Micamo

Far as I understand it, they're already planning on assuming as little as possible about your character background. Your connection to the plot is that you were the (unwilling) witness of a life-changing, supernatural event, and your goal is to figure out what it was and what it meant.

Yeah, plot flags. All my system does is show the player when and what flags are being tripped (like the walking dead's "They will remember that" UI messages), and that you get to choose a few flags to set right out the gate. (You want to make being a betrayer to st. waidwen part of your backstory? You can!) I don't think I could name one. Then again most video games we give the "RPG" label are given that label precisely because they're based around allocating stat points and such. As such, one may have escaped our notice simply by being mislabeled. I believe you could make strong arguments, for example, that The Walking Dead itself is really a JRPG at heart wearing the mechanics of a point-and-click adventure title.

Yes, you acquire them over time, but not in the same way as feats. You'd get the "Betrayer of St. Waidwen" aspect after you've done something in the story that betrays that faction, but you don't select that aspect from a menu at level-up or anything. The majority of dialogue options available would be ones that are neutral to your aspects and are available to all characters. Sometimes your aspects provide alternate quest solutions or create additional complications for you, but they don't literally affect every line of dialogue in the game. As for a system without quantitative aspects, it's already been done: Lady Blackbird is a lovely little indie tabletop RPG where there are three components to a character: Traits (like Aspects but slightly different in that they're exclusively positive), Secrets (special abilities that can only be attempted if you have the Secret), and Keys. A Key is a goal or an aspect of the character's personality, and you gain a benefit when you "hit your key." If your key is "You hate the empire" then you hit your key whenever you do something to hurt the empire. You can check it out for free here. (The game as-is assumes you're playing the pre-generated characters, but you can adapt the system pretty easily to whatever you want.)

A few issues. First, the intention behind aspects is that they're both positive and negative for your character to have. I'm having a hard time coming up with non-contrived reasons for why having high Strength would be a bad thing except in the opportunity cost of not having your other, perhaps more important attributes higher. Conversely, low strength is never a good thing unless you're using it as a dump stat to get your other attributes higher. Second, the problem with attributes is that in this context they have an unnecessary level of granularity (or, rather, granularity in the wrong dimensions). Unless you're rolling checks (which is something I'd also like to move away from), the difference between 5 strength and 6 strength is kinda arbitrary (and even if you are rolling checks, the difference between a DC15 task and a DC20 task is just as arbitrary). Thus the choice between them is also kinda arbitrary. I can't make an informed judgement about what the game interprets as a 5 STR task and a 6 STR task unless I'm looking at a walkthrough. Aspects are much easier to judge this way. Third, attributes just aren't flexible enough. You can have a "Reputation" attribute that ranges from 1 to 10, sure, but with Aspects you can have "Disgraced Nobleman" and "Accused Criminal" and "Famous Orc-slayer." Furthermore their properties means the player can gain additional aspects that reflect the events of the game and have them affect things in a 100% natural, organic, and transparent way. The only problem with Aspects in a CRPG is, unlike in a tabletop game, you can't give the player freedom to come up with literally any aspect they can think of, you have to limit them to a pre-written list. It's not all that complex at all, actually: Sub-attributes as refinements of attributes is something that's been done numerous times. Personally, I don't think it solves any of the problems a traditional attribute system has, it just makes the system more complex. The additional complexity might be a good thing (or it might not) depending on the exact refinements made and the game being played, but it's still qualiatively different to an aspect system. (And, indeed, aspects and attributes can peacefully co-exist in the same game: See Strands of Fate.)

I'd actually like to see a CRPG that moves away from attribute scores and toward an Aspect-based system. You pick some aspects at character creation: These aspects affect your interactions with NPCs (both positively and negatively) as well as your interactions with the environment. I'd also like to see a CRPG that moves away from exploring "Can you do this?" and more towards exploring "Why would you ever want to do this?" but that's beside the point.

Yes, as far as the abstraction of the game mechanics is concerned.

The thing is, conversation and argument is not a challenge. Not in the same way a combat encounter is, anyway. There are roleplaying systems that try to turn it into one through more complicated social interaction mechanics, but in my experience they don't really work out all that well. The problem is "how do we make conversation just as engaging as combat" is a wrong question. Believe it or not, this mindset is very much the mainstream one: Experimental games that defy it like Proteus or Dear Esther get shouted down by CoD-ites and Grognards alike, and it's part of the problem. Insisting that the feeling of overcoming a challenge and winning is the only thing that makes a game worth playing is like insisting power metal is the only type of music worth listening to: Power metal is great, but by refusing to even consider anything else you're shutting yourself off from an entire galaxy of possibilities.

And you believe it has potential to be great based on... what, exactly? I've seen lots and lots of examples and explanations of how the system could go horribly wrong, but no examples or explanations of what the system could add to the game: All that the defenders seem to have to say is "You just hate innovation."

I think the point of a game is to engage the player. Challenges are one way to engage a player but they aren't the *only* way, and I've honestly never played an RPG that manages to do this successfully in any way deeper than simple skinner box mechanics. Personally, my best experiences with RPGs aren't the parts where the DM decides to "challenge" me with a difficult combat encounter, they're the parts where I interact with the characters and the world.

I have a bit of a problem with this. Having my items break and my stats take a hit doesn't make me feel worn down and desperate, it's just the DM telling me "You are very tired right now."

Comically missing the point, much? Early firearms and item degrading are probably the least risky modifications to the Standard Average Fantasy RPG I cam think of.

It's a testament to just how much of a rut the fantasy genre is in that early firearms and weapon/armor durability is what counts for "taking risks."

Uhh, they *are* making exactly the game they want. There's nobody with a metaphorical gun to their head saying "The game has to not have a durability system or there will be no game at all" like you'd see with a publisher. The team heard the opinions and decided to change the design. This is a perfectly valid artistic decision to make, and I honestly don't understand why you would think that listening to outside opinions means Obsidian loses agency in the design of their game.

I say good riddance. Then again, I'm not exactly at the core of Eternity's target audience, so what do I know?

What if magic items were powered by soul fragments, and this caused superstitious people (i.e. basically everyone who isn't a trained wizard) to believe (erronously) that having a magic item around is dangerous because your own soul can "leak" into the item. This would be an easier sell (and much more in line with the tone of the world and the role of soul magic) than "a monster shows up and kills everybody."

This debate happens literally every time a company publically goes back on something it previously said. "Flip-flopper!" "Stick to your guns!" "Where are your principles!?" "Spineless hacks!" "Design by committee!" What the people who say these things don't realize is these complaints are exactly why we can't have transparency about anything, ever. These kinds of changes in course happen internally all the time, especially in a creative endeavor, and they're perfectly healthy. Really, I'd be much more concerned if the design didn't change over the course of the development process, especially this early. In the creative process your first idea is almost never the best, and is usually the worst.

Replayability is touted as a wonderful property in a game precisely because it extends the game's life. I'm not talking about "how long it takes for you to reach the credits" I'm talking about how long you can play a game before you exhaust it of interesting content and move on to the next game.

Not necessarily: Black and White morality stories and settings are perfectly capable of creating drama and depth, they just do so in a different way. Take LotR for example: Frodo and pals are unquestionably The Good Guys and Sauron and his orc army are unquestionably The Bad Guys. Blandness and shallowness are the products of a bad writer, not a property inherent to black and white morality. EDIT: Haha, yes Elerond, I made a typo.

Because to see all the major content you have to replay the game, potentially many, many times. See The Cave as a good example of a game that was absolutely crippled by this desire to create "replay value."

I hold the same opinion of TES games as I do for New Vegas. The parts that matter are held intact at high levels no matter how overpowered you get. The only part that becomes irrelevant are the unplayably bad fight sequences that I rush to get over with as fast as possible anyway. I think this is a really poisonous design direction to take: When you're making mutually exclusive bits of game content you have to be very careful that you aren't just tacking on extra hours of gameplay. It should be no secret that I'm a big opponent of the cult of "longer games are better games."

I disagree. I played Fallout: New Vegas the legitimate way for about 3 hours before I gave up and turned on god mode. I dunno about you, but NV is waaaaaaaaaay better that way. It didn't render the game pointless, it just took out the parts that got in the way of my enjoyment of the game (e.g. inventory management).

No.

Honestly, I think mental stats are pretty stupid overall. They tend to be either labels for stats that are only important for certain characters (e.g. mages benefiting from high INT), or they're just a reason for the DM to yell at you for "not roleplaying your stats correctly." For some reason a lot of people think dumping INT means you're only allowed to play Thog.

I think New Vegas took the best approach you can for an open-world game: The setting is the story. The game doesn't really have a linear narrative in the sense of something you could turn into a book or a movie because that's not what the game is about: The player emotionally connects with the game through exploring the world, turning over every rock that looks interesting to see what's underneath. You know those moments in Minecraft where you find a random entrance to a cave, so you jump in to see where it leads for no other reason than because it's there? That's what NV is about. If you're the kind of person who plays Minecraft passing over everything unless it's a resource you want, then NV is probably not the game for you.

Connotations are exactly what we want in a name, at least connotations of things that hold for all characters. This is what I was going for with "Godscarred": The Goldikes are the result of a god tampering with a soul for whatever reason, and their physical differences are a manifestation of this tampering. I imagine that most godlikes, one way or another, struggle to deal with the consequences of this. Some can handle their scars and come out stronger for them, others can't and are destroyed by them.