PrimeJunta

Why not?

I like to take pictures. At one time I wrote about it on the Net a quite a lot. One of my idiosyncrasies is -- and has long been -- that I prefer using prime (fixed focal-length) lenses over zoom lenses, for a variety of reasons that make sense to me. For some reason, many people took this to mean that I think everyone should prefer prime lenses and zoom lenses are no good for any purpose. Eventually I kinda gave up and made up a Prime Junta which enforces orthodoxy in the correct choice of photographic equipment. So that's me. The avatar is from Scandinavia and the World, because I am from Finland and I liked the look.

I've updated it a bit: added Connections, fixed some errors in the data, disabled the buttons when you've hit the limits, and gave it a bit of a visual makeover. Still not a graphic designer though, but hey.

Yeah, that's gonna be interesting. Most of the best bits about the Numenera system are about arbitration and creativity -- DM intervention, using XP to get temporary benefits, tinkering with numenera to change their properties, using your esoteries or other skills in unconventional ways, and so on. I.e., guidelines for players to use their creativity, common sense, and logic in play. Some of the character creation rules have to do with inter-player interaction. There is no way to translate that directly to a computer game. OTOH the bare-bones system gives computer game designers a lot of freedom to build on. I'm really curious to see what they come up with.

I have a huge crush on the Numenera character generation system. It works like this: http://prime-junta.net/numenera/chargen.html

I thought that chargen utility was a bit limited, so I made my own. Not as pretty (not a graphic designer here) but it has some more stuff in it. http://www.prime-junta.net/numenera/chargen.html

Great find. From character creation to play in about fifteen seconds...!

How about making use of AI for consumables? What if each character portrait had a toggle that let you switch consumable use on, after which they'd make their own decisions about it? It could be off by default as combat begins so you don't accidentally forget it on and lose all of 'em. I know there's an option to control this in most other games of this type, but it's usually buried pretty deep in the behavior adjustment UI.

+1 on the vials. Also, The Witcher. It did potions right in so many ways, not least serving size.

Definitely. It's by far the simplest RPG ruleset I've come across. The GM needs to do a bit of homework to get his/her end of the operation down, of course, but the core rules fit into a few pages.

So, Numenera is out. Any other prospective players/GM's here? What d'you think? I'm going to start my campaign in another few weeks, after my D&D one winds to a close. Been reading the Corebook. My impressions so far -- I love the mechanics. Just enough to give the game structure but not get in the way. Some simple yet brilliant ideas there, such as making the rules asymmetrical, with a bare minimum for NPC's and lots of stuff for PC's, the GM intervention rules, and the rules encouraging player creativity, such as spending XP for short-term or long-term benefits, modifying esotery effects, and awarding each other XP. They suit my way of running the campaign to a T. I'm less awed by the setting. It's very much of a kitchen-sink, with some way-cool, out-there ideas and locations. Unfortunately it's also a bit of a hodgepodge. As presented it strikes me as too poorly structured to be really believable. Weird and unknown is fantastic, but there has to be a minimum of underlying logic to make it work. There are also some downright dumb bits here and there ("Temple de Frogue" -- really?), with some fairly plain-vanilla kingdoms and empires and such. I prefer settings with more structure and a stronger history, and at least some high-level explanations for how they got that way. Al-Qadim, Planescape, and Dark Sun all qualify in this respect; the Ninth World, not so much. Then again, I like world-building, and there are plenty of things to dip into, there. I have a hunch this may be what the designers intended; deliberately leaving fundamental things open so GM's and players can fill them in. Anyone else have any thoughts on this at this point?

@Silent Winter: PE won't have health potions, so that's unlikely.

My main beef with consumables in the IE games and their successors is that they're either unnecessary or a chore. You only actually need them if you're intentionally gimping your party -- for example, playing as a rogue or bard, or without a cleric or druid. The upshot is that I'm just hauling around a massive load of scrolls, potions, and wands "just in case" and never end up using them, or alternatively just treat them as vendor trash. Oh, and, arrows. Isn't it so much fun to run out at the wrong time because you forgot to spend small change the last time you dropped by a shop? To make consumables worthwhile, the game system has to design them in. They have to be an integral and critical part of the gameplay. It can most certainly be done – NetHack, for example, makes massive use of them. Trying to play without scrolls, potions, wands, or comestibles makes the game much, much harder, and a big part of the challenge is figuring out what each of the consumables do and finding or making the ones you want. I thought Shadowrun Returns gets it almost right too -- fetishes and grenades make a really big difference and don't cost all that much. The trouble with that is, again, that the game is too damn easy. Why would I use an 800 nuyen fetish if I don't have to? I like the Numenera system's approach of basically building the mechanics around single-use cyphers and limited-use artifacts, even if the carry limitations strike me as a bit heavy-handed -- surely there would have been better ways to stop players from hoarding them? In other words, putting a lot of effort into consumables is, IMO, a bit of a waste of effort unless you change the gameplay simultaneously, so you really need them. It would be cool if P:E did this, but I kinda doubt it. Making consumables worthwhile means making the game hard enough that they matter, which would probably make way too many players ragequit when attempting to play the way they're used to in IE and NWN -- it would be a legitimate complaint too, as it would be a material departure from the "IE feel." Perhaps in one of the harder modes?

Ya think? I thought they were mostly done pretty well, especially in The Witcher 2, Saskia's boobplate notwithstanding. Most of the time when skin was shown, there was a good reason for it, while regular clothing and armor looked fairly realistic and practical.

w00t, Vesemir. You could certainly do worse than drawing inspiration from the Witchers...

Why not, as long as it doesn't hold up the PC/Mac/Linux release? -- Although I'm sure current-gen consoles have more than enough horsepower to run it great too, although the architectures are different enough from a PC that it might make things a bit trickier than the PS4 at least. I've never had a console so I couldn't really say how the UI would work; I would imagine that a game built on the idea of selecting things by pointing at them might not adapt all that gracefully to that though. I think a tablet version might be easier actually. You could do all kinds of stuff with gestures. Draw a circle to select a group, that sort of thing. (There's nothing particularly difficult about it technically I'm sure; it's a design challenge.)

Fighter-specific only, not paladins, clerics, or others: [ http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64027-fighters-in-project-eternity-will-have-stamina-regeneration-in-combat/ ] Specifics of stamina regeneration were left open in Update #24, which introduced the mechanic, and JES also said "I don't know, man" when asked how quickly it regenerates in an interview with Iron Tower Studios in December. I can't remember exactly when they formally announced that stamina does not regenerate in combat except for fighters, but it was a while back. So not news, exactly.

I've had multiple uses of Security, Shadowrunner, and Gang etiquettes already.

Been playing with it for about 9 or 10 hours, experimenting with a few different char classes. Impressions: + Great atmosphere -- art, music, writing, etc. + Competent turn-based combat system. + Stable. I haven't encountered any seriously serious bugs yet. - Eeeeaasyyy. At least so far. I'm playing on Hard and am handling most encounters without even having to use consumables. Also scads of karma (=character points) to spend. - Super-linear, with very small areas. You do your runs in a specified order with specified objectives, with no more wiggle room than in a typical adventure game. - Classes should be better balanced. Street Samurai seems fairly boring compared to Rigger or Shaman, and deckers should have decker-specific content which so far at least I haven't really encountered. There are similar weirdnesses re equipment, e.g. a rigger can easily boost drone combat abilities past the point where she can get the drones to actually use them, while none of the other classes seem to have this problem. All in all? As it is, it's a nice light snack of an adventure/RPG hybrid and well worth the money, but no way in the same category as any full-on heavy-duty cRPG.

@anubite, Monte Cook just blogged about pre-play-centric vs play-centric RPG's. I thought it was an interesting way to look at things. In a nutshell, a game where the challenge is to build a character in order to overcome a set of pre-defined challenges as efficiently as possible is a pre-play-centric game; OTOH, a game where the challenge is to find varied and creative solutions to challenges as they come up is a play-centric game. He said they designed AD&D to be play-centric, but somewhere around D&D 3.5 the focus shifted to pre-play-centric. A lot of the discussion here seems to relate to that. It looks like there's one group of people who are worried about character building mechanics losing their challenge "if every build is viable," and another group who's thrilled at the prospect of playing the game with wild and wacky character concepts "because it allows many different playstyles." Pre-players versus players. Am I onto something here? The blog post is here. (Full disclosure: for PnP I far and away prefer play-centric gaming. For cRPG's I've enjoyed the pre-play aspects of the IE and NWN games immensely; in fact character-building is the only reason I've replayed NWN2 several times. So you could say I'm sympathetic to both sides of the argument. Which means I'll probably enjoy it whichever way it goes.)

I thought of adding a house rule that would tie different spell schools to different attributes. Enchantment and Conjuration to CHA, Illusion to DEX, Alteration and Evocation to INT, Necromancy to CON, Abjuration to WIS, that sort of thing. It would make a kind of sense and yield a much wider variety of relatively balanced mages. Didn't bet as far as working out the details, and eventually gave up on the idea because I didn't want to add even more complexity to the system.

I ran a campaign that had a paladin with INT 6 and WIS 16 (and I would certainly have allowed INT 3 had he rolled that). The player did a brilliant job of doing that role. His paladin had a natural and intuitive sense of right and wrong, but would have been completely unable to, say, describe that sense of right and wrong in terms of ethical imperatives. In many ways he was wiser, more compassionate, and juster than many of his more intelligent superiors!

Instadeath can be a fun gameplay element, but only if there's enough information that you can fairly avoid it. NetHack, for example, would not be anywhere near as fun as it is without all of the myriad stupid deaths you can experience, from choking on your food or dying from food poisoning, to taking a misstep and drowning in a pool, to falling down the stairs while wielding a ****atrice corpse, to being zapped by a gnome carrying a wand of death. But it's only fun because almost all of those sudden deaths are avoidable, and the game lets you discover the ways of avoiding them through those infinite replays in procedurally generated dungeons. I do not like instadeath in RPG's with precreated rather than procedurally generated content. It just leads to types of gameplay I don't enjoy: saving and reloading repeatedly to discover the hard counters, followed by saving and reloading repeatedly to abuse of any instadeath-dealing spells or abilities. In fact, this is the feature I liked least about the IE classics. I defeated Firkraag by preparing all the Feebleminds I could and reloading until one of them bit, for example. That was an exercise in bloody-mindedness, not tactical or strategic acumen.

It's not quite as simple as that, actually. Sometimes taking more time will save money, or will yield much greater value for money. Most projects start out with a very small team (the research/design/early development/pre-production/whatever phase), then expand to a bigger team (full development), and then tapers off again in the final production/beta testing/release/whatever phase (not counting testers, which cost less per hour than designers or programmers). The early small-team phase costs comparatively little per day compared to the full production and release phases, and by being extra super careful in that phase you can avoid really costly problems later on. IOW, pushing the schedule forward by 50% doesn't necessarily increase costs by 50%. It might be as little as 10%, depending on the trajectory. Bad things only happen if the project goes south in the full production or release phase. That's when big chunks of stuff get cut, things go over budget, and you get rushed, buggy releases, or projects get killed off altogether. I would wager that most of us working in software will experience at least one project like that, and believe me it ain't fun... and once you've survived it, you do your damnedest not to do it again. You also learn to recognise many of the warning signs and take corrective action early on. The senior Obsidian devs working on P:E are certainly crusty enough to have been there and done that. I have little doubts about them being able to handle the project management and budgeting end of this particular exercise.

I'm not too concerned about them staying on budget; Obsidian aren't new to this stuff and P:E won't have a large number of technical unknowns, so it shouldn't be too hard to budget. As to the schedule, they already mentioned immediately after the KS -- unofficially -- that April 2014 isn't realistic, because they exceeded their target by nearly a factor of four. What's more, Obsidian's bad old days of buggy messes are fairly far behind. They've demonstrated that they can deliver quality unless the publisher arbitrarily shifts deadlines forward and/or skimps on QA -- which obviously won't be an issue this time around.