Lephys

@Sedrefilos, 3D is definitely a way to go. Not necessarily the way to go. The biggest argument for Pillars is what injurai said; If you're going with a fixed-perspective game, there's really no reason to go full 3D, even though it's easier. The results are more optimal if you do what Obsidian's taken the time to do for 2D backdrops (you're never going to see them from another angle anyway). There's nothing wrong with going full 3D, but this idea that 3D is somehow inherently better than 2D is a bit silly. Not saying you're holding that idea, but the industry sort of took off with it really badly about 15-20 years ago, and we keep seeing it crop up with various things, as if the only way to go is photorealistic graphical fidelity. Some of the most charming RPGs were the JRPGs that switched to 3D backgrounds, but still used 2D character sprites. The characters had SO much more detail and charm in them than 3D characters did, and you still got the effect of a 3D expansive world and rotatable camera, etc. I honestly don't see why they can't continue a line of games that remain isometric in style, like Pillars, and keep on with the 2D-baked environments for that. Separately, if they want to make all the 3D games in the world, they can. But to just take the next Pillars game (or Pillars-style game) full 3D... I won't say that's definitely a mistake, but it'd take some extra care for it not to be.

... A much more interesting Wizard than the traditional "OH NO, I LOST MY STAFF! NOW I'M USELESS!" Wizard? *shrug* Even in lore like Harry Potter's, in which everyone's always using wands, it's indicated that they're just focus tools (kind of like shouting out the name of your spell) that aren't strictly necessary if you're BAMF enough. I think it's more interesting for a Wizard to simply channel magic through any weapon/implement. I mean, maybe you have to prep it a bit first? But, I just don't see why it needs to be a wand or staff, etc. In Pillars lore, they channel through their grimoires. Which... I think it would be cool if you had a gradual level threshold for which you either needed to actually OPEN your grimoire to channel a higher-level spell, or could simply do the spell without it. And/or just have the option to open your grimoire and read/channel the spell from there at a higher potency, at the cost of maybe a longer cast time or prep time, etc. I've always liked the idea that a novice magic-user needs to rely on tools and methods to help them "shape" the magic into the form it needs to be, but as they get better, they need these things less and less, until they don't need them at all. You wind up with things like faster cast time (don't need to incant the spell, or can take shortcuts, etc.), and a lack of needing to wield/prep some specific tool. Annnnnywho. I'm also all for doing super cool stuff via your staff/implement. I just don't think it should have to be a "classic Wizard tool."

@Sedrefilos But full 3D doesn't have that same FEEL. Their 2D environments are AWESOME! You can get the same level of detail with 3D, but it's gonna tax your system a lot more AND is going to still not going to have the same feel as a 2D environment. Not really saying one's inherently better than the other, but... going full 3D just isn't the same. It's not comparing two cars with differing horsepowers. It's like comparing a motorcycle to a car.

This is one of the best things I've read on here in a long time. SO well said. Even if you climb back up to the exact same state of certainty about either of those things, the fact that your certainty can be tested means everything. That's all constructive discussion is. Just a great big co-op game of Certainty Tester 2K17. I'm very excited about the kinds of things we'll see in Deadfire, with its greater developmental breathing room and its increased budget. I second the desire for more out-of-combat spell/ability interactions. That's my favorite thing about tabletop games is just how much utility there is with a lot of things. I was that guy in DnD that always bought all the weird "knick-knacks" and always had like rope and chain and stuff in my pack, while everyone else was spending all their coin on the best sword they could get. I also did some pretty crazy stuff with Wizard spells, heh.

Good question. Honestly, if classes were to get abilities like this, I'm much more in favor of "here's an effect that gets added to your weapon/attack", rather than "here's an effect that gets added to (insert one weapon type here) attacks." I think "here's how Class X works" is always better than "Out of the things available to all classes, here's the one that Class X does/uses." I know that gets tricky with 11 classes, though. But, ideally, classes aren't defined by gear/role restrictions, but by mechanical dynamics and the dynamic utilization of equipment, roles, etc.

Good stuff! It kind of makes sense that Casual games are amongst the lowest rated. There's nothing wrong with casual games, but it'd be a bit paradoxical if millions of people were like "I mean... I just kind of play these games when I'm bored or just want something simple and kind of fun to do, BUT ALSO I DEMAND THAT ALL GAMES BE CASUAL GAMES, AND I WILL PLAY THEM LIKE HARDCORE WOW-RAIDERS!" Haha. I think everyone "likes" casual games, in that, if you're stuck in an airport terminal, you'd probably rather someone hand you a phone with Candy Crush on it or play Fallout Shelter than do nothing (obviously you could read a book or something, but I'm just talking about options with your free time that involve playing games.) But it's not really going to dominate the gaming market or anything. Also, though, you said "we know we can't please everybody," and while that's true, it's also less true than you might think. The DLC aspects are a good example. There's probably an inherent reason why people tend to favor the big, deep DLCs and expansions. While some people might really like small DLCs, too, the biggest reason for people to dislike the larger ones is simply wait time. So, if you make people wait, you're making them unhappy, but it's still VERY likely that you're going to inevitably make them super happy when the expansion, etc., actually releases. Hardly anyone's going to say "I loved this big, full game so much that I REALLY wish this big, full expansion had just been a bunch of really tiny things, specifically." Especially when it's optional. So, as with most things, while you might have group A favoring thing X, and group B favoring thing Y, chances are, if you do it right, and both groups appreciate the general goal you're going for (they're not purist racing game fans complaining about your medieval fantasy RPG, for example), then you ARE going to please everyone. Some people just end up more pleased. The biggest factors are the functional ones. There's "I feel this UI is clunky and think it could've been a different way that I prefer," and then there's "this task is actually difficult and bothersome to do in this UI design, and even the people who like this UI layout agree that this part of it could've been designed better." The subjective bit's going to get a lot more easily overlooked (and people are still going to enjoy the game, quite probably), than the objective part. So just keep that in mind, and keep at it! You guys have such a great attitude about game design! Thanks for doing so!

^ It's the approach that's changed. Lots of newer tech and coding is WAY better. Older games couldn't do a lot of stuff. But then, in the new games, instead of taking something like BG and trying to do all the stuff you wish you could've done in it, they tend to do what Bethesda's done to Fallout -- throw out anything old because it's all horrible crap. Which is silly. This is why the recent indie surge has been so successful. You've got games like Stardew Valley that took Harvest Moon and spruced it up a bit. "Charm" is, indeed, one way of putting it. Back then it was still about making fun worlds, etc. So, sure, you had some unnecessary, purely simulationist elements, but the approach helped the game out in other ways, because of how they tied things together and just designed the big picture. Also, because the graphics and coding were so limited (compared to today), you had actual chunks of the budget going towards writers and good writing of stories. Now, it feels like the Hollywood approach; a wealthy, successfull producer comes up with a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if" scenes and set pieces that string together in a statistically money-making way (action, explosions, cool powers!), then they pay some writing interns $3 and give them a month to fill in the parts in between with script. Nowadays it's more about "Hey, I bet putting a half a cup of open-worldness in this game would make people like it more!", instead of "Hmmm, do I have a good game idea that lends itself to being open world?"

Haha. They showed the "sassy" pose on a Stag-shifted Druid, I think it was, a little while back? I think it was TOO sassy then, and it was hilarious seeing a half-man, half-stag stand in a sassy pose. Heh. Anywho, it's still fantastic. I kind of hope your idle stance conveys some sort of demeanor in dialogues/interactions. Not anything super potent, but stuff that makes people raise an eyebrow. "Hey, why are you all hunched like that, creeping around my chicken coop?" "I'm sorry! This is just how I walk!"

I'm not seeing the illustration of "better" here. Don't get me wrong... you've made good points, but only in support of the idea that Stronstitution isn't something that simply cannot work. In other words, "yes, combining them can be a feasible thing to put into a video game." I haven't seen anything that shows why one stat works anything even close to "better" towards the goals of an RPG. You said stats are just tools, and this is true. However, tools can be very specialized. A sledgehammer and a claw hammer are both hammers, but they're very different tools. An RPG inherently calls for certain tools over others, purely because the goals its trying to accomplish are not that of other games. "Might" is like something out of the Dragon Age games, where you pump a bunch of points into your stats, for some reason, at every level (because those stats don't actually measure the idea of a character in a world. They just measure video gamey values about your video gamey avatar -- they're just values for the game to do math with so you can deal damage and have health.) ... Says who? Why will the magician be restricted to not-doing Strength-related things? And, if so, why is that the attribute system's fault via the inherent function of a separate Strength stat, and not just "this is the way these developers decided to make these stats work"? And why is it not the class system's fault? Or, to go higher, what about class design suggests that it's bad to let Wizards take advantage of Strength and other stats, instead of just restricting them to a "magic damage" stat? It's no more passive than Strength. They both work in conjunction whenever physical feats are performed. Strength, for example, could affect how hard of a blow you could block with your shield without falling down or staggering, while Constitution would affect how many times you could block whatever your Strength allows. No matter how you look at it, if you combine them into one stat, then everything you could possibly measure with strength, that's also affected by Endurance/toughness/constitution/what-have-you is going to benefit greatly from BOTH. The whole point of metrics is that they're separate. People don't want a character who's good at one thing to automatically be equally good at another. There are a ton of little problems with traditional attribute systems, and these could probably be solved with simple tuning and re-thinking, rather than just taking away what they do well. They measure your character's individual components so that the game's systems can use these values to determine how your character's experience in a given situation is going to differ from another character's. What you do with them after that is not the fault of the very notion of character metrics. It's the fault of how the systems are using this data. Though everyone's just going to say this is ridiculous, if Charisma affected your climbing ability, that would be no less of an inherent flaw in the system than Strength affecting your endurance. Strength does not determine your endurance. There are people with varying endurances, despite having high strength. You either want to represent this, or you don't. If you don't, then so be it. But you can't try to act like that variance isn't there, or that it doesn't affect anything. But, when people first made wheels, then had to make wheels for some other vehicle, such as a train, they didn't go "Oh, this is a different thing, and we need a wheel that fits these rails better than just a flat wheel that falls off of them. So, something about the old wheel doesn't work... let's just throw all of that out, then! Shape of the wheel: circle? Nope! Can't use that! It's no good! MAKE IT A SQUARE WHEEL!" No. They recognized that the circular shape was just fine, and that it was specific factors about the wheel's form that needed to fit the rails. Likewise, small problems with DnD stats, for example, are not a reason to discard the entire stat system as inferior or obsolete. Only parts of it are problematic.

This is precisely correct. That's why, when it comes down to it, you can't design a system for the purpose of pleasing people. Obviously the game's overall design is to please people. "I think people will like an active-with-pause RPG with a bunch of RPG depth." That's not more objectively correct to design than, say, a puzzler involving aliens, or a platform brawler. But it's what you want to make, and what you think a reasonable enough number of people will enjoy and purchase, such that it justifies the development expenses and lets your company make a profit and continue to make games that they want to make. Once you get past that? Objectivity is the way to go. Do you want to represent intricate character aspects and provide a spectrum of character depth, even within class types? Or do you just want all Wizards to pick Intelligence because it gives them their damage, and each class just gets their 1 or 2 stats that are valuable while the others are not? Do you want the attributes to be well-defined, or don't you? You choose, and then you do it. That's your goal, and everything is measured against that goal. Someone's ALWAYS going to dislike it. The only problem arises if NO ONE likes it. Which, A) almost never happens, and B) is pretty difficult to measure even if it DOES happen. Pillars solved the "make sure all stats do something useful for all classes," but not at the cost of "make sure the stats actually do interesting stuff in terms of RPG character creation/customization." So, I'd say they had 2 goals, and they only succeeded at one of them. Or, if they didn't have the other goal, then they should have, based on the design of the rest of the game. It's just silly to have this in-depth world, and introduce tabletop-style scripted interactions into your RPG, then have stats essentially be "damage" and "interrupt" and "AOE size." So I'm not telling people to like what I like. I'm telling people to choose what is the most effective, and not settle for less just because it's hard to please people. That being said, as I've said before... I fully understand why PoE did what they did. Obsidian had a smaller budget, and a time crunch. Heck, it was one of the first largely successful games on Kickstarter. So, they did what they had to. I don't have a problem with their not having the time to keep hashing out systems until they were all "perfect." What irks me is to hear people constantly make excuses for why it's somehow a waste of time or just-plain dumb to try and improve the stat system. I know you're not saying it, but there are so many conflicting statements out there. "You can't please everyone, but this system is okay because I like it just fine." Or "All systems will have problems, so just stick with this one even though many resolutions to its problems have been proposed and not yet countered." It's just weird, how hard people will try to make sure other people don't try to collaboratively improve something. We can all sit around on this forum telling our favorite colors, then arguing over which colors are better because they're such our favorite, OR we can discuss the objective effects of various options in system design, and, worst-case scenario, all develop a better understanding of the topic at hand, even if there end up being reasons why the system that's ultimately implemented into the game can't get or doesn't get changed. Once again, this is not calling you out, because you didn't do this really, but roughly 70% of the responses in ANY thread on this forum (related to mechanics/system design) are simply vents of frustration that don't even touch on what the other person said. "I dunno, if you did Strength this way, it could work really well, instead of this Might that we have." "OH, SO YOU WANT TO JUST GO BACK TO DND STATS?! HERE'S ALL THE PROBLEMS WITH DND STATS THAT YOU DIDN'T SAY YOU WANTED, AND YOU EVEN LAID OUT AN EXACT DESIGN FOR STRENGTH THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM DND, BUT I'LL JUST INADVERTENTLY STRAWMAN YOU BECAUSE I'M TOO LAZY TO TAKE THE TIME TO READ THE DISCUSSION AND PROCESS IT, BUT I STILL WANT TO EXPRESS MY OPINION ARBITRARILY!" Erg... I just wish people would be more objective. Everyone's got opinions, and that's fine. Most people have good points, too, but often they don't even make them. It's like pulling teeth to actually dig the useful bit of debate out of them because they just want to throw out their pokeball and have their Opinion-mon beat what they believe to be your Opinion-mon.

It does look cool, but the gun weirdly lobs the spark at it. It would be cool if the animation matched up with the idea of a gunshot/bullet. I realize it's probably just not-tuned yet... dunno, though. I can't think of a weapon that would lob an elemental blast at anyone. Maybe a wand? But those still kind of launch it straight out, and they semi-homingly "fly" towards their target, like a magic missile, but not as fast and sporadically. Annnnnnnnnywho...

I think the focus/approach should be meeting the minimum. Or rather... "Do we have enough freedom here?". "Do we have enough focus/'linearity' here?". The problem really comes from a lack, rather than an abundance of something. You can have a TON of freedom, but if you've got "Here, do 7,000 hours worth of random, unrelated 'freedom' content, but when you're done with that, come back to the 40 hours of actual focused content," you're in trouble. It's not necessarily because you've got 7,000 hours of freedom, but because you don't have enough cohesion in that. Too linear is really just a lack of freedom, and vice versa. Sometimes, it seems like the focus is "How much freedom can we cram into this?!" *coughSKYRIMcough*, and it ends up being a problem because of the lack of focus. It's a bit like a tree. If you climb a branchless tree, it's not very exciting. "Where should I go? Oh, up the only frigging path." BUT, if you climb a tree with branches coming out of branches coming out of other branches, you're going to get to one of the outer branches, and it's just going to snap off. It's too top-heavy and wide. Rampant roaming, by definition, is the opposite of a focused campaign, and pure linear rails are the opposite of exploration and freedom.

There's nothing inherently wrong with open worlds. They're just WAY overdone nowadays, and they're usually a bit too sandboxy (just... content for the sake of content... here's looking at you, Fallout 4!).

It's even easier to have 1 monitor for each game. Then you don't even have to alt-tab between apps.

I've never understood this, either. A friend of mine has like 60% more hours in all his games than he's really played, because he'll just leave games running for like 48 hours while he does other stuff, then eventually come play them again. It confounds me.

I don't really think there's much of a ceiling to exploratory freedom in a game like this. However, I do think that the ratio of "story" to "random exploration" has to be kept in check. I think a game either needs to be a sandbox, or a cohesive story-world. When it tries to be both, it fails in some respect. Most of the bigger-budget games nowadays try WAY too hard to firmly separate optional stuff from core-path stuff. I understand this to an extent, but the game really needs to organically let the player decide how much is optional. When you start trying to forcibly say "Oh, I wouldn't want this to be something significant someone could miss out on," you start deliberately watering down all the "optional" content. "Oh, better make this optional quest pretty unimportant, lest it become something a player feels they must do." Heaven forbid the story compel you to engage in it. Anywho... That's the biggest thing I've noticed. And no, if the main plot is that you're trying to stop an evil force from taking over the ruling family and wrecking the kingdom, every single side-quest you bump into or townsperson you talk to doesn't have to DIRECTLY have knowledge about the evil force or the conflict at hand, but I think a lot of times too much stuff is just lore exposition for the sake of lore exposition. It's not often you see all this "Ask about kingdom... ask about Henry" exposition actually help you by providing additional dialogue options later in the game. As in "Oh, I actually know the history of this castle! I can now bring THIS up, when I couldn't before!", etc. The best illustration I have of tons of irrelevant side-stuff is Dragon Age: Inquisition. When you actually got to the things that pertained to the main story (and prior story of the earlier games), it was REALLY GOOD! But, about 80% of the stuff wasn't so much fleshing out the story or world as it was just "fleshing out this zone full of content." It feel a bit flat. You didn't really care that this abandoned campsite that you were looting belonged to such-and-such. There were some exceptions, but for the most part, it was just random "fight things and loot stuff" content that THEN had some text try to tell you why you should care about it. And most of it was completely isolated. Not a soul in the world would so much as mention "Oh, hey, I heard that ancient ruin that's prominently protruding from the hillside in this area isn't cursed anymore. That affects the area pretty significantly, and now people are moving trade goods, etc." Oh man. I hate that. You see this even in things you wouldn't think of as choices, per se. Like "Sneak past everyone, OR shotgun everyone in the face!" I mean... that's better than only getting to do one or the other, but you're still choosing to get past all the enemies. That's not a very significant choice. Or "Defeat everyone with bolts of magic that do ice damage!" vs "Defeat everyone with bolts of magic that do Fire damage!". It's a choice, but the game isn't making it interesting at all. Anywho, the main thing with this is those dialogue/interaction choices. And the most common thing you see, besides a lack of choice, is something overly simplistic, like "Diplomacy your way out of combat, but still get all the rewards, and probably BONUS exp for pacifising so hard! 8D!". OR, like you said, they give you a choice, but then the same exact thing happens no matter what, and the game's like "See, this is the real world, and sometimes you can't affect things." Which really isn't true. You can ALWAYS affect something. Even if you help out a resistance, and the big overlord still takes over/retains power... you didn't change the immediate fact that he was in power, but your actions should at least change the state of morale in the resistance, or their resources available, such that further down the road they're able to do better in taking him down than they were able to without your help. This is one of the biggest problems I see in RPGs. The games seem to be designed with your choice of outcomes in mind, and not your choices with direct consequences in mind. You should be choosing what you're character's going to do in response to something -- what they're going to spend their effort points on, essentially -- and not what you hope to accomplish. It's the difference between "(Convince Steve to not-kill the puppy)" and having 5 other options to do/say that could all result in him either killing the puppy or not killing it AND feeling/thinking differently about the situation after the fact. Maybe he kills it, but regrets it because he thinks on what you said. Maybe he kills it and reinforces his "life's tough, so I had to do this to prove how tough I am, and now I've got more resolve in killing innocent things if I have to, so this was good" notions. Maybe he doesn't kill it, and later regrets that. Stopping at "what happened? Did you convince him, or didn't you?" is simplistic. Also, sorry for such a weird example scenario. I don't know why there would ever be a bunch of turmoil over whether or not someone should kill a puppy. Maybe it's one of those "we're training you to be a hardcore agent of our organization, and you raised this puppy, and now you must kill it to prove your stone-cold resolve!" situations? *shrug*.

I'm sure there are plenty of musicians/choirs out there who'd love to make some sea shanties (etc.) for an indie video game, who wouldn't charge eleventy billion dollars. I mean, sure, they can't get U2 to do the soundtrack, but I don't think some cool folkish music is beyond imagining for what is currently one of the most successful indie developer's budget.

It's a boon to the genre, UNTIL EA and Activision and every single major company decide "this style of RPG is the way to go!", and 50 of them get made in one summer, more than half of which are just phone-ins to extort the boon. Then the boon will crash and become a blight. Then the industry will decide "Those kinds of RPGs don't sell well" for another dark age.

I just started a new game last night. AND bought & downloaded The White March. I'm only at a total of 60 hours, T_T... I'll never be as cool as Boeroer.

^ It is. . It definitely is. At the end of the day, though, you have to consider the game you're putting it in. If the overall game is just simulating your direct experience (like the old-style 1st-person dungeon crawlers), then mapping things is great! But in a game like PoE, it's a bit weird in a way, that you, the player, are having to perform all of the specific actions necessary for any of your characters to possess any kind of recollection of where things are, etc. For example, making notes of your own about quests and people is great, but imagine if the game journal didn't record stuff your characters already knew, and you had to hand-write every single journal entry from scratch to be able to keep up with anything. In a way, that could be fun, but it's also completely unnecessary. Why do your character in this game not have a memory at all? Why are you solely responsible for their memory? It's unintentional side effects. This happens when you try to evaluate an idea in isolation, and just plug it into a game because it's cool. Like... I dunno, flying mounts! They're awesome. But slap those into the wrong game, and your entire combat/traversal system's shot.

The question is not about whether or not getting numbers right is the important thing. It's what "getting them right" means. Or, rather, setting the correct goal for the numbers. Obviously if the numbers are wrong, things suck. But if the goal for them is wrong, they also suck. To use attribute as an example, if there was just 1 attribute, and it was "Awesomeness," it wouldn't matter how well you tweaked the numbers and effects of that attribute, because no one wants to play a game in which characters are measured wholly by ONE number value that covers all possible effects. On the other hand, you could have a fantastic attribute system, but have a possible value range of 1-2. That would also be dumb. OR, you could have ranges from 1-1000. This would just be an unnecessary amount of math busywork for people to figure out how many points to put into what. Etc. Or you can have simple number imbalances, wherein the value of one attribute is incredibly useful across the board for all classes, while the value of another is measurably less useful (very commonly, one affects combat, and 90% of the game is combat, and another only affects non-combat things, really, which are a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller portion of the game). They made everything useful to everyone, but so forcibly so that I'm not sure what the numbers are doing now are really the things that people want in an RPG. In other words, an AI might look at them and say everything's perfect, because the numbers check out. Put simply, you can change things about your character now, no matter who you are, but at the cost of the interestingness of the attribute effects. Might is essentially "Damage, and also you can pass uber simple strength checks." It almost skips the adjustment to your character, and just directly adjusts game mechanic values. Part of the fun of attributes (even when they're not perfect) is that, if you're super Constitution-y, you can withstand the poison from the dart trap, whereas if you're Dexterous/Agile, you can simply dodge the darts, etc. One thing makes you better with certain weapons in some respect, while another thing makes you better with others. Etc. When stuff stops caring about all the little nuances and character differences, and just says "whoever you are, you just output X% more damage), it starts becoming very difficult for anyone to get into roleplaying that character factor. Awww yeah! My character does X% more damage! Throwing a grenade? X% more damage! Suplexing someone onto the ground? X% more damage! Forming your soul's energy into a lightning bolt? X% more damage! It's not that it doesn't work. It's that it's not the same thing. They didn't fix the problems with traditional attribute systems. They just ignored a bunch of them altogether and quarantined those cool mechanical factors and effects. Like... "People were sad, so we eliminated emotions. PROBLEM SOLVED!"

I fear you underestimate my slowpokedness. Let's just say that if I was actually the protagonist in an RPG plot, the world would be screwed. Nah, I know Pillars isn't that long. I was using a bit of exaggeration on the time-to-beat hours, there, but for the genre in general. Or, a bit broader than the genre (not just CRPGs, but kind of all RPGs). Honestly, I started playing it, put about 30 hours in, and was having some pretty severe problems (this was way back when it released) with various bugs and build factors, etc. So I thought, "there's supposed to be a big patch coming to fix a lot of stuff in like 2 weeks. I'll just resume then." Then I started playing about 10 other games in the meantime, and very inadvertently procrastinated getting back into Pillars. Also at the time, my work schedule ramped up and I stopped having much time to play anything. I may go home tonight and fire it up.

With all due respect, I'm failing to see your reasoning behind being unconcerned with with attributes representing human capabilities. What would you have them do, instead? Also, when you ask "How many of these do you see in fiction and gaming," is that supposed to be part of the reasoning? "We shouldn't allow for these characters on the basis that no one ever allows for these characters"? That's a bit of an infinite loop. The state of things justifies the reason to make the state of things how it currently is. I don't like trying to do this purely with talents or class features. Unless you make a talent group that's like "Endurance 1, Endurance 2, Endurance 3," etc., you just wind up with 2 options: You're character is equally as tough as everyone else who's of average toughness, or your character is exceptionally tough (just like all other above-average toughness people). That's not very exciting in an otherwise robust world. And having a spectrum of each talent like that would just be redundant, when your attribute system was already allowing for that. You can tune it all you like, but without a gradient, you just create binary options. The people with the different value, and the people with the base value. I don't doubt that Brawn works "well enough." That doesn't change the fact that there are large functional differences between "Stronstitution" and two separate attributes. I'm also not trying to say that there's no merit in the argument that Strength and Constitution are not 100% entirely separate things. I'm simply trying to illustrate the utility of each of them, as systems have used them in the past AND as systems have yet to use them. I'm not saying "do it just like someone already did it, or don't do it at all." I'm all for new designs and mechanics. Also, as I've said before, it depends on what the game wants to do with the metrics. If your game is never going to use just-plain Strength much, then sure... don't use it. But, if your game is going to use something like Brawn, then just still represent both things (such that everyone who's strong is super high-endurancey, and vice versa), but the game world doesn't actually want everyone who's strong to be identical in other regards, then the attribute is failing the system in a way. Measurably, and not just "I like this more", etc. There's nothing wrong with preferences... I'm not trying to belittle preferences, but they are secondary to objective design goals and the achievement of those goals. And yes, Strength isn't super valuable to everyone. But it shouldn't be. If you want a weak character, you should be able to make a weak character. The whole "attribute viability" problem is when Stat A isn't viable for Class X. If I'm a Wizard, and I have no use whatsoever for 1 or 2 attributes, that becomes a problem. That's what they technically fixed with Pillars' system. The problem is that they made everything affect the exact same things for all classes. And/or that the classes are too restricted in what kinds of things they can and cannot do. That's a bit of a side-topic, though. But, Constitution is a go-to stat because staying alive is always good. In fact, usually, the only reason you WOULDN'T want to spend points in Constitution is when you choose a class that gets piddly HP bonuses from Constitution points (be it initial HP or per-level gains). So, in my mind, that problem is with the HP/class design, and not with Constitution as a basic character metric. @1varangian: I hear ya, but honestly... you're either going to do all the math no matter what because you need all the uknowns to be knowns for your min-maxing urges, or you're just going to ride the intuitive flow. If you're more casual and have an interest in wearing some heavier armor for its style/armor value/what-have-you, then you're just going to go "Oh, okay... the heavier it is, the slower my actions are or the more stamina I use whilst wearing it and doing things (etc.)". That's a pretty intuitive relationship. "Do I want to be a bit slower but have heavier armor? Yes? Cool." It's really not that big of a deal. I mean, if that's a problem, then attribute points are a problem from the get-go, as every point you put into ONE stat is a point that another stat lacks. I don't see that as a design problem, but just as a side effect that means you have to do a little bit of work the more picky you are about exact values. Any system should be intuitive enough for people to just pick what they want without doing a ton of math IF they're not already inclined to do all the math and be super particular about their values. This is one way in which the d20 DnD attribute values work well, though. If you add one more point to Strength, and you know Strength determines your chance to hit with melee weapons, and you know you roll 1-20 to try and hit things, then you can intuitively comprehend the value of +1 Strength in that regard. If plus one point of strength affects your chance to hit by 3%, it's not as clear. Now you have to math, unless you're a math-oriented genius-brained person, in which case, go you. I understand that, but if you abstract things out into numbers the way that game code has to, it wouldn't actually be PURE endurance. If you drop 40lbs of chainmail on a tiny person with no strength, they're going to collapse in like 10 seconds. Even if they can jog for miles under their own weight. Again... this doesn't mean that if you have a 300lb Strong Man Competition guy, that he can definitely wear full chain and perform physical activities for hours on end. So you're right in that just checking Strength for stuff isn't really cutting it. But, you can't really separate fatigue from strength, as it plays a part in that. It's a bit like Perception or Dexterity/Agility completely deciding your precision on their own. You might can see really well, but not be able to aim where you're looking, or vice versa. Going back to Strength and Endurance, you see this all the time in Ninja Warrior. That's the best example I can give. Some contestants have the strength necessary to overcome many of the obstacles with ease, but wane around the middle of the course (or fail to hold themselves up through a whole obstacle). Others can go for days climbing around with their fingertips/hanging/swinging/etc., but hit certain obstacles and lack the strength to get past them (they can't lift themselves high enough, etc.). It's two pretty clear factors. Are they completely separate? No. Are they the same thing? Not at all. What's the best way to represent them in an attribute system? I don't know. That's an excellent question that we should discuss, I feel, but I don't think disregarding these truths about everything helps any attribute system in the least. Many traditional systems don't do it perfectly, but I don't think discounting everything about the way they do it is the answer.

Some version of this would be pretty great, but it would require a goodly bit of support programming to make it really stand out.

I'm all for that aspect being in there, Goddard. I would like for some amount of auto-drawing (i.e. if you move through 4 rooms in a dungeon, the map could just gain 4 blank rooms on it), but with the ability to place markers and make notes. Maybe even have some kind of rolodex of people's names, places, etc., and have little notes you could attach to them (alongside the game's general description of your character's interaction with them, like "Bill is a farmer in Bruckington and is looking for his lost pigeon"), so that if you have trouble remembering NPCs based on their names, you could simply attach a little note that says "The crazy guy near the well in such-and-suchington."