Lephys

I'm sure it would be an easy enough thing to, in essence, "toggle" with some code.

I actually already agreed with that exact situation. The ability to restore a burst of health is quite the tactical ability. In the grand scheme of things, it's very much like a time-altering block ("Ha-HAH! That crossbow bolt's effects on this person suddenly NEVER HAPPENED!"). However, that in absolutely no way changes the fact that an entire role dedicated to constantly granting people bursts of undamage is not necessary, except as a balance to the design of the expectation for characters to NEED more health than they actually possess. No one's against the sheer ability to heal. It's the role which is a bit unnecessary. As "It's fun and tactically different to be able to heal" is already covered by the sheer ability, without "this is what you do all the time, and what your class progression is completely centered around" being thrown into the mix. There is no fundamental difference between the relationship of potions to the character in the single-player Diablo-esque scenario and the relationship between the healer ROLE and the other characters in the healer-class RPG scenario. Either the desire to be a health battery demands inadequate health pools, or inadequate health pools demand a health battery. If you remove either one, the other becomes blatantly arbitrary and imbalancing. Also, I'd just like to emphasize that I'm simply making a point here. Nothing more. There are games without dedicated healers, and all's well, so obviously they aren't needed. That isn't to say I'm just trying to make a big deal out of this, and I don't play games with dedicated healers. All that aside, they're either necessary, or they aren't. And they aren't. Not without being arbitrarily MADE to be necessary. Honestly, I just wish that, at the very least, they were given a better offensive capability-to-healing ratio. The problem you run into is either: A) They're a weak, obvious target, so the enemies focus fire them and take them out, leaving the rest of your party screwed because the game's design made sure it fabricated a need for a dedicated healer (all because you lost a single party member), OR B) The enemies simply focus fire the people your healer is trying to keep not-dead, basically burst-killing them, leaving your weak, lack-of-offensive-capability healer to pointlessly toss pebbles at the enemy. Obviously those things could happen to varying degrees, but I had to use slight extremes for the factors at play to actually be evident.

^ That's why I said it's actually fundamentally logical. And that's why we see a difference between self defense and straight-up murder, at the very least. Sure, lots of people ignorantly jump to conclusions. That doesn't mean that "morality" represents such an act. Only that some people use it to represent such an act. It's very similar to any organization/faction today. Catholic priests molested boys? OH NO! CATHOLICS MOLEST LITTLE BOYS!" No. Some people, who happened to be Catholic, decided to molest boys and/or cover it up. Even from the rest of Catholics. Unless they're a hivemind, they obviously can still act independently. But, people tend to not like unknowns, so some of them figure it's best to just go ahead and make the association.

That's exactly my point. It's already done, it's just a matter of extent, now. If you can spend 7,000 minutes shopping for a sword, and time isn't going to flow, then why worry so hard about time flowing constantly for the purposes of maintaining the integrity of time-sensitivity? That seems like doing things the hard way, just to wind up with the easy way's results anyway (but in more annoying form). Exactly. Furthermore, why do you spend more than 5-10 minutes shopping for things in town? Or spend more than some reasonable maximum amount of time getting through a situation? Why does it matter if one player takes an hour to get through 5 combat encounters' worth of area, and it takes another player only 40 minutes? As long as they're both not intentionally ignoring that area and running off to perform other tasks significant to the world at large (however locally affecting)? You don't care if someone dillies around at a merchant stall for an hour, but you DO care if someone dillies around in combat, or in between combat encounters, or any other encounters/dialogues/events of any significance whatsoever? Seems a bit contradictory of a stance, is all. Put simply, if you're going to "pause time" for player convenience, and lose out on "OH NOES! TIME'S ALWAYS FLOWING, AND WE HAVE TO HURRY!", then why put in "hard time limits"? "You've only got 48 hours to save this girl!... You know... plus however long you take to shop around town and rest!" But, man... once you set foot outside that wall, you'd sure as heck'd better pause the game for every sneeze, every NOSE ITCH YOU SCRATCH, because heaven help you if you miss rescuing that girl by 13 seconds!" Bi-polar game design, much? Heh. *Shrug*. I just personally see that as quite self-contradicting. Maybe it has value for other people? In real life, you DO know such things. You know it's POSSIBLE to hurry enough and alter the outcome of a given situation, even if it doesn't happen. The game is scripted so that, even if you somehow hack the game and teleport to the destination, you have no option to alter the situation. That's the difference. The game can only represent an option with hard-coding. If it's going to go around suggesting choices all day long, and never actually providing them, then the player's going to start assuming pretty quickly that all these "time limits" aren't real. So, in whatever fashion, the game needs to let the player know that "hurry" actually means "hurry," and not just make-believe hurry. Methinks you're getting a more specific meaning of "let the player know" than I'm actually suggesting. RL also isn't designed. A game is. RL doesn't guarantee there's going to be enough stuff ahead so as to REQUIRE a liberal supply of well-being before setting out on a "quest arc," etc. Also, if you're gonna roll with that argument, then why stop there? Real life doesn't wait on you, so why should the game? Didn't even play the game today? It should simply check your system clock when you fire your compy back up and play the game again, and adjust the in-game-world time accordingly. It's not like you paid money so that you could enjoy a game at your leisure or anything. Also, we probably shouldn't be able to pause the game during sequences of urgency. You'll just have to decide whether or not your bladder's more important than that kidnapped girl, or the defense of a town, etc. Why does it need to be easy? It could be equally as difficult no matter WHAT the player's happenstancical rest/quest situation, if you abstract it. Or, we could just throw those cards in the air, and play 'em however they fall. I'm not seeing a particularly overpowering point in the second option. It's not binary. The player MUST have control over SOMETHING in a given situation. No one wants to play through a game in which you just guess your whole way through, and never actually have a hand to play. Just because you can't always address all factors that you'd like to with the resources at your disposal doesn't mean you don't need to be able to affect any of them. That's what mutually exclusive content is for. You encounter a number of splits off the path, ahead of you, and you get to pick one. You have the capaciity to travel down one path and do something about whatever's at the end of that path. You have to at least have SOME idea as to what path generally leads where, or what you'll probably find if you go that way. Very general info. If not, then in this choice metaphor, you're not choosing. You're just playing eenie-meenie moe. It's one thing to have a choice between attempting to hold a city gate and running off to find someone in particular in the city, and it's another thing entirely to automatically hold off the gate or automatically find a person and easily rescue them. Just because you know what you CAN do doesn't mean you're guaranteed to do it. It doesn't make it somehow a dialogue option that you click, and all's well. Maybe you go to rescue a person in the city, and as an AUTOMATIC result, the gate is going to get over-run much sooner than it would if you stayed and fought. But, if you stay and fight, the person you might want to rescue is DEFINITELY going to get slaughtered. That's two definite detriments. If you don't balance that with two definite positives, then you've just got a depressing game on your hands, filled with hopeless choices. If you're going to leave the gate less defended (definitely), then you should DEFINITELY have a CHANCE to save the person you're going after. And if you're definitely going to abandon that person and they're going to die, then you should definitely have a chance to hold the gate. That's how important choices work in a designed game. It has to quantify what you can and can't do, just like it quantifies your abilities/stats/skills. Why would you put 15 more points into a skill if you didn't KNOW that would pay off somewhere, somehow, in the game? If you're INTENTIONALLY designing the clock to accommodate ONLY the players who don't mess around, then why does it even exist in the first place? Again... If one player LITERALLY takes 1 minute and 47 seconds to run outside the city and engage some bandits, and another player takes 2 minutes and 1 second, why should the second player "fail" the quest? Why even set a timer like that? I'm all for ways in which to fail the quest. Like failing at sneaking, so they detect you and kill the hostage, or handling things poorly (like letting them catch you in a lie in some kind of negotiation) so that they get angry and kill the hostage, etc. But why TIME?! Why ACTUAL, PLAYER TIME?! That's what you're not giving any reason for whatsoever. So the player who can do it 14 seconds faster can feel better about himself? Neither place made the choice "dally around and not worry about the situation," and yet there's still going to be a range of times in which such a thing is completed, depending on party makeup, individual player skill, possibly health/rest status, equipment status, etc. So, unless you say "Well, even for a slow player, it only takes 3 minutes to do this, so... let's set the timer to 5 minutes, just to make sure," in which case you've just ruined the urgency factor anyway, what's the point in setting an EXACT timer, with consta-flowing time? How is that important and useful? If you leave the city in ANY other direction than toward the situation, or if you go engage in whole new quest briefings over tea with people, or if you decide to go drink the night away at the tavern, then the game can easily decide that you've DEFINITELY shrugged off the urgency of the situation. The only couple of things that are even remotely necessary to prepare for urgently tackling the situation are equipment purchases and resting. Pretty much ANYTHING else could result in "oh well, time passed, and bad things happen." Abstractly. Please, describe to me how actual stop-watching the player objectively handles things better than all that stuff, and how I'm full of nonsense, and I'll gladly continue. Otherwise, I don't know what else to say. It seems like you're intentionally thinking of all the worst-case factors for a system that doesn't use hard timers. For what it's worth, my example, above, of deciding to leave the city gate to a smaller defense force, seems like a pretty valid potential use of some kind of hard timer, to some degree. Maybe every minute that passes, another guard at the gate dies. Or, maybe that's even affected by prior choices (like who to hire, if it's your stronghold under attack, or how you've potentially helped bolster the ranks of whomever's defending that gate now, or helped equip them, etc.). Timers have their uses, but I don't think they should be the go-to mechanic for urgency in a cRPG.

*slowly waves hand* "These are not the druids you are looking for..."

I think we're going about this all wrong. We're not looking at the word "project" for all its potential, here. Eternity Projector. It's a perfect Fate/fabric-of-existence metaphor! Darkness falls upon the land when something corrupts the film and/or prevents it from being properly exposed! And the projector projects it all into existence!

Unceasingly Neverending Infinite Eternity: The Lightless Shadows of Blackened Darkness Eternity: The Quest for the Blown World Fuse

I pretty much voted for all of them. I think it's some kind of crazy ****tail.

... crafted from individually-enchanted rings! o_o... ... Dear gods... *Latin Choir Music of Hopeless Apocalypticness* I'm calling this. This is the supernatural event our protagonist witnesses at the beginning of the narrative! Someone trying this, and the horrific, chaotic results!

One thing I don't quite follow is how taking out a "bad" person always gets described as "murdering someone in cold blood," as opposed to, what, killing someone without killing them? If you beat them to death with a shovel, then maybe that doesn't say much about your vengeance issues, etc., but it makes them no less dead. Anywho, the difference with humans is that we can choose things. If a fire breaks out, what do we do? We "fight" the fire. The fire is rampantly destroying stuff, and the only way to prevent stuff from being rampantly destroyed is by "killing" the fire. Of course, the fire isn't sentient, AND as a result, it cannot help but rampantly destroy things. It has no desire, and it made no choice. However, a human KNOWS it can either destroy a bunch of stuff, or not-destroy a bunch of stuff. It doesn't just constantly destroy things in its naturally-existing state. Therefore, if someone goes around setting fires all over the place, and you can't stop them any other way, you have to kill the source of the fires. You're not "murdering a human in cold blood." You're intentionally stopping the source of aimless, voluntary destruction. Yes, ideally, we'd just never kill anyone. Ever. But, also ideally, no one would ever have any reason at all to need to be killed. If a psycho killer who just loves killing living things takes out that firestarting destructive person, then the effects of that person's death (in contrast to their constant decision to rampantly destroy like a chaotic fire) would be "good" to lots of people. But, if that psycho killer didn't care about the fact that he stopped rampant destruction, at all (or even wished he could've killed the guy WHILE continuing the rampant destruction), then his motives and actions would be seen as "evil," because they're in direct opposition to the desired state of things that was benefitted by the lack of a guy rampantly destroying everything. No, I don't think any of it is somehow cosmically good or evil... It's not about filling some meter with goodness. It's fundamentally a battle of logic/reason, with upper layers of emotion/psyche reaction. It's the same reason almost anyone in the world has some sense of "honor," even if we choose to ignore it. Almost every single person (possibly every single person) recognizes that feeling/connection. If someone save's your life, you might be an "evil bastard" and not return the favor somehow. But, when it comes to an opportunity to do so, it's something you'll consider, even then. It's not like it just won't even pop into your head. *shrug* Obviously we're not going to explain the entire human condition in a couple of paragraphs, haha. No one's even been able to do it with entire books, thus far. I don't think it's because we're wrong, though. I just think it's because it's so complicated. It's like an equation. Every single time you want to evaluate it, even if you've got the perfect equation, it doesn't mean you don't still have to plug in all the situation's variable values and solve the equation, which is extremely complex and could take weeks to solve, just with one set of values.

I will admit that I am moderately irked when I can only wear ONE ring/earring, etc. And, not that I'm suggesting it's wrong for you to NOT be able to, but I think it'd be cool if you could wear two different gloves/bracers/boots. Who says things that are WORN in pairs must always be ENCHANTED in pairs? Oh, and obviously, if you CAN wear more than one ring on each hand, you'd still have to have one main ring... you know... to RULE them ALLLLL!!!! And in the darkness bind them! "Hey, what the! Guys! Turn the light out! I was TRYing... to BIND them... u_u!"

That isn't at all the point I was making, and I don't agree. Magic isn't inherently a paradox. It could simply be something that COULD exist, but doesn't. Like a unicorn. A unicorn doesn't not-exist because it's logically impossible. Look at an atomic bomb. Who the hell would've thought there was THAT much energy in atoms? That doesn't even make much sense. Magic and science are almost the same thing, except magic represents interactions with physics that don't actually exist. It's theoretically possible to build anti-gravity stuff to hover about. That's levitation. The only difference is that it's not done by magical power. Just really fantastical science. In other words, all paradoxes are things that don't exist, but all things that don't exist aren't paradoxes. The fact that we can't manipulate ethereal energy into telekinetic force doesn't mean that for such energy to exist would be a paradox. We turn lightning into force with electric motors. The only difference being that lightning happens to exist. Magical energy doesn't. Sure, there are plenty of magical systems out there that make no sense. That doesn't mean that magic, inherently, can't color inside the lines of logic. Nothing HAS to be logical, no matter whether it's fictional or real. A person in the real world can go stab someone else in the face, because rainbows. But that doesn't exactly get us anywhere, now does it? Nature doesn't DECIDE to be logical. It just is. 4 is 4, and 5 is 5, because. We didn't design reality, but we design our own fictional realities, and you're suggesting that attempting to have them make sense is folly? Again, I go to a unicorn. Simply because a unicorn doesn't actually exist in real life, does this mean that if I'm going to put a unicorn into a fantasy world, it doesn't matter if it just arbitrarily floats upside down everywhere for no reason at all, or walks like a regular horse? I'll just put in a flying squirrel that, when angered, has the ability to expand to 73 times the size of the planet upon which it dwells, annihilating the world. Because fiction, right? Let's just throw reason out the window, because we couldn't possibly design a reasonable world.

I think the painting works best when it's already got other constraints. Like... Flamewall. Why does it have to be perfectly straight? Seems like you can produce 20 feet of fire, in a line, so you can produce 20 feet of fire in ANY-shaped line. So, it'd be kinda like laying out rope, only the rope is magical floor-flames. But, with a radial spell, I wouldn't want to paint the circle. A circle is already nice and efficient. But, ehhh, ooh! Cone spells! What if you could widen them at the cost of range? 90-degree cone that goes out to 25 feet, or a 180-degree cone that goes out to only 10 feet, for example? Or, back to flamewall, if you can cover 9 floor tiles worth of floor in fire, why do they have to be perfectly aligned? Why can't you make a "vertical" line, a "horizontal" line, a diagonal line, OR a 9-square shape of fire? The same with typical floor-coating stuff, like Grease. Why is it ALWAYS the same shape? If you're in a hallway, 1-person wide, you still just cast a big 30ft circle of grease, so about 80% of it is lost on a lack of targetable floor. What if you could stretch it out to cover that whole narrow hallway, or widen it back out when you're in the open? Or, potentially, "paint" it out until you've used up all the square-footage of Grease you can produce? The last option is the least likely, there. Like I said, painting works better with things that are already constrained to lines and the like. Because it's basically pathing.

^ Heh. I dunno know how to get into it very well with words and whatnot, but some of the things we think are "great" are, for some reason, very seemingly negative things. Kind of like how we sometimes want things t exist that scare the crap out of us so that we can feel thrills. Or how we don't want to get hit by a tornado, but we yearn to witness its destructive power.

Yeah, I would go with some kind of interference. Makes sense with lots of other kind of energy, so why not with magical energy? It might even be interesting if you COULD wear up to 4 rings on each hand (or 5, with thumb rings? *shrug*), but each additional ring you put on the same hand dampens the effect of all rings on that hand. Kind of like running a bunch of powerful electrical signal cables right next to each other. *shrug* So, if you found a bunch of rings, you could opt for more different bonuses at once, OR for fewer-yet-more-potent bonuses.

The problem comes from it being a game. In real life, you push on and do what needs doin', finding the strength to go on. In the game, you're "out of abilities" for the day, because that's how the game needs to abstract things for other reasons. But then, if you go rest, which is the only way to regain your abilities, so that you can functionally have any sort of chance of overcoming kidnappers and resistance, you advance time. You see, time is quite a factor in real life, but real life time doesn't translate perfectly into in-game time. It's understandable that some things taking place in the game world (while game world time is ticking away) should take longer, because of the player's real-life interaction with them, than they would if the characters were just doing them in game world time and that was that. Looking at equipment, etc. The player must read everything on the screen and learn about all the differences in equipment. The player must click his characters about the screen, searching for appropriate markers and things, while the characters, themselves, could actually see MUCH farther than the edge of the screen, and would know which way to go much more quickly and specifically than the player can, etc. Therefore, allowing the player only so much time for the characters to get to the goal under the game world's already abstracted time flow (as compared to real life), doesn't always work like it should. Sure, silly things happen when none of it is absolute, either, but, look at it this way: If you get somewhere with 7,000,000 abstracted hour to spare (but the game doesn't tell you), then is your experience ruined? If you went after that quest (kidnappers, or whatever) "immediately," then you've obviously placed priority on that, in the context of the game world, even if you're taking the time to eat a fresh slice of pizza at your keyboard, without pausing, in between every combat encounter on the way there. If you get there too late, then you OBVIOUSLY didn't place priority on getting there. There is no question. If there's a hard time limit, then, like you said, you probably shouldn't even know what it is. So, if you get there too late, despite your best effort, then how are you to even know that it's POSSIBLE to not get there too late? What good does that serve? You can say "Well, you should've gone and healed up BEFORE randomly finding out that there was a kidnapping, u_u," but that doesn't really serve much. The game is about making choices, not randomly watching things occur beyond your control. Not that some things aren't beyond your control, but, I don't know what's gained by some seconds on a clock actually determined whether or not all the abstracted things you did were fast enough or not, even after you've already chosen not to **** around before handling some urgent situation. If the game had a "Just make preparations and get there as fast as you possibly can!" button for your party, then it wouldn't be so bad. But then, that would defeat the purpose of all those systems being designed for player interaction. Not when nobody knows about it, it doesn't. It just generates a lot of "WTF! HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET TO HER IN TIME, THEN?! I WENT AS FAST AS I COULD!"s... Or, you know, just assumptions that the possibility of saving her doesn't even exist. Which I don't think is what we want in an RPG: players who are discouraged from thinking their choices have any signficance.

Whoa whoa whoa... the explanation I gave was absurd, but "Most RPGs have healers, and there's a obviously a good reason for it, otherwise, you know, why?" is a perfectly logical, well-reasoned explanation? Enlighten me, please? Could I trouble you for some details, there? I don't... o_O. Yeah, in isolation, healing is great, and there are all sorts of options. That's so far beside the point. Look, healing only has a purpose if there's a conflict. Right? The most basic conflict you can possibly have is two entities clashing, each with finite ability to be not-dead (health), and each with the ability (presumably finite) to make the other dead. Boom. You've already got that. You can't have combat, and not have that. So, you're already working to take down your foe, while not-dying, yourself. What do games do? "Well, you only do 10 damage per second, and you have 100 health, and your opponent has 1,000 health, so... you're not going to last this fight unless something keeps you going." Boom. Everything was fine, but now they introduced a new problem: Your opponents health surpasses your ability to kill him before he kills you. So you COULD just have some buddies join in, so that, between your collective health bars, and your collective damage, you could kill the thing before it kills any one of you. But no... what do games do? "Hey, you're gonna have a buddy, but instead of actually helping you stop the thing that's damaging you, he's just going to render damage pretty moot, as often as he can." So, now we've got Group A trying to kill Group B, while simultaneously anti-killing itself, and Group B trying to kill Group A, while simultaneously anti-killing IT-self. The only way you could possibly make that more fundamentally redundant is to introduce a THIRD role into the mix -- The Anti-Healer -- who undoes enemy healing effects. They wouldn't simply do damage, though. They can only do damage as a direct result of reversing healing effects. Then, you could even introduce another class, who must tactically turn the fate of the battle by RE-healing the damage that was caused by the healing that had been flipped after it negated the initial damage that was dealt in the first place. Annnnnd you were already doing that. See above. If you're trying to do damage against something that can't harm you, that's not combat. It's a training dummy. If damage isn't done, you're in good health. If it is, you're in worse health. Why does there need to be an ENTIRE role centered around constantly moving health bars back toward full, when you could simply put literally the exact same time and energy into TWO other things already: Pushing enemies' health bars down to zero, or keeping your own health bars from decreasing? You tell me how the equation YEARNS for a damage-undoing dynamic, and I'll gladly listen. For what it's worth, I don't hate the idea of healing. I just hate the idea of pretending it's a constant necessity, and that battles in games should be designed around the idea that you can't get through a battle successfully without someone pumping anti-damage into you. It's like in Diablo, when you're expected to drink 73 potions in 5 seconds to take on a tough boss. It's not as if the devs were designing the game, and came upon a naturally-occurring boss with certain damage numbers and HP numbers, and went "Oh no! This is terrible! Our characters will NEVER be able to take this creature on and live! Oooh! Let's give them the almost-constant ability to laugh in the face of damage! 8D!" If you ask me, Healing roles would be so much more fun if they focused on offensively doing things to prevent damage. Knocking arrows out of the air with spells. Closing up wounds to stop the bleeding (you took the damage from the initial blow, but losing blood is what's going to kill you, not the tissue damage to your leg), etc. Everything's SO passively focused, to make room for all the active damage-undoing. "Okay, I'll just hit you with a holy shield of increased armor value, which'll last about 30 seconds, so that I can get back to firing health beams at your face!" When Warhammer Online came out, and they had the Archmage class, I was SO excited! Not that it wasn't heavily healing-based, but, it was a lot better than just that. It was meant to be a half-and-half idea. You had pretty powerful magic, but every time you healed or used protective magic, you built up a sort of backlash reservoir of offensive magic. Then, when you unleashed an offensive spell, it gained a bonus depending on how much extra backlash you had built up (up to a maximum). And vice versa. The more effectively you smote foes, the more effective your strategically-placed heals were. From a gameplay standpoint, that was such an awesome idea to me. Healers and Support roles are just fine, but there's absolutely no need for them to be healing batteries that dam the tide of damage flowing at your party for the duration of combat. Wayyyy too much focus on undoing damage. All the undone damage in the universe doesn't actually advance progress toward victory on either side of the conflict. It simply prolongs defeat. It draws out combat so that there can be healing, and you're healing so that combat can be drawn out. That's my problem with that.

That's not possible. If magic did "totally different things," then it wouldn't react with the physical world. I can grow plants with soil and seeds and water and nutrients. Magic can maybe do this faster, or circumvent physical causes with its own causes, but it isn't "doing something completely different." Also, in the context of P:E, if magic couldn't harm an enemy thing like a physical attack could, I'm not sure it'd work at all. "You're a magic class... but you do COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS than all the non-magical people do." How could that even be a class? Exactly. You can have 40 sword swings in you, before your stamina is spent. or only 5 firebolts before your mana is spent. Why? Because your mana is not your physical ability. It's a separate thing. How silly would it be if your firebolts were powered not by mana, but by the number of arrows you had in your quiver? "Hmm... I can launch 40 arrows with my bow, or I can launch 40 firebolts with magic... *ponder*". I don't see how this example is very relevant to the issue at hand. An engine powering a saw, and a completely separate engine powering a computer... A more apt analogy for everything I've been getting at this entire time would be a saw, and a magic saw, hooked to the same generator. Every time you turn on the gernerator, it makes power for both saws. So, you can either use the physical saw, and hope you get a nice cut, or you can use the magical saw (with the exact same power source) to cut in a magical way. Does one render the other obsolete? I should hope so.

I'm honestly confused by the application of this directly to my quoted section. But, I will say that I was false. I left out a possibility. 3) Magic is less useful than physical capability. Basically, it's either better, equal, or worse, is what I was getting at. Just for what that's worth. The very reason you're asking "Why did Gandalf sword people?" is QUITE LITERALLY the basis of my point. If the use of his arm muscles to swing that sword COULD'VE been used to generate a fireball, don't you think he would've just fireballed everyone? The reason he sworded people was that magic DIDN'T come from his muscle use, but swording DID. So, he has a finite amount of magical "stamina," we'll say, AND a completely separate-yet-also-finite amount of PHYSICAL, NON-MAGICAL stamina. Therefore, in order to conserve his magical stamina for more dire circumstances, he resorted to his physical capabilities. If your physical body's capabilities were the source of BOTH THINGS, then why would Gandalf ever sword people? Instead of throwing "Umm, not necessarily" at me, could you please (I'm sincerely asking) explain how what I'm saying is wrong, and how using one stat that represents both your burlyness AND your magicalness simultaneously doesn't lead to what I'm describing, and isn't at all problematic? I'm explaining how it is, which apparently isn't making any sense. But, I think an actual counter-explanation would help more than simply pointing out that "It could just work differently, somehow, *shrug*". The wind isn't magic. It's just moving gas particles. If you spent the same amount of time learning to manipulate the wind as you did learning how to use a sword, then you could just manipulate the wind with as much might as you could put behind a sword swing. Who do you think wins THAT duel? The Wind God or the Sword Duelist? You think a group of people who's all "Hey, we actually have the ABILITY to control the elements, themselves, but we actually just spent all our time learning how to swing swords at other people who we're assuming will be wielding swords against us, in close range" is going to tell another group of people who decided to master control of the elements that they're NOT going to do whatever the crap they please? "We'll stop you... *leaps*... with our MELEE RANGE SHARP METAL THINGS!" *sigh*... With all due respect, it's only a "fundamental problem" when you're not actually grasping the point. Yes, if the point were that the RESULTS of magic were different, that would be a problem. But it isn't. Magic circumvents physical means. "Oh no, I don't have any tools with which to create enough friction to start a fire!" Hey, guess what? with fictional magical energy, you can still start a fire. You don't physically strike flint against steel, taking advantage of the physical properties of both materials to cause sparks. You don't generate enough friction to cause extreme heat. You use fictitious, doesn't-really-exist energy to ignite something. Now, it might still be regular fire after that, all within the realm of physics. But, what was outside of the realm of physics was that magical energy was used to start it. Meaning energy that doesn't actually exist. Meaning energy that isn't your muscles' mechanical energy, because that already exists. Here's another one for ya... physical muscle cells make magic. So, a Wizard studies the application of magical energy in enhancing physical muscle cells. Strength buff. You use magic to make yourself stronger, which grants you greater magical potency, which allows you to make yourself even STRONGER, which allows even GREATER magical potency, and so on and so forth. Or, ya know, transformation magic. "I'm now a 30-foot dragon, with 7,000,000,000,000,000 more muscle cells than I just had! World = PWNED!" Disconnects? Pssh... what was I thinking.

Hahaha. "Man... that wolf was like 5 levels higher than me! But, still, I took it down in one hit. All I did was heal my companion, and the wolf died from that, apparently? Weird..."

The main problem with the "healbot" role is that it's redundant. An entire role dedicated to that is a bit silly. They're literally spending time and resources to UNDO damage. Time and resources that could've gone towards preventing that damage in the first place. And/or you could simply have larger health bars across the board, and cut out the dedicated healer. The ability to undo some damage? Tactical. It's kind of like a surprise, retro-active block. An entire role based on constantly undoing damage faster than enemies can DO the damage? A little silly.

As long as you weren't presented with 2 time constraints at the same time, everything would be fine. What I mean is, "You've already only got a week to explore this area, but now, you've only got 2 days to go rescue the baron's daughter!" The more you do that kind of thing, the more you might as well just say "You can only do 4 out of these 5 things." I mean, when it comes down to it, if you had the same time limit on two different choices, it would come down to the time limit versus the amount of time it takes to do each task. If there's actually not enough time to do both tasks, then you've basically got a simple, mutually exclusive choice, with the added possibility of failing at even the choice you pick just because you take too long. And if there IS enough time to do both, then you've just got a bunch of urgency floating around to get all your stuff done on a schedule. Which, again, I don't think you need to do. I don't think there's really any need to have the player calculating and scheduling time. "Hmmmm, okay, it takes 16 hours to travel there, and if I only rest 3 times, total, in this unknown amount of dangerous terrain, then I can totally get to the baron's daughter in time to not fail the quest due to time limit! 8D!" It could easily be more contextual. When it comes down to it, you're either choosing to hurry, or to not-hurry. There's no need to tell the player, who isn't even in direct control of many factors at all, that he sucked too bad at hurrying and failed the quest. Why not just say "Here's an urgent thing. Go do it, or don't go do it?" You just start running into really silly things when you go with strict actual time limits, and not contextual ones. Like, what if you were on your way to the inn to rest and heal up, and you happened upon the quest? After all, it's time based, and time doesn't care what you're doing when something occurs. "OH NO, THEY'VE TAKEN THE BARON'S DAUGHTER!" Well, crap, do you go after her in super rugged condition, JUST because you happened to come upon this time sensitive quest in the state you were in, while some other player happens to come upon it at full-health? Or just rest up... OH NO, like 8 hours have passed, 'cause I slept at the inn! Darnit! Maybe you adjust the time limit to compensate for that, but then, people with good conditions don't actually have any urgency. "HAH! Luckily I totally just finished upgrading all my equipment and working on my stronghold and resting at the inn! Now I have a fresh THREE DAYS to do this quest, because part of that time is to allow for all the things I just did! 8D!" See, it's horribly inconsistent because of the nature of a number of systems in the game. I'd rather see time limits abstracted, to fit with all the other abstractions hovering around time in the game. If someone kidnaps the baron's daughter, and the first place you go when you leave where you are now isn't in pursuit of the kidnappers, then they're going to get away. If you go there next, however, it doesn't matter if you arbitrarily ran around in circles for 17 hours in the city after hearing the news, or stood on your head all day. If you didn't actually choose to go do things IN LIEU OF chasing down the kidnappers, then time doesn't functionally penalize you. Need to rest up? That 8 hours of sleep doesn't actually count toward your time limit. Why? Because how much resting can you possibly do? How much running in circles can you possibly do before you then must actually accomplish something? What are the odds someone's gonna rest 5 times before even heading out of an area? Now, what COULD be cool is that, if you leave literally within a fixed time limit (5 minutes?) of hearing the news, you could actually catch up to the kidnappers as they make their way to whatever place they were going to keep the hostage and ransom her. Whereas, if you're "too slow," you don't fail and she dies (how would you even know WHEN they're going to kill her, exactly?), you simply fail to catch them and free her before they reach fortifications and reinforcements, etc. Now, you can still go after her, but she's in a much more secure position. I guess what I'm getting at is, the point of urgency in an RPG like this is to give you reasons and consequences for your decisions on priorities, not to challenge you to accomplish a task in an extremely specific amount of time. So, I'd rather see quests and situations that worsen/change depending on the order in which you tackle things. Certain actions don't need to be in that order. Again, I'm kind of open to resting affecting things, but I still think it should be "Okay, obviously you didn't go after them immediately, because you went to rest" instead of "OMG, you're 8 hours closer to DOOOOOOOOoooooom!!!!" The most important decision is whether or not to acknowledge urgency, rather than exactly how quickly you're being urgent.

At the obvious risk of being misunderstood here, I'm just going to say that you're all still missing my point. And, while I could try to address every single thing that's just been said in response to my last post, it wouldn't really accomplish anything but to potentially further confuse the conveyance of my actual point. I'll try one more time, and if I still just can't make any sense to anyone, then so be it. (I do not mean that in any anger or anything. Just, really, it happens. If I can't convey my point clearly enough, then I'll stop wasting threadspace trying and trying to no avail, and just confusing people more, 8P). Okay, muscle operation = physical energy. Force. Power. Whatever you want to call it. Our muscle fibers produce mechanical energy, when used. That is basically, simply what we refer to as one's physical "strength." Yes, we COULD refer to other factors all mashed into that, like mental resolve, and the ability to literally push our muscles to the point of tearing our own ligaments, etc... But, that's beside the point. No matter how much extra stuff CAN be applied and described by the word "strength," the power our muscles can generate is definitely represented by strength, at the very least. Okay... so, we're saying "Hmm, suppose magic energy/force/power was also generated by our muscles." Cool. So, 1 engine, 2 powers. Maybe some people can't generate magical energy, and some people can. Muscles are just what does it. Doesn't mean all muscles do it. Okay, still cool. There aren't any people who can use magical energy but NOT physical energy, right? I mean, no one's muscles will like, contract to produce NO mechanical energy, but will make magical energy out the wazz. Correct? How would your muscles even contract if they couldn't mechanically operate? So, we've got 2 types of people: People who, when flexing an arm, can produce mechanical arm power (relative to their arm's muscle mass), and people who, when flexing an arm, can produce mechanical arm power AND magic power. So, at this point, I have to ask "What are the differences -- ANY differences at all -- between mechanical energy and magical energy?" Are they exactly identical? I mean, If I have enough strength in one arm to punch through a thin wooden door, then does that mean that I possess the capability (in just that arm's worth of muscle fibers) to produce EXACTLY the same amount of magical energy/force to knock a hole in the door with magic? Or, can I, say, rip the whole door off with magic, but only punch through it? Or, can I always spontaneously create fire and electricity and ice and stop people's hearts and summon ethereal animals and render people paralyzed and stuff, with magic? Can I always attack from a range, with magic? Just hurl lightning bolts and firebolts and projectiles at people? Using the SAME exact amount of muscle power as I would use to mechanically be able to do far less than that? There are only 2 possibilities: Magic is more efficient/useful/potent/versatile than physical/mechanical power, or magic is EXACTLY as useful as physical power and can only do/accomplish the exact same feats as physical power. What I mean is, if I can throw a given rock 50 feet with my arm, then I can only throw that same rock that same distance, with all of my mustered magic power. Well, if it's literally exactly as useful/capable, then why wouldn't you just use your physical capabilities? OR just magical capabilities? Not to mention that, in the context of a class system and such, ALL people who can work magic (for whatever reason) will possess twice the capability of people who can't. They won't just do something DIFFERENT. They'll do something EXTRA. That's just the thing. The reason magic works in any fiction is because it's something DIFFERENT and DISTINCT. Oh, you're frail? You can use some power OTHER than physical power to knock me on my arse! You're tied up and can't move? You can access MAGIC to actually fray the ropes or something, or burn through them, etc. If your ability to do something magically is always exactly the same as your ability to do it physically, then what's the point? If the two are different, but derive from the same thing, then why wouldn't you just use the best energy? "Hmmm... I could walk over there, OR I could teleport, using my muscle magic. I could actually physically use this scythe to reap this field, OR I could just reap the whole thing in half the time with magic power! 8D! I'm gonna use my muscles, either way, so why not?!" Basically, the entire point of magic is that it's an alternative to physical means. I mean, you take reality, and you add magic. That's what we do in fiction. I can plow a field. OR, maybe IF magic existed, IT could be used to accomplish the plowing of this field! It's something that is inherently an alternative to physical, mechanical effort. When you have to USE mechanical effort to access magical power (as a direct correlation -- as in the more mechanical effort you have at your disposal, the more magical power you have at your disposal), then what's the point in the two even both existing at all? Same with stats. That's the whole POINT of stats. You can be good at one, but lousy at another. Merging them sort of defeats the very purpose of that, in the first place. Why don't we just have 1 stat, called simply "Awesomeness." It'll derive all other things. Maybe we sprinkle some skills on top, so that Awesomeness is just the base, and the skills determine the rest. Obviously extreme and silly, but the principle is there. Why even say there's physical strength and magical strength, as separate things, if they're both fueled by the exact same source? At that point, you might as well just have "Power," and say that there aren't actually two separate things. There's just one thing. Everyone has some measure of Power, and everyone can perform all actions/abilities, because there's no such thing as "magic" or "non-magic" abilities. Just abilities. And no. For the record, you couldn't have 4=5 in any world, without having a paradox. What happens when you pick up 4 apples? A 5th one always spawns into existence? Even once you have 5 things, there are still 4 things there, then 1 thing. Therefore, you'd just infinitely have apples spawning into existence, because there'd always be ANOTHER set of 4 apples, but there couldn't be, because in that world, 4 would equal 5. You can change the names of numbers, and the methodologies of math all day long, but you cannot change the fabric of counting. I'm not talking about a metaphorical facet of a fantasy world, like "Our heads are actually in our stomachs! 8D!" that is for some reason being equated to a literal paradox. I'm talking about a literal paradox. Such as Strength = not-strength.

GUNBLADE!!!

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