Amentep

If you're wanting to do a "legit" stealth build, then you'd have to use stealth ability to avoid combat as much as possible (since I'd think a stealth build should be weaker to a combat build for, you know, combat). I assumed Josh was talking about penalized in terms of losing out on XP with which to improve the area of focus (stealth, diplomacy). If Combat + Quest Xp is implemented and the stealth path only gives quest XP, then stealth parties are going to take significantly longer to advance their skills, leading to stealth paths "deadending" because the party is too under leveled to succeed in high level stealth checks. Depends on how sneaking is implement. If we're not talking about magical invisibility and silence, it might take a good bit of time to work characters around paths without being spotted.

What if... respawns? What if... plague strikes? What if... earthquake? You still improved your skills by killing them. There shouldn't be raspawns because this means unlimited loot and/or xp for the player so it's an inherently negative machanic, unless it's a MMO. No, I won't accept the "learn by doing" xp for hitting the dragon, because this is not the spiritual successor to TES and I wouldn't like the silliness that springs from such a system in PE. I don't want a learn by doing system either (I think I said that up in the thread). Why would respawns effect loot (or are you saying that your party, after killing 5 monsters, stopped in combat to loot the bodies? No wonder they lost to the remaining 5! ) You're still improving your skills by killing them - by killing all of them not half of them (as an old music teacher once said "perfect practice makes perfect" doing it wrong doesn't improve you any!)

Numenera: Torment: Not Quite Torment 2: Electric Boogaloo: Revenge of the Colon

So you'd be okay with a system that, for example, doesn't reward combat against weaker enemies at all, but still rewards stealth options? So lets say a CR encounter 2 levels above the party gives the same XP to stealth and combat but a CR encounter 5 levels below the party only gives XP to the stealth party (because there's still some "effort" involved on the part of the sneaking party in sneaking but not in fighting the punny fellows)? What effort is there to sneaking past a significantly inferior enemy? Also, what's the danger? What's the consequence for being spotted and heard? :D You do have to take consequences into account for success/failure when employing such a philosophical stretching of circumstances. Penalties to combat if caught sneaking plus the alerting of ALL monsters in the area to your presence (ruling out sneaking further even against more advanced foes, requiring retreat/failure of the objective or heavier combat resource investment than a combat path)?

This. Why should one player who simply sneaks through an area receive the exact same amount of xp as another who fights his way through? If they're both using equivalent levels of their resources to accomplish their chosen path...how are the two any different? The scenario is only imbalanced if there is no risk or expense in stealth options - for the system proposed to work I'd think there would have to be equivilency in resources used (or else your fears would be right). It seems to me that the disagreement here is one side believing that stealth won't (or perhaps can't?) have an equivalent resource drain to combat. Would that be accurate?

Because the dragon will regenerate his stamina back when you leave, just like the player. Will rest too, probably. The 5 monsters will stay dead. But what if the 5 remaining monsters are rejoined by 5 of their pals (respawn)? From a game standpoint, the encounter is still the same, so rewarding the failure to take the 10 monsters all at once with a combat xp system will reward you constantly. (Do we know if PE monsters will respawn?)

So you'd be okay with a system that, for example, doesn't reward combat against weaker enemies at all, but still rewards stealth options? So lets say a CR encounter 2 levels above the party gives the same XP to stealth and combat but a CR encounter 5 levels below the party only gives XP to the stealth party (because there's still some "effort" involved on the part of the sneaking party in sneaking but not in fighting the punny fellows)?

Nope, it wouldn't. If a group was scripted to give XP only once for sneaking past them. And if you kill them after that you'd get no xp either. I suppose you could assign a system that gives an opponent a set of xp that is "taken" when the player kills or stealths the enemy, thus allowing the xp to be gainable only once. I'm not entirely sure how that's fundamentally different from assigning an objective "get past the enemy" to a quest and rewarding the same amound of total XP for the objective as to the individual kills/stealths. It's diffent because... The player could kill 5 enemies from a group of 10 and then run away to survive. He'd get no xp under the "quest xp only" system. To counter this argument, I'll ask - why should the player be rewarded for loosing combat against a group? If a Dragon gives 100,000,000 combat XP, should a player who gets the dragon to half her HP before running away get 50,000,000 combat xp? Because that's equivilent to killing 5 of 10 in a group...

I don't mind... but this is a RPG. How do you want to level and build up your character? By giving combat xp + (specific instances of stealth/dialogue XP) + exploration xp + quest xp. In your scenario, how does combat then not become the optimal resolution of conflict? Combat party = Combat XP + exploration xp + quest xp > (specific instances of stealth/dialogue XP) + exploration XP + quest XP = Stealth party In essence, you're saying that you want the system to be unbalanced toward combat, yes? You don't engage in combat, because avoiding it yields the best results? Combat will be a waste of time and resources in almost every situation? There will be plenty of loot in the enviroment so you don't need combat loot? There is only quest xp? How do we know that combat is a waste of time and resources vs stealth when we don't know what resources will be used for stealth? This is the big assumption in this thread that I can't get past. One would think if the goal is to make each choice viable then the cost of each choice (in general) would be equal. Since when has diplomacy not been a viable choice in the IE games? And they used the combat and quest xp. Diplomacy and stealth were always limited cases of viabilty in the IE games. Having a thief in your party or putting points in stealth really only had the benefit of allowing you to disarm traps or scout outside of combat (in combat you could backstab and pull enemies by appearing from the shadows) No. It only makes substantial stealth for every class a less viable choice (i.e. you sneak around everywhere)... which makes sense in a tactical combat based game just like the spiritual predecessors. That is like, I dunno, saying that you should be able to sneak past every encounter in Modern Warfare 4. But here's the issue - and this may be the fundamental divide between players on this issue - to my mind, when you look at PST (combat bad and irrelevant) to IWD (combat required all the time) you've got a lot of room to cover - and a lot of flexibility to look at things beyond combat. As you say, substantial stealth is irrelevant in the IE games - it makes thieves of limited use. Diplomacy as well. So what happens is you throw a thief and a diplomat in the party to be surrounded by your bloodletters and run headlong into combat every time. But is this the only way to do this? If the IE games were intended to bring the "Pen and Paper" RPGing to the computer, shouldn't the fact that P&P games are more flexible than the IE games were be addressed?

I don't mind... but this is a RPG. How do you want to level and build up your character without XP? I think if you're removing kill & quest xp, you're moving to a "XP for doing" system. 100 sword strikes = level up sword skill? Not terribly fond of those systems (at least the ones I've been exposed to)

Nope, it wouldn't. If a group was scripted to give XP only once for sneaking past them. And if you kill them after that you'd get no xp either. I suppose you could assign a system that gives an opponent a set of xp that is "taken" when the player kills or stealths the enemy, thus allowing the xp to be gainable only once. I'm not entirely sure how that's fundamentally different from assigning an objective "get past the enemy" to a quest and rewarding the same amound of total XP for the objective as to the individual kills/stealths.

Of course the D&D rules will not be used. As for the rest, read the thread. I have read the thread. It boils down to this - right now I don't see anything in what Josh has actually said that leads me to believe your fears that moving to quest XP is going to eliminate combat as a viable choice. Right now what I see is an attempt to make stealth, diplomacy and combat viable choices. The suggestions I've seen for Combat XP so far seem to all boil down to making combat the optimal choice and stealth and diplomacy less viable choices. Given that we know the game wants to have skills and PST style dialogue responsiveness, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is a better path. If someone can suggest a way to use Combat XP without making stealth and diplomacy undesirable I'd certainly be willing to give that a listen. But so far I haven't seen a workable suggestion; again the suggestions I see all fall back on "make combat the optimum conflict resolution path". What we know is that the high level system is going to be designed for egality; that doesn't mean that all the quests will be designed so. Again from my understanding it is much easier to make a high level system that is equal than to create an unequal system and write additional code to make "abuses" (like stealthing past an enemy and going back to kill them for twice the xp) irrelevant.

An Isometric camera, party based fantasy game with a strong central narrative. Beyond that the road was open as far as I could see. YMMV or course. How could I not see that the game was going to be fundamentally different and dumbed down. Ohh, thats why. Thing is your fundamentally different isn't mine. Even in that sentence I don't see anything that so far cannot be achieved by what we know of quest xp. I knew this wasn't going to be a D&D game, so there's no real reason to keep D&D like rules. While I understand your fear that combat is going to be meaningless, I have - as of yet - to see anything that makes me think that will actually be the case.

An Isometric camera, party based fantasy game with a strong central narrative. Beyond that the road was open as far as I could see. YMMV or course. And deep companion interaction and reactive world content! At the time that it was pitched, I wasn't sure that it'd be more IWD or PST in terms of companion interaction, so for me that wasn't really an issue (since I liked both games).

An Isometric camera, party based fantasy game with a strong central narrative. Beyond that the road was open as far as I could see. YMMV or course.

One of the *many* reasons why romances gargle donkey sick. I don't follow... character depth is bad? Is that the reason to which you're referring? I believe he's referring to romantic character depth existing at the expense of having non-romantic character depth. In short, the player gets short changed in terms of a responsive and interesting NPC if they don't follow the romance path (or worse, that non-romancable NPCs have very little character development also)

He also gave an example of a sneaky person being able to grab treasure chests without fighting but having to weigh whether they wanted to expend more resources to fight one of the areas antagonists so as to get that antagonists gear or not. So yeah, based on what he's saying you can get good loot whether you kill or not, but you won't get loot off of people you don't kill...

Not necessarily. There would just need to be an equivilent penalty, ie the loss of HP in combat isn't guaranteed but possible / loss of HP in stealth may be impossible, but other penalties may add to stealth to compensate so resources expended in either scenario would average to the same.

Indeed. Sadly enough, that's usually not the case. You and your co-worker could both worked 32 hours, paid the same. But it's 100% impossible both did the same amount of work. There always will be this variation. Same with questing in RPG's. And it's not a good way to reward one specific task more than the other, in this case, combat. Or you almost guarantee people will do it for the reward. It's why most people will want to work on sundays, it pays more than ordinary days. But one can hardly make everyone work on sunday alone and not the rest of the days. Nor is working on sunday really "harder" or " easier" than other days... I'm not saying to always reward combat as the best choice. I'm merely asking to reward the paths that hold the most conflict and confrontation(whether combat or not) I'd like to think - and I may be wrong on this - that just because the "system" at the high level isn't intended to prefer one way to solve a quest over another, that in specific situations there could be (and should be) places where combat leads to preferable outcomes. As I recall there was mention of objective and quest xp, so if a quest is broken down into 10 objectives, the quest might be completable by doing 4 objectives (stealth) 5 objectives (diplomacy) or 6 objectives (combat), thus making combat a "better" choice - but only for that particular quest (with the other objectives being optional but not required to complete the main quest). The idea being more objectives completed = more Quest XP when complete. I may be misunderstanding this, however.

it also opens up the question of why a player can't be awarded stealth xp for constantly walking back and forth in front of the same enemies; if you follow the idea that stealthing past "something" gives you xp, then why does it only give you xp once? Then there's the "Can you talk to the orc guard and diplomacy your way in (xp), sneak back out (xp) and then kill them all (xp)" problem...

I'm not really saying its not viable (as it exists in games), but that the scenario encourages (via xp) the player using combat as a resolution. "Least effort" is an interesting thought; is it harder for a fighter with loads of skills in fighting to beat an orc guard who is stronger and bigger than they are in armed combat, or a thief with a lot of sneaking skills to get past an orc guard who can see in the dark and has better hearing than they have? Seems to me that there's effort in both situations, but effort of a different kind. So how does that encounter giving 600 exp to every solution not favor the hiding party? Because - for now at least - I don't know what resources might end up being expended for the hiding party. For example, stealth mode could consume stamina and stamina used in stealth mode could have a penalty to regeneration that stamina used in combat doesn't. Thus making the player whose party build is such that a stealth resolution is viable have to decide whether use of resources to stealth solve the quest outweighs the resources for using combat for the same (with the added penalty to stealth that failure in the stealth past results in losing both the stealth resources and your combat resources). But I'd like to think that if they're going to not encourage non-combat solutions at a high level that they're looking at ways to make the choice of resource use non trivial.

I'm not really saying its not viable (as it exists in games), but that the scenario encourages (via xp) the player using combat as a resolution. "Least effort" is an interesting thought; is it harder for a fighter with loads of skills in fighting to beat an orc guard who is stronger and bigger than they are in armed combat, or a thief with a lot of sneaking skills to get past an orc guard who can see in the dark and has better hearing than they have? Seems to me that there's effort in both situations, but effort of a different kind.

I don't want to put words in Helm's mouth but reading through this, I think the general fear is that by having quest XP, the system is encouraging whatever path requires the least amount of resources, thus you're replacing one system because it favors combat with a system that favors non-combat options. I'm not 100% convinced this is the case, partially because we know so little of how the resources are actually going to work. If I remember correctly the stamina system already mitigates some of the issue in terms of using up health potions in combat since as I recall stamina regenerates relatively easily but health not so much; but I'd think a combat based party would be (or should be?) less inclined to suffer health losses as opposed to stamina. This means that limits to times of use on skills might be a more important resource for players (combat powers used in combat, stealth powers in stealth) and management of resources in regard to the unknown situations ahead on the quest as opposed to what's in the inventory. Not sure.

True, it does, but in a way that is relatively easy to address. E.g. low-level loot drops from kills which more or less match your expected expenditure of resources for the battle. As an added perk, skillful players will be able to win battles with less resource use, meaning they'll end up ahead. This is a much easier problem to address than the imbalances introduced by kill XP. Could you please elaborate on how it would be so terrible if the majority of Exp was quest based and some exp was rewarded for combat ahead of avoidance options? I believe the inherent issue is the ability to double-dip into the XP. Lets say you have 10 orcs guarding a chest that contains an object you've been hired to get (the quest). If the 10 orcs have a 10xp for being killed value and the quest itself gives 500xp then if you fight the ten orcs (100xp) and complete the quest (500xp) you get 600xp else if you sneak past the orcs (no xp) and complete the quest (500xp) you get 500 xp so the scenario encourages combat. Same scenario but you add 100 xp for sneaking past the orcs to not encourage combat as a resolution now if you sneak past the orcs (100xp) and complete the quest (500xp) and then double back and kill the orcs (100xp) you now encourage stealth complete quests and clean up for xp. So now you have to deal with, how do you make sneak a viable option without adding an additional incentive to go back and kill the orcs upon completion of the ques. You could remove the orcs (but why do they leave when they don't know what they're guarding is gone?) so they can't be killed. You could make them unkillable (that sort of thing annoys players). Or you could script it so that if the quest is completed by stealth the orcs no longer give XP. But I think what the developers are saying, rather than looking at a low level (script something that changes the quest xp for each scenario) that they'd like a high level solution that works for all scenarios.

Right, but I'd think that a fighter who specializes in sneaking would have to be paying a penalty to some other skill that would diminish their effectiveness in combat or other aspect of gameplay. Hence why I also suggested a "battle mage" build as opposed to a support one who might have an invisibility spell and a sound damping spell at the cost of not having as many combat spells to choose from.