Alexjh

I'd add that for my personal preference I'd not only grant XP per kill but per successfully doing (almost) anything at which there is a chance of failure. Successfully undo a lock? XP. Successfully disarm a trap? XP. Successfully use a tracking skill to detect monsters are ahead? XP. Successfully bluff a guard into letting you through? XP. There are plenty of compromises possible (I've pitched 3 or 4) and no one is saying no to objective XP (only they want "real time" XP too) in my mind two of the most important factors here are a) people don't learn when they completely finish a task, they learn as they are doing a task and b) the "real time XP" worked in the Infinity Engine games which worked perfectly fine there. In some ways pure objective XP is harder to balance, particularly if you load a character through into a second playthrough or are playing it with a less than full party - if XP is constant from quests you either end up with the character getting = XP every time regardless of whether your character is high enough level to clear a dungeon blindfolded or you do scale it and proportionatly end up with said characters getting so little XP they take forever to level up. If you however have "live" XP as scaling to next to nothing but have objective based XP at a fixed level you then get a suitable trickle enough to keep that character growing. Yes there are reasons to limit or tweak kill XP (negate grinding) but there are ways around that which have already been discussed.

Lets just have a quick summary at this point to work foward on: People do want: - A rogue class that feels distinct from fighters in combat - A rogue class which outside of combat is highly versatile and has the option of iconic skills including lockpick, pickpocket and disable traps. - A rogue class which has stealth options. - A rogue class which has some sort of one off combat bonuses when performing a surprise attacks relative to other classes. People don't want: - Rogues as a source of continuous high damage - Rogues with some sort of seemingly magical invisibility. Is that all fair? Anything to add?

Well you obviously have consider balance to some degree, but it in itself is a fairly easy problem to fix - scaling encounters isn't especially difficult to automate, either in terms of having individual opponents be more powerful (worse option but easier to implement) or (harder to implement but more worthwhile) scaling the entire encounter to be more complex. For instance, if you normally would be fighting eight goblin warriors but you are levelled past that by a few levels, perhaps the encounter is then of 12 goblin warriors backed up by 2 shaman and 5 archers. But when you add enemies to encounter you must think should higher level player get more experience from encounter or should one implement game system where you can dial down experience gain from enemies. And if dialing down is the thing what designer wants to do, then comes to question how this should be implemented, like dropping some percentage of experience what enemis give by every player level or put fixed experience in encounters. And here comes argument between objective oriented and per kill based xp gain. Well it worked perfectly fine in Icewind Dale 2 where you got progressively less XP depending on your level vs opponent level to the point where if you were, say, a level 15 party loaded into the start of the game at normal difficulty you wouldn't get any XP at all from monsters. You could easily implement a system like: Enemy -5 or more levels to Party = 0 XP Enemy -4 levels to Party = -80% XP Enemy -3 levels to Party = -60% XP Enemy -2 levels to Party = -40% XP Enemy -1 levels to Party = -20% XP Enemy = Level to Party = Normal XP Enemy +1 levels to Party = +20% XP Enemy +2 levels to Party = +40% XP Enemy +3 levels to Party = +60% XP etc

Well you obviously have consider balance to some degree, but it in itself is a fairly easy problem to fix - scaling encounters isn't especially difficult to automate, either in terms of having individual opponents be more powerful (worse option but easier to implement) or (harder to implement but more worthwhile) scaling the entire encounter to be more complex. For instance, if you normally would be fighting eight goblin warriors but you are levelled past that by a few levels, perhaps the encounter is then of 12 goblin warriors backed up by 2 shaman and 5 archers.

The classes are locked in already - they are Fighter, Priest, Wizard, Rogue, Druid, Ranger, Paladin, Monk, Barbarian, Chanter and Cipher. While I do quite like the Elder Scrolls model of leveling (which is similar to what you are suggesting) for the sake of Project Eternity, as a game which is recreating the gameplay of the Infinity Engine games I'd prefer to stick with D&Desque classes, just because that was part of the experience before and to do otherwise would be moving away from that. It can also be tricky if you do that to have characters have distinct feels as you just end up with characters being good at everything instead of specialising into something more unique. What I would suggest though is that if multiclassing is included, perhaps Obsidian might consider including ways for the skills to blend a bit between those classes so that you can do the combined things you have mentioned.

Slight offtopic: I would honestly, if I had the choice, cut out all "traditional" crafting from games and instead only have "legendary" crafting - ie. rather than go to a blacksmiths/enchanters and make a weapon, there are certain ways in the world to make legendary unique weapons through fullfilling specific objectives. Things like going to the top of the highest mountain on (real world) midsummers day and invoking a certain ritual that you found on a scroll at the bottom of a huge dungeon, or making a deal with a dragon who will temper your weapon with dragonfire if you butcher a nearby village. Even if in Icewind Dale 2 with the "ghost touched bottle" quest, you'd been able to pick a weapon of your choice to be enchanted rather than just recieving a dagger. Things like that which make item creation fun rather than an excercise is menus and skills.

Uumu..how is that a bad thing? Knowing with more accuracy player XP is good for balancing encounters and quests. And how is that less organic? To combine the answers to those two, I don't think (finely tuned) balance is necessarily a worthwhile goal in itself, sure there certainly needs to be some level of it (say... to within 20% accuracy) , but I think it makes for a more interesting experience if different players are hitting the same quest at different levels. I actually think games are more interesting when they aren't perfectly balanced so that when you win a fight that is very hard and otuside your level by the skin of yuor teeth there is a real sense of achievement, and when you easily wade through what should be be a really hard fight you have a sense that you are a badass. If balance is overly tuned you end up cutting out both of these, and while you don't want either to be happening all the time as otherwise they lose that emotional buzz, having a difficulty tailored too specifically by micromanaging eaxtly where you get XP kills them entirely unless you preprogram them, and then that isn't emergant gameplay, it's just "there" and no longer so much an achievement.

I think we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves suggesting that there is any set definition of "what a rogue is or should be like", this is afterall a FANTASY class. Yes there are people in the world who would be rogues if fantasy classes were real, but realistically as armour/magic/taking more than one attack that hits of any sort isn't standard in, say, mugging someone in a back alley, we can generally work on the principle that how actual rogues work is not = to a fantasy rogue archetype designed to present different combat options. Neither can I suspect most real life "rogues" detect traps, disarm traps, create traps or use poisons, or many cases, do more than running up behind someone and grabbing their bag and running off. So assuming you want the out of combat proficiencies of pickpocketing, detecting setting and disabling traps and so on, perhaps a sneak attack would be more for causing specific effects - sneak attacks having chances to cause specific bleeding damage, cripple an opponent in the legs so they move more slowly, hit them in the arms causing them to fail spells or drop what they are holding, or, indeed, in the head for an automatic critical, and while others would in theory be able to do that, as rogue's are training in that specifically they would have a greater chance of doing so.

I think if you were going to do some ideas like this it'd be interesting to have certain classes be better at certain quests than others - so in regards to those examples I gave, a priest might be able to force the mystic presense to manifest earlier, a ranger might be able to tell you what is tracking you in the fog and what to do about it, a cipher might detect the ambush and so on. The problem with SoZ was definitly that it favoured very specific classes for its ability mechanics, while I think generally speaking there should be a spread across all classes of little bits and bobs where they provide an advantage.

To clarrify my personal position in regards to why I was suggesting a compromise, the reason I'm not fond of purely objective based XP is precisely that it is too regulated and lacks organicness, as if you just have a pure objective based system you end up with every character finishing the game having an amount of XP purely within a fixed range of "just main quest" to "just main quest + all side objectives" which means you can exactly predict how much XP a character is going to have when you finish the game. Now conversely, I do think steps should be taken to minimize grinding, but I do think the possibility should be there to get ahead of the difficulty curve, and if you want to maintain the integrity of boss battles in that circumstance just have a scaling formula which means that they have hitpoints and damage that scales to your level. You certainly don't want to end up with my Skyrim problem where I overlevelled/super enchanted my stuff in the anticipation of a really hard fight and ended up killing the final dragon whose name I currently forget in about 4 shots of my bow. For that matter, I think a bigger balance problem than leveling is actually the crafting system - you frequently end up either with what is a rubbish system which only produces ow end items not worth the time OR you end up being able to produce god peoples that are the equivelant of +5, vampiric, keen, and do ice fire and electric damage and double damage against dragons/humans/evil/moomins. That is way more a problem than an overlevelled character. A fourth solution now I come to think of it would be to just have objective heavy XP, so while in a game like Icewind Dale lets say your XP might be about 50/50 combat/objective (made up figure), you could always do it so you got some small amount of token XP for fighting, but 85% of the total XP output was from objectives.

Often yes, but not always - there are a couple of named opponents/bosses in Icewind Dale 2 for example who you more or less run into on the way to do something else. You could of course have missions which appear when you meet such an opponent, but I'd prefer it if you were going to do it that way that they were "unspoken" missions as I kind of dislike it in a game like dragons dogma where you run into an opponent, you get a little popup saying "new mission! ambush" or somesuch which you them complete a few seconds later kind of takes you out of the immersion a bit. Even appearing in your journal just takes a bit of suspension of disbelief as it kind of implies you have spotted the evil necromancer, stopped briefly to write in your journal and written "quest to self: kill evil necromancer" before beginning the fight. A quibble I know, but I prefer things to have an organic feel to them when it's like this.

I do like the idea of adding extra combat animations into the mix as you advance level, particularly if they were going for more realistic movement style than in Infinity engine (perhaps in line with ToEE?) and I think the more attacks per turn/new abilities probably go without saying, but the voice is probably a little impractical as it'd require more recording to do, and as people have mentioned people don't want to have a non-confident character to begin the game. A vague idea I've had before, (and not really suited to this game as such, vaguely done in Fable but thats just based on general levelling but not specific scores) would be to tie attributes to physique sliders / animations so a character with a high strength score would be more muscular or a character with low intelligence has a dopey expresssion, high charisma has confident posture etc. As I said, wouldn't suit this game given this is an isometric game, but would be fun to see in an RPG someday.

I personally like getting XP from enemies (there is a certain satisfaction to know that you are a few kills away from leveling in the middle of a fight), but I do see the validity of not doing so as it does lead to the potential for grinding. I can think of a few alternatives that compromise on the matter: Depreciating XP: Each time you kill a monster you get less XP from it as you are learning less: the first time you kill a three headed devil moose you are going to learn a lot from the experience, but the more three headed devil moose you kill, you'll be getting the hang of it so will learn less and less from the experience. If you got 200 xp for your first devil moose, each additional one perhaps halves the XP so you get 100, then 50, then 25 and then so on. This then keeps the idea that fighting is an experience but makes farming for xp pointless. or Notability XP: Instead of getting XP for any opponent, perhaps you only get XP for certain ones - defeating a dragon would certainly get you some XP but killing rats in the cellar doesn't. For instance, named opponents might always grant you XP, but if you are just killing generic goblins this isn't really pushing you and so no XP gain. This could also include when you face monsters specifically ahead of your own level, so again, no XP for orcs, but if your level 3 party miraculously manages to kill a high level demon or wizard, this counts as a notable victory and thus gets xp, even if the wizard wouldn't ordinarily be notable. or Encounter based XP: You don't get XP for individual opponents, but based on the overall combat scenario when you win - if you just face, say, 6 dwarf warriors, this is fairly minimal XP as the scenario is very simple, but the more complex the opposing side it multiplies upwards. An encounter that then includes a healer dwarf would be a small multiplier higher because it becomes a more complex encounter, and then you might end up with an encounter facing warriors, rogues, wizards, clerics and assorted monsters stacking the multiplier yet higher still. This way you are being rewarded for being able to survive tactically more challenging encounters rather than just killing individual enemies. So yes, I'd still like to have some XP for winning fights, but I'm open to compromises to the problems that entails, and certainly I think offering rewards for alternative solutions is also a good idea.

Apologies if this is already a thread that I've missed. This is not necessarily I think Project Eternity *has* to have by any means and perhaps an isometric game isn't the best or easiest place to do them, but more something that I think most RPGs haven't really managed very well (with the notable exception of Vampire:Bloodlines) and this is using a lack of / the tantalising sense of combat to create suspense. One thing that I find in a lot of RPGs is that they can very much be "enter room, fight monster, enter room fight different monster" in a pitched battle every time. What I'm suggesting is in some instances have the fight not be obvious, and even have setups designed to trick the player. Music/sound effects would probably play a big part of this as otherwise A few examples of the sorts of things I mean. 1) (blatantly pinched from vampire: bloodlines) You are in a cursed ruin. As you proceed through various things in the environment seem to be after you with a malevolant will of their own, but you aren't presented with any actual opponents to face, but are left with the feeling you might be at any second until the climax of the storyline. 2) You are in an area of thick mist - while you can't see very far, you catch brief glimpses of creatures flanking / surrounding you who only actually attack when you are already weakened. Perhaps you only hear them. 3) A single opponent engages you and then flees, you pursue only to fall right into an ambush. 4) (blatantly pinched from Lord of the Rings) you are travelling through some long empty dungeon, and you occassionally hear skittering around you, but you are only attacked if you cause noise to draw the monsters out of the depths. 5) You are informed by someone that a distinctive and dangerous looking being is hunting you, and overhear conversations that it has been seen on the roads. This foe doesn't attack you in a predetermined place, but catches up with you in a random place depending on some hidden mechanics, forcing an organic encounter. 6) You end up facing a foe who you lack the means to kill, and must merely slow it down before it reaches its actual target to allow for evacuation/preparation. These are just a few random examples and by no means the only ones possible, but the general gist is I think it'd be quite interesting to see encounters that work on a variety of themes rather than just the trudging forward and killing anything option. What are peoples thoughts on this?

I kind of think the issue here is "how do you make rogues relevant in combat but suitably different from fighters". Personally I don't mind the D&D system, but as some people don't seem to like it there are certainly alternatives. I actually have no problem with the general concept of backstabbing, but it perhaps needs some caveats. Perhaps have backstabbing as a togglable mode rather than an automatic feature - when not toggled rogues will be doing normal damage per hit, but get a normal number of attacks per round, while if they have a backstab ability of similar they get far less but do backstab damage when they hit to account for taking the time to line up precise high-damage shots. There is of course the aspect of rogues about using things like poisons and caltrops and whatnot, but I don't feel those should really be exclusive to rogues (no reason anyone can't use them) but perhaps rogues would be able to take feats/get free feats to specialise in them to make them more integral to combat. Another possibility is a weapon like a garotte that literally only works as a sneak attack weapon, which then justifies doing high damage, again, anyone can in theory use a garotte, but perhaps rogues get benefits in using it. If you aren't going to have a backstabbing focus I think the key is probably giving them bonuses to speciality attacks which aren't in the normal repertoire of fighters - the focus of fighters is really about standing toe to toe and winning through proficiency with their own martial skill, whereas rogues are more an opportunistic opponent using a selection of tools to get the job done.

I think the key for me is that I want a large selection of spells, ranging from practical and sensible (old classics like equivelants of fireball, mage armour, dispell magic, magic missile etc) but also the things which are missing from some games which are the weird eccentric little spells which add character - I'm replaying IWD2 right now and found a scroll of Vipergout for instance - that's a ridiculous spell, but the fact it exists adds character and range to mages, and the only way to improve on it would be to have situations where actually the ability to vomit up snakes would be tactically really useful, even compared to the "practical" spells.

I don't quite see why this is a real issue, at the most basic level because this is a fantasy game and therefore, while some real world grounding is a good idea, we don't have to go for complete accuracy. As already mentioned, while it's not going to provide any great deal of protection, say, motorcycle leathers still protect you more than not wearing them, which is reflected in their low ranking they always have, which would be in D&D equivocal to someone who was slightly but not notably dexterous, which is not unreasonable. If it doesn't end up in the game I'm not too fussed, but it seems a minor artistic choice given the amount of talk on the subject.

I think converse to a lot of the responses here, I think while a level of quality system makes sense to some degree, I think going overboard on it would be a mistake - realistically, I don't think more than three tiers of quality of non-magical stuff are needed - equivalents of shoddy (the kind of stuff you start the game with), (adjectiveless) normal for when you scrape a little money together and masterwork to bridge between normal stuff and magical. You could however of course have different makes/materials within each of those with tweaks to benefits, though I really don't like the Elder Scrolls model of a linear progression from material A through to material F of which is the best, as it doesn't give much room for creative choices of equipment on the players part. But if say there was a group of enemies ahead who were vulnerable to fire but very fast, stick your melee character in some salamander-hide armor to get their attention and drop a fireball on the lot of them while you walk out unscathed, though that same armor might make you more vulnerable to cold for example. However, I really don't think its worth going too overboard on elaborate armor rankings when once you have the basic stuff down, the real juicy equipment is going to be the unique stuff anyway and I would rather we had an interesting range of those than 10 quality levels on 10 kinds of armor on ten kinds of material with ten levels of enchantment...

I think part of the solution to differentiating armours could be a mixture of "what is armour made of" with "how good quality is this" in a sort of extrapolation of the idea of "masterwork" weapons, the benefit of working in a fantasy setting is you can formulate fictional substances and mythical beast hides to justify why armour a is better than armour b. I think aesthetic is a part of it, and you perhaps the key is thinking why a class is generally associated with a certain kind of armour. In the barbarian/ranger and hide armour example you give I would suggest that they might wear hide as opposed to a different armour because its warmer and offers better protection from the elements and is quieter. Possible solution would therefore be to give hide armour some resistances, while giving heavier armours penalties to skills that would logically be effected by heavier armour. Quietness strangely is possibly one of the major key things you didn't mention, and while I think you need to strike a balance between letting the player do what they want, there should clearly be limitations in as far as there is some vague semblance to reality - so in this case, plate armour would have penalties to sneaking and similar skills. The wizard (and monk) question is a bit more interesting as these are classes which have historically been denied armour at all, and I think why thats the case has to be examined. In the case of monks, the core concept of that class always seemed to be a bit counter to the concepts of a dungeon crawler anyway in that they are a low-loot class. No weapons, no armour. What I'd think is perhaps position them slightly more towards a "weaponmaster" kind of character concept of focusing on offense through a specific means (be it unarmed, or a focus in just a staff or something) and instead of saying "wear armour and loose all your powers" you presumably need a concept which encourages light armour but doesn't mandate it. Perhaps if you are inegrating any sort of acrobatics into their playstyle options, heavier armour would run counter to that. Wizards are a bit more complex but I think the classical wisdom essentially boils down to wizards acting as the artillery of a group and therefore for balance purposes being lightly armoured, not to mention the "robes and pointy hat" aesthetic they have. One option would perhaps be to say that while a wizard can wear a massive suit of traditional plate armour, it isn't necessarily a good idea to do so, but for the less limber wizard there are alternatives. Assuming you were working on the D&D model for a second of AC measuring difficulty to land a hit, if you had a seperate family of (magical, perhaps forcefield based) armours which didn't do that but had damage resistance instead you then have a system where you can have wizards clunking around in big beefy armours without necessarily losing the class aesthetic or impinging on the role of traditional armour too much. The trick then would be justifying why everyone didn't wear that, but this was merely a starting point. The other option of course is to go the route of training trade off - again basing in on the 3rdEd D&D, if instead of when you level up having a page for skills, a page for feats and a page for spells all seperate, have them all on one page and let the player choose to allocate what they want where. This way, you end up with a scenario where, if someone wants to take the classic mage route they can, but equally, if someone decides they want to sacrifice a bit of their spell learning and focus instead on being able to use heavy armour they can, but they'll be just that bit less experienced in magic as a trade off.