tajerio

if the probable enemies can be fairly deduced from the situation, I don't mind preparing for them. If I'm going to a tomb in a magical world, then yes, I'm definitely making sure I've got my defenses against the undead ready. The problem occurs with encounters the player has no reason to suspect will either a) occur or b) require specific counters. And those happen in the IE games, and are the worst. More generally, I think there's still room for prefight defensive strategy without having prebuffing. I can have consumables along that will help me drop debuffs or better resist my enemies, and have my wizard bring a grimoire with a spell or two to help defenses against a specific type of enemy, without having to pause before every fight for Death Ward/ Stoneskin / Haste / Protection from Evil.

I have two problems with IE/D&D style prebuffing. In the first case, there are buffs that can be applied before combat that are very general and always useful--haste and stoneskin spring to mind. That is, as people have said, a bit boring and deprives the player of meaningful choice. It becomes something one does by rote, without any conscious thought, not something one pauses to evaluate for strengths and weaknesses. In the second case, there is instead an array of specific buffs, some of which apply to only a very small number of situations. Nothing wrong with that. But there's no way for the player to know those buffs will be needed until it's too late, for the most part, without metagaming (which I despise having to do). So instead there's a situation wherein the player character would have spent hours gathering information and arraying precautions, because the player character is actively trying to avoid death in the course of doing a highly dangerous job, but the player is just trying to have some fun, and instead the player character dies, the player doesn't have fun, and everyone loses. Thanks to Josh, it appears we'll be dodging both of those.

The problem I found generally with status effects was their immediacy. In BG running across a couple basilisks unprepared was as good as game over for a low level party, because the effect was immediate if the saving throw was failed. If petrification, for example, initially slowed the character upon a failed save for 30 seconds before fully petrifying them, the player would at least have a window of opportunity to try counter it. I never found level drain that bad in comparison after the first few times I encountered it, because while it affected you immediately upon being hit, you still had time to dispatch the enemy before dying from level drain or casting a restoration spell. I think giving the player time to counter status effects would reduce the need for reloading and pre-buffing, and the game flow would be interrupted less often. I agree with this wholeheartedly. If an enemy is going to lay the hammer down on me with a massively debilitating status effect, one of two things is required. Either 1) make it known to the player beforehand that here there be level drain, so that the player can be ready with a specific counter, or 2) have a generalist counter like Greater Restoration broadly available for multiple characters through spells and consumables. On the whole I prefer option 2--I thought the plethora of D&D spells for neutralizing and countering this and that demanded a level of metagaming that signally detracted from entertainment value.

I think very elaborate instances of asymmetric play as mentioned in the OP should be fairly small in number, because that's a lot of balancing and branching for the devs to handle for anything but a very important fight. But generally speaking, I agree that ideally different skill sets should lead to different outcomes. The problem is that a multiplicity of branching paths for every encounter simply isn't feasible if they all lead to different outcomes, and may not even be feasible if they all lead to similar outcomes. My guess is that you will see a few instances where different skill sets do lead to substantively different results, and a number of instances where different skill sets lead to different methodologies for producing similar results. Asking more than that on this kind of budget is probably too much.

On the point of story, I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy going on here. Planning for a sequel does not ineluctably lead to chopping up one story into tiny bits for each game. There's clearly tenable middle ground between a completely self-contained game and a series of episodic games. As for mechanics and encounter design, I agree with Infinitron in that if the devs decide to have an import-character-from-first-game sequel, then they shouldn't have epic-level enemies in the first game. Personally, I've never liked the ability of characters to ascend basically to godhead in cRPGs, and I'd prefer it if we didn't get to the point where a neverending stream of lich kings and great wyrms were the only way to challenge our characters. Level 15 in 3.5 is about as high as I ever want to see my character go in this kind of game.

Do classes still get a static bonus to other defenses, or are they now completely reliant on attributes ? E: And because Health and "Carry slot" are kind of long term situations, there is a risk of this attribute becoming ... not really a dump stat, but a stat that you may not want to increase very highly. Inventory slots does limit tactical options in the field and Health does increase your longevity over an adventuring day, so it seems that it might be a good stat to chuck a few points into - but if there are too many rest locations, or the player has the ability to leave an area without consequence and return to the Stronghold to rest, I don't see too many people having max strength. Perception is another one that seems a bit situational, on classes that aren't really focused on dealing damage, it doesn't really make too much sense to put any points into perception - rather just put those in Dexterity instead as you are getting accuracy (thus more consistent damage) and Reflex. Are attributes on a 100 point scale ? That may not be an issue though. I see your point on strength. But if I recall correctly, you can hit critically on something with a duration effect, right? So perhaps Perception would still be worth it for status effect types. Then it might be a kind of tradeoff between having high Resolve (when all hits have expanded duration) and high Perception (critical hits have enormously expanded duration). Though I don't know if that's how the system works, obviously.

Got no K. Thanks

Sorry, I don't follow. Why having a different way for various class to access soul magic (like Monks mortification of the flesh, Ciphers meditation, Priests devotion/ritual, or Mages mastery of occult) make this like a non party base multiplayer game mechanic? I think he's trying to get at "each class is so different that you're gonna end up in a position where it would be better off being played by 6 humans, than 1 human playing 6 characters". With IWG/BG it wasn't "that bad" since they pull from AD&D, so "Fighter is the tank, mage is the weakling in slot 5 or 6" (with very little variation) and it was pretty easy to pause, see what was going on, figure something out, and unpause. *What I mean is, in AD&D, you can pretty much always expect a fighter to be a decent tank, or a paladin to fall somewhere between a cleric and fighter, or a cleric to be a healing battery but mediocre melee combatant, or a Druid/Ranger to be about as good as a paladin, or a rogue to be indispensable in a dungeon, or a sorcerer/wizard to be about as strong as wet paper (but massive offensive/defensive capabilities if allowed to use them). Familiarity breeds boredom in addition to contempt. I'm happy not knowing what I'm doing at first and having to figure it out, rather than leaning on the crutch of an established system of roles and capabilities.

Well, we don't know anything about what they can do yet. My hope is for a fast ambush predator with a pounce, pin, and shred style of attacking. And given the camouflage look they have, I'd be jumpy the whole time in forests.

I don't know. I like it when designers defy my fantasy preconceptions. For instance, if these trolls were extremely swift ambush predators that travel in packs.

I don't think there's even any need to make enemy composition high-level responsive to your decisions. Just have a lot of variation in enemies and enemy combinations as a usual part of the game.

I actually thought that DA:O did an OK job of presenting the lore. The first time I played through the game, I didn't read most of the codex entries very closely, instead mostly listening to what people had to say. I felt like I got a good impression of what the world was like through that, without getting so much information that I understood everything that could ever possibly happen in the world. I also really enjoyed the expository dialogue options, but one man's peach is another man's poison. I do agree with you, though, that presenting lore in a new world is a tricky challenge, because the game has to compensate for the fact that although the PC has the knowledge of probably at least two decades of living in the world, the player has none of that. Generally, I'd like it if we ran into histories not infrequently, thus allowing us to pick up broad knowledge through reading in-game stuff (like TES' approach, but done well). Dialogue exposition should probably be limited to specialist knowledge, about a particular area, profession, or skill. I think an introductory cinematic of the type that Sensuki's promoting in another thread would also be a great mechanism for giving a broad-strokes picture of the world.

I would suspect (without any actual proof) that it will tend to be passive in nature most of the time, but will have a few active moments (a couple of different quest resolutions, slightly different quest-taking options).

I don't know... "normalisation" sounds to me like 'as easy as modern games with all their failsafes so you can barely die' As for above post, the amount of skills would also be less with fixed values. Gone chosing a weapon based on 'less damage, more crit' or 'more damage, less crit' since crit's a chance. Skill's would be boring cause +1 is a lot less interesting if you already know your value, rather than if it adds 1 to the 1-20 roll *maybe* allowing you a hit. No, I can't see it working. Not fun anyway. If the values were fixed, then I would agree with you. But they're not. The range of variance is simply reduced. That puts more, not less, importance on the player's optimization and tactical skill, since big lucky hits are much less likely to save the player or screw the player.

The biggest risk in that is making probability ranges too small, or not at all. There's a reason D&D uses a d20, imagine how fun it would be without the dice roll. People wouldn't still be playing it. Imagine if swords always hit, to prevent "to hit" rolls missing. So damage and HP is adjusted accordingly. Then again, your sword ALWAYS does x damage. Nothing more, nothing less. Crits are gone too, too much random. Everything's all fixed. Wouldn't it be the most boring RPG in existance? Yes, yes it would. Fortunately, they're not doing that. There's still a range of values for damage from everything. But the normalization of probability is a Good Thing, since it neither does away with luck nor makes it crucial to survival.

In that sense, verisimilitude takes a back seat to internal consistency for creating an immersive experience. I guess I made my point poorly. For a fantasy game, I consider verisimilitude to be more or less the same thing as internal consistency. If all the disparate parts of a world make sense together, more or less, then I credit the world with "the appearance of being true or real" on its own terms. But I didn't choose the best terminology there.

I agree with TrashMan that coherence is the key to immersion. That said, I've got a degree in medieval history, so I've played exactly zero fantasy games that had an acceptable level of verisimilitude. Political structures don't make sense, social organization's barely articulated beyond standard tropes, economies don't even seem to exist, religion's passed over and not fleshed out, societies have extreme technological stasis, the ramifications of magic use are brushed aside, etc. That's why I'm excited about Josh's attitude towards building the world of P:E, because I think his approach gives a reasonable chance that the world might be believable. And that's all I want out of immersion. To believe that in a world which developed differently (even to the extent of magic being real), these events could be happening. I don't want to feel like they are happening, just that it's possible they might in this fictional world. EDIT: @Lephys: The MC Hammer could never be parried. It would simply announce "can't touch this" and strike wherever it wished.

P:E is NOT being designed with the idea that all choices are viable, insofar as I can tell. It is being designed so that a character concept based on a combination of a couple of attributes and a class should work, more or less no matter what those components are. That doesn't mean that someone can't screw it up, or that there will be no poor choices. It means that if you roll a wizard, and don't immediately pump INT, you haven't made a poor choice. Poor choices seem to me to be further down the line--you could pick talents and abilities that work abysmally with your attributes and class of choice, and then you'd still be screwed. But since they're further down the line, players have more freedom to explore different character concepts without being penalized for those broad choices they make throughout the rest of the game. Moreover, Josh said only that a wide variety of builds will be "viable," not that they will be equally viable. Maybe the high-STR wizard has a harder time than the high-INT wizard, but you can still take that high-STR wizard through the game without overmuch raging and cursing. That's what it sounds to me like they're shooting for, anyway.

It would be pretty tough to give the party a good motivation for going down the dungeon, though, if they didn't think they had a reasonable chance of making it back. That level of necessity would almost demand that the dungeon be tied into the main storyline.

I think you're probably right. There's nothing absolute that prevents pickpocketing from being fun--I've just always thought that improving pickpocketing ought to be very low on the list of mechanic prioritization.

I believe the lacklusterness of pickpocketing in most existing games is specifically the point of this thread. Not, "Since pickpocketing is so great in existing games, we should overhaul it and make it even greater!" You seem to be suggesting that only things that can benefit the least from improvements (things that are already oodles of fun) should be benefitted, and that anything that seems like it could use a lot of improvements isn't really worth improving because it probably inherently sucks. Seem... I think his point is more that even if pickpocketing can be tremendously improved, at its core it's still not a very interesting or fun mechanic for a cRPG--a point with which I agree. So then, is it worth developer time and effort to try to improve pickpocketing, given the layers of complexity that would need to be added for pickpocketing to be enjoyable? Or are they better off treating it like the very minor part of the game it is?

That means the aesthetic is doing its job, by transitioning so well between fantasy world and computer-screen buttons that your conscious mind isn't really prompted to even think about that transition at all. Possible, I suppose. Generally speaking I don't care what the UI looks like as long as it does its job, so it could be ugly as sin like the BG/IWD UI or cartoonishly colorful like the DA2 UI, but since they both perform their function adequately I had to go back and look at them to register what they looked like. Then again, I'm also more or less incapable of immersion and glad of it, so a lot of this discussion flies right over my head.

I've never found that a UI positively or negatively affected my immersion. Frankly, unless the function is irritating I hardly notice the aesthetic at all.

First off, "intangible" and "illusory" do not mean the same thing. Unless you're making a philosophical point about the nature of reality here. Power is very real, and that's not reduced in the slightest by the difficulty of quantifying it. Second, I fail to see what's gained by trying to generalize about whether rape or torture is worse. The psychological and physical harm done to the victim is so greatly variable as a matter of circumstance that any generalization is going to be false a large percentage of the time. Personally, I find rape more abhorrent, but I'm certainly not prepared to make that a moral dictum, and I can't see how anyone with the opposite viewpoint could fairly do so either.

I'm really struggling to understand why you keep posting in this vein. The developers have created their system. You wish they had made another IE game. They are instead making a game that takes inspiration from the IE games while innovating in a number of key respects. None of this is changing. So what, exactly, is the purpose of repeatedly declaring that it will be a bad game?