PrimeJunta

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.

If anything is yesterday's design, it's 4e. 5e is already out. Perhaps MC was insinuating that Josh's design philosophy == 4e. Which is untrue, obviously, but it's one of the favorite things his un-fans like to say.

What's the current generation of RPG design dogmas? (Not a rhetorical quesiton, genuinely curious.)

:whispers: I houseruled that. Eventually. For me at least, when I started RPG's D&D was the only game in town. Literally. I branched out to others, mostly for radically different settings--Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Judge Dredd, Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0, Star Wars (two different editions), a stab at Warhammer but that didn't take for whatever reason, a stab at Rulemonster... ahem, Rulemaster, but that didn't take for obvious reasons. But I always kept coming back to D&D. It was because of that wonderful, magnificent multiverse system. My Al-Qadim campaign had forays into the Inner Planes; we met some old friends from there when we went Planescape; again with a completely different-flavored thing set in a fantasy version of Warring States China on this Prime Material plane or one very like it. There was a feel of "anything is possible" that nothing before or since could quite capture. But those systems, man. AD&D was godawful in every way. :stops self before embarking on long rant:

I would have backed it if the concept was good, but that would have been despite the D&D, not because of it. I'm an enormous fan of the worlds of D&D--many of them, anyway--but not a fan of the systems and mechanics.

Fortunately the spleen is one of those organs nobody seems to know what it's for, and people do just fine without it.

The point of a beta is to help development of the final product. That means we are here to help them. Their responsibility is the final product and its users. It is up to them to decide when a new build best helps the project. They do not owe us an "emergency patch" because a beta with critical bugs is not an emergency. At the moment it's obvious that they've got their hands full without our helpful advice. We can wait. Yes, even you, Marceror.

I think that what Namutree is saying is that you can then double the absolute values of the adjustments without affecting the average, making the builds more extreme. If all the adjustments are positive numbers, doubling the range will also raise the average, making everybody more powerful. Edit: oh, he wasn't. Sorry...

Dump CON and MIG, pump PER and INT, equip him with a pike, jab from behind somebody else, and make sure to use priests or paladins to buff defenses. Then take extra Knockdowns and make sure to use them a lot. Voilà, interrupter/disabler build.

Fighters currently don't have great ranged Accuracy, and all of their feats are melee-oriented. So no, not really. The go-to ranged classes are the ranger (obviously), and the cipher. I posted a suggestion in the General Classes Thread to bump the fighter's base ranged accuracy and add some ranged talents to the mix, to allow that kind of build which currently none of the classes support.

You smacked people with your stiletto? Why? Your base melee Accuracy is terrible, all you'll do is graze anyway, so nothing's going to make more than a decimal-point difference. Look at spell damage. IMO the real difference is in RES. Your muscle wizard who dumps RES will get interrupted, like, a LOT, if standing in the front line. This is because casting time is up to 12 seconds and your opponents will have time to get in a lot of hits, any of which can cause an Interrupt.

Have you tried playing one in P:E? I have. He's not overpowered. He casts half as slow as a "glass cannon" and despite pumping RES, occasionally gets Interrupted. Overall difficulty was not affected much at all.

Have you tried it or are you just talking out of your khyber? I dare you. Create two wizards. Pump CON and RES on one, and dump CON and RES on the other. Kit both up in brigandine and put them on the front line. Play on Normal or Hard. Then come back and tell us, hand on heart, that there was no difference between the two.

So you're against the idea, then?

Same here. Clearly a quest bug.

IMO the need to rely on auto-pause a lot is symptomatic of something else wrong with the combat UI. Autopausing after every action is cleared could get extremely stuttery, with six characters performing actions with different times/recoveries. Not sure it'd be workable in practice. I'd rather they drastically improved the feedback as per Sensuki's suggestion #008. Then if it still feels unmanageable, add more auto-pause options.

I kind of like that idea, Longknife. On the other hand I'm not sure there's a problem here, other than that of magnitude. The effect especially of dumping Int is not all that dramatic. I'd prefer to see durations and AoE's that really are short enough/small enough that you'd wish they were longer/bigger.

Suit yourself. My muscle wizard casts with his muscles.

@Gromnir Resolve is not at all useless. Try building a front-line spellcaster, or a melee type who uses slow weapons. If you dump RES, he'll get Interrupted all the freakin' time and won't be able to get any spells cast/attacks made. I got bit in the behind by this when I thought RES was easily dumpable. You won't notice it much on back-row/ranged types, and IMO PER is dumpable as interrupts against melee fighters only really work against slow-hitting types, and only against one target at a time, and there are better/stronger ways of debuffing them. I suspect it will be useful against spellcasters, but then casters have spells specially for that, and I believe some items as well.