tajerio

Some questions: 1. So you don't have a problem with magic being tossed in a world that doesn't behave as ours does? 2. What sort of world would that be? 3. And I don't understand these implications your going with? I'm genuinely curious because for myself and my friends, we want to have something familiar. Using worlds that behave like ours helps players and the DM to understand that world. Medieval type settings with magic helps players to identify what they're playing, Knights, Paladins, Fighters, Druids, Thieves, Magic users, etc. When you take an alien world that doesn't behave like ours, then it's a lot of harder to identify with it and the rules that govern it. 1 and 2 together: I don't think that game designers could ever make that kind of a world. We only really know one reality--the one in which we live. And that's the foundation of all fantasy creations. The world that's made is like ours except the parts where it's not. I know that's a tautology, but there's some underlying sense to it. Not everything can be modelled completely de novo, because no one has the imaginative capacity to create an entire consistent world that's simultaneously not ours. Let's take the example of, say, the Lord of the Rings. You've got elves, dwarves, magic rings, undead, wizards from across the sea who are really second-tier divine spirits, and all that kind of stuff. But people are still people. They use spoken language to communicate with each other, they want distinction and honor, they want happiness and wealth, they fall in love with each other, they develop friendships, etc. And they form systems of government, they make war, they engage in industry, they farm, etc. The nuts and bolts of how the world works, the basic human meeting of needs and psychology, stays the same. And that's true of just about all fantasy. The further away from those fundamental principles of how the only known sentient beings behave one gets, the harder it is to engage with that world and the less sense it makes. Which I think is your point. BUT: people put magic in their games or their books or what have you and then there's a question of "how does this new thing, that doesn't exist in our reality, act in tandem with these principles of behavior that don't change?" People are still going to hate, love, covet, fight, rule, work, sell things, and all that. That's the extent to which the world behaves like ours does, and it's something that no creator can get away from without going really weird. And a lot of those creators don't ask themselves that question. They don't say, "how does magic interact with all these activities that happen with or without magic? How does it change the way people live?" Sometimes it gets answered, but only superficially. And that's the crux of the issue. If, as you say, you want the world to behave like ours, then magic has to be integrated into the broader sphere of human activity. Your garden-variety fantasy tends to half-ass that.

Right. But again, you're not discussing the system's rules here, you're discussing campaign worlds or "settings". Two very different things in D&D. As I said above, that's absolutely true for D&D, at least ideally. But in a cRPG, the setting and the rules have to work together right out of the box. And in the context of PoE, that's what I care about. What's the scale of effort that's going to go into making the system and the world feel like a unitary whole? I obviously don't know the answer to that question, but I'm getting the sense that it's favorable. That's where I draw my line, by the way--the point at which the effort required to make a bit of magic work in the campaign system just becomes ludicrous relative to the utility/prevalence of the spell.

I agree entirely in the case of counters. My point was more that it's ultimately up to personal opinion in deciding if the line's drawn at "mitigation possibilities" or at "plausibility in the setting" (which could be before or after mitigation) or at "challenging for the average player" or any one of a number of criteria that could inform a designer's choice.

Then tell it like it is: You have a problem with the concept of magic itself. In ANY system its in. After all, no one in the real world has the ability to magically shoot bolts of electricity, or fireballs, or pretty much ANYTHING. Sure it does. Even In the forgotten Realms (one of the Worst campaign worlds ever created using D&D's rule system) Whole empires have gotten wiped out because of magic. In Baldur's gate 2, Bioware enforced laws against using magic in the streets of Athkatla. In Mask of the Betrayer, Obsidian developed a magic-based addiction system. D&D has whole classes devoted to anti-magic and hunting down magic practitioners. D&D has an alignment system and Priests who cast spells opposed to their alignment lose their spell casting ability. Not that any of this matters. D&D is a rule system. It's not up to the rules system to design the societies and worlds and police them. It's up to the creator of those worlds. I have no problem whatsoever with the concept of magic itself. Magic in fantasy games is great! I wouldn't feel strongly about this if I didn't like it. What I do have a problem with is when game designers toss magic into a world that otherwise behaves as ours does, and then don't follow through on the implications of doing so. I happily concede that a number of D&D campaign settings have made major efforts in addressing the effects of magic on society. But those efforts tend to produce something half-baked. Lots of specific questions get answered, but broad general questions kinda go by the roadside. And it's a bit disingenuous to dissociate D&D the rules system from D&D worlds, since those two things have been closely tied together as "D&D" in most people's imaginations since the 80s anyway (though not, of course, for the highly self-aware grognards). In the case of a cRPG, that distinction truly is meaningless. The world and the rules together ARE the game. So just pushing the responsibility from the designer to the DM to "make it work" doesn't help, because the designer and the DM are the same.

I'd draw it at mitigation possibilities. My rule would be: there should be a way to protect against anything. Thus, if I was designing a system, and my assistant came up with a spell there was no defense against, I'd either scrap it outright, or I'd design the defense against it. No need to draw arbitrary lines based on personal opinion (what you've been admittedly doing on this thread) Ultimately, every line in game design's drawn based on personal opinion. There's no other way to do it without the designer pretending some knowledge of objective truth they don't have.

@ Stun: OK, I'll try to respond in a sensible way. Insofar as I'm aware, no one in the real world has the ability magically to kill someone else. So the analogy doesn't work there. I'm just of the opinion that D&D doesn't take into account the effect that its rules system might have on societies at large. What does magic do to political economy? I don't know, and neither do any of the guys who designed D&D. Also, if you know of a psychiatrist who has been attested to induce death in his/her patients by means of creating phantasmal terrors, I suggest you report that individual to the proper authorities. But my point is NOT, "could that happen in the rules system?" My point is, "what does the POSSIBILITY of killing someone instantly without using a tangible weapon do to society? How does it transform it from what we know?" I was making a larger concluding point by the end of my post, not limited solely to death spells. I do agree that Josh didn't remove them for reasons of verisimilitude. @Hiro: That's absolutely true. Everything I post is my opinion. In my mind, Dragon Age tried to build a world that was verisimilitudinous in how mages were handled, how magic was produced, and that sort of thing. The devs at BioWare didn't succeed--they buried a lot of the explanation in codex entries, and a lot of it tried to work but just didn't--but they did try. In my opinion, it's just about never been done successfully. Because the vast majority of people don't really care about it, and why fix it if only a few people think it's broken?

The problems with implementing fleshed-out religions in PoE seem to me to be twofold: 1. Religions in fantasy generally tend to be either close analogues of real-world faiths, or an amalgam of elements from those same faiths. This is because a game developer can't hope in at most a couple years to match the sophistication of centuries or millennia. So they tend to gravitate towards the familiar. This can lead to people being offended, or to people like me with a background in religious history being like "lol that's just high medieval Catholicism with a Tengriist admixture." Which would actually be kinda cool to see executed, but never mind that. In any case, people taking offense due to similarity tends to be a danger because of... 2. Game developers specifically, and fantasy writers generally, often don't paint religions very sympathetically. They tend to be portrayed as neutral at best, and soul-suckingly evil at worst. And the scale tends to tilt towards worst. It's particularly hard for people in the industrialized Western world to get into that pre-Enlightenment (there's a good piece of marketing) mindset and convincingly show religious sincerity without also judging it and finding it wanting. That said, a world without major religions falls very flat indeed, of which fantasy's most egregious example would be the Wheel of Time series.

Just a touch ironic given what a hash you made of my last post.

By the criterion of internal consistency, "halfway decent campaign world" rules out D&D. It's fun, it's complex, there's a lot to dig into, but it does not all hang together very well at all, as one would expect from the pattern of its evolution. Nor does the mythology of the real world really earn a lot of points for internal consistency. First of all, There's nothing internally inconsistent about the way D&D applies its rules for Insta-death spells. They function precisely the same as any other binary spell effect in the system (like save or be stunned; save or be held; save or be turned into a squirrel; Save or lose your left arm; Save or go to sleep; and even Save or take full damage) So I have no idea what you're talking about. Second, I cited real world mythology because you claimed such a thing does not exist to explain Insta-death spells in D&D. But it DOES, as I've shown. Deal with it. Third, and finally, Fantasy role playing games are not supposed to emulate Physics, chemistry, 21st century jurisprudence, 16th century medicine or psychology or any other laws of science and society. Go play a first person shooter, or a flight Simulator or something if FANTASY is too unbelievable for your tastes. LOL wut? So...Play a warrior then. No one's forcing you to practice Necromancy in your game. In order briefly: 1. My issue isn't with whether the rules work like anything else. My issue is "what do those rules mean for the world at large," which is not D&D's strong suit. Though I don't expect to convince you of the point. Moreover, there's no rule that says what fantasy RPGs can and can't be. Some strive for a high degree of consistency and verisimilitude. Some don't. In my mind, fantasy isn't created by saying "anything goes, no real world rules can possibly hold," but rather by saying, "some things will behave in ways they couldn't in our world, but otherwise everything should plausibly hang together." But the central point is that either approach is equally valid in seeking to entertain, and to dismiss my taste by instructing me to play a different genre of game is hardly fair. 2. That's my point right there. Those kinds of questions aren't the kind of thing most people like. Which is 100% absolutely fine. 3. Thankfully, given what Josh has said about trying to ensure verisimilitude, I have high hopes that I won't wince much, if at all, at how magic is implemented. And I want to reiterate that I have no problem with insta-death spells as such. It's when the larger game world doesn't take proper account of them that I'm displeased.

Or none of the above, if you have a marginally intelligent DM running a halfway decent campaign world. Insta-death spells and effects of the various kinds are explained quite well in the lore, actually. Finger of Death, for example, Originally existed exclusively as a 7th level spell for Druids. Its "magic" is strictly divine based, and its function is to stop an enemy's beating heart. Literally. It forces a fatal cardiac arrest. According to the lore, its success or failure is dependent on whether the Druid's patron Deity has judged that the target has done enough harm to nature to warrant an immediate death resulting from a cessation of a major bodily function. In the game world, this is manifested via a saving throw, and of course, the Druid administering the God's will. Some of the others, like Wail of the Banshee, Vorpal Blades, Flesh to Stone, and a Monk's Quivering Palm do not need D&D lore to support them, as they all exist in very common Greek, Roman, Norse, or Chinese Mythology and AD&D just borrows them. They're also not that easy for a character to have in his arsenal, as the spells require rather expensive material components which get consumed upon their casting, the weapons are rare to the extreme and have their own intelligent wills, and of course a Monk in pen and paper cannot even advance to 13th level to get Quivering Palm unless he defeats the guy above him in rank in a duel. By the criterion of internal consistency, "halfway decent campaign world" rules out D&D. It's fun, it's complex, there's a lot to dig into, but it does not all hang together very well at all, as one would expect from the pattern of its evolution. Nor does the mythology of the real world really earn a lot of points for internal consistency. People just don't fully explore the implications of the cool things they design or dream up on sociology, economics, politics, and technology, which for most people is fine because their tastes don't run to that sort of thing. Mine do, generally, and though I can often suppress my complaints due to the need for acceptable breaks from reality, for something like an insta-death spell I can't. I want to know how societies police these things--wouldn't these components be controlled substances? What's the market like for them? How vicious is the trade? Who's out there trying to mass-produce this sort of thing? And wouldn't every single person who can perform one of these spells be regarded as a public menace waiting to break out? Don't nascent states want a monopoly on that kind of use of force? Or do they control the world, in which case Thomas Hobbes is bang on? Not to mention that the treatment of gods in their role as magic dispensaries makes me shudder. Most people don't care about that sort of thing, because it has nothing to do with their having fun and may actually prevent it, which is kind of against the point of a game. It's just my taste.

Where I draw the line, is in deciding the intersection between the Quadratic Wizard & Linear Warrior ultimately rests. I generally don't try to balance them out 1:1, as it makes no sense to do so. Swinging a chunk of metal--no matter how masterfully done, cannot and does not yield the same results as controlling the fabric of reality with your will. I accept that after a certain point, non-magical creatures/characters will have to rely on magical items or companions to survive direct confrontation with a powerful spell. This is not necessarily true in all game worlds. "Controlling the fabric of reality with your will" is basically what goes on in D&D magic, yes. But D&D magic is not by any means the only possible kind. Magic can have all kinds of different limitations placed upon it, because it exists solely (insofar as we're aware) as a fictional concept. Insta-kill spells don't have to exist, and they don't even have to be possible. There's also no reason why magic can't be immensely tiring, highly time-consuming, etc. I always find it a little bit annoying when people assume that magic must be supreme in all possible worlds. Now, I agree that for PoE, hearkening as it does to the IE games, magic altering the fabric of reality makes sense. But consider also that all party members, at least, are harnessing the power of their souls to aid them in combat. So for that reason also, the Linear Warrior/Quadratic Fighter thing doesn't necessarily need to hold true, because everyone's drawing on something that doesn't fit with our observed scientific laws. I draw the line at insta-death spells. Massive damage spells are fine, but just ending life without actually doing a physical kind of damage always seemed a bit stupid to me. It either wasn't intelligently explained in the lore, was an incredible power jump both practically and philosophically from anything else that could be done, or completely wrecked any hope of a plausible world structure. And often all three.

I guess IWD2 doesn't count as an IE game then. LOL And you're wrong anyway. Rangers could wield and thrive with melee weapons in all the IE games. And mages had spells like phantom blade, black blade of Disaster etc. to get their sword-wielding fix. not to mention spells they could use in tandem with the above to make them good in melee (tensors transformation, haste, improved haste, stoneskin, spirit armor etc.) But really, dismissing the multi-classing/dual-classing argument as something that "doesn't count" or "doesn't hold water", will not make it go away. The ability to dual or multi-class IS there to give the player near unlimited build choice options within the class system, yes. The fact that there are cleric and mage spells specifically designed to enhance specific multiclass combinations is just further proof. The hell it is. If I'm building a melee mage in POE, will the build be flexible enough to hold its own in melee with a warrior? Because you could do that in the IE games. Because everything was less rigid. I'm not trying to dismiss the multiclassing argument. I think it's perfectly valid. But the multiclass argument muddies the water when talking about the flexibility of individual classes. That's all I'm saying. I agree that saying all the classes of the IE games were incredibly rigid was a bridge too far on my part. But I think it can't be denied that the classes were immensely asymmetric in how flexible they were. Compare mages to fighters in that regard. Multiclassing for most classes was basically de rigeur if you wanted a character to perform a role that wasn't optimal for the initial class. And of course in IWD2 and all 3e influenced games, flexibility was also achieved by having a panoply of feats. Basically, that's ensuring flexibility through complexity, which makes eliminating clearly optimal choices pretty difficult. Josh seems to be ensuring a different kind of flexibility by giving each class a broader initial range of capability to occupy, then having the player modify that through attribute allocation and talent choices, of which I doubt there will be hundreds. And that speaks to his design goal of trying to make player choice more meaningful by eliminating objective superiority of certain choices. I understand you hate that with a fiery passion, but that's pretty clearly a central mission here, so debating its merits may be interesting but is also ultimately fruitless.

It would seem plausible that some classes would have different options in certain areas though. One could imagine a cipher having different choices when talking about animancy, since the cipher messes about with other people's souls constantly in combat; a priest might have different choices in a religious dialogue or a temple; a druid might have the good old "talking to animals" option, as might a ranger. That sort of thing seems eminently reasonable to me.

...at which point they stopped being purely mages. An optional multi/dual-classing mechanic that the majority of players probably ignored is a pretty poor substitute for making the classes themselves fundamentally more flexible. But that's just one example. What about the fact that there are no dump stats and fighters can benefit from high Intellect? What about the fact that everybody can be stealthy and pick locks if they invest in the appropriate skills? What about the fact that every class gets the same amount of skill points and additional max health per level? These are things that you and other people in this thread have probably complained about, things that make the classes LESS rigid and distinct, not more. You can't have it both ways. You claimed rigidity in combat roles of the classes in the IE games, citing the weapon choices of mages as an example. But the fact that those games gave you Multi-classing capability and dual classing capability proves otherwise. Literally. And so does the entirety of IWD2's character generation system, where any class can use any weapon-type even without multi-classing. If you want to now shift focus to non-combat skill rigidity, go right ahead. But it's a different subject. Except for IWD2, that argument doesn't hold water. The individual classes themselves were incredibly rigid. So multiclassing was in to provide the flexibility that each specific class was almost entirely incapable of providing. If you want to argue that the flexibility provided by multiclassing is better than that provided by the more inclusive classes of PoE, go right ahead. But it's a different subject.

I sympathize with the sentiment here. I think the design as laid out here is very interesting and does some cool stuff. But it appears as though the ranger's locked into ranged fighting and the rogue into melee. And as you say, I don't see the route for the characters to get outside their prescribed role. The variation does all seem to be within the role, rather than between roles. Here's hoping that some of the later paired updates show us some more flexibility.

I'm really excited to see that the animal companion is mechanically well integrated, rather than being a extra bag of HP for the party to send in. Not that I expected that from you guys, but still it's nice to see the reality of it.

Yeah, it's a location you can explore in the third act. It's more interesting than just about anything else in SoZ, and it's a fairly difficult couple of fights.

People who don't agree on a fundamental level are probably better off just not arguing with each other. And certainly no one else is being convinced by the occasionally vituperative walls of text.

Many of them which are on this forum. All of them should be even, since they require an OE-account for the backer portal. As for 'objecting being a minority' actually amongst the ones who responded in reply to J.E. Sawyer the majority wasn't positive about the idea, very few came out positive for it. Now this might trigger a 'still minority of backers to vote negative' reply, but it remains of the backers replying the majority is against it. Would it be too far-fedged that this would be the same share of proportians amongst all backers? It very well could be... It *could* be, but there's absolutely no way to know. This game has 75,000 backers. Nothing even close to a representative number of those people post on these fora, and I'm very willing to bet that nothing even close to a representative number of those people read these fora either. The absolute most one can say about this forum community in terms of representation is that it is the group of people who are most inclined to voice their opinions.

Embrace the Monte Carlo Way: There ain't no passive in this here aggression.

I think the problem here is that a high score in any attribute shouldn't penalize the character except in the form of the opportunity cost of not having more points in other attributes. But in this case, a benefit of having a high INT comes with a cost also directly associated with having a high INT--the double-edged sword of bigger AoEs. That makes the choice of high INT substantively different from the other choices of attribute in the game, which is obviously something that Josh wants to avoid. To me, this is one of the cases in which the "sometimes" of your aphorism applies, since the elimination of the non-opportunity cost just results in a head-scratching subdivided radius solution. My solution would be instead to get rid of the expanded AoE and figure out some other benefit to slap on INT. Seems more elegant but possibly more difficult to work into the game as presently balanced.

Every time this question has come up in any of the press surrounding the game, Josh has made it abundantly clear that a pacifist playthrough won't be possible. All I've drawn from what's been said is that some encounters can be "won" through the application of solutions other than combat. I'm quite confident that the considerable majority of XP-giving objectives will require some combat to complete. I also don't entirely understand why it is that people seem to be assuming an "I win" dialogue button for objectives achieved without combat. Couldn't Obsidian make the player think a bit to pick the right series of options, based on what might have been learned about the situation from the game? Doesn't seem like that would be a stretch. And there's not even a guarantee that the non-combat resolution method is "belly up to the guy in charge and Charisma him." Sneaking or the application of some other skills will almost certainly be in there too. Moreover, I'm pretty sure that the devs are aware of the challenges that the Path of the Damned mode poses to an objective-based XP system. Seems to me like the complaints are really more about objective-based XP than PotD.

It would appear not--looks like that moved over to Intellect.

I'm loving the tweaks to the attribute system, particularly since it's clear that some changes were made at least partly in response to reasoned feedback from the fanbase. That's the glory of direct developer-customer relations!

@Stun: Ideally, would you want changes to BG2's character creation and encounter design, or would you like those mechanics intact with new lore and story? I don't think I quite grasp your position.