PrimeJunta

No, I don't. However, I don't know if that is actually the best way to play a heavily armored paladin. Be a bit surprised actually.

I'm with Stun. I don't like doing pointless things in games. Where I differ with Stun—I think?—is that I don't think lack of combat XP necessarily makes combat pointless. It's quite easy to set up maps so that combat is either inevitable, or you have to work equally hard to avoid it as you would to engage in it, or to have a nice mix of both. Successfully sneaking past or otherwise avoiding a group of enemies can be very satisfying too. What would not be good is if one or the other was consistently the only way or best way to resolve a situation. It would not be fun if the most efficient way to play P:E would be to always run away from enemies. I would like it, however, if for example you could pump wilderness skills in your scout so she could suss out the enemy patrols, so you could then avoid them with careful timing and choice of path... and then got to a dungeon where you had enemies actively guarding chokepoints with no way past except through them. And I believe that no kill XP makes the above kinds of situations better. If you did have kill XP, then scouting and avoiding contact in the wilderness would cause you to lose out on XP, which would make it an objectively weaker strategy, which would make for less variety.

I did bind jump to something or other and taped it down while hopping around Tamriel. To level up Athletics. Boing boing boing. @BrokenMask IIRC Morrowind didn't have level scaling. Never finished Oblivion because it had it to such an absurd degree, and never bothered with Skyrim.

More: all the Elder Scrolls games. No kill XP, you improve your skills by practice and level up by practicing your primary skills. (Which, incidentally, incentivizes really boring behavior. I spent what felt like hours repeatedly blocking an attack by a rat to level up my block skill. I was younger then.)

Darklands didn't have kill XP either, I believe.

Off the top of my head, Vampire: the Masquerade (PnP) and VtM: Bloodlines (cRPG), Shadowrun Returns (cRPG), Numenera (PnP and certainly the upcoming cRPG), Call of Cthulhu (PnP). I don't remember if original DnD had kill XP or it was awarded only for treasure. And yes, I've played all of those.

How would you get that without making every fight easily winnable simply by having a party of melee DPS characters, Ctrl+A, click on enemy, repeat until dead? From where I'm at it's much more interesting if you have to play tactically in order to get your DPS characters to where they can dish out the damage without getting killed. My only concern with combat as shown in the videos was the strategic durability of the fighter. It's fairly basic tactics to have a tank hold the line, then outflank with other units to do the damage. If the tank's health gets bled off so quickly you have to rest after every battle, that's not so great. OTOH we don't know exactly what went into that fighter and how well Adam played to its strengths -- if you can pump health and deflection and improve durability with (self-)buffs (at the expense of DPS, for example), then that tactic's perfectly viable and interesting again.

@Iucounu true, but beside the point.

@Iucounu Yes, a high stam/low health fighter would have even less strategic endurance, but a low stam/high health fighter be the contrary -- wouldn't last as long in an individual fight, but could get through more of them before depleting the health reserve. Giving the player a measure of control over the ratio would let us decide whether we favor strategic or tactical staying power.

@Pray why not?

I understand that the Health/Endurance ratio is fixed at 1:1, with damage ratio at 1:4 or 1:8 for barbarians. I also understand that this wasn't always so. I think it would be a good idea to unlink the ratio, for example by associating health with Might and endurance with Willpower (or some other abilities). Partly because of the heavy health costs of the standard fighter tactic (as discussed here) but mostly because it would make it possible to weight your characters differently. You could pump Endurance to make a character that's tough to take down but needs to rest more frequently, or Health to make one who's a bit more fragile in a fight but gets up to fight again more times without having to rest. I believe this would be a simple way to add more variety to party-building.

I would prefer a pop-up levelling window. I don't really care all that much though. This works fine and we won't be looking at it all that much. No point changing it at this point IMO. Perhaps rethink it for the expansion or sequel.

@Labadal that is cool... and weirdly disturbing. Do you know the rationale behind the design? What are those spider legs supposed to do?

Entirely unlike the universally calm, positive, and humble people posting on this forum, for example.

@Gfted1, there is no resurrection in P:E. If a party member dies, he stays dead. And dead men don't wear plaid, or earn XP.

@Namutree: Continuing traditional Finn thread-hijack -- namu is also Finnish for 'goodie,' as in piece of candy or similar. Would be a good name for a cat here too.

Shadowrun Returns is a combat-focused RPG with no combat XP. It has many problems, but XP mechanics are not among them (IMO as always).

I think I will name my pet piglet Lambchop.

I live on that street, but it also sounds like a Maori war dance.

I hope so. I'm already planning the names for my characters. I definitely want a suitable name for the pet of Dyrtipix the Aedyran barbarian aristocrat. (If I make an Aumaua from Rauatai, he'll be named Hakaniemenkatu. That's only funny if you're a Finn though.)

That one's easy. If you have character advancement and want to give the player a degree of control over it, you need some form of 'currency' with which to buy it. XP is a simple, general, and workable solution to this problem. Not the only one of course but IMO better than most of the alternatives. "Why have ability scores, classes, or levels at all then huh?" would have been a better question. They are IMO an unnecessary layer of complexity. I prefer systems where you buy abilities directly. FWIW I also like Numenera's solution of having other things to spend XP on than character advancement.

I recently played Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall. I enjoyed it a lot. It forces you into combat all the time, and does not have combat XP. I did not miss it. Getting XP rewards when progressing in the quests felt entirely adequate. Just my experience, of course.

IIRC Josh said somewhere that the system is supposed to scale up to level 50. That'd leave room for a high-powered sequel, with levels roughly analogous to (A)D&D. The abilities the characters showed off looked very similar to what a level 5 D&D character would have, too. Allowing for adjustments like making the lowest levels somewhat less fragile and nerfing high-level spellcasters somewhat to keep rough parity with non-casters, I think D&D levels give a pretty good idea of what to expect with P:E levels.

Edit: never mind

dat hammer