Ninjamestari

It's a funny saying, especially on the occasion it comes out of the beaks of pigeons.

Well, we live in the time of diversity officials, so there's no telling what kinds of pressures Obsidian are under. I trust that if they have the freedom to do stuff their own way, SJW bullcrap won't be a problem in Deadfire.

So a discussion was always going to head towards the fundamental reality that underlies it? Isn't that a good thing?

My tune depends on the kinds of arguments I face, and I'm not responsible for other people derailing the topic by complaining about my 'tune'. What do you mean by multiplicative? Might in PoE was already a percentage bonus already, which in essence is multiplicative. A 30% bonus is the same as multiplying by 1.3

The fact that this problem existed doesn't make my statement any less true. I would've preferred some other solution to this, something that doesn't completely sacrifice the strategic layer of the game. A big part of the problem in BG was the incredibly inflexible vancian magic system. A spellpoint system could've been used instead to facilitate drawbacks, such as continual spellpoint drain while a spell is active but no activation cost/time, and like you said, having pre-cast spells on the NPCs also helps. Then naturally there are the ludicrously powerful buffs that lasted too long. What I mean is, that problem could've been solved, and the strategic layer didn't have to be sacrificed.

To be quite frank, I don't like the separation between combat and out-of-combat mechanics. If you can cast a spell, you should be able to cast it whenever you like. Perhaps you want to cast a protective spell before triggering a trap you cannot disable otherwise? Perhaps you just want to be prepared? I really don't get this new trend of removing all the strategic resource management layers from games, it fundamentally makes the games a lot less interesting.

Not sugarcoating everything doesn't make me aggressive. So apparently this is ok for you but not for me? Or is it just when your bearing the brunt of it that being direct is totally unacceptable or "simply disgusting" How many posts need to devolve into these sorts of discussions before you consider that maybe your the problem? What you and I are doing is different. You're not even part of the discussion, yet you come here brandishing, declaring victors while adding zero to the overall discussion. At least Andrea had a stance, even if he didn't have a point, you don't even have that, you just have a chip on your shoulder.

Not sugarcoating everything doesn't make me aggressive.

There wasn't an argument to begin with, all Andrea even 'added' to the conversation were meaningless platitudes and empty sentiment. And now you're just showing colors and adding even less than he did. Whatever his failings were, what you're doing is simply disgusting.

This doesn't have much to do with PoE but you're gonna have to explain how you get from traditional gender roles to millions of years of evolution. For one traditional gender roles and morality generally enforce strict monogamy (at least for women) while basic evolutionary biology demands pretty much everyone in a monogamous relationship try to cheat if they can get away with it; men to spread their seed and women to aquire higher quality seed (basically the only one who shouldn't cheat is the woman who already has the one male with the highest quality genes). Now personally I think that sounds kind of ****ty and see no reason we should assume that what is 'natural' is for some reason inherently good, malaria and the plague are natural too so TBH **** nature. Also while traditional gender roles (at least the aspects that are shared by varied cultures across the world) must certainly have filled a function in the past they are still a result of an environment we no longer live in. F.ex. women staying home so they can give birth to and raise a bunch of kids is important when child mortality is high and even those who make it to adulthood don't always live that long, just so that there doesn't stop being people. Now that there's 7.6 billion of us and we live for a close to a century it doesn't really serve a function. Also again even if those gender roles where inevitable due to environmental factors it doesn't make them good, so **** traditional gender roles too. The world can and should be a better place. Yeah, perhaps I should've used 'biological' instead of 'traditional' there. I'm from Finland and traditions have always been a lot more down to earth here. Then again, the traditional gender roles are a result of thousands of years of cultural evolution, so there's a ton of wisdom in them too, but which parts of those traditions are the ones that turned our western culture into the dominant force on the globe and which are the ones that are causing our downfall really isn't as obvious, they might very well be the same. You're right about our polygamous nature (quality of seed is only one reason among many for women to be sleeping around), but what I was referring to was our roles in society, not any sexual-morality bull****. IE, women are not warriors and leaders, but they are afforded special protection due to their fundamentally important role in reproduction. Dying in battle is left for men who are expendable, and leadership positions are left for men because they are stronger and more focused. That being said, I've got no problem with female warriors as long as they are the exception and they are well written, such as Pallegina. She's perfectly written, a broken and shunned little bird that has been forced to fight for her approval and thrust in the world of men, and against all odds she has not only survived, but also thrived. She's also still a very feminine character and even manages to be attractive, she really is a brilliantly written character. EDIT: what I'm talking about when speaking of traditional gender roles, I'm talking about the traditional roles women and men have occupied, not the traditional roles that have been culturally accepted at point x in time. Just like women are driven to sleep around, men are driven to prevent it. Also when it comes to monogamy, it is a measure to protect women, as assigning a man the special responsibility of taking care of her and her children. If you're familiar with the word 'shotgun wedding', where if a man impregnates a woman, the men of the woman's family go and get said man and force him to marry the woman with a shotgun to his back to ensure that the woman and the child are taken care of. Monogamy is a response to a very real and very practical problem; as the man is more invested with a single woman, the chances of that woman's survival go up, as well as the chances of her offspring. A man with multiple women doesn't really care that much for the individual woman in his harem, but a Man that has all the eggs in one basket so to speak will do his damnest to make sure that basket is safe. That's the general idea anyway, we all know it doesn't always work that way but there it is.

I hate Might, I doubt anyone could've missed that by now, but if that's why the change was made, then the change was made for completely wrong reasons, and there shouldn't have even been a question on whether the outcome would be problematic. It also shows how weak the original design of the stats was, they're supposed to portray fundamental reality of the game world that are used in large part to determine the identity of your character, not be a separate minigame to determine combat encounters.

Or perhaps you simply should have a little humility when talking about stuff you know you're ignorant of instead of virtue-signaling your tolerance of other people's preferences, especially when said people aren't even a part of the conversation. It's funny how you flip over about me 'putting words in your mouth' when you're doing it yourself on such a grand scale.

You seem to have written that wrong, I fixed it for you. You seem to have some sort of hipster fetish Did some hipster take your girlfriend or kick your dog or something? In PoE a caster did not need to have a high Might to be good, plenty of great builds concentrated on Perception and Intellect for accurate long lasting afflictions. Now in DeadFire a caster is actively encouraged to dump strength as it does nothing for them besides auto attacks which should never be used as you'll have so many per encounter spells from mid level on that you'll never run out. Now its back to the standard fare casters=weak. Hurray for being original Original =/= good. Being original isn't a worthy goal, being good is. People appreciate when those two mix because that means you've found something new that is good, but being new and original for the sake of being new and original is just retarded, and usually a sign of complete lack of vision. And a caster did not need high might to be good, but they needed high might in order to have more spell-power. And if dumping strength is too easy, simply tie some other feature to it, like the ability to wear heavier armor, and you suddenly don't want to dump it in every single case. Hell, you could even make it so that strength would reduce the speed penalty of wearing armor, and suddenly you've got a reason to invest spare points in it again. I mean, you people are constraining yourself to a very tiny box when you think and talk about PoE attributes, there's simply so much more that you can do to them easily in order to fix these min-max issues.

Although I really don't want to see Might raise its ugly head ever again, if it was to happen, I really don't understand why resolve didn't contain a bonus for passive abilities such as auras in the first place. Just have resolve grant +4% or so per point over 10 to every single passive ability, and have Might only govern non-passives. That would mean paladin auras and the Fighter's constant recovery would be governed by Resolve, while Priests' healing spells would be governed by Might. I always found it frustrating that I couldn't build a character that focuses on making those passive paladin abilities more powerful, and I think Resolve would be the perfect stat for that purpose.

So you're even more clueless about what min-maxing is than I thought. Here's a hint for you: I'm a powergamer, I aim for the most powerful build there is for the class I roll, and that means min-maxing the **** out of the stats if it's just possible. I like the challenge of being able to tweak my stats for optimal performance, and systems that allow straight-up min-maxing make it so ridiculously easy that it is simply disgusting. Don't argue a case if you don't represent it, chances are you don't know what you're talking about. If you don't min-max or powergame, then don't speak for the people who do.

You really have no clue about what you are talking about. Min-maxing for maximum power is a direct consequence of having different stats and different classes; some stat will always be more powerful for certain classes than some other stat, and creating absolutely ridiculous characters that shouldn't even be able to exist in the game world doesn't really add anything to the game, it takes away from the game. People having different tastes doesn't mean you ram everything you can find in the kitchen on the same platter as a dish, you sell a different product to different people. I want the stats in my games to reinforce the fantasy, and I don't give a flying **** about enabling min-max builds that aren't really any fun to play with anyway. You don't pick min-max builds because you you find them interesting, you like min-max builds because it makes the process of creating the most powerful character simple for you and you don't have to be afraid that your character isn't going to be powerful when you do that. You don't like to plan and think in complex terms, hence you like the simplicity of min-max.

You seem to have written that wrong, I fixed it for you.

Yeah, I can see that you do not understand. It's not about people encountering a gay character, it's about people encountering a random NPC whose first priority is to express to the heavily armed group of strangers that they indeed are homosexual. This has nothing to do with sexual morality or some other bull**** like that, it has always been about people being sick of games force-feeding SJW-narrative down their throats. And yeah, being an SJW is a negative thing, it means you've got no idea how the world functions and yet you're presumptuous enough to actually believe that you understand how the world should be. I mean, these snot-nosed punks assaulting traditional gender roles for example actually are arrogant enough to think that they are smarter than the wisdom of hundred million years of evolution bottled into our instincts, not to mention the utter lack of any moral backbone these people suffer from. Yeah, I'm talking about the trigglypuffs and smugglypuffs of the world and I know not every progressive liberal is that bad, but having such a strong opinion on how the world should be when you've got no idea about how the world actually is in the first place and sometimes outright denying objective empirically observed reality is simply a sign of supreme arrogance and ignorance. When you vote, you're using political authority, it means power. With power comes responsibility, not to adhere to some idiotic, idealistic and simplistic moralist viewpoints, but to actually know and understand the very real implications of the beliefs and views you put your power behind. An SJW is simply someone who forsakes that responsibility and takes the easy way out by adopting beliefs that seem to be socially acceptable in their immediate surroundings, confusing them with being morally correct, and then abusing the hell out of their power of their civic rights. And no, listening to emotional stories and feeling outrage is not the same thing as understanding what the hell is going on.

How about you just reduce the effects of min-maxing by introducing a point-buy with diminishing returns, like the one in NWN? I mean, if you really want to get rid of the most ridiculous min-max builds, there's a tool already for doing just that, also it will benefit hybrid classes in a way that they'd get higher overall stats if you begin to min-max anyway.

It's the hated Muscle Wizard! I will see you destroyed, you hear me, DESTROYED!

That is backwards. You started off by talking about majorities and minorities, but then point to what the devs created. That means you accept anything as long as it was part of the world building and it also means majorities and minorities is, in your case, irrelevant. At any case, I have yet to see a definition of "SJW writing". I see no reason for the alarmist posts. You know full well what people mean by SJW writing, quit pretending otherwise. It's kinda obnoxious.

The scientific method is great for breaking things and understanding them, not so much for building things. There is a whole separate methodology for designing stuff, and the implications of simple changes like the one that has been made are quite easy to anticipate to a certain degree. EDIT: what I'm saying is, games are essentially just a bunch of logic and math, you don't really have to experiment in order to know how a design will work when you've done everything from the ground up. If you begin to change stuff on the fly however, then you'll potentially be in the dark. The more so the further you're in the development. Not so I think, there's so much wiggle-room with the mechanical side of things that it is easier to design the concepts first, with the mechanical side in mind obviously. It's a great starting point because it lets you form up a list of features the game needs and the kinds of designs needed for individual scripts, spells and such. It's a basis that will then help guide the rest of the design process. The thing is, the concepts of the stats are important in creating the identity of your character, that's why you have stuff like Strength and Constitution and not just "Damage" and "Hitpoints", and why you want the Strength of the character to manifest itself in more ways than just increasing damage. The strong guy in the party carries most of the loot for example, the nimble guy does the nimble stuff like sneaking, scouting and stuff. It's there so that when you create a character with high strength, there really is a reinforced fantasy of playing a strong character to back it up. Or a weak character for that matter if you choose to have low Strength. It's better to have the concepts guide the mechanics than the other way around, you'll just get a more powerful fantasy that way.

It's funny, now that you mention it, I've got to admit that Durance and Pallegina were my favorite characters in PoE1. Then I saw the Joshugina portrait and everything got ruined, I'm still having nightmares. If only Durance was in Deadfire :/

mmmm..... pork and beans....

Like I've said before, one has to make sure the concepts make sense before moving onto the mechanical side of things. If they really changed might to strength just for mechanical reasons, they did it for the wrong reasons and I'm not surprised if it causes problems. The problem with their thinking is the same it is with your thinking: you can't just make singular changes like that to tweak a badly designed system, you need to redesign it from the ground up if you're changing the concepts you work with.