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mcmanusaur

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Everything posted by mcmanusaur

  1. mcmanusaur
    It improves the player's experience of the world unless you are a mindless drone who thinks that money only exists to show how much progress your character has made, in which case GTFO from RPGs pl0x. Believable narratives may be linear, but believable worlds are not. A world designed to be linear doesn't feel immersive, whereas a world that is merely constrained to linearity after it has been designed otherwise, due to narrative considerations, can feel immersive. But please, feel free to try creating a linear world that seems convincing in any manner. Once again, you show that you're incapable of making valid comparisons in the context of this discussion; balance is a quantitative thing and arguing that things like religion don't affect it is stating the obvious (and irrelevant). Not that I should really have to clarify this, but I never said that all of the mechanics that influence immersion have all of the same effects (this would mean that they are identical mechanics), but instead that many of the effects you claim do apply to some other mechanics that influence immersion. Scroll up to where you cited such negative side effects, and you'll find your examples. Regional pricing by itself does not "cause you to become stuck", and if you reply by simply regurgitating the same contrived, assumption-laden example over again, then I'm simply going to ignore you. Again, this isn't about making the game objectively harder. It makes the game slightly more complex, but this has nothing to do with how much money the player has to spend. Another assumption with which you can't quite part...
  2. mcmanusaur
    I'm interested in a more realistic economy in so much as it characterizes the game's setting in a deeper and more convincing way, not because I want the in-game finances to be more challenging for the sake of it. The spatial or temporal variety of prices is not related to how saturated the game world is with money. In my view, all RPG settings should be designed in a manner that's viable for a sandbox-style experience; that to me is the sign of an adequately developed game world. Most games might not end up as sandboxes, but that's not an excuse to cut corners in world design in my personal opinion. Linear worlds simply don't exist in three dimensions, and for me a linear narrative isn't justification for ignoring that. Those are the general effects of regional pricing, and many of the supposed negative side-effects you've argued apply equally to other factors that create immersion and wonder. The rest of your arguments operate under biased assumptions, such as the notion that players put so much emphasis on mindlessly optimizing the crap out of everything in RPGs that they are incapable of carrying out cost-benefit analyses, along with those I mentioned in my previous post.
  3. mcmanusaur
    Running out of funds? In how many RPGs is this actually a regular occurrence? I haven't read much that suggests a high likelihood of this happening in Project Eternity, unless you're investing in a stronghold or some other optional gold sink. We're not talking about "good deals" and complete rip-offs, we're talking about good prices and slightly better deals. If you actually manage to find a way to go broke over something like this, you probably stuck at the game. These arguments against regional pricing are seemingly becoming increasingly dubious, needy, and obscure, and you seem to be intent on retaining base assumptions- such as that this mechanic is somehow different than other mechanics that accomplish the same general effect, and that it cannot possibly be balanced to be neither insignificant nor compulsory- which I have already argued against, so I'm not sure whether this is getting anywhere.
  4. mcmanusaur
    You're confounding a lot of different variables there. Learning about the economic landscape as you go is no different to learning about the weaknesses of the enemies that you'll be facing, or the solutions to puzzles/quests you'll be completing, which both only happen through trial and error for the most part. In any of these cases, that knowledge could ostensibly help you play through the game more efficiently, so there's no reason to feel compelled to start a new playthrough in light of the former but not also due to the latter. And yet you're not suggesting that uncertainty regarding opposition forces the players to restart their playthroughs as soon as they've gained that knowledge... that's strange. Why is regional pricing any different? Alternatively, you could recognize that RPGs are always learning experieneces and instead play the game like a normal person, using trial and error as you go to figure out economics in the same way that you do enemy counts. The comparison to be made here is between entering an area where enemies are too tough and reloading so that you can travel elsewhere, and traveling to a place that has higher prices than where you started and reloading so you can go elsewhere. However, the former is actually a "brick wall" in the figurative sense in that you literally cannot progress further without dying, whereas the latter is at worst a small inconvenience and hardly requires reloading at all. Maybe you choose to make use of your trip to buy some other commodity rather than what you intended, or maybe you simply continue on your travels, all the wiser for the next time around, which will likely come in the same playthrough. Again, all of this is only an issue if you are an obsessive perfectionist anyway, in which case I say once more "that is your problem, not the designer's". To me, "wonder" is a product of many little things; sure, you could progressively remove each component without marginal costs for each being too significant, but that doesn't mean the things you've omitted contribute less than the things you've included, or that you won't eventually rid the game of all its wonder that way.
  5. mcmanusaur
    Then I suppose- by the same token- we might as well inform the player of exactly which enemies he/she can plan on facing in a given area, so that they can make informed strategic decisions? Otherwise they can't possibly know what to do and when, which is bad design? For me, uncertainty is an important part of RPGs, and many of the most intense RPG experiences I've had result from my uncertainty about the environment around me/my character. As far as I can see, economics is one of the most uncertain aspects of real life, so I don't see the problem with there being some small amount of uncertainty in its in-game representation.
  6. mcmanusaur
    Not enough hand-holding for your tastes, then? I guess that outcome means you learn your lesson for credulously trying to optimize the game, eh? Maybe the next time that you only have enough money to buy 1.85 swords at the base price you'll be wise enough to not expect that you will have enough money for 4 swords in some far-off town. Or perhaps the lesson is that there's a reason why merchants tend to avoid trading along dangerous routes. Or maybe this could even be a lesson in opportunity costs, who knows? What would you prefer? For the last time, this isn't a "brick wall"; it's merely yet another degree of challenge to add to the rest. I'm sorry that the consequences of navigating "accidentally" frustrate you, but I don't see how that's a problem with the proposed mechanic.
  7. mcmanusaur
    My answer to how price lists are avoided is that it should be intuitive and based on geography, politics, or other factors that might logically impact resource availability, as I have stated from the beginning of this thread. You shouldn't need a list to tell you that armor is cheap at the place where they have a lot of metal, that furniture is cheaper near lumber camps, or that grain might be more expensive in an urban area. As far as learning where there are mines, lumber camps, or farms, that's part of learning about the setting and happens as you go as with any other aspect of the environment. I see the questions you mention as precisely the things we should be asking ourselves about any setting, and if people are so stuck to the notion of an optimal playthrough that they refuse to engage in a reasonable amount of trial and error, that's a problem with their approach to the game in my opinion.
  8. mcmanusaur
    Getting things "right" is a function of one's character's role, and if players are too blinded by the opportunity to optimize the numbers on the screen to realize that, then there's nothing that can be done to help them. In RPGs you define your experience as well as your character, and if you decide that your experience will revolve around hauling loot around in the most efficient manner, to me that is your own fault. When the advantage of engaging in such behavior is restricted to the optional gold sinks, instead of impacting the experience of core content, I don't see the issue.
  9. mcmanusaur
    Could you please clarify what "flexibility" you're referring to? Because both those for and against explicitly defined backgrounds can make an argument that their option is the self-evidently more flexible one. "An undefined background is more flexible, because it allows the player to fill in the gaps with their imagination instead of relying on the designer's predefined options", or "a defined background is more flexible, because it allows far more organic interactions with the world's NPCs instead of merely leaving all PCs generic adventurers of no known background." Well, rather than calling them both equal kinds of "flexibility", we should note that the former gives more freedom to the player, and the latter is theoretically more flexible as far as the designer is concerned. However, I would contest this claim; for me the former is no less flexible, as it simply involves organic interactions being written for a variety of backstory options rather than for a single defined background (after all, no one wants their customized character to be treated as a "generic adventurer of no known background", because that completely defeats the point), and thus simply constitutes more work for the developers.
  10. mcmanusaur
    I was initially hesitant, but the more I think about it, the better filtering sounds. With a certain amount of leeway -- a dickish character should always have less dickish options open if the player wants them to develop into a more pleasant person for whatever reason. But they shouldn't spontaneously start rambling like a noble hero of old. The area between "no gold? Then the goblins get to keep eating your cows," and "of course I'll protect you from those wretched goblins" should have an intermediary area of "I can't believe I'm saying this, but... fine, I'll deal with your stupid goblin problem for free," while the character shakes off old habits. And maybe have the character take a bluff check or the equivalent for saying something blatantly out-of-character for pragmatic gain (I.E. a jackhole playing goody-two-shoes to endear themselves to a paladin order they plan to betray and rob, where a genuine repentant would at least admit their doubts). Of course, all of this would take a lot of writing, mapping values to dialogue, and overall significant amounts of work. I'm talking idealistically, not realistically, I admit. Ah, that decent makes sense; I hadn't considered that in limiting dialog options, based on personality as defined in advance, you're somewhat limiting the player's ability to develop their character. But yeah, you could definitely still have all the morally oriented dialogue options included, but simply have their tone reflect personality/alignment as chosen during character creation. Also for some elements of personality (such as introversion/extraversion), something like this might be preferable, whereas other personality aspects (for example "claustrophobic") are somewhat more unlikely to appear over time.
  11. mcmanusaur
    I haven't really suggested that this apply to services- in comparison to goods- although it is conceivable. This is not true. We know that there will be at least a few optional gold sinks in the game (not least of which the stronghold), and as I've said a couple times now it could be balanced such that casual playthroughs opting for convenience provide enough finances for core gameplay elements, whereas a more mindful approach opens the possibility for other options. And I might clarify that this is not about encouraging players to micromanage for the best prices for cheap, insignificant loot, but rather to provide incentives regarding more expensive items, or bulk transactions. To me your argument seems comparable to claiming that "side quests will either provide an insignificant reward, in which case they're not worth doing, or they will provide a significant reward and players will be 'compelled' to complete them", or that "generic loot will either end up being worthless, or the player will be punished for not hauling it all back to town". It's a false dichotomy and it's up to the players to decide; if the players are really that obsessive-compulsive about their finances then there's nothing the developers can do to help them in my opinion.
  12. mcmanusaur
    I thought the point of the evil approach was to simply steal people's goods, or kill them and loot their corpses, instead of expecting decent prices from other characters? Let me fix that for you: #2: repair prices differ significantly, encouraging the player to make a cost-benefit analysis of whether he should bother. A lot of the time it might not even be worth backtracking given the associated travel time/costs, but if you're choosing whether to travel to point A via town B or town C, perhaps this is something that could inform the decision. This only "compels" players who are ridiculously obsessive-compulsive about their party's finances, and I'd say such people already have their priorities wrong, personally. Again, it could be significant for the kind of player who wants to buy everything in the game, but not for the player who wants to breeze through things casually. A world "not designed for backtracking" is a poorly designed world in my opinion, with or without regional pricing. This is like saying if there's a system allowing characters to rent carriages and horses that costs money, players are compelled to not use it and instead walk everywhere.
  13. mcmanusaur
    Yeah, the issue I see with defining personality through play is- assuming they actually write enough dialog options to reflect a decently-sized list of personality traits- there should always be a lot of options to choose from, to the point that picking a set of personality traits in advance would narrow things down to a more manageable list. However, this is a problem that an RPG with traditionally "written" dialogue is unlikely to run into, but if dialogue options corresponding reflecting various personality traits could be generated (mad libs-style or otherwise) then it hypothetically could be useful to narrow the list down.
  14. mcmanusaur
    I've never played DA:O, but this sounds like something that results from bad writing, and could happen regardless of whether you can choose from multiple starting locations. Regarding the second, this is obviously of consummate importance. It's pointless to choose such things if they don't affect your experience. I guess the counter-argument is something like "well, it's hard to know what choices you want to make until you've gotten in-game" which suggests that you should define your character more through play, but personally I find that a bit too much hand-holding and too streamlined at that. We don't need to be constantly "reminded" of our character's backstory in shallow ways by NPC's, but it should affect the choices they have.
  15. mcmanusaur
    I don't actually make it a habit to playing games through multiple times, but like many of you when I do so I try some things differently the second time around. However, the issue I often run into is that there is a latency period at the beginning of the game before my character has had the chance to make any choices, or at least before those choices have had a chance to affect the gameplay experience. Even if later on in the game's trajectory a lot of differences do come into play, the beginning of successive playthroughs always seems to feel the most repetitive part and skipping through the same exposition cutscenes becomes a chore. Thus I wonder whether people could see the main character's backstory being customizable in the manner described in this thread, or if it's something that people feel is out of PE's scope or is undesirable regardless. Given the amount of effort being put into PE's setting, and the fact that it features multiple races, I thought it would be cool if certain elements of your character's background could even affect your character's starting location. The first objective could still be "report to large city X" or whatever it is, but this would definitely add a lot more variety in the game, as long as we were willing to part with a bit of linearity. I realize that this may interfere slightly if most locations are designed around relevance to specific quests that you're not supposed to reach until later in the game, but one would hope that there are at least enough self-justifying locations that a handful of them could be used as starting locations.
  16. mcmanusaur
    Yeah, I really hope we'll have significant control over certain elements of our characters' backstories in Project Eternity, but then of course the difficulty with that is it's harder to make the main narrative conflict relevant to your character, or something. Personally I don't have any qualms with playing a character who isn't destined to save the world or anything like that, so I don't see how customization can really hurt too much.
  17. mcmanusaur
    Thanks for the input; I found that very interesting, and you're right to bring up the fact that consistently haggling aggressively might just have a negative effect on long-term rapport, and thus it could make little net profit. I hadn't considered that but now that you mention it, it makes sense.
  18. mcmanusaur
    I'm just curious, since I never really understood the mechanic, and the poll results suggest that it's quite popular, but do specialized merchants have better or worse prices than general traders, and what's supposed to be the reasoning there? I could see general stores buying for less along the lines of a pawn shop (and I may be mistaken but I think this is the way most games do it?), but then does it really make any sense for someone who is trying to sell their goods (i.e. swords) to want to pay more to buy swords off someone else? They're trying to convert swords into income, not the other way around. If anything I'd think bladesmiths would refuse to buy your spare swords, and the only thing allowing general stores to buy low would be the seller's poor BATNA (excuse my business parlance). Hopefully someone can enlighten me, since I seem to be in the minority here, judging by the poll results.
  19. mcmanusaur
    Yep, I agree. And it should be said that complexity isn't inherently a bad thing, especially when it's not a tabletop medium where players are responsible for calculations, but of course it's still more difficult to learn. Even still, I'd love to see an RPG represent the things you mention, and the dexterity/agility thing is a particular pet peeve of mine. This is not in any way a suggestion for Project Eternity, but I suppose the only way I can see the establishment of a system that is complex and true to life, without being bogged down in terminology and construct abstractions, would be a hyper-scientific approach to attributes. Instead of constructs like "strength", "intelligence", and "charisma", you would have direct measures of muscle mass, metabolism, the immune system, facial symmetry, nervous reflexes, visual acuity, various neural metrics, and so on. However, this obviously puts magical abilities in a strange position, and would feel generally out of place in a fantasy setting, in addition to the fact that system remains vulnerable to the dump stat/min-maxing problem. I could see different measures contributing a certain weight/percentage to various checks, but this could get into "too much like real life at the expense of fun" territory, not to mention the difficulties in balancing the importance of each measure. In other words, the strength of a character's immune system would only apply to a small number of situations, whereas nervous reflexes occur every time the character performs any action, so the units of progression in each would have to be scaled such that the value of raising each is comparable. Lastly, this implicitly assumes physical reductionism from a philosophical standpoint, which is something I'm not entirely sold on (and it certainly doesn't apply in a universe where souls exist like in PE).
  20. mcmanusaur
    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.) I see. Well, it occurred to me that if we take a step back we might realize we're not giving developers enough credit here. After all, there must be some binary (on/off) flags that apply to your character (some of which you acquire through play) and affect available options (either in dialogue or quest resolution); it's just that the majority of such that likely exist in the game's programming are not directly visible to the player. I do still believe there's a lot of untapped potential, but it's interesting to think about the fact that the "system" that the player is presented with is streamlined from and works differently to the system in terms of the actual operations taking place. Hmmm... sounds interesting, so I'll check it out; however, more specifically I was wondering about cRPGs that exclusively utilize qualitative characteristics.
  21. mcmanusaur
    Urgh... I would have hoped that we had played enough exceptionally extraordinary fantasy genre-ified superhero characters that the novelty of this would have worn off by now... Does consistently playing unrealistically powerful characters really provide such a never-ending source of gratification for most players?
  22. mcmanusaur
    I'm not sure if you were involved in the conversation or not (I'm guessing not), but we discussed something similar to this here if you're interested in reading about it: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/62051-attributes-fixed-or-increasing/page-7 I'm sort of expecting that we'll see something along these lines (combining physical and mental aspects into single attributes), but that's only speculation and I have to admit that it even if does a bit to avoid dump stats it seems a bit contrived in certain cases (are physical and mental strength truly correlated in such a direct manner?). That said, I'm not sure anyone proposed checks for component "aspects" though, which might be a solution for the above problem, but then you've more or less returned to people min-maxing the "aspects" instead of min-maxing base attributes. I've played around with similar systems, and the issue I run into is that you could always group multiple components together to form different base attributes, and it even begins to become unclear which level certain characteristics belong to (how is balance, which involves both coordination and strength, abstracted?). The single-level attribute system is simple if nothing else, and the more complex you make things the more you run into problems of "why do we have a nice word for this combination of characteristics but not for that one?".
  23. mcmanusaur
    So I'm getting the impression that by "aspects" you mean qualitative traits rather than quantitative attributes/ability scores? Would aspects then be binary and "fixed", or would you aquire them over time like feats? I definitely see a lot of untapped potential in such kinds of traits with regard to fleshing out characters' background, personality, motivations, prior knowledge (not to be confused with quantitatively ranked skills that progress over time), or possibly even their mental health, and you could be required to pick an equal balance of positive and negative traits. However, if these traits actually control which dialogue options are available that might be seen as too restrictive. That said, I'm a bit skeptical that a RPG system could work without any quantitative elements, but I would be very excited if that was achieved. I discuss relevant issues a bit in this thread, but beware my long-windedness: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/62105-character-traits-and-statistics-in-pe/
  24. mcmanusaur
    I have to agree with Lephys that it's a bit absurd to say that players are "compelled" to travel out of their way for better prices on healing potions or other menial consumables. I'm also not asking for economics to be the strongest driving force, but simply one of the considerations (currently it's not even that with the all-encompassing haggle skills we tend to see). It's up to the player to decide what motivates them and their characters, and if the player decides that it's getting as much money as possible, then it's their fault if their experience suffers somewhat, in my personal opinion. Again I'm not advocating for the availability of standard items (weapons, armor, consumables, etc.) to be restricted to certain areas- in fact I'd be happy if "unique" items were the only ones restricted in such a manner- and I'm not sure how that's a compromise; if anything that's far more inconveniencing than a slight price difference. I'd simply like to see prices vary realistically, based on reasonable estimates of regional supply and demand, and changes over time need not be perpetually simulated.
  25. mcmanusaur
    Half-baked... that was the term that I meant to use but couldn't remember.
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