Doppelschwert

Well, it is lorewise. You gave that very definition yourself: Thats basically saying they are exclusive in the game world and don't you dare to play them otherwise! You say paladin and priest are distinct classes and if you happen to want to play that skillset with the "wrong" gender people consider your character as trash. I don't see how that's an incentive to choose freely what I consider to be the most fun. Thats like saying: "Sure, you can have your swords all you want, but don't forget the -10 to hit. That'll teach you to pick the axe next time, sucker." Don't get me wrong, you could certainly have an interesting story with such things in mind, but make that an choice itself and don't link it to the skillset I want to play.

Using the same name for different classes just confuses the player at character creation, and making classes gender exclusive is kind of sexist (although I hate that word). You might also consider other languages where the translation of "wizard" and the like is unisex, although that may not be the case in english. Also, witches most certainly do not display the same skills as a wizard so that makes it even worse. I see no need to link the abstract package of a class to the lore of a character concept. That's just forcing the player into using certain lore he may not even want to roleplay. Also, NO

Or maybe you're just condescending by essentially calling everyone with a different opinion an emo kid. I'd argue the anti-mancers propably have more to laugh about in this thread than the pro-mancers.

So basically you think its arbitrary when not everbody in your party is bisexual so that you can't freely pursue every romance regardless of gender? I'd argue that when you choose gender it shouldn't come as a surprise if the straight people from the same sex in your party may lock you out of their romance content - neither should you need a popup indicating that in order to make it an informed choice. I seriously hope I've misunderstood that comment of yours.

I can relate to most of the things you say umberlin, especially not being interested in playing a new game plus only in order to see the text. I also understand that the original approach outlined in the first post is propably too much minigame for most of the backers (while I still think that this can be intriguing for its own reasons), but I think the following would work reasonably well and add a lot of atmosphere to the game: - There is one special dead language in the game which you can find in ruins all over the place and this relates to - Additional to the traditional lore skill, you get a short sight of the decrypted text at the beginning. So its not like "You find an old craving on the wall hidden under some dust. [if Lore > 6] It seems to be a warning of some sort about going further after sunset, although you don't know why. [if Lore <= 6] Sadly, you can't really make out its meaning." but instead "You find an old craving on the wall hidden under some dust. It reads [if Lore > 6] [show decryption according to Lore skill, for Example: Lore=12] >> "Aevare oe the Nifht" << It seems to be a warning of some sort about going further after sunset, although you don't know why. [if Lore <= 6] [show decryption according to Lore skill, for Example: Lore=6] >> "Aevaqe oe tge Nifgt" << Sadly, you can't really make out its meaning." This doesn't exclude the lore skill to be traditional at every other instance of using it, neither does it involve a treasure hunt for stone slabs or anything. Its still stat based, but its a whole different experience - without having to invest too much ressources on development. I also want to stress that this way this is not a minigame you're forced to do. You could still decipher the text as the player even if your skill is too low, but the game doesn't expect it from you, thus it is not a minigame but only a nice visual clue indicating why the character didn't succeed.

But an encryption isn't a language. If it's just an encrypted form of the base language, it's an encrypted form of the language, not a different language. Learning a language and en/decoding an encryption are two different cognitive feats. Language is more than just shuffling and replacing letters, there's grammar, syntax, semantics, tone, etc. I get your point, but I don't agree. An arbitrary encryption may not produce reasonable phonetics and thus disqualifies as a natural language, but it defines a language nonetheless as grammar, syntax and semantics are just inherited by the base language. The phonetics part can be adjusted by only allowing seperate permutations among vowels and consonants. That may not make it an original language, but it still qualifies as a language. However, the point of this is not to introduce a new language (as developing a new language surely goes beyond of the scope of project), but to visualise the progress of learning a language. I think this is is better than having a simple lore-check which means either comprehending all or nothing, as in reality, you seldom comprehend a sentence completely or not at all but most of the time partial instead.

I don't know if it would be that hard to implement, although I haven't considered any translations to other real languages until now. Obviously, this is difficult for languages using another alphabet, but for languages using the latin alphabet, this shouldn't be too much trouble: All you'd really need to do is make a function which ciphers/deciphers a given text with a given cipher by substituting symbols. Translations could then just translate the texts that are ciphered normally, and all they had to do was to exchange the cipher, which is an easy task if you just use the character distribution over the words of the corresponding language. Given that I'd be able to code this without working in the programming industry, I don't imagine this to be a problem or overly ressource heavy. For other alphabets than the latin one, this could theoretically be doable as well, you only need a way to adapt how many symbols the cipher skill is able to translate - but you still have a valid point there.

Maybe I should elaborate a little more on how I'd imagine this to work. I'd show you an screenshot of the mechanic in the final fantasy game, but I can't seem to find out which game that was, so I'll do an example instead. Lets consider a simple caesars cipher for the example, so we would say an "a" in the ancient language is a "b" in our language, an "b" is an "c" and so on - finally an "y" is an "z" and "z" would be "a" (the characters are shifted by one). Now lets say you'd find an ancient writing somewhere which said "Advzqd ne sgd Mhfgs" which translates to "Beware of the Night" Lets say that you have a translation skill of 6 which could mean that you're able to translate 6 characters of the ancient language - to make it easy lets say those are the first 6 characters a,b,c,d,e,f. So what you'd get is something like "Bevzqe nf sge Mhggs" where the orange characters describe what you understood and the message is also displayed this way in the game for you to read. With a translation skill of 12, you'd be able to understand "Bevzqe nf she Mighs" And with a translation skill of 18, you'd be able to understand "Bevzre of she Nighs" Obviously, this example isn't a good one as you need a pretty high skill to get anything from the message. However, if we use the frequency of characters in the english language instead of the order of the alphabet to model the skill, beginning by the letters with most frequency, we get the order of learning to translate "dsznhm rgqckb tlvefx oaujiwpy". With the values 6,12,18 in the translation skill, still meaning that you can translate the first few characters of the order above, you get "Aevaqe oe tge Nifgt" "Aevare oe the Nifht" "Aevare of the Night" Note that the above example is delusive as you're able to understand even more from context than what is translated when texts grow larger. I agree that hunting for stone slabs or other kinds of minigame would not be fitting to the game, and I wouldn't expect the player to translate the message themselves manually. The skill would just replace the things you're able to decipher with color. Alternatively, you could just give every message a a difficulty check and translate a percentage of characters according to skill / DC, although that loses much of its atmospheric factor. You can give a short summary of what your characters get out of the text as well at the end (like the traditional deciphing checks in varios DnD games) - the concepts aren't mutal exclusive - I just think its a satisfying and fun process to see how you're advancing in the language at the same time, getting a feel for how your characters are struggling with the texts by reading the partial translations yourself. This way it shouldn't need a lot of work to implement while imho adding a nice bonus to atmosphere. Also, the messages should make out only an optional part of the lore as not to spoil the game for players without the skill, but still rewarding the players investing in it (additional hints about difficult areas ahead or something like that for example, and cultural things which are not necessary but nice to know).

I just remembered that there is a Final Fantasy game where a faction spoke a language which you don't understand (at first). What those people are saying is normal english, but the text is decoded by a permutation of the alphabet (as opposed to a simple caesars cipher). The player was able to find some kind of stone slabs which would then give him the ability to "translate" the language (which effectively decoded a single character of the alphabet for the rest of the game). In the end, if you hunted for those stone slabs, you were able to understand everything the people were saying - but you already were able to understand some of the words even without finding every character, which really felt like learning the language. The game featured also some kind of new game plus so that you were even able to understand everything in a second playthrough, discovering more information about the gameworld. I think a similar concept for eternity would be awesome. Naturally, it should be a language which is not spoken anymore as to make sense in the game world, so a dead language which you can find scriptures from in dungeons or the like. Maybe couple some kind of lore skill to it and you have an easy way to give the player more lore and/or tips for certain areas if he wants to invest in the skill, making it a way cooler lore skill than the usual item identifying. What do you guys think?

I agree on your post. However, I thought hells was too easy. I quickly deducted an algorithm for solving hells (it is an easier version of the game "mastermind", which itself has algorithms to solve it) and than it was just winning by going through it step by step. My point is not that I'm good at mastermind, but that it is really diffictult to get the difficulty of puzzles right, as the difficulty mostly relies on your background. Puzzles are either logical where they can be analysed mathematically, or they rely on speech and the like or they have no structure at all (= bad puzzles). However, if your personal life resolves around analysing patterns (most scientific jobs, for example) or being eloquent (for lacking of a better term as I'm not eloquent) puzzles that are hard to others without that background become trivial. There's also the part that after playing a lot of games, you've seen most "popular" puzzles, thus making them and minor modifications trivial again. That is also a reason why significant intelligence tests are rather difficult to make, as you're doing better if you've practiced on/seen the puzzles they contain beforehand (which is also why there is a market for books preparing you for assessment centers). So I think finding challenging puzzles in a game is pretty difficult once you as a player have developed a certain "puzzle skill" - at least if you want to make puzzles accessible for everyone regardless of background at the same time. That said, I like most puzzles, even if they are not challenging at all. Usually, the more math it involves, the happier I am (as long as I can't solve it without writing some notes). Also, I liked hells anyway, as it was fun to deduct the algorithm necessary to win every time. It's just that after that, actually winning hells was just mechanical work which at the same time will stay this way for every subsequent playthrough I'll have in the future, which is rather meh.

Uh... limit the amount of buffs that can be on one character at a time? Or limit the number of buffs a character can cast (i.e. you can cast 10 lvl 1 spells but only 3 buffs? Or a given buff can only be cast 3 times?) ô.ô I probably don't get it because making buffs scale with your level means you would have a huge arsenal of very powerful buffs at the end. Unless you really cut down the number of buffs per spell level (1 or 2). Initially, every spell level is limited. It is only until later that you can begin to cast those spells unlimited times. I'd just exclude the buffs from this rule, for example: LVL1 5 LVL1-Spells LVL2 7 LVL1-Spells LVL3 9 LVL1-Spells LVL4 Unlimited LVL1-Spells which aren't Buffs, still only 9 LVL1-Buffs In exchange, there would be only a few buffs per level, just as you mentioned, so that those lvl1 Buffs are still viable later on. Propably too complicated, though, and it doesn't make much sense from a logical point of view either. Then again, unlimited scaling buffs would be too powerful otherwise. I hear you. I especially want them to do away with the "Thou shalt take one of each kind" 1st commandment. http://forums.obsidi...bilities-in-pe/ I want all sorts of parties to be viable and powerful. 3 paladins, 2 bards and one cipher should be just as legit as 1 fighter, 1 paladin, 1 ranger, 1 rogue, 1 priest and 1 wizard. (Note in this topic I also called for stackable buffs/ abilities - a contentious issue I know ) Although I agree with you on this, isn't that contradicting your point before about the party of all barbarians which is improved by adding a cleric? Point taken. I agree. The disadvantages should make sense though. A fire shield making you more susceptible to cold - why? Good example: Haste makes you fatigued after a while. Yeah, disadvantages should make sense. Being fatigued after being hasted is also a way better example than the fireshield. (The fire-shield is made out of ice, so its protecting you against fire and it enforces cold passing through towards you would be the explanation). The first group is most often the group which is accesible at low levels. However, as the game goes by, most often there is nothing else worthwhile on those spell levels so that you just use those small buffs semi-permanently, as you normally only have to recast them after resting. So you could actually make them auras without losing anything or just increase the base statistic of all characters, because they automatically are active once you get that party member. I think those buffs are actually the worst as they are just recastable auras which don't need any decision making at all. I still agree on making them unstackable. The point of an 6-chanter party would be to let them sing 6 different songs at the same time, so that you gain various benefits for all chanters. As they can act while singing (in contrary to the DnD bard) you could propably have them act as the fighters themselves while singing their 6-part epos (which is kind of cool, at least I understood the description this way). On a related note, how do we feel about buffs stacking with enhancement from equipment? I prefer them not being stackable (as that normally makes buffs unnecessary after some time and I don't have to bother with them anymore).

Yes, it would be p. annoying to always have to recast those low-level buffs. The only thing that comes to mind is to not make buffs available on low levels at all, only debuffs... but that's kind of sub-optimal of course. If you make buffs limited per day regardless of level and make their strength dependent on caster level, you can have weak buffs in the beginning without them becoming a recasting annoyance while at the same time keeping their usefulness all the way through. I'd prefer a strength buffing spell that grows with levels over "minor bull's strength", "bull's strength", "greater bull's strength" any day. I'm not sure about what you mean by this. A party of 6 barbarians should be weaker than one of 5 barbs and 1 priest IMO, for the exact reason of buffs. Just like that party should in turn be weaker than one of 4 barbs, 1 priest and 1 wizard (for crowd control). I think certain staples should remain, and bad party composition shouldn't be justified with citing "player choice". I'd agree on this. However, imho, the goal should be that if you pick any 6 distinct classes out of the pool of available classes, those parties should be playable/trainable in a way that they are equally strong. Of course, this would propably be balance perfection and is thus not attainable - but if you end up in a situation where every party consisting of 6 distinct classes which is missing the cleric vastly improves by swapping a member for a cleric, the cleric is propably too important overall. You're right that bad party composition shouldn't be justified with citing "player choice", but good party composition shouldn't be dictated by having exactly 3 specific classes in every party either, as it is in most DnD games. Nice idea IMO, but then shouldn't that apply to other kinds of magic as well? There shouldn't be too much of a divergence between buffs and other spells. The advantage/disatvantage is more about involving tactical decisions in the first place and less about having disadvantages in general. I feel like most spells in DnD are pretty balanced by this: Area of damage spells are powerful, but you'll hit your own party members as well if you don't care about protecting them / moving them out of the way. Most offensive spells have saves, so you have to choose your spells according to the enemies saves if you want to succeed. Buffs are in general not that thought provocing, as they are a simple enhancement and its much easier to decide which ones are useful and which ones are not, given that you can have them simultaneosly. So by this proposition, instead of casting everything available to you, you have to think about what the enemy is going to do if you want to have an advantage, as your buffs could also very well help your enemy if you're not careful.

As I dislike overly powerful magic, I have some issues with buffs: 1) Low level buffs. After a while, low level spells can be cast an unlimited time per day, when I got that correctly. So effectively, those buffs can be permanently on. But then, you could as well make them auras to save the player the tedious recasting. But then, you could as well increase the stats of all classes permanently for the same effect, without the need of having buffingclass Y in the party. So I think some regulations should be there in order to balance this. 2) Several versions of the same effect. I think spells should somehow be scaling with your power. There is no need for "bull's strength" when you can cast "mass bull's strength". Imho, buffs should rather give certain unique effects instead of just increasing your stats. 3) A party without a buffing class shouldn't be weaker overall, as that makes buffing classes no brainers. 4) Buffs are most of the time just plain upgrades and the only tactical decision is about when to cast them (if this question arises at all). Ways to counter these things I could think of are: - Make buffs per day limited no matter how strong they are - Make buffs like combat modes, giving certain disadvantages in addition to their advantages (fire shield reduces fire damage but increases cold damage) - Make them take away stamina in order to be maintained (I think DAO did this? Your maximal MP went down when buffs were active) or give them some other cost which keeps them in place (also compare to the witcher and potions) - Make characters only be able to maintain a certain number of buffs at once, so that you have to choose which ones are most useful at the moment (you may want to choose more damage in order to kill a vampire faster or immunity to level drain in order to last longer). Better yet, make this number change by having a certain class or learning special feats so that players can have customizability. In fact, I think this is the fairest way to cater to both players that want a heave use of buffs and players that want to neglect them.

Uhm yes I also suggest restricting resting, didn't I say so? The difference is the cause/effect. You proposed to reduce the rest spamming so that you had to limit your magic usage per battle until you're able to rest again. I proposed to limit the amount of buffs you can cast so that there are still some buffs left for the next fight, which means that the number of available spells run out more slowly and there is no need to rest as soon. You're right, its really about the question of how the role of magic should be. I can see where you're coming from, and I understand this point of view, although I don't agree with it. However, in order to respect OPs intention, I'd propose we agree on disagreeing on that topic for now, as it most propably boils down to personal preference anyway.

To be fair, I'm playing IWD2 at the moment so my judgement is propably clouded. However, I think most walkthroughs on IE games highly recommend using buffs, and it clearly is a superior way to play the game if you can be bothered to use them, as you're far stronger. My point is that your alternate strategies are not mutualy exclusive to buffing, you can buff your party AND do an ambush / backstab / traps etc. Regardless of what you were doing, buffs made it easier. My issue is the following: When buffs are necessary to win, there is no choice about using them. If buffs are not necessary to win, the game propably is to easy if you use them. Finding a middleway is difficult. Since buffs are only one component of overall balance, I don't see the point in hating on them. You'd either have to make characters stronger, or direct damage spells stronger, or make monsters more susceptible to status effects, or increase weapon damage. If your 1.90m tall character with a longsword can duke it out with a giant w/o buffs, I think you put too much emphasis on the wrong balance components (HP bloat, ludicrous strength scores, etc.) What noone wants is the tedious and mindless task of applying all your buffs at once all the time, then rest to regain your spells after every encounter. The optimal solution IMO is to reduce rest spamming and thereby restrict magic, and thereby make players think about exactly what spell they need and when and who to cast it on. Cast haste now on your archer to take out an enemy mage quickly, or cast a dispel later on your tank should he become mind-controlled. I agree on the second paragraph, but you could also restrict magic and therefore restrict rest spamming to achieve the same goal, which is what I would propose by restricting the number of simultanously active buffs or giving them some downside. You're achieving the same thing this way, you have to think about which buffs is most useful at the moment while at the same time a buff heavy party won't be several power levels above your ordinary, non-buffed party. Regarding the first paragraph, personaly, I think someone with 10 buffs from a cleric being a near undestrcutable half god is way more ridiculous than HP bloat or high strength, but thats just a matter of taste, as I've already stated. I also think that buffs are not a part of overall balance but rather a system that makes everything better on top.

That would be one solution I could live with and which I'd use. However, I still think that has its own flaws. If buffs are time dependent, (one lasts 10 rounds, one 5 minutes, etc) the order in which you cast those spells still matters and you'd still have to wait for every single buff to be cast one after another, or otherwise, some would last longer than they would if cast individually. So if the casting time for a spell is 6 seconds, not much is gained in the time regard, thats still tedious. At the same time, the way buffs are normally used, they aren't really tactical decisions imho. They just make you greater at anything they improve, there is no drawback. While fighting against a boss, there is absolutely no decision involved, as it is a no brainer to use them. So most of the time, either buffs are a no brainer, or most likely not necessary at all. Tactical decision? I don't think so. The song of a bard is a much more tactical buff. You can only maintain one at the same time and you have to choose carefully from which you benefit the most at the moment. Combat modes come with advantages but also disadvantages. Buffs can be maintained happily at the same time, so there is no drawback which one to use (given sufficient duration) so they are really just no bainers. I don't want to deny the existence of buffs, whether you like them or not is just a matter of taste in the end, but in the IE games, you're just weak if you not use them at all, which I think is kind of bad game design (and this is independent of the tedious casting process).

Although you're points are all valid and good hormalakh, I think there are still some dimensions you're missing in your analysis. For example, I know how most DnD 2e and 3.5e rules work although I never played the PnP version, as I've picked them up with the DnD games and some wikis. However, I feel like many things which you categorize as crutches simply save time. To be honest, I don't feel like buffing my party 6 rounds ahead of combat. I don't feel like casting "Heal light wounds" 10 times in a row. Thats tedious, doesn't enrich my experience in any way and costs precious time. "Blasphemy!", one might say, "you don't want to take your time to play the game and just want to rush through it, leave these forums!" Well, no. I'd take my time with the game, but I only have that much free time to fool around playing video games. So why should I spend a minute to cast 10 spells when I could hit the rest switch and be done with it? When I get to play, I'd rather clear a dungeon floor instead of doing the half of it and patting myself on the back for looking at casting animations for half the time. Also, there are problems with gamebalance. Normaly, the game designers have a certain party composition in mind when they design the encounters. Right now, I'm playing IWD2 with a certain roleplaying party concept. The rules are to use all monks in the beginning and make interesting multiclasses with them. No powergaming stats like dropping charisma to 3 either. So what gives? The party sucks big time. I don't have a full level mage, so I'm not able to use fireball when the game expects me to by sending 20 goblins after me. So the only viable option left to me is to fall back to some save scumming and rest spamming for some time in the beginning, as the game is not designed in a balanced way. A new player could have picked the same party, and he wouldn't have had a chance, without it being his fault. (Don't get me wrong, I don't expect a game to be completable no matter what, and I know that my party is bad, but I'm having fun since I'm lvl 6, so there is no problem in the end - playing is about having fun, first of all, whatever that means to you). I propably won't buff in PE either if it will be that tedious as well. However, if you could toggle buffs to be cast automatic as soon as they are gone, things would be different. It's not about losing the tactical decisions associated with buffing, its just about making them accesible in a more friendly way and less tedious way. I think the concept of combat modes is much better, both from a tactical and a practical point of view, without losing complexity.

I get that, and I'm in favor of the possibility of your stamina having to drop a certain point before health is affected. And I understand what you mean about the "when you have low health" situation. But, as far as your ability to die is concerned, that's no different from being injured in a different game, in an area you cannot rest, and having run out of potions. The "health" bar in this system is still basically a limiter on how much of your stamina bar (in this case, about 400%) you can lose and replace before having to go out of your way to be able to do it some more. Again, I do advocate the "health only drops below a certain stamina threshold" system and I think the ability to alter the ratio would be a good addition, as well. Not to mention the fact that the ratio might need to be tweaked as it stands, regardless of whether or not it can be changed in-game by anything the player does. I just don't think the system itself is shattering any worlds here. It's just a different way of getting to that "Agh, I've actually got to go get some more supplies" point, and I'd agree that it does encourage the player to think about what they're doing in combat, instead of simply having everyone "ATTACK, ALL THE THINGS!". I also don't think we're looking at the final system details, here. I'm confident they'll figure it all out before launch. I agree with lephys here, as he points out in this and his previous post what I've been hinting at before: The stamina system is the old hitpoint system you already know while the health system is just a means to make you rest after some time but with the benefit of full healing inbetween fights, as stamina recovers. In the end, you have a more or less simple formula whether you want to rest before a fight or not: If your health is below 25% of your maximal stamina, you may want to rest, as that means your character can die before he is knocked out, so its not that much of micromanagement being added, especially if the information is presented as bars. Lets say you loose about half of your stamina on average in every battle as you're good prepared, so thats a total of 6 battles you can do before you have to rest and if you're daring, you can do more battle on a risk. That doesn't sound overly punishing. (You'd have to factor in some stamina healing during battles through clerics and the likes as well, but that will only change some numbers). Furthermore, if there are rests spot every 5 battles or so, health is not handicapping you at all while at the same time giving you a natural reason to rest some time and renew your abilities (which opens up interesting possibilites to set up encounters, as they can be better matched to your progress). At the same time, this system equals melee classes and magic classes, as everyone has a reason to rest after some time. So the real argument is about whether players should be forced to rest after some time or not. However, I think as proposed before by others, that this system would benefit from the ability to influence the health damage by either being immune to it above a certain stamina threshold and by manipulating the ratio through various means, although I think this should be kept simplistic - imho, those things should be restricted to class abilities with low overall effect, spells with temporary effect and rare equipment which is not easily available. Its still a solid system without those things, but it has no tactical decisions involved then either. Its only logical that you would exchange health damage for stamina in a boss fight as that means you can longer fight without being knocked out while its beneficial to take more stamina damage in exchange for health during normal fights, so that you can last longer overall.

You're making assumptions based on things Sawyer never said. I asked him specifically about whether PE would have ways of changing this ratio, and he didn't answer. I don't think he's ever implied that the ratio would stay static. Once again, look at my signature. As he says, the details can always be changed later if they don't play well. Fair enough, but I didn't want to imply that a static ratio is final, either. All I wanted to say is that there is no decision involved if there are no ways to influence the ratio, and the way I read his post, that seems not likely for now (I started to write my post before you asked him for clarification on that, btw). I meant to imply that what I'm saying is based on an assumption, so I propably just worded that badly, sorry. No, see above. Thats what I was responding to. Im not sure I follow you. You are saying that deciding to push forward or not is tactical (1st paragraph) but what are you saying is not tactical (second paragraph)? Also, another great way to prevent rest spamming is to choose not to push the rest button. I was arguing that he stamina/health system doesn't introduce new tactical decisions, if there is no way to change the ratio at which damage is received. Its tactical to decide whether to push forward or not, but this decision was in every IE game available, so its not tied to stamina being there. However, some people seem to suggest the opposite when they talk about sending high stamina / low health characters into battle (which is not a new option, its the same as sending a character with low hitpoints into a battle). Also, under that assumption, I ruled out that limiting health damage would be possible, so it was the only thing left I wanted to comment on. Look, there are good tactics to use when fighting armies and terrible tactics to use when fighting armies. If you're wasting all your magic missles on the goblins and throwing your melee fighters with non-magical weapons at clay golems and then wondering why you're losing health, then you're not playing tactically. You aren't looking at the rules and making judgements based on them. You're just rolling the dice and hoping to win the crap shoot. There are absolutely "right" ways to win a fight and "wrong" ways to win a fight. It's not just armor/underwear. I mean ... come on. BG2 you knew that if you wanted to kill mages, oyu had to use breach first. If you didn't, you lost HP as the mages fireballed your dudes. If you played "tactically" you breached him, then sent in your melees for the kill. These are tactics. You could also sometimes win by waiting for their protection spells to run out, but during all that time, your party members are losing health. You aren't playing effectively. You haven't figured out the important bit (breach mages). It's fun because once you realize that you're doing it wrong the 100th time and realize your tactics need to be changed, you realize that you've been playing the game inefficiently. Then the mages and other dudes fall at your feet. And you feel like you've accomplished something. If they just make everything easy, then you're just playing for the story and the combat is there to distract from the cinema. If you aren't told where you're going wrong (by dying) then you just keep using the same bad tactics as before. The game should teach how how to play it, and then provide challenges to you to see whether you've learned from the basics or not. Hiking back to town to rest isn't fun. It's supposed to be there to say "dude, you did it wrong." Does that clear it up a little? Although I agree with you on the most part, I think your example is quite the opposite. For one thing, BG2 was pretty bad at teaching you how the combat rules work and it assumed you picked at least one healer and one arcane wizard and one kind of thief character or else you're at an disadvantage. Especially the magic battles were tedious as they always consisted of doing the same spells in the same order - thats not tactical decision making either, thats locking you into a single viable option to defeat those enemies. The fun comes when you havea lot of viable options and you know about them at the same time. Imho, you should be dying because you overestimated yourself or neglected the feedback the game gives you, not because of your party composition or failing to find the single only solution to the combat puzzle. The feedback what you're doing wrong should become obvious while you're dying, not the fact that you die (things like the message that your weapons don't work on the clay golems you mentioned, for example). Granted, those are all things josh already adressed as problems somewhere, so I think we'll have some nice mechanics to prevent this. @Gfted1: If it helps you, just pretend that stamina are hitpoints and health is some kind of fatigue. You'll be able to heal your stamina during combat and treat it like the hitpoints in other games, while health just tells you to go rest in a while. I'd guess you'll find by actual playing the game that it doesn't feel that different from the things you know. The system is designed so that you don't need to rest that often, but this doesn't have to mean that you have to run through a lot of floors to find a resting place. We'll see how it turns out. And if there is a way to actually influence the ratio between stamina and health damage, you may want to take more stamina damage in order to save your health or vice versa, making the party more / less reliable on rest to fit your tastes. (which is the tactical decision hormalakh was talking about, if it is in the game).

Thanks for the response! That is how I understood your intentions as well and imho, the proposed system is a good way to achieve this intention. However, contrary to popular belief in this thread, I don't think this system opens up tactical decisions (and more importantly, I think it doesn't need to do this in the first place). Especially, I agree on the following: With a fixed ratio of stamina/health damage, resting depends on how much damage you receive (and how many abilities you want to refresh). But there is no tactical decision about how much damage you receive (none which is opened up from the mere existence of stamina / health, which is what this discussion is about) - that would be only the case if you could influence the ratio of stamina/health damage - but this does not seem to be the case. The tactical decision people are implying is whether you feel up to surviving the next battle or not - which is in a fact a tactical decision, but not the consequence of the dual system as it has been in every IE game before. You can think about the system what you want but I have yet to see a convincing argument how this introduces tactical decisions based on what we know so far. Also, don't get me wrong; I feel like the system is a very good way to stop restspamming and I'm beginning to like it - however, I'd still have a problem with this if resting is limited to far apart places.

Players will be "knocked out" for the duration of the battle once they reach 0 stamina, that's the important part. It's not meant to serve as a buffer for health but rather a stat which gives health a tactical significance during individual battles. Well, I'm ok with this system, I just try to figure out what the motivation behind it is. At the moment it all boils down to the following: Stamina is exactly the same concept as hitpoints are in the IE games: - You take damage when being hit - You can restore it through various means, including magical means So whats actual new is the health part, not the stamina part, as stamina is simply another name for a concept we all know. And if you really can't heal healthdamage, this is basically just a mechanism created to force you to rest, as it serves no other purpose than counting down toward 0 where you'll die while taking further damage. So basically, right now that sounds like the new system has everything the old one had *plus* an additional rest enforcing mechanism every couple of fights *and* an additional regeneration between fights (which has not been in the IE games) as stamina is supposed to heal fast inbetween fights. Of course, these systems may interact with other systems, yadda yadda, and so on, but this is what it basically boils down to at the moment. So on the one hand, we don't need to heal between fights in the traditional sense (which reduces a reason to restspam), but on the other hand, we're enforced to rest every couple of fights (which was avoidable if you used potions in the old IE games). I think those are the things josh wants to accomplish with this system and that is reasonable, but I'm still not sure if I like it that way. What I want to say is that I don't see where it becomes more tactical than it used to be, it just creates a more reasonable mechanic which doesn't promote restspamming in the way the IE games did.

Although I'm exctied about the content of the interview, I don't really understand the improvement of using the dual bar approach either: Using this with a ratio of 4:1 and 20 hitpoints, I'll be dead after taking 100 points of damage. Using only health as a ressource and having 100 hitpoints, I'll also be dead after taking 100 points of damage. As long as I have positive stamina during the fight, the systems accomplish exactly the same, so the only difference is when running out of stamina, which makes you unconscious when I recall correctly, but we don't know anything more about how that works. So as long as I keep my stamina postive, nothing seems to change apart from some number scaling, while losing stamina introduces new effects. At least, thats not how I understand a buffer to work. Stamina would be some kind of buffer if you only got healthdamage after losing a certain threshold of stamina, as that would seperate short term ressources from long term ressources - but this way, you always lose longterm ressources anyway, even if you manage to organize your short term ressources. I don't really see the point. There really are no regenerating health ressources this way between fights. In fact, thats just as vancian magic works: You use up your ressources and then there is no way to refill them apart from resting.

I propably should leave the forum for some time, I'm in danger of being exposed to too much awesome news around here... Can't wait to see how those ideas play out

I agree with sacred_path. What adds even more to this is the fact that the game can be paused almost anytime. A lot of suspense in games comes from the need to react immediately to a threat the game throws at you. But you see, with a pause function, thats not really a problem. You can still set a frightening mood through atmosphere and good writing, but shock events or anything like that are pretty much out.

Although I appreciate the effort you've put into this, I don't think this is a good idea. In the end, what you're arguing is to have those stats in a range of values, for example the interval [0,100]. Naturally, that only works for concepts which have some kind of duality. At the same time, your system tries to describe a lot of personal information. So either you have a lot of variables, or you project alot of different things onto a single axis. If you have alot of variables, I don't think its practical to write dialogues and use every single one stat often enough for them to actually matter/justify the amount of extra work you have to put in. On the other side, if you project them along a single abstract stat, you still have the same problem as before, losing information by abstracting discrete properties into numbers. The questionare even suffers the same problem as the traditionial alignment in the first place: For example, what your childhood was like does not have to be a direct indicator for what person you become. So at character creation, I may want to pick some answers which I think fits the character concept I had in mind, while in the end its only about how the developer interprets the impact those choices have on the characters live, which may differ greatly what I've thought about. In the end, you're actually losing what you want to achieve: Abstracting your appearance into a single number implies that your appearance has the exact same value to every npc, which effectively hinders a realistic set of diverse reaction/opinions in the npc world. I also think it doesn't matter whether the variables are hidden or not. In the end, if they have real consequences, someone is going to deconstruct the game and write a guide about which choice has which effect anyway. Without losing much of your approach, I think its far easier to just implement dicrete attributes. Those can express your looks and the things you did, like an greatly expanded version of the history feats in NWN2. So you have decided to burn the dryad grove down instead of helping them get rid of the lumberjacks around. You just store what you did and let people respond to that. Thats realistic as you can assign checks about that to the people that actally care about the dryads/ that area while people on the other side of the continent are able to not care about it in the first place. Also, this way you can creaty a much broader set of responces, as every npc can have their own set of values. Maybe theres someone who really hates the dryads, but is a really nice guy otherwise. If you encode the information about the quest into some morality bar, your overall alignment may appear "evil" and doesn't reflect that you actually did something the guy feels really positive about, as he general dislikes evil guys. Same thing with "good" characters and the druid around the corner which should be upset about the burning. Of course, this is not mutually exclusive, and in some way it is a bad example, but I think individual opinions on a small number of issues are sufficient for every npc to get an immersive experience without the kind of overhead you're suggesting. You can always give an armor a feat which makes it intimidating, without having to tuck a numerical score onto it. TL;DR: I agree on the general idea of the game being more responsive. But I don't think the way to achieve this is by using a lot of numerical variables but with discrete events npc actually care about, as this makes for more diverse responses. You already used that in your suggestion, but I think it is sufficient if applied consistently.