PrimeJunta

4e combat is better than 3e combat... if you play with figurines on a grid with battlefield features also on it. If you're pure PnP, with combat done purely by description, it stinks. AD&D and 3e OTOH work just as well that way as on a grid. The main problem of 4e is that it fails as a role-playing game. The previous editions are mechanically rubbish, but at least they do support role-playing, and especially 3e even lets you create character concepts somewhat flexibly with the multiclassing rules, if you're not too concerned about minmaxing. If you drop most of the arbitrary requirements for prestige classes and feats, it allows a quite a bit of player freedom, making it almost serviceable. But for PnP groups who are in it primarily for the roleplaying 4e is an abject failure.

4e might've made for a good MMO. That is all.

Wow, this is turning into a group hug. And I'm okay with that. :grouphug:

Re Deep Wounds: have you tried the LVL2 priest spell which suppresses hostile effects? Re the Wizard: have you tried playing an armored frontline "muscle" wizard? Those L1 cone-shaped spells are pretty badass IMO, but you can't effectively use them from the back row.

@Indira ... get used to it...? The health/stamina split is irritating in the beta but IMO it's irritating not because of the mechanic itself, but because of the ratio (too hard on health) and because of the AI (one guy always takes all the damage, forcing a rest). Correct these two and I believe it'll work fine.

Whoa, that's a lot of stuff. Largely good stuff, some stuff I disagree with, some that I'd file under nice to have. And some, frankly, just sound like reflexive conservatism--"make it like it was in the IE games, whether it makes sense or not." Right now, my highest priorities would be something like... Combat feedback and transparency. What's happening, to whom, when; how much damage am I doing, how much is getting through; why or why not; how much are they doing and how much of that is getting through. Includes simplifying the numbers. Combat AI. Pick targets more intelligently, not always the closest guy or the guy who last attacked. Pathfinding, in and out of combat. Combat balance, including spells and specials. Better, more, and more diverse talents. Use these to break the currently role-limited classes out of that straitjacket (rogue and fighter in particular), and add variety and pizzazz to the currently serviceable but somewhat boring ones (wizard, priest). Medium priorities: Stealth. It stinks. Make it work. Has to be individual, must be more to it than not letting some circles intersect. If all else fails just copy IE stealth and throw in some invisibility spells/scrolls/potions. For extra credit, let us lay traps. Inventory. It's unnecessarily fussy. I'd solve it in the opposite way you would: keep the quickslots and weapon sets, but then give us unlimited party inventory which self-sorts by type and value. I do not consider dragging icons from one place to another an enjoyable gameplay element. Armor. Make it more attractive all around, e.g. by lowering penalties on light armor and adding value to heavy armor, e.g. deflection bonus. Stats. Make them matter more, make RES and especially PER less dumpable, and iron out some of the unintuitive bits about them. Rethink the recovery mechanic. Experiment to make sure it feels right. I'd start by making movement interrupt recovery for different weapons in different ways: melee weapons, spells, and light ranged weapons should be able to recover while moving, perhaps somewhat slower than when standing still, while you do need to stay put to crank an arbalest or reload a firearm. XP. Award frequently and in small doses. Low priority: Better and more consistent UI's all around. Apply, Cancel, Accept buttons everywhere applicable. Trading should require less clicking and scrolling. Info panes should make more efficient use of screen space to display more info. Etc. and so on. Better animations, sound and visual FX, animations to the background, etc. From your list, there are a few things I disagree somewhat strongly about: Limited ammunition: God please no. I do not want to deal with stacks and stacks of arrows/bullets/bolts/darts anymore. Please? Health/stamina, with no magic strategic healing. Keep it. It's a material improvement over the IE. Randomness in combat. No. Please keep the current more deterministic system. Hell, make it more deterministic: fixed damage by weapon, x0.25 to 0.5 on graze, x1.5 to x2 on crit. This would also help with combat transparency a lot. Noncombat talents: no, thanks. Base noncombat stuff on stats and skills, keep talents for combat. The split is simple, straightforward, and understandable. Don't unnecessarily complicate it.

Good post. I've often wondered about the contingent of players who seem to want exploitable mechanics (=DG). That just... does not compute.

Hear hear. To Sensuki! Obsidian ought to fly you in to butt heads with JES for a few days. I have no doubts it would do wonders for the game. There's nothing quite like sparring with an intelligent end-user to get the product right.

Yay. Would still like to see some mechanical changes to the armor though.

Atmosphere, dialog, story, the way things look are great IMO. Character classes and advancement are... serviceable. Workmanlike. Some classes are significantly more interesting than others (chanter, cipher, barbarian, paladin are good IMO, wizard is OK, priest, fighter, and rogue are boring). I don't think the boring classes are fundamentally boring though; I think more and more interesting talents and some general adjustment would fix them nicely. Combat has the longest way to go. Pathfinding is still wonky although no longer a complete disaster, feedback is poor, and some of the mechanics don't... really... work very well. Needs a lot of tuning for balance, more transparency so you can actually tell what's going on and why, more auditory and UI feedback so you can tell when it's happening and to whom. It would be nice if some of the mechanics were actually revised rather than merely tuned (the armor penalty/flat DT/percentage bonus system isn't really doing much for me), but I think it would get to "serviceable" even without major mechanical revisions. I also think the stealth system kind of stinks, but then that never was super-central to the IE games. That can't be fixed by tuning values; it would need more fundamental changes. It would be an ugly wart if left as it is, but not so ugly it'd RUIN the GAME IMO.

I'm pretty damn certain that Paradox QA hasn't even started, certainly not with 18 testers in parallel. Perhaps one at this point. It would be a colossal waste of resources at this point. In a nutshell, 18 testers costs a lot of money. You don't start that kind of testing until you believe it's feature-complete and you've fixed all the major and critical issues you know about. While you're still adding stuff and adjusting things you'll want to do it with a minimum number of testers. Those 18 testers will be needed once they believe it's ready. Then they'll find all the broken dialogs, wonky spells, decimal-point errors in the combat arithmetic, that weird thing that happens when you equip a two-handed sword and a Robe of the Archmagi and cast Haste, the non-matching voiceovers, and so on and so forth. At this point there's no point. They'd just be wasting their time reporting issues everybody knows about anyway. For the beta builds, I'd expect they have internal QA that plays through the thing a few times to make sure it's not catastrophically broken, and that's it. At this point, they will want to have playtesters though -- people whose job isn't so much to hunt for bugs, as to report things that are un-fun, out of whack, over-powered or not powerful enough. People like us in fact.

Nah, it's not a bad idea. With a project like this, butthurt is inevitable, and I don't think it's worse to get it out of the system early on. Plus at least some of the feedback we're giving is genuinely useful, I'm sure. It's got to be hard on some of the devs though. I hope they have a sufficiently thick skin plus enough judgment and patience to be able to hear the signal among the noise. Participating in the beta is not a sacrifice for me. I'm enjoying the process of seeing it take shape, and I look forward to having a pretty good handle on how it works by the time it's released, so I can wade into it eyes wide open as it were. The final game might eventually fall short of the extemely high expectations some of us have, but we will have gotten a brand-new isometric party-based fantasy cRPG chock-full of quests, monsters, loot, and magic. That's pretty amazing when you think about it.

But don't alignment mechanics have exactly the same problem? The game's makers can only know what you said or did, not why you chose to say or do that. Similarly, if you tie mechanical consequences to the alignment, you get incentive effects. A reputation system is IMO more honest as it admits that it only works on perceptions.

I did.

Most people who do the really evil stuff convince themselves first that they're doing good. Hitler was absolutely convinced of the justness of his cause. Also most people already believe without question that bad people are punished after they die, one way or the other... hell, bad rebirth, whatever. So I don't think Lonely Plane: Acheron would change much. Edit: also, most people are really bad at changing their behavior due to long-term consequences. Everybody knows you're likely to be "punished" for smoking, eating too much sugar, salt, and fat, and not exercising, yet lots of people do all three.

I liked alignment in my Planescape campaign. In all the others it was fairly useless.

Seems kartoffel is also Danish for potato, which no doubt amuses the Swedes and Norwegians no end, what with their potatis. I can see 33 sailboats out of my window.

True, they're not. You could always have both. The interplay between the two could be quite interesting in fact -- imagine a genuinely Lawful Good character with a Cruel reputation.

There is IMO only one good case for using a DnD style alignment system: if good, evil, law, and chaos have some essential, cosmic meaning. I.e., in a world with universal, absolute morality. Like in DnD for example, what with the Planes associated with them. Then you can bind it both to the lore and to mechanical effects to make it meaningful. Everywhere else, IMO reputation is the way to go. There are way too many downsides to alignment. Since P:E's lore appears to be morally relativistic, an alignment system wouldn't fit.

That's not what Vancian casting means, MC.

Not anymore you don't, I'm sure. But did you, the first time you encountered these games? I certainly did. And more to the point, the games have strong incentives that push you to play that way.

Walp, I'm now officially resident in Denmark. Got the CPR number, electronic ID and everything. Was very easy and pleasant, perhaps especially so for a Nordic brother. Don't wanna change my avatar yet though.

IMO "will I hit or not" was only an issue in BG1 and the IWD's, and there only during the tutorial. From there on out it would take more than one hit to bring an enemy down, or get brought down yourself. And I found the L1-2 gameplay frustratingly rather than enjoyably random.

@Sensuki Actually Vancian casting and trial-and-error set-pieces are kind of two sides of the same coin. The rhythm becomes fight, get beat up to know what spells I should have had to win, reload, shuffle spells around, rest, fight again, win. It breaks mah immershun to have to consciously play with meta-knowledge like that. A lot of the encounters were did require rather specific resources to beat, a lot of these resources were spells, and if you didn't know what was coming you were somewhat unlikely to have them memorized. I realize this is a preference, and that many feel differently. Edit: also the games were different between each other in this respect; the IWD's made much less use of this than BG2 for example.

There's the rub, Indira. There is no objective way to decide what's core and what's not. Of your three core elements, I'd only count two, as I don't care about the dice. (I do care however that the numbers are understandable, which currently needs work.) It's a good question though, and a tough one. It's also hard not to let your preferences blur the picture, and just concentrate on what was central to the experience. My "core feature" list would include... Isometric, painted backgrounds (not rotatable) Party-based, RTwP XP- and class-based advancement XP from quests and combat <- yep, you read that right... Scads of gear to choose from Scads of different enemies to fight