PrimeJunta

I don't think so, but then I may be mistaken.

With the inflated XP in the beta it's impossible to say how the system will feel in the real thing, of course, but with that qualifier... I would like the game to have more frequent but smaller XP rewards. For example, consider the Aelys quest. Instead of awarding the XP in large chunks when the quest progresses, break it up so that you gain a small amount of XP when ... You would obviously miss out on some of that XP if you didn't meet the reputation or skill requirements to get the intel, but that's perfectly okay. It would give a smoother sense of progression and strengthen the incentive to poke around discovering stuff about the quest, not just getting big chunks when a part of it actually completes.

This sounds like a case where you'd want to post your dxdiag and game logs. I haven't seen it, so it's at least possible it has to do with your system configuration so the more they know about it the better.

For the sake of your soul, Indira, give up all hope on this. The worst that could happen is that you get a really nice surprise.

@Infinitron muchas grácias. Looking forward to attribute stat effects being bumped in the next build. (Also LOLed at the dig at D&D.)

Hollywood hasn't made movies that would qualify as art in thirty years or so, allowing for the very odd exception. They used to but it somehow faded away by the early 1980's at the latest. The latest movies that touched me at more than a European level weren't European or American at all. This one, for example.

I liked the idea at first blush when thinking about it more, it won't work I'm afraid. Currently you typically get around 4 uses per rest, and 2 uses per encounter. These are small numbers, and they're enormously significant. You can never let them fall to zero without making the build unviable, and, say, doubling the number immediately makes the character way more powerful. So adjusting the number by 1 is a Very Big Deal. Consequently, this would make RES a required pump stat for any class relying on per-rest/per-encounter abilities, especially wizard, priest, and paladin, moderately for fighter, ranger, and rogue, and least of all cipher, chanter, and monk with their unique ways of charging up their abilities. That's... not good IMO. Second, because the range of numbers you're moving in is necessarily small, say between 1 and 8 for per-rest abilities, 1 and 4 for per-encounter ones, the effect would appear in jumps. Some of the values would see a massive leap in character viability, others would see nothing. In particular the fighter, rogue, and ranger which have mostly or exclusively per-encounter abilities would see no difference at all until they hauled up the value by four points or more. So no, I don't think this'll work. You need to bind something that can be adjusted at finer increments. Some possible candidates not currently affected by the ability system are crit chance, recovery speed, movement speed, deflection, and armor penalty on recovery speed.

Would require a whole new inventory system. Probably won't happen. Also encumbrance mechanics are a drag. That would work. Then again, DEX is already extremely attractive b/c of the accuracy bonus. Don't see a need to make it even more so. Negatory. Currently wizards get one new spell per day, and you get 1 talent per three levels. Those numbers can only be changed in full integers, they'd have a huge impact on how powerful a class is, and you couldn't let them to fall to zero without making the build completely unviable. That means that you'd have to space the benefit out very, very widely -- like allow one extra talent for INT 18, or something like that; even so, it would tend to make it the pump stat for many classes. Same if you tied it to uses per rest/per encounter. Getting one more spell/level/rest, or one more talent use/encounter is enormously significant, so much so that "extra knockdown" is a fighter talent in and of itself. Again, you could not let the numbers fall to zero, and having more uses is so immensely attractive that it would again become the obvious pump stat for most if not all classes. Yep, it would fit there too. I put it on INT because RES is already very attractive because Concentration is so important for frontliners, and moving Duration there from INT makes it even more so. Basically, when tweaking those I wanted to get as close as possible to having something that's really attractive for both front-line and second-row characters on each ability. Everybody wants to do more damage and hit more accurately. Everybody wants more health (okay, second-liners perhaps less than front-liners). Everybody wants to do things faster (therefore the addition of Recovery Time). Frontliners want to not be interrupted, and everybody wants their duration-limited abilities to last longer. I think Healing is kind of the odd one out still. You could really put it on whichever ability you think fits best, or perhaps drop it altogether and just not make it possible to pump healing. (I can appreciate why Josh put it on Might though, from a system design point of view -- it's aesthetically pleasing to have the same stat govern the taking and the giving.)

Yep, just like in all the IE games.

You could do that. We all know they won't though. You could also bump the mechanical effects of the attributes, turning it into a significant gameplay element.

I could never bring myself to do the horrid deeds that led to the most super of superweapons in MotB though, even on my psychopath playthrough.

The summons. Take that skeleton summoning Invocation. Then play with the sole objective of hanging around in combat without getting anyone killed. Soon you will have an undead army that'll roflstomp over everything.

Not fair to compare short-duration, limited-use buffs (that Accuracy L1 boost, Arcane Veil) with an unbuffed fighter. Also, I'm reporting how it played. So far I've played at least until the ogre fight with, let's see, a barbarian, monk, paladin, chanter (LOL!), ranger, and muscle wizard. Of these only the chanter felt wildly out of line with the others, and Mr. Muscle did not feel dramatically more powerful than BB Wizard. That said, I'm sure the numbers need adjusting. That's what we're here for.

Yeh, PS:T is the very definition of "more than the sum of its parts." <snobmode> I have long felt that computer games should, and eventually will, evolve into a serious art form. It's the trajectory theater, opera, cinema, and TV all took. They started out as entertainment for the masses, and all the time while remaining just that, also became something bigger than all that. Planescape: Torment remains for me the shining beacon that shows that this can be possible. It wasn't quite there yet, perhaps, but it opened the gate and showed the way. The sad thing is that nobody else yet has managed to walk through that door to what must lie beyond. And as much as I anticipated T:ToN, I'm not sure that a "spiritual successor" is the way to do that. It'll need another unlikely confluence of the right people coming together at the right time, with the means to do what needs doing. </snobmode>

Not without a license, and not (directly) for cRPG's. Pathfinder is based on d20 which uses the Open Gaming License, which explicitly forbids computer games. Obs just announced their licensing agreement about Pathfinder games, but they're going to need new mechanics too. Not sure exactly who has the rights to license d20 for computer games, but it certainly can't be done just because you want to. That said, you can't copyright game mechanics. I.e. you could take the d20 mechanics, remove all references to d20, rename possibly proprietary terms like "saving throw" and "armor class," and Bob's your uncle.

I was expecting the combat at least to be less bugged as well. But that's neither here nor there. The fact is that if they decide to prioritize keeping us (the beta participants) happy, then the rest of the project progress will suffer. I do not want that. I think it's a big mistake to think of a paid beta like buying a product. It's a continuation of the Kickstarter -- a chance to sponsor something you would very much like to see happen, with the added possibility to participate in the process in a small way. We are not customers, yet: we're sponsors. That's different.

Do you use the slo-mo option much?

I'll get the tar. Karkarov, you got the feathers? Indira can bring the rail.

Why not just grab it from GoG? Doesn't cost much and makes life waaay easier.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Because I was going to cite PS:T as the perfect example from beginning to end. Be delighted to. It might get a bit wordy, but hey. In my opinion, the main purpose of any reward system in a game is to incentivize players to play the game in the most enjoyable possible manner. It should reward activities that are fun, and not reward activities that are not fun (dull, repetitive, requiring patience rather than than skill, and so on). This applies especially to XP, since XP are an unqualified good: there is no downside to more XP, assuming that the player's goal is to become as powerful as possible. Everything I say about XP proceeds from this premise. To achieve this goal, an XP system has to be predictable and it has to reward fun things and not reward un-fun things. By "predictable" I mean that when choosing to do something--fight something, explore an area, pursue quest objectives, pick locks, whatever--the player should have a reasonable idea of what kind of reward to expect. This creates a kind of a feedback loop: pull the lever, get the goodie.* Now, PS:T. Let's tackle predictability first. I experienced PS:T's XP system as utterly unpredictable. There was combat and quest XP there for sure, but there were gargantuan piles of XP dumped on you completely by surprise. Talk to a skeleton and if you had picked the right stats in chargen, ding! go up a level. Interact with an apparently half-random object, trigger a memory, ding! go up a level. The XP system didn't actually incentivize anything, I was just randomly rewarded at random times for doing what I would be doing anyway, i.e. interacting with the environment. So it fails my first XP system test, predictability.** Second, rewards for fun and un-fun things. Because of the sheer randomness of the placed XP, there wasn't really any incentive system with the "placed XP" at all. You just got XP triggered by apparently random things. The only places there was a consistent reward system was with, yep, combat XP. And that was a complete disaster because of Modron Cube and Undersigil -- especially when combined with TNO's brilliant and unique ability to switch between classes at will and AD&D's geometric XP progression. That was a recipe for encouraging grinding if there ever was one, and boy did I grind. I bet I spent more time in the Modron Cube than in the rest of sigil, whacking those stupid automata, just so I could grind up XP so I could get my secondary classes to go up nicely. As gameplay goes, the Modron Cube was kind of tedious to start with; to make it a grind-o-mat was disastrous. I dig that it was actually a comment on the grind mechanic -- the 'research question' Modron had set it up to resolve -- but that did not change the incentives there at all. So on the one hand we have the game dropping unpredictable, random loads of XP on you, and on the other hand, we have a predictable system rewarding kill XP... in a game where the whole point of the exercise is to decide and discover how you orient yourself to the world. It is crying out for an XP system that is as neutral as humanly possible to the choices you make, instead of having the only consistent system reinforce the "murder them all" behavior. It is exactly how you should not do an XP system. *I believe this is in fact a major reason a lot of us like kill XP. See scary-looking beast: "Haha, big bag of XP!". Fight scary-looking beast. Beat scary-looking beast. "Ding, XP!" Rinse and repeat. These dopamine-reward pathways have gotten a pretty damn good workout in all the classics, and they're firing up again when seeing something that looks like the thing that tickled them before, and they're shouting when not being tickled as expected. **I'm not saying it was all like this of course. There were islands here and there where it wasn't; your interactions with Dak'kon for example, and you did also get XP for doing what the core of the game was about, i.e. peeling back the layers of your past and piecing together your previous lives, to discover how you ended up on that slab in the first place. But a big, big part of it wasn't. The level progression in the beta feels completely wrong. That's because I go up a level practically every time I complete a quest. There are, what, four questlines or so in the beta, and you can go up three levels. That is way, way too chunky. But then we know that that's not going to be the case in the real thing. They said up-front that XP rewards in the beta are inflated precisely so that we get to level up a few times to see how it feels. It needs to be finer-grained -- and it is going to be.

Except that the class design is the polar opposite. 4e defines classes strictly in terms of combat roles. You can't deviate from them. It's in fact the main reason I threw my 4e boxed set across the room after reading it. Josh wants to maximize freedom within classes. There are obvious influences, of course, like per-encounter and per-rest abilities and an attempt to address the class imbalance between magic-using and mundane classes, but then there are obvious influences from other sources as well. The blow-by-blow combat mechanics are strongly reminescent of 4e. Funny though that those elements are seeing a good deal less criticism than elements that have nothing to do with 4e, e.g. the attribute or XP systems. I'm mostly seeing that criticized by people who object to fighters having active abilities as a matter of principle.

It's possible I'm missing something, but it sure feels like a bug. To reproduce: 1. With two wall symbols lit, but before heading to see the vithrack, have two party members stand on the floor symbols. => Observed: they light up. 2. Head to the tunnel to meet the vithrack. => Expected: the symbols go out when the characters move off them. => Observed: they stay lit. (May be intentional, but bear with me.) 3. Murder vithrack, despoil corpse of soul vessel, loot adra spear from sarcophagus. 4. Return to room with floor symbols. => Observed: floor symbols are still lit. 5. March two party members to stand on the floor symbols again. => Observed: nothing happens. 6. Wield adra spear, keep soul vessel in inventory (attempted to equip it in the shield slot but no luck), march up and down the dais. => Expected: something dramatic happens. => Observed: nothing happens.

To reproduce: 1. Cast Wall of Fire (L4 spell) 2. Walk your party into it Expected: they take burn damage Observed: they don't

I have not experienced the combination as harmonious, much of the time. It worked well in Hordes of the Underdark, Storm of Zehir, and the IWD's. In the BG's I thought it was a somewhat uncomfortable fit, and in PS:T it was working against the grain of the game. This is not because it was done well in the IWD's, SoZ, or HotU. It's because the IWD's, SoZ, and HotU are set up in ways where killing things aligns pretty closely with general progress in the game. The quests were more of a simple side dish. This was less true for the others, in which kill XP skewed the incentives, nudging you to prefer violent solutions in the expectations that you'd get better rewards. Attempting to mitigate this by giving nonviolent solutions bigger quest rewards only partly addressed the problem. If P:E turns out to be structured more like the IWD's, HotU, or SoZ, then I agree that something of value will have been lost with the decision to drop kill XP. But if it turns out to be as quest-driven as BG2 let alone PS:T, then I think it'll work out fine... and perhaps even some of you folks in the kill XP camp will grudgingly come around.

Bug. If they didn't actually die (i.e., if you didn't have permadeath enabled in the prefs or get them hit while maimed), they ought to stand up by themselves. Don't know what happens if they do actually die; I would presume they drop their loot and evaporate like the rest of the corpses.