Everything posted by PrimeJunta
- Friendly Fire Toggle
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Betabackers: Are racial bonuses important?
I never even noticed any anti-communist bias. I never played Dragonfall though. You encounter a orkish Communist policlub calling themselves the Arbeiters. Turns out they're just a bunch of thugs spouting vaguely Marxist dialog lines. You can express sympathy for them but the dialog lines read like whoever wrote them had a manager standing behind their back going "Write them! Write them or you'll never work in this town again!" It's striking how different their portrayal is from the F-state anarchists. It's quite clear where their sympathies lie. Which is perfectly fine of course. But a game based on Iain M. Banks's, China Miéville's or Ken MacLeod's unabashedly Communist ideas would be very cool too, and not only because my politics tilt more that way.
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P:E mechanics - how is it doing compared to IE?
Long enough. Slicken is way OP. I think it's due to a bug which causes full-duration status effects on Grazes.
- Friendly Fire Toggle
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Betabackers: Are racial bonuses important?
Nah. I'd rather discuss games. Not here to educate anybody.
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Betabackers: Are racial bonuses important?
Symptomatic of racism, not because of racism. Not the same thing. Still an interesting topic, and still not something to pursue ITT.
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DR Clarity
Yep, that means 10 against everything else.
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Hit points and death
In the IE games having a party member go down is an automatic reload for me (until I have in-party access to Raise Dead, and often then too). I can't stomach the trek back somewhere they can be Raised. That makes many of the set-piece battles much duller than they could be since I end up not fighting them to the end a lot of the time. I prefer a somewhat more forgiving system that allows for closer victories. OTOH I don't care for NWN-esque "everybody always gets up unless it's a TPW" either. P:E's compromise suits me great.
- Native anti-alising support
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Walking or Running
It would also really screw up the gameplay in a RT game where you want the toons to respond immediately.
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[v392] Thoughts on The Paladin
Again: level of engagement is not the same as low or high maintenance, in PnP or a cRPG. I do not find IE game fighters less engaging to play than IE game spellcasters*, even though AD&D fighters have no active abilities at all. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip. There is no action a vanilla fighter can take in or out of combat that any other class can't take. What makes a fighter engaging to play is that it does what it does better than any other class. No other class can hit things as reliably and as hard as a fighter. If the paladin isn't working, the problem isn't that it doesn't have enough active abilities, it's that there is no thing that it does better than any other class -- or, as you put it earlier, it needs to be conceptually tightened up. *In the level range we're discussing here, say up to 12 or so. High-level DnD is a whole different game.
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Little questions
They do, but lately more in the backer beta forums. Here's a nifty tracker which digs out the dev postings for you: [ http://pedevtracker.azurewebsites.net/ ] Josh especially is pretty good at answering questions on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/jesawyer/ ] and Tumblr [ http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/ ] also.
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[v392] Thoughts on The Paladin
Low/high maintenance is not the same as more or less engaging. The former is something of an objective, unambiguous quantity: a character with lots of passives and modals is low-maintenance compared to a character with lots of abilities you need to explicitly invoke. The latter, however, is a matter of preference. Several players in my AD&D group always rolled with fighters, despite the fact that there isn't much for them to do in encounters except hit things. Others always swung with mages and showed up at the session with a list of spells they'd decided to memorize beforehand so they wouldn't waste everybody else's time on that.
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[v392] Thoughts on The Paladin
I disagree. Especially with a party of six to manage, I like it when I have a few chararacters I can just park somewhere and let them do their thing, while actively focusing on managing others. The monk for example is extremely high-maintenance and "active," and I really dig it -- but I could not put up playing with a party of six monks, it would just get too frantic. I think this too is largely a matter of how the game communicates itself to the player. In this case, if a class is designed as low- or high-maintenance, this should be communicated to the player in character creation. Even better would be -- as the case actually is with many classes in P:E -- if the player can skew a class towards high- or low-maintenance as she gains levels. Ultimately, the point of having classes in the first place is that they provide different gameplay experiences. High or low-maintenance is one way in which designers can create class differentiation. It would be a shame to leave it unused.
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Hit points and death
Me too. It's a good system.
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[v392] Thoughts on The Paladin
Good write-up. I think the reason for treating Flames of Devotion and Liberating Exhortation as core abilities is that they originally were. Things went a bit wonky when they opened up the talent and class ability selection. I doubt there's time to do much about the lack of things to do in combat (also I believe the paladin was always intended as a low-maintenance class), but I hope they will adjust the numbers to make the talents less lopsided. As it is, the paladin clearly fails Josh's "no trap choices" test. That said, when I tried it a couple of times in BB392 I found it both effective and reasonably fun.
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Hit points and death
I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to mod though.
- bad design decisions
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Number of portraits?
I tried making one for an aumaua, and it looked surprisingly good actually. Would've been even better had I cropped it a little tighter. Now that they've upgraded the heads, a screenshot option wouldn't be bad actually.
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bad design decisions
I think that's less likely than metagaming with grimoire spell selection. Weapon focus and specialization (for fighters) is extremely beneficial, which means each character will have a restricted pool of weapons to choose from. I think it's more likely that each character will pick the best weapons that fit their feats and use those. Smart players will give different characters different foci so someone can use anything, and then switch combat roles around if, say, something really really needs to be hit with a mace rather than a saber. Edit: @Gfted1 There are two weapon slots by default. Additionally one of the aumaua subraces has "Armed to the teeth" as a perk which gives a third one. You can also take an extra weapon slot on levelup as a feat. Edit edit: I can think of one good use for the third slot: gun in one, melee in one, other ranged in one. Unless they've changed the reload times again, guns are only good for one volley (but VERY good for that), so it would be useful to have something as a third slot.
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bad design decisions
@Osvir 3. is actually impossible. There is no way to exit the map if you are "in combat." Stun, knockdown, hobble etc. do not end the combat state even if you manage to break engagement. 4. A limited stash would be worse. It means that for a long time you're happily playing with no inventory Tetris, then boom, you're faced with a marathon of it at once. Cf. Fallout 2's car trunk. 5. You can change weapons in combat, but only between your two (or three) weapon sets. 6. I don't think there are one-handed guns anymore. Sadly pirate pistols are a thing of the past. And yes, special ammo would need a UI feature to use it. 13. There aren't any AI UI helpers to speak of (and a good thing too). Characters just use their basic attack if not instructed to do otherwise.
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I learned that fights don't give you experience
Don't worry @Gfted1 you can award yourself all the XP you like with the console. No need for all that tedious grinding. Grand, isn't it?
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bad design decisions
Actually there is an 'objective' aspect to 8 at least: the lower camera angle makes it harder to see what's going on in combat if there's a cluster of toons swinging at each other. As to 12, I also think individual stealth would be nice, but in practice it's not nearly as bad as some people here make it out to be. The only thing you can't do is position a rogue in the back, charge the lines at the front, and backstab at a suitable moment. You can still position your rogues with stealth and open with a backstab, you can scout ahead with your stealthier party members, and the rest of it. Also rogues can take the Shadowing Beyond ability which gives them temporary invisibility. It's 1/encounter only regrettably but it does make a lot of stealth tactics feasible again. 13 is entirely true, which is why I never switch them off. With no alternative way to get at the info, I really don't see why they made them optional to start with. They're quite crucial.
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Number of portraits?
It's good it's so easy to use custom portraits. I think I'll go with this one.
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P:E mechanics - how is it doing compared to IE?
Not of all of 'em. Paralysis is mucho effective. Hobbled/Slowed also, especially in the way it synergizes with other abilities. I think that's actually an often-neglected (and positive) aspect of Joshism (Joshology? Jo****ude?): he designs stuff for synergies. One ability does one thing, another ability requires or benefits from whatever it was the first ability did. That adds a lot of possibilities to use the systems creatively. Which of course doesn't mean that there can be on such thing as a counter or that Petrification has to be temporary. Edit: LOL at the profanity filter. I wrote Josh+itude. :D