Lephys

I dunno about that... maybe the most technologically advanced gear, though. Technology doesn't always make things better. Look at plastic parts today, 8P. "Hey, plastic is a new technology we've mastered, SO WE MADE YOUR DOOR HINGES OUT OF PLASTIC INSTEAD OF METAL! 8D! What? Oh, sure, you're gonna get about 500 uses outta that door, tops, before they snap off. But don't worry! The new ones will be SO CHEAP THANKS TO PLASTIC! 8D!"

Minor correction, if I may. Intelligence is the rate at which one is able to learn and understand things. Wisdom is, indeed, the efficient use of those learned things to learn and understand new things (or existing things to a better extent). Or, to put it simply: Intelligence is the ability to gain knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge. Neither is, itself, aggregate knowledge. And @Karkarov, I'm aware of the reason you didn't include Charisma, and the problems with tying beauty to it. I was just making an example with many existing systems. That's all. Sorry aboot that.

"On an all new Big Brother: Obsidian Entertainment, Chris and Josh struggle with the coffee maker, and tensions rise! Also maybe some new game footage!"

I recall several instances, in several threads, from several people, of "You're not going to see anything on little tiny people anyway," and several other people attempting to convince them that they might be surprised. So thank you, screenshots, for doing what those people couldn't. Haha.

^ Besides, a meteor spell generally isn't even designed the same way as a death spell. The meteor doesn't try to touch you, and then you roll a saving throw, and then if you fail the throw, DEATH! No... the meteor is generally AOE-based, or actually, physically avoidable, via movement, and usually (if it does that much damage) takes a lot longer time to cast than other spells, and/or actually only deals heavy amounts of damage over time, requiring channeling (like a meteor storm spell that keeps raining highly-damaging meteors down upon you for up to 6 seconds or something, so long as the caster continues channeling it). Why do you think they don't just have that target someone, and they all roll saving throws, and if the rolls fail, a 9999-damage meteor strikes whoever failed it? Because, that just doesn't even make any sense in the context of combat. No, there are oodles of factors involved purely in the meteor even being a concern or not. Maybe you got out of the AOE range. Maybe you stopped the spell. Maybe you got lucky and rolled high dodges. Then, even when it DOES hit you, it can hit you to varying degrees, causing the flow of combat to react to various different extents. Maybe you expose different people to the possibility of meteor, because they have more armor or faster movement speeds, etc. You can even lure enemies into the meteor area, or forcibly relocate them there, using awesome abilities! The fun never ends with tactics! 8D! There's not just "Did you or did you NOT get meteored?!" Get meteored: dead. Don't get meteored? Not only that, but an instant-death spell either kills you, or does nothing ('cause you resisted it). Even if you "resist" a meteor, you just get less hurt. Like I said, varying degrees of outcome. Did you just lose 80% of your health? Well, now you have to change tactics, probably. At least with that character. did you only lose 30% of your health? Well, you might be fine. Depends, really. Did you get hit with Death? Well, you're dead. So... that's the end of that. Did you resist Death? Well, then you're totally perfectly healthy, as absolutely no harm came to you! ^_^ It's literally the same thing as getting hit by the meteor, only minus all the other possible outcomes.

But why should the stats increase that much? I'm interested in the why of it, more so than the what. If Strength, for example, goes from 1-20, then why should you start out with 8 Strength, and become the absolute strongest person alive (20), just from going about and using your muscles? Obviously you might gain Strength, but when the world's already established what 20 means, relative to everyone else, what reason is there for people to go around becoming more intelligent and gaining pure strength and constitution every time they save a kitten from a tree? "We killed so many orcs yesterday, I'm HELLA Charismatic, now! 8D!!!!!" That's even worse in systems where Charisma is tied to physical beauty, haha. "Dude, I've adventured so much, I'm THE PRETTIEST PERSON EVER!"

Maybe you can actually only summon them out of "thick" air? At higher elevations, they could be difficult or impossible to summon, due to the actual thinness of the air. *shrug* That still leaves an awful lot of places in which they can readily be summoned.

By that logic, your attacks should just naturally hit 100% of the time and deal infinite damage. You could always optionally choose your own accuracy when you attacked, and choose to deal finite damage, you know... whenever you just happened to feel like "roleplaying" a more realistic venture. Also, dialogues should just go however you want them to. There should just be a "make them give me 1000 gold" option. I mean, you could always choose to not-click on that one. In fact, the game could just auto-pilot you through itself. You could always toggle manual control, if you wanted to. Otherwise, who is the game to tell you that you must travel to the next city to actually GET to the next city, or that that city even has anything to do with playing the game? Pssh. Silly game, u_u. It's not like combat, itself, is a competition between you and the enemies that can be easily adjusted using difficulty options whilst still remaining a competition. 8P

The TL;DR version of all that wasted posting I did back while I thought Stun actually cared about mutual understanding in the dicussion was basically regarding this. Save-or-die: Not really fun at all, as dice-roll saves are purely one little tiny factor within the greater entirety of combat. I don't ever want one factor to play out to absolution. "Hey, a fire elemental! Use water spells AND THEY DIE!" No. I want to use water spells and have them be more effective. I want my active choices to affect the flow of combat. Then, we've got Prepare-or-Die: Again, this is technically cool, by the meaning of the word. But the die doesn't need to be instantaneous. "Oh no, I didn't see the clues that there's be flame elementals here! WE INSTANTLY DIE NOW because I didn't enchant everyone's stuff with fire resistance!" That would be terrible. No. What should happen is that my armor/protection should be significantly less effective against these flame elementals than it would've been had I actually prepared. Which could lead to my death, if I don't try to compensate for that as hard as I can. It should be EASIER for me to die. Not GUARANTEED. That's the whole point. If it's guaranteed, then where's the tactical nature of combat? "How do you take on flame elementals? By getting your fire resistance up to a certain number. Otherwise you just die." That's a 2-path fork. That's literally the least amount of tactical option you can have regarding a given dilemma. "What should we do, sir? We can either fire arrows at them and they'll die, or we can not-fire arrows at them, and we'll make absolutely no progress!" "Hmmmm... I'm thinking, Lieutenant!" So, yeah, that brings us to your React-or-Die: Awesome concept. Only, like Karkarov said, I don't think it should be a reflexive, instantaneous thing. Not across the board, at least. I don't inherently have any problem with some slow-moving orb thing that gets fired across the battlefield, and if you touch it, you die. Something like that, maybe. Because that provides options. It's just time some dive, or cast the one correct counter-spell or you die. That's no fun. The core of tactics is overcoming limitation. Coming up with a clever way to accomplish something that isn't easily accomplish. Not finding the one correct puzzle piece to fit into the puzzle. If you run into a limitation, and there's no alternate route to take, then you've had your tactical decision-making stripped from you. I don't care if things kill my party. I just want things to tactically kill my party. So, yeah, I want to react-or-die. But I want there to be more than just one stroke between reaction and death (in the design of the system, not in every single situation... obviously if I have 1 hitpoint left, and I fail to properly react to ANY amount of incoming damage in any form, I'm dead.) I can react by changing targets, or using spells/abilities I typically don't use. Change my strategy. Swap weapons. Move people in a different way. If I don't find a way to properly take on the enemy, I die. That's fine with me. There are OODLES of ways in which to take on the enemy, and that's what's so exciting about tactics. When the enemy uses his "I KEEL YOU" spell, there's only 1 way to take on the enemy: Don't get hit by that spell. There is no swap out characters option, or switch to defensive spells to mitigate damage, or take down the other foes first so that everyone can collaborate on that foe, etc. There is only "whatever you do, DO NOT let that thing cast that spell!" Again, it's not the death that's a problem. It's the instantness of it.

Point taken. That's one reason I don't really like some aspects of how magic is typically handled. It feels too much like a bag of grenades that you, as a Wizard, are privileged to carry around and utilize (as their pins are like the sword in the stone, and only you can pull them to use the grenades), rather than an actually ability/extension of yourself. That being said, I believe this is exactly why (or one reason... or it's simply coincidentally good that this is so) Wizards will have a small set (relative to their entire spell repertoire at any given point) of infinite-use spells, if I'm not mistaken (fewer, even, than the per-encounter ones). Kind of like Level-0 spells in Pathfinder rules. If you've prepared Ray of Frost, you basically can fire off infinite Rays of Frost in a day. So, really, you'll never be completely without the ability to use a magical means of dispatching that foe. Especially if he's clinging to life. As for the priest... if it's such an easy encounter, then you're not dealing with much XP anyway. If you wanted him to focus on support, rather than attacking things, then you'd just have him stand by while some more-combat-oriented character ran in and slew the easy things, and you could heal them, if you'd like. And if you DO want him to sometimes attack things and improve his weapon skills to any degree whatsoever, then, voila... that was one instance in which he got to contribute to that aspect of his build. 8P There's not really any other way to fix the "Oh no, I'd have to use the appropriate skills/abilities to gain the appropriate XP" without stepping into the realm of "why do I get better at Shrubbery when I kill enough rats?" So, my example was in the context of wanting the "as you use it" system of progression, but with an effort of trying to possibly fix some of the problems with existing systems of that type. Namely the "nothing prevents you from just standing there and infinitely using skills to progressive effect, for no reason" one. To use the Priest as an example, again, if you spend 25% of your time healing peeps, and 75% fighting, then you'd be 3 times more advanced in whatever combat skills you used than you were in your healing stuff. Not even counting the choices you made at character creation that affected your starting variance. I admit, again, that it would be quite tricky to implement. It's not as if I feel I've just made a complete system that we should shove into a game. I literally thought that example up in the time it took me to type that paragraph (... 3 minutes, maybe?). It's just an idea, and would need a load of work to become an actual usable system.

I don't see why. I'd much rather have a development team who arrives at decisions after actual consideration, than one who simply foregoes consideration of possibilities all-together and simply goes with the first thing they think of. That's like... the foundation of concepts. A concept artist will draw 10 or 20 or 30 variants of a "troll" or "orc" or some creature they're designing. Then, they can objectively look at those variants side-by-side, and say "yes, those ears WERE too goofy-looking," and "hmm, it needs to look less sinister and more natural," etc. I'd hate for them to just think up how a creature should look, draw that one thing, then call it a day. The same goes for the class system.

... What if the wolves have SOUL MAGIC? O_O! Really, though, they should probably only really stand their ground/fight you when you're wandering into an area they would likely try to protect, like a fresh kill/feast, or their lair/wolf-cub nursery. Sure, SOMEtimes you might come across some hungry, hungry wolves, whose desperation for food overrules any other instincts for the moment. Still, though... especially in a game where random wolf kills won't really necessarily gain you anything, it'd be nice to see them either avoid conflict all-together, or to use "I'm going to try to drive you away from this delicious food" tactics, in which, beyond a certain threshold, they finally just say "okay, this isn't working, and it's likely I can't take on these creatures and live. Let's just go, even though I don't want to." Even ANIMALS do that to each other. Bear vs. wolves. T-rex versus Raptors (of course, raptors ALWAYS win that one...). In seriousness, though, self-preservation is one of the most powerful instincts common to pretty much all natural things. It's far more potent than other-depreservation. Let's put it that way.

Yeahh... backing up Merlkir here, have you SEEN the layers of clothing that desert cultures wear? They don't walk around in speedos because it's hot. I wouldn't be surprised if a fantasy desert culture had very light-weight, breathable cloaks that they let flutter in the wind while they're walking about, then clutch around themselves in sandstorms, etc, for added protection. Hell, they could even wear some kind of mantle thingy, and pull the cloak around that, then pin it. Now, it doesn't hug them tightly and trap extra body heat when they're in the sun, yet the sunlight directly heats the CLOAK instead of their layers of clothing underneath. It's like Perpetu-shade. "Desert cloaks! Now with Perpetu-Shade Technology! 8D" Not to mention, nights in a desert can get awfully chilly, quite rapidly. Like LadyCrimson said, they have a plethora of uses. They just wouldn't be the same as wooly cloaks worn purely for body-heat-trapping in frigid tundras or chilly wooded regions, etc. Different cloaks for different folks... Besides, you just pointed out the whole "enchantment" thing, which is yet ANOTHER reason to wear a cloak in a desert, even if it served no other purpose whatsoever (wasn't lightweight and breathable, and you didn't use it as a blanket/satchel, etc.). There's a practical use for some form of cloak in almost every situation imaginable. Except maybe... underwater? *shrug*

Word of caution to any potential future modders: Take great care with that code. It's sharp. o_o Also, if any of the dev team ever wants to "run with such-and-such's code," make sure they keep the point aimed in a downward position. u_u

-____- Well, Stun. Congratulations. You, sir, are officially irrational beyond hope. Good luck with that.

Hooray for project-wrangling! 8D! If everyone else on the team are all lengths of bamboo, you are the vine-rope that ties them all together into a fully functional gatling-defense-turret. Hmm? What do you mean, "strange metaphor"? What else would you possibly be constructing out of bamboo and vine-ropes? u_u And just because that wasn't enough like a joke, I'll include one now! 8D: What do you do in an MMO that has Anicrafting? ... ... ... You farm animats. (Also, they could be a collection of welcome mats in the shape/image of adorable animals. They could even be FUZZY mats!) I actually like the animats, by the way, for what it's worth, as well as that scrumptious-yet-crumblike omorsel of lore regarding soul-magic/infusion. But nothing -- NOTHING -- can extinguish my need to provide ferociously terrible humor. u_u

Hear hear! There's a vast difference between a game saying "These people will consider you evil for making this choice" and a game saying "This choice is inherently and absolutely evil, and anyone who says otherwise is obviously, themselves, evil, or is just plain wrong."

Forgive me for finding it amusing that people decide there's too much discussion going on in a discussion topic. I wish Stun would listen to reason, true. But, I'm here to discuss Instant Death. Why would I want to do that? Hmm... because we're in a discussion forum, and this topic is "instant death," maybe? If people are sick of just seeing mine and Stun's responses to one another, how about chiming into the discussion with something else? I can only provide my own perspective on this, and Stun can only provide his. The more the merrier. What are we going to do... bite you for joining in? If you don't think there's anything else to say on the matter, then don't read this topic. If you DO think there's other stuff to be considered here, then, by all means, let's hear it. I'd love to hear it.

Oh, we're still stuck on the exclusion thing? Well, we'd better include fetch quests, since excluding those would obviously result in a crappy variety of quests. Oh, and lightning storms! Random weather that can just strike you dead at any second while you're traveling about! We should put that in, because NOT-putting-it-in would be a far worse scenario. And there should be infinite skills and abilities, because there's always another skill/ability to be thought up, and excluding those poor, poor skills and abilities from the game makes the game so much more lacking in vibrance. Riddle me this, Stun: When is it tactically a bad idea to instantly kill something as opposed to actually having to reduce it to 0 HP through the use of a variety of other tactics? How is that any different from having a spell that deals infinite damage? A spell that deals infinite damage can still not-work on certain foes, or be prevented from casting, or be resisted via saving throw. So can a spell that deals 50 damage. So, if you have a menagerie of spells at your disposal, all of which do various types of damage and work on various types of targets, and then you have a spell that does however-much-health-that-thing-has damage (basically infinite, since the HP value of your not-yet-chosen target is indefinite), when would you say "Hmm... I just wanna deal 50 damage to this thing, instead of infinity, because tactics."? And I swear if you say "Omg, you could totally miss it, or it could have high resistance, or... or...", then I'm just giving up all my faith in your ability to partake in rational conversation. Also, @Morgulon: I'm not against insta-killing traps. Just insta-killing sentient beings within dynamic, tactical combat.

I just imagined an Adventure game scenario in which you walk into a scene, and some villain appears, or some trap triggers, and goes all "PREPARE TO DIE!", and you only have a certain amount of time to select one of your companions from your inventory of items to use properly in the scene to shut down the trap or thwart the opposition. *snicker snicker...* I love mental images. ^_^ "Thank goodness I brought this Khelgar! *Throws the Khelgar at the Evil Wizard, breaking his Wand of Evil Power* "Yeah, you can't get past this part if you don't have a Khelgar. You just die, 'cause you can't break the Evil Wizard's Wand of Evil Power, u_u"

You know for a fact that this is the case in P:E? Because, you know they've already mentioned, in vague detail, a separation between combat and non-combat abilities/skills, right? Also, for what it's worth, the whole "you leveled up!"/experience system is designed to abstract a LOT of things. Namely, when you gain a level, and "learn a new ability," it's supposed to represent the fact that you've put your fighting experience to good use and have, in your free time (the abstracted part, since no one wants to play a character's 3 hours of combat practice every single day, real-time, to perfect a new maneuver), developed at least fundamental mastery of a new ability/technique. It's basically saying "by the time you've fought this many times and traveled for this long, you'd probably have mastered a new ability and/or improved your overall capabilities by this much." If you check a system of abstraction against reality, it's ALWAYS going to fail. It's moot. As for the first part, I think one of the main flaws in it (and similar systems) is the lack of a cap. Basically, it's true that you'd get better with a sword the more you use it. However, swinging a sword 7,000 times at a tree stump is only going to make you SO much better with a sword. Just like solving a linear equation 7,000 times is only going to make me so much better at math, or baking a pie 7,000 times is only going to make me so much better at baking a pie. I'm not going to suddenly know how to make gourmet souffles just because I baked a pie enough times. Basically, they've abstracted the real-time process of improving skills/abilities into numbers-per-use, but they FAIL to abstract in the fact that there's a limit to how much you can improve something in a given amount of time. This is difficult to implement, in a game, since you have things like "well, I can just rest at an inn, thereby lifting my daily cap, and doing it again, 8D!" This is why tying progression to levels is so heavily used. You can limit XP gain via design, in how many instances of XP gain you provide, and their quantities of provided XP, etc. As long as the game doesn't have infinite XP generation (in the form of respawning combat encounters, repeatable quests, etc.), you're literally restricting the pace of character progression. And this isn't a bad thing, I don't think. What might be interesting is a system in which certain general things are tied to simple level-ups (ehh... minor HP/stamina gain? Or regen, at least? I'm not really sure what all would be here, off the top of my head). Then, in each encounter/quest, have a limited XP award, just as usual. Only, have the game keep track of what skills were used to complete objectives. If a combat encounter granted XP, for example, and your Wizard used nothing but destruction spells, then he would gain 100% of the combat XP towards his destruction skill. If he swung a sword at something once, and spent the rest of the time casting destruction spells, then he could gain like 95% of it toward Destruction, and 5% toward Swordsmanship. etc. Obviously, that would be quite complex, and would need a lot of figuring out and tweaking, but I think it would be interesting to see such a system tested in action. And, obviously, the entire game would have to be designed around this, rather than just tossing it into the existing formula.

There's a difference between being "punished" and suffering the consequences of a complete lack of effort. If you run into a Level 1 rat, and try to hug it over and over again, and it bites you to death, the game ins't punishing you. YOU'RE punishing you, and you're using a rat to do it. In my opinion, one of the most common forms of punishment is the gauntlet battle. The kind of combat system/encounter in which the foe has 70,000 HP, and your characters can only deal 100 damage per hit, and only have 400 HP, while the foe's dealing 357 damage per hit. Dragon Age 2 on pretty much any difficulty above normal did this. It's no longer about expending effort to have sound tactics. It's just a "let's see how long you can jump-rope without tripping, MUAHAHAHAHA! scenario at that point. I think a much better way to make a combat encounter difficult is to force you to change tactics, or emply out-of-the-ordinary tactics for maximum effectiveness. But, maximum effectiveness should still not require 17 and 1/2 minutes just to get the thing down to half health. That's ridiculous. Really, it's not that "punishing" is inherently a bad thing... it's that it's a lame thing. I don't really even think the Dark Souls type of design is "punishing," because the entire game is designed around those almost puzzle-like combats. The goal of the game is to figure out how to get past creatures/foes, and you know that from the get-go. They're not just like "lolz, the game isn't even ABOUT these encounters, but these are BY FAR THE MOST DIFFICULT, FRUSTRATING THING IN THE ENTIRE GAME!" But, yeah... main point: the requirement of effort does not mean a game is punishing you.

Hell... even the lying Rogue type who guilts impoverished townships out of all their supplies and gold for performing some "valiant" task that wasn't really even that hard could be considered evil, if only to a lesser degree. Just like you can go around cutting people for no good reason, or you can go around cutting people's limbs off for no good reason. The nature of the action is the same. You've decided that your exorcism of your power to hurt people making you feel good is more important than other people remaining uninjured. Only, giving people little cuts differs from hacking entire limbs off in extent. Taking advantage of people isn't physically, directly harming them, but it's still voluntarily worsening their well-being.

*chin stroke of pondrance*... I'd say quite the opposite, really: I backed a game from a company I trust... to never reduce combat down to hard kills, hard counters, and the chancical dice rolls that decide your entire fate. I thank them for that dedication to tactical, meaningful decisions and deaths in combat. Also, for what it's worth, traps don't move around of their own free will, target whomever they choose, and kill you instantly regardless of armor/HP values. Also, I don't think trap-detection will be restricted to a particular class in P:E. So, no, I'd say powerful traps that can potentially kill you if you jog around in strange dungeons without a care in the world aren't really in the same boat as foes that can gamble your life away on a whim.

Well, then you still have people like Heath Ledger's version of The Joker, who pretty much make it a point to go out of their way to prove to people, on a philosophical level, that everyone's pretty much evil, and that there's never really any divide between groups for you to even be saving the "good, innocent people" in the first place. Not that that's quite the same thing, but it's also not "I'm just trying to gain something in a selfish way." What he's trying to gain LITERALLY involves going out of his way to set things up to "force" people to "be evil." But, yeah... that really kind of reinforces the point here, since EVEN HE isn't just doing things to "be evil." He still doesn't even think he's evil. I think it was said that he "just wants to watch the world burn." But, I think it's more that he wants to show that fires happen without evil starting them, and that true "evil" is the selfishness of the masses in simply letting them burn, as long as they aren't in danger of getting caught in them. etc... Anywho... there definitely needs to be some actually-thought-out motivation for people to do what they're doing. I mean, if you want to put insane people in, then awesome, but they shouldn't be insane just to support all the whacked out crap they're doing, then conveniently quite sane when it comes to the greater coherence of their plan, all at the same time.