Lephys

Yeah, it's not simply that faster is always better. It's just that, if there's no strategic decision-making going on in the non-abstractly-sped-up time (the quick regen of stamina outside of combat, in this case), then there's not really anything to be gained by accurately representing the effects of time on it there.

Ahh, I fear I was unclear. I was saying that it was more a matter of knowledge than of sheer intellect/intelligence/smarts/cleverness, not that it was more knowledge than skill, or that skill/capability wasn't involved. All I meant was, smart people might figure out the best places to strike someone, but that doesn't mean everyone who knows the best places to strike someone utilized smarts to figure it out.

I'll hafta check it out (Divinity 2, and, I suppose, the original... unless it just sucks or something) sometime. As for the journal in BG, I also enjoyed reading it. It's just that, it makes sense that you've got 2 different types of entries: 1) Entries you know are pertaining to some particular quest/event/mystery/topic and 2) Entries you don't really know the significance of. I think without the second type, the game lacks a bit, since it makes sense you'd sometimes find things out, but not know about a specific connection to something else. So, I just have an interest in organizing the 2nd type, is all, as the first is already organized. It's not as if it was unbearable in BG, just having them all in their little miscellaneous category. But, as games and interfaces go, I think it would be quite prudent to allow for player-controlled organization of such things.

I would wager that knowing the best places to strike and the best techniques to use for maximum effectiveness (ergo "damage") is more an issue of knowledge than it is of Intellect. Granted, a genius is probably going to figure it all out more quickly, with fewer resources (no teacher, etc.), and figure out MORE and BETTER ways of doing it all than someone else. However, even the (to put it simply) dumbest brute around can master one thing, if taught. As long as he's got memory, and the dexterity sufficient to hit where he aims, he's going to remember "When I hit people in the neck, they die real fast. But when I hit them in the arm or something, they don't die right away." Etc. There are artisans/craftsmen who don't know how to do much else at all, and can't really figure out a lot on their own, but who grew up apprenticed to someone else, and were shown a way to do something, memorized it, repeated it, and have simply practiced it so much now that they are extremely precise at their technique. Granted, in abstraction, I have no issue with simply "Intellect," overall, affecting this. But, even in abstraction, there's room for a knowledge skill to affect this, as separate from pure physical capability (and even separate from overall Intellect).

I'm smack in-between L and XL, and I have the exact opposite issue. If you wear an L, you're apparently supposed to have a very short torso (and arms), but if you wear an XL, you'd better be 17-inches wider than the person who wore an L. It's really quite silly. You'd think they'd just separate overall "size" (to oversimplify it), and length. That's pretty much how pants work. But no... I guess shirts are too cool for that.

*Actual quote instead of childish reduction to insult inside of some asterisks* You realize you could spend the time you're giving to trying to convince me I'm somehow wasting my time, instead, on actually acknowledging what it is I'm saying, right? Then you could've saved yourself the trouble of emphasizing your "incredibly simple point" in the first place and pretending that yours and mine are mutually exclusive. *shrug* Also, didn't realize I had failed at being a smart-ass. I guess I'll have to try harder next time. Cheers.

You guys take everything I say so far out of context. @Darth Trethon: Nowhere in any of my examples was there a publisher. A publisher is functionally (among other things) an investor. They supply a lot of money and resources for the game to get developed, and then get a bunch of extra money when it makes a profit. So, you're right, except in that I was somehow wrong about publishers, as I wasn't even talking about them. Otherwise, correct. @Karkarov: Perhaps this was my fault for not being specific enough (but, I just try to keep my word count at least under 2,000 per post, haha), but, by "you" I meant "the people actually making Call of Duty." I meant, hypothetically, Kickstart the next Call of Duty game, and really, truly, actually, don't make it if it doesn't get funded Not "one of us in here, pretend the next Call of Duty game is going to be Kickstarted and won't get made if it doesn't reach its Kickstarter goal." Whether or not people believe it is irrelevant to the point of that. IF you put it on Kickstarter and funded it up front or didn't make it at all, and IF everyone knew that and that's just how it was done, then it wouldn't just start failing sheerly because of the process. The argument was that Kickstarter isn't a legitimate, long-term business model for a series of products from the same developer. So, my comparison was to the process itself. If people knew they needed to fund Call of Duty up front for it to get made, then I bet you money they'd all jump onto Kickstarter and fund the crap out of it. That was the point.

I haven't played Divinity 2, so I'm not sure. I was kinda thinking directly of the BG journal. Not that it was bad, mind you, but, sometimes, I had to keep checking it to get a specific description, etc. But it was all just chronologically kept in there, so my only complaint was that I sometimes had to go back through a few pages of miscellaneous stuff just to find the description I wanted. I think we're sort of after the same thing here, though. I mean, what I'm thinking of is basically your system, but with a "just in case" area. Because, if you JUST record what the player decides to record, and the rest is just non-existent, then I have a feeling you're going to run into two huge groups of players who either: 1)Never record anything because they just don't think that sort of "side quest" content is worth the trouble, or 2)Record everything because of the distractions of real life in between play sessions and imperfect human memory. Basically, WHEN you hear something/find something out, in your system, you'd either make an entry, or it would just go poof (unless you just remember it in your head). All I'm proposing is that it gets an entry no matter what, but that you still get to decide whether or not to "mark" it or flag it or what-have-you, so that it goes into your "here's an uncluttered list of things I think are actually important," instead of your "this list is all the things I actively decided I wasn't really worried about, but are here just in case I change my mind about their importance." So, basically, your journal isn't going to be cluttered in the sense that those entries won't be "in your way." Nothing's going to force you to look at that section, as you always get the opportunity to "flag" them and have them go into a different section that you actively worry with. In other words, the only "this is in my way" situation would be "I'm actively trying to look at this section of my journal that only contains all these things I didn't deem important, but all these things I didn't deem important are getting in my way and cluttering it up!"

See, it's things like that that make me strongly feel like you're still misunderstanding some aspect of the design. I'm not trying to be hostile here, I just really believe your feelings against the stamina regen are at least partially in response to a mistaken idea of the whole design. Your health requires you to "go back during your journey because of the wounds/fatigue of your party." At least the wounds part. As for the fatigue, simple "Oh, we were sprinting and exerting ourselves, and now we're not" fatigue does actually "regenerate" in real life. You rest for a bit, and it goes away. You don't have to go back to an inn just because you sprinted a bit, or fought some orcs/bandits. That's what's being represented by "Stamina" in PoE's design. As for long-term fatigue? They haven't really said anything about that, I don't think. It could very well be an issue. And, in that regard, I do like Osvir's idea of lowering your Stamina cap (so that it stops at 90% of your total instead of 100, etc.). Maybe Stamina-restoring abilities, in-combat, could actually still push it back up to 100, if only temporarily? That would even be pretty cool. Annnywo, the point is, you've got 2 different ways in which you can be screwed: 1) You lose the ability to fight (even though you're still healthy and alive) whilst your opponents still possess that ability, OR 2) You suffer fatal wounds and die. Health is a representation of your actual physiological/biological damage. If you get a cut on your leg, you lose less health than if you get a gash all the way down your leg, to the bone. That sort of thing. It's ALSO going to affect your stamina, though. Your immediate ability to not collapse onto the ground, even if it's not because you're near death. So, Stamina's main representation is the "can I make it through this fight" aspect of your ability to stand and fight. Hence, once you do so, it regenerates rather quickly. Why? For the same reason the time in a game is abstracted, and you don't have to go spend an hour of real-life time watching your party sit in a tavern for an entire hour, just to wait an hour in-game until some person meets you. Because, simply put, that's not particularly fun. And, as far as stamina goes, once you're not in immediate danger, nothing's preventing you from "Catching your breath." And, with the abstract passage of time, it makes sense that that would happen faster rather than require 30 minutes of you. However, no amount of abstracted couple-hours' worth of time passage is going to have your leg gash heal itself. Which is why you STILL have to go long-term rest and heal-up your wounds. Which is STILL abstracted, but represents your inability to simply wait it out/"walk it off." I mean, if you have 100% stamina, but run out of Health, you die. Your Stamina doesn't override your Health. So, when you get to 1 Health, your Stamina regenning itself to full isn't exactly cheap, as it's not going to save you from anything. It doesn't negate the need to heal. That's pretty much the entire point of the distinction. Health = no regen or recovery on-the-fly. Stamina = recovery on the fly. Thus, if stamina didn't regenerate, there would literally be no point in its existence as separate from health. You'd just have 2, redundant health bars. "If you run out of stamina, you die. If you run out of health, you die. Have fun! 8D!" Does that make sense? By all means, you're welcome to your opinion about it. I'm not trying to tell you you can't feel bad about the design or something. But, if you've got an objective problem with it, there kind of has to be an objective reason for that to work, and I'm not seeing anything that's actually problematic with this particular design's use of stamina regen. Maybe you feel there's a better design, and that's why you don't like it? I would very much like to understand what it is that's fueling your perspective on this, is all. So, if I'm wrong and you haven't misunderstood, then please forgive me, and clarification would be much appreciated (as obviously, at that point, I'm misunderstanding you).

Okay, in answer to Josh's question, yes, it would be Might/Power (as the damage-producing stat). However, in answer to the second part, I would feel equally as weird about Might/Power (Strength... whatever you want to call it) governing ALL damage as I feel about Intellect governing ALL damage. I really, truly believe that the system need not be boiled down to simply "damage" that somehow gets applied to all things. And here's my main reason for believing this: We're already representing the nuances and sources of damage in other ways. You've got 4 different defenses (as I pointed out earlier) which decide when and how damage is applied from various sources/methods (including how MUCH damage is dealt, thanks to the Attack Resolution scale). You've got different weapon types and different armor types (even though the specifics of that are still in flux). Etc. So, it seems like an arbitrarily forced thing to make sure one stat = damage bonus, across the board, when so many other things affect the actual application and generation of damage. So, I can't tell you exactly how to do it, no. But, I firmly believe that we should separate out the aspects of damage. I think it already makes sense for damage to not come directly from a stat, as it's already governed by so many other factors and conditions. So, I think that, in whatever form it occurs, Strength should affect the capability to generate force, and Intellect should affect the intelligent application of that force. For non-physical/spell damage, you could even go with Intellect and Resolve or something (with Resolve acting like a metaphysical Strength, and determining the force/potency of spells and such, including magical healing, etc.). There've been oodles of good ideas tossed around in here on ways in which to allow Strength to play its part in the formula. But, as I said, however it's done, I think that's the best road to be looking at. The best question to be asking. "What should be affected by Strength, and how should that affect damage?" The same goes for other stats. Really, that's what is happening with Perception. Perception affects Accuracy, and accuracy affects damage (by increasing the consistency of normal-damage and/or critical-damage hits). Perception affects damage, but Perception does not = damage. It's not that simple. Each point in Perception doesn't give you +1 to damage. And Strength (OR Intellect) don't need to, either. One thing I'd like to add to the list of suggestions is Attack Resolution range: Strength could inflate your Hit range (by squeezing your Graze range to a smaller size), and Intellect could increase your Crit range (by squeezing your Hit range to a smaller size). For example, if you had no Strength bonus, but an awesome Intellect, then your crit range could be 10, by default, instead of 5. So, the equal-Accuracy-and-enemy-defense baseline would be (miss-graze-hit-crit) 5-45-40-10. Or, if you had a nice Strength bonus, and no Intellect, it could be 5-35-55-5. Or, if you had BOTH (Strength and Intellect example bonuses), it would be 5-35-50-10. Again, that's the base. Meaning that, if the opponent's defense was 5 points higher than your Accuracy, you'd still have 5% chance to crit. Anywho... that's just another thing that could be affected, is all. Doesn't mean it's the only thing that has to be affected. But, I strongly urge Team Obsidian to consider splitting the effects of both Strength and Intellect for the purposes of damage. It's much like the idea behind the stats in the first place, right? If you have an Intelligent Fighter, it won't be a bad Fighter, it'll just be a different Fighter from a Strong one. "Damage" is a very broad thing, and with so many other factors governing its resulting value, I don't think deriving it from more than one stat (or different aspects of it from different stats) would be completely out-of-place here.

^ Agreed that it's hard to actually just go somewhere and read all the currently-known stuff about a given system, because it's all broken up in bits and pieces, here and there, at different times and such for now. I just think it's pointless to judge that statement as if it was meant as anything more than just "for what it's worth" information. In interviews like that, some people are interested in getting into the mind of the person being interviewed. So, he tossed that little tidbit out there, just for what it was worth. I don't at all think it was meant to be some crazy, epiphany-sparking revelation into the heart of PoE's design. Anywho, as for Wizard spells, I'm fairly certain he meant "spells you get access to, in total." As in (and the is PURELY an example): A Priest might get 4 spells at Level 1 (out of all the potential Priest spells). Whereas, a Lvl 1 Wizard might have access to 3 different grimoires, each holding 5 spells. So, that's 15 different spells he COULD cast, depending on the circumstances (with his spells-per-rest "ammo"). So, Wizard: 15. Priest: 4. BUT, the Wizard can only cast those 5 (from a given grimoire) at one time. He can't choose from any spells outside that grimoire, without switching to another grimoire. So then, later on, that Priest might be Level 5, and be up to 20 spells. He can now cast ANY of those 20 spells at any given point in time. But, the LvL 5 Wizard will still be limited to his currently-equipped grimoire (which, at that point, might contain 10 spells instead of 5). And, of course, maybe he can potentially get 5 or 6 different grimoires at that point (not that he can necessarily equip that many... probably not), giving him access to 40 or 50 or so spells (some of the spells would probably be redundant between grimoires -- as in, Grimoire A has Fireball, plus 9 other spells, and Grimoire B has Fireball, plus 9 DIFFERENT spells). So, basically, Wizards -- between all their different grimoires -- CAN cast from a much larger total pool of spells, but can only cast from the limited set specifically in their equipped grimoire, at any given moment. While Priests and such get a smaller total pool of spells from which to be able to cast at a given level, but have immediate access to that whole pool, instead of being limited to a grimoire's worth of immediately-ready-to-cast spells. I hope that makes sense. As far as the spell "ammo" -- the number of spells they can cast per rest/per encounter -- I don't really know how that differs. I would guess that it's going to be about the same for Wizards and non-Wizard casters, because the spell-access differences already set them apart. However, I don't really know.

I get not wanting to turn in-the-moment decisions into pre-conditioned routines. But, I hope that what does still make sense as pre-conditioned routines is still able to be AI-controlled. Stuff like "When X enemies are around you, switch to this stance." But not "When X enemies are clumped, AUTOMATICALLY CAST FIREBALL!", or "when enemies move near a destructible environment piece (explosive/volatile device, etc.), DESTROY THAT OBJECT WITH PERFECT TIMING, AI!" But, I don't want them running around like idiots, not even handling the most basic of functions on their own. A very mild bit of AI would be quite nice. I mean, if you have something like "When X enemies are near, switch to 'Keep Distance' mode," then your Wizard (for example) will automatically stop what he's doing to begin fleeing when, say, 4 enemies close on him. But, he's most likely just going to run generally away from them, so he might even put himself into a worse situation if you just leave him completely alone to his AI control. So, the human tactical choice of where he should go is still up the player, and still makes a lot of difference. But, the basics of "Don't just stand there when 4 brutes with swords charge your arse" are taken care of. I'd like that level of AI control. Just to sort of handle basic party behavior in between those in-the-moment decisions, so you're not HAVING to keep the game paused and/or keep constant queues of commands, just to make sure your characters never do something so dumb that they arbitrarily die or screw stuff up.

Heh heh heh... My bad, Kjaamor. Guys, apparently we're not allowed to discuss anything contextual to this topic. All we can say is "Yes, Obsidian should use volunteer voice actors," or "No, they shouldn't." And only one of those answers is correct, so that's all there is to it. Also, all those 11-year-old prodigy singers, and high school freshman athletes who are super awesome at their sport, don't actually exist. They're all just figments of our imagination, as clearly, it is impossible for anyone to be skilled and knowledgeable in the art of voice-acting and/or sound recording unless they have a masters in Voice Recording and work in a professional voice studio. Also, if you're already using a sound studio for your non-volunteer voice actors (because they probably don't all own their own sound studios), it would somehow cost a DIFFERENT amount of money to use that sound studio for a volunteer person, instead of a "professional"ly-established voice actor. And finally, all of that can't possibly just mean that it's quite possible for there to exist a human capable of delivering quality voice-acting who is willing to volunteer to do so, and NOT mean that it's still probably less trouble and more feasible for Obsidian to just stick to established professionals. Thanks for clearing that up, Kjaamor. You're the best. ^_^

I'm not so sure that's quite the case. It's one thing for a particular overall build to be nonviable or less viable, but another thing, entirely, for a whole STAT to be nonviable. If you're an ignorant Fighter, there's another Fighter out there who possesses something useful to his Fightery that you do not. I firmly believe Strength needs to have its effects on damage/attacks, as I've stated in not-so-few words above, so we're in agreement, there. But, that's just part of common sense. "There are just dump stats" isn't really common sense. And, I think people tend to not really get the fact that stats exist in abstraction, whereas reality doesn't separate everything into stats. Sure, there are strong people in the world who don't care about being smart, but that doesn't mean smarts is a real-life "dump stat" for them. A dump stat is one that blatantly provides SIGNIFICANTLY less value, in ANY capacity, to your specific character. Worrying about not having any dump stats isn't a dumb thing to do. It's common sense. A system that allows you to pump everything in Strength and take a 4 in Intellect doesn't have to not-allow you to get something from putting more points into Intellect. The allowances aren't for "you," the individual. No one cares if one person just cares about damage and offense and HP, ever, and never explores any other builds. If one person doesn't value what a stat does, then awesome. They can do that no matter what. But, some other player, out of the entire player spectrum, who DOES want to take advantage of some "non-typical" build, should get to do so, so long as it makes sense for that to be possible. It's no different from anything else in the whole game: DnD schools of magic. Specializing in Illusion should be just as viable as specializing in Evocation. Doesn't mean nothing's different no matter what you choose. It means that there aren't 2 uses for the entirety of Illusion magic, and 70 uses for the entirety of Evocation magic.

Oh. Oops... *ashamed face with droopy ears*

Hey, non-conductive material (I was just going for an antithesis of sparky... 8P), that's fantastic. I'm not sure where we've disagreed on anything, or what immersion has to do with anything. o_o

Not necessarily. You have no idea how people procedurally beget their designs. They could just go "Okay, obviously, a Mage should be squishy and have really powerful spells, and suck with melee weaponry... so, let's just start him with 40 health instead of 120, and 2 attack power instead of 7." There's a big difference between starting them both at 80 health, then adjusting accordingly, and just starting your prototype for each class with different things, then trying to balance them however you want from there. Both are completely possible. If you think that starting them all equal is the only reasonable way of doing it, then be thankful Josh Sawyer is reasonable, as opposed to unreasonable. Besides, he wasn't saying "Hey guys, I just want to stress how different and awesome I am compared to everyone else when it comes to designing things." He was just pointing out how he arrives at his design ideas. Also, you didn't "pull them apart" in your example. You initialized all their values and attributes at completely different amounts. You didn't start with Wizards doing the same thing as Fighters, then arrive at spells-over-weapons somehow. You just started with them doing completely different things. Besides, Wizards can still use weapons. They just don't use them the same way as Fighters. Which is kind of the point. Exactly how to make them different, as opposed to just over-arching ways to make them different (i.e. "Wizards will cast spells and Fighters won't! LOLZ!").

The problem with investors is, for every dollar you get up-front from an investor, you've got to earn that much more money above your margin just to make them happy. i.e. if you get 30 million from investors, well... you can't just make a 30-million-dollar quality game instead of a 4-million-dollar quality one. You've got to make a game that earns you enough money to get them back their money PLUS profits, and for there to be money left over for you to have your profits, too. If PoE ends up making 7 million dollars, then that's 3 million above the 4-million cost of making it. Whereas, if they'd gotten investors, who couldn't care less about the game, as long as it makes profits and they get back more than they put in, they'd owe back money. Basically, this causes a problem at some point, for certain games, because, there are only so many people who want to play a particular type of game. Take Civilization. If you spend 50-million dollars making Civilization, you've got to sell so many copies of the game that you earn much more than 50 million in revenue, so that you can pay your investors' returns, THEN still have made a profit yourself. Meanwhile, only so many people in the world are going to buy Civilization. Doesn't matter how good of quality it is. And, as for the shine wearing off... If the shine wears off, then the Kickstarter isn't successful, and development doesn't even properly begin, and you move on to some other option. If they just-plain can't make, for example, isometric-style party-based RPGs anymore, then they can't. If there's no demand, there's no demand. Getting a bunch of investors doesn't help that. Because, if enough people don't want to Kickstart a game, there probably aren't enough people out there to want to buy it if it was funded any other way (again, to satisfy investors AND developer profits). It's not 1:1, obviously, but out of the total number of people interested in paying money for a given product (that's not even a necessary product, mind you), some percentage of them is going to be willing to fund it up front to prevent it from never being created. Here's an experiment: Put the next Call of Duty game on Kickstarter, and tell the populous "If you don't help us hit 100 million dollars, there won't be another Call of Duty game" and see how many people fund it.

Didn't even think of that. Scratch that whole "Maybe Strength helps you steady your aim of a heavy crossbow" thing I said, as Dex already covers that. I'm glad you pointed that out.

@jamoecw: I'm not sure what logic "this logic" is that has a problem, because I addressed the fact that strength doesn't directly translate into the damage of many a weapon type, including swords. However, it is still a factor. Especially with certain swords. I guarantee you a 7'4", 300lb muscle-mountain of a man who swings a claymore at you is going to do more damage (just from the sheer swing) than a 5'5", 150lb guy with just average strength swinging the same claymore in the same fashion. It's not that a slicing weapon doesn't rely on force. It's simply that the force is applied along the blade rather than outward from it. It's not about strength being more significant in fueling the damage of, say, a katana swing, than accuracy/proper swinging. It's about it still being a factor. In fact, what I was thinking of would ideally involve different weapons/weapon-types bearing different Strength modifiers/multipliers, etc. A katana might have .5, while a maul might have 2. So, if your Strength Damage bonus is 10, the katana would only do 5 more damage, while the maul would do 20 more. Those are example numbers, to illustrate the relationship, and mean absolutely nothing outside of the context of an entire weapon/combat system with its own balance. Anywho... Basically, we've already seen systems in which Strength is the only thing that determines damage. Then, we've seen systems in which only one stat determines damage for any given class, but that stat differs between classes (Rogues derive damage from Dex, Wizards from Int, Warriors from Str, etc.). Why not a system that represents each thing? Accuracy/"dexterity" is already represented by the attack roll, mostly. If you happen to roll really high, you hit your foe in the eye or the spot between their armor or something, and this is represented by a critical. So, basically, the "where exactly did this hit" is represented, which is what I mean by accuracy. And even more so in PoE, because you have full misses, grazes, regular hits, AND criticals. So, the more accurate you are, consistently, the more consistently you score what amounts to "damage bonuses." Then, now, you've got Intellect modifying your damage. Just generally being smarter and therefore aiming more intelligently (and not necessarily more skillfully, as with Dexterity/accuracy), and thus consistently producing more effective blows/strikes, aka more damage. Another damage bonus. So, why not force? If something strikes you on the helmet, instead of the eye socket, but strikes you 10-times more powerfully than usual, would it not produce greater damage? For every action there is an equal-yet-opposite re-action, is there not? In other words, hitting you between armor segments instead of right on an armor plate, with the thrust of a sword, is going to be more effective, regardless of how much force there is. But, then, hitting you between armor segments with even more force is going to be even MORE effective than hitting you there with far less force. This is all I'm getting at. Not "we should arbitrarily make Strength affect EVERYTHING to a great degree! 8D!". Heck, it doesn't even have to be sheer damage bonuses. What if, much like the accuracy representation, increased Strength provided some circumstantial boost to critical chance? And/or knockback/knockdown/stagger chance? Okay, your broadsword isn't doing MORE slashing damage from your harder swings, but that force is still going somewhere, right? Maybe we even work in the benefit of having stronger muscles for control, as in holding the weight of a rifle/heavy crossbow steady. So, maybe, on that particular weapon, your Strength bonus actually translates to an accuracy bonus in your attacks? At whatever rate you choose. Sure, it's a bit more complex, but it's still the same for every class. "Strength does THIS to rifles/heavy crossbows, and THIS to hammers/mauls, and THIS to bows, etc." *shrug* Pretending Strength has no impact (pun intended) on anything attack-related is just as arbitrary a choice as pretending it has a major impact on everything attack-related. That's all I'm saying. It feels like Strength shouldn't do NOTHING in relation to combat actions/attacks/weapon-types. etc. I mean, all other things aside, riddle me this: How weird would it be if your 20 Strength, 7 Intellect Monk was a pansy, but your 20 Intellect, 7 Strength Monk was like Uber Melee Attack God? Because, as it stands, even purely unarmed attacks -- basically just your muscles as weapons -- wouldn't have their damage or effectiveness in any way affected by Strength values. I think Strength should affect something, and then that something should, in turn, affect a subset of weapons/attacks/abilities to a variable degree.

If non-professional voice actors never voice-acted, then no one would ever level up to the rank of "professional voice actor." Just sayin'... u_u Imagine if sports worked like that. "I KNOW he can run the 40 in 1 second, but he's not already a PRO, So we don't want him!"

Sorry, I've got to correct this now, in light of Josh Sawyer's postings in the Attribute Theory thread. Deflection will still vary a lot based on Class, but the other three (Fortitude/Reflexes/Willpower) will be mostly (if not fully) dependent upon Attribute values. Apparently it's been changed, and I hadn't read that before pointing out the old system. Sorry about that.

^ Dude... you do know how Health and Stamina work, right? The "regeneration" of stamina is just you no longer being about to pass out because you're no longer exerting yourself (because combat is over). It's not the sealing up of wounds and healing of your tissue and organs. If you're down to 10/100 health, you're down to 10/100 health. You can have 15-hits worth of Stamina (for example), and the next hit can still outright kill you. Do you know how tedious it would be if you had to manually heal your Stamina, AND your Health? Very. I'm not understanding this repulsion to the idea of Stamina regen, at all. People are acting like it's making it so that you never have to worry about healing or something. But, Stamina is the thing you have to worry about in a given battle/encounter (even if you have large amounts of Health left), while Health is the thing you have to worry about in the long run (why you'd have to stop your trip to heal up, or turn around and go back to town instead of pushing onward, etc.). If they both served one of those roles, it'd be pointless to have both of them. From what we know, your Stamina only regens QUICKLY outside of combat/encounters. With the exception of items/spells/abilities that give you bursts of regen/"healing" to your stamina, in-combat. Your Health doesn't regen, ever, as far as we know, and you can't quickly top it off with potions and spells like you can Stamina.

Well, what if your journal automatically recorded the "tidbits" we'll call them, but they were separate from the "obviously specifically related directly to a significant quest" stuff? So, whenever you were working on a quest (say, trying to find out what happened to some guy), you could flip over to your "random stuff I've overheard and whatnot" section, and flag/highlight/mark bits that you felt were potential leads for your current quest. Like "Suzy has been hearing strange noises in the barn at night, but her pa's been out to check it out, only to find nothing out of the ordinary." If that has any significance to anything in the game, I'd like to have it "automatically" recorded (assumed that my characters at least noted it somewhere) by the game's UI (journal). BUT, I just don't want the game sticking it under some quest title. "You have no idea what these sounds could be, but this UI's telling you that investigating them is DEFINITELY related to finding out what happened to this missing person." That's all a bit silly. That and it would be nice to not have to scroll through pages and pages and pages of miscellaneous stuff whenever I go "wait... didn't someone say something about sounds in a barn a while back?" to find out specifically what info I had acquired. It'd be nice if, whenever I thought that might be something I'd want to investigate at the time, I could bookmark it or something, so that, functionally, I could go straight to a sorting of "important" tidbits, rather than just looking through all of them in their chronological sorting to find the one I wanted. *shrug* Just me thoughts... I personally don't feel that shirking all the responsibility of simply recording information onto the player is the answer. I just think it needs to be left up to us to actually discern the significance of that info, and we need tools to be able to sort it, rather than just having a big amalgamation of tidbits that we're powerless to organize. Oooh! Maybe once it's discovered that such-and-such info is definitely related to such-and-such quest (like, you go check out the barn, at a certain time of day and/or using a "see invisible" spell or something, and you find out it's the missing person, or someone you interrogate who is affiliated with the missing person), that little miscellaneous tidbit gets moved to the "Find this Missing Person" quest log/section. So that, once you've completed that quest, it gets checked off/marked as complete, so that "sounds from the barn" bit isn't still just floating around in your miscellaneous section. *Shrug*

All I can really say is, while it's functionally sound, it's a little saddening that the physical aspect of Strength is kinda of going *poof* I mean, I get it. It makes sense under the hood. But, it's almost like we're only representing half of damage, now. Sure, bows and slicey weapons and spells don't derive their damage from strength, but lots of stuff does. I mean, if you boil it down, you've got two aspects to the abstraction that is damage: 1) Where/how you're striking something (is it in between armor plates, or right on the front of the breastplate? Are you just hitting them with your katana like a baseball bat, or swinging it in an optimally slicing fashion, and letting the sword's design do its thing? etc.) 2) How much force is being applied in the strike. Even slicing with a katana, a weakling isn't going to be able to put enough force into the swing for it to slice as well as it should. Or, a weakling with a bow isn't going to be able to draw the bow as far -- to store up as much potential energy to be released into the projectile. Of course, with a crossbow, you've got pretty much no Strength effect. Not abstractly. Sure, I guess if you had a heavy enough crossbow, you wouldn't be able to ready it. But, you're not firing the projectile. The crossbow is. Same with spells. You're not physically transferring the strength of your muscles into the force of spells. So, those are still both covered by Intellect. You aim the crossbow, and the spells, and you intelligently weave the spells (much like mixing a grenade's powder or something -- the more intelligently you know how to make a powder mixture, the more effective the explosion from the same amount of substance.) So, I dunno. If it stays the same, it stays the same. But, my feedback is to definitely keep considering the possibilities. Maybe Strength could have a milder affect. Instead of just "damage," it could affect an aspect of damage, with Intellect affecting another aspect. Then, weapons (and/or spells/abilities) would either have one, or the other, or both. To put it simply, if a sword's base damage is 10, then a Fighter with 20 Strength and 3 Intellect might gain a +2 to his base damage (with that sword). Similarly, a Fighter with 3 Strength and 20 Intellect might gain a +2 to his base damage. However, a Fighter with 20 Strength and 20 Intellect might gain +5 to his base damage. Of course, the uber-Fighter (20 STR, 20 INT) would only get his +2 from INT to a crossbow, or even a bow. I always liked the restriction on, what was it, the recurve bows in DnD? The ones that allowed Strength to apply? But, only so much, based on their design. Anywho... I don't think that would be too convoluted. Just off the top of my head, you could have a property for both things: Strength benefit and Intellect benefit. Intellect would still pretty much affect, to some degree, all potential damage with all weapons/attacks. So, even a brute Fighter couldn't dump Intellect without giving up something. But, we could still make burly Strength people without HAVING to pump stuff into Intellect just to have any effect on damage at all. *shrug* Like I said, just food for thought. Another really minor thought I had was, what if Strength affected Stamina and Constitution affected Health, instead of the way it is now? OR, if you wanted to get crazy, what if everyone had the same amount of health, and Strength affected Stamina while Constitution affected the ratio of Stamina damage to Health damage? That's probably a huge clash with the current design, I know. Just some thoughts, is all... My main issue is with Strength not affecting damage at all, and not so much it not being the sole attribute for damage. Which, really still isn't even that big of a deal. It just... feels so off. To have Strength only affect survivability and carry-ability. EDIT: Splitting up the effects of Strength and Intellect on damage is very similar to splitting up the effects of attacks into 4 defenses (deflection/fortitude/reflexes/willpower). The effects of Strength and Intellect, respectively, could be something like "Force" and "Effectiveness." Much like the game pointing out what attacks target what defenses, it could just point out what damage values draw from what properties (force, effectiveness, or both). Or, if Intellect ends up affecting literally every damage source available, then all you'd really have to toggle is Force (Strength's effect). Either something would benefit from that, or it wouldn't. An easy thing to indicate.