PrimeJunta

More the other way around, I think. I tend to like Obsidian's games (and Troika's and BiS's before them) because they explore such stuff. They occasionally stumble of course, but that's better than never wandering off the tarmac.

@Alfiriel I'm pretty sure they didn't drop romance in order to make less NPC interactions. More like the opposite really.

If more of us dealt with disappointment like this, the Net would be an altogether more agreeable place. :salute:

I figure they're doing this kind of stuff with those cool tan illustrated CYA panels, plus dialog. They could always throw a poison status effect on top of that. Don't think there's much point for a whole dedicated mechanic, especially as multiplayer is definitely not on the cards.

The devs have been saying that PoE is set during a golden age of progress and discovery. While I'm sure there'll be plenty of room for all kinds of interesting conundrums, ethical, political, and otherwise, it doesn't sound exactly dystopian or cynical to me.

@TrashMan IMO it's generally a mistake to classify people as "racist" or "not racist." It's more accurate and more useful IMO to describe attitudes or actions that way. I believe everybody has some racist attitudes, and occasionally acts in racist ways. I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't, and I can't see how it could be otherwise, as we absorb our attitudes and learn our reactions from our social environment, and our social environment is deeply racist. Thing is, different people deal with this situation in remarkably different ways. Many if not most get reflexively defensive about it. They angrily reject any suggestion that they might hold racist attitudes or act in racist ways, often inventing quite elaborate stories to avoid having to address such suggestions at face value. Others acknowledge that they too have such attitudes and occasionally act in such ways, and therefore pause to consider whether the suggestion might have some merit; if they decide that it does, in fact, have merit, they might even attempt to change their behavior on that point. Or if it's a deep, unconscious bias – as is usually the case – they attempt to be more aware of it and catch it before they act on it. I much prefer to hang out with the second variety of people. So yeah, I would characterize your preference for white women as racist, but I would not consider it helpful to characterize you as racist for it. It's just a racist attitude. Everybody has them. The more intersting thing is what you do with it. If I was in your shoes, I would acknowledge that preference, and then attempt to be aware of it and not let it influence the way I interact with women of any race.

Burn the heretic.

True, the stances are very lifelike. That guy in the green puffy breeches is handling his a bit carelessly though. It's an interesting looking situation actually. Makes you wonder what they're up to. They're clearly waiting for trouble, laying an ambush perhaps, with the matches lit and everything ready, but the guys in the back seem to be in conversation and not paying much attention to what's coming. Hardened veterans who trust their comrades on the lookout to warn them to shut up and look sharp on time? The style isn't my favorite, but the guy can draw and knows what he's drawing, that's for sure.

Matchlocks, actually. Cool, though, and would fit PoE nicely IMO.

I'd be surprised if this kind of thing wasn't in the game, and doubly surprised if there wasn't at least a solid attempt to do a good job of it. Obsidian has done this before with varying degrees of success; in MotB we had the Rashemen matriarchy and the enmity between them and the Thayvians and the racism towards the Hagspawn, and more recently in FO:NV there was the horribly misogynistic and generally rather awful Caesar's Legion. That's IMO an especially encouraging precedent as it managed to create a believable portrait of them, instead of just making them a one-dimensional essentially evil Enemy that can only ever be resisted. I'd say the biggest flaw with MotB in this respect was that while there was a lot of prejudice in the world you were in, you, the PC, were never at the receiving end of it, not even through your choice of companions. Perhaps PoE will manage it better. (Also, btw -- as games go, both Witchers did a fairly good job of working both sexism and racism into the game without doing it reflexively or unthinkingly. I'm more than happy to forgive their occasional stumbles for everything they did well, and the risks they took to do it at all.)

I'll just say one more thing about this whole chainmail bikini thing. I'm not the least bit bothered by chainmail bikinis as such. In fact, if done well, an erotic cRPG could actually be pretty damn good, especially if done in top-down isometric format like PoE, since it would necessarily avoid the embarrassingly awful pixel-humping you get in first- or third-person OTS perspective. It'd have to suggest more and reveal less. The tropes that do irritate me are simply these -- One, asymmetry, aka the "men get platemail, women get bikinis" trope. In general, men are portrayed as people you want to be, while women are portrayed as things you want to possess. This is reflected in the way they're dressed. Two, titillation overload. If everybody's showing an enormous amount of flesh all the time, it becomes the default and loses all power. Ever been to a nude beach? I spend my summers in southern France and many of the best beaches are nude or clothing-optional. After the initial unfamiliarity/discomfort wears off, you get used to it, and being nude is just what you are at the beach. (It's also way more convenient than faffing about with bathing suits.) I would like nudity or revealing clothing to be there for some reason other than just to titillate specifically men, and I would like that reason to make sense in the context of the game world. My gigantic magic golden codpiece suggestion in the other thread was obviously tongue in cheek, but I was also making a point. At the very least, the physics of the world should work the same way for men and women: if we have both men and women as warriors, and it makes sense for men to wear sensibly-designed, protective metal armor in combat, then it should also make sense for women. Conversely, if, say, we have a high-magic world with a tropical climate where magic items are powerful enough to render metal armor obsolete, sensibly-designed metal armor would make no sense for anyone, and warriors of all sexes should be dressed accordingly. And, of course, if we have a world where men and women have different roles – say, only women can be priestesses or witches, and only men can be knights or diplomats – the clothing should reflect that. (Throw in a couple of fertility goddesses and magic powers driven by sex, and half-naked badass women would make total sense.)

Cool. So, what level are you in VtM:B, roughly, once you reach the Giovanni mansion? ... That's right: there is no answer to that, because there's no such thing as "level" in Storyteller. I realize this is a matter of semantics (your definition of "leveling mechanics" is broader than mine; broad enough to include games with no notion of "level"), but I prefer to distinguish between character advancement mechanics in general and leveling mechanics in particular. This is because it is a significant mechanical distinction. (Cf. class-based RPG systems and class-less RPG systems with skill trees. They do more or less the same thing -- character advancement and differentiation -- but in different ways.) I agree that RPG's do need character advancement mechanics. However I am pointing out that level/XP is not the only way to accomplish this.

Levels and XP are second-order abstractions. You can build a perfectly good RPG without either. Just award character points directly, which you can use immediately to buy skills, talents, or whatever the character advancement abstraction in your system is. If you want to support specialization, put the skills in a tree, with the more powerful ones costing more and being further down. The Storyteller PnP system works like this, as do its computer implementations, e.g. VtM: Bloodlines. It wouldn't be hard at all to make, say, a class-, XP-, and level-less D&D 3.0/3.5. Just assign a character point cost to each feat, skill, ability, and spell level, lay them out as hierarchies so that, say, you can't take a higher-level spell slot before taking a sufficient number of lower-level ones, and recalibrate XP awards to award character points directly instead. No more leveling up, just buying abilities immediately when you advance.

I'd back a classless, level-less, XP-less party-based isometric fantasy cRPG. Mechanically I'd even prefer one to what we have.

I'm all for opening cans of worms. There is a risk of screwing things up, but if you never risk anything you just end up with something that's perfectly bland which is not much fun. I'd much rather have them take risks and fail, even if failing means being inadvertently offensive. I trust Obs to be mature enough not to fall into the obvious traps. They are, after all, the makers of such thoughtful and sophisticated (future) philosophical masterpieces as South Park: The Stick of Truth.

I was going to write something but then I read what Nonek wrote and now there is no point. Just this, though: I like companion NPC's with their own agendas. Like Veronica and Boone from New Vegas, for example.

@Wombat I think it's largely a matter of terminology. Some of the words in PoE don't mean what we're used to them meaning, if you get my drift. There was a lot of anxiety about that in the attribute thread. There is something odd about a heavy-hitting rogue, or a Mighty wizard for that matter. Personally I don't care all that much. It's largely a matter of what you're used to. Int, Wis, and Cha don't really make much sense either, and there are plenty of rogue fantasy archetypes who excel at dealing death in melee -- the Gray Mouser comes to mind, and as a swordsman he was second to none, even Fafhrd. I can see how it would bother some of the more conservative-minded amongst us though.

It's funny how different people latch onto different things as essential to the IE experience. Many of these are in fact the things I don't like about them. Some that have come up are grinding for XP, hard counters, obvious dump stats, rogues as relatively useless combatants, clerics as required healers. I suppose that's quite human. When we develop an attachment to something, we often become especially attached to the flaws. I remember a Top Gear episode where that obnoxious older guy was complaining that the Abarth 500 just isn't the same as the old, great Abarths because it's not completely stupid, as in, it's possible to get into the back seat, there's room in the boot for things, and the engine doesn't overheat so bad they would have to leave off the cover. There really is something to that. Maybe the IE games were like British sports cars of yore where having two out of oil pressure, temperature, and electricity working at the same time is pretty good really. If PoE turns out to be a Toyota, will it be as lovable? I sure hope so, because demanding that games be worse to be better seems like a dead end to me.

4 would not bang

Does too!

Also that's gotta be extremely painful if she has to tie her shoelaces. That corner will dig into her solar plexus like ow. Edit: Or sternum.

Is too.

@JFSOCC I have a feeling it might not be all that grim. Different classes tend towards different ability and skill mixes. If the checks are connected to the abilities and skills, class will influence them indirectly. So a Wilderness Lore check will favor druids and rangers even if it's not specifically tied to those classes. Personally I would prefer it that way, like with the "holy warrior order stronghold quest" from the other thread.

In the interests of fairness, if skimpy female armor is in, I demand that the most powerful male armor in the game is a giant codpiece that loses all of its magic if worn with anything else. You would, of course, have different versions, from padded, boiled leather, chain, and plate, with the latter two of all the grades of steel available, and the highest-level ones gold-plated and studded with gems of various colors. Surely we wouldn't want to deny men the choices the women get, no?

Interesting challenge. I've played lots of low-combat D&D, including many sessions with no combat at all, but the game would be drastically different if killing wasn't in at all. But I'll try. I'll try to keep as much of the IE/PoE style intact, to sketch out something that you could do by modding one of the existing games, rather than something completely different (like an adventure game for example). My game is set in Khumbu-Lo, a great island in the middle of an ocean. It is peopled by immortals, sustained by ancient magic they no longer understand. This magic is powerful enough to restore any amount of damage: even an individual who is completely disintegrated will re-form the next day, completely intact, including memories, skills, and personality. There is no disease. Hunger and thirst are present, but once past a certain point, starvation simply stops. If you stop eating and drinking, you'll be weakened and end up looking like an Indian ascetic, but will continue to survive in that state indefinitely. This magic affects all animal life. It also makes all of it completely sterile. Nobody and nothing ever dies, nobody and nothing is ever born. Other than plants. Needless to say, everybody's vegetarian. Khumbu-Lo is an extremely violent society, precisely because the cost of losing a fight is so low. Since it has all of the problems other societies have -- poverty, tyranny, slavery, oppression -- conflict is common. There are wars, oh yes. Because nobody ever dies or is permanently physically harmed, violence against people is not a very useful way of resolving these conflicts. Instead, those on the losing side are dispossessed, exiled to barren, unwanted areas, or enslaved. Wars, vendettas, and battles for territory are about material goods: destroying fortresses, depriving the enemy of vital resources, or physically pushing them out of an area. Slave rebellions have the rebels take up arms en masse and fight their way out to set up an enclave of their own. These are not that common because the slave population is relatively low and slavery is a temporary state. Since slaves don't have much to lose, the potential for rebellion is much higher than in mortal societies. Consequently slaveowners keep their slave populations down to manageable numbers and, lacking the sticks of owners of mortal slaves, provide them with sufficient carrots to keep them from rebelling. Most of the time. The aristocracy uses heavily ritualized combat -- duels or between groups -- to resolve matters of honor. These are public spectacles, much enjoyed by everyone. There are also professional gladiators reknowned for their skill at fighting entertainingly. The lower classes simply fight amongst each other, or attend brutal prizefights. So, you could have pretty much the whole gamut of classes, races, mechanics, items etc. from any of the IE-style games, and write in a fantasy story suited to the setting. The removal of death would change your quests in material ways; for example there would be no "bring me the head of X" or "kill be N rorgwulfs" simply because you couldn't, they'd never be dead. Instead, you would be, I dunno, stealing valuable objects, destroying dangerous artifacts, collecting bits and pieces to create a dangerous artifact, discovering forgotten corners of Khumbu-Lo, perhaps eventually talking to strange beings from outside time that know something of the nature of the curse, or blessing, lying over Khumbu-Lo. Another twist would be that because combat is always survivable and the biggest risk you're running when engaging in it is losing all your stuff, there should be more scope for avoiding it altogether. I would take care to design in a pacifist solution to every conflict in this game, and I would use a class system where not every character is necessarily awesome in combat. If you want to, you could build a cloaked catburglar type who's adept at avoiding or getting out of fights with all his stuff intact and of relieving others of their belongings without fighting them. Or someone who accomplishes her goals through gathering information and knowledge and using these effectively to manipulate events to her wishes. Your extra credit? I'd introduce an explorer. Call him Dr. Breathingrock. He's the first outsider to arrive in Khumbu-Lo in thousands of years, shipwrecked on the coast, all alone, with nothing but a journal, a compass, and a revolver with six bullets. He's no good at fighting, doesn't speak the language, doesn't (to start with) even realize that nobody (including himself, as long as he's there) won't ever die.