Ffordesoon

@PrimeJunta: The idea is, however, an intriguing thought. Certainly, there's something there that's worth developing. Which is not to say that you aren't correct.

Oh, very well. That was fun to write, though.

Seems unnecessarily harsh. It's clearly placeholder material used to illustrate his point, isn't it? No, they're not exactly Richard Price-caliber lines, but I doubt he (she?) expended a great deal of effort on them.

@AGX-17: Well, admittedly, I would like to see PE gain traction outside the target market without compromising any of its mechanics. I'm a pretty staunch advocate of growing the RPG market without simplifying the games in the genre, as you may have noticed. You're right that I should have cut the post down a lot, though, as the only idea in that whole thing that's of interest to me in terms of its applicability to PE is the dice-roll mechanic, and chopping most of the extraneous material would've been a good move. The post was very much a first-draft, brainstorming-on-the-fly piece, and those rarely work outside the context of the original discussion which spawned them. I confess it was pure laziness on my part not to simply restate the idea in a more concise fashion. I might rectify that shortly. In my meager defense, I was only able to use my smartphone at the time I posted it, and editing a large piece on a smartphone is a poor choice. Upon further reflection, the mechanic seems like a much better fit for a sequel to or improvement upon the mechanics of New Vegas, not PE. The Torment method works just fine for it, methinks. Still, I hope the idea at least provides some food for thought.

@Helm: You're right, we're all too stupid to understand you. I mean, we don't understand RPGs, right? Just like Josh Sawyer who hates BG2 and loves Skyrim and I heard he punched a baby just for looking at him funny. We all want RPGs to be action games with twitch combat like Skyrim which Josh Sawyer who is a terrible human being likes, right? Why can't me and Josh and Lephys and all the other people who are definitely conspiring to bring about the fall of RPGs just shut up and let you take over? I mean, you are a genius who knows what an RPG is and what it isn't, there's no question of that. Why do simpletons like us always stand in your way? Ah, if we would just listen, we would see that you, o warrior-poet, are a light shining in the darkness, a way through the neverending tempest that is this sad life! It must be so frustrating to be a scholar of your caliber! It's no wonder you're so absurdly condescending to everyone who doesn't agree with you - I mean, it's gotta be tough among us proles, yeah? If we would just accept that the definition of an RPG is whatever you like at any given moment, such wonders we could create! Characters making wise decisions and showered with kill XP for that wisdom! Limited inventory space to reward wise decisions! Enemies that look exactly like Josh Sawyer who hates BG2 and loves Skyrim and may or may not be the son of the devil! Gosh, it makes me weep just to picture it...! Oh, if only we understood that an RPG is about building a character! If only we realized that loot and experience points are a reward for making tactically sound decisions! If only we could see that character skill should matter more than player skill in a real RPG! If only we knew the pleasures of a narrative that rewards choice with appropriate consequences! If only we enjoyed satisfying, tactically complex combat! But, alas, we do not. How could we? We're so stupid! Not like you, o mighty prophet, wisest of the wise, bravest of the brave! But there is hope, my lord! Josh and Lephys and myself resolved to enter into a secret compact with you at the last meeting of the conspiracy to murder RPGs. Yea, as Vilquar did betray the People to the illithids, so too would we sell out our fellows! To convince you of our intentions, we bring tribute, my lord! Our copies of Skyrim, signed by the accursed Howard of Todd himself! We shall break these with a hammer atop your altar, my lord, and prove our reverence! Surely this will please you, o lord of lords, eminence of eminences? WE REPENT, LORD HELM! WE REPENT!

@Helm: No. You're the one who seems determined not to read your own posts. Why should I bother replying if you don't know or care about what you just said?

It does work well. Did you play New Vegas? @Osvir: I agree.

Knocking on doors sounds nice, frankly. It's always a bit weird to come to a locked door and immediately have to pick the lock to see what's inside.

What games have you been playing, and where can I find them? Are you from the Glorious Future of cRPGs? O_O Most cRPGs (classic and modern) outside of AP and PST don't give me any choice at all in what things I can say, let alone how I can say them. Of the choices mentioned, the only ones the player gets nine times out of ten are "start a fight" and "ask politely." With the dialogue-wheel mechanic current games favor, even that's pushing it. It's usually "start a fight politely" or "start a fight by being rude." And then you get into combat, and there are twenty-seven different varieties of flail you can smash your enemy's brains in with. You know? Dialogue mechanics are still crazy underdeveloped compared to combat mechanics. I understand the logistical reasons behind that, but I still feel like there's a lot more developers could be doing.

@Helm: See? You're bad at reading.

@Helm: Funny, because when I think of RPGs, the IE games and Fallout are the first ones that come to mind. Certainly, I consider them the pinnacle of the Western approach to the genre. Not that you'll believe me, because why should facts get in the way of your childish vendetta against Josh Sawyer for not designing his game to your exact specifications. I did quite enjoy Skyrim (which I fully expect you to cite as "proof" that I "don't understand" RPGs, because you are bad at reading), but I would readily admit it has serious problems with its RPG mechanics. I wouldn't call them fatal by any means, but they do impact the game. I would also call Skyrim an RPG, because that's what it is. By my reckoning, any game in which you define a character in whole or in part is deserving of the term RPG. It may not be a particularly deep RPG when considered solely as an RPG, but it is an RPG. Even you said that building a character is the key part of an RPG. You build a character in Skyrim. Yes, every character ultimately ends up becoming a generalist, but that is a problem with the way leveling works in Skyrim, not a reason to disqualify it from being an RPG. A generalist in Skyrim is still a character who has been defined by the player; two Level 70 generalists that serve the same function in combat might not have the exact same perks checked in their perk trees, and thus one is only pretty good at melee combat while the other's great at it. That is a difference between the characters. It is not a large difference, but it is a difference. I do like that you skipped over my actual substantive points and called them "a bunch of BS." I'm going to take that as an admission of defeat. Finally, you appear to have misinterpreted (quite deliberately, I assume) my answer to your question. I said that I would be willing to try a system that doesn't give you XP for anything. Whether or not I would want such a system in PE is a different question, one to which I would answer firmly in the negative. Kill XP is not important to maintaining the integrity of the IE experience; quest XP absolutely is. Alright, go on, dig the hole deeper. I'll wait.

Ha! I was amused to see the reactions to my post, because they were exactly as I had predicted they would be. PrimeJunta has the right of it. I love dungeon crawlers like Diablo and Etrian Odyssey, and I love hack-&-slash killfests. Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. And they are games centered around numbers going up. The IE games had numbers going up, but they were not centered around numbers going up. The Icewind Dale series, maybe, but the rest of them? Absolutely not. And I can prove it to you. Ask yourselves what your favorite memories of the Baldur's Gate games are. This includes battles, by the way; good encounter design is enjoyable in itself, regardless of the ultimate reward (though that can certainly be quite nice). Oh, and loot is also included. Are you picturing those memories in your mind? How many of your very favorite memories from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 begin and end with numbers going up? I don't mean the excitement of learning what the higher numbers allowed you to do within the game, but solely the numbers themselves. Very few, I'd wager. I doubt you were checking the XP counter every time you killed a monster to see if your sweet, sweet numbers went up. And if you were, it wasn't because you were SO DANG EXCITED to see those numbers increase, was it? You did what you did in those games in order to overcome the goal set before you. If you wanted a better sword, you wanted it to kill some dudes who were guarding a part of the map you'd never been to before. If you wanted to level up, you wanted to do it because you wanted to complete a quest sitting at the bottom of your journal that you'd been killed trying to complete a number of times before. You wanted the numbers to go up in the IE games because they let you do more things within the content. The numbers, in other words, were a means to an end, and not an end in themselves. In a numbers-go-up game like Diablo, you want to go up a level or get better loot so you can go up another level and get betterer loot so you can go up another level and get bettererer loot, et cetera, ad nauseam. The sole point of character progression is more character progression. That doesn't make Diablo a better or worse game than Baldur's Gate, just a different one. The IE games - even the Icewind Dale series, in a way - were quest-focused narrative RPGs. I completely understand the desire of some players to have percieved control over their leveling, and I wouldn't necessarily be averse to that. Certainly, I don't care at all for the overly prescriptive leveling of Mass Effect 2 and 3, and I'd imagine that's what most people here are afraid of. I'm just saying that a spiritual successor to a series of quest-focused narrative RPGs should ideally be about questing. It's also worth mentioning that the "challenge XP" Sawyer has referred to multiple times would - if it's anything like New Vegas - basically be combat XP. It would simply be delivered in one lump sum as opposed to being parceled out over a long period of time. I understand why someone might prefer one to the other, but there's not a huge functional difference between the two. When any of you actually sit down and play PE in 2014, I seriously doubt any of you will be fuming at the changes made to the IE formula. Unless, of course, you've already made up your mind to fume at the changes on release. But, hell, you can't all be Codexers, can you?

@rjshae: Hmm, interesting. @JFSOCC: Fair point. The attempt is to emulate the variable nature of PnP while allowing for guaranteed successes, but you're correct that simply giving more varied options can also mitigate the "auto-win" feeling. @Karkarov: Someone has posted a similar thread? I'm new here. As to your argument, I understand it, for sure.

IE-style, obv. Though an attempt to capture BG1's more freeform approach to exploration would be nice, since none of the other IE games really recaptured it.

I'm sure "This is an idea I came up with" has become an automatic eyeroller of a phrase for many people on here, not least the developers themselves. Nevertheless, this is an idea I mentioned in a thread on the Wasteland 2 boards that almost immediately struck me as a good fit for PE, and people seemed to like it a lot over there, so I think it's worth copy-pasting. Probably worth noting that I was here assuming a hard threshold-based system of Speech checks, as in New Vegas. That may or may not be the case for PE, but I think at least some of this is still salient regardless. Oh, and Fallout obviously has a classless skill system and PE doesn't, so. I'm also going to censor some of the curse words, as I'm not yet sure of this forum's policy regarding them. Now, obviously, this isn't something I think PE should adopt wholesale, but there are some interesting ideas in there that could be adapted to PE's systems. I would never claim it's perfect, but it's a good starting point. What say you, PE forumgoers? I'm open to any reasonable criticisms.

@Stun: That's fair. I retract my previous statements and apologize for impugning your character.

@Stun: Mm-hmm. That's what I thought you'd say. And I'm so glad you did, because you just revealed the depth of your ignorance. You are welcome to dislike Japanese RPGs. The point is, you are rejecting and - for the purposes of this discussion - denying the existence of an entire genre's worth of steadfastly traditional party-based RPGs on the grounds that you don't like them, and yet you are taking it upon yourself to lecture me on the nature of party-based RPGs. You are, in other words, a hypocrite. I can understand the exclusion of "Bioware hybrids" from the discussion, because they remove traditional genre elements. I don't agree with their exclusion, but I get it. But to argue that we can't bring Japanese games into the discussion because "they're all icky and Japanese" is to out yourself as just as much of an ignoramus as you just implicitly accused me of being. You're willfully ignorant of an entire country's worth of games, and you're telling me party-based RPGs "might not be for me?" What would you know about party-based RPGs? You're the one who hasn't followed the subgenre's evolution for the past twelve years! You said "inventory management" - by which you meant "the type of inventory management I like" - was "a staple of party-based RPGs." I mentioned that there were many party-based RPGs with unlimited inventories that still involve the management of an inventory. You said that was irrelevant to the discussion, because - ugh! - they're Japanese. Yes, and the Witcher games are Polish; what's your point? JRPGs are direct descendants of Wizardry and Ultima III. Should we exclude those games from the discussion? Because you're essentially arguing for that when you argue for the exclusion of JRPGs from any discussion of RPGs.

So all those party-based Japanese RPGs based on Wizardry, like Etrian Odyssey, that have unlimited inventories A) don't have inventory management, and B) aren't party-based RPGs? Interesting. You know games with only one created character (like, er, all the non-IWD Infinity Engine games) aren't technically "party-based" RPGs either, right? Because, according to some people's definition of "party-based," it's only a party-based game if you create all your PCs. That's stupid, right? I mean, the IE games are clearly party-based, yeah? Only a lunatic would assume that one specific implementation of a feature that they really really like is the feature itself, and any variation on it will automatically result in disaster! Oh, those crazy RPG nerds! Why am I bringing that up? Oh, no reason. You were saying?

It... doesn't waste the player's time?

Well, maybe we should remove quest xp for all sidequests too. Or will you only do quests if they reward you with xp? Of course you would do all of the sidequests just for "phun", because only the content matters and not the numbers that go up (as you wrote in another thread). Yes, I would do all of the sidequests just for fun. That's why I do sidequests. And play games. For fun. Would I be fine with the removal of all XP? Sure, if there was a better progression system. I've never heard of one that would work as well as XP, but I'd try it. You know they're called "experience points," right? Meaning that they are an abstract measure of what your character learned from his or her experiences, AKA the content. In other words, even the name of the mechanic is an implicit condemnation of the "make numbers go up" mentality. By the way, combat is part of the content. If it weren't, it wouldn't be in the game. Why spend time on it at all if you can just sneak past everything? That's just bad design. ...He says, knowing that Helm is going to miss the point and follow up with something like, "So you agree Josh Sawyer who hates BG2 and loves Skyrim and punishes wise decisions by allowing players to enjoy themselves is a bad designer, then?" Also worth noting? All challenges in games are about crossing an imaginary line. You go to a place, you solve a puzzle, you fight some dudes, you fight a boss, you get the ball to the goal - it's all just crossing imaginary lines over and over again. To be fairer to you than you're undoubtedly going to be to me, I do vaguely understand what you're talking about. If overcoming a challenge feels like crossing an imaginary line, it's ultimately a failure on the developer's part. Josh Sawyer knows this. Josh Sawyer has said it outright many times. It's not his fault that you're ignoring his actual words on the matter - even the ones you've cherry-picked, which is pretty astonishing - because he didn't like a game you liked and liked a game you didn't like. One more thing: it's possible to love a game without wanting to make one like it, and it's possible to dislike a game while understanding what people love about it. I love Tetris, but I would have no interest whatsoever in making Tetris 2. Conversely, World Of Warcraft does very little for me, but I get why the people who love it love it. Alright, have at me. Really tear this one apart, okay? I want to see just how tortured your logic can get.

@JonVanCaneghem Interesting! I'd like to request one clarification, if I could: are you saying that hidden caches we don't find will be wholly owned by the scavs (and thus not in the dungeon anymore), or that we'll have to explore the dungeon a second time to recover any hidden caches? I'd be cool with the first, not so much with the second. Backtracking is dull, and being forced to make every dungeon "backtrack-compatible" might limit what Obsidian can do with the content inside the dungeon (e.g. no cave-ins). I can, I suppose, see the appeal of the second approach, but it's not for me.

If you want to play a game about making numbers go up, there are plenty available. The IE games' strength was that they were about the content itself. The numbers are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

I love it. Don't care that it's not "realistic." A weight limit isn't fun, but has some theoretical utility in gameplay. This system removes the unfun element, but keeps the utility. I would be cool with a totally unlimited inventory, of course. I'm playing as an adventurer, not someone who tidies up a room.

If you need a number to go up to do something you already enjoy doing in a game, may I humbly suggest that you don't actually like doing it very much? EDIT: My apologies for the multiple posts, by the way. I'm using my phone to type, and there doesn't seem to be a way to quote multiple people in the same post in the mobile version of the forum.

I love how you think that matters in any way. Monte Cook also loves Skyrim. Does that stop him from being Monte Cook? Not to mention that loving something doesn't mean you want to copy it, and disliking something doesn't mean you don't appreciate what it's trying to do. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but as the obsessive lorekeeper of all things Sawyer, one would assume you'd be aware that Josh has spoken of Baldur's Gate 1 with approval several times, yes? Which would imply that he didn't care for the more explicitly linear direction in which they took 2, in which case your argument that doesn't matter to PE's success is invalid anyway.