Lephys

Agreed. Although, I will say that there are some nice ways to make the map sort of come alive using only (or mostly) 2D aesthetics as well. The best quick example I can think of is the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter. Granted, that was mainly a blueprint-style layout of the interior of a place, with representations of moving people. But, still... that type of approach can be taken with terrain and locations, too. I also agree about the Skyrim map. I mean, it was nice, but then... all the locations were just little icons anyway. Which is great for differentiating all the different travelable spots all so clustered together like that, but, other than general terrain and clouds (and snow), the map didn't really allow much to take advantage of its 3D form. Honestly, if anything's going to be 3D on a more BG-style overland map, it'd be nice if it was the locations themselves; towns, keeps, forests, passes, etc. Maybe some of the terrain, but, overall, it's not super important that the overall terrain read from a bunch of different angles, so a lot of 3D terrain would just be lost if it went the Skyrim route, too.

A) That's called Invulnerability, not specifically immunity to bullets. B) It's generally quite temporary. C) No one ever had to dispel it in those games. D) The general design of an FPS is completely different (one character versus hundreds upon hundreds of enemies, in real-time action combat in which a mere couple of strikes can and will kill you; pretty much the whole point of those games is "don't get hit."). E) Your enemies didn't get to cast this protection upon themselves. Also, I'm not really sure the way the Saint's Row games do things is very applicable to even other shooters, since they're basically just big, digital playgrounds (considering in the fourth one, you're essentially a super-hero the whole time.)

... It rolled high on its Stealth check? *shrug*

I also think a lot of folks are forcing one very specific meaning of "don't like." Show me a cake, and I'll probably like it. Put a spider on it, and I suddenly dislike that cake. Why? Because there's a spider on it. If I'm more specific as to why I don't like the cake, my answer will be "because there's a spider on it." A lot of the things Josh points out that he doesn't like, he accompanies with a specific "because it creates cases such as (example here)." But then, I see people quoting those snippets, and saying "See?! HE HATES THE VERY IDEA OF THAT!" Like the BG2 thing. He says there's not a whole lot he did like. But, then he cites very specific things that made him not like something. Not just "everything about the entire system was bad. Damage? Don't like damage, 'cause it used damage. Numbers? Don't like numbers... we're gonna hafta make PoE's system NOTHING like that." No. Look at his quests complaint. He very specifically said that he didn't like how many quests the player got pelted with all at once. So, what would he do with quests in BG2? He wouldn't throw them all out the window and design nothing but entirely new, completely different quests. He would just spread them out a bit more.

^ This. Plus, I dare say you can even have all those immunities and such, but make them a lot more temporary. For example, the idea that you, as a mean old mage, protect yourself from fire, then bathe the battlefield in fire... that's a great tactic! But, why do you need to be immune to fire for the next 72 hours, or until someone else can dispel it? Does it prevent this ability if you make yourself immune to fire for like... the next 20 seconds, or for the next 5 hits from a source of fire damage? Nope. You still get to do really cool things with that. "Hey, Fighter... *poof*, you're immune to fire for the next 10 seconds. NOW CHARGE THAT FIRE ELEMENTAL AND MAKE THEM COUNT!" The thing that makes them boring (in a way, mind you; that spell system isn't just-plain lame or anything... it's just an aspect that could allow for the rest of combat to be more interesting and diverse) is that it becomes a game of "either successfully dispel that, or just completely abandon anything even remotely having to do with that." Oh, you made a Fire Mage? And the enemy mage blanketed everyone on the battlefield with fire protection? Well, you can use of of those 2 spells that aren't fire-based. OR, you can be useless. Or, you can try to dispel that protection. Except, what's this? They're even using countermeasures against your attempts to dispel it! WTF?! Better deploy the anti-anti-dispel countermeasures, so that you can dispel their anti-fire countermeasures, so that you can actually use fire again, which your build was designed around for your mage. And that's just the start of things. Now, your mage is useful again, and you wasted all that time and effort just so he could hurt things again. You STILL have to win combat. They can still mitigate your fire damage in various other ways, and can still thwart your casting efforts and such. It's not like tactics are gone now because they can't immunize themselves against fire for the duration of combat, and force you to partake in a Dispelling Bee. And... I'm sorry, but PROTECTION AGAINST WEAPONS? That's great in a PnP campaign, but in a friggin' cRPG? What the eff? That's like an FPS giving people "Protection from Bullets." I really don't think that's necessary at all. A damage threshold in the armor system already provides functional protection from weapons. So, that's just plain redundant. The mage could just as easily cast a magical armor-boosting spell, and raise the DT so that most of your normal attacks don't hurt him. You can still hurt him, though. You just have to use your more damaging abilities. But, it doesn't just nullify the entire type of damage. I think a system that allows you to figure out how to achieve something in a limited capacity is much better than one that just says "try something else, entirely." Especially when you start stacking those effects. "Oh, now he has protection from like 5 things. Great..." Basically, the more options the player has (even if some of them are still far less effective than others), the better, in a tactical sense. Figuring out a way to turn a disadvantage around is something you don't get to do when the disadvantage is simply "this approach has been totally nullified." And this is far worse when it applies to build choices. Very general ones. "Oh, you can specialize in this one school of magic, but then... in certain fights, the enemy mages are going to render moot that entire school, LOLZ!" Look at PoE, at the Wizard's Arcane Veil. Sure, a firearm is the quickest, easiest way to pierce it, but it's not just "immunity to everything except firearms." I can still be broken in other ways, just not quite as quickly. Thus, "carry a firearm around" doesn't become an absolute necessity, with the difference being "either we can't do anything to mages, or we can do stuff to mages."

NO~! Everyone must die, kill em all!!!! But what if you can kind of be a mean person, then frame some unwitting bandits for your deeds? If you kill them, then people are still on the hunt for you, because they know someone obviously killed these bandits. Think of the frame-ups! 8D

It's not even so much "problems" that must be fixed. It's just mutually exclusive decisions. We could just make every even mildly similar game adhere strictly to the style of the AD&D ruleset, or we could sometimes actually try a different approach, in consideration of things that could be different and still good. Obviously, the IE way of doing things worked, or we all wouldn't be here backing this Kickstarter in anticipation of a new game built upon the idea of those games. But, it's not like there's absolutely nothing about them that wasn't perfect, or that any alternative design choices are ruining things. Look at attack resolution in PoE. It "solves perceived problems" in the IE games' attack resolution system, which consisted largely of misses. Now, there will be a lot fewer misses, but a wider range of effectiveness on hits. And the chance-to-hit scale is a lot more intuitive. It barely changes anything, functionally, from the way the IE games did it. Yet, it makes a whole lot of sense. And yet, decisions like that instantly produce "I find absolutely no reason to even CONSIDER changing anything about that system, whatsoever, u_u" from some people, as if anyone was claiming it's got 0 value, and now it'll be perfect when replaced with something entirely different. This status effect change feels the same way; it's really a pretty subtle change. And yet, people want their reasons for liking the previous system to be acknowledged, but want to act like there's nothing at all to like about the proposed changes. It's like Obsidian says "this part of this song was a bit loud... we're gonna turn the volume down on that from 10 to 9," and people are all "OMG, THEY WANT TO MAKE THE WHOLE SONG A WHISPER!". Something can't quite screw you over as absolutely as it could before (when the effect lands), and suddenly the game is "dumbing everything down" and making everything easy instead of at-all difficult. As if having a really tough time finishing a much-prolonged fight and still managing victory is so much easier than simply being definitely defeated by the same effects and having to reload, only to basically ensure that you don't get hit by them at all, then achieving a much easier victory because the brunt of the fight's difficulty was in not having your party members drop like flies to effects of extreme incapacitation.

I demand a Game-of-Thrones-Intro map. It's flat, but when you select destinations and/or travel around, everything pops out of it all mechanically and awesomely. Also, the sun is a 3D mechanical sky contraption. (Not really, but that IS a cool map). I think some neat 3D effects here and there would be nice. Maybe if the destinations themselves were 3D, and it sort of zoomed down to them when you traveled there, *Shrug*. At the same time, I think that's basically all just decorations on the frosting on the cake. As long as it's sufficiently invoking of the "this is totally an interesting world with a lot of personality" feeling and it's quite functional, it doesn't really need anything 3D for any reason, I don't suppose. There's definitely room, creatively, for 3D elements, though. It's always nice when a map kind of feels alive. Sort of halfway between "this is just a map you're looking at" and "this is actually the world."

^ Oh man! Thunderclaps! Brilliant!

Excellent strawman! Let me put it this way, and be done with you and your ignorance of other people's exact arguments: You either believe that a publisher is capable of detrimenting a game's development timeline/progress (in which case you don't actually disagree with my point, because that's all it is), or you believe they are incapable of doing so. So, maybe figure out which you believe, and you'll be doing yourself a solid. To you and to Volourn... "It could be poor handling on the publisher's part.[/i]" There. Prove that's impossible, and we'll talk more. Otherwise, we don't even have an argument, besides "Who knows best what Lephys is trying to say with his very own words? Lephys, or not-Lephys?". I'll leave the two of you to that one, if that's the one you want to go with.

How do you know he's never personally experienced someone telling him that these "suckerpunches" he's describing are good and should be in the game? You've never heard anyone tell you that, so clearly no one exists who thinks that way? That's along the lines of the thinking he's describing, in general. You did the same thing to him that you did to me. Just because he describes certain people, who happen to be of the old-school persuasion, who sort of buck against changes out of nostalgia or inertia, you automatically assume he's said "anyone who could even remotely be considered 'old school' is obviously one of these people, u_u"? Then you tell him he's wrong, because the specific example he gave that didn't apply to you, somehow applies to you, but is totally wrong by not being accurate regarding you. Excellent. This was your first response in this thread: K, is this supposed to be representative of what "grognards" want? Aside from the fact that I can only think of 1 (one) such encounter in ALL of IE games (Kangaxxx), I have yet to meet a grognard who's ever said: "hey I want more encounters that force me to use at least 1 rogue and 2 clerics." or "I hate modern games because they don't require you to have a Fighter!" lol You might want to figure out which it is: Is he describing your feelings on the matter? Or is he describing someone else's thoughts on the matter? It's one or the other. Really? You seemed pretty sure you were part of it when you responded with that assumption. And if no one exists whose part of that group, then, *GASP*, I might be... MISTAKEN! I know, I'm apparently supposed to think I'm incapable of such a thing. Regardless, it's kind of moot unless you can somehow present evidence that no one just kind of hates the fact that some old school elements will be different, just 'cause they liked how they were. So, I observe a group. You observe that the group doesn't exist. Awesome. I'm not really going to fight you on that, since you can believe quite literally whatever your brain is capable of choosing to believe. The fact that there actually is, aside, "everything he says" isn't proposed game features. You personally over-scrutinized his example of people liking a very specific list of viable party builds/strategies to complete fights, merely because you don't know of anyone who's complained about that. Like it's invalid if you don't get to confirm it, personally. That's not even a game feature. It's just something you can't even prove isn't true. At the point at which there's not even any productive goal to the scrutiny, it's excessive. Hehe, don't worry, Ffordesoon. I don't know about Stun, but I'm stopping here. I don't really have anything else to say on the matter that's going to produce any different results than what I've already said. I'm trying to work my way down to a "three strikes" policy,

Sometimes, it's not your fault it gets screwed up. If the publisher insists that you spend 50 hours polishing up a character so they can show it off in a super-awesome gameplay clip of eye candy to some investors, THEN they insist that you need to change that character completely (and waste the majority of those resources you already spent) for some such reason, then still expect your game to be out in 1.3 years, whose fault is it that you wasted time you could've spent making the game better? A publisher doesn't always just say "here's a whole game's budget worth of dollar bills. *pat on the back* make me proud. We'll check up with you in a year and a half! 8D!" Umm... that actually happens quite a lot. It's called factors. He's not a magical fairy. If he was told by a supplier that he could get such-and-such materials to do your kitchen floor, and then that supplier says "Whoops, just kidding. We don't have any of that," then, either he finds some different materials, probably at a different price, or you don't get a floor for a while. He doesn't just put a Sorceror's hat on and Fantasia up all the building materials to make your house. Good thing I'm not doing it. I'm simply observing the publisher as a factor, alongside the development team. 1 partner in a partnership can only ever do 50% of the work. I'm saying that, even if the development team (ANY development team; this is nothing specific to Obsidian) performs flawlessly, they still have to work within the confines set forth by the publisher (in a publisher-actually-has-project-control scenario). Dunno. Maybe there wasn't as much interference? Or maybe the development team simply overcame it. *shrug* If I got stuck in traffic, but was able to take an alternate route and get to my destination on-time, why would I show up and tell everyone "Sorry I'm not late but almost was... there was really bad traffic"? Does the fact that I was on-time mean that the traffic couldn't have existed?

I was actually kind of expressing my failure to understand an actual reason for that level of scrutiny. What you provided was essentially "because people can." Granted, I didn't really specify that I wasn't simply asking why it occurs, as opposed to not-occurring, so that's my fault. I don't understand why, if I point out some folly in some people and don't actually make any connection to you, whatsoever, you automatically affiliate yourself with that group. Why is that? If you're not just averse to change for no other reason than that it's change, then you're obviously not in the group I'm talking bout. Not "No, you're definitely talking about me, but you're wrong, since that doesn't describe me." Sheesh... Yeah. A game we funded despite the fact that Josh, and not we funders, is heading the project. Also, funding someone's game automatically justifies excessively scrutinizing everything that person says or does. I mean, since we backed his game, there's no longer any such thing as irrational behavior! I'm going to go write a 7,000 word thesis, now, on why he decided to use the word "extreme." Brb.

Maybe the dimension in the stash... is "the outside"... and our world -- what we consider to be outside the stash, is actually the container... O_O...

Fair enough. I just don't really agree on how much easier it's making anything, I suppose. It just feels like deciding that fast-forwarding is warranted, the "how much?" question obviously comes into play, which is then answered by "obviously stop at a reasonable limit," but then... that's what the initial design was doing. You can ALWAYS make your way through an area more slowly, even if everything around you isn't slow. And, in combat, for example, you can pause it to "slow down" the overall pace of the action (I guess you could pause outside of combat, technically? Maybe to look over terrain without having patrols move around and stuff while you're there? *shrug*). So, the only thing being provided is "make things go faster." It feels a little like skipping the game. Even if the hard-coded movement speed for your party was stupidly slow, I wouldn't say it warrants some kind of option. I'd just say it was bad design, and it should've been a reasonably faster speed. As for the mechanics I've described, they're not meant to solve any problem in an easier fashion. They're simply meant to actually provide a purpose for things like movement speed options. There are plenty of games in which you get a run/walk toggle that affects absolutely nothing except whether or not your character moves faster or slower. It'd be nice if that actually mattered, if it's going to exist. And, honestly, I'd much rather have the option to run in lieu of the option to double the game speed. I'd just set everyone to Stealth mode and increase the game speed to make up for lost movement speed, then "run" around whilst still detecting traps and secret doors in a fraction of the time it would normally have taken. Thus, nothing in the game would actually require "care" on my part, since I could just bypass it with time control. Trying to sneak past those patrolling guards? Who needs to wait for their patrol to pass by again when you can just fast forward until they do! 8D. Got a sequence-based puzzle you didn't pay attention to the lore enough to know how to solve? Just max out time speed and "run" around trying all the sequences in one-tenth the time! 8D Just... if it's such an obviously problem-free, nothing-but-good feature, why doesn't every game ever made have a game speed setting?

A = problematic. A has variety. Therefore, variety = problematic. I don't think that works. There are plenty of things that add variety and aren't suckerpunches. Honestly, I don't really think that example is much of a suckerpunch. It's a pretty terrible design. If you actually have to deal with the traps (instead of simply figuring out which protection to cast on yourself to match to their type), then you'd actually be avoiding/disarming them in the first place, instead of tromping across them. Thus, when you got to the fire one, the fact that the trap type changed wouldn't make much of a difference, in regard to it somehow becoming something unexpectedly detrimental. You might still have to deal with fire differently than poison (you can dodge a jet of flame, but it's harder to simply "dodge" a poison cloud, for example), but it's not "you died 'cause you didn't prevent this thing from even being able to affect you." Maybe I'm just weird, but I prefer to counter things with actual, active tactics and choices, and not with passive "protection from bad things" effects. The counter to a trap is to get around the trap without tripping it and being struck by it. Not "want to laugh in the face of threatening effects? There's an app for that! 8D!"

Exactly! Though, I will say... typically, if you fail the poison roll, you simply become poisoned, and must simply deal with the fact that you are poisoned while you're still able to interact with the encounter. Death isn't something you can really mitigate or react to (with that character). I realize you were specifically talking about save-or-die poison (from a trap, in the example), but I just thought it brought up another good point in the form of the differences between the effects. Which is why I love that particular example. Also, it's not any easier to win combat because you were poisoned instead of deathed. It's just a lot more possible to do so. The fact that you can take poison to the face and still feasibly fight efficiently/effectively enough to win without having simply immunized yourself to the poison says a lot. You can't out-effect death. Unless your strategy is to come back as a lich, or posses the foes with your disembodied spirit or something. Heck, sometimes you can even use damage to your advantage, if you're clever. "Oh, I've been poisoned? Well, that'll put my Barbarian here into a rage once it deals enough damage in a certain amount of time. Silver lining... I'll use that rage to my advantage, in lieu of the lost hitpoints, instead of wasting time stopping the poison and/or healing him to mitigate it." Show me a strategy that puts a silver lining on death, and I'll give you a cookie.

Ffordesoon said it pretty well. There are plenty of games in which one hit or one wrong move kills you, but they're generally platformers and/or action games. In Megaman, you can die VERY, very easily. But, you're also actively controlling Megaman and his jump timing and aiming and shooting and dodging. It would be horrible if, in playing Megaman, all his actions were left up to dice. "Oh, I needed a 17 to jump that chasm, and I only rolled a 15? He fell in the pit." So, yeah, dice and luck are involved with pretty much any attack or damaging effect in combat, whatsoever, and playing with odds is a factor. But, the thing is, combat isn't "okay, just don't get hit at all, ever, to win." In fact, the game's pretty much assuming you're going to take damage and fall victim to things. So, the challenge is "how can you take your hits and mitigate things efficiently enough that you still win before you die?" When a dice roll results in just some negative detriment, you can react and adjust. "Aww, crap, that player's slow now... do I take the time with another character to get rid of that effect, or do I adjust my strategy to use other people to make up for the fact that that character cannot close on foes as well as I wanted him to?" Or, "Aww, he's poisoned now. Do I take the time to heal it, or do I mitigate the damage somehow, or do I just go all-out with that guy to take down other people before he dies?" The roll, while uncontrollable, affects the player's continued approach to combat. When that roll is just "you're out," even at full health, no matter how slim the chances, there isn't really any recovering from that. "Oh, he's petrified? I'll just... do nothing, 'cause he's dead." That's the thing. And how do you prevent it? You can tweak odds all day, but, if they're still there, you're still running on hopes and wishes. One player's gonna get hit with that effect, against all odds, 25 times in his whole playthrough, while another (with the exact same odds) is going to get "lucky" and only get hit with it like 3 times. Even though they both did "the exact same things." And, again, if we were talking about a single attack, or poison, we wouldn't be talking about something that warrants a desire to reload, or a probably loss of the rest of combat. And if you tweak the odds as far as immunity, where's the fun in that? "The challenge here is for me to either will the dice to not land on a hit with this petrification, OR, to cast 'You Shall Not Pass!' versus that particular effect roll, and not even worry about it." If you were to make a game that played just the same -- tactical, party-based cRPG combat -- but everyone always just had 1 hitpoint, you'd see the relationship there. There's a lot less significance to player choices when things are all-or-nothing. You can't make an attack any MORE effective if the enemy doesn't even have more than 1 hitpoint. Your attack either does more than 0 damage and you win, or it does 0 damage and you don't win. Throw in immunity/protection spells, and that's all fine and dandy, but it's still just not as deep as the same system with multiple hitpoints, and critical hits, and varying levels of effectiveness from many an ability, all highly affected by the player and his choices, as well as circumstances, etc. "Don't let this effect one-shot you" isn't much of a challenge, really. Because it's either impossible (i.e. "I can get it down to a 5% chance to work, but I still just hafta hope for a non-unlucky roll"), or it's easy (i.e. "I just have to push the odds all the way to a 0% chance, and/or immunize myself, and/or the only viable strategy is to prevent that guy from even being able to cast his spell, which eliminates all other strategies that don't do that."). It's not that it isn't a challenge. It's just that, a challenge that goes a bit beyond one thing is a bit more interesting. "Dodge this one arrow" isn't as amazing as "run through this entire obstacle course, all while being fired at, and don't get hit by more than 5 arrows." I'd much play through the latter challenge than the former, and not because it's any easier.

Yup. Off the top of my head... quest markers. I might could dig around to find some specific examples of particular titles he's criticized, but my claim -- to be clearer -- is that he's done plenty of mocking of the things modern games do that older games did not do. The other thing is, just because you take issue with the way things were done 10-20 years ago doesn't mean you automatically favor all the stuff that's commonly done today. There's the third option of "not how old games did it, but also not how current games are doing it." It seems like the majority of the problems people have with his changes to the old systems are simply intertia -- which is why he cites "grognards" in this example. Almost anything he's tried to change, sometimes even before he's actually said how it'll be different, he's been met with "What?! WHY?!". Doesn't mean everyone's got the same complaints, or if you like some old-style stuff you're just a grumpy old grognard. I don't know why every word he says is held under an electron microscope, anyway. As if no one in the universe matches his example. Anywho...

Even excrement holds the value of being excellent fertilizer. I dare say it's not them that don't know games very well, if you think games are somehow 100% bad or 100% good. And before you say "Who says I said that?", notice the "if" there. And, there are either good things and bad things in a game, or there are just all bad things, or all good things. So, yes, when you respond to the idea of some things in decidedly not-stupendous games actually being good with "Pssh, that's silly," I'm not sure what else to figure you mean. And I'm not blaming publisher's for Obsidian's failures. I quite specifically said that I can't attribute those specific games' development choices to publisher interference, but I do know for a fact that it is a very precedented thing. When you can either do exactly what an oftentimes mostly-business-oriented entity tells you (for whatever reasons they want it done, that aren't necessarily "Because we totally creatively feel like it's best for this design, ^_^") and receive money and actually be allowed to continue developing the game, OR not do what they say and have all your funding cut and be fired while they find someone else to finish their game, you're not really responsible for the entirety of that game's design, as a development team. It happens. Dunno if that was the case on those two games. If you do know, then, by all means, share. Either way, on this project, Team Eternity is in 100% control of the whole shebang. So, now, if the game is sub-par, we can say with certainty that none of it could be attributed to publisher interference. That's a simple observation. I'm confused as to how or why it warranted a "it's not like they're perfect and publishers are all to blame" response. If I wanted to say "It was the publishers' fault," then the contents of those quotations marks, there, would've been my post.

Fungi are awesome. "There's been something different about Steve ever since he came back from his adventures in Od Nua. Before, he was always so serious and boring. But now he's such a fungi!" Seriously, love the idea, though. What if the mental effects of the cave spores/fungus kind of make your mind turn a simple cave complex into an illusionary maze? Everything could start to look almost exactly like the same corridor/cross"roads," and it'd turn into a sort of puzzle, finding the subtle difference in the correct (actually somewhere you haven't been) pathway that your brain just isn't replicating perfectly. That, or maybe you'd have to find out how to get the various plant growths to react to other things (be it other plants, or fruits from plants, or insects/animals and their pheremones, etc.) to get them to sort of retract and grow in different ways to allow you to access various different pathways. It could be more complex and interesting than just "this fungus is blocking this one corridor, and if I use the right item on it, it'll stop blocking the corridor; this is basically a locked door with a key, disguised as a cave plant puzzle." Not that that isn't an interesting take on locked pathways, but, we've seen it before. I'm thinking more like, not only can you maybe get something to not block your way, but you can actually get access to various different approaches to the next "room." If there's a fight in the next room, for example, you might could approach it from several different directions/positions with varying advantages and disadvantages, if you manipulate the fungus properly by taking the time to study it a bit in your exploration of the cave network. Heck, maybe you can even go all "EFF THIS!" and just burn it away to get past it in one point, only to cause some linked patch of fungus/flora in another part of that cave system to go into some kind of "defensive"/survival mode; maybe it produces some fireproof secretion or exoskeleton that prevents it from thriving and taking in food, for the moment, but also protects it from exposure to external threats. *Shrug*

On the other hand, it's not like he hasn't mocked plenty of modern games and their designs.

It'd be pretty amazing if it were just the place for people to exchange stories and information, etc. Instead of specifically tying an entire quest to some request/story told in an inn, the banters in the taverns could simply provide contextual information, be it just lore, or clues to actual quest/character interactions, or useful tactical info about creatures (maybe they tell exaggerated tales about some encounter with something, but you still gleam useful information from that; maybe there's a group of bandits they think are demons, and even if they aren't actually demons, you can learn something about how they fight, or how they seem to be un-armored, but are obviously well-protected somehow, or how they spread poison, whether they really breathe it out as the story-telling patrons suggest, or simply use pouches/mechanisms to convince people that they breathe it out, etc.). I think having tavern banter be a large source of local information and such (amongst just-plain entertainment and character-building/atmospheric value) would be quite interesting. The thing is, you couldn't just hang around in a tavern common room without actually being a paying customer. It'd give more of a reason to the gold you spend on food and drink, and/or room rental (maybe if you rent a nice enough room -- i.e. spend enough in patronage -- you can even freely wander about places you wouldn't normally be allowed to go, like the kitchens, etc., instead of just "Okay, you can sleep in this little wooden room upstairs, but don't touch anything."). You could even have certain people who aren't really willing to give up information unless you drink a certain amount with them, whether it's 'cause they're protective of the information, or just because they don't loosen up enough to talk about themselves until they have a drink, or they're skeptical of people who seem to be specifically hunting information rather than relaxing and drinking with the rest of the room, etc. In some situations, you might run the risk of divulging information, yourself, that you don't really want made public (alert certain people who may be looking for you, etc.) because of your drunken state. *shrug*. The dialogue options for "we're drinking together" branches could be pretty fun and interesting. . Check please! Constitution/Resolve check, that is.

That's taken a bit out of context, to be honest. You have no control over the roll itself. For example, if you needed a 15 for a successful saving throw, then whether or not the roll came up 15-or-higher or lower-than-15 was out of your control. You, yourself, just pointed out the unlucky 1 roll. That's part of any roll, is it not? Or is there a die that doesn't start with 1? You can influence odds, sure, but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure. And, when you're immune to something, you simply don't roll. Not functionally, anyway. It's the equivalent of rolling a D20 to see if it comes up 21. Also, you can't really be expected to immunize yourself against every single status ailment attempt on your party, ever, so you're going to have to deal with rolls against status effects. At which point, you really have no control over the result of your roll. I will say that at least in PoE, all that odds-influencing actually translates into control over the end result: You don't just make yourself less likely to be hit. You also can eliminate the chance of things like a critical hit happening, or a miss (if it's your own attack). It's a nice level of control between full immunization and mere wishes.

In all fairness, you don't really get to control whether not a certain level of trauma causes a given foe to lose consciousness before dying. That being said, Josh (I think?) specifically talked about taking certain foes prisoner in lieu of killing them (when talking about the prison/dungeon component of the stronghold), so, it sounds like we'll always have the option. I dunno if it'll just be a manual "keep hitting them 'cause they've got health remaining, even though they're out of the fight from a 0-Stamina state," or if you'll be able to "stamina-kill" all the foes in a given group, then just select "finish them off" or something, just to efficiently do it. 'Cause, it's probably not super often you're going to take the time to finish off an incapacitated foe's Health while multiple other foes are still striking you. And, once they're all "knocked out," it's not like there's any further reason to enforce tactical combat resource management to kill a group of foes that's no longer offering any resistance whatsoever. Of course, for story/lore/quest reasons, maybe you might want to leave them alive, sometimes. Loot their unconscious bodies, then let them wake up in their underpants.