PrimeJunta

Sadly, you're mistaken about that. Dig through some of the "Armor and weapons suggestions" threads, and you'll find some lamentably deluded people arguing in favor of moar spiky bits for the sake of looking badass.

But that's not what the update said. (boldface mine) What I'm confused about is the apparent contradition beteween the second and last sentences. Thinking about it more, though, I think I get it. Is the idea that armor has two properties, damage threshold and damage reduction, and weapons have three properties, weapon damage, threshold negation, and reduction negation, so that full damage is applied if it beats (damage threshold - threshold negation), otherwise weapon damage is reduced by (damage reduction - reduction negation)? So slashy things would have high weapon damage but low threshold negation and reduction negation, stabby things would have low weapon damage and reduction negation but high threshold negation, and crushy things would have medium weapon damage, low threshold negation, but high reduction negation. This would make crushy things best against heavy armor, since nothing can overcome their damage threshold but crushy things are best at getting some damage through anyway, stabby things best against medium armor since they would get through the threshold for full damage while crushy and slashy things would get the reduction applied, and slashy things best against no/light armor since they have the highest weapon damage and would have no damage threshold to worry about. If this is the way it's supposed to work, I say Yay! Makes sense, both in terms of verisimilitude and game balance.

@Monte Carlo -- yup, heroic logic FTW. I'm just (mildly) concerned that piercing weapons will fall between the cracks as it were, mechanically, and I was wondering how the P:E gang was intending to justify their existence. Put another way, suppose I have a maul, a claymore, and an estoc. According to the update, the maul does most damage through armor, the claymore does most damage against no armor, and both the maul and the claymore have higher base damage than the estoc. So when would I want to pick up the estoc instead of the maul or the claymore?

Great update. I'm confused about a detail regarding damage types. You say that slashing is highest base damage, piercing negates a certain amount of armor damage threshold, but crushing is best against armor. Right. So slash against unarmored opponents, crush against heavily armored ones. Makes sense. My question is, when would piercing be the preferred damage type? Against medium armor? How would the maths work for this?

Designing a game that assumes that every player will replay it is not, imo, good design. Which isn't to say I don't personally like replaying a lot of games or don't want games to have aspects to encourage replays. Just that I don't think that should be a requirement to feeling like I enjoyed the game/the game played fair. I agree. But I feel very strongly that a cRPG that lets you get everything on one playthrough is lacking. It removes one of the things that, for me, make the appeal of the genre -- choices and consequences. Choosing something implies not choosing something else; otherwise it's a phony choice. What you don't get defines what you do get.

I'm sure it's possible. I worked with a company that did 3D modeling software some, oh, 20 years ago or so, and they had ways to do this already then. Dunno exactly what the algorithm was, but it worked really nicely. It took a few seconds to render the image (at a high resolution too), then you could zip lights around it in real time. The hardware was state of the art for the time (Silicon Graphics), but your phone has more processing power in it than those did, never mind a computer.

I love sword canes as much as the next guy, but they sound a bit too top-hat-and-monocle for this period, methinks.

I like your idea of tying it in with the reputation system. Run away enough and you get the perk "Cautious" which makes people point and laugh at you. Never run away and get the perk "Boneheaded" which makes people cross the street when they see you approaching.

That's what replays are for. The first time around there's a lot you don't know. What the toughest fights are like and which weapons, skills, and party builds are most effective in them. What the outcome of particular story choices you make is. What's around the next corner. That's what makes the whole exercise worthwhile. Games that let you have everything on a single playthrough are much less satisfying than ones with built-in limiters. These are the ones you end up replaying, that give you a different experience every time. So the first time around you won't even know that there's the Uranium Necktie and the Wet String in the last shop you'll encounter, and you'll only have amassed a quarter-mil worth of barterable treasure. As long as the rest of the game is still beatable with a reasonable amount of frustration, that's all good. Next time around you'll be saving up for them. And the next time after that, for the other thing. Wanting to get everything NAOW! is a big reason cRPG's have gone downhill for the past 10-15 years.

Yes, that would be silly. However, having a Uranium Necktie of Complete Protection (1,000,000 ZM) and a Wet String of Instantly Lethal Damage (also 1,000,000 ZM) available for purchase, but only 1,500,000 ZM worth of other treasure in the game would be interesting, because it would mean that you'd have to decide which one you want, even if you'd wrung every last ZM out of the game. Then maybe pick the other one on your next playthrough. That's what's cool about scarcity. It makes choices meaningful. If you always get everything (and a pony) it gets boring.

Very simple. It's not "having fun playing in your own way." It's playing in a way that's not fun only because the game system rewards you for playing that way. That's the problem with all degenerate mechanics, whether we're talking savegame abuse, grinding, farming, or whatever. A well-designed game should not reward such gameplay. An exploitable level scaling mechanic that makes the game easier by avoiding becoming more powerful is a variant of this. It rewards degenerate gaming. Therefore it should be avoided. It would be doubly Not Fun in a game like P:E where you get all or most of your experience by completing things rather than killing things, since it would reward people for avoiding content. All it would do is make speed runs easier. This would be Not Fun, because in order to be Fun, a speed run has to be a special challenge, not the easiest way to play a game.

The devs -- especially JE Sawyer -- have discussed degenerate gaming at length and on multiple occasions. They do want to make it a design goal to make a game that discourages it. I agree with them. Degenerate gaming is symptomatic of a design flaw. Why? Because degenerate tactics are not fun. They're repetitive, compulsive behavior. It's characterized by Skinner box mechanics: pull a lever and sometimes -- but not always -- a pellet comes out. It's quite easy to design a Skinner box that traps people. Some do it on purpose, in order to squeeze as much money out of you as possible (slot machines, MMO's). Degenerate behavior in cRPG's is accidental and benefits no-one, not the player, not the maker of the game. It's just an accidental trap that captures the player and makes him waste his time stuck in a loop. Therefore, a game should be designed in a way that does not promote degenerate gaming, as far as it's feasible or possible. It may not be possible to completely eliminate it, but it is certainly possible to push it to the margins. I hope the P:E team succeeds in their effort to marginalize it.

Yah, I think the big problem with cRPG economies these days is plain ol' inflation. Epic out the wazoo. Things are way more interesting with scarcity. I wanna be an adventurer, not a pack mule.

I feel that it would be a good deal of work to properly implement a dual-wielding system, but it could contribute greatly to the depth and tactical options in the game. And I still don't like the simple "hit twice as often with penalties" mechanic that we usually end up with. I'd rather not see it in at all. Put another way, if it's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all.

In before the "level scaling is of the devil" crowd. I'll say this much: BG2 did level-scaling well. It was so subtle you almost didn't notice it, but it was there, just enough to make things the mid-game palatable, where you did stuff in pretty much any ol' order. (And even so, if you stumbled into the Firkraag quest first thing, as I did on my first attempts, you would be in for a bad time.) It did it not by making goblins tougher, but by changing the composition of enemy groups. That IMO is the only way and only situation where level-scaling is useful. If you have a long mid-game that can (technically) be played in any order, having no level-scaling will either railroad you into one particular order in which case you might as well make it linear (if you make some quests lower-level than others), or reverse the difficulty curve, which makes for frustration early on and boredom later. It would be even better if there's some in-game rationale for the mid-game quest difficulty ramping up regardless of the order in which you do them. Or if they presented such a broad range of different types of challenges that combat difficulty would be only one component, in which case it'd be OK that the fights are tougher to start with and easier at the end.

I would add Numenera, the upcoming deep-time/post-apoc PnP game by Monte Cook. I never liked the xp-for-kills mechanic, and haven't been using it in my PnP games for years. I find xp-for-learning-something, xp-for-accomplishing-something, and xp-for-exercising-your-skills much more interesting.

Wel-l-ll... actually I was arguing more from cRPG rather than simulationist premises (i.e., verisimilitude is nice but of secondary importance compared to stuff like character differentiation and strategic/tactical depth), but since you brought it up... The simulationist argument for making two-weapon wielding comparatively more effective against human(oid)s is that it relies on more effective feinting. Feinting exploits the training of your opponent. For example, I understand that in fencing it's generally a good idea to keep an eye on where the point of the other guy's weapon is and what it's doing. A feint by a two weapon fighter would involve making like he's attacking with the main weapon, causing the defender to move to block or parry that, but really attacking with the secondary one in a spot now exposed by the blocking or parrying move. A bear wouldn't care about such niceties, it would just rush you. To pile on more simulationist arguments, a bear would have thick fur, thick skin, and, towards the end of summer, a thick layer of fat. It would be a good deal more difficult to get through that to a vital organ with a light weapon than, say, a spear. This applies to pretty much anything that doesn't fight like a human. (It would probably even apply to an untrained but really angry human, but such a human wouldn't pose much of a challenge for a trained fighter anyway, so that's kind of moot.) Also, a bear is able to catch a moving salmon with its bare bear paws. That counts as pretty nimble in my book. Let me emphasize, though, that this wasn't really the direction in which I was thinking; in a game like P:E, if simulation and interesting gameplay collide, I believe simulation should step aside. That said, I think this type of collision is rarer than you might think and quite often verisimilitude and interesting gameplay are congruent goals.

Then again it's really easy to tune the system with modifiers like that. If you have the time to add in a few extra animations, so much the better. The biggest challenge I think would be transparency; communicating to the player what the effects are. But then that's no different from spell combination effects or other such creative nonsense.

@Lephys: I like the way you're thinking. Those would be dead simple to model in a cRPG. Make it harder to flank a dual-wielder, and give your handaxe/sword combo a bonus against sword-n-board. Lots of possibilities.

@Lephys: Nope. It was for the scenario with the premises: (1) Each one either always lies, or always tells the truth (2) Each one is either a boy or a girl (but not sexless or hermaphroditic)

There's a fair bit of discussion here about game balance and various subsystems, such as armor, weapons, dual-wielding etc. Josh Sawyer in particular has discussed the utility of skills a fair bit. Magic has been discussed a bit too. One thing that hasn't been done well in any cRPG I've played, though, is situational utility of combat skills (and equipment). I think it would be a great way to add variety to the gameplay and encourage creativity in character and party builds. By situational utility I mean making different types of combat skills be more or less effective in different situations, or against different opponents. I think this sort of thing would be relatively easy to model in a game system, and it would be pretty easy to have them contribute to the verisimilitude of the game as well. A few examples off the top of my head. Large weapons with lots of reach would work better against large creatures and beasts but be significantly hampered in confined spaces. Heavy armor gives a great deal of protection against damage but would take time to equip and would fatigue you more quickly, which means you would only be able to use it if you had time to prepare for combat, and you'd have to find a way to conserve or restore your stamina during combat if it dragged on. A character would need to be physically very strong and fit to be able to manage this, but would not need to be acrobatically nimble. On the other hand, dual-wielding two light weapons gives an advantage to feinting and parrying. This means it's more effective against human(oid)s, but less effective against beasts and suchlike. Dual-wielding requires higher dexterity, which means trading off something else, resulting in a particular type of fighter. His blows are light but precise, and his skills are honed for one-on-one duels with humans. Piercing weapons would be useless against unliving enemies, but perhaps more effective at getting through magical protection; firearms could be a more powerful version of the same, but with slow reload rates. You'd have a better chance against a battlemage with a gun and a rapier than with a longsword or a sling, but you'd be advised to bludgeon a skeleton or a golem into submission rather than trying to ineffectively poke holes into it. If the game system had these types of complexities, and a variety of combat challenges to match them, it would make party and character-building very interesting. One party could be a collection of specialists, with the one with the right skills taking point in each encounter and the others moving to support her; another could go for a set of well-rounded characters able to perform at their best in most situations, and would use that tactically to their advantage. Both would be viable strategies for victory, but would require very different tactics. Additionally, no build would be objectively better in all circumstances. Our nimble dual-wielding Scaramouche might be able to best heavily-armored Sir George of Joustalot in a duel, with a skilful stab in a vulnerable spot -- but Sir George would run a raging magic giant wild boar right through with his lance where Scaramouche's best bet for survival would be to climb a tree. N.b.: I'm not arguing for any of these mechanics specifically; rather, I would like to see a system of mechanics balanced out to function differently in different circumstances. I don't really care about the details. Thoughts?

If they do put in dual-wielding, I hope it's done for better reasons than the badass factor. It could be a useful building-block in a particular type of character. High DEX has secondary benefits, other than just being able to hit things better, so a fighter with lower STR and higher DEX might trade off some damage per blow and perhaps the ability to use some massive badass weapons, but gain the ability to dual-wield, which would partially offset this. Or we could have different styles be more effective against particular types of enemies. So a dual-wielder, having an advantage in feinting and parrying, might fight better against other humanoids, but would be at a disadvantage fighting a large, thick-skinned beast compared to someone landing heavier but less precise blows. Somebody already mentioned the D&D distinction between different damage types (piercing/slashing/crushing). If done intelligently, dual-wielding could mesh well with this type of system too. If it was PnP -- and I've actually done this in PnP -- weapon concealability also comes into play. You might not be able to wear full heavy combat gear to the King's ball, but having a couple of daggers tucked away in your boots might come in very handy, and in this situation someone skillfully wielding two might be at a significant advantage. Dunno how well that would work in a cRPG; most players would probably object to having the computer force you not to use your most effective stuff where they might find it totally logical in a game with a human DM.

Metric. And make everything 100 times smaller than IRL. So your character would be, like, 18 mm tall, and a real badass dragon would have a wingspan of, like 60 cm. And then let us zoom out far enough to play the game in 1:1 scale.

Actually, with that extrinsic assumption, and an additional one that neither is hermaphroditic or genderless...