Whipstitch

If what you're really concerned about is combat mobility then the safer solution would be to give Escape a couple more uses instead of buffing something that becomes a pretty nasty damage ability when combined with the Backstab talent. Also, I must say that I'm not really too concerned about dual wield rogues being flimsy without talent investments in defense and/or a backup shield or ranged attack weapon swap. Rogues have an awful lot of inherent damage potential and can rather easily afford to be built or played more conservatively than most other classes.

Wizards could use some help, yeah. They're fragile and less forgiving to build than the other casters due to the spell selection mechanic and if anything the BBWizard is an optimistic example of what can be done with a mediocre spell selection due to coming with a sweet ring that gives them a really solid bump to their spells per day. I've been able to get good mileage out of PC wizard but only because I was really careful to hunt down every spare scrap of synergy that I could when selecting my spells. For example, a bunch of the damage spells aren't so hot on their own, but Eldritch Aim, Combusting Wounds and multi-hitters like Ray of Fire or the Missile line work together pretty well, but that sort of thing represents around a third of your spells per day. Otherwise you're a slicken dispenser, and sadly it's possible to build a wizard who can't even do that.

Honestly, I'm all for time limits.

This sentiment is a surprisingly popular one, but in my experience it's largely an empty aphorism that rarely if ever applies to the games being discussed. That's because games can easily be complex enough that two choices can both be valuable to different types of characters and/or reward different behaviors and synergies. For example, passive health regeneration increases your durability in a manner that is independent of your personal damage output while life steal effects increase your durability in a manner that scales with your offensive capability but does not function at all in the absence of a target. Which one is superior is thus a pretty complex question that depends on a lot of moving parts, and in many cases the answer will depend entirely on what synergies come into play or what role the character tends to take during combat.

I'm going to be a bit of a scold here and point out that the article doesn't come across half so bad if you haven't been primed to interpret it as such by the headline and the OP's out-of-context summation quote. Ochner acknowledges in the article that patient behavioral modification is a necessary part of the process and most of his criticism is actually about best clinician practices rather than what patients should be doing at home. And within that context he's on point--some medical professionals are unfortunately far too quick to declare that they led the horse to water but that they just wouldn't drink. Which, is too bad, because sometimes that "horse" actually has a pretty serious endocrine condition.

That's rarely if ever been the case in my experience. More often it seems that there's simply a natural and altogether predictable dissonance that occurs when people describe things that are fantastical IRL as being commonplace within a fictional setting. That generally works out fine in non-interactive fiction because in such instances the audience knows going in that they lack any real autonomy and thus aren't particularly put out to find that their understanding of the world is not true. However in tabletop games you can often quickly find yourself trying people's patience with such things given that they are making a good faith effort to interact with their surroundings in what they perceive to be a reasonable manner. For example, I once spent the better part of a session stuck in front of a chasm. It turned out that the DM was trying to teach us that as long as we didn't look down we could walk across like Wile E. Coyote. He thought it was clever, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable that we felt trolled. You sometimes see the same "We are not amused" reaction when stories that are ostensibly mysteries turn out to have an "impossible" explanation.

Some form of spontaneous casting or independent cool down is practically a necessary design feature if narrow and reactionary spells like the "Prayer Against" line are ever going to see much action. Things like damage and accuracy buffs are broadly applicable and thus more attractive on a strategic level even if narrow spot fix spells may occasionally be more powerful on a tactical level.

I think there's an important idea that should be emphasized before things go much further: "realistic" is actually a hugely useful property in fiction. The closer something is to the ordinary, the more easily people can assimilate it into their everyday understanding of how things work and more accurately intuit potential consequences, and that's vital if your story or game is supposed to be function as anything but surrealism. For example, look at the Fireball or Flight spells from Dungeons and Dragons. They're magical effects and despite the in-joke spell components there's no adequate explanation for how their primary effects jibe with normal physics. And that's fine--they can still be adequately included in thought experiments by treating them as unexplained exceptions to the normal order of things. You can still present satisfying explanations for where all the smoke goes after the Fireball explodes or what happens when a Flight spell ends because in the absence of explicit exceptions people default to "common sense" and we've all been taught that hot smoke floats upwards and that people under the effect of gravity fall down. That's a useful and near universally accepted event generator and it doesn't cost a writer anything. Even doggedly fantastical settings like Discworld only function as an exception to such things because we have a vast store of literary references that allow us to play the "It works like in book/movie/cliche X" game for a long, long time before finally resorting to "It works just like in the UK, alright?"

Seconding the Jackie Chan face. Duration bonuses are nice and all, but it's not like every class really gives a crap about AoE size. I also often wonder if things would have been easier if there had been less attributes to begin with: Might: Damage, Healing & Fortitude Saves Constitution: Health/Endurance & All Saves Dexterity: Interrupts, Accuracy & Reflex Saves Mind: Duration, Concentration & Will Saves

Also, if there's limitations on effect stacking I'd prefer they be at least documented in help files even if such broad subjects are not well-suited to concise tooltips.

I sincerely wish they had just not included racial abilities at all and left race as a role playing hook. I feel like they're putting an awful lot of work into making the attribute system into something that can be viable in a wide variety of configurations just to have people like me turn around and pigeon hole race-class combos based on abilities anyway. The current selections are only build neutral in the sense that most of them are nigh on useless pretty much regardless of what class you are.

I feel like "overpowered" has lost a lot of its meaning if people are going to seriously argue that it's an OK thing for tactics to be. Also, combining incredible efficacy with low availability/high opportunity costs would promote hoarding, not discourage it. Even people who treat their items as just another tool rather than trophies aren't likely to blow their megalixirs on random encounters if they're pretty sure they won't be able to replace them for the next boss fight. It's a fun bit of kismet that there's a poster with a Geralt avatar just above me because the Witcher series is a much better example of how to create conditions that promote the regular use of powerful and ostensibly limited items without making the entire experience a cake walk. Of course, whether that sort of approach is a good thematic fit for Pillars is an open question, since part of the Witcher's solution to the problem is to present alchemy and being hopped up on werewolf mutagen as one of your primary specialties rather than a rarely mentioned emergency button.

That's some interesting info in the OP. It's heartening to see that racial abilities sound like they should be relatively easy to mod. I prefer to leave race choice as largely an aesthetic and RP thing, so the min-maxer in me finds it somewhat galling that hearth orlan get Minor Threat.

Well, a prestige class/paragon path analog could certainly work. Selecting between a few variants after X levels is a pretty familiar concept to many people and many of the pitfalls pen and paper rpgs fall into--namely, expansion bloat and early entry shenanigans--are issues that can easily be eliminated or at least controlled within the context of a single expansion pack.

I agree. Unfortunately they seem to go the 'nerf the strong one' route rather than buff the weak ones. I see this a lot in various beta tests and I'm really curious as to what the argument for it is. I mean, I understand the justification in games that have gone live--taking away or nerfing various toys understandably breeds a fair amount of resentment given people have invested time or energy into something that has now been made into a less optimal strategy and nerfing them as opposed to quietly handing out nerf-equivalent buffs also makes those people feel singled out. But well, this is a beta test, and that frankly shouldn't be a concern at this point, and making outliers conform the the expected standard is a helluva lot easier than setting a new standard and trying to adjust everything to meet it.

I absolutely loathe pick pocketing. Even when the rewards are great I always felt like it was uninteresting busy work and completely skipped it if at all possible. Rare is the game where creative approaches for pick pocketing are really at all creative--all too often you have to make heavy use of only-in-video-games logic or save scumming to really get the risk-reward calculations working in your favor. Plus, I find treating every npc as a potential loot receptacle to be really immersion breaking, even moreso than compulsively rifling through every interactive container available or experience grinding. I have a lot of sympathy for this line of thought in general but ironically pick pocketing has historically been implemented so badly that it's practically a handy strawman for attacking that otherwise reasonable position. I mean, just think how dumb it is that so many games feature items that can be stolen from the npc while they're alive but are nowhere to be found if you loot them the violent way. Mind you, I understand that nobody is advocating for such nonsense in this thread, but I thought I'd mention it just to give some perspective on the sheer stupidity many gamers have been subjected to.

My receptiveness to new classes depends almost entirely upon the nature of the expansion. Introducing whole new classes is more appealing to me if the expansion is a stand alone job where you're expected to create a whole new character from scratch and recruit companions from a new cast of characters. However, if it's more of a mini sequel and you're allowed to import your main game PC then I'd much rather see the emphasis on expanding core class progression. I understand that many people enjoy replaying these sorts of games, but even so I suspect that content that would require people to start over from the beginning or swap classes entirely in order to be fully experienced would be a relatively poor use of development time.

I tend to think the "Rare benefits are the best benefits" scenario isn't really all that much fun. Game planning around the possibility that there will be valuable black swan rewards tucked away somewhere can be frustrating for a couple of reasons: 1. If your game is truly sandboxy then it's entirely possible the specialists you want to reward may not stumble across the rare checks intended to reward them in the first place. 2. If you start handing out +7 hackmasters in exchange for high checks, then many people will feel compelled to hyper specialize everyone in their party just in case. I'd rather do it this way: have really high checks be relatively common but put them alongside lower level checks to allow parties to experience varying degrees of success. That way you can reward high skills at semi regular intervals instead of feeling compelled to give a party the moon and the stars the one time their Toaster Repair skills are actually relevant.

I feel comfortable dismissing that theory in this instance. Pillars of Eternity has player option races that were created in-house that appear to be quite different from humans, so it is disingenuous to imply that Obsidian objects to obvious differences in general. My assumption is that elves are similar to humans in Pillars of Eternity because elves are physically similar to humans in most fiction and that there is little point in including elves at all if you're not going to be leveraging some of that familiarity. Honestly, I'm not even too fussed about whether the elves end up tall or short, since again, throughout various works you have elves that vary from Tolkien tall to Keebler tiny. The defining characteristics of elves in most fiction typically have less to do with gross anatomy and everything to do with lifespan and cultural differences, and we know rather little about what those differences will be in Pillars of Eternity.