PrimeJunta

I personally didn't mind this. You just explored, and if too hard you went elsewhere. I much prefer it over modern RPG's who have difficulty indicators and "you should be this level for a quest" and all those guiding systems. It's no shame to retreat and return later, more powerful. Not quite what I had in mind. Take Planescape: Torment -- you were basically locked out of most of the best content if you chose to play a low-WIS rogue type character, and there was no indication in-game that this was likely to happen. Having "you must be level X to play" is not what I would like at all about the quests; however, I would've placed the Athkatla questgivers so that the tougher ones would not have been in the first area you're likely to get into (the inn), and mmmaybe have added a line to the dialog something along the lines of "Hm, you guys look a bit green for this job. You sure you want to go with it?" What about Haste? Yeah, Haste too. There were others as well but it's been a while since I played BG2 so I don't recall the details. I agree; that wasn't what I meant by overpowered. Feeblemind and Haste aren't super-high-level spells though, yet the former would turn a really nasty dragon into a helpless lump of meat (most of the time), and the latter would effectively double your party's attacks. Never really bothered with it in the IE games. Just hope they don't make it like Drakensang and Dragon Age... where there's absolutely no penalty for failure. So you generally just pickpocket everyone for some bonusses and those you cannot yet you return later when your rogue has a few more points in it. It's also basically what I think about the KOTORs. I like it due to the story, the characters, the setting, the exploration, the quests. But the mechanics itself are pretty bad. Sometimes one will suffer through horribly gameplay just to experience those good points (TOR, DX:HR, Morrowind, Drakensang, Witcher II etc. etc. etc.) I agree about the KOTORs and Morrowind. Haven't played Drakensang. Major hate-on for DX:HR, not because of the mechanics (I got so mad I even blogged about it). OTOH I liked the gameplay in Twitcher 2 a great deal, irritating QT events and some annoying boss fights notwithstanding.

Helm, would you be so kind as to not derail discussions in which you have no interest in participating? Thank you very much in advance.

Oh, okay. I did not expect that. So, specific gameplay features that I really liked, partially recapping what I already said: Likes: - Support for big variety of character concepts, play styles, and parties. - Beautiful, lively, hand-painted 2D/orthographic art. - Huge variety of spells and large variety of well-differentiated magic-using classes. - Huge variety of monsters. - Carefully crafted, genuinely variable combat encounters. - Big variety of combat mechanics, most of which worked pretty well. - Tactical aspect of combat. - Wide possibilities for character development, of PC and party members. - Very tough optional sidequests. - Party interactions. Dislikes: - AD&D multiclassing. Whoever thought this one up must've been really drunk. You go from pretty good to awful to god snip-snappity-snap, with no ingame rationale for it. - Poor AI. Pulling and kiting was too easy, for example. Pathfinding bugs were too easy to exploit as well. - Encounters as puzzles -- some nearly impossible until you figured out the right spell or spell combo to use (through trial and error), at which point they became trivial. - Sometimes poor communication of intent to the player. E.g. the Athkatla questgivers were all together and gave no indication of how tough a quest to expect, which lured you into innocently wading into water much too deep for you at the time. Just placing the questgivers differently would've solved this issue! - Some overpowered spells, e.g. Feeblemind. (Even a feebleminded dragon ought to be able to lash out like the beast it is, even if it loses the ability to cast spells!) - Terrible overall balance in some of the games; PS:T in particular -- good luck trying to play a high-DEX high-INT, low-CON low-WIS rogue for example. - Misaligned incentives, such as combat XP (incentives for pointless murder rampages; Jaheira the druid killing wild animals for XP instead of rescuing them etc.) - Some more or less exploitable mechanics, e.g. rest-spamming, save-spamming, pickpocketing, grinding (in areas with respawns), some "infinite money" exploits in shops IIRC. - Wonky difficulty/power curve (problem inherent in (A)D&D) -- very early game you're Sir Diealot, very late game you're way overpowered. Overall, though, gameplay is maybe a quarter of the reason I really liked those games. The other three-quarters are because I loved the content delivered by the gameplay. Put another way, if Planescape: Torment had been an adventure game (a genre I don't much care for, usually), I would probably have liked it almost as much. Conversely, an IE game that doesn't have quality art, writing, characters, quests, critters, locations, and items would interest me not at all. So basically what I'm hoping from P:E is that it takes the best parts of IE, expands upon its strengths, and fixes at least its most egregious faults. That's probably too much to hope for, but hey, I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Actually, sneaking to avoid combat successfully could very well give the best results. On the other hand, failing to sneak successfully could have very dire results, i.e., getting into a tough battle poorly equipped and with low stamina. This would make stealth a high-risk/high-reward strategy, and combat a low-risk/low-reward strategy. Do you see a problem with that? Also, if you want to discuss combat XP vs quest XP vs activity XP, please start another thread for it. I'll be happy to discuss it with you, but not on this one.

Sneak XP would be extremely problematic, as it would very easily turn into a grindable exploit. To prevent it, you'd have to add yet more complication. Where I'm at, that dog don't hunt. In any case, I intended this discussion to proceed from the assumption that the quest XP/combat XP discussion is already settled; i.e., XP doesn't enter into it anymore at all. If you like, why not start another thread specifically about the advantages and drawbacks of different XP schemes?

@Helm, don't you think you're being a bit childish? There is an actual, reasonable discussion to be had about this. The devs might even get some good ideas if they peek in. How much do you think your continuing epic hissy fit is contributing to that?

That would work. Ideally, building a stealth-focused party would be a strategic decision you'd make early in the game and, for best results, stick with it. That would certainly come with trade-offs; a party of lightly-armored sneaky commandos would necessarily not be as good going toe-to-toe as a party of heavily-armored wrecking balls.

Since the Degenerate Gameplay thread is starting to... degenerate, I thought I'd raise one substantial point that came up in it. For those who missed the fun, background. It's been established that P:E will only have quest XP, rather than combat XP (à la Infinity Engine) or XP for doing things (à la KOTOR1/2). One substantive objection has been raised about this: "Assuming that combat consumes resources and stealth/non-combat doesn't, won't this create a systemic incentive for avoiding combat?" The answer to that objection is "Yes, it does," of course. And that would be bad, not to mention contrary to Josh Sawyer's explicitly stated design goal of crafting a system that does not systematically favor any approach over others. Which is why I think the problem should be addressed. For example, you could have minor loot drops that would roughly compensate for typical resources used to win that combat. Or you could impose resource costs on stealth and other non-combat activities. Here's a sketch for a stealth system with resource costs, as an example of how it could be done. 1 Moving while stealthed uses stamina. It regenerates when standing still. 2 Any character can enter stealth mode. 3 Any stealthed character has a chance of being spotted. 4 Heavy armor makes you easier to spot and increases the stamina cost. 5 Being a rogue or adding points to your sneak skill will make you harder to spot and will reduce the stamina cost of stealth. 6 Consumables exist to temporarily boost your sneak skill. These are used up when consumed. 7 Magic exists to temporarily boost your stealth. These take up your spell-caster's spell-casting capability. 8 Sneak buffs are incompatible with combat buffs. Use one, lose the other. Consequence: a party who decides to sneak through an enemy-infested area will have to do it pretty carefully. They'll trade off combat spells for stealth spells (7), have to acquire and use sneak buffs (6), forego combat buffs [8], and have to use light rather than heavy armor (4). Since they're avoiding combat, the cost of failure is very high -- if they're spotted (3), they'll very likely be in a tactically poor position, low on stamina (1), lightly armored (4), and un-buffed for combat [8]. If implemented this way, would stealth still sound like the systemically favored way to solve problems? If so, why? Would this kind of system be fun to play? Why or why not? Any other ideas? Discuss.

Ohhhh, that is the question that always makes you rage, because you can't answer it. You answer is not satisfactory, because it makes absolutely no sense. :sigh: I've already answered that question: it doesn't. The whole point of quest-only XP in a game where questing is the core mechanic is that it aligns with the in-game goals and therefore does not result in degenerate strategies. Kill XP on the other hand does not align with the in-game goals and therefore does result in degenerate strategies. Examples have been provided. If you disagree, kindly provide an example of a degenerate strategy produced by quest-only XP in a game, such as P:E, where questing is the distinguishing, core gameplay mechanic. I loved the games overall, despite their flaws. I liked the gameplay in them, despite its flaws. There are many specific features about the gameplay that I loved, and some that I did not like. I could write a list, but that would be long, and I'm not sure you're interested enough in what I think to read it, so I won't bother unless you ask nicely and promise to do so, with a modicum of thought. In my opinion it was a flawed mechanic that detracted from games that were otherwise superb. I have explained why. I'm still waiting for you to address my objections. Yes, you keep asserting that avoiding combat yields the best results, but asserting it doesn't make it so. I have already addressed the resource consumption objection. As I said earlier in this very thread, I am puzzled by this, since it is JES's explicit intention to craft a system that does not systematically favor any approach over others. Of course the resource consumption issue needs to be addressed, but that's quite easy. You simply have to impose a cost on non-combat activities, e.g. use of lockpicks when picking locks, or add a small reward to combat, e.g. minor loot drops sufficient to compensate for the consumables used in combat. Unlike XP, neither of these rewards is accumulative, so the perverse incentives it adds are very weak to nonexistent. It's also the kind of thing that's dead easy to tweak in the late stages of playtesting and balancing.

Yup, you're right. That is the general fear among the fearful. I'm a bit puzzled about it, since JES's explicit design intention is to craft a system that does not favor one approach over another. Indeed. We'll know when we'll know.

I already answered that. Please pay attention, 'cuz I won't repeat it again. I loved the IE games despite their flaws, not because of them. It is soooo possible to make a game that takes the best bits from them and corrects the worst bits. That's what I'm hoping P:E will be. I love parts of the system. The parts that don't suck. I loved the hand-painted 2D orthographic art. I loved the party-based gameplay, where you could pick your comrades from a largish pool and then develop their capabilities to suit your needs, and deploy them in a large variety of interesting, hand-crafted combat encounters against a massive bestiary of genuinely -- not just cosmetically -- different enemies. I loved the huge variety of spells I could pick from. I loved the intra-party interactions and the back stories my party comrades had. I loved the large variety of useful and interesting hand-crafted items that were in the game. I could make a similar list of stuff I didn't care for so much, but maybe some other time. But no, I did not love every little thing about the game. The rogue path in Planescape: Torment sucks like a tornado, for example. How will quest only XP give rise to degenerate strategies (if that's what you mean by "degenerative" gameplay?) Examples, plz. I've produced several examples of kill XP yielding degenerate strategies, so it's your turn now IMO. TL;DR: put up or shut up.

On average... yes. But in every particular instance... absolutely not. It would be boring if I knew of every problem I encountered that I could choose stealth, diplomacy, or combat and the end result would be the same. The game would be much more interesting if it had you wondering whether you did right to fight, or not fight, this time. Variety is the key. And once more, the obligatory caveat -- perfect balance is a mirage. Won't happen. But there is such a thing as sufficient balance: making the overall system roughly neutral re the various subsystems (combat, stealth, diplomacy, etc.), and then creating a variety of problems which feature a mix of different favored approaches.

I'm not saying it'd be terrible, I'm saying quest XP only is better. Combat XP -- even if there's only relatively little of it -- will create perverse incentives, which result in degenerate strategies. You won't be able to have any persistent respawns (e.g. the "close the portal wherefrom the demons spring" quest), you'll reward players who chase monsters for no other reason than XP and so on. Once again: if there is an easy way to align the systemic incentives with the in-game objectives, why would you not want to do that? If you were a designer, why would you knowingly leave in perverse incentives?

So, for how long would you be willing to mindlessly grind boars? Two days is a bit much, for sure. How about one day? Four hours? Two hours? One hour? A half an hour? Different people have different thresholds for it. With NetHack, I find pudding farming too tedious to bother with, but I do polypile (unless I'm going for a polyless conduct). And if you as a designer could align the incentives in such a way that there was no benefit to grinding boars for even fifteen minutes, why wouldn't you? You know, it doesn't sound like we disagree in principle. We just have slightly different priorities. I value balance between different approaches more than you do. I certainly agree that there should be at least one fun way to play the game. Moreover, if there is only one, the game should somehow communicate to the player, through its incentives, what the fun way is so the player doesn't accidentally attempt to play it in an un-fun way. But I do think it's a worthy goal to try to give the player as many different fun ways of playing the game as you can. In fact, I believe that just the availability of those alternative approaches adds depth and interest to any of them. That's why I'm such a big fan of branching storylines, unexpected consequences, and delayed effects.

True, it does, but in a way that is relatively easy to address. E.g. low-level loot drops from kills which more or less match your expected expenditure of resources for the battle. As an added perk, skillful players will be able to win battles with less resource use, meaning they'll end up ahead. This is a much easier problem to address than the imbalances introduced by kill XP.

Yeah, you could divide players into two camps -- those who respond strongly to systemic incentives, and those who don't. Those who don't usually have some reason they don't; for example, they role-play some particular kind of character even if it goes against the grain of the incentives. LARPing in other words. Or maybe they're in it for the story, just not interested in figuring out the game system, or just casually play through once. Which is all cool IMO. I've played a few games like that myself -- ones I didn't really care about enough to get deeply into. Mass Effect to name one relatively modern one. Played through it once, didn't bother returning to it for any reason. But that, IMO, is a red herring. I simply cannot think any good reason not to try to align systemic incentives with in-game objectives. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Yup, that's a good example. I may be a bit more of a game design geek than most people, since I am a software designer myself. As such, I am irritated no end by design flaws, and perhaps for that very reason I tend to notice them... and then get caught in the ensuing degenerate strategies. More casual players probably won't care; they'll never get deep enough into the system to catch any but the most glaringly obvious misalignments, like that rest-spamming you mentioned for example. And some of the truly hardcore consciously eschew the degenerate strategies they know about, and are strong-willed enough to stick to their decision. Perhaps some aren't even bothered by the availability of such strategies. For me, just knowing that they're there, within arms reach, greatly reduces my enjoyment of a game. Point being: I see no reason whatsoever not to attempt to create the most elegant, least exploitable game system as well aligned with the in-game objectives your game as you're able. I mean sure, nothing's perfect and eventually you're going to have to stop faffing about with it and let it go, and there will probably still be the odd exploit left in, but leaving in misaligned incentives that you know to be misaligned is just pointless and stupid IMO.

That is true. Those are also two very big ifs. I'd say that NetHack and Diablo are two examples of games where they hold, more or less, although they have their degenerate strategies as well (e.g. pudding farming in NetHack). But that's not why they do it! They do it for the same reason rats push a lever to get a pellet. They don't enjoy pushing the damn lever; they do it for the pellet. It's known as Skinner conditioning, and MMO's are built on it because it's the only way to keep players playing. "Challenge and excitement" have nothing to do with it. Believe me, if there was a button you could press every half-second to gain 1 XP, there would be players out there who would keep hitting it and do nothing else until they hit the level cap or died of carpal tunnel syndrome. I'm not making this up -- this is how people behave. This is how Blizzard made it's billions, for cryin' out loud! You really ought to read JES's posts on the topic, 'cuz you've got it backwards again. A degenerate strategy is not the player's fault -- the player is only doing what players do, i.e., responding rationally to the incentives handed out by the game. It's the designer's fault, for setting things up in such a way that the game rewards the strategies.

What if your diplomatic solution requires that you bribe an official with 10,000 zorkmids? Again, resources consumed. Wouldn't that make combat obviously the better choice and what the dev's said they don't want? I'm pretty sure JES was referring to systemic features. Combat XP is a systemic feature. Lockpicking XP is also a systemic feature. Random loot drops are systemic features. OTOH a quest nexus where you can talk, fight, or sneak, and your choice may have varying costs and outcomes, is a situational feature. The good thing about a system that treats stealth/combat/diplomacy/other neutrally is that it will easily permit crafting situations which favor any or none of the available solutions, without having to go through the extra effort of figuring out how systemic features affect the design of the problem. You can intentionally make one approach better than another in a particular situation, and then make some other approach better in some other situation. In a multi-path game, a big part of the fun is figuring out which is the best way to approach a problem, and not always picking the optimal one. Unforeseen consequences FTW!

That's quibbling with words. "Degenerate strategy" has a precise and generally accepted meaning in game design, which is how it's being used here. So I'm not following you on this tangent, TYVM. Whether it's an apposite term or not is a different matter, and one I don't want to get into either.

People keep saying that, but it ain't necessarily true at all. What if sneaking your (non-all-rogue) party through an area requires that everybody drinks an invisibility potion, or your spellcaster maintains a "cloak" spell? That's resources diverted away from battle. What if your diplomatic solution requires that you bribe an official with 10,000 zorkmids? Again, resources consumed. What if your diplomatic solution requires that you put points in Persuasion rather than Weaponcrafting, and Weaponcrafting gives you a supply of more effective arrows for use in combat? Again, cost. I could go on, but you get the picture.

@Karkarov, maybe I am. There are other ways than level scaling to maintain challenge, of course, but they all come with their trade-offs. The classic IE way is to split the game up into relatively manageable areas and only let players into a higher-level one after they've cleared a lower one, and to keep the amount of optional content to a level that won't produce huge spreads in party power at any given point. The Gothic way is to keep killing your character if he wanders off the intended path. But that's a pretty big trade-off in and of itself. It constrains player freedom a great deal. I like big areas, lots of optional stuff, and lots of player freedom. Putting in level scaling allows designers to make those sandboxes bigger and give players more freedom. Do it too much and you end up with Oblivion, of course, but there are balances to be found between that and none at all. Once more: I'm not calling for level scaling for its own sake. I just think that it's a useful tool in the box that can be applied to get desirable results, and we shouldn't discard it out of hand just because Oblivion misused it. I like what we're hearing about it in P:E so far -- the level 5-8 bracket JES cited sounds like it already allows a good deal of optional content and player freedom, without letting things get completely out of hand. But we will see. Edit: dafuq? The BBS ate half my message...

Ah. Humor. I have heard speak of it. It is a ritual practiced by your species, no?

Oh, Helm, Helm. You still don't appear to have grasped that quests are the defining core mechanic of a cRPG, and therefore demanding that they don't award XP is as silly as demanding that a racing game doesn't reward you for winning races. This is getting a little absurd actually...

@Helm. We have no indication whatsoever that avoiding combat is pure benefit. In fact JES went out of his way to say that he wants to avoid situations where one approach to a problem is always pure benefit -- e.g. lockpicking over using keys in DX:HR. You're just assuming as a matter of course that noncombat solutions to problems carry no cost -- opportunity cost, resource cost, some other cost. I can think of a half-dozen ways off the top of my head to make it not always so, and I think it would be very surprising if the game turned out that way, especially with JES's known obsession with balancing everything against everything else.