Lephys

If ANYONE was on my team, it'd hafta be Jenkins, from Mass Effect. He knows when to take one for the team, and when 3 of the weakest sentries in the entire game show up, I want to KNOW I've got someone on my team who'll arbitrarily walk face-first into their fire, for absolutely no reason.

^ I think that's good for a specialization within professional Ciphery, but I think restricting them to purely mind-effects is a bit too narrow. That's not to say you were strongly suggesting they do nothing but mental things... I've just seen the idea come up a lot in various topics. So far as I know, the official description says that they directly affect souls, not necessarily "minds." So, like I said, I like the idea of illusionary/hallucinationary evocation within the mind, as a facet of Cipher capabilities.

I like the implications, Hormalakh, 8D. It makes me think of debilitating "debuff" type abilities for the Cipher... like, an ability that forcibly "sticks" or muddles (for lack of a better word) enemies' souls together in a certain area, causing confusion or dazing or some other form of "random," unoptimal AI behavior for a duration. The more beings within the area of effect, the more intense the effect/longer the duration. Other things could be distance-based. Even within the duration-potency scaling (the Mind Jab example). Maybe the closer you are to the target, the more quickly the ability gains focus/intensity?

Yeah! I already want to take a party through that dungeon test-section made out of greyscale tileset, 8D!

I'm sure they've thought it out a lot more than I have, being the development team and all, but Rangers and their pets sharing both Stamina AND Health seems a bit much. With the established "dual-health" system, what if they each had their own Stamina, but they shared Health? Ultimately, damage to one always affects damage to the other, but, at the same time, you don't collapse in battle purely because your animal friend got double-teamed for a few seconds. Same-stamina just sounds like a LOT of rigorous multi-tasking just to effectively control "one" character. What if you simply had 3 outcomes? 1) bad/meh/good 2) meh/good/bad 3)good/bad/meh "Bad" could be 50% effectiveness, before you pit the damage against DT, just like they mentioned in the update. Then, "meh" could be 75% effectiveness (or even 70 or something... room for tweaking) before DT, and good would be 100%. OR, you could even do it like... 70%/90%/110%, or 75%/100%/125%. Again, there's room for math tweaking, depending on what works and the specifically desired effect.

What if grimoires affected all your spells across the board? As in... You equip Grimoire A, and all your spells' durations are increased (at the loss of any of the other grimoire's effects). You switch to Grimoire B, and you lose the duration bonus from A, but now all your spells' projectiles travel faster and your cast times are reduced. Grimoire C increases all spell ranges and adds additional targets to multi-target spells, etc. Maybe these values could progress (and overlap) as you find/upgrade improved grimoires, kinda like how "regular" equipment works for all the non-Wizards. *shrug* Just my 1 silver, 7 copper (inflation!). (EDIT): Also...! I hope Barbarians plow through anything in their path in the midst of that "ignoring all hazards along the way," in a straight line, meaning that Wild Sprint will be a very positionally-tactical ability. And maybe they get some abilities that are more effective the more foes they're surrounded by.

Yesssss. I forgot which thread that was, haha. It wasn't my intention to completely rehash that whole system possibility. I was just getting a little overly elaborate in referencing it. I was only trying to say that, even if you use a system like that, or if you use a much simpler system (in which things are either in a non-normal state, or they're in a normal state), I think it would be best to use effectiveness boosts that wear off with time or in response to certain actions/events, rather than detriments that must be repaired back out of the negative with even more resources. The relative math is the same, but it all comes down to the balancing of the rest of the game. If 5 DT is pretty good armor for the enemies you're exposed to at a certain point in the game (basically, 5 DT is the mean, for example's sake), and everyone gets their armor broken and is down to 2 DT, then you're at a disadvantage without spending the time and resources to go repair it. However, if, in the exact same scenario, you still had 5 DT armor (or maybe you got it up to 6, or you just got a boost to defense rolls or something more minor/more easily scalable), and that went away when your armor was damaged, you'd still just be down to 5 DT armor. *shrug*

^ Fair enough. I mean, I personally enjoyed the whole ME series, for what it was. I don't think it's the end-all-be-all model for any RPG or anything. It was a hybrid, and it was a fun game, with a lot of problems (like a bunch of the major decisions only ending up affecting a "How good of a completely one-dimensional ending do you get?"-o-meter). All I was trying to get at by citing it was that, in playing through it, you felt like you had a lot of chances to impact things. Sure, sometimes they ended up not doing much, but that doesn't say anything bad about the offering of choices. And I still think they could've gone with more choices/branches/things-to-affect. But, what with it being fully voice-acted and all (and all hollywooded out to appeal to a larger crowd, etc.), I guess they could only do so much in a certain amount of time (which is why they had to come back with DLC to beef up the still-horrendously-inelegant conclusion.) Just, if you look at it side-by-side with, say, Dragon Age (I know, I know... but they're graphically/engine-ally RIDICULOUSLY similar games), you get WAY more choices and outcomes in ME than in Dragon Age. Dragon Age gives you oodles of pointless decisions that don't even give you IMMEDIATE differences in the outcome. I just like the idea of the little things actually being numerous AND mattering in the bigger picture (just, you know... actually mattering on down the road, which is where the value of the ME example stops.), rather than trying to code in only choices that are huge, pivotal things that decide which mountain explodes and which dimension changes or something.

Shouldn't be too much of a problem. They're usually cumulative. Or, if you finish a task, it's fine if that part changes, because you no longer need to reference the information from before completing it. For example: "Billiam Tharper has unearthed a peculiar mask in his farm plot and has given it to you, suggesting that someone in the Livington district of the city of Blarg might know more about it." ... ... would change to... "Upon receiving a strange mask from a farmer in the village of Squeep, you have taken it to the city of Blarg, where you discovered its origins from Philton Carras, a renowned historian and loremaster." If you underlined bits in the first part, you don't really need them anymore. You could still underline bits in the new journal text for that. The journal would now tell you what Philton said about it, or any locations he mentioned or directions he gave. Such a feature would be especially useful with directions to things, rather than simple instructions to go to named, readily-findable locations like settlements, cities, and landmarks. YES!

Well, my point was obviously that P:E should be Mass Effect, so I'm glad you agree. u_u I mean, it's not as if I said something like... Which is why I now must defend all attacks on Mass Effect with my life! T_T

What if item degradation were one of those things abstractly tied to resting? For lack of better terms, it would almost be like debuffs (but there would be various ones with various detriments, and they'd ONLY be tied to something rare, like criticals, or very certain abilities, or what-have-you). Maybe, if you had "Armorer" and other such background trait choices for characters, you'd get per-rest repairs you could make, on-the-fly, but only fix one problem with each (and they'd be VERY limited). Otherwise, it would just be understood that you take the time, when you make camp (since the idea of camp, as a mechanic in P:E, is tied to safe areas), to sharpen your swords and repair armor straps and such, and fix dents and bends from general combat wear-and-tear. OR, you could even go in the opposite direction. Go farther with the profession-based abilities/traits, and have them IMPROVE your stuff when you camp (sharpen/oil your sword to even greater effect than basic sharpening), and maybe certain things and/or simply use-over-time has these improvements wear back down to a "normal" state. So, at worst, your stuff is always at least functioning at its base level (you never have chain mail providing 0 armor/DT or something crippling), but you might have some chainmail +3 that's only working like chainmail +1 now. I know that, in a way, the math is the same, but the point is that it's an optional, strictly beneficial thing (like lockpicking, where, if you have a master lockpicker, you simply get a greater loot bonus in the form of more containers being opened than if you didn't.) I think that, for item degradation to even POSSIBLY work well, you've got to take out the ongoing penalty. "I KEEP having to spend money JUST to keep this armor functional! Not to mention that, at functional, it's still not as good as some other stuff I could buy, the buying of which gets delayed by my 82 gold I drop every time we get back from combat!" With the improvement-only system, you could forego talent/ability choices in lieu of upgrades to "Armorer" and other such traits, and/or acquire better-quality materials, with which to hone your items every time you rest/camp. Maybe even have it be 2-stage: 50% improvements at camp, 100% if you rest at your stronghold (where you have proper forges, etc.). Or, you know, it might make more since for the stronghold to handle PERMANENT improvements, and the campfire to handle temporary ones. Any suggestions/changes to this are quite welcome.

It might be. I wasn't commenting/speculating as to the actual lockpicking mechanics in P:E. I was merely using lockpicking in cRPGs of old as an example. That example you cited is precisely what I'm talking about, though. There's no point in it ever being possible to pick a certain difficulty lock (in relation to your skill) ONLY after an hour of picking through all your lockpicks and reloading. That's not fun for anyone. If that example is the system being used, then now, you either have enough lockpicks and skill to pick a lock, or you don't. There's no "Aww man... I just tried to pick that lock 87 times... maybe an 88th would've worked, but I'm out of lockpicks, so lemme reload and try again." Or, even if you don't reload, there's no need to waste all that time, then run back to town to buy some more lockpicks, then come back and try some more. There's no need for it to be a mystery how long picking a lock will take when it is possible in any capacity. That's the idea behind the whole "degenerate gameplay/behavior" thing that always comes up around here. A more appropriate term is "degenerate design." Instead of just requiring you to have a certain amount of skill and a certain number of lockpicks, the game is also requiring a completely random amount of time for the lock to be picked at your current level. It's basically an imbalance. It's akin to having a big scary dragon that kills your party instantly if you get too close and your party outranges it, but you only do 3 damage to it with your ranged attacks, and it has 17,000 hitpoints. If you drop its health to a more reasonable amount, and/or increase the player's damage dealt to it, and reduce its extreme damage, the combat challenge can still take time and effort without eliminating all viable, enjoyable tactics and leaving only the mundane, waste-of-time option for killing it. It's simply pointlessly inefficient design.

The most common, simple form of this is the invisible wall. You know... "Oh noes, a tree has fallen across the path here! It's like... THREE feet tall! You can even jump, and your entire party are ninjas, because that's how the game's programmed, but since we don't want you to be able to go in the direction that tree fell, YOU SIMPLY CANNOT! We COULD'VE just made the tree bigger, or had a big chunk of rock fall or something, or put a pit there too big to leap across... but we took the time to animate a 3-foot thick falling tree! 8D" Or, when you're searching around in areas with a lot of small things on the floor, and SOMEtimes you can get all the way to walls/bookshelves/drawers, etc. and you even find important things in them. But then, 50% of the time, that tiny, half-a-foot pile of books/debris on the floor keeps you from getting to half of the room's square-footage. *siiiiigh*

I don't understand. Insectoid creatures add valuable variety to the game's beastiary. "You chose background trait: Exterminator." In all seriousness, I'm sure it's already been mentioned, but... Dialogue options that are listed as some crazy shorthand version that doesn't even mean the same thing as what you actually say. I can't even begin to describe how infuriating it is when you choose "Maybe we should just go...", only to hear your character say "Well, you guys and your deity SUCK and are STEWPID, so we should probably just be on our way." O_O... Where in that option did it inform me that I was about to instigate conflict?! Or, you know, there's always "That's a lovely amulet you're wearing," and "That's a lovely amulet you're wearing, *ATTACK*" listed without the "*ATTACK*" part, so you have no idea as to the tone. "Crap, I wanted to compliment that amulet and/or get information about it, NOT snidely suggest a polite comment whilst inferring with my blade-unsheathing and subsequent life-taking actions that I MUST possess it by any and all means, right this moment!"

I think the Mass Effect series did a pretty good job with the effects of quest decisions (especially carrying over through 3 games). Of course, that was still just a well-above-average number of possible starting states and outcomes for different quests (there still weren't really any "OMG, this city is DIFFERENT because of what I did!" moments). Of course, however wide your cause-effect tree got with its branches, they all just converged at the end, no matter what, which was the brunt of the main complaint with that trilogy's conclusion. But, it was really nice to talk to friends and learn about all the differences in quests and such based on stuff you did in the first game, then stuff you did in the 2nd game, and even choices in the beginning half of the third game. Again, not that it was perfectly executed or anything, but I think they had the right idea (compared to a lot of other RPG stories.)

It'd be awesome if you could quill-pen-underline the parts of a quest entry that you, personally, need to remember the most. Like locations (Sort of the "ye olde" version of highlighting, heh). *Open journal*... "Ahh, Lelvinorr is where that guy told me to meet someone. I couldn't remember..." Map free-drawing would be nice, too. Maybe even tie the annotations to the quest (only the currently-selected quest's scribbles would appear at any given time... unrealistic, I know, but immensely valuable to gameplay. Maybe the map bears the soul of a cartographer, *shrug*). You could mark paths/routes and areas, and maybe draw little treasure markers (or whatever kind of markers you want) in areas you need to leave for now but wish to come back to later for some hidden door or currently-unreachable loot, etc. (Also, I think the correct term is technically "penii." Even if it isn't, it's certainly more fun to say.)

YOU HAVE THE GRIM O.O sorry. The Gadget for the Revelation of Ill-advised Movements (GRIM)? "Tinker divination", FTW! ... Counter-sorry... 8P

It's like a Geiger counter, but for danger, instead of radiation, 8D! "... Whoa, whoa whoa! Guys, calmly form a single-file line, and proceed slowly in the opposite direction."

^^ I want to make a Monk who fights entirely with his hands folded behind his back. u_u...

Awww... I was kinda hoping to see slashing/piercing/crushing glove/gauntlet type weaponry for unarmed attacks. A glove with spikes in the right places (to be utilized by unarmed fighting-style movements/attacks... no just spikes all over a gauntlet), or a glove with blades maybe on the edges and knuckles/back-of-palm would be awesome. It might be unrealistic in the sense that no one really fights with such weapons, but it's not completely infeasible (if you developed martial arts around a well-designed fist/glove weapon.) Or, you could even have a small blade that could lock into place at the base of the palm for combat readiness (sort of like the Hidden Blades in Assasin's Creed, only maybe not quite as "I magically flick my wrist and and they obey my will!"-ish. Haha). I hate how Unarmed combat gets so neglected in the ranks of existing RPGs. It's always "You can fight with cool weapons, or you can fight with nothing," rather than treating "fists/hands" as a completely separate weapon specialization. Not that, from what you've said, you'll be neglecting it. It sounds like you'll be providing a lot of character development options specifically for empty hands, which is splendtastic! I'd just like to see lore in which unarmed fighters actually designed specialized weaponry for the very same Unarmed martial style of combat.

True, but if you have it as a series of branches (and only "ping" for changes in factors every few seconds or so, so enemies aren't changing tactics every .2 seconds), it shouldn't be too much trouble for modern computers. It could still be pretty basic stuff, really. It's just being checked/computed really, really fast.

What for? Extra mouths to feed that bring no utility to what has officially been stated to be a combat-centric game? Do you want to bugger them? Or to kill them? I don't recall anyone at Obsidian announcing that P:E would be a child-rearing simulation. Human Sacrifice? Send them out as scouts. "Gained Reputation Status: 'Evil, Itself, Thinks You're Sick'."

Or maybe that one, slightly larger, more intelligent undead thing that assimilates the corpses of the re-fallen (re-dead?) that you slay around it (more basic undead) into its own form as battle progresses? So, do you thin the numbers on the 15 undead in the room, or do you focus fire on the scary assimilating thingy at the cost of extra punishment from the 14 other undead so that it can't become ultra-frightening? Or maybe you kill things and make sure to specifically focus position-altering abilities on it? (Block it with the Fighter's defensive stance ability, knock it back with Monk/Barbarian stuff, root it, etc?)

I'm not trying to get terribly off-topic here, but I'd like to see a lot more use from things like alcohol, now that you mention it. Molotovs? Sure, but how 'bout the ability to simply chuck a bottle of liquor at an enemy, shattering it all over him and surrounding foes (or on the ground)? That "piddly" 3-damage flame cantrip your Wizard has had since level 0 isn't looking so piddly anymore. I like versatility like that. "Is this bottle fragile? Yes. Could enemies be soaked in alcohol? Yes." Simplicity at its finest. ^_^

^ Yeah... I just mentioned it a few times when it came up in several threads, because a lot of people were seemingly assuming that we were always only going to have 4 times our stamina in total health. I kept thinking "Hey, that's maybe not true," because they only said that 1 Health damage would pretty much always result from 4 Stamina damage. To my knowledge, there has been no official statement on the limitations governing Health/Stamina pools, other than damage received. *shrug* Anywho, that could be a contributing factor in a lot of class mechanics. 8P My guess is that it's probably just a soul-based diversion of potentially-wounding energy, because it's a time-sensitive storage/diversion of said force. If you closed off the wound, it would just open back up again when you failed to focus that energy into some useful and it manifested as damage anyway. Or, if you took the wound, and it closed up when you actually expelled that energy in the form of a Monk ability, then you'd still have this strange, bloodless slice on your chest the whole time, which kind of doesn't make sense either. I think it's sort of like a chi-power/soul-based resistance to damage ("I can stop your sword from cutting me") mixed with the idea of sort of conflict cancellation/returning to a harmonious state. It is the Monk's limited ability to essentially "catch" a portion of incoming intentionally harmful force, reshape it, and return it to the sentient who sent it out (or another of the same group) in an almost karma-like fashion. Mayhaps? Perchance? I dunno. It sounds pretty Monky. And it's more of a strategic bonus, rather than just "Your skin LAUGHS at the feeble prick of giant blades on a fortnightly basis!" being passively applied all the time. If you use it correctly, you can probably absorb a lot of incoming damage, but it's a very shallow pool, it sounds like, so you won't just be standing there, absorbing 50% of incoming damage. Not to mention that you ultimately take that damage anyway if you fail to vent it in a useful manner.