PrimeJunta

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.

Except that it was fairly easy to end up with a character/party that did not have the counter when encountering the situation, and no way to backtrack to get it. I believe that's Josh's main objection to the mechanic.

@Mrakvampire there's randomness and there's randomness. Insta-kill due to a single RNG event is not the same as hitting or missing in melee combat where winning requires landing a half-dozen good hits or so.

@Mrakvampire What else do you think should be copied exactly from D&D? P:E has different magical metaphysics than D&D. Dat soul power thing. A wizard is someone who produces magical effects with his soul power through the intermediary of his grimoire. There's nothing inherent to that which demands high intelligence. You may not like it, but that does not make it "nonsense" or "illogical."

And you can't make a fighter who casts fireballs. Your point?

Ah, but was it successful and well-received becuase of the XP system, or despite it?

I agree about the slow-food combat simulator aspect, by the way. It's a good analogy. I think P:E is shaping up nicely to capture that as a matter of fact. I do notice reflexively looking up to see how much XP I got after finishing a fight and then going "Oh... right." I can't say yet how the XP system feels overall because bugs have been eating my quests and I haven't really managed to get any XP. It does have an effect on how I play the game though -- I don't really mind sneaking past one of the beetle groups for example, to get to the ogre cave. We'll see how that ends up feeling on balance. Right now it's still a bit unfamiliar, as I do get that lawnmowing impulse. We will see if it abates and how it feels then.

Not every character ought to be optimized for max damage. You could also optimize for durability, buff/debuff strength/duration/AoE, and so on. That's what a lot of the classes are for. Second, not every class uses weapons equally effectively. Check out the base accuracy. Wizards are terrible at that. This is made up by the high accuracy bonus on most spells. Give one a bow and compare how he uses it compared to a ranger or even paladin, and the difference is fairly dramatic.

@IndiraLightfoot I had to like your post even though I disagree. It was just so beautifully written -- and I can hardly argue with "but I LIKE my rewards for killing sprees!"

You're right about the glass cannon thing. Still, both Health and Endurance are extremely important; dump one or both and you will feel it.

Nope, a muscle wizard would pump Might, Dex, and Con and could dump Int, and would wear heavy armor. He casts more slowly with smaller AoE's, but takes a lot of punishment and is able to make maximum use of those spells that originate from the caster without causing FF damage like back-row wizards. Many of the L1 and L2 spells are AoE that originates from the caster. Try it for spits and giggles. 'S fun.

That can't be. You're still bleeding off Health when getting hit. This tactic ought to whittle down your fighter's Health plenty quick. If it's not then something weird must be going on.

@Lioness I don't think rounds in the IE games were synced. They were all the same lengths, yes, but could start at different times. That's one of the things that made them feel so responsive -- characters reacted to commands immediately instead of in a few seconds.

That's kind of the point. If you don't feel that you're losing out by dumping a stat (or, conversely, don't feel like you want to pump every stat), then the stats are poorly balanced, ne?

@Infiltrate_SF I disagree. I think you should get your teeth kicked in if you fail to play your character to its strengths, whatever those are. If you make a muscle wizard and then play it like a glass cannon, you do deserve to lose, just like if you make a glass cannon wizard and put him in the front line. But saying that there's something inherently wrong about a muscle wizard is kind of a low-INT thing to say IMO.

Not possible. KOTOR basically only had swords -- single-bladed, double-bladed, and dual-wield. The enemies were either monstrous or humanoid. You only got the dueling field between two humanoids, so you only needed six animation series (single/single, single/double, single/dual, double/double, double/dual, and dual/dual) to get that feel. You could basically ignore monsters and just use the half of the animation sequence the human fighting it was using; it would be whiffier but nobody would notice. P:E has a huge selection of weapons of different types (small, medium, large, reach, with/without shield, dual-wielded), and at least four different size creatures that wield them (small, medium, large). That means they'd have to animate way, way, WAY more combinations. Add to that the fact that KOTOR's animation budget must have been MUCH higher than P:E's, and it ought to be obvious that this isn't happening. Same thing with the requests for special animations for different races etc. That's not really what this game is about.

PER and RES are currently dumpable, yes. I don't quite agree with the rest of your criticisms. Specifically, you feel that way because you want to play all your characters in a particular way. That's totally fine, but it doesn't mean other styles of character aren't viable. Consider CON. Yes, it is much more important for front-line characters than back-row glass cannons (duh!). Thing is, you can play against type (a lot of the time) and make a perfectly viable front-line wizard. There are a couple of classes which do really need high CON, specifically fighters and barbarians, because their features are so melee-focused. Consider INT. Thing is, all the classes have some duration- or AoE-based effects. Even fighters -- Knockdown. A high INT fighter can use that way more effectively than a low-INT one. So the current cookie-cutter feel comes from the dumpability of PER and RES IMO, which leaves enough points to haul up the others to the point where the differences are fairly small. Fix those and it'll work out fine.

Health would still be bound to CON. Endurance would be bound to RES. It would diminish CON obviously since Endurance would be moved away from it, but not this way.

I would call high Dex crucial. Landing hits is important, for just about everybody. For some classes, e.g. ciphers, I'd even say high Dex is more important than high Might, since landing hits is what charges up their... whatever it's called they charge up. As to high Int, same thing: I tried playing with a low-Int and high-Int barbarian, and the duration change to rage makes a huuuuge difference. The AoE effect of Int is IMO too big ATM; clerics and wizards at least get pretty massive AoE's even at moderate Int. Tuning that is going to be a simple matter.