PrimeJunta

I think I saw an effect of dumping RES in my previous attempt. I made a back-row druid rocking an arquebus, and when an enemy engaged him the attacks interrupted his reload pretty effectively. If interrupts do interrupt melee attacks as well, and RES is needed to stop that from happening, then hell yes, PER and RES are both vital. Pump PER = stunlock most enemies; dump RES = get stunlocked in most combats. That said, I'm not sure how much fun getting stunlocked is.

Hey, there is an XP system in place. I finally leveled up. Once. In the ogre cave. Before meeting the ogre. I think the secret sauce was that my starting quests didn't disappear before I managed to complete them. After that some Bad Things happened again and I had to quit. Again, I think it's too early to tell. For me I think the main appeal of an XP system is frequent small rewards punctuated by big juicy rewards (i.e. leveling up). Can't tell from the beta how that's gonna feel, because it's (a) broken and (b) inflated.

They were. Fallout: pump INT and AGI, the rest are cosmetic. OK, STR if you want to use heavy weapons (although there's no reason really because you'll be able to shoot a gnat in the left eyeball soon enough otherwise). Arcanum: decide whether you want shoot, melee, throw, magic, or have your buddies do the dirty work for you, and pump the associated attribute. The skill trees even handily tell you when to pump it. If you're a technomancer, never mind INT, just buy those potions from the helpful lady near the city gates; it's useless for anything other than crafting anyway. The main takeaway from those games is that yes, Virginia, it is possible to design an attribute system that's worse than STR-CON-DEX-INT-WIS-CHA. (Great games anyway, though. Especially Fallout.)

The attribute systems of both Fallout and Arcanum were terribad.

What kind of profound effect, specifically?

Nah. Balancing is done near the end of the process. It hasn't been done yet. Revising the attribute system before final rebalancing barely registers.

I like that idea, @Amentep. I'm in but not in this build. Let's wait a bit until it's stable enough that you can play through most of it most of the time without hitting one of the game-breakers (disappearing inventory or quests, in particular).

An attribute-less system would be mechanically more sound, no doubt. How well it would fit an IE successor is another question. I say make these attributes work. Can't be that hard.

I normally don't respond to this sort of thing, but... really, Helm. You're one of the most abrasive and divisive posters on these forums. Getting all pious about how bad it is that the community is split is a bit rich, frankly. If you want us all to be a big happy family, then :roots in cliché bag: be the change you want to see.

There seem to be at least three different variants of the infamous stuck character bug: 1. Triggered by weapon-swap in mid-reload animation (reproducible) -> Character can't be selected by clicking on toon or portrait, but can be selected by dragging on the ground for the rectangle -> When selected, weapon sets and modes can be swapped, but won't respond to commands 2. Triggered in combat for unknown reason -> Character can be selected normally and responds to all other commands than move; if close to map exit, can exit map and he will follow, but will remain unresponsive 3. Triggered when character falls in combat due to stamina hitting zero; when gets up, is unresponsive as in (2) above -> Behavior same as in 2. Could be the same bug.

Haha, actually you ought to then be in the happy minority who likes the current attribute system. Pump PER. It's fairly useless in combat but does wonders for dialog.

This is kind of funny actually. My head says combat XP (and systemic XP in general) is bad design and a bad idea. But my heart misses it.

Anything that discourages people from playing elves is a pro in my book.

Massive kudos about this, @Sensuki. It's these little, almost unnoticeable things that make the difference between something passable and something really smooth and natural. They ought to take notice.

I think it'd help if they just made the race/culture attribute bonuses a bit bigger. +2 or +3 means more than +1. Perhaps reduce the free pool of attribute points accordingly.

Actually, attributes are among the least essential aspects of the system and one that's the easiest to change. It's basically a map of attribute values to combat bonuses. Not even programming, just adjusting values in a hashmap. There are plenty of topics not worth discussing ("Make it more like BG2!") but changes to the attribute system are not among them. As long as there are six, pretty much anything can be changed right up to the last minute. (FWIW I voted "something else." Per and Res are too dumpable, and I don't like the "might affects all damage" thing, which is counterintuitive. Find some other way to make muscle wizards attractive.)

Tips: (1) Use slow-motion (tap S). (2) Use at most two melee characters. Three or more will trigger the Y U NO DO???? bug, which will leave them just standing there getting punished. (3) Switch out the starting gear. BB Wizard wears breastplate, which makes him cast s-l-o-w-l-y. Swap that out and wear it instead if you're a melee character. (4) Explore the per-encounter and per-rest abilities. In particular, use BB Priest's buffs; they're seriously powerful. (5) Pay attention to weapon type vs damage. Bugs in particular are vulnerable to crushing. (6) Move your character before switching weapons, or it'll trigger the "stuck" bug and you'll have to reload, which will trigger the "disappearing items" bug.

I actually agree about the unintuitive bit. It's pretty easy to tell that Josh would rather not have attributes at all. As it is they do feel shoehorned-in, with counterintuitive effects that are there in an attempt to make all of them useful. I do like the effort to avoid cookie-cutter builds, but there's got to be a more intuitive way of getting there. We'll see how it is in the next iteration.

Hyperbole much?

Have you actually experimented with different stat distributions? As stated elsewhere, Per and Res can be dumped for most classes, but apart from the obvious Mig and Dex, Con, and Int remain useful: you need Con because you share your health pool with your animal companion which is going to be scrapping with the opposition, and Int is useful because it boosts durations. Wounding Shot for example becomes that much more effective. (Do they stack by the way?)

This is the best argument for combat XP that you've made so far, Stun, as far as I'm concerned. (I don't find it as jarring, but that, of course, is subjective, and I can hardly argue with how you experience it.)

They're different restrictions. "Casting spells" or "Ruling at melee combat" are class-related features. "Surviving in the front line," "Dealing damage from the back," or "Supporting other characters" are broader roles. They've kept the former while relaxing the latter, which is a good thing IMO.

@Mrakvampire. P:E's lore is not D&D's lore. D&D explicitly required wizards to be high INT, and provided a rationale for why. You could not make a dumb wizard because in D&D dumb wizards could not learn spells. This is not the case in P:E because the lore is different. Soul power != intelligence.

@Waywocket: a failed system does not necessarily make for a failed game. Most cRPG's by far have kill XP largely because "that's the way it's always been done." Many of them have enormous problems with their systems, often due to adopting features intended for PnP directly. For example, threshold skill checks. In a PnP game, you only get to roll once to see if your character can open a lock. In a cRPG, you can save and reload until he makes that roll. (Which is prob. one reason Take 20 was introduced.) In many cases you can get great games despite the slapdash systems underneath. The IE games had combat that felt great, beautiful and varied backgrounds, and lots of stuff to do. The fact that they also had perverse incentives, massive exploits, encounters designed to be beaten through trial-and-error reloading, and so on may have detracted from the experience, but did not turn the games into failures. And in some cases, the generally great experiences we've had with these games have made us like the flaws. There are people who actually want exploitable systems, like the ability to rest-spam, open locks by save-scumming, or farm XP, despite all those being unintentional side-effects of the original (flawed) designs.