Ffordesoon
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Posts posted by Ffordesoon
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@Indira:
"Cozz Paladini" is probably a reference to the Darcozzi Paladini, which is a Vailian order I believe Pallegina is part of.
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Tactics Ogre PSP is waaaaaaaaaaaaay better.
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@Suburban-Fox:
All of that is more or less irrelevant. Plain arrows in real life may not be trivial, but we're talking about arrows in a cRPG inspired by the Infinity Engine games. In which, from a pure mechanical perspective, they absolutely were trivial.
To be fair to you, this may be a difference between vanilla BG and BGEE of which I'm unaware, but in BGEE, you can buy a stack of twenty arrows for one gold piece. Gold pieces are the only unit of currency in Baldur's Gate, and it's rare you have less than a hundred gold pieces even in the early game. Which, assuming space wasn't an issue, would buy two thousand normal arrows.
Now, I would agree that if you're going to charge players for arrows, even in stacks of twenty, they absolutely shouldn't be the no-brainer purchase they are in BG. But I believe that because finite ammunition has to mean something mechanically, else why make it finite? I do not believe that because real human beings work very hard on individual arrows and players will damn well respect their monumental achievement if I have anything to say about it. That way lies didactic madness and an economy stacked against the player.
Fact is, video games are mechanical abstractions of reality. Prices of items should be based on their marginal utility to the player, not on whether a fletcher who doesn't exist can make a living wage.
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Every time I read about another class in PoE, I think, "That's the one I wanna play!" I would say that is a very good sign.
This may seem odd given the amount of "cooler" spells revealed in this update (which were very cool, don't get me wrong), but I think I dig Arcane Veil and Blast the most. They let even a Level 1 Wizard PC feel like an active and unique participant in combat without betraying the "glass cannon" expectation people have when they play Wizards.
Minor Arcane Reflection also sounds wicked awesome. I'm already picturing badass mage duels where spells get batted back and forth like ping-pong balls of death.
I haven't had a chance to study the Druid as closely as the Wizard, but I liked what I saw.
Also, Paradox! Yes! They are the coolest! :D
Very pleased, I must say.
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RTwP combat has a problem that neither turn-based nor fully real-time games have to deal with, and that is the problem of rhythm.
In a turn-based game, you have full control over the flow of combat. It's like playing an instrument casually; you find your groove and wallow in it. You act, the world reacts, you act on the reaction, the world etc. etc.
In fully real-time games, combat is more like dancing in a club. The music's going, and it's up to you to move to the tune in the right ways.
Both approaches are pleasurable for much the same reasons playing an instrument or dancing in a club are pleasurable. You control the rhythm, or the rhythm controls you. Either one can be intoxicating.
Real-time with pause is like the DJ in the club giving you a remote with a button on it, and when you press the button, the DJ and all the other dancers freeze, and the music abruptly stops, and you're just kind of standing there all sweaty and feeling vaguely idiotic. So you press the button that keeps the party going, but you have to get back into the groove before you can start dancing again. And sometimes the DJ presses pause on the button when you don't want him to, because you told him beforehand to press the button whenever a blonde steps onto the dancefloor, but you meant attractive blondes, not all blondes.
Or, uh, something. The point is, it's hard to get into a groove when you're engaged in a nonstop game of Red Light, Green Light. That's what I find, anyway.
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That was in the original IE games, more or less, so I see no reason not to have it here.
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To be honest, I actually liked how Skyrim did it. I know that's not something you're necessarily supposed to say in a community of hardcore RPG fans, but screw it, a good idea is a good idea.
If you didn't play Skyrim, the magic was tied to the bows instead of the arrows, and you could make arrows out of a variety of materials which scaled in damage in the same way +1 and +2 arrows do in BG. Each type of arrow stacked infinitely, but with a minuscule amount of weight added each time. There was also a chance to recover arrows after you used them.
All this added a pleasing amount of complexity and depth to ranged combat prep without becoming a burden or an annoyance, I think. I'm not saying PoE should copy-paste Skyrim 's system wholesale, but it's a good starting point, at least.
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@Khalil:
What do you want out of PoE?
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Your points seem more argumentative than substantive.
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Yes, but who doesn't like whining about how WoW/VTM/COD/KOTOR2/D3 ruined fun forever.
You forgot Fallout 3. If only the people who hate it would.
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Spell pre-buffing will not be in the game. But they said nothing about every other kind of pre-buff. We don't know, for example, whether we'll be totally free to chug down potions of fire resistance, potions of accuracy, potions of invisibility etc. before a fight.
Personally, I'd rather not. You say it makes the game more involved and challenging, and if it does for you, that's fair enough.
But, for me, if the game does a good job of telling you what you're in for in the next encounter, chugging a bunch of stacking potions that turn you into an unstoppable god takes the challenge out of that encounter. If the game does a bad job of telling you what you're in for, as BG does, then you could easily be wasting potions - which are, for most of the game, rare and very expensive - on protection from the wrong sort of thing. Make the effects not stack, and then you have to design the game around enemies that only inflict one or two status effects to compensate. Limit the number of potions, and you encourage hoarding. Make them unlimited, and you encourage potion-spamming. It's an insanely tricky thing to design around, for rewards that aren't commensurate with the effort.
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I'm surprised people are getting lost in the definitions and distinctions. To me their choice in naming the statistic "Might" says it all. Might (Adj.), being the potency or force of something is different from Strength. Strength is a specific form of might--it is not might itself. Given that character abilities of all types are fueled by the magic of their souls in one way or another, the statistic might being applied wherever damage is calculated is logically consistent.
I have a link to share with you guys, and I think you'll like it. It speaks about exactly what I think is confounding people's sensibilities within this thread. This link contains a superb musing on the concepts of magic within RPG systems and how the pervasiveness of scientific thought have changed cultural notions of "what magic is". Enjoy.
Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems
However, the concept of magic really comes from a pre-scientific age. From a pre-scientific viewpoint, magic is not a thing apart from Nature. Indeed, many things in Nature are inherently magical. Magic is integral to explaining why it rains, the beating of your heart, and many other things.
But magic in PoE's world would seem to be exactly the sort of magic that article inveighs against, no?
The article itself also seems to miss the point of what it calls "scientific magic" - that is, to make magic (which is basically a cheat code unless there are strict rules governing it, see also "A Wizard Did It") work within the framework of a balanced game. It's not a matter of science versus nature so much as a matter of impracticality versus practicality. The suggestions are interesting, but they also seem to take a lot more work to set up on the part of the designer and the GM than your standard "you fire a magic missile, now roll for damage" system.
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I'm surprised you didn't mention Fallout, Stun. That's much closer to the IE games in feel than any of the others you mentioned, and it was put out by the same publisher. The IE games were perhaps more popular for reasons I won't go into right now, but Fallout could definitely contend with them on a few levels.
As to your objections to my previous post, I judge them all fair enough. Though I would argue that D&D's enduring appeal does not stem from specific mechanics in any particular edition. Rather, it comes from a combination of factors:
1) Being the very first tabletop roleplaying game, and remaining the only one to penetrate mainstream culture to the extent it did and does.
2) The comprehensive nature of the ruleset.
3) The encouraged mutability of the ruleset.
4) It lets you live out the fantasy of you and your friends being the most awesome heroes who ever lived...
5) ...while also giving you and your friends an excuse to hang out and shoot the s**t.
You could change a ton of rules and still keep the essence. Players do that very thing already, and they never say they're not playing D&D anymore. Hell, Pathfinder is only Pathfinder because of trademark issues.
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@Death Machine Miyagi:
I knew that, but thanks.
It's not harder than vanilla BG. If anything, it's easier in a few respects, or at least less annoying. The problems I describe are in the ruleset and the presentation of the ruleset.
And I say this as someone who likes BG1 a lot. As I said, I still think it's better than DA: O, a game I quite like. I just don't like being punished because I haven't memorized the 2E Player's Handbook. The game was designed to be the first more or less comprehensive AD&D experience in computer RPG history, and it absolutely succeeds at that goal, as far as I can tell.
But that's a double-edged sword; what makes it stunningly comprehensive for those well-acquainted with AD&D makes it needlessly obtuse for those not acquainted with it. And the game isn't a very good guide through those rules, either. In fact, it's a terrible one. And yes, I'm including the manual in that condemnation. Very good lore-wise, very good at explaining the basic concepts behind AD&D and the Realms, but there's so much of great importance you simply don't learn from it. This makes the game harder to recommend and harder to play.
Sawyer seems to understand my frustration, thankfully. One of the biggest reasons I'm excited about PoE is because Sawyer isn't just a damn fine designer, but a guy who intimately understands the strengths and the weaknesses of the AD&D ruleset in cRPGs.
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As someone who's been making his way through BG (Enhanced Edition) for the very first time sans SCS, I feel I have an outsider's perspective on this issue.
To be honest with you, I started on Core Rules, tamped it down to Normal after a while, and finally switched to Novice. If I am not a bad enough dude for BG1, I can accept that, but since I am a bad enough dude for Dark Souls and any number of exceedingly complicated roguelikes, I feel like there is something wrong with BG1 difficulty-wise.
For me, someone who is not familiar with 2E rules whatsoever, the problem is that the game is a bad teacher of them. Spells and status effects in particular are so obtusely presented that it's impossible to know what to do about them before they occur, and even after.
What's more, the RNG has too much control. Saving throws are a fun mechanic in PnP, but in the context of a single player game, they're just boring. Is there any reason I should be caught in an AoE spell like Web or Entangle for as long as I am in BG? Sure, I can cast Dispel Magic, but I can still get my guys caught in the damn thing again, depending on their position.
In too many fights, the solution is either A) the one the designers want you to use despite failing to communicate that to you, or B) luck. I don't necessarily mind combat being a murder-puzzle, but I can't assemble a puzzle if I have no pieces.
I thought about installing SCS, since watching enemies act intelligently is one way to learn how to act intelligently yourself, but that still doesn't solve the fact that 2E's rules were never meant to work in a computer game. More intelligent enemies in a broken system doesn't fix the system, even if it helps you learn it.
And don't get me started on the amount of prebuffing you have to do.
I'm having more fun on Novice than I had on the previous two difficulty levels, and that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Still way better than DA:O, though.
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Okay, so now the wizard with high might does everything via telekinesis.It seems to me that the main problem here is with non-combat actions. The fact that a mage with high Might hits harder with his staff is incidental, as that's an edge case and will almost never come up. But the fact that he can bash down the door for the same reason his spells are strong seems... weird. Or at least, it does if you assume the mage is bashing down the door the same way a fighter would. I don't think that's a safe assumption. Similar to the different means of intimidating mentioned earlier, the mage and the fighter would bash down a door in very different ways. The fighter hurls himself at the door, knocking it down by weight and physical force. The mage instead rips the door off its hinges with a burst of telekinetic force. Both are very Might-based, but they aren't both the same kind of might. In a class-based system, I don't see the problem with that. Different stats mean different things for different classes, even if they lead to similar results. In fact, the ability to achieve similar results is *literally* what it means for the stat to be the same. The rest (muscle mass vs. magical power) is just flavor text.
What happens when I want to built a muscle wizard who shouts RARGH and headbutts his way through a door?
Play as a barbarian?
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Hi Adam,
I'm curious to find out how the integration of the KS contributor NPC designs have been coming along? I'd imagine you're getting quite a few unusual ideas, which I'll bet are a challenge to adopt into the setting. Could you speak to that? Thank you.
Second.
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Yo, Adam! Just fired up Stick Of Truth, and I'm really digging it so far! Also showed it to a friend who's not the insane Obsidian fanboy I am, and he dug it too, which bodes well for y'all.
Hmm, questions... Man, you know, I always have so many until a Q&A thread or an AMA actually happens. Let's see here...
1. This may be more of a Josh question, but I didn't stumble into a Josh Q&A thread, now did I?
So I'm playing through BG1 for the first time (Enhanced Edition), and I'm really liking it, but one thing that I notice is that it's often unclear what killed a given party member and why, particularly where magic is concerned. This annoys me, because if I can't figure out why I'm dying and learn from it, I can't rectify the problem. What is being done to counteract this in PoE?Also, cats or dogs?
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Despite some problems, I think PST is still the gold standard for highly reactive dialogue that never feels inappropriate to a given situation. Which, in a way, is why I think that "RPGs then vs. RPGs now" picture is funny, but ultimately misleading. There were more options "then," for sure, but A) the conversation with Ravel is unique even in PST, as alanschu pointed out; B) that conversation has only one mechanical outcome, and the Dragon Age 2 conversation has at least two and maybe three, which means that the two pictures could just as easily give the false impression that RPGs have become more reactive; C) if you were to compare that DA2 picture with a picture of an average interaction from, say, Baldur's Gate 1, the contrast wouldn't be nearly as pronounced; and D) a lot of RPGs "then" were just as unresponsive to player input in dialogue as most RPGs "now."
There are, of course, more useful things the contrast reveals: how much value old-school players place on options in conversation even when they're mechanically useless, for example, or the value of contextually appropriate responses as opposed to Good/Neutral/Bad.
(On a related note, isn't "I'm hungry" ultimately an even meaner response than "Get out of here?" At least "Get out of here" shows that you've been paying attention!)
Anyway, to address the topic more directly, one thing I hope PoE will have is PST's "Lie: blahblahblah" responses. They weren't necessarily more in-depth mechanically, as most of them never really paid off, but they allowed for additional character definition, which is in some ways just as important.
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Ah, cool! Thanks, Josh! :D
Ragarding your question about, uh, my question: I was mainly interested in how slaves are treated and the possibility of earned emancipation.
Also, how do curses work in the Eternityverse? I was planning on writing a curse into my character's backstory that manifests as an unsettling facial tic, but I'm not sure if that's possible.
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I almost never use player-written journals, but I absolutely support their inclusion. It's one of those cases where I don't think the game should be designed around it, but I do think that players who like that sort of thing should always be allowed to have it.
One thing I like about BG:EE is that it allows you to copy certain documents into your player-written journal, thereby allowing you to to drop those documents and move on. I wish they had let you do it with lore books and the like, though I understand why they don't. Still, it's a lovely little workaround. Given the stash system, I don't know if it's strictly necessary, but it might be a nice feature to allow in PoE for people who might not want to scroll forever to get to any lore books they might have picked up, or whatever.
I also liked the way Dragon Age did it, of course, but there's something ineffably cool about books being interactive objects that a lore repository just can't replicate.
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@JFSOCC:
That's my personal favorite approach, and it's the one Obsidian uses most often, in all three models of RPG narrative that PrimeJunta mentioned. They lay the Big Problem out for the player, and then the player decides how to solve all the Small Problems that compose the Big Problem, and how the player solves the Small Problems affects the world, and the world pushes back accordingly, and nothing works out as well as it could, which makes the resultant story - a work coauthored by player and designer - feel convincing as a narrative.
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@Ineth:
"Witness dynamically in the game" was probably a poor word choice, as it implies directly experiencing the change, but I believe the idea was that you would come across a group of darguls or revenants if you decided to go to the fampyr-filled area a long time after you got the quest. And there are plenty of ways to communicate the change indirectly, the easiest being to have the quest-giver tell you a given area is a "fampyr meeting place" or something. When the player comes upon a group of darguls, you could have a journal update that says something like "It appears I have tarried too long in resolving this matter, for the fampyrs have become darguls!" Or something. BG did a lot of stuff like this.
Whether it's worth scripting (especially if the passage of time only applies to this one quest) is an open question, but in isolation, it wouldn't be much harder to script than, say, Xzar and Montaron turning hostile if you take too long to go to Nashkel in BG1. It's just a state change or two, nothing major, especially if the only ones that talk are the fampyrs. There's already a day/night cycle, and I believe a clock and an in-universe calendar have been promised as well. No new mechanics required.
Not saying it should or shouldn't be done, but it's hardly impossible.
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Yeah, so don't do it.she's more or less a joke character designed to let me do a silly voice and be horribly inconsistent in my roleplaying and make dirty jokes.
I can't speak for everyone, but I for one don't want some male pig's haha females joke character in a game I helped pay for.
I should point out that "haha females" is so far away from the point of the character. Just because she's a joke does not mean the joke is at the expense of women, or that the character is what I think women are like, or whatever. I've always been very careful to play her as a character who is ludicrous in ways that everyone in any gaming group can find enjoyable. The ultimate joke of the character is that she's utterly shameless about her shallow, hedonistic nature. Think Troy McClure meets Paris Hilton meets Divine.
Not that this should even matter, which is why I didn't bring it up earlier, but you should understand that I created and evolved this character in a game run by a female DM, in which more than half the players were women. I mention this only because it sounds like you are under the impression that I created her to make a bunch of misogynistic dudebros laugh at how lame chicks are. That was not, is not, and has never been the case. I'm not going to argue that she couldn't seem sexist to someone; my acute awareness of the potential for miscommunication is what led me to post what I posted originally. But I absolutely did not create her to laugh at women.
Many of the friends I wanted to amuse via her inclusion in PoE are women. The people I intended to (and did) entertain originally with the character are those same women. Half or more than half of my friends outside of that gaming group are women. I am a feminist.
I state all these facts not to imply that I am somehow exempt from being sexist; that's honestly not my call to make. I'm as good at putting my foot in my mouth as anybody. But my intent is never to be sexist. The worry I had about putting the character in the game was that I was unsure if that intent would be easily communicated through a short description of her, or if she would just come across as a sexist caricature out of context.
And I suppose you're wondering why I didn't say this when you originally called the character sexist. It's because I wasn't sure if you grasped my intent with the character until you confirmed you didn't with this latest post.
And that's my fault, to be clear. I obviously didn't communicate the aforementioned intent well enough in my first post, which led to the same misunderstanding I worried the character would provoke if included in the game. This is why I ultimately decided to go with another character that represented my view of woman less ambiguously.
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Infinity engine question
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Shockingly, not everyone plays games the same way or keys into the same things other players do.
Don't be snobs.