PrimeJunta

@maggotheart, design for save-and-reload has to be executed and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It's a lazy way to add the illusion of challenge where it adds nothing but frustration.

I can't think of too many ways in which diseases would contribute anything meaningful to the game. If disease is just another relatively short-duration status effect, then yeah fine I guess, but that's about as exciting as catching a cold. OTOH if it's genuinely scary (think plague, mummy rot, leprosy, cancer) then it's most likely just another trigger for ragequit and/or revert-to-previous save. The only positive would be to make plague zombies (or whatever) that much scarier. There are some specific circumstances where it could work. Becoming infected with something and having to get the cure is a legit quest hook, and having to beat the clock because the disease is progressing adds urgency. Or, alternatively, having someone else become infected and having to get the cure and beat the clock to save them. If done well, that can make for some good gameplay, even if it's a bit of a cliché already. (Morrowind much?) But that wouldn't be a systemic feature; it's a scripted one. So I'd vote nay on disease. Do something more fun instead. Curses, lycanthropy, mutation, whatever.

I would hate to be tasked to write these and all the reactions to them. It would be mind-numbingly dull, which I think would affect the quality of the writing. I prefer a more free-form approach with a mix of different tones and responses as contextually appropriate. You could internally flag these with personality traits you're tracking, though, and then create some nice mechanics around those -- for example if you have a reputation of being a mean, surly type of person, suddenly picking a kind, compassionate response could have a bigger impact. Or there was the great "curse" idea where a curse would gradually whittle away your kind, compassionate options until you only have the balls-to-the-wall evil ones left. But yeah, systematizing it like you suggest does sound like a bad idea. Huge chore for the writers with relatively small pay-off. Depending on how you set up the UI, it could also add another layer to selecting those options which would interfere with the flow of conversation.

But Isabel necessary on a bicycle?

Okay, in light of today's update... Name: Reywas Alias: The Equalizer Portfolio: Armorsmiths, balance, and fairness Enemies: Cheaters, degenerates, and Hülm, the god of wine Symbol: Two spoked wheels connected with a triangle Manifestation: Defeated warriors and laborers engaged in repetitive, tedious work will occasionally encounter a slight, tattooed, bearded man balancing on a device consisting of two wheels connected with a triangle. He will gently admonish them about more interesting life choices and, for defeated warriors, offer suggestions on proper choice of weapons when fighting enemies of particular types. A mortal following his advice will always succeed in his or her, or hir next endeavor. An armorsmith calling Reywas's name while forging a suit of armor may find it blessed with additional protection against a particular damage type.

I have a thing for Tibetan dharmapalas. One of 'em, Palden Lhamo, was the wife of an evil king of Lanka. He was bringing up their child as the destined final destroyer of the Dharma. After spending years trying to convince them to change their mind, she did what any decent person would do: killed her child, drank his blood out of his skull, ate his flesh, flayed him, tanned the hide to make a saddle blanket, and rode off on a white mule. The king got a little bit irate about that and tried to shoot her with a poisoned arrow, but hit the mule instead. She plucked out the arrow, and an eye opened where it hit. She is now the protector of all Buddhist governments, specifically the Dalai Lama's one. If P:E has anything remotely as badass as that, I'll be happy. Sadly I'm not creative enough to make stuff like that up meself.

Call of Cthulhu. Your numbers go up by learning something. You learn something by studying, being taught, or practice in the field. Every time one of these things happens you roll d100; if you beat your current skill level, you add d4 to d8 points (sometimes even more) to your skill. IMO works better than XP in PnP gaming where you have a GM to prevent players from gaming the system. Would be tricky to translate to a cRPG without ending up in Oblivion-ville. The Storyteller system awards character points for plot progression directly without the intermediary of XP. So instead of adventure -> XP -> gain level -> points to spend improving your character, you get adventure -> points. Higher-level skills cost more character points to buy. At higher levels this ends up feeling a lot like an XP system though because you need to collect several character points to materially improve even a single skill. Works very well, but with a very different feel -- in CoC you progress organically based on your actions; in Storyteller you progress based on explicit choices about where to put those character points. VtM:B used Storyteller as the basis. Personally I prefer XP-less and classless systems. Class, XP, and level just add unnecessary complexity without adding depth; in PnP it's also a bit of a chore to level up characters, especially if they level up at different times (and no, my players don't usually do this as homework even if they mean to -- some of them have lives). Awarding character points directly cuts out this complication while retaining all of the freedom and depth players have to develop their characters. In practice a Storyteller-like system with additional awards to specific skills for study/practice works best. IMO as always. And yes, I do realize that doing away with classes, levels, and XP would have been too radical a departure from P:E's IE roots that it was very unlikely to start with, so I ain't complaining that they kept them. If a trivial change to the way XP is awarded causes this much anxiety, I can only imagine the howls if they had tried to do something genuinely innovative.

It does affect the bouquet, but whether it makes it better, worse, or just different is a matter of taste. Which do you prefer, Cabernet or Shiraz? I also share your dislike of combat in VtM:B -- it was awful; click-spammy, unbalanced, frustrating. Just plain bad.

@Raszius: it's about the why of those numbers. There are games where the numbers going up are the game, more or less. Roguelikes, MMO's, the Diablo series, arguably some of the more dungeon-crawly of the IE series (the IWD's, ToEE). Then there are games where the numbers are a means to an end. There are numbers and they go up, for sure, and as they go up, you get stronger. But that's not all they're about. The numbers interact with the rest of the game to determine your place in an imagined world, and the imprint you leave on it. I'd put Fallout, PS:T, BG2, MotB, the KOTOR's, and VtM:B in this category. They're games that are about something, and the system is just a way to hold whatever they're about. In general, I prefer that kind of game. So the way I read Ffordeson's intent, and the way I feel about this stuff, is that I prefer games where the system -- the numbers that go up -- are of instrumental value only. They're the vessel that holds the wine. A crystal goblet won't make rotgut any more palatable, and a fine wine will be good even drunk from a cracked clay mug. This is also why I think the most important feature of the game system is that it makes the lives of the vintners as easy as possible; lets them pour in the kind of wine they want to make. That's the main reason (although there are others) I'm firmly in the "placed XP" camp: it's way easier to tune than any form of "systemic XP" and so makes it easier for them to make us a better wine.

You only need one cat. They absorb psychic imprints like you wouldn't believe. Practically live on them. Well-known fact.

I'm all for nigh-unbeatable secret optional battles. There's no multiplayer though so the second suggestion is kind of moot. That said, randomly generated quests sort of go against the grain of an IE-style game; one of the attractions of IE was that because content was so easy to place, designers could hand-craft everything and didn't have to rely on algorithmically generated anything. So the world felt... dunno, handmade, living, in a way a procedurally-generated one doesn't.

As far as I know, they haven't said yet. I guess the default assumption is that it'll be more like the IE games and NWN (your first example) than fully open-world like TES or Fallout. But who knows, they might surprise us.

Oh? I didn't expect that. I expected some basic similarities -- races, abilities, classes, progression through XP, and some sort of spell/skill/feat system, but that's about it. (Personally I wouldn't have been devastated even if they hadn't stuck to the formula even that much. I prefer classless and XP-less systems and don't much care for varied player races, for example.)

Interesting tangent, this. How does padded armor do against blunt force? Or, put another way, how thick would the padding have to be turn a life-threatening hammer blow into one that just knocked the wind out of you? How about a Kevlar vest?

Well then you really cannot into reading, as that's not what I've been saying at all. You'll find I'm arguing for more tactical complexity in another thread on this very forum, for example -- specifically, better and deeper rules covering movement in combat and the blocking thereof. I do agree with Ffordeson that the content made the IE games great, and the system to a much lesser extent, though. I'd go one further, actually -- I'd say the IE games were great despite the underlying system, not because of it. AD&D is frankly awful, and D&D 3 is decent for tabletop but a poor fit for a cRPG. The great strength of IE was that it made it easy for authors to create quality content for them. The systems themselves got the job done, barely, but no more than that. That does not mean I want less numbers in a cRPG. Quite the opposite, actually -- computers are really good at arithmetic and looking things up in tables, so IMO we should use more of them to add depth to the gameplay. Computers make it possible to manage depth and complexity than no PnP system could, easily. It would be silly not to take advantage of this. Whether all of those numbers need to be exposed to the player is a different matter. What do I want, then? I want an (1) isometric, (2) party-based cRPG with (3) deep and varied character development options, (4) tactically interesting combat, (5) a sprawling world with lots of stuff to do in it, (6) interesting companions, (7) compelling storylines, [8] complex rich, and interesting magic, and (9) mechanics good enough and complex enough to support the whole. And yeah, I will be disappointed if the mechanics turn out as bad (or poorly fitted to a cRPG) as D&D. Thus far, I have seen no indication that this is to be the case.

Don't you understand the meaning of the phrase "means to an end" either? I can explain it to you if you like.

Nitpick: cosa means "thing" (also matter, affair, business), not "cause." So Cosa Nostra is more like "Our Thing" or "Our Business." It's not like it has much of a "cause" as such anyway. Mafia-like groupings with causes are usually called "terrorist organizations" or "resistance movements," depending on which one we're talking about and who's asking... Edit: also mad props to JonVanCaneghem on the scavs' guild idea. Brilliant in-game way to solve the problem, without needing unexplained mechancis. Later you could even acquire a magic crystal ball that would let you phone them right from the dungeon, without even needing to drop by. "Yo. Another one clear. Here are the coordinates, come have a party..."

One thing that's annoyed me no end in all cRPG's I've played is how difficult it is to block enemy movement. At most you suffer an attack of opportunity when moving past someone, and what with the hit points to damage ratios we have, that's often a small price to pay. The upshot is that the most you can do is block a door, and that by packing several meat shields shoulder to shoulder in front of it. I would like to see combat mechanics that fixed this. Basically, you should not be able to move through an active enemy's zone of control at all. Then you could add things specifically to deal with this -- a short-duration stun effect that would allow you to pass the stunned enemy, a rogue special ability that would let you tumble through it, and so on. And I would like to see this worked into weapon mechanics. Reach and facing would become way more important. Two swordsmen facing two spearmen would be a standoff, but replace the swordsman with an acrobatic rogue who's able to tumble past the spearmen to get behind them, and the whole situation will change. This would make combat much more tactical. Positioning would matter. There would be such a thing as a defensive line. Getting behind one could swing the entire battle. It would be more RTS-y, yes, but IMO in a good way, and in a way that would enhance the entire game.

I detest inventory busywork. I do like being required to choose what I'm bringing with me. IMO the proposed system strikes a very nice balance between the two. The biggest weakness is that it's a "magical" mechanic with no in-game explanation, which means it does interfere with suspension of disbelief somewhat. But then again so does an inventory that lets you carry a half-dozen suits of plate mail and then have a feisty melee fight.

Loot is a reward. Health is a resource. These are qualitatively different things. That's what shops are for -- they allow you to convert loot into resources. The ability to rest anywhere makes it unnecessary to manage health and spell use strategically. You'll always be at full health with a full spellbook in every battle. That removes a pretty big and interesting strategic element from the game. A well-designed game should be designed in such a way that the most efficient way to play it should also be the most enjoyable way to play it. "Most enjoyable" is a matter of preference of course which leaves lots of room for legitimate differences. Some people don't like strategic resource management and want to be at full strength before every encounter, for example. That's a totally legit preference, and many games are specifically designed around that -- Dragon Age: Origins, to pick one. If you fall into that category, then naturally you're going to hate restricted resting, or things like the curse in MotB. So there's certainly room for disagreement about this mechanic. The discussion here about it has been almost completely worthless though; it's been all "hurr durr degenerashun" on the one hand and "bow be4 me, I iz hardkore, resting is teh girly" on the other. Still, most degenerate strategies are not enjoyable for most people. Which is why I find the hostility to the very idea of getting rid of them completely baffling. I wish the discussion was more about what kinds of gameplay you enjoy (or not), and which kinds of mechanics support (or restrict) those kinds of gameplay. We might actually get somewhere.

Yes, that's correct.

Not sure if it'll be infinite or merely very, very big. Either way, it'll be much bigger than your normal inventory. Not if the deep stash is infinite or very big -- big enough to hold all the salables from a couple of dungeons for example. My understanding is that your normal inventory is roughly as big as what we're used to; the deep stash is in addition to that. It's just a simple change in mechanics to make it a little less tedious for packrats to packrat, while retaining the strategic layer of inventory management. Sort of like the car trunk in Fallout 2, the storage locker at the inn in The Witcher, or the party chest in ... games that have the party chest, except that you can magically throw things in wherever you are, and it's always with you when in a shop, in addition to being available in camp. I don't know if there will be an ingame explanation for it. Personally I don't care; it's not like the inventory systems in the IE games were realistic or anything, what with being able to run around lugging multiple suits of plate armor and enough iron to equip a small army.

@Gfted1, close, but no cigar. The degenerate strategy the "deep stash" obsoletes is trekking back and forth between a dungeon and a shop in order to sell off the loot. The trekking back and forth is not needed because you can just plonk the stuff you intend to sell in the deep stash, and it'll be there when you get to the shop. Why not just remove carry limits altogether? Because this would completely remove inventory management (=the need to think about what you're bringing with you) from the game, and inventory management is a small but significant facet of strategic resource management. Same thing with resting mechanics -- the rest-spamming in NWN effectively made all spells per-encounter, and health regenerate fully between encounters, unless you intentionally handicapped yourself by making up an arbitrary code of conduct about resting. IMO having to manage resources like health and spells between encounters makes the game a lot more interesting. That's why I liked the curse in MotB so much -- it discouraged rest-spamming very effectively, which meant that you weren't just spamming meteor swarms in every encounter.

You're right, AGX-17. My concerns are probably overblown. Mods, please feel free to lock this thread.

Are you claiming that you have a better idea of what the relative difficulty of sneaking as opposed to fighting is going to be than the game's lead designer? Are you familiar with the concept of invincible ignorance, by any chance?