Jarrakul

I agree that in PoE, it seems as though magic is not particularly separate from the physical world. It pervades everything, and saying that muscle is inherently different from magical power is not necessarily sensical. That's not to say that the power to lift a rock and the power to hurl a fireball are same the same, but saying that they come from a similar source seems reasonable. This does still leave Lephys's complaint that it's harder to have non-combat checks care whether you're muscle-strong or fireball-strong, which might be an important distinction to make because even if the source is the same, the end result is not. That said, I disagree with the premise of the article that magic being fundamentally part of everything means that scientific approaches to magic don't have sense. Physics is a part of everything and scientific approaches to physics make sense. If magic is, in fact, conceptualized the way it historically has been, it makes more sense, not less, to treat mages like scientists. Because if magic is real and fundamental to the world, what else could a mage be but a scientist (or perhaps an engineer)? Ancient views of things like alchemy and astrology seem to support the notion that if magic is part of everything, then the study of magic must be a science.

My two cents on prebuffing: I really like it in concept. If you have time to plan and prepare, you should have an advantage. The problem is when you run into a battle, die, reload, and then prebuff. You aren't being rewarded for good foresight and planning. You're being rewarded for having died the first time. I don't like the way that changes the game. That said, it's entirely possible to just voluntarily not do that, but the game can't be balanced for both prebuffing and no prebuffing. So in the interests of balancing the game for as many people as possible, the devs need to pick one, and I do support their decision to choose no prebuffing. Granted, my feelings on the matter aren't all that strong. By contrast, in pen-and-paper, where there are no reloads, I support prebuffing. I actually support it in hardcore mode also, but allowing it in only one game mode would require more design effort than I suspect it's worth.

What is the 'smarter', non-cheap strategy you would have hoped to see for enemy mages if not skillful use of magical protection? They're glass cannons, by design, and can only survive for long enough to do damage with the right protection spells up. If anything is to blame on that front, it isn't SCS, but the AD&D 2nd edition ruleset. Well, more focus on the glass cannon-ness and less on becoming an unbreakable stone wall would've been nice. But honestly, I totally agree that they were played intelligently within the rule set, and that it was the rules' own fault that it wasn't fun when everyone was played at their smartest. Nonetheless, I didn't find the result enjoyable, and prefer to handicap myself rather than use SCS because I think it makes for a more interesting game. Hence, while I'm not necessarily opposed to AI as smart as SCS, I really don't want a game that plays like SCS.

Understand, I have nothing against Stratagems in concept. I totally agree that the unmodded BG AI can be... really dumb, and it'd be nice if it were smarter in a lot of ways. But Stratagems, particularly when fighting mages, tends to end up as "did you take enough anti-magic to take down improved mantle and spell immunity: abjuration four times? no? then have fun dying horribly." For that matter, the fighters like to make any attempt at any sort of crowd control irrelevant by having and chugging potions of magic protection, thus guaranteeing that they'll make every save. Now, you might point out that I can do those same things, and that's true, I can. But both sides doing really cheap things doesn't make the game good, it just highlights the ways in which the game is bad. Turns out you can get a similar effect on difficulty by just playing the unmodded game and not using obviously broken spell combos, items, and strategies that take advantage of poor AI, and the game doesn't become a test how many cheap tactics you know or know how to counter. But again, this is just my personal experience. If you don't agree that the tactics mentioned are cheap and kind of stupid, you'll obviously have a very different opinion of Stratagems. I also want to make it clear that I do agree that Eternity should have better AI than BG, if at all possible. Perhaps a Stratagems-like AI would be appropriate in a game harder to break than BG. Which, admittedly, is not a very high bar. But while something as smart as Stratagems might be appropriate, I sincerely hope that we don't get something that plays like Stratagems.

Sorry, but ventriloquists are not allowed in this thread. Darn. I guess I'll just do over here and play with these rocks, then. :'(

Lephys, I totally agree with you, with the minor nitpick that, from a game theoretical sense, randomly sampling from a few strategies is very often the best overall strategy in games involving more than one decision maker. So what you're describing is probably actually the optimal strategy, or at least closer to optimal than any purely deterministic strategy would be. Sorry about the nitpick, I'm just really pedantic and really like game theory.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of Stratagems. I've played it, and it definitely adds challenge, but more in the "oh look, he cast Stoneskin again, now I have to hit him twelve more times" kind of way, or "oh hey, every enemy on the map just aggroed, I guess I'd better break out the Fireball wands" than in any way that actually made me think strategically. It felt like trying to chop down a tree with a herring. Yes, it's harder, but not in a way that makes it more fun. I realize I'm probably not in the majority, here. That's fine. Subjective things are subjective, and I certainly don't claim that my experience is the universal experience. But while I'm all for smarter AI, I personally would rather not have Eternity end up like SCS.

http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24839 I don't know the specifics, but summons seem to get some or all of the HoF buff. Hence, while they're often lackluster in the main game, they are flat out the best spells in HoF (other than things like Dominate Monster, which works on the same principle but isn't as reliable). This odd quirk explains why the party from the link can do it.

I just want to throw my voice behind the "don't show in shop window" tag for items. My brother's been going on about the need for this for years now, and I'd love to be able to tell him Eternity's finally done it right.

I like the OP's ideas, because I think they strike a good balance between limiting the use of powerful arrows and allowing players to actually use their good arrows. My one concern is with the arrow retrieval thing. I love it thematically, but in practice I'd be happier if they just automatically came back at the end of the encounter. To me, retrieving arrows is kind of like going to the bathroom. I'm happier just assuming my character does it and getting on with the fun parts of the game. I also like having infinite normal arrows, for much the same reason. I can assume my archer stocks up occasionally, so having to do it myself is just kind of a pain. And for funsies, in support of arrow retrieval in general, I give you a quote that I hope all of you will recognize, which I feel explains why arrow retrieval is thematically awesome. "'Arrow!' said the bowman. 'Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!'"

Lephys, I must apologize for misconstruing your position. You clearly have a nuanced view of the issue at hand, and you're trying to make other people understand why it's not cut and dry. That makes perfect sense to me, and the pursuit is worthy. While I am glad I got the chance to make the my point here, I now realize that there was no need to make that point in opposition to you. So for that, I apologize, and thank you for your gracious response.

I too have little trouble with any IE game, with two situational exceptions. I have not been able to beat TOB with a character started in TOB. The lack of optimization just tends to kill me. On the other hand, I haven't tried in quite some time, so who knows. The other exception is IWD2 on Heart of Fury mode, even with an imported party. It really seems as though eventually anyone who can't summon or mind control becomes useless because of the weird way scaling works, and I can't beat the game with three party members who've been sharing their xp with another three. Fortunately, it doesn't sound like either of those situations is likely to be relevant here. It sounds like Eternity is likely to be in the BG2/IWD2 range, difficulty-wise, which sounds great to me. Especially since we have some cool options for making it harder.

Obviously, the explanation isn't perfect. Combat spells can do the very things you describe, at least approximately, but they're use-limited. Then again, the fighter should really take some damage from throwing himself against that door, so maybe we can call it even. That said, I agree with your simple fact. The primary concern, to my eyes, is with the lack of differentiation between what a fighter can do and what a mage can do. I suppose there could be things where the requirement was "martial class, Might 20" or "spellcasting class, Might 20", but that leaves the rare muscle-bound mage out of the cool strength-based stuff. Which might be fine in terms of class balance, but doesn't necessarily make a lot of actual sense. This is a definite weakness of the current system. But here's the thing. Like it or not, the current system isn't being compared to a perfect system. We haven't come up with a perfect system. Sad but true. Using strength and magic (or intelligence, or whatever else would govern magic damage) as separate attributes allows for more nuance in terms of dialog triggers and such, but also creates balance issues in the form of dump stats. If the goal is to make every (reasonable) concept viable, then a high-strength mage has to be decent, if not necessarily optimal. But if strength is a dump stat for mages, then increasing it to any substantial margin is likely to seriously weaken the mage in combat situations. This, like the class differentiation problem, is bad for roleplaying, because it punishes certain character concepts for no particularly good reason. The team has made the judgment that dump stats are a more substantial threat to roleplaying than the loss of certain specific sorts of triggers. I'm inclined to agree with them, but I understand how you might not. In single-player games especially, not everyone is terribly concerned with balance. I happen to think it's really, really important to rping, but then that might be because I'm a recovered powergamer and it still really bugs me if the character I want to play is weaker than I feel they should be.

Sure, but you're still a mage. In a class-based system, even a flexible one like Eternity's, your mage-ness fundamentally alters the nature of your character. You might be a mage with a sword who likes to smash things, but probably at least a large portion of your physical strength comes from magical augmentation. Think telekinesis without the "tele" part (i.e. point-blank range only) or many interpretations of the Jedi. But honestly, if it's all muscle, who cares? At this point the distinction is academic. It has no impact on what you can actually do. So at this point it's finally and for-real entered the sphere of "just rp it the way you want."

Given that Eternity seems committed to delivering a believable realistic-except-as-noted fantasy setting, I don't think chainmail bikinis would fit, except possibly as dress armor (because, historically, people have worn some really strange and impractical dress armor). I have nothing against skimpy armor in the proper context (and applied to both genders, because while sexualization isn't sexism, inequality is), but I don't think this is that context. That said, if Eternity wants to have mages in skimpy clothes that's fine, because mage clothes are just fashion, and if I was an all-power continent-destroying mage I'd wear whatever I felt like too. And if Eternity wants to have a barbarian tribe whose members don't wear armor or much at all in the way of clothing, that's also fine, because it makes sense that a barbarian tribe might not have developed practical armor. Just don't try and tell me that a culture that developed plate armor is going to use that technology to make bikinis.

It seems to me that the main problem here is with non-combat actions. The fact that a mage with high Might hits harder with his staff is incidental, as that's an edge case and will almost never come up. But the fact that he can bash down the door for the same reason his spells are strong seems... weird. Or at least, it does if you assume the mage is bashing down the door the same way a fighter would. I don't think that's a safe assumption. Similar to the different means of intimidating mentioned earlier, the mage and the fighter would bash down a door in very different ways. The fighter hurls himself at the door, knocking it down by weight and physical force. The mage instead rips the door off its hinges with a burst of telekinetic force. Both are very Might-based, but they aren't both the same kind of might. In a class-based system, I don't see the problem with that. Different stats mean different things for different classes, even if they lead to similar results. In fact, the ability to achieve similar results is *literally* what it means for the stat to be the same. The rest (muscle mass vs. magical power) is just flavor text.

This is very nice. I love the Twin Elms ruins (seriously, you guys make Skyrim look ugly) and the Cean Gwla looks awesome even at Alpha quality. But the thing I like most here is the character sheet. Everything is clear, well laid out, and extremely transparent. I love that the basic stats screen has that much detail about exactly where different modifiers are coming from, and I also love that there's a detailed stats tab for people who want even more info (as I surely will). Well done, guys.

I share the concern over balance here, but I'm honestly pretty happy with the system being proposed. Cast speed tends to be really important (just look at the Robe of Vecna in BG2, and that didn't even break the 1-per-round limit), so having armor reduce cast speed really hurts (which is a good thing). In addition, it helps define what sorts of characters will want to wear armor. Because ability use will, I assume, be primarily offensive, armor will create a tradeoff between offensive and defensive capabilities. For someone who's intending to stay in the back of the party and hurl spells, greater defensive abilities won't be worth the loss of offensive power. For someone who's on the front line taking hits all the time, defensive abilities are probably more important than offensive ones, especially if the rest of the party is focused on offense.

I'll throw my support behind this. Neverwinter Nights did something similar, with its first name/last name thing. Obviously this wouldn't be identical, but a full name/nickname would probably work just as well, if not better. Maybe even auto-suggest the first word of the full name as a nickname, so people can be lazy if they want to.

It's so pretty...

I am absolutely 100% for this. Because, frankly, I get attached to my loot, and I don't like when it gets made obsolete by more powerful but less awesome loot.

While I love all the details, this bit of flavor is my favorite thing about this update. It's just so awesome.

So, you're right and you're wrong. I agree that the idea of a magic sword that isn't worth getting excited about is stupid. Magic swords should be rare and awesome. But a +1 isn't worth getting excited about. It's worth going "oh, that's neat" and that's about it. That's just the way the mechanics work, and there's nothing the game can do to change that (except using different core mechanics, I suppose, but that's outside the scope of this argument and not really the point anyway). The way you make magic swords good is by making them... good. Either you give them bonuses beyond +1 to hit and damage (like the aforementioned ability to hurt creatures that would be otherwise immune), or you increase the bonuses (so that a +1 magic sword flat-out doesn't exist; it's not magic until it's +2 or +3). So, your general attitude here is "screw what the game encourages, players will decide what to do anyway so it doesn't matter." That's a great stance to be taking when you're playing a game, but it's rather pointless when designing one. It leads to a lack of consideration for your mechanics, and whether you like it or not it does lead to pigeonholing players. If I want to use a sword for the entire game, but I can't because it doesn't scale well enough to be viable in the endgame, you have artificially limited me. You have either forced me to play something I don't want to play, or you have screwed up my difficulty curve and made the game less fun. As for balance/fun and realism, you're right that they aren't inherently opposed, but you're wrong in assuming that they're inherently aligned. And why should they be? Adventuring in real life wouldn't be fun for most people. I mean, I don't want to fall down a pit trap or get shot by arrows. And in real life, weapons are horribly unbalanced, even weapons that were widely used in the same era. Look at longbows and crossbows. Nearly any conscript soldier is going to want to use a crossbow, but a longbow is a clearly superior weapon in almost every way once you learn how to use it. It's simply better for the types of people who are going to be out saving the day. That's a terrible balance curve, though, and enforcing it in the game is just going to arbitrarily punish people who want to use crossbows. And for what? Greater immersion? Immersion is getting to play the character I want, thanks. There are two types of choices in games. I'm gonna call them personal and strategic choices. A personal choice is basically saying "this is the sort of character I want to play," while a strategic choice is saying "this is what I think will work best." Gameplay at every level is a mix of those choices, and in many cases they are confounded within a single decision (would my barbarian hero sneak into the enemy camp, even when that's clearly going to work better than a frontal assault?). Having such confounds in individual choices is fine and reasonable (although still dangerous if used too often). Having those confounds pervasive throughout the game, as equipment choices will necessarily be, is not okay. Why not? Because when personal choices become strategic choices, all you will do is make the game artificially harder for the people who decide to play the way they want to, rather than the way that's optimal. And the problem with making the game harder is that, if you've done the rest of your job right, the game should be somewhere near the optimum level of difficulty to be fun already (for their chosen difficulty, naturally; people like different levels of challenges, but they don't like the game arbitrarily spiking up or down in difficulty for no in-game reason). I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to constantly crank down the difficulty as the game goes on just because my personal choices are increasingly not viable. Especially not if some of my NPCs don't suffer from that problem, as it'll mean my PC will be outperformed no matter what I do for no good reason. I'm honestly not sure why you don't consider recoil "actively fighting you," but whatever. Think of it like an organ donation. Even if the person wants to donate their organ to you, even if you're the same blood type (and god help you if you aren't), there's a decent chance of rejection. Now, a weapon isn't an organ donation, and it's not gonna work in exactly the same way, but the idea remains that just because something is similar doesn't mean it's a part of you. Or, if you'd like a different metaphor, think of a magic weapon as a friend. You can get along really well with your friends, and even work well together, but you'll always be more coordinated with a puppet that you're directly controlling (like most video game characters). Which is not to say that the friend's independence isn't an advantage of its own, much like how a magic sword has advantages whether you're familiar with it or not. And it certainly doesn't mean that familiarity shouldn't apply at all, only that coordination takes a lot longer to achieve. But I feel like you're trying to come up with reasons why my explanation might not work, rather than reasons why it necessarily won't work. This suggests to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you're more attached to your version of the mechanic than you are to its thematic explanation. I actually think that's totally cool and is a very good reason for maintaining your stance, but I'm not sure I've seen many arguments against my version from a mechanics standpoint. So let me ask you this: what is the thematic benefit you're trying to get from your mechanics (not the explanation, but the reason why you felt familiarity mechanics were important), and why do you think your suggested mechanics are better than mine for achieving that goal?

I think that everything that can be incorporated into the weapon's stats should be. Speed, stamina drain (if that's a mechanic), damage, armor penetration, crit chance, all these things should just be part of a weapon's base stats. Other things, like "can misfire" and "can be concealed" are great as perks and I'm all for them.

My vote is for Baldur's Gate, for two reasons. First, those portraits just have so much more character than the 3d rendered ones. It takes some serious rendering to approach the artist's hand, and I don't think PE has the resources to implement rendering on that level. Second, the ability to import your own portrait is just crazy awesome. It's a rare day indeed when I play Baldur's Gate with a stock portrait (Icewind Dale, on the other hand... I love those portraits). Also, I get a lot of my character inspiration from art, so it's sometimes nice to import that art directly as the character's portrait.