Lephys

Yes. It doesn't have to be Civ-style research. IRMA's not wrong in that that style of research, for example, doesn't have much room in the game. But, that hardly says that no possible form of the idea of research could fit in anywhere at all. And yeah, you definitely wouldn't want to get to do it on-the-spot. I mean, level-ups are already kind of an abstraction of that ("I spontaneously compressed all my experience with swordplay in the last few hours into the deduction of a new ability, perfected! 8D!"), hehe. But, still, even some games have you only able to level-up back at some kind of safehouse or something. Not that I think that's necessary. The abstraction's fine, as you're not going to really utilize a non-perfected new sword technique or something (I mean "perfected" lightly -- you're not going to go "Okay, I think I have an idea for a new technique, but I'm really not sure if I can execute it quickly enough, or if it's just going to let my foe run me through where he wouldn't otherwise have been able to, but I'm going to try it anyway! 8D!"). So, it kind of makes sense... Annnnnywho. Every time I think of Research, I think of the Stronghold as the most likely candidate for its setting.

Wow... lot of discussion since I was on holiday vacation. 8P Okay, so, I'm kinda just firing these off to what's been said over the last 5 pages, just FYI... A lot of this is, ehh... terminology interpretation barriers, methinks. Take, for example, the "strength is totes a skill" argument. I would say that no, no it is not. In the literal meaning of words, no it isn't. Skill could be a part of it, but that doesn't make it A skill. That's like saying knowledge is a skill. No, you use mental capacity to be capable of comprehending how to read, and then you read to take in knowledge. Thus, your knowledge capacity is made up of both your inherent attribute (your raw intelligence) AND the effort you've actively put into gaining knowledge. How strong is an engine? The fact that you can modify that engine to make it stronger (or even weaker), or that it can run at varying efficiencies, or that you can apply the energy it generates to a number of tasks to a number of degrees of effectiveness is COMPLETELY beside the point. If you have a hamster running in a wheel, you simply cannot launch a catapult boulder at a field of soldiers. If you're a weakling, you can probably rig up a machine or apparatus that will do what your muscles cannot. But, guess what? You're not the one generating the energy/force necessary to perform the task. You're getting that from some other means. Doesn't mean there's no force needed, or that your ingenuity = strength. No. The results are the amount of force required to perform the task, but they didn't come from you, and that makes all the difference in the world. The other thing I've seen almost NOTHING of in the last 5-or-so-pages (since my last post in here, really) is the meaning of stats in not-purely-combat-related capacities. This kind of ties in to what I was just saying. In a role-playing game, your character has attributes for a reason beyond just "how much damage am I doing in combat?". You have attributes that tell about you, and then that tells what you can or cannot do in a given situation throughout your travels. So, if you're super intelligent, and the ceiling starts collapsing, your intelligence counts for nothing. Why? Because all you have at your immediate disposal is yourself. You can either utilize the strength of your body and hold up some beam or something, or you cannot. If you need to break something off, and it's made of metal, then you MIGHT have a really effective tool at your disposal, but it still requires a minimum amount of force to work (leverage, for example, only amplifying the force that's already there). Okay, maybe you're a wuss, and you just build a 17-foot-long lever to make up for that. OR, maybe you're not carrying that around with you, and/or it won't fit in the room, etc. As someone who works on cars a decent bit, and lives in a family of mechanic folk, I can attest to the fact that there is often a bolt you need to turn or break loose that is in a very cramped location, thus preventing the use of longer wrenches and other leverage-inducing devices. Yet, my stupidly-strong brother can just turn a lot of them with a regular wrench and his sheer arm/wrist strength. The only difference there being raw strength of muscle. So, yeah... and, regarding non-combat stuff, there's a LOT of that to be had with something like Intellect. And yes, raw damage is not the end-all-be-all of a warrior/brute archetype, since even Intellect's raw damage bonus is still just a factor in your actual circumstantial damage output/results in any given situation. BUT, it's still a factor. And if you can min-max all the other ones, then why not that one? If you want to do 10 damage with all your hits instead of 5, base, and just hardly ever crit and have trouble hitting agile people, then why SHOULDN'T you be able to do that? And why should you have to become super intelligent just to do that? People keep pointing out the other factors involved in final damage output, but are acting as though damage, itself, is not one of those. "Don't worry about X, since you can just boost Y and Z, ^_^" What if I want to boost Y and X? or Z and X? If there are three factors, then why are we just pretending its fine that one of them is attached to a stat that doesn't at all support an entire array of overall character builds: non-smarty-pants people? Also, finally, @Ganrich, as for your Brute example that works fine... it would have to be high Dexterity somewhere in there for you to crit a lot. Perception just affects crit damage, not crit chance. So, all high perception's gonna do is make your rare, rare crits be that much more devastating. Not a very good replacement for raw base damage, if you ask me. Especially since the system allows for a crit chance of 0 in a lot of cases, unless you have ridiculously high dexterity. Speaking of which, every point you put into Dexterity is a point you cannot put into Perception, so the more often you can crit, the less you're going to crit for. Which brings us back to base damage, which is the third, equally-valid-and-important factor of this tripod. If your base damage is 1, it doesn't really matter how much your amplifying it. And, for the love of all that is holy, the point here is that all the factors are important. Before someone comes back with some kind of "base damage is nothing if you can't hit people!". See, most of the arguments seem to be directed at the idea that I want Strength to give a damage bonus, and for Intellect to not affect damage in any way. Which is wrong... OR, that I want to put all my points in Strength (with it giving me bonus base damage), and just dump everything else, which is ALSO wrong. Obviously, the most effective person, in terms of sheer damage from stats (all other damage -- weapon, skill, ability, etc. -- is irrelevant, because it's all going to be there no matter what. There's going to be icing, no matter how much cake there is), is going to be the one with max Intellect, max Dexterity, and max Perception (in the given build). That's not going to change a lick even if Strength got the damage bonus and Intellect lost it, except that you'd replace the names. TL;DR: Both Strength AND Intellect affect damage, as do Accuracy (from Dexterity), Perception, weapon damage itself, skills, abilities, etc. So, why doesn't Strength play any role in the damage equation, and why is base damage somehow unimportant in the equation? Oh, and non-combat stuff (think scripted decisions). Does everyone in the universe now use Intellect-based soulpowers to accomplish all things? Or are strong people still effective in certain situations where weak people are not (think scripted interactions and stat checks, etc.). Aka, "Screw damage for a second, and just think about all the other things Strength affects that are power-based in a role-playing environment."

I think you're pegging the definition of "research" a little narrowly. "diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise facts, theories, applications, etc." In a game with crafting, why do you think you magically learn how to do something new/better with the same materials (iron, leather, etc.)? Because you investigate the use of your materials in order to discover new applications of those materials. Plus, you've got a stronghold in this game. And since there's no crafting skill anymore, the crafting system COULD entail permanent hirelings at your stronghold, making the best use of their time to figure out new ways to do things, etc. "Hey, I've figured out how to make better-quality steel that's half the weight but just as durable/protective), etc. Or, especially in the sense of magic and the like, there's already oodles of research saturating the lore. Animancy, cipher powers, etc. So, research could EASILY be a part of enchanting and the like. So, I'm not really seeing how "research has absolutely no place in this game." That seems a bit arbitrarily extreme of a stance, to be honest. Also, for what it's worth, you don't have to be coming up with something no one else has ever come up with for it to be research. Research is the process, not the novelty of the results.

To be fair, its existence as an option is hilarious. That's the joke. The act of voting for it isn't really a joke at all. Where's the joke? "Lolz, they put Call of Duty on this poll, which was really funny. But now, I'm gonna vote for that instead of what I really want PoE to be like, so as to give the poll absolutely no useful function. LOLZ!"

I think it would be pretty awesome if the Mega Dungeon were kind of like a derelict city, in function. Obviously not a quest hub, but... you know, kind of like the Mines of Moria in the Lord of the Rings. Sure, there's lots of old tombs and loot, and lots of things to slay that are infesting the place. But, there's also a lot of culture and ties to other things in the world. I mean... people used to live there/operate there. It's not just some treasury where they put a bunch of stuff and then left, then monsters moved in.

I don't think what Osvir's proposing (with the diminishment of character performance at low stamina) is useless or silly, or overcomplicated (in its essence), but I DO think that you'd have to be pretty particular with exactly what occurs and the extent to which it occurs, for the sake of "balance" (for lack of a better word) to not sort of cancel out the role of Stamina. I dunno if making low Stamina cause you to become easier to hit is the way to go, for instance, because that's an awful blurry form of simply reducing your stamina. It's akin to just giving enemies a damage bonus because you're low on Stamina. I do think there might be room for SOMEthing to happen, though, when you get low on stamina. Such as, off the top of my head, You suffer a 5% Accuracy penalty when below 25% Stamina or something. OR, you suffer a movement speed penalty? Granted, I understand that would make you "easier to hit," but not really to hit as much as to catch up to. In other words, yeah, a melee foe would have an easier time of reaching you to gain the opportunity to attack, but he could still have a terrible chance of actually hitting you when he swings his weapon. Also, you can react a lot more readily and tactically to a shift in your character's capabilities than you can to a shift in your character's mechanical defensive rolls and such. *shrug*. Just my two cents. You could even have passive traits/abilities along the lines of "Character suffers 20% movement speed but gains 15% Accuracy with Ranged Weapons when below 25% Stamina." Or, you could apply that affect with Health. But, yeah, I wouldn't tie the potential for you to take more damage (in a directly mechanical fashion) to the amount of stuff-that-measures-how-alive-you-are you have left. And I wouldn't have it on a staggered scale like that (90%, 80%, 70%), because then, when your character has 100 Stamina instead of 70, he still starts sucking worse just from losing a small amount of it. Ooooh! More ideas: Maybe you get an increased chance to get knocked down, or staggered or something, when you're low on Stamina? Like... pretty low (again, 25%ish?). OR, you could even have traits/passive-abilities that do something like provide a chance for a blow that would normally take you to 0 Stamina to instead take you to 1 Stamina and knock you down for 5 seconds. But, it could only happen once per encounter. Maybe you even take half damage from it or something. *Shrug*. I definitely see potential for stamina-based factors and such. I just don't think a direct scale that's almost a "the less stamina you have, the more you suck" scale is a very good idea, as the main point of Stamina is supposed to be that every point lost takes you that much closer to 0, and thus, unconsciousness. Not, every point lost is the probability that you'll get to 0 more and more quickly. If that makes sense, Osvir.

Apparently there's absolutely nothing I can say that's going to have any effect on your assumption that I'm somehow trolling you, as you've now rejected my reality and substituted your own, permanently. This saddens me greatly, as I find reasonable disagreement to be just as constructively stimulating as reasonable agreement. But... *shrug*, people decide what they will, and the world turns on, I suppose. I'm honestly sorry for (from your perspective) wasting your time, and further attempting to convince you of my interest in the actual discussion of the matter aren't worth the extremely high probability that you'll just assume I'm maintaining the same trollish goal (which I still don't comprehend, for what it's worth) and, thus, wasting even more of your time. Maybe we'll bump into each other in another thread, and this situation won't repeat itself. Hopefully, if we do. See ya a around, ^_^

Excellent advice, methinks. Hmmm... Well, I can't be certain as to the EXACT effects of all the stats thus far, but... 1) A powerful hulk of a Warrior who smashes things around far more than others (when applicable) but lacks finesse and cleverness. He's not really dumb... he just doesn't really care much about anything beyond the basics of how not to attack really stupidly. Also, he's resilient, but doesn't have an extra 17 pints of blood in his system, and hardened veins. So, I dunno how to make that guy with PoE stats. 2) A caster-type who relies on the potency and sharpness of their mind, and who uses a weapon as a backup, but doesn't have the maximum weapon damage bonus just because they've got maximum mental capacity. Also, maybe he's frequently helpful by figuring out oodles of extra information and details that your other characters couldn't figure out, because intellect. So, lots and lots of scripted interactions and dialogue allowances there. Also, for what it's worth, I don't really think Josh is "ignoring" us (and I figure you maybe didn't mean it quite literally); it's not ignoring if he's just too busy to even read the stuff in the first place. It's only ignoring if he has the opportunity to read it and reply to it, but simply opts not to respond at all after reading. 8P I'm pretty sure he is, indeed, quite busy, and yet he responds whenever he gets the chance.

Negatory, unfortunately. Well... allow me to rephrase that: "The" problem I have is with what is represented, and what isn't. A tertiary problem might be with the naming, after all's said and done. I think what Ganrich said about the names kinda almost hits it... with his example of what happens when you rename "Intellect" to "Ferocity." If you're waltzing about through the game, and there's some kind of intelligence/mental-aptitude check, and it checks Ferocity, then that doesn't really make any sense anymore. Also, NOTE: The "sense" I'm worried about is not perfect simulation sense. It's more like system integrity sense. But, yeah... the problem I have isn't with power being called "Intellect." It's with Intellect still actually representing Intellect. I've already said this, but it makes perfect sense that someone with great Intellect would more effectively deal damage in combat, in some fashion. But, abstracted or not, Intellect isn't going to boost your damage across the board while Strength does nothing. Something else I'd just like to emphasize is the fact that "strength" doesn't mean "bicep size." Bruce Lee was very small, but he was stronger than many a larger man. However, he didn't just have magical strength powers. His strength was still derived from his honed body and muscle fibers and control of those muscle fibers. Anywho, it's abstracted in an RPG, as with all other things. Someone said "maybe it should be a skill, because you can gain it or lose it over time." And, that's very true, but, ideally, that would be an ASPECT of Strength. I've known several people who've taken it upon themselves to go to the gym on a very regular basis, and specifically adjust their diet for the purposes of bulking up and building muscle, and they just still can only get so big. While they could become very, very strong relative to their limit, their limit is different from someone else's limit. Anywho... "Strength" isn't just one thing (size/muscle mass). But, RPG strength is an abstraction of the things that make up strength. Also, stats, by their very nature, are a measure of your character's essential being. That's why "Intelligence" doesn't measure how many books you've read, or how much stuff you know (governed by skills). It simply governs how readily you can figure something out and/or obtain more knowledge or derive it from your existing knowledge. Charisma isn't a measure of how many friends you have. It's a measure of your ability to influence people's reactions to you. Constitution isn't a measure of how many vaccines you've gotten. It's a measure of your innate ability to shrug off stuff that other people would fall weak from, etc. So, my issue is with what's being represented versus what conflicts with that. Not what it's called. And if they're not representing physical power/capability, then so be it. In that case (here's where that tertiary comes in), don't call it Strength. And, for the last time, this is not about Strength and Intellect duking it out for the role of global damage bonus, so, no, the naming is not the issue there. I've specifically stated about a hundred times now that my ideal situation would have Strength do its part (affecting something like Force, which would only apply to certain weapons/actions/checks, etc.), and Intellect do ITS part (affecting things like critical chance range or something of that nature). I know there are a lot of posts popping up rapidly in this thread, but, seriously... I don't type just to see my own text, here. If you're not going to take the time to read my posts, that's fine (they're long, I know...), but don't arbitrarily guess at what it is my point probably is. I really don't think that's what he meant by "twitch muscles." He just meant the muscles that aren't designed for endurance, which is why you have to build up your control over them and strengthen them so they don't get all shaky after you hold a 10lb bucket of water up for 1 minute, etc. That's all. At least, that's what I gathered from it, since he was talking about Dexterity. Whatever the specifics of said muscles, you're very correct that they involve control, and I think that's what all three of us are talking about. I'm not really here to argue the details of simulation. My "4x stronger, 4x more force" example was very generalized. You realize that they've used force measurements to measure the impact of adept martial artists, and the amount of force they can generate is WAYYYYYYY beyond what I can generate, even though I'm a fully grown 6'1" male at 200lbs. So, yeah, I'd wager that, whatever the exact numbers are, they're pretty consistent in the sheer output department. The human body is just a machine made of flesh. If you can double the force of a hydraulic piston, you can double the force of a human arm. Also, you're assuming that extra force with the katana is applied in a chopping fashion ("at" the target), which doesn't have to be the case. If you swung the katana that hard AT someone in armor, it'd just break, probably. OR they'd get knocked to the ground or stagger backwards. The force doesn't just cancel out or evaporate just because the blade can't transfer it directly into a deeper slice. Which is kind of precisely my point. Which is kind of why I didn't stress that you'd generate more resulting damage, but that you'd simply generate more force. Hence, your mace-on-armor example... Armor is going to do what armor is going to do. That's why, in a game, it typically does something like reduces damage. Meaning, your Strength typically makes you do additional damage, and that damage gets reduced by the armor. Not "Well, he's wearing armor, so your Strength literally stops affecting how hard you can hit him." Also, we're not going to be fighting JUST armored humanoids in this entire game, so it's not like an armored person is the only example we need to look at.

As much as I agree that the specific terms used might be a problem, the one that worries me is a separate issue. How did Shakespeare put it...? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," I think? If a measure of your "smartness," to put it quite simply, were called "Purpleness" as a stat name, it wouldn't change the fact that it was still the same measure of the same character attribute. Everything else feels pretty good. Perception affects critical damage, but not all damage ever to exist. Resolve even makes your AoE's that much larger (in a way, more powerful, as it takes more of something to cover a 10ft radius with equal something than it does to cover a 5ft radius with the same amount of something-per-square-foot). If you hit 17 enemies instead of 10, because of the larger radius of your effect, then you're doing 7 more enemies worth of damage or effect. So, that's actually influencing damage (where damage is already present), as well, without outright just globally increasing all damage. Dexterity affects Accuracy... which affects the probability of your dealing full or critical damage as opposed to halved (graze) or no (miss) damage. Thus, even Dexterity affects its realm of damage, without just affecting "damage" in general. Then, we come to Intellect, which affects what? Damage. So it affects crit damage (because more damage x a crit modifier = more crit damage), AND normal hit damage, and graze damage (more damage halved is still more than less damage halved), AND it hurts everything in your greater AoE radius even more. If Perception, Resolve, and Dexterity are pieces of a cake, Intellect is just icing that covers the whole thing. Then, you have Strength not even affecting anything combat/attack related. So, the absolute strongest person in the world can carry a house instead of a pebble, and can take 50 more slices to the torso before actually dying, but he can't damage something any better than anyone else. *shrug*... Maybe I'm crazy for thinking that's weird, and not just because of names/terminology. If power/might is actually just the power of your soul or something, then why does it simultaneously make you intelligent/clever? The problem isn't that "strength" is called "Intellect" instead. The problem is that Strength is actually called itself, and exists, but simultaneously represents itself AND doesn't affect the amount of force you can transfer into another object at all by physical means, and that Intellect actually represents not-strength, but still solely increases damage values without conditional prejudice. If you pick up a rock and throw it at someone, and you're really strong, it just does 1 damage (regular "rock" weapon damage). But, if you have excellent Perception, and you critical them, it does 4 damage instead of 2, because you hit them in the eye, lets say. But then, if you have excellent perception, and you're really smart, and you get a critical hit, you hit them SO intelligently in the eye that it you made the rock do 3 damage by default, instead of 1, and so now its critical did a whopping 12 damage. See, I dunno... just thinking about that example, Perception affects critical damage... when you DO crit. Intellect could affect critical chance, at the very least. That makes more sense, to me, just off the top of my head. What causes the extra hurt from your cleverness? The exact manner/location of the strike, with whatever amount of force. What do you call a very fortuitous/effective strike technique/location? A critical hit. Whether by chance or by intent. It's still going to be rareish. You don't just go "Intellect! Strip away mine enemy's defenses, and guarantee true flight!" Anywho, that's in isolation, and Dexterity (via Accuracy) already affects crit chance, relatively. Although, Intellect could extend just the crit range, I suppose. OR, something else. It was just an example of an alternative.

I dunno how it'd work. Aside from, like I said, "visibility" cover with ranged things. *shrug*

??? Man, we are obviously on completely different pages here. Any chance you'd like to actually share with the rest of the class what it is that I've so clearly (in your eyes) misunderstood? Or would you like to waste some more time arbitrarily assuming that I'm incapable of simply being mistaken, and am intentionally toying with you on every possible level? If it's the former, I'm all ears. If it's the latter... have fun with that. FYI, a strawman is a deliberately set up false argument to take the place of your own, against which I would then be arguing. Therefore, it's a little bit impossible for me to "completely miss" your points, then somehow deliberately set up dopplegangers of those very same points, against which to argue and win with the advantage of their not actually being your points. Basically, accusing me of missing your points AND using strawman arguments against your points is a little like accusing me of trying to steal something from you I didn't even know you had/owned by replacing it with a perfect replica that I hand-crafted beforehand, based on absolutely no knowledge of the object's existence in the first place.

While I follow, I think that's getting a bit microscopic about it. I mean, the archer with the 4MPH wind behind him will have more range and retain more velocity in his shots than the archer with the 4MPH wind against him. But I'm not really worried about that detailed of a representation. The point of my example wasn't that strength doesn't come from arm-length-leverage and such. It was merely that strength -- wherever it comes from -- affects things. The 6-year-old child's purpose in the example was to be blatantly weaker, physically, than the man, while the man's purpose was to be blatantly stronger than the child. The weakest 7-foot-tall man who still actually possessed the capability to fight you without crumbling into dust would be clearly stronger then the strongest 6-year-old child hopped up on steroids, ever. Barring some crazy mutation, or giantism. Which is completely beside the point... Exactly. Forgive my frustration, but I just feel like I've repeated myself about 15 times in this thread, and still I get responses as though I'm having a competition between STR and INT. I simply think STR should do its part, and INT should do its part. Not JUST one of them do BOTH of them's part, etc. It's really as simple as that. The whole point is that hitting someone harder hurts worse, AND hitting someone in the right spot hurts worse then hitting them in the wrong spot. AND, hitting someone HARDER in the right spot hurts worse than hitting someone more feebly in the right spot. That's the whole point of stats. If you have uber Perception, you can spot stuff and calculate distances and whatnot. If you have uber Dexterity, you can physically aim at whatever you can see. If you have HORRIBLE Perception, but awesome Dexterity, maybe you're near-sighted, but you can hit wherever you aim, so long as you can see it to aim at it (so maybe you'd be REALLY good with melee weapon accuracy and short-ranged throwing knives, etc, or whips or something, but SUCK with ranged weapons?). Or, if you have AWESOME Perception and terrible Dexterity, you can see that orc at 200 paces, and tell that it's an orc, and see that it's sticking out from behind the tree it's hiding behind. But, you cannot make a shot with a bow that far, because you lack the physical control to match your Perception with aim. Two parts of the same thing. Just like with damage. Strength is the generation of force. Intelligence is making the most out of the force you can generate. Neither one makes every single thing you do hurt worse. "That guy hit you in the head with this maul, and you died. But, I'm so smart, I hit you in the head with this maul, and you died even WORSE!" If anything, in the given mechanics, Intellect should affect your attack resolution. Because, your hard base damage value is simply a point of reference for the Attack Resolution scale to do its thing. Your damage might be 10, but when you crit, you do 20. And surely it's not that you just swung really, really hard that one time, right? It's that you hit your foe in such a way that the applied force of your strike was even MORE effective than usual (hammer to the temple instead of the chest). Part of that is luck, sure, but you'd think being smarter/cleverer would allow you to statistically strike in the intended "most effective spot" locations more often, rather than just making all your attacks do more damage. "Oh, you only grazed him... meaning you got a very crappy angle, or he side-stepped as you were striking, etc. -- you did not strike as you intended to and got a "bad" hit -- BUT, you're SO smart, that you used your sheer thought power to 'more intelligently' hit him in a really bad way, so you did 8 damage instead of 6! 8D!" Maybe misses could do like 2 damage instead of 0, because you're so smart. I jest, I jest... but, does that not make sense? If Attack Resolution did not exist, and it was just miss or hit (like in other games... minus criticals?), I'd accept that the intelligent application of your attacks was being abstractly represented by a collective "damage" rating. But, with the way the current system works, your being smart suddenly means that, aside from completely missing, there is NEVER a time when your intelligence does not directly translate into a better hit. Literally every single attack action you take that connects is significantly more effective than every single attack action a not-quite-so-smart (not even outright UN-intelligent) combatant can make. That's just... really weird. And finally, as someone else already pointed out, Strength is dangerously close to being a big dumpy for a lot of class builds, what with it only affecting Health (pretty much how often you need to hike back to the last rest spot, in a worst-case scenario) and carry capacity (which, admittedly, is at least more important for Wizards, what with the benefits of grimoire-swapping and such). I mean, in DnD, Wizards already pretty much universally dumped Constitution (at least to an extent) and Strength. Not that they weren't at all useful, but they were significantly less useful the second you picked "Wizard" as your class.

Which makes me think Strength affecting weapon speed (based on some weight factor or something) would be really, really awesome. That Wizard can USE that two-handed sword, even with his 9 Strength, but he's not going to be able to handle it as well as that Wizard with 18 STR. Then, materials come into play, too. Pay good money for that Mithril claymore, and now your Wizard can handle it much better, even though he still only has 9 STR, simply because it's lighter/better balanced. It's still abstracted, sure, but I think that's a very interesting possibility. Attack speed is even a direct factor to damage, allowing STR to affect damage without simply making a given weapon swing do more damage (against which the most feasible argument is "you don't necessarily swing harder just because you CAN, because that may not be the most efficient application of a given weapon"). Although, certain situations still seem a bit lacking. Such as Conan the Barbarian swinging a giant maul. Sure, he'd probably handle it better and swing it faster than a weaker person, but it would be very weird if he didn't do more (base) damage swinging a giant maul harder than someone else who wasn't nearly as strong, unless the power behind his swing was ALWAYS directly proportionate to the crappiness of its angle or something... which is pretty nonsensical. Dunno why being strong would mean you can't strike properly. Annnnnnywho...

I appreciate the elaboration, and... well, fair enough.

Ehh, sort of, but sort of not. Getting through an encounter is just a subset of getting through multiple encounters (with your full amount of per-rest "ammo" and Health). It's very similar to how you get Stamina back at the end of an encounter, but don't get Health back until you've gone to rest. I think I get what you're saying, and yes, it could potentially be done very wrong, but so could anything else. I don't think the usefulness of a given spell that becomes per-encounter instead of per-rest upon a level up somehow just jumps straight from "completely useless" to "BLATANTLY overpowered because you can use this so often!" Sure, when you're Level 20, are those 5 Level 1 spells per encounter going to be super helpful? Probably not at that point. BUT, they're still more useful than 0 Level 1 spells per encounter, and less useful than just getting all your spells back per encounter. So, yeah, making sure it's not ridiculous is a concern, but I hardly think the leap from per-bunch-of-encounters (rest) to per-encounter recovery of certain amounts of certain spells is going to somehow be inherently impossible to balance in any kind of feasible manner. Also, for what it's worth, the point about it not really being a cooldown wasn't me telling you what "the point" was. It was just me making an observation. I didn't think you actually thought the stuff was time-based, and I got your meaning, but other people might not when they see "cooldown," leading to either people completely missing "the point" of your argument, or alltogether getting confused about the system and thinking that it is cooldown based. So, I simply pointed out that maybe referring to the per-encounter recovery as a "cooldown" isn't ultra prudent. That's all. It was just an observation and a suggestion. Not trying to be hostile/antagonistic.

I'd call that Bard a "No Holds Bard."

I'm sorry, as I realize I'm saying an awful lot of stuff, and all of it probably doesn't make perfect sense at a glance. And, for what it's worth, I'm not trying to call you out on not understanding the stamina design or anything. My interest is only in helping you to understand it. And yeah, it's kinda weird, even when you do get it. It's pretty abstract. I mean, with a game, we take something as complex as life, and we try to just make it an equation. We just turn it into numbers. And, for someone to just have 50 stamina, and get hit, and now have 40 stamina... that's strange. But, it still kinda works. Even though stamina/endurance -- the term -- means a lot more, I think the mechanic in-game is basically just supposed to cover short-term, ehh... fighting capability. It's sort of a combination of tiredness and trauma. Like in sports... people take a really bad hit, and they're down. Sometimes they aren't even moving for a good minute or so. So they stop the game and referees and medical people run out on the field to check on them. Often times, after a minute or two of recovering from the blow, they get back up, and there's no lasting damage. It just was a lot of trauma, and probably a lot of pain, all at once. So, they were immediately overwhelmed by it (even if they didn't lose consciousness), and couldn't really continue playing the sport to any effect. It's kinda like that. But, it's ALSO sort of your immediate tiredness. Like... go do as many pushups as you can, all at once/in a row. Or sprint as fast as you can, as far as you can, until you have to stop. At the moment you stop, you probably feel like you can't do another pushup, or run any farther. But, take a few minutes to rest, then try to sprint some more or do more pushups, and I bet you'll be able to. It's that. You're not fatigued for the whole rest of the day and must go get a long amount of rest or sleep to recover and be able to do more stuff. You're just temporarily fatigued. I think it's more the first thing than the second thing, though; more trauma than fatigue. Because, again, even though the word stamina refers to your energy to do things, the abstracted PoE stamina is mostly (if not fully) representative of damage-taking. Basically, ignoring immediate pain and trauma and such and remaining upright and in a fighting stance, or at least remaining awake and able to get back up and keep fighting. But, also, to take a forceful blow, that takes energy to keep your body up/keep your balance, etc. So, the fatigue thing comes into play a bit even when you're getting hit and taking damage. And, back to abstraction, it's still a bit weird, because it's not localized. You don't take a blow to the leg and fall to your knee/knees because it was your leg that got hit. You keep standing just fine because you still have stamina. Then, when you run out of stamina from taking 5 more hits like that with a sword/club, you just pass out (even if you're not actually dying/bleeding to death, etc.). But... that's abstraction. I mean, ideally, it could still be represented a little more precisely. Like you said, after some amount of time, or so much stamina loss, it only regens to 90%, or then maybe 80%, etc., until you rest again. And/or, maybe the less you have left, the worse you fight. "Oh, you're at 30% stamina? You're a bit sluggish now, and your attack speed is suffering, too." That actually wouldn't be too hard to do, as armor weight/bulk already affects "action speed," which apparently governs almost everything you do (except movement, I think?). So, you could have low stamina give a penalty to action speed, etc. But then, with the "you've got 4 times the health as you do stamina" thing, it might make more sense from a game mechanics standpoint to have low health affect your action speed. So that, if you're near death, even if you've got a bunch of stamina (which is weird and abstract again, but, *shrug* ), you'd be fighting more crappily. So, that would be an incentive to fight efficiently and "protect" your health, so to speak, instead of just saying "Meh, I can take all that stamina damage 3 more times before I actually die...". Of course, that might just make going and resting TOO frequent a thing, because the encounters and such will probably be balanced against your 100% effective party, and not your "everyone's at 50% speed 'cause they're all super wounded" party. *shrug* Annnnnnywho. Now I'm just rambling.

I'd definitely like to see area-property bonuses, like elevation bonuses for ranged weapons and sight/perception distance. Maybe something like mild stamina-only drain if you're standing too close to a lava pool or something. Accuracy penalties if you're in some windy valley, with no penalty if you're in an alcove or behind a large boulder/outcropping and the big wind tunnel effect isn't really hitting you. No super specific cover mechanics or anything, though. I dunno... I wouldn't mind an archer crouching in some brush getting a defense (as in attack resolution/chance-to-be-hit, not damage reduction) bonus to ranged attacks made against him or something. But no "you're standing beside a boulder, so you get half-cover" stuff, as that would get really messy in a real-time game without grid-space occupancy and such. I'd also like to see terrain interactivity. Using some wind ability in a sandy/dusty area to make a little sand-devil tornado or something and temporarily blind targets within its "cloud." Or a concussive stomp/blow near/at a snow-covered tree dropping all the snow into a temporary cloud. Etc. I realize that last one would be pretty tricky, what with the 2D state of the environment. But, I'm more interested in the functional nature of such things than the specifics of the example (a tree doesn't need to have something happen to it -- in the sand"storm" example, you could just have a 3D sand cloud be "kicked up" on top of the terrain without changing the actual terrain, for example). But, yeah, area stuff, more so than specific location stuff. Elevation is a very good example of the type of factor that would work well in real-time.

That seems like a really strange thing to call it. It's the exact same thing in both instances (per-rest or per-encounter), as neither is a time-based function; just a more frequent versus less frequent trigger/occurrence. You could rest, move 500 feet and fight some stuff, then run back to the campsite and rest again and get all those spells back, OR you could go 15 encounters before resting again. Likewise, you can finish a combat encounter in 15 seconds, or it could take 10 minutes for a tough one. Thus, at a given trigger (the end of an encounter, or the party's resting), you regain certain/all spells, respectively. It's not really a "cooldown," since it's triggered, and not just "wait long enough and something happens." And if we start tossing that word around, newcomers might be confused into thinking that spells are just wait-based.

If we take Power, Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, Intellect and Resolve, there won't be much left of these "attributes". CON, DEX, PER, INT, they all can be honed, even if it's clearly a matter of predisposition and genetic advantages involved as well. RES sounds like a personal trait, a temperament. And POW, is that just a big pool of abstract force? Then it's perhaps not based on knowledge, skills and training so much. In many RPGs you get to increase these attribute slightly at a certain interval, often based on levels. And what is levels? Experience, and thus acquired knowledge and skills. If these attributes should be used, they surely must be regarded as abstract baselines of capacity, some springboards of predisposition that grows along with acquired experience. I'm fine with that, but then I think Resolve has to go, since it doesn't fit the bill. That perhaps goes for Power as well. I'd prefer to have STR instead, which certainly fits, just like Aluminiumtrioxid pointed out. Perhaps Resolve can be replaced by Discipline, as that could be something more easily moulded and honed? Just some confused thoughts from a tired RPG-ODer... I just want to say that, yes, knowledge is a separate factor that interacts with almost all the stats, but I'm not saying that you can't have a stat value abstractly overlap a bit with SOME amount of knowledge. But, you're basically dealing with 3 things when it comes to damage with a physical weapon: 1) Force/power/strength. If you swing a weapon with the strength of a 6-year-old, you're just-plain not going to be as effective as a 7-foot-tall adult person, all other factors the same. 2) Knowledge/experience/expertise. You know how to apply force, rather than just swinging really, really hard all the time to lesser effect and even wearing yourself out, etc. 3) Intelligence. Your ability to convert experience into knowledge, and apply that knowledge in an effective manner. This is why the abstraction of Intelligence granting you more skill points when you level up actually makes a lot of sense, because you gain more knowledge, more effectively, from the same amount of experience. A super-genius who's really strong, who's only just seen a sword for the first time in his life isn't going to use it more effectively than an average-intelligence person of average strength who's been an active soldier for 20 years. But, give that guy 3 years, and he might be nearly as good as the 20-year veteran, simply because he extracts THAT much more information out of his experience with the sword. Comparatively, a super-genius who's just discovered a sword is going to be able to use his existing knowledge (even without a lot of specific knowledge particular to swords) to deduce how to use the sword more effectively than a non-genius who's just discovered a sword. What I'm getting at is that we've already got an established difference between stats (passive properties/measurements of your character) and skills (experience/knowledge gained over time). You've got Dexterity (or agility/speed etc. depending on the game), but then you've also got the Stealth skill. A situation could require a Dex check, or a Stealth check, or even both (in whatever fashion -- bonus from stat to skill for the purposes of a check, etc.). AND, we've already established that strength/force does have an impact on physical weapon use, striking, etc., even if it's not always the exact same impact across the board. AND, Intellect affects your use of a tool as well. And it's all abstracted in a game, but that has no bearing on whether or not it should be represented at all, or what each thing should be represented with. The ideal solution, I think (ideal meaning "maybe we can't quite do that, but we should reach in that direction, at the very least"), is to have Force affect things that force affects, Cleverness affect things that cleverness affects (Intellect), and accumulated experience/knowledge (skill rating) affect things that skill rating should affect. Ideally, they don't need to step on each other's toes. That's the beauty of a ruleset. You're casting Fireball. Does this use physical force generated by your body? Not at all. Okay, then your Strength has no affect on it. You're firing a longbow. Does this use physical force generated by your body? Yes? Okay, then your Strength affects it. Or, maybe the simpler way to put it is "What do we want damage to actually represent in the mechanics?" Then, "What parts of that do we want stats to represent?" If the goal isn't to do anything more than represent a sheer, abstracted damage amount, then alright. But, as I pointed out, things like the 4 defense types, weapon/armor types, and the Attack Resolution scale already represent conditional factors for determining the resulting damage of a given attack. So, it's not as if breaking stats' effects on damage up into parts/factors would be completely stepping into territory that would otherwise go unexplored.

Well, not to be snide or anything, but that's kind of what the pause function is for. If you only need to adjust what one person is doing at a given moment, you probably don't need to pause. If you need to change what everyone's doing, you probably do, so everyone's not taking like 7 swords to the face just while you're trying to make sure your party has their orders straight. The mild AI would be useful in handling things so that you don't have to pause more often than you actually have to pause. You know, like "Oh no, 4 of my party members have killed their target and are now just standing around not making ANY good use of their time. I'll need to issue commands to all 4 of them, so I'd better pause again." That sort of thing.

No worries. I could've made it clearer that "the argument" I was referring to was actually the one I was arguing against. As for the argument, I'm not going to say it's totally definitely 100% going to work if they were to just use Kickstarter for the next 10 years to make games, but, I honestly don't see why the sheer process of making them like that is any less feasible than the "get a bunch of non-crowd-funder investment capital to make our game, then sell as much of it as possible after it's done to make all our money and make this project worth it" model that's used most today.

For what it's worth, it seems, from what Josh has said, that you won't actually be "slotting" spells anymore. The restriction of "this is in your currently equipped grimoire, or it isn't" for the Wizard will be the closest thing to that. Everyone else can either cast 20 Heal You spells, or 1 each of 20 different spells (using the 20 spells-per-rest/encounter -- aka "spell ammo" -- example you made with the Cleric). In other words, you don't actually "prepare" your spells like most of the classes in D&D anymore. You don't have to go "Aww man, I wanted to cast Entangle, but I used up all my Entangles, and all I have left is 6 Cure Light Woundses!" So, basically, casters who aren't Wizards get to use any of their available spells they want, at any time, so long as "spell ammo" permits, while Wizards can only cast any spell in their currently-equipped grimoire at any given time. So, it's almost like prepared spell sets that you can swap between. But, yeah, as for "spell ammo" ratios, I don't really know anything about that. I haven't heard anything that suggests they'll differ between classes, as in "Wizards get 6 spells per rest and 4 per encounter at Level 2, but Priests get 8 per rest and 6 per encounter at that level."

I completely agree, I'll go even further and say it's also unwelcome model. Although it might not be the best place to discuss why, though shall not bite the hand that feeds I'm confused now. Do you agree with me AGAINST that argument, or do you agree WITH that argument? I might've been too vague when I didn't specify that "the argument" was the one I was arguing against. 8P