inventory gets replenished at a certain rate, up to a maximum. So lets say an alchemist has 5 healing potions. You go and buy 4 of them. You come back the next day and he has 2 healing potions in stock. You come back 2 weeks later and he is at 5 potions again. You could also make it random, so some days the inventory goes down instead of up, because some other band of adventures came and bought up all the stock. Similarly, maybe he got sick so one day he doesn't craft any new potions. It would be a simple system of die rolls to modify the inventory, though it would be cool if the shop keeper changed the dialogue to explain why the inventory is going up or down. Finally, in terms of magic items, I think that there should be 3 tiers of items. Common, Rare, and Legendary. Common items should be everywhere, fairly cheap, and could be things like healing potions, long sword +1, etc. It depends on how things scale really. This tier of items should be easy to buy and sell. Rare items are hard to get, requiring lots of components and skill in crafting, doing quests for npc blacksmiths, wizards, etc, or should drop from powerful monsters or be hidden in well guarded chests. This could be things like archmage robes, gauntlets of ogre strength, and a mirror shield. It should be difficult to find someone who can afford to buy these from you, and it should be very rare that you can buy one in a store. Legendary items should be pre-placed, very powerful with unique effects, and should have a boss + skill check or a difficult puzzle in order to get to them. A few should be part of quests, and a few should just be in side areas that you find by exploring. These should be items like the holy avenger sword, a ring of invisibility, or armor that has no encumbrance. These items should all be priceless so you can't sell them, though maybe you could trade them to an NPC as part of a quest. You should never be able to buy these.

I would like to see some detailed bonuses and penalties from terrain. If you look at Age of Wonders 2 they had a really neat system where you had a % chance of intercepting creatures, trees, rocks, cliffs, walls, etc if you didn't have a clear line of fire. The only way to be 100% sure you won't nail an ally in the back with a firebolt or a longbow is to move to one side or be directly behind the ally. You could hide behind trees or houses with your melee units during an assault until they got into range. I guess I don't really see 2D or isometric view points as a limitation, most of the games I enjoy have that visual style. I think that King's Bounty: Armored Princess does a great job with interesting tactical combat, which like Age of Wonders is a strategy game with RPG mechanics. Speaking of fog of war... I think stealth could be a really interesting thing to play with. Like being able to hide behind a pillar and get an attack of opportunity that interrupts an enemy as he runs by, that would be pretty cool. I think both enemies and the player characters should have to make a difficult choice between killing the enemy you can see quickly, or move cautiously to avoid the enemies that might be hiding behind the terrain.

I was pretty disappointed that firearms were being included. I don't really know the history of it, but it seems like WoW was a big influence in proliferating guns into the fantasy world. In many settings, it really seems out of place with no reason for inclusion other than the designers like guns. I thought Arcanum was well done, but they had 3 factors that made it a good addition. First of all, it was set in a period where there was lots of technology. Then they added cultural distinctions, where magical cultures disliked technology and vice versa. Finally, it had mechanical effects because technology could cancel out magic, and magic could cancel out technology. This encouraged you to have a diversity of weapons, abilities, and party members. For project eternity, I think firearms could work if they make it part of the various cultures. For example, if there is a group that has little or no access to magic so they furiously industrialized in order to compete, and maybe they had some sort of bonus such as heightened intelligence or geographical access to superior metals, it could make sense. In terms of balance, I think that it doesn't make a big difference. On kickstarter there was an interesting game about spanish explorers and I think they have a great balance going between firearms, melee, and bows. Obviously in this game the melee tanks also have guns but have low accuracy to compensate, and there is no reload times so its not as realistic as you guys are going for, but I think it looks like a fun and manageable system. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-D1Rh0y1FEY So even though I don't like guns in fantasy games, I am not very worried about it and I trust the developers to make it mesh well with everything else. I do hope that I can choose to play the game gun free and not have any major problems doing so.