illathid

I think the ship system is a decent enough base. The biggest problem is that there is a very clear optimal set of decisions, and it's the same for almost every encounter. Adding some non-standard events that break up the optimal path would help it a lot.

Pretty sure they'd need to charge way more than $25 to be worth the investment of making a full isometric RTWP ship combat system. If you're into that kinda thing you should check out Battlefleet: Gothic Armada.

Number of maps is a poor metric for measuring content size of an RPG expansion/DLC. Number of quests, lines of dialogue, etc. would all be much more accurate.

I could very well be wrong too. Maybe Shadenaut will help remove the fog of confusion from this discussion.

PoE is more wizard centric than any IE game ever was. Developer(s) found one mechanic to rule them all (similar to cooldowns in other modern RPGs) that is good enough at applying spell effects, and used it to apply all other effects in the game, by using same resource mechanic for everyone too. That level of uniformity is not terrible for pnp games where you need to play fast and all you can do is roll dice, but in a computer game that means that yes, classes mechanically behave the same. Uh right. You actually played Eternity at some point? You realize it is perfectly viable to beat it with no wizard at all? Good luck beating BG2 on any real difficulty level without a wizard. But Eternity, way more wizard focused. Yeah. To be fair, I believe Shadenaut is saying that PoE is more wizard focus because it made all classes play like wizards do in BG2. Fighters cast knockdown, basically. I don't agree with this sentiment, but we should at least argue against what he's actually claiming.

if anything i want to make taller probably would be elves. obsidian version of elves are shorter than human. not sure why dwarves aren't taller. if not mistaken dragon age elves are short and slaves too. Dragon age elves are indeed short. I always like to make characters look like myself (tall n slim), but my favorite games always make elves too short (small n slim) or the humans too jacked/wide (tall n broad-ish). Life is hard. obsidian: we need change for the sake of change :D Elves are shorter than humans in Baldur's Gate and D&D too. It's more likely they copied that then trying to be different.

Fair enough. But not to be to picky what counts as passive and which are active? For instance Paladins have that all-defence-buff-on-kill ability. Does that stack with other all-defence buffs like in Pillars, or is it an active enough ability that it doesn't. Is such an ability active or passive? Sure it activates on kill but it's latent and permanent like a passive. I would guess it doesn't Not to mention priests all protection spell, which might stack with similar buffs despite its activeness. IIRC anything on the right side of the level up screen is a passive, anything on the left is active.

Then Buggers would still stand out. They are an insect Hive-mind with no concept of the individual. The Hanar work similarly, they ahd to learn how to interact with the other races. This isn't even bringing up the Great Old Ones from Lovecraft's stories. That's missing the point. Yes, the buggers are an insect hive-mind with no concept of the individual, but they're were still invented by a human and filtered through human experience. So their depiction isn't of a hive-mind, but what a human thinks it might like to be in a hive-mind.

Yeah well, that's true of all invented beings, ever. The Hanar, Buggers from "Ender's Game", Starro from the DC universe, the Angels from "Out of the Silent Planet", etc. There are quite a few non-humanoid races out there. I believe they're talking about mental, rather than physical characteristics. So Hanar are just very polite humans in a squid costume, Buggers are telepathic humans in bug costumes, etc. EDIT: The philosopher Thomas Nagel actually wrote about this idea in his paper "What is it like to be a bat?"

My best friend just played BG2 for the first time this spring. He had played Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and other newer RPGs, but not any of the IE games. According to him, while there are parts of the game that feel very dated and unfun, it easily the best RPG he ever played. So I don't think it's nostalgia alone that cement's BG2's place in gaming history, rather we should praise it for the things it did well and seek learn from the mistakes that it made. In this respect I think Deadfire did a good job, although it likely could do better.

I'd buy it!

It always pains me a lot to see how little attention game devs give to their dialog tools. Just look at the dialog editor in the GECK of Fallout 3, etc... Seriously, seeing this garbage software makes it clear why Bethesda dialog is so god damn awful. Using this is worse than writing dialog in notepad or heck, excel. Josh responded to a post on Twitter about dialogue tools that claims most of the industry uses excel for dialogue. Which is a bit depressing. I'm not a big studio guy, but we certainly did use Excel in our project - however, in this case, it was mostly to export lines for translators outside the studio. It's not quite errorproof, but it's still a fast and accessible way to import/export huge dialogue databases without having to copy things by hand. As for Excel being used to construct actual dialogue trees, I'm kind of surprised to hear that it's the preferred method. For instance, I'm pretty sure Unity has a boatload of dialogue creation plugins. Yeah, I've used excel extensively in different projects, but even then it was hard to manage different dialogue trees. I can't imagine trying to do it in an AAA game.

It always pains me a lot to see how little attention game devs give to their dialog tools. Just look at the dialog editor in the GECK of Fallout 3, etc... Seriously, seeing this garbage software makes it clear why Bethesda dialog is so god damn awful. Using this is worse than writing dialog in notepad or heck, excel. Josh responded to a post on Twitter about dialogue tools that claims most of the industry uses excel for dialogue. Which is a bit depressing.

I named my Galleon Abydon's Hammer, as I'm still a bit salty I didn't get it back.

Dang, I never got the flag.

I like my galleon I could also outpace a plot event with my upgraded galleon. I've gone with double-bronzers for all my cannons now - 4 on each side - close to 350m and blast the cr*p out of the enemy. Sure, they occasionally get close enough to ram me, but generally they sink before that. Same. I prefer a galleon to a junk myself as the added hull strength means I don't have to worry as much as I close on the enemy with my double bronzers.

So what would you use instead? I'm not a game designer. Many people here (i'm repeating myself) can't seem to afford to look at the problem from a Roleplay perspective, like if RPGs were all about bashing and looting, like a Diablo would. Like i said, the attributes in Pillars are well designed (probably, though i don't really care about this) from a mechanical point of view (character building, templates, numbers, stats,...), but they are inept when it comes to telling anything about the character they are built upon. What i need, from a Roleplay perspective, is a way to play a caster that is not a brawler. Having my flimsy caster displaying a high score of Might on its character sheet is an unbelievable bother to me, because, the sheet of my character tells me it has not only great spiritual power, but huge physical strenght, too. Which is a complete **** in the face of the background i wrote for the character. I think the idea of rebalancing the attributes while using Resolve as a representation of spiritual power and making Might into physical Strenght, like it was in the beta, would be an acceptable way to go. This would allow me to have my character sheet be respectful of the work i did while writing the background and history of my character. It would have low physical strenght, but high spiritual power, like it was meant to be. In the state of things, i can't look at my character sheet without thinking each time that my character is ****ed up. That it is not at all what it is meant to be. It's more than just a bother for me. I can't Roleplay it, because it feels utterly disatisfying. The only way for me to play with the Might attribute would be to create a character background that adapts itself to the attributes of Pillars (meaning forbidding the creation of all sorts of character backgrounds), while, in any pen and paper, attributes are meant to allow the player to Roleplay its character the way it was intended (in short, it's the other way around). Sawyer, imo, made the exact opposite with attributes that he was meant to do, when it comes to a RPG. He created a system of numbers to take care of combat mechanics and numbers in character building, while disregarding everything tied to actual RPG character creation. Just think about this. This is the way i create a character for a RPG. First, i will write a background. Who the character his, his beliefs, his goals, his values, his fears, the things he hates, the way he thinks, hope, and despair. Then, i will tie it to some background origins. Country, social status, family, personal problems, cultures, talents, weaknesses. The kind of personality he has: courageous, coward, strong willed, overprotected, and so on... I would probably, too, work on langage habits, special traits, how the character origins could render it inept to understand things in a very different country. And i will try to think about its potential. Where it is it can evolve, where it is that lies its potential. And how a regular nobody could become more than the some of its parts when confronted to very special circumstances he was never prepared to face. And Pillars 1, with the madness lurking, was full of potential. And that is why i wanted since the start to have an Eothasian Priestess. I managed to create a character i really wanted to play, full of contradictions, flaws, and room to grow, because the story became so much personal to her. It should have been incredible fun... Only AFTER creating all that, will i create the character and distribute the attributes. I will distribute them accordingly to the background i wrote exclusively, with great care. If the attributes prevent me from actually creating my character the way it was written, then there is a problem. A HUGE one. One i just can't forgive. I can do with crappy mechanics and character attributes, as long as they allow me to translate who my character is on his character sheet. In short, most of the things most people here consider most important for the game regarding attributes, are things i could not care less about. Although i try to consider your point of view too, and find some reasonable way to do things. I would then appreciate if the people who tend to troll (not you) would be willing to do the same from where they come from. Regards. I guess I don't see the issue. Eora as a setting has physical and spiritual might linked, and that's a part of the background. Yes, it limits your ability to roleplay certain types of characters, but every system does this to some extent. For example, most editions of D&D conflate perception and wisdom, making an extremely wise Mr. Magoo impossible. While this can be disappointing, the remedy is to just roleplay a different character that does fit the system. I've had to do this in practically every tabletop and cRPG game I've ever played. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Roll for Anal Circumference. Is it bad that this was one of the first things I thought about when reading this thread... Well if it is bad, then we're in the same boat. It's the first thing that comes to mind anytime detailed appearance stats get brought up. Granted, I love reading about all the really horrible tabletop systems that exist in the world, like F.A.T.A.L. and Witch Girls Adventures.

Meh, I like the more abstract attributes of pillars. No need to turn this into F.A.T.A.L. the cRPG.

According to google translate it's filipino for "partner."

Relationships were fixed in the second patch released over a week ago now. The Respec issue is not a bug, it's just a feature a lot of people would like. Import was also fixed over a week ago. Relationships have not been fixed. The respec issue is absolutely a bug. The save import is still slightly messed up for a lot of people, myself included. How about getting your facts straight before you try to tell others what is or isn't an issue? Just a suggestion. IIRC there were two interrelated "relationship" bugs. One was based on the amount of points giving for each check, which also had an affect on dispositions. This was what delayed the first patch, but was fixed. There was also a bug based on amount of checks present in each conversation. This bug hasn't been fixed. At least that's what I remember from the twitch stream the other week.

Man, I've been wanting to play a Rauatain character after being able to interact with the RDC, but none of the aumaua portraits are a good fit. I'd really like an aumaua portrait with a more japanese feel, like you can see in some of the watercolor npc portraits. If anyone can find one I'd appreciate it!

I'd submit a bug report.

I have Pig-Sticker Rukowa, not sure where I picked her up though...