Lephys

Or, as I like to call them, "fortrices"! ^_^ Unless they're really, really huge. "What news, sergeant? Can we emerge victorious from this endeavor?" "I'm not sure, sir. This fortress... it seems devoid of weakness, sir. It's... well, it's like a FIVE-tress."

You don't beat it to death with a sword. You dramatically dodge its strike, whilst swinging upon its tooth (using your shield strap, or belt or something) up onto its neck, then get shaken around until you lose your grip, falling back off of it relative to its motion of trying to turn about to keel you, but then even MORE dramatically somehow utilize your uncontrollable fall to your advantage as you intentionally get launched by its flailing tail, high into the air, resulting in your coming down with an ULTRA-dramatic downward thrust finisher, straight into its brain. Either that or you just get straight-up nommed, but swallowed whole (because all manner of animals just swallow giant bits of food the size of their head, even while its alive and wielding a sharp, metal object). Then, at the opportune moment (typically when all seems lost), you simply SLICE your way out of the innards of the beast! Because... it's totally like... super spacious in there and whatnot, rather than a straight-jacket of fleshy insides squishing you against yourself. Duh... everyone knows how to deal with giant animals whose sheer size renders swords nigh-useless. u_u

I think a main consideration here is that betterment isn't restricted to raw power. A Wizard can learn a new spell that's significantly LESS powerful than his previous repertoire, and it can still make him a much more effective Wizard.

I see. So you weren't implying, nor have you been at all arguing anywhere in this entire thread, that that is in any way problematic in the balance of such things (especially in a game), because the tool's potency outweighs, to some degree, other factors? My apologies. I must be sorely mistaken. I guess it's also logical to assume that peasant children will have access to these items/spells, as well? And this will facilitate their ability to carry around 50 palm-sized iron balls filled with black powder at all times, so as to be an effective force against armored, disciplined foes at all times? My reason for pointing out weight limitations was not to say "You can't carry enough grenades around to ever attack someone because they're SOOOOO HEAVY." My point was that you'd have to restock fairly often, as an iron orb weighs a lot more than some bracers and arrows. Plus it takes up a pretty decent amount of space. Also... why did you put the deep stash in quotes? You basically said weight would be a non-issue, and that P:E would have "one central inventory," in response to my pointing out carry limitations on grenades. So I clarified the distinction between the more-than-one parts of the inventory P:E will have. Is that somehow irrelevant to what was said? o_O I never said you said it was a flawless design. Also, guess what? Fire. Fire is more potent than all other weapons, requires little training to use, is easy to mass produce (just light flammable things), can defeat any armor and anybody can use it. Do we wonder why peasant children don't just go around burning entire armies to the ground and taking over the keeps of lords? Also, I didn't say explosives were unreliable. I said that the precise delivery of that power is unreliable. Bear in mind, too, that we're talking about 16th-century explosives, here, so I'd say modern-day factors of explosives and firearms don't really apply to the reasons for using grenades/explosives/firearms 500 years ago. Let's stay consistent, shall we? And for that matter, would you be so kind as to answer this question for me, so that I can avoid wasting your time: IS there, or ISN'T there, a problem with primitive explosive weapons technology being allowed into the P:E setting? Because you seem to be saying there is (key word "seem"), but then, every time someone points out something like "well, here's why that's not really as much of a problem as you say," you keep falling back with "Oh, I never said it was a problem. I was just arbitrarily stating properties of explosives, and how, unlike any other weapon known to man, small children could easily use them to great effect. But I don't think there's any problem anywhere." Heck, even just a subjective answer would be nice. ARE grenades fine by you, or are they NOT fine by you? I'm a bit confused on that.

Yeah, I'm really not even understanding the whole "let's not overcomplicate this" sentiment here, either. We're dealing with two stats (INT and WIS) either way. It seems the more simplistic way to handle it is to let skills (which already govern accumulated knowledge/aptitude) govern one thing, and let stats govern another. Boom. Trying to see if this character can understand this book? Check his INT. Trying to see if this character can answer a question or perform a given task with his given knowledge? Check his skill. That seems pretty simple.

I don't imagine you'd suddenly feel the arbitrary urge to don heavy armor and abandon your magery. Maybe you've become exiled, and no longer have access to your magerish resources? Maybe people are now on the lookout for someone wielding magic of your description. I didn't say it ALWAYS makes sense no matter what, for any given person, ever, to spontaneously and without reason fully SWITCH to another class. I even already criticized the whole "You are actually a full-on Level 1 Warrior now, AND a full-on Level 7 Mage! 8D" thing. (If you didn't want to read all my stuff, I'd prefer you just leave it at "I didn't read that stuff, so I'm not even going to say anything regarding what I didn't read." Otherwise, what am I suppose to do besides point out what you didn't read that I've already stated? ) Maybe you're a Novice Mage, and your teacher dies. Now, you find yourself in a place where your magic isn't effective enough to take people down, but you have no means of very efficiently/effectively furthering your own magical prowess. But some local group needs soldiers, and you're of a mind to help them. So you start actually studying combat moves and techniques. Are you "a fighter" now? Not at all. But you kind of know some of the Fightery stuff. A class simply determines what your character focuses on. It doesn't inherently determine what you can and cannot study/learn/do. Basically, a class just serves to organize focii, and what specific things each one allows you. It doesn't say anything about your ability to switch focii. That's only dictated by time/resources spend, and your voluntary decision to do so. Granted, in P:E, specifically, it actually has another layer (how your soul works/the specific manner in which you derive energy from it). So, yeah, it's great how it works. I love it. That doesn't change the fact that the fundamental concept of multiclassing is the shift of one's focus to learn something outside of one's specific focus (like lockpicking for Rogues). What does P:E do? De-classify lockpicking (and other such commonly class-specific tidbits) so that all classes have access to it. Basically, you have a separate classification of skills/abilities: The non-class-specific class. So, again, this functionally accomplishes the same fundamental goal as multiclassing capability. Multiclassing has just typically been less balanced. And if you can do it without technically having players choose/manage the progression of two specific classes, then awesome possum. I still stand by the value of the consideration of the very notion of multiclassing, as it pertains to the decision of which character-development options to offer to which characters, how to offer them, and what to restrict and when.

A god-like touched by the god of Simplicity could simply be rendered as an 8-bit sprite.

I'll see your call of bull****, good sir, and raise you one call of bull****. Hall of Adventurers allows you to play with quite literally ANY companion you wish, so if you care more about what kind of companion you have at the direct cost of the quality of their individual development, this option offers you the best array of solutions. Then, when you HAPPEN to want to play with one of the main companions (and/or you happen to start actually valuing the quality of the development of your companions), the smaller list of Oodles-of-TLC companions delivers by the boatload. Teknoman2... is that a nod to Suikoden I see, or just coincidence?

One should hope you could make both-in-one: An agile, skillful, charismatic, manipulative Rogue. Which would imply that there are other types of Rogues you're giving up as the cost for specializing how you did. Or, maybe you could just do what was so prevalent in the Mass Effect series and simply "go completely Rogue."

Pink magic = Breast Cancer Awareness magic. Duh, u_u. Even gamers've gotta represent good causes.

So... let me get this straight. Games have all gotten it wrong with Dexterity this whole time? When you increase your skill with a bow, you're accumulating skill, which should increase your Dexterity, but it's been increasing your bow skill all this time? In other words, instead of Dexterity being your potential to aim a bow with maximum accuracy, it should be your accumulated skill/aptitude with a bow? Also, how does your version of Intelligence serve to represent an illiterate genius who figures out how to build a geo-thermal generator in half the time it takes another, literate person to read a comprehensive book the matter and learn the same task? Why is it that, when people don't understand something, their intelligence comes into question, and not their wisdom? Wisdom deals more with understanding the limitations of your knowledge, and accounting for the things you don't know. That's why it's wise to prepare yourself in advance before venturing off into some ruins after increased knowledge. Your wisdom, there, isn't directly gaining you knowledge. It's simply preventing your lack of knowledge (of what you'll face in the ruins/what could possibly happen to you) from killing you before you get to use your intelligence further. Wisdom deals more with judgement than with knowledge gain, whereas Intelligence affects your direct interaction with knowledge. Again: An Intelligent person can acquire/comprehend the same bit of knowledge in less time and/or with fewer resources than a less-Intelligent person can. Plus, some people simply read an entire book and cannot comprehend it, because they are limited by their Intelligence. How could the quantity of knowledge you've accumulated dictate the quantity of knowledge you are able to accumulate? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if other stats (such as the Dexterity example above) DO represent your general potential to advance in something, then why doesn't mental stuff get represented in this respect? Your version of Intelligence simply represents aggregate knowledge, and Wisdom simply represents your ability to put knowledge to use. What, then, separates the fast-learner from the slow-learner, or the person who can comprehend almost anything in the world from the person who can only comprehend 5% of things in the world? Some people have no hand-eye coordination, no matter how much they practice. Thus, a low DEX score represents this. Some people have INSANE amounts of hand-eye coordination, from the second they ever even try to practice with it. Is it not the role of attributes to indicate these inherent differences in people, and the role of skills and the like to indicate the more changing accumulations of specific amounts of ability/knowledge? Hence, 2 characters can have a skill of 100 with bows (or all the bow feats, if there's not a skill... whichever), yet one can have a DEX score of 14, and one can have a DEX score of 20. The one with a DEX of 20 is always going to be better than the one with 14, even though they both have all the bow knowledge, skill on can have. Otherwise, everyone in the entire world who mastered the bow would have a DEX of 20, just like everyone who read everything in a library would have an INT of 20. There would be no "Oh, that took me a lot longer to read, and I only understand about half of it" people among the intelligent. They'd all be "geniuses" via practice. Why is it, do you think that we pick these attributes/stats at character creation, rather than simply everyone starting with the same thing and having them develop throughout the game? Why do you think they impact such a broad range of things? Why are there even Knowledge skills, with skill checks to see if you can decipher some ruins on the wall (against your current knowledge; whether or not you know what those ruins are already), if Intelligence is supposed to serve the same purpose? A bit redundant, I'd say.

Nah, I don't. Sorry. I must've misread that part about black powder grenades transforming even a child into an unstoppable wizard. I guess what you were really trying to say is that grenades wouldn't really make anyone very powerful at all (since most regular children are already unstoppable wizards), and that there's not really any problem with grenades in this setting being overly powerful at all. My response was for naught! You mean those games whose exact systems P:E isn't actually directly copying? Hmmm... probably best to reserve judgement until we actually hear official word on how much weight will affect things. Also, I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain the only "central" (and apparently weight-unlimited?) inventory "sector" will be the Deep Stash, which is inaccessible during your adventuring travels. The interface will consolidate all your characters' accessible-yet-weight-limited belongings for ease of access/management (so you can, say, equip something to Steve that's currently being carried by Sally, etc.). But I'm pretty sure they said the size of this accessible portion of your inventory will still be dictated by the individual characters' stats. So, now you can do 1 of 2 things: Continue assuming this just won't be an issue and refuse to address it, or actually address it since it has the potential to be an issue. *shrug*. Your call. Awesome. So you acknowledge my point, then. I greatly appreciate it. Grenades might, indeed, seem over"powered," but at the cost of the precise/reliable delivery of that power. It's not like I'm trying to say grenades are wussy and won't ever hurt anybody. You just seemed to be very concerned with how they'd cause a problem in the lore, because children could go around tossing grenades and taking over kingdoms. Methinks that will not be the case, is all, and I attempt to ease your concern with things you may not have taken into deep consideration.

I can't recall which game(s), but I KNOW I've seen a multi-auto-save system, by default, somewhere. It had the typical checkpoint-style auto-save system, but it had 3 different autosaves it cycled through. That way, if something glitched up, or you needed to go back a bit, but you had auto-saved very recently, you still have a little leeway with the 2 previous ones. I thought that was pretty convenient. Personally, I think a single, separate auto-save file is fine, plus however many manual saves you want to make. And I definitely don't see why all that can't be separated between your main characters/playthroughs.

There's never any winning in a discussion. That's not what they're about. Mutually-heightened understanding, however...

I'd like to cite The Last of Us, here, as an example of "Why in the hell would you do that?!". Apparently, once you make your first save (save slot 1, or whatever, out of I think infinite, so long as your PS3 hard drive has space), it just automatically uses that one as an autosave, without telling you. And it autosaves CONSTANTLY! I mean, I think it literally tries to autosave every second it can. It's crazy. Now, I understand there are games (especially console games) in which you only get one save slot per playthrough, and that one will essentially save over itself as your only save option. But, this is different. You get independent saves, but they didn't even take the time to make a SEPARATE auto-save slot. RIDIKKULUS! *waves wand*

Yeah, I think the whole "there's no resurrection!" thing got confusingly tossed around throughout the boards. I'm pretty sure that's just for combat, by default. Err... to clarify, there's no mid-combat resurrection. From Health-death, I think. Stamina-"death," as we already know, can be undone via, at the very least, that Paladin ability. I think it's called something like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING... SLEEPING?! GET YOUR ASS BACK IN THE FIGHT BEFORE I BREAK YOUR KNEECAPS!".

There is no morality scale in P:E, so they'll have to hire non-aligned writers to write non-aligned endings.

I just try to think of it in a broader sense, I suppose. Like the different schools of magic in D&D rules, and how you can either specialize in certain ones for extra effect/focus, or take the accessibility/effectiveness tradeoff of going unspecialized. It's simply the nature of people to dabble. Just because you love necromancy doesn't mean you can't possibly study some Illusion magic, also. A 10-year soldier can have his army disbanded and wind up doing wetwork in the streets for ne'er-do-wells. Would not he bear some qualities of a Rogue? The restriction is inherent: If he didn't already soldier about for 10 years, then he wouldn't be much of a soldier. If I study magic for 5 months, you probably wouldn't call me a "Mage." Yet, I can study it for 5 years, THEN change my studies to something else. It's just-plain feasible. So, yes, while it often isn't really needed in a lot of games' systems, I hardly find it in any way blatantly preposterous to consider. It's not as if it's just some silly thing that was spawned up out of game mechanics. If there's a class-less system, and there's a classed system, then obviously there's a viable range in between that. There's no reason to simply pretend it's not there, just because you aren't going to use it for a particular game design. What's sillier: Forbidding a Berzerker from ever learning any healing techniques, because those are ONLY for people who decided back when they were young that they were going to become healers, or allowing a Berzerker to learn SOME amount of healing techniques at the cost of forgoing the progression of his Barbarization techniques with those resources spent? I will agree that a multi-classing system should really be a lot better designed than they usually are. It shouldn't just be "You totally are like a level 7 Barbarian and a Level 1 Healer mashed together." You should be something else entirely if you're studying Healing from a seasoned Barbarian's perspective. And you should only have so large of a secondary role-knowledge bucket to fill. You know... roughly 75/25 or something. Like I said... the fact that P:E is taking all those typically-class-specific skills/abilities and putting them into a common pool pretty much handles this exact issue. But, what's the difference between leaving all those things as class-specific and allowing access to them via multi-classing, and taking them out and putting them in a non-class-specific pool to be accessed by all classes? Functionally? Nothing. If I take Lockpicking as a non-class skill, OR I multi-class to Thief/Rogue so that I can gain Lockpicking, there is no difference. Not between the methods, at least. In other words, the only difference is the labeling: whether or not that skill was considered to be owned by another class. Either way it's not part of my class, and either way I've got access to it.

I'll try to post less. I'm sure my 1,000-word posts of androidish analysis aren't helping them want to read more. Really, though, I just figure they're busy (and with good reason... I mean no upsettedness/negativity in this). So, every time I think "Man, haven't seen too many dev posts lately," I just think "Oh wow... just think how many extra diligence points are ticking off of their persons and into the Project: Eternity Qual-gress Bar of Completenessitudity! 8D!" (Note: "Qual-gress" = Quality + Progress.)

I understand why Vancian magic is how it is. And I know a lot of people just don't know how to ration their spells. But, before you even hit that, you have the simple fact that a Fighter doesn't need to ration his effectiveness, and yet you can only memorize, what... 3 Lvl-1 spells per day? And even casting aside the fact that the D&D ruleset isn't about constantly fighting things 24-7, the fact remains that it doesn't make sense for you to just be restricted to never running into a combat encounter until you've leveled up some, OR to restricting the difficulty/numerousness of foes in a given combat encounter at low-level such that your 3 spells actually make a difference. Really, the only valid reasoning I can see behind telling Wizards they can only do 3 things per day of a magical nature, and telling Fighters they can do infinite things per day, is the whole "we're making you weaker at the beginning because you're so strong later on." I understand why that sort of makes sense, in a way, but at the same time, it's not really a very good way to go about it, especially in a friggin' game, the rules of which were literally created from scratch and are supposed to support the enjoyment of the game. A) It sucks to just-plain suck in a pinch for several levels, and B) It actually kind of sucks to be stupid-powerful later on, compared to everyone else. And I'll add in the C), it sucks to have all your already-underbalanced uber-powerfulness and over-utility balanced out by hard counters like super-high magic resistance. What do you do at that point? You don't get to cleverly use your tools (magic) in a different way. You just get to use not-magic, or you get to suck. Anywho... in the context of all this, it's hard not to address like 17 different little points throughout, heh. But, the very core of the point is that it's silly not to accommodate all classes' core abilities into the design of the game's ruleset. The level-0 spells being infini-use are a good start. You're still limited by one spell per turn (in D&D), so it's not like you can ever just annihilate 17 things in one turn with Ray of Frost. Yet, you still have a magical means of contributing to the effort at hand, even when you're "exhausted" of magic. The other thing being that, shy of taking non-lethal damage or something, I don't even think a Fighter can EVER become exhausted in any way. They can use their special attacks like 8,000 times a day if they want. But, apparently, a 1d4-damage magic missile is just wayyyyyy too exhausting to do more than like twice. I very much like the approach P:E is taking. The more powerful/skilled you become with magic, the easier things become. Therefore, you start being able to do lesser things more and more often. Makes perfect sense, really. Plus wand blasts, etc. It doesn't feel like all your class-specific Wizardish capability comes from some magical finite bag of pixie dust that exists externally or something.

Why does no one ever comprehend that such examples are comments upon the logic itself? Your reference was to the ability to readily bypass a limitation (resting/replenishment), with the reasoning that "you can always just limit yourself if you want to." What differentiates that scenario/limitation from ANY other scenario/limitation in the game? Your sole condition seems to be "If there's a limitation," with the option of "then just get rid of it, since the player can always self-limit." If your condition is more specific than that, then please, enlighten me. Because, if it is not, then there's no fallacy in applying your line of reasoning to any-and-all limitations in the entire game (HP, damage, to-hit chance, dialogue outcomes, etc.).

Meh, details like that are pretty up-in-the-air until later on in development. Josh's big thing is "How does this actually affect the gameplay?". So, until it fully checks out against that, I wouldn't assume it's set-in-stone and absolutely untweakable. Look at the miss mechanics. He had the very reasonable notion that chancical missing was playing too lame of a role in most games, and he wanted to fix that. Well, he took missing out completely. After further consideration and feedback mulling, he decided "Yeah, that may have been a slight overshot. We'll step it back a few and just make misses the rarer thing now." And now we have hits and critical hits, and grazes and "critical grazes" (full misses). And I think that's splendid. The point being, even after he, with all his awesome development knowledge, thought he had nailed a solid solution, he still ended up tweaking it, because of its effects upon gameplay. Whatever they end up with, in the finalized version of the inventory mechanics, I trust that it will be something that's well-thought-out and entirely functional.

This isn't a debate about whether to adhere PURELY to reality, or to stray from it and enter the realm of fantasy. I don't mind fantasy, but, if in the world, there are people who work as blacksmiths all day every day, and they're 45 years old, and they have a Strength of 20, and your character has the potential to gain 10 points of Strength over the course of his adventure (which could, but most likely doesn't, involve as much as the 30-or-so years of constant, every-day blacksmithing that blacksmith has been laboring through) when he started with 20 Strength, that doesn't make any sense. The fantasy world, itself, is declaring that inconsistent and unbelievable, not reality. Not to mention the other problem: Sure, Strength changes a bit over time, but other attributes pretty much don't (not once you're a functional adult), like Intelligence, or Dexterity, or Perception, for that matter. At the very least, they DEFINITELY are not as prone to change as something like Strength or Endurance, by any stretch of the imagination. And if you are actually claiming to be modeling all those potential changes, then you're stepping more closely to a simulation of reality than you are by just leaving them static, in a way. I'm not saying any of this to say "WE CAN'T HAVE ANY ABSTRACTION OF STAT PROGRESSION, WHATSOEVER! STICK TO REALITY!" But it's valuable to consider when deciding how far we can feasibly stray before reality doesn't even function as a basis for this fantasy world any longer. Plus, like I said, there's the whole "what exactly are we representing with these stats?" aspect to consider. If you're representing inherent, static values of potential in a person (i.e. You have 20 Strength, even when you're a newborn, but that just means you're at the peak of newborn strength at that time, as compared to other newborns. When you're 6, you're stronger than all other 6-year-old boys, but still weaker than adults with even lower strength. When you're an adult, you're among the strongest adult people in the world), then having these things increase at all is a bit contrary to their very design. If you're simply representing the exact rating of a given attribute at a given point in time within a given set of circumstances (i.e. as a 6-year-old boy, you have maybe 5 Strength. At age 10, you have 8. At age 14, you have 15. At age 19, you have 20), then you're now dealing with a plethora of possible effects and changes upon this value, beyond just "oh, you've developed some, so you get to pick a point." I think the main reason the pick-a-point-every-so-many-levels system was implemented was simply to provide a means of progression for the groupings of factors that the stats affect. There are other ways to handle this, in the game, without providing the overkill progression of a character's core aptitude in a fantasy world.

If you can get them to stand still long enough, or time the fuse so well that the grenade simply explodes before anyone can react to it, AND/OR you don't take an arrow to the shoulder and drop it after you've lit the fuse, AND/OR that Mage doesn't toss a fireball your way, igniting your entire grenade-filled-satchel dangling at your hip. You act like the explosive power of grenades automatically makes you a god with the ability to just look at people and kill them instantly. It would even be cool if, in-game, when you threw a grenade, there was actually a roll-radius for the ground-targeted throw, so that, AFTER you throw it, it would actually wind up in a randomly decided spot within a given radius, THEN explode to affect an explosion radius. So, you may throw a grenade at the center of a group of skeletons, and it may roll/bounce 8 feet to the right, and only strike 2 out of 5 skeletons instead of the whole group, as intended. Maybe a Throwing skill affects both the accuracy of the initial throw AND the control of rolling/bouncing (shrinks the potential roll/bounce radius from the point of impact)? Not to mention, how much would those types of grenades weigh? Couple pounds a piece? How many of those would you feasibly carry around with you, to just throw at everything that moves? Plus, does everyone else just sit out of the fight while your grenadier takes out every foe in the land, single-handedly, since throwing grenades at things your frontline melee-ers are battling against would probably be hazardous to their health. What about speedy enemies, like wolves? "Hang on, guys, I'm lighting a- AGH!!! *wolf clamps down on throat and tackles you*"

Regardless of whether or not it's actually "officially" a god, it's still actually manifesting external "unnatural" forces upon a Godlike upon their birth, rather than that person simply looking funny and everyone simply alleging that they've been influenced in some manner by a god/powerful-being-who-isn't-actually-a-god. Plus, "Really-Powerful-Spiritual-Being-Like" is a mouthful.