nipsen

Btw, did we understand how armor class works, then? That if you throw all your armor off, have decent dexterity (although that last part doesn't matter any more), then you're difficult to hit - and your armor class will be high. So it's difficult to hit you, and your armor class penalty is non-existent. If you can somehow boost that AC high enough, physical attacks are either going to miss, or simply not do all that much damage (because of the graze system. Of course if you do get hit, even a "normal" hit is going to be painful, since you have no damage reduction/threshold). If you heap on a full armor, and don't have dexterity and so on - you're slow moving and easy to hit. Your armor class will be low, but your damage threshold will be high. So now, even though you get hit more often on average, you don't take as much damage (on each hit). However, the tank can still be vulnerable to: status attacks, poison, fortitude attacks, drains, critical hits, and slow and inaccurate heavy blows, etc. Specially since any creature is going to hit really often, and even special attacks with a relatively low hit-probability (poison stingers?) will hit often. And because of how accuracy skews the attack roll against low AC characters - you're more likely to score a critical hit, if your accuracy bonus is high. If your accuracy bonus is low, you merely hit normally, and the blow is deflected. Situational spells and abilities can turn that around really quickly. And that's why I enjoyed playing the game early in the BB. Since what you did in the game was meaningful, rather than a tedious grind designed to last for as long as possible. Since then, all - literally all - of those things were removed from the game. Per request, to make the game play in a way that didn't offend a few selfish, unintelligent misers. And I'm just saying that it's not going to serve Obsidian either in terms of reviews, sales or "legacy" afterwards.

There is no "resistance" stat, and never was. You may be thinking of Concentration though, but given how confused you clearly are about the game's mechanics it's hard to take anything you say seriously at this point. And you claim to have turned this into a PnP system? :boggle: And since in P:E all attacks, including touch attacks, rely on Accuracy to hit, and there is no such thing as "armor class"... well. Your imaginary system maybe. You clearly have no idea about what the actual system in P:E is, or was like though. But keep talking, this is amusing. 1. ..An attribute called "Resolve". Affected a stat called "resistance". Resistance is what governs damage, status changes, and possibly other things - from the mechanical point of view. From a character creation point of view, a character with high resolve happens to have high "resistance". So "resistance" is probably what you're going to be worried about when writing a ruleset..? 2. If you had a heavily armored fighter, your armor class would be average (in spite of the class bonus). But the damage threshold would be high. So a low-might build would rely on beating the armor class, and beating it with so much that it would range towards a critical hit -- which then would bypass the DT. A character with average accuracy would still be able to hit a heavily armored fighter, though -- but not do any damage. So - a build that has decent attacking ability through some spell or buff (touch-spells that bypass DT?), but has low accuracy, can now suddenly hit every turn for non-critical hit damage and roast everything. Every graze is a full magical hit, etc. Add attacks of opportunity from the fighter trying to retreat, and that rogue or priest could have a situation where they'd dominate completely. 3. Well, I know how a lot of you played the original Backer Beta. And I know some of you think that your way of playing that beta is "how the game really is". That's fine, it's understandable that people think this way. Some of you even argue that "how you specifically play the game" is also "how the game should be, even if we could imagine anything". That's less easy to respect. Meanwhile - the system is abstract, isn't it. It's supposed to be a driver for imagining what actually happens. When you role-play a fighter, you don't imagine the knight kneeling down before every turn to throw the dice, to figure out if he hit when he next swings the sword, yeah? It's abstract and figurative. The trick would be to let the abstraction actually work with the mechanics in your rule-set, rather than against them, like you have with DnD. And I don't understand why people are so narrow-minded that they get a crisis of faith when you create a ruleset with a formalisation level that actually gives you both the abstract concepts, and then successfully tie those to the game's actual mechanics, without breaking either the rules, or the abstract concepts you constructed your character with. Specially when their way of playing the game is completely well-described in the game, and isn't even really that disadvantageous in the first place. It's like photographing people and suddenly finding that they scream and trash around and can't be reasoned with because their soul has been stolen into the box. You know, it's not really all that great of a feeling.

Like I thought; making things up. There is nor was any "Resistance" stat. Ever. Maybe you're thinking of resolve? Just a guess. Such a build would have been worthless. In the early build fighters were terrible at dps compared to other classes. The fighter NEEDED his heavy armor to be useful. BS. In the early beta the ONLY viable fighter build was armored tank. Attempt to make anything else and you were nerfing your fighter greatly. Tanking was the only thing the fighter was good at. Oh, yeah. Resolve. Thanks. ..It actually granted a bonus to a "resistance" stat, though. But thanks for that. Other than that - "I am convinced completely that I'm right" isn't an argument. I know you think the first system dictated one single build for the fighter. But I don't know how you came to that point of view, or why that is the case. I'm obviously open to the suggestion that there is a good reason why you personally think the system only allowed one build. And that understanding how you arrive at that view might be interesting. But - it's still the case that you could create a light and fast fighter, and rely on defensive abilities when you were outnumbered, and so on. And it would give you the advantage of having a fighter placed in the right situation more often - specially if you built for interrupts, which you could. That was the build concept. Not complicated. Mhm, you're mistaken. Well crap. When you so clearly lay it out like that, how can I possibly doubt that I was mistaken? Could you perhaps, I dunno... produce some modicum of evidence that actually shows me I'm wrong? 'Cause I'm totally fine with being wrong. In fact, I'd rather KNOW I'm wrong than THINK I'm right. I'm just kinda missing out on the knowing part, here. ... evidence that perception at one time was what determined "interrupt%" and "range", determining how likely you were to interrupt casters, ability triggers, runners and so on that were in range? Turns out I actually don't have evidence that that ever happened. But I think the game simulated (badly, imo - even if it was a good idea) a system where you would generate a possible attack of opportunity at pretty much everything - movement, ranged attack preparations, spells, ability triggers, stance changes, whatever. But only a few of these would actually be exploited, depending on the build standing next to you. And typically, the might-based builds would have low perception, making them less dangerous than a faster one if you were triggering a lot of interrupts against you. Like my example with the weak but criminally perceptive priest, who normally doesn't fight much, has low stamina, etc. But he can spot any detail, etc. and could for example completely dominate in a defensive battle if he had a magical touch attack prepared, that didn't rely on accuracy to beat the armor class. Gaining attacks, and hitting every time, with the defensive bonus an interrupt would give you. That's what made the system interesting. That you could literally break a formation, or crash a well-organised attack. And when the line falls, it's overy in a moment. Instead of... after kiting down to the next corner, etc.

This is one thing I'm super glad about. Automation can take a hike. Indeed. If it's one thing everyone in the world loves, then it's to get Baldur's Gate 2 - just without the crutch that was AI scripts. AI scripts in a tedious combat system? Hah! Casuals! Real players click the mouse-button until their wrists go numb. And then they continue doing it. Because this, my friends, is serious business.

Yeah, I could be mistaken, but I don't recall anything ever affecting your chance to make an attack of opportunity. Ever since its conception, engagement was "you leave the circle, you get attacked." And what stat is "resistance"? Mhm, you're mistaken. And Sensuki is hung up on a suggestion I made - that was to skew the critical hit table for spells and strikes with the intelligence bonus, so you would get more severe sideeffects like bleeding or shocks, or stuns, etc., when a critical hit would occur. This would make a lot of sense in the ruleset as it was then. But as Sensuki argued: it's not in the reverse-engineered code that has to do with displaying the stat-sheet card, so it's not in the game, and should never be either and ...things. I still think it would have been a good idea - if it wasn't already in the game in some form or another via the tables and the logic for the actual attack rolls, that we still really know nothing about specifically on the code level, in spite of some people insisting otherwise. Resistance was the "dump stat", remember? The one that "no one picked", because it was "unneeded". Also, "waah, the crystal spiders are hard". THIS! I wish I could give two likes! I still remember how pissed I was that the fighter had to be an active defender because that's all fighters were good for when the beta came out. Now the system is much more flexible and I can make my fighter focus on offence with passive talents rather than active abilities. Like a fighter should be. I'm in some ways sorry to provoke people who seem happy enough in spite of their disabilities. But you guys realize on some level or other that "more flexible", and 'it now fits the limited role I think a fighter should have, perfectly' - are not two statements that could reasonably be said to have the same meaning? Meanwhile, I have demonstrated, in detail, how you could vary your builds on the original schema. I'm not making that up. Seriously, "I don't accept that it exists, and violently scream that it doesn't until you go away", isn't a valid point of view. Nor is it someone's "valued opinion" (in spite of Obsidian apparently insisting on telling the rest of their fans otherwise).

*sigh* It's not finished yet, but my pnp adaption of the original rulset is in the works, yes. It'll be released on a creative commons license. And it will be different enough from Obsidian's released game that they would have had to fish up the design documents and make complete asses of themselves if I released it commercially. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to make available a good role-playing system that me and friends enjoy playing with, so more can enjoy it. If that eventually motivates someone to make a computer game that uses a similar system, I will obviously be back here to gloat. But hey, feel free to think what you want. I'd have it no other way.

Really. You're worried the game will get lukewarm reviews when the vast majority of the time spent with the game is boring and dull as wet candy-fluff. And the combat doesn't even have scripts to help you avoid the tedium of clicking in every single command, over and over again, in the same pattern every single time. I mean - how could that possibly be anything but an invalid complaint from people who don't see the genius in copying all the design flaws from Baldur's Gate in rapid succession. Truly, what supreme elitist of a reviewer wouldn't dismiss that concern as a minor detail as long as the writing is good. No, I think we all know that this is going to work out brilliantly. It's going to soar into the sky until we stand and watch it, mouth open and eyes burning, shading our faces from the blinding radiance. Like the launch of the Hindenburg.

Ok, a little bit serious for a change - what happened was that in the original build, it was possible to specialize every class. I've made a few different examples from it, but the fighter class could end up in a slow-moving tank, an extremely fast but lightly armored striker, or for example a skilled defensive swordsman. The base class was intended as a normally armored defender, considering the abilities you started with. I made a Witcher character of some sort that was a fast fighter wielding a greatsword - buffing dex (that used to be accuracy, to boost critical rate), resistance (to avoid status attacks), intelligence (to boost athleticism and other skills, to better use potions, and increase stamina, etc.), and perception (to increase attacks of opportunity rate) - and he would rely almost exclusively on the buff-skills for defense, but then focus the feats on striking ability. So I would have a fighter tank (the bb-fighter) being defensive with increased armor buff, and the Geralt mutation almost always running with increased engagement limit. So from that one class, you could make completely different characters, and all had a role to play if you configured your party well. None of the characters would have incredibly debilitating weaknesses, but they would have super-specialized attacks and ways of bypassing or bashing through certain types of defenses. What made the combat interesting was that you would then have to figure out how to focus your attacks. Some weapons and some attack types, with such and such buffs, would bypass some types of armor, other weapons wouldn't make a dent. So now you had the opportunity to super-specialize your characters, not to maximize their damage bonus, but to maximize their effectiveness when you figured out the weakness of the monsters. If you then dropped a stat and got negative bonuses, you would get a few really nasty surprises. This was too difficult, some argued. What they did was for example maximize might - but neglect resistance and perception. And they'd get trashed by the first venomous spider in the forest. Others balanced their characters evenly, and did perfectly fine. But it was not good enough. There were /trap builds/. So the solution was to remove perception as a variable, remove interrupt opportunity and resistance as a separate stat. And then simply move all the critical attributes into the class table. This caused two things. One, all the specialized variations of the classes are now impossible to create. Two, the stats don't matter any longer. If you now have a party that's too specialized towards one area - which is completely possible to make, but also to inadvertently end up with if you assign your priest to a certain role, or your mage to another - you end up with impossible fights. And so the solution would be to turn the difficulty down. And that's what actually happened. They made the classes flat and one-dimensional to please a particular slice of their customer base. Creating one-dimensional attrition warfare out of every fight in the process (and it is tedious and similar and the same every time). While failing to understand that the problem really was that the ones who complained simply didn't understand how the game was supposed to work. And now the game was just tedious and boring, like people remark. It's not really very interesting, and you don't get the feeling of actually being powerful in this "no-magic fantasy" world, where magic doesn't really exist, and blabla. So what do we get now? It's the mages that need a buff. If you don't understand how this hangs together, I'd recommend giving BG2 a spin, and see how laughably easy that game becomes if you simply have a few extra wizards in the party and spam damage spells. It's not much more complicated than that. You have a small core of people who played the IE games in an extremely particular fashion, cannot imagine anything else - and all the feedback is geared towards that: if the game isn't identical and favor their particular way of playing the IE games, then the game is broken. And that's where the feedback for "improvements" comes from. I'm sure it's not malicious, or intended to ruin the game for everyone, including Obsidian and Paradox. But that's the result anyway. And like I've said, it's not the fault of the superfans for being passionate about something. Good for you. It's Obsidian's fault for not realizing what they were doing to their completely functional system, and understanding that even if they spent 100 years on perfecting that system -- it still wouldn't be any good. So yes, I'm holding out for a way to turn the difficult level down to "enemies have armor made of origami paper". So I can skip past the bs as quickly as possible to get to the dialogue and story-telling. Which my characters will be specialized towards with intelligence (the most useless stat in the game, as well as in the real world as we well know), resistance (another stat that has no use of any kind apart from resisting cutscene torture, I guess), and dexterity (to climb ropes in side-quests well). Outside of that, there's no point whatsoever to do anything with the combat. Because it's so flat and boring I can't imagine who in the world would write off on it and say: "GOOD JOB!". It just doesn't remotely make any sense to aim for something like this. It sounds impossibly exaggerated. At least until you actually see the thing in action. Then you see for yourself what they've ended up with. And it is so disappointing in so many ways that it just can't possibly escape comment. We've all thought, I think, that developers are held back by evil corporations and nasty publisher spawn. And surely they are. But what happens when a developer has to deal with the publishing responsibility themselves? They do the exact same thing as their publisher overlords: they cave to simplistic solutions in order to please the first and best customer in the most superficial way you can imagine. And that's disappointing. Still, sure, will be playing the game, and wanting to get to the plot and the dialogue. But if it turns out that "the book was better" than the game, I'm not going to exactly laugh of the irony, to put it that way.

No. I predicted what the changes would result in. And that very few would be happy with what they asked for, and what they then got. I hardly needed to predict an endless fount of sarcasm flowing from that.

It's still not wrong that the stat bonuses has almost no impact on combat with the system they're using now. Even for the stats that are still there to be tweaked, and won't be completely governed by the class. So you don't get 10% bonus damage if you chose resolve instead of might. Which means that even if you attack with the right damage type, or if you still beat the damage threshold, means the difference, at the most, between something like 12 and 15 damage per hit? So I'm not sure how it's not the case that the class abilities and the class variables matter massively more than anything you can do with the attributes. So I guess their idea is that you should simply pick the attributes that describe your build for the unexplained old system, so you get the dialogue options you want? Good job..?

..honestly? After the kind of responses I got when I predicted exactly what would happen after the changes (never mind for the suggestions I made), it's not even bad for my karma to childisly gloat over how badly this has turned out.

Don't worry. Since after the second beta update, the stats, regardless of difficulty, makes no practical difference. What matters is class bonuses and abilities.

..it's a bit weird to make Josh the director and then trash his first combat/role-playing schema as well. Almost as weird - to then replace it with something else that is beyond rescue. But hey, I'm not one of the people who sponsored the development of the project, so no skin off my... oh, wait...

Well, yes, I know that. But what they reacted to, and what Obsidian internal testing and apparently Paradox Q&A latched onto, was the idea that the first design was too complicated. As in they didn't make any changes based on your suggestions directly. But were very sensitive to any evidence that what they began with was too difficult to understand. As well as extremely open to the idea that giving fans what they wanted, even if it wasn't a good solution, was a good idea. Which, as I said at the time as well, was what that paper was really arguing. That "even" the hardcore fans couldn't understand what Josh had dreamt up. That the design was simply too different from the IE games, and therefore not possible to sell. It's not the case, of course, when you actually take a look at it (or given that the presentation of the system as given to the player had been better constructed). But that seems to have been the narrative - that some of you seem to have shared in a sense with Obsidian internal testing.

I suppose it says something about you when you think your opinion is that important. Specially when what I said is that I was extremely disappointed when Obsidian looked for an opportunity to throw out the original design. And literally used isolated ditto-opinion on this forum to justify it as "what most people wanted". That Obsidian could do something like that - in spite of the very obvious problems implementing the changes would cause, even if they ever managed to "balance" it afterwards. And in spite of the amount of work it would result in, that would have been better spent on fixing mechanical problems that apparently still exist. That's what disappointed me. That they didn't have the foresight to ignore the internet-noise, stick with their design - and really thought pleasing some super-fans was more important than designing a consistent ruleset. With the deep role-playing they obviously advertised and promised they would choose, now that they didn't have to sell to a publisher and argue for "common appeal". It's also why they allowed a refund, which they have no obligation to process (and normally refuse). It's also what had certain.. extremely well-placed people close to the design process argue that the focus of the game for them now had become the dialogue and story-telling. While that the combat system and character build system was at least more dynamic than in the IE games (which doesn't take very much). Saying then that therefore the Kickstarter promise was fulfilled, technically. Frankly, I'm also not the only person who rolled their eyes when you and matt came up with a model that had some very obvious flaws. Flaws that you ignored very happily. Such as that you "proved" the PoE attack rolls and damage model were skewed, by assuming a completely linear system. You literally set up constants for a special case, and ignored how the rolls would be variable. Ending up with an analysis that first made the PoE system seem unbalanced. And you then proposed changes to it to make the system statistically balanced. When what you really did was simply ignore how the design was meant to function, forcing the data over your assumptions of how the system worked(a d&d model). While swearing that the math you had set up proved your completely disconnected point, because the math you presented was internally consistent. Maths doesn't work like that. Everyone knows that. Obsidian folks know that. But they chose to not ignore how very loud people, people they assumed were their superfans, had such a ridiculously hard time understanding the original rulset proposal. And how they started to noise about betrayed Kickstarter promises. That was what they acknowledged - that some of you were incapable of grasping how the system worked, for whatever reason. So they thought this was a common problem - that they underestimated their audience like this - is something that helped motivate the changes they made. And that was disappointing. I didn't think Obsidian had that attitude towards developing a game, and I really don't think people who like Obsidian games typically think that either. Basically: We didn't go to the PoE kickstarter to fund a "AAA"/common denominator game that Obsidian could have otherwise gone to a publisher to fund. To essentially get a streamlined and shallow game, that also had bad graphics. That wasn't the point with the Kickstarter project.

Well if they are reducing damage in next build, maybe the will survive longer. Maybe if you're really careful, correcting the height of a table by sawing off a bit of each table-leg, one at a time, will also work. Just have faith.

Hahah. Nope. When you think any correct solution of a random equation will always answer the question you have at hand - then yes, you have fundamentally misunderstood how maths work. You've also said you have put me on the ignore list. Which I think is a good idea, since you do not deal well with criticism. So please keep me on the ignore list.

Why not humor us and list these fundamental design problems? Or I can do it for you: "It's not identical to the IE games". There, all done.

Really, now. So do you think that this could have something to do with how the attack roll is relative to the armor class? In the sense that a lower armor class that is beaten by a significantly stronger attack roll, has a higher chance of receiving a critical hit, compared to an armor class that barely is beaten by the attack roll? So that when damage tresholds are tweaked down, and the threat range and attribute modifiers are tweaked into a class setup with fairly high base default values and no weaknesses, as apparently Obsidian Q&A and people around here have all wanted -- then all characters tend to do critical damage often, have no weaknesses. And this ends fights very suddenly for no reason. Etc. Because, you see, I've never heard about this before, or ever thought or ranted at length about exactly this particular ****ing point for pages upon pages, of course. And it's not at all sad to see someone - after everyone Obsidian listens to got what they wanted - having to make the point that the mobs are now simply too weak, and that this makes the combat unsatisfying. But at least your paper seems to be based on something valid. The last "analysis" was based on a complete misunderstanding of how maths work.

Yes, well done. And it was /because/ BG was an IE game, and had no innovations of any kind compared to earlier games. And in fact, all the problems were, undoubtedly, deliberate design decisions. And keeping those are therefore essential if PoE is ever to be popular. At the same time, if PoE doesn't sell millions of copies, it is because it's not similar enough to Baldur's Gate. It makes perfect logical sense! And nothing anyone will ever say will convince me otherwise. In fact, I'm now just holding over my ears and singing "lalalalala", just to make my point even more logically consistent.

So wearing armor is a liability in terms of damage in the long run. You're literally proposing to "balance" the reduced damage while wearing armor, by increasing the amount of damage they receive on average over time. Not with speed or agility or number of attacks, depletion of stamina or weaknesses to certain types of damage, while specific damage could bypass the armor completely, etc. But by simply increasing the damage dealt on critical hits, so that a sharpened toothpick can bypass the armor if you survive for enough time. Honestly, I can not see why either Sensuki Reversecompile Inc. or Obsidian Entertainment haven't brought you on as a game-designer yet.

You mean, exactly like in the IE games? Halleluja, it's a miracle! The game will now magically sell millions, because it's exactly like the IE games, down the the most annoying detail ever! Success!

All in for linear damage models, then? I'd just like to take this opportunity to congratulate you all for ensuring that the story-telling and writing will be the exclusive focus of the game once it's reviewed, though. Since the combat system description will feel comprehensive and redundant after about two sentences.

Once upon a time, movement speed would have been very useful for positioning yourself without being attacked or interrupted too much. But alas, we collectively do not care about subtleties like that. So they patched it out. So now it's also not good enough, and there has to be additional spells and additional mechanics. Sounds familiar? As if somebody told you so, literally, ahead of time?

Oi, oi. Hold on.. an entire page of actual discussion about mechanics as they relate to gameflow? Which forum is this? Who are you guys? Or maybe converting the UI to something halfway usable on a gamepad just seemed... extremely unappealing with the time they planned spending on actual coding? But good points. Still - I think it's very obviously a game that is niche in terms of marketing. But they also know that it's a type of game that has a completely different audience than typical PC gaming niches. Role-playing is kind of big. Fantasy literature the same. Interactive story-driven types of games arguably is what everyone making games wish they could do more with. So perhaps it could have been thought of more as an experiment, as well as an excuse to make a game Obsidian could be proud of showcasing: this is what we're really about. Here's a game on a tiny budget that has interactivity and story-telling interference with player input of the kind that AAA folks say, frequently, is impossible to do. But here's a tiny game that allows you to actually role-play just about anything, and still be immersed in the writing. A weather-balloon, as they say.. So what will it be a test for now? Those were minor, though, and made sense, even if I think they weren't necessary. The decision to separate the character ability stats from the combat, streamlining the classes, etc... apparently to attempt to make the underlying system simpler, so that the presentation automatically also is easier to understand, or something like that. That's what ends up making the combat monotonous, where your input or character makeup doesn't really matter all that much. Where your character creation is more cosmetic than anything else. Where the combat is decided on how well you can guide the combat rolls and game things to your advantage on a technical level. And it's also what requires the extra abilities and a complete rework of the combat system, if they want to make it something people happily spend time on. I mean, I can't imagine an rpg combat system, in a game where combat isn't the only focus, that's more interesting than where you actually can use your own character's general traits to make small and rare, but significant, tilts to turn the combat your way. Where several player-controller heroes fight multiple enemies - but where it doesn't turn into "mark all units of this type and attack the tank in the middle", etc. Because it doesn't require you to control every detail, things can go on automatic for the most part, and you still feel that what you're doing has an impact on the outcome. Not because you just got a new sword, or because you just unlocked a new ability, or the AI cheats, or the designer cheats and hides the horde of guards in the cutscenes, or the boss stage is designed so suspension of disbelief is a player skill rather than a designer skill - but because your character used their strengths to their advantage in a combat situation that actually made sense. Or, you role-play your character, and they have the traits you chose, and they make a difference in combat without leading everything every single step. .. *shrug* It's like some sort of holy grail for rpg-rulesets , that you might imagine could be done but can't really understand how specifically. But there it is -- and.. then weirdness starts happening.