eschaton

Toughness does not equal physical strength in all cases however. Women are pretty much proven to have greater endurance (on average) than men, despite lower strength (on average). Athletes, particularly those who engage in team sports, do have higher pain thresholds. But differences in terms of how much poison affects one person versus another seem to be mostly genetic, and don't really have anything to do with how physically robust you are.

I think the problem is if you have magic for everyone, and not a secret cabal, it's very likely you'll have, for lack of a better term, "magical engineers" who begin systematizing magic. Even if they cannot actually figure out how to make commoner magic more potent, maybe they'll figure out how to link everyone up together (so a whole village can build a barn with telekinesis), or how to use magic in concert with physical items in ways to make everyday life easier (maybe a mildly-charmed plow+1 results in faster farmwork, hence the need for less farm labor). Literate people will begin exchanging their "tricks" through letters, and as time passes, society will get more efficient. The bottom line is you will see something like the industrial revolution happening, but with a distinctive magic focus. In conventional technologically-stagnant settings, there is the excuse that the wizards horde their knowledge - using it for either personal self-aggrandizement, or battling with one another. But in a world where everyone has it, even people of modest means, people will look for ways for magic to merely make them rich. And there goes the high medieval setting.

You have a point. There are many game systems which were very combat-heavy, but had unfun combat systems. I hated the combat systems in the Witcher and Mass Effect, for example, and had a hard time finishing the games because even on easy it felt like I was fighting the controls. I do think the example of Planescape: Torment, which remains immensely popular despite probably being the least combat heavy D&D-based game, shows that the core audience will be willing to accept a world where the number of encounters are ratcheted down a bit. Also, I think I made it clear in the examples I used that I think there are many ways you can make "fights of choice" easier with planning. Even in the case of ambushes of the player, given an RPG is to an extent story driven, I think it's fine to offer a "plot device" way out of a difficult encounter, such as the attackers just happening to bunch up next to a crate of explosive powder. I'd even be okay with the compromise of a similar number of encounters, but ensuring that the number of foes is seldom much larger than your party. In real life, hordes of peasants easily killed knights, because nothing beats the power of numbers. You have a point there. That system is a step forward. But again, even with the understanding hit points are an abstraction, I don't see any reason why the traditional system of mages having few and fighters having many makes sense. A skilled warrior should be able to dodge and parry better. They'll often be armored. Their battle experience should make them more likely to notice sneak attacks. And general conditioning should make them more able to shrug off minor wounds and continue doing what they were up to before. But none of that means they should be hurt proportionately less by a sword than a mage. And it especially doesn't show why they should respond better to poisoning than a mage. The HP concept falls because it encompasses so many other things which could be dealt with through combat skills instead of a multiplier off of constitution and class. 1. Phineas Gage did survive a horrific injury, but it's not like he was in combat prior to this. It does make me wonder, however, if we went to a metric similar to what someone suggested - with a "pain" meter, if you'd have a "shock" status where the PC wouldn't feel any pain at all following a grievous wound. The times I got bad lacerations which bled heavily, there was a moment of intense pain, and then it didn't feel like anything - until it started healing the next day. 2. This would work. However, as I've said elsewhere, a system where experience characters spent skill points on things like dodge, parry, and conditioning would work just as well. Experienced characters would get hit less, and when they were hit, they'd be able to shrug off minor injuries easier. The chance of critical hits wouldn't change dramatically of course, but use of proper armor (which would probably be contextual to the mission - everyone should wear the best for planned assaults, and less or even none when traveling, in cities, or making sneak attacks) should be able to make up the difference.

Back from work trip. Some scattered comments... First, I want to make clear I don't want realistic combat because I want a combat-focused RPG. I actually dislike action focused games. Instead, I want realistic combat to make combat a brutal, uncertain thing, and to severely limit the number of encounters. Any system which makes combat too "safe" compared to real life is going to result with body counts far higher than even most soldiers rack up in their professional career. I don't like being forced to have a trail of corpses behind me hundreds deep. A system with real repercussions to face-to-face combat opens up strong incentives to either nonviolent solutions or asymmetric encounters, which are often not rewarded properly in RPGs. I can understand this abstraction of hit points. But as others have noted, it has resulted in weird results as P&P rules moved over into computer games. Why should a backstab of a high-level mage be less effective than a low-level mage? Perhaps a high-level character would be more likely to notice someone before they attacked (having years of experience dealing with sneak attacks), but they shouldn't be able to shrug off a critical hit. Similarly, as I noted, once firearms get into the picture, it just gets ridiculous. Even in action movies, one typically cannot continue to attack after getting shot in the head. One might miraculously survive the attack depending upon the needs of the plot, but you don't just keep on charging. I don't want combat to be fun (or at least, far from the most fun thing in the game). If combat is fun, we're artificially rewarding body-count heavy play. I think by making combat have so few repercussions (lots of attacks to kill foes or kill the player), we're inflating the amount of time and energy which should be devoted to encounters. I'd love to see more games, for example, do what KOTOR2 did where a huge amount of prep work involved strengthening a settlement for a known assault. That sort of planning is most instrumental in winning, not what happens on the battlefield once the melee is joined. I hate arcade action games. I think people tend to have too negative a thought about save/load use though. Sometimes you just lose games, even things like solitaire. You just try again. I don't see the issue with this. In a long, plot-driven game, it makes sense to try again from a point before the beginning, as the crucial mistake you made may have been just before perishing (or whatever). Regardless, in my ideal RPG, you'd be able to avoid rolling the dice most and resorting to it though, since you go diplomatic, recruit allies, set the opponent's camp on fire, assassinate, divert a stream to drown them out, cause a cave in, plant evidence they falsely committed a crime, etc. Any number of ways to ensure that you do not meet the enemy in the field of battle, unless you can bring down numbers heavily in your favor. I'd be okay with a mechanic similar to recent Bioware games though, where "killed" characters are simply unconscious and can be revived provided you win the encounter. Particularly because most people before this mechanism used to just reload when a party member died anyway. It would still mean you'd be highly unlikely to wade into (as an example) 40 goblin mooks, who would likely kill all of you due to sheer number of attacks and flanking bonuses (regardless of how low-level and inexperienced they otherwise are).

I agree that a world with commonplace magic could be interesting. The problem is, in a society chock full of magic you'd see peasants and the like begin using magic for all sorts of labor-saving reasons. Why drive the ox yourself if you can charm it? Hell, why not convince the guy down the street to make you a golem to do the farmwork? You see where I'm going. In a world where everyone has magic, it won't be used for merely parlor tricks and combat. It will be used for everything, and society will stop looking high-medieval and look more like some weird dreamland version of the Industrial Revolution. Which would be a totally awesome setting, but not what's being done here.

I'd see the tradeoff for an armored mage being they'd need to invest in say a high strength in order to wear heavy armor. Which in turn might give them less (presuming we're talking a D&D like system) points to intelligence, and slightly lower spellcasting ability overall. Of course, this raises a different issue. Say you have a comparably high-strength wizard, who wears armor and wields melee weapons. In what way, at that point, is a plain-Jane fighter with the same stats superior? The fighter may have access to some feats/skills that the mage does not, but the mage may also have buffs which more than cancel out the difference. This sort of shows why class restrictions are often used. All you need to do, if you have a class-restricted system, is design each class, and make sure it's balanced with the other classes. In contrast, if you provide crossover of abilities between the classes, you need to ensure that there are no secondary builds of one class which render a second class irrelevant. And if you resort to special skills/feats (which I think you'd need to) you're still using the restriction system. Better, IMHIO, to either go whole hog or go classless.

I realize that, in many ways, PE is going to hew to RPG standards, but I wanted to share some thoughts regardless. By far, I find the weakest part of the RPG combat experience to be "hit poiints." Somehow, everyone has a lot of them, and somehow, weapons do little damage, meaning you need to typically make lots and lots of hits against a target in order to kill them. This is ridiculous, and it always has been. When you consider what happens in melee combat IRL, for example, basically the following things are likely, presuming you're talking about a bladed weapon and you are unarmored. 1. You parry or dodge a blow. 2. You are hit by a glancing blow. It could be quite painful and bleed a good deal. You're still able to fight, but unless you have excellent battle training/conditioning, your concentration is sapped. 3. You get hit in an arm or leg, and basically crippled for the duration combat. 4. You get hit in a vital area, and are either bleeding out dead within two minutes, or otherwise so incapacitated you collapse to the ground. The bottom line is combat is actually not about who can take the most punishment, it's about not getting hit. If you get hit, you've essentially already lost. Hit points are dumb - Gary Gygax swiped them off a Battleship game, where they made sense. But humans can't take hits the same way battleships do. The minimal damage level of weapons also leads to absurd results in other areas. For example, while rogues can backstab in D&D, even critical hits don't always lead to instant death. It's even worse with games like the Fallout series, where you can shoot someone in the head (or eye!) and have them not only survive, but continue to attack you!. As I said in a thread the other week, one low-point for me in Fallout: New Vegas was realizing I could not successfully kill a sleeping character with a shotgun blast to the head! I think the ideal system would work something like this. This is still more forgiving than real-life combat, but more like 1. Glancing blows (or hits to armored characters) are abstracted as stamina drains. If your stamina drops to zero, you pass out. You've basically lost too much blood and are in too much pain to go on. But every decrease in your stamina also saps all of your combat abilities to some degree. You hit less hard. You're less likely to hit. You find it harder to concentrate on anything as the pain level rises. Of course, this is also true for your enemy. In reality, it should take weeks after heavy stamina drain to recover fully, but I'd be fine with a shorter period 2. If you get a direct hit on a limb, you're crippled. Ideally, it should be months to never to heal from these, but given many RPG systems have magic or high technology, going to the appropriate healer would work. 3. A critical hit and you're dead. The beauty of the system to me would be it would provide great incentive to non-traditional means of dealing with combat, including assassination, ambush, use of terrain, etc. In general, it would make combat much more infrequent, but this isn't altogether a bad thing. Even soldiers at war are not getting into multiple battles with body counts every single day. Just getting into one encounter every few days with a party of similar size should be a treacherous, literally death defying experience. While higher-level characters would not get additional hit points on leveling up, they would get other bonuses. For example, a bonus to conditioning would represent battle-hardening, showing your character can deal with pain without getting distracted. A bonus to dodge and parry is also realistic, as experienced characters have not been hit many, many times, and should know better how to evade hits. Thoughts?

One of the best things about PS:T was there were dozens of axes, maces, and daggers, but basically only two longer bladed weapons in the entire game. Since the game setting is post-gunpowder, but only barely, if it follows modern analogues, swords will actually be secondary to battleaxes in terms of primary melee weapons. Swords just aren't as good with armor penetration after all.

This is a spinoff of a tangent I went on in the grind thread. I remember a moment playing Fallout: New Vegas which totally broke immersion. I was supposed to take out a group which was initially not hostile. Two members were sleeping in a tent. I crouched down in the tent, snuck up, shot one point blank in the head multiple times - and they did not die. Mostly I missed. Even after trying again and again multiple times, the same thing happened. I realize this was because in game mechanics an attack was an attack, and I shouldn't have been able to pull that off unless I was higher level. But in reality, the idea that a stealthed person cannot kill a stationary target with a lethal weapon was just so ridiculous it made the game lose the fun aspect for me. Which leads me to wonder - could we just insta-kill someone who is sleeping or unconscious. The argument could be made this would wreck the balance of the game. However, provided you make it difficult to get to most high-level sleeping targets (hella locks on doors, stealth requirements), and post-assassination consequences (high likelihood guards will be alerted) I don't see how it would be game breaking.

If (similar to Arcanum and Fallout) the game has realistic 24-hour cycles, rather than NPCs who stand in place all day, you could easily find a way to lift his gear when he's asleep as well. For that matter, you could kill him in his sleep. I hope so anyway. I hated how in Fallout: New Vegas you could shoot someone point blank in the head who was asleep and still not kill them instantly.

You could definitely see all equipped armor/clothing and weapons in Arcanum. To a lesser degree the same was true in Fallout (base clothing was not strippable). In the Infinity Engine games this was less true because there were very few rendered armors, and weapons really only varied in terms of color.

As I said, I have no issue with combat per-se. I just want fewer mandatory encounters, and those which exist to be strategic and trying. It's always been unrealistic in CRPGs how everywhere you go, everyone wants to fight you to the death. Given PE has gotten rid of combat XP on death, there's really no reason to chase down fleeing hostiles at all (unless there's a story reason, like they're a sentry or have a mission critical item). Which makes me think, it would have been cool if instead of eliminating combat XP, they just tied it to "defeating" hostiles. This would mean you get just as much XP for knocking someone unconscious, capturing them alive, or making them flee the scene, as killing them. This is more battle realistic anyway, because you generally are considered to "win" an engagement IRL if you cause the enemy to flee the battlefield. But again, if you look at a medieval knight, they didn't spend every day they were not traveling killing someone. By necessity, battles were fairly rare because they were deadly. Or look at someone like a brigand. They might kill people without compunction, but if intimidation worked better, they'd often take that route (particularly with armed opponents) as it eliminated any risk to themselves or their colleagues.

COMBAT IS NOT WHAT MAKES AN RPG. If you can play a role in a story which reacts to your choices, it's an RPG. If it has a stats-heavy system and a well-defined, branching story, it's a CRPG/Western RPG. While combat-free CRPGs have been very rare to absent, it's not unknown in P&P, and the amount of actual combat encounters is generally smaller even in the ones with traditional combat system. Regardless, I don't want a combat free experience. I just want to have a game for once where I'm not the angel of death sweeping up all mooks before me. I like my killing in games more measured and tactical. That loot is still dropped is good. And it's sort of realistic in the incentives it gives me. If I kill for gold, and I'm fairly wealthy, I'm going to stop mowing down orcs and filthy bandits after awhile, and go after bandit kings, giants and dragons. Yes, the risk is great, but the reward is actually worth the effort. Hell, even in Baldur's Gate, after awhile I just stopped picking up piddly little gemstones from Gibberlings and the like.

Actually, i got the impression that Rogues are good for spike damge: E.G, they can do a LOT of damage in a short while if backstabing an unaware foe, but they can't maintain their offense for long, and they can't do much damage if it's not against an otherwise occupied foe, and they are also very squishy. Sounds pretty similar to the utility of rogues (if they weren't Swashbucklers) in the BG series. Mainly useful for hitting spellcasters before they could get to you, and sometimes sneaking up on ranged characters who would otherwise fill you with arrows. If the game utilizes sentries well (and I think it should, given they were even in Icewind Dale II), then taking out a sentry would be another logical use of a rogue.

To simplify my point: We know that every class gets both combat and non-combat skill points, which are different pools. We don't know the amounts are equal for every class. Many assume they are, however, so let's also consider that. How do spells fit in? Presuming you have spells which are non-combat oriented, but you use "combat skill points" to gain additional spells, you can effectively make a better non-combat build with a caster than anyone else. I have to think, given what we know about magic, there isn't a different "pacifist grimoire" which specializes in spells used to influence people's minds, identify, find traps, unlock doors, fetch objects from far away, communicate over long distances, etc.

The point is magic is not clearly a combat or a non-combat skill. If it's similar to AD&D, it will be mostly, but not entirely, combat, but some will be non-combat related. Meaning they either need to shave off the non-combat spells as skills, or spellcasters really do have less combat utility than non-spellcasters.

I could see smart ways around it, besides a literal back door. Maybe you bribe your way in. Maybe you find some drunk guy at a tavern - you either talk the password out of him, steal his key, or slit his throat in a back alley and steal his key. Maybe there's a "puzzle door." Maybe there's another faction in the dungeon, and if you do a different quest for them, they'll arrange for passage through the dungeon unmolested. There's many, many different options.

This is veering off topic, but it's still unclear how casters will be dealt with in said system. In D&D, not all spells are either offensive attacks or defensive buffs. Some have no utility in combat at all, and others have utility both inside and outside of combat. Unless they have a "non-combat spell" option for casters, I don't know how this will be handled.

I'd agree, except. 1. We don't really have an answer yet on money loot (I found most enemies in IE games weren't worth the loot unless they were named, but YMMV). Personally I'm not a big fan of undroppable items - I think every enemy ought to have everything strippable (as was the case in say Arcanum or Fallout), although it could always get ruined during combat. Given we have infinite inventory, this means collecting 100 rusty shortswords suddenly becomes less time consuming (presuming you can find someone to sell them). I would never do this sort of crap though, and hopefully the game is balanced so that the cost in terms of wasted equipment (arrows, bandages, healing potions, etc) is higher for most low-level encounters than the loot gained. Killing everything in sight shouldn't be a consequence-free way to make money. 2. We might still run into the issue, for example, in a dungeon where the actual encounter we need to make is at the bottom, but there's all these unrelated (in terms of the principal antagonist, not the game design) encounters we need to get through to actually get there. I really hope the game doesn't throw such at us, or allows a "backdoor" into such areas in all cases. But this remains to be seen.

In general, I've been disappointed with the movement of RPG games toward the action side of things. I'm aware that PE will in no way be an action RPG like Diablo, or a recent Bioware-style hybrid, but even within the old IE games, there was a huge variance. On one hand, the Icewind Dale games were essentially nothing but a long, hard, slog grind through dungeon after dungeon (usually in linear order) with minimal dialogue and character interaction. On the other extreme, Planescape: Torment was arguably less combat-focused than any major CRPG made in the past 20 years. There was only one respawning XP farming area, which was essentially skippable, and dialogue occupied a lot more of your time than combat. The Baldur's Gate series fell between these extremes, although it became a bit less combat heavy as time passed. I'm hoping the game is a bit less combat focused than the Icewind Dale series. I enjoyed creating and equipping an entire party in those games, but the unrelenting grind of the games after time just didn't feel fun. Maybe it was just a symptom of a well-balanced game, but I just could never hit the same stride I did with higher-level parties in the Baldur's Gate series, and the lack of a "town side" of the game meant there were no breaks from the dungeon crawling. The movement away from XP for kills seems like a great step to me, which suggests the game is not going to be about "grind." You actually have incentive to avoid trash encounters at least. Some other things I'd like to see to lessen the grind. More realistic combat odds: You should not be able to defeat even a weaker party with many more members due to flanking issues, unless you have serious crowd control, or favorable geography. The game should be set up so a party of roughly equal size to you offers deadly challenge - not throw wave after wave of mooks. Less kamikaze enemies: If you get ambushed by bandits, they should under most circumstances flee once you kill a substantial number of them (and, given you don't get XP from them, and they probably have trash equipment, you have no reason to pursue). Wild animals (which aren't magical) should usually back down when seriously wounded as well. Fighting to the death should be limited to hardened soldiers, and various magical constructs. Limited respawn: If the game goes on over a long period, it might make sense for new enemies to take up residence in dungeons you cleared. But in general, having the exact same trash encounters come back often doesn't make game sense. Sometimes, Orcs don't attack you: Put every other "evil" intelligent monster here as well. They have their own agendas they are going about, which in some cases, won't involve being immediately hostile to the party traveling through the area. Presuming the game doesn't have level scaling, it would be awesome if intelligent foes could actually know your approximate challenge level, and avoid a challenge if they knew chances were high they'd end up dead. Anyway, thoughts?

I'm going to be honest. Even though the random encounters in BG1/BG2 were largely trash, and unless I had a low HP mage who got stuck near some enemies there was no danger, I often used to reload. Not because I couldn't deal with the encounter - just because grinding through the mooks wasn't fun to me (minimal XP, minimal gear, no story advancement, etc). But they still did their job to disincentivize me from resting anywhere, particularly back in the 90s, as the save/load time was quite long back then. So in practice I didn't rest except when I absolutely had to anyway.

If you were talking about something like the flaw in BG1 which allowed you to exit a house with hostiles without them following you out, that would be one thing. But saving/reloading is such a standard part of all games (including the classic RPG audience this game is going for) there would be open revolt if it was not made the standard option, and avoiding metagaming which wouldn't happen in P&P games is impossible. Regardless, I'm new to the forum, so you should point me to quotes if there are some, not make vague allusions. If we were going for true realism, then yes, we should only be able to regenerate hit points in a more safe, hygienic location. But then, presuming hit points mean actual injuries/blood loss, it should take weeks, if not months, to heal from them without magic, meaning combat should be scaled back to probably around 1/10th its presumed level in the game. I'd be all for this (I really would like to see an RPG which deals with combat similar to the real world), but I think many players actually enjoy the grind and would miss it.

Exactly. Why should you stop the gamer from metagaming? I mean, if you want an "Iron Man" version to stop saving that's one thing. But people enjoy different things about the game, and you shouldn't force them into a narrow, tactical vision. I absolutely suck at action games. To even get through the first Mass Effect (or the Witcher) I needed to turn the difficulty all the way down. And I still needed to save and reload all the time. I didn't ever have fun with combat in either one, but I worked by way through because I wanted to see how the story developed. Hell, when I played Star Control 2, I almost always had the combat on automatic. I would have walked away from all of these games and never used them if I didn't have ways to get around the action elements.

One somewhat realistic consequence would be if you rest in a non-inn location you need to set up a watch system. So unlike inn rest, where everyone will get a fair amount of sleep, you'll end up with at least half of your characters not having a full recovery, who will also show earlier signs of exhaustion. I agree with a lot of what's said in the other thread. When I played the Baldur's Gate series, I usually didn't rest until the whole party was exhausted. I have to say I didn't like Icewind Dale as much, so I played it less (too much combat, too little everything else), but even there I tended to rest only when I absolutely needed to (all healing spells exhausted, all healing potions gone).

I don't understand how you say rest didn't have consequences in the IE games. You could often be attacked during sleep, and unless you metagamed and reloaded to not deal with the sleep encounter, you'd have to deal with the consequences. I mean, in the real world, there's no reason why a party couldn't set up camp nearly anywhere. Certainly there would be less risk in defensible areas. What is the problem? Awesome icon, BTW. Loved Star Control 2. EDIT: You also couldn't sleep in towns/cities in any of them without going to an inn, so there already were some restrictions.