Mr. Magniloquent

I'm going to explain this on the basis that we are discussing magic and magical spells used by the PC for the sake of discussion. I have no problems with instant-death spells or their equivalents. In a premise where creatures/entities maniuplate reality with their minds/magic, there is every reason to believe these types of spells are realistic, plausible, and within setting. I guage and ability's power by contrasting how another PC would survive it. This analysis is done by utilizing every ability and equipment accessible to the test PC with respect to its appropriate "level" that it would face such a powerful ability like instant-death spells and their ilk. Where I draw the line, is in deciding the intersection between the Quadratic Wizard & Linear Warrior ultimately rests. I generally don't try to balance them out 1:1, as it makes no sense to do so. Swinging a chunk of metal--no matter how masterfully done, cannot and does not yield the same results as controlling the fabric of reality with your will. I accept that after a certain point, non-magical creatures/characters will have to rely on magical items or companions to survive direct confrontation with a powerful spell. The counter balance, is verisimilitude. A lvl 2 Wizard or a level 30 Wizard will be felled with equal speed by an arrow, and a two-handed sword is likely to cleave them in half with one blow if not protected. Using a wound system like FATE or the original Deadlands rather than HP accomplishes this very elegantly and enjoyably. In addition to it, I generally make magic use difficult/risky to the point where the more powerful a spell becomes, the more likely it will be that the caster themself will face a disasterous result. I have many more contraints, but explaining them is beyond the scope of this discussion. If you're interested, PM me and I can explain in greater detail how I find equitable balance with powerful instant-kill abilities.

I think Ganrich is probably close to the correct answer. While it will still like be easier for a Wizard to solo than a Fighter, any character's ability to perform in combat well enough to forgo companions will necessarily be making trade-offs to do so. I also wager that encounters--particularly plot and quest encounters, will be default balanced to a party size of six. I imagine that soloing or reduced parties will be possible, but with a level cap, this method will likely reach punative and diminishing returns.

By patterning of saving throws & defenses. If another PC would have zero, or essentially zero chance of surviving a single ability, then it is too powerful. I also like (in this case) powerful spells to have certain risks involved, like rolling against a consequence table for failing to meet a skill check at time of casting.

I concur with this but I still don't think Class Specific quests would hurt. Obviously we all get a stronghold though so that won't be involved in this case. I enjoyed the class stronghold quests of BG2 as much as anyone, but it does make more sense to merely create quests that all classes can satisfy. I think the room for compromise lies within awarding players/characters with how they have completed a quest. A wizard using magic to solve a problem, versus a rogue's wit, or a fighter's might should yield different rewards having these choices cause a quest to branch different. This is a very simplistic example, but think of Dungeon Siege 2. There were many "secret" mini-dungeons that would contain a treasure room with locked doors. Only specific classes could unlock certain doors which held an item suitable to said class. Having a quest were a players path would diverge slightly to stumble upon a class appropriate treasure/reward would be an acceptable way to have the best of both in my mind.

Given that party members left at the stronghold will advance at different rates than the active party, I feel it will be safe to assume that the entire sum of a quests experience will be awared across the party, rather than a set value to each individual in more recent Bioware games.

I don't think every ability needs to have an intended encounter purpose. Tools may have a primary function, but the breadth of their use is ultimately up to the wielder. Many (functioning) varied abilities are a positive, as they enable different strategies, play-styles, character concepts, oh yeah--that thing call "fun". I almost forgot about that one. Players don't necessarily need to be pushed into any given playstyle. Players shouldn't be pushed into concieving fully articulated character concepts and personalities. Players shouldn't be forced to roleplay. Players shouldn't be forced to resolve scenarios in a specific way when another more amenable to their playstyle/tactics/character/whim will solve it. I'm still not 100% sure what you're trying to express here, but it is certainly peculiar. While certain toys (see: Games) are generally created in such a way that an intended use to provoke (here's the word again) "fun", it is ultimately a toy. Like a tool, the user cares can and may derive utility from it in whatever manner they please. Verbosity aside, please design varied and unique abilities to your hearts are content Obsidian. Dare to dream!

It's not the setup and usage of the spell to effect that's akin to a cheat code. It's the effect of the spell, itself. That's why I just kept using the base spell specs as an example, even though everyone keeps saying "yeah but what if this?". Sure, you can adjust its likelihood of working or not, via clever knowledge of/use of the system and rules. More power to ya. However, you can already do that with everything else; Boost weapon proficiency, so your attacks will more likely not-miss. It doesn't make them do infinite damage, it just makes them work. And, you can never do anything clever that makes that spell (Harm) have the effect it does. It can never work better or work worse. It can only work, or not-work. You can even cleverly prep a heavily armored foe, for example, so that some sword attack (if swords, say, weren't effective against heavy armor) ends up being ridiculously effective where it wouldn't have been without all the prepwork. But, it still doesn't have some all-powerful effect, like "you just die; I don't even care how many HP you have or how much damage I deal... I deal all of it... or all of it, -1". In other words, if you take that spell out of the game, and you just use conventional means to damage the dragon to death, it relies on your actual tactical use of the tools at your disposal to effectively reduce the dragon down to 1 health (to match the effects of the Harm spell). Whereas, with the Harm spell in, and it selected as your battle strategy, all those efforts are put towards simply getting an ability to not NOT-work. A single ability. You're just adjusting passive numerical factors to get it to work. You're not making anything actually work to a better or worse degree. You're just making it work. I'm going to have to intrude on you here. Harm (in vanilla BG) requires several things to succeed, and only one to fail. It must be successfully memorized and cast. One makes it finite, the other leaves you vulnerable and subject to wasting the effort should casting be disrupted. If your cleric doesn't use it within 2 rounds (12 seconds), the spell is wasted. The cleric gets no bonus attacks and low THAC0, making the necessity of a touch attack less than likely. If the cleric misses (most likely), the spell is wasted. If all of those conditions succeed, it works. I think even Magic Resistance can derail it, though I am unsure. I use Spell Revisions mod. The point is, it's finite, expendable, disruptable, and difficult to execute. You will likely need to devote considerable other resources to make it successfully occur. Using several spells to debuff the foe, buff your character, quality gear, and enhancing potions to carry it out is not trivial. Nor is it any different from your sword example--or even using Breach/Spell Thrust/Lower Resistence/etc. to cause you greater success of landing a spell. Armor Class causes melee attacks to completely fail, yet I doubt you hold the same reservations of lowering a foe's defense to make melee attacks "work" as banal. You're aguing semantics or taste.

Wizard, Chanter, then Priest. After that...order is irrelevant. Caddies are for carrying loot and polishing boots. Though letting them wear some of the vendor trash does help their self-esteem and reduce the chore of finding another pack mule flunky companion.

It's philanthropy brought world wide to and through the masses. Much like donating a small sum to your local art gallery/museum.

The problem with EA has to do with what makes EA successful; that is, the role it holds in the gaming economy. EA is so large and has aquired so much property, that there is no true direction for the company. Between its metastic size and broad portfolio, the only way it can exist is through the volume of its sales. The best way to accomplish this, is by grasping at the low hanging fruit of many trees--ergo; the lowest common denominator of consumers. Furthermore, its economies of scale better enable it to pursue endeavors that are graphics heavy, which only perpetuates the kind of product it is capable of offering. The kind of art found in Obsidian's narratives and writing cannot dwell within such a machine, particularly because of the inherently inefficient nature of creativity and art itself. Behold McDonalds. The quality is low--if sometimes servicable, consistent in nature, the price is attainable, and the products are accessible. This mix has made McDonalds the most dominant global brand such that it is found and recognized over the entire planet. Such is EA. Nothing will be able to compete with the scale of EA without first becoming EA. Blizzard nearly became EA's competitor, though instead chose to willfully congeal with EA like a freshly spilt beverage does with the hemogeneous expanse of saccharin constituting any cinema's floor. Kickstarter will never produce what today is regarded as a AAA game. Rejoice in this.

Hahahaha! Thank you for this. A telling quip of introspection, no doubt. Precisely.

I imagine that outsourcing of some of the exterior maps also had to do with the render times. I recall reading somewhere that they slightly underestimated the amount of computational power required to render the backgrounds into 2D. Their "outsourcing" could be as simple as using a server farm to crunch bits, then maybe pay some promising intern to polish them up a touch.

Ultimately, I don't believe it will matter much. I created this thread mostly as a creative discussion on player motivation in cRPGs. Before the IE games, and subsequent NWN 1 & 2, I rarely played games in a role-playing or "in character" fashion. My choices were munchkin and mechanically motivated. Given the spirit and nature of Project: Eternity, I thought it might be intriguing to consider game-play options which would lend gameplay to a more "in-character" play-style. *Lo, I have now ascended to theurgy. I think this is only the third or fourth board I've ever had that many posts. I think that might mean I'm a bit eager for this game.

Most of the time, whatever is offered just isn't worth it; the amount of content for the price is pitiful, especially compared to the good old expansion packs I agree. I don't buy DLCs, because the price : product ratio is an insult. Given the original content of the game, they expect me to pay a major percentage of the original titles just to get a grenade launcher, or some stupid pet, or perhaps a singular mission? Screw you! Much better to wait 12-18 months and get the full game, all delux content, and every DLC & expansion for 30-50% off what the original title alone cost a release. Economists have a term for this. It's call time preference. Staying a year to a year and a half behind the game release curve yields many advantages. I can't say I enjoyed Shadowrun Returns. I wanted to believe in it, but didn't trust the development team enough nor Microsoft's licensing demons to fund it. Mech Warrior II was great and all, but I can't recall what those guys had made since. The game would have been great for....a Sega Genesis game, but we've moved a bit beyond that stage. While I understand their budgetary constraints and IP fiasco, I didn't enjoy the art direction, character development, meaningless "conversations", or the general plot. I played through it twice in as different ways as I could manage, but I just failed to appreciate it. I wanted to, and tried, but to give it an easy pass would be disingenuous. As I've said many times before though, I don't have any significant fears for P:E. I trust the team implicitly with what they are doing and how they are doing it. Finally, while meager, their budget should be sufficient to accomplish their goals.

Not necessarily, as you'd still be operating within the confines of the defined "design-a-spell" system. Of course, it would be tricky and complex to design in a super interesting fashion. But, it's not as if it would be "just write down whatever you want to exist, in the entire world, and the game is going to create that spell for you! 8D!" It's very much like character builds; you only get to choose from a limited set of options, already, but the specific way in which you allocate points and choose aspects/components can lead to a variety of different results. Yes. As an example, the HERO/Champions system has considerable flexibility in terms of designing your own powers/spells. But it is the result of many years of careful balancing and tuning. On P:E budget, crew, and time constraints--yes, it would be a disaster. Design would be lengthy and arduous. Even making sufficient art for such a system would be incredible. Debugging and testing would need to be extensive. Development of such a system would likely impede progress on other game aspects, as they could not be designed properly until the spell system would be complete. Then there is expense again. Competely cost prohibitive for all of the reasons above and more. Furthermore, I hold a great deal of doubt that any system which will allow players to create spells would be able to produce much of interest, as it would have to be severely tweaked to keep it from being overly powerful and game breaking. Balancing that would be such a monumental task, that developers would likely err on caution and just have it be less interesting. Perhaps for a sandbox RPG where developers spend all of their time on systems and need not worry about quests/plot/etc., yes. I would love to see something like that. Outside of a sandbox RPG though...I would not hold your breath--particularly for a game with P:E's scope and constraints.

Implementing a spell system where players can design their own spells would be a disaster. It would easily eviscerate any balance the game might possess, and likely be buggy beyond all belief. I also imagine that it would cripple the variety of spells possible, and those which were possibly would be far less unique. Furthermore, a toned-down system like this is already being created for the Chanter. For similar reasons, I don't think it is a good idea to be able to toggle spell duration. A much simpler and better solution is to allow spells to be dismissed as in TOEE. Finally, I am in agreement that using a mousewheel to adjust the scope of a spell does seem practical, elegant, and tangible.

I can't say that I care fo this suggestion. While I loved the wound system of the FATE RPG, it's a flexible system which only lends well to tabletop RPGs. I am a player that prefers my RPGs grity and survivalistic, but I have long since accepted that P:E is not intended to be that--which I am completely fine with. I may still push for verisimilitude in many ways, this sort of thing feels overboard for the genre. After all, there is always Wasteland 2.

One thing to keep in mind about Project: Eternity, is that Obsidian never stopped making games, and has been for some time. Many of the kickstarters are from, well...kickstarter. Several others have been less active in the industry than they once were. While DoubleFine has been in business, it has Tim Schafer. He's a creative and funny guy, but management and budgeting are his classic downfalls. Obsidian arguably has a spotty history, but almost all of that can generally be attributed to external (see: Publisher) problems. While the budget constraints are severe for P:E, I don't think that will ulimately undo them. They're a world class studio with both their heart and reputation in the game building exactly what they desire. I think I can keep the faith for awhile.

As one of 'em =) (if not the only one - I'm in a minority, I think!) I'll say, in vanilla IE games I'd completely agree. The AI isn't going to remove your protections in all likelihood, so using PfFire on your entire party lets you lob fireballs with impunity. But with a good AI (read: SCS), the spell system can turn against you easily (I'm assuming, and very much hoping, both the players and the enemy AI have the same rule set). If you have an AoE-based attack plan and they remove your protection spells, you've sacrificed spell slots for basically nothing and your own attacks are a problem. I've actually sometimes wondered if some of the differences in opinions on the IE games you see around the boards isn't b/c of different experiences with the AI, especially since it seems most people in the forum share the same broad goals for the game. Like, I don't think either of us want protection spells to be the Awesome Button Against Friendly Fire, and yet we disagree regarding the extent to which IE protection spells were that. And ultimately it's not an either-or thing; I'd very much like to see positioning micromanagement too, given what I've read. It's easy to picture the two (spell mechanics and positioning) complementing each other in combat, and there are a lot of good ideas on the thread to make positioning more than what I've found boring in previous games (especially DA), where you cluster your frontliners to one side of the enemy so you can have the AoE spell just miss your guys. I'm just really worried about the spell system, so that's part of it. Agreed. Every time I speak of Baldur's Gate, it's with Sword Coast Strategems I & II installed--which is a significant difference from vanilla BG. I tend to have my parties protected from fire and cold perpetually so I can blanket the screen with those spells. However, when those protections get breached or pierced--and they will, it can be a very rude change of pace. Not only is my character now in critical danger, but it throws off much of my spell selection and general strategy until I rest. AI frequently makes use of these tactics to very deadly effect to the point where against certain classes of enemies, both activating and maintaining your protections is necessary to survial. I found it to be an interesting moment when I began having my wizard memorize Spell Shield, which nullified the first debuff spell cast against you. I would like to see a similar spell system play out in P:E. Friendly fire, protection spells, counter spells, counter-counter spells. It's my singularly greatest hope that finally I will get to have a cRPG with as excellent spellcasting battles and spell selection as in the IE games.

I was fond of Yakman. Lonely lonely Yakman running from the demons. The skeletal children and the wandering geezer at the bottom of the ocean were also great characters from Grim Fandango. Let's see...just about every character from Psychonaughts was great, minor or otherwise. Humor generally makes for a great minor NPC, as other characteristics generally need more development to give a character real memorability.

It really depends on the underlying lore for spellcasting in P:E. Within D&D, spellcasting was an irrational force that was more or less stored within the mind as an arrow is stored within a quiver. I don't believe they are taking this approach.

I think the combination of these could be very interesting. Whereas Intelligence can govern the maximum area of effect for a spell, Dexterity/Accuracy could be used to refine the area of effect to a smaller radius using the mouse-wheel. This could perhaps be in addition to Dexterity/Accuracy granting a bonus percentage to either avoid or reduce damaging friendlies that fall within any such radius.

Instead of circle, use half-cirlces. That leaves a blind spot for vidual detection. Audio detection is another matter. I can see the utility of something that bulges out, perhaps like this: perception.png Red is noticed you, yellow investigating. It's circular near the human since that's affected more by hearing, and vision extends conically from the entity. You could even have a formula which made the yellow decrease faster with sneak ability than red. For ninja death attacks, you could have characters dash in with sneak attack ready before their target raises the alarm. If they succeed and kill the mob, the dying character makes a ping, which hits the other detection shapes and interacts normally. That way it isn't DX:HR levels of ridiculousness where you can muffle guys from their buddies five feet away, but it still allows the option in the gameplay. The problem is that you would then have to make / test / debug several different types of perception cones. While the first models human perception, this might model skulldr perception: skulldrperception.png Eventually that becomes a lot to implement, test, debug, etc. They could do archetypes, human, beast, dragon, undead, etc. But that still turns into a substantial amount of work for a less important subsystem. That would be an amazing job for a modder though (although this is going to be pretty hard to mod from what I understand). Or, it's work for obsidian to do in a game based on this technology. The great thing about Project Eternity is that it's just the first, and other games can build substantially on its capabilities. I was going to make this exact post, drawings included. I am in total agreement with what you've contributed here. I don't think it would be too terribly difficult to implement over what (as we understand) is currently being created. Having a few templates for certain archetypes as you've said would make this sort of variance straight-forward.

I approve of friendly fire. It is a tactical problem which enhances the game. It also allows spells to be designed in a way that they are powerful and effective. Mitigating their effects should be possible, either through use of protection spells or meta-magic and abilities. Overall, friendly fire enhances a game by bringing intricacy and verisimilitude.

Excellent update. The area and creatures look absolutely superb. Hats off to the artists. I also appreciate the view of the character sheet and all of the headache--erm, feedback that it will provoke. That being said...here's my contribution... I'm suprised that duration is impacted by intellegence rather than resolve. I would think that a character's force of will would have more impact on maintaining the duration of an effect. Also, how does dexterity translate to accuracy with magical spells? I can see the need to guide magical projectiles, but I would think that intellect, or perhaps perception would be more relevant, as a spell would be guided by one's mind rather than their coordination.