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I'm not sure if this is an already explored topic, but I'd like some minor tweaks in the interface. If this belongs in other threads, plese welcome mods in movign this post elsewhere, or pointing me at the proper thread. The purpose of this, is to reduce a bit the bureaucracy times, where you don't play but you just "do the luggages". Which I love, don't get me, wrong, but that's because I'm some kind of retentive. - Leveling up: I find it a bit cumbersome to be able to level up just the current party. The specific case is, mainly, about ship travels, maybe dotted with battles, and pertains mostly the sidekicks. I really wish there was access to the level-up screen from any point in the game, to any character who reached the next level(s). As it is, if I do not use three or five characters for some time (mostly the sidekicks, as I said), I find myself with them lagging behind compared to their xps, at some time even by three levels. So, I need to periodically stop at an inn, tunr the characters, level them up, which takes more than ten minutes (sometimes way more). On a side note, if the sidekicks all had a more juicy storiline or dialogs, I would leave them behind a lot less... (I totally adore Mirke) - Inventory: for about the same reason (not passing hours in an inn or suitable place to arrange the luggages), it would be nice that the inventory screen included ALL the characters and not just the ones currently in the party. During the third quarter of the game I find myself with a cartload (boatload?) of items to assign to thirteen characters, each of them having four (or six, or eight!) weapon slots and about ten body slots, making a grand total of 150ish items to allocate, picking them from usually three times as much. It would be reasonably nicer if I didn't have, ON TOP OF THAT, to load and unload characters. So: could it be possible to access all characters and not just the four (plus myself) currently active? At least in the "common points" (inns and ship) where you are assuming they are all there anyway. Incidentally, having an inn-like place in every subsection wouldn't be amiss, but I digress. - Inventory (there's more): personally I could use a finer division of the weapon inventory (one-hand v two, and ranged v melee v grimories v shields), of the clothing accessories (by body part, maybe including armors) and of the miscellanea (pets v books v tools). Incidentally, I would put the tools in the "consumables" menu. Point is, I tend not to throw away anything until I'm sure of what goes better ob whom, so I find myself with tens of clothes items all mixed up. But I understand that this is just my inner Jeeves talking.

Hopefully I'm not the only one that likes switching party members up but hates that their levels can vary so much. It'd be great if all companions would stay locked at my PCs level but I'd say that is more involved. Right now I'm working around it with the addexperiencetolevel console command but it'd be nice not to "cheat" and to still get achievements.

Looking over the wiki, and theorycrafting a shifter druid (as I have a mac and can't play at the moment) and I noticed that all of the animal spirit shifts have an armor calculation of (8+ Power Level +1 every 5th Level), with the exception of bears which have (8 +2 +1 every 5th Level). It looks like bears are supposed to be a tank form. Does this mean that they are strong at 1st level, but falls behind all the other forms shortly after? Or is it supposed to be {8+(2 x power level)+1 every fifth level}? Can someone with access to the game check this please? because as it stands it looks like the elk and boar forms seem to be stronger tanking options.

So there's been much discussion of the difficulty of PoE (or lack thereof), and a good deal of the problem seems to be related to how easy it seems to be to hit the level cap very early in the game. Players (not myself, I'm not that far yet) have reported reaching level 12 literally before even starting Act III. This is a problem for a number of reasons that are hopefully self-evident - no reward for completing more quests, all combat encounters become trivialized, etc. Was this a design decision? I don't think so. I think it was a mistake. My basis for saying this is a quote from Josh Sawyer - earlier on in development, sure - but still a reflection of their design goals, I'm sure. Taken from: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65074-level-cap-and-pacing/?p=1421141 So if you were never even intended to reach 12th level without being a completionist (and presumably reaching it while still in Act II should be out of the question entirely), why is it happening? Since there's only a finite amount of XP in the game, we can fairly easily reach the conclusion that XP rewards and the leveling curve are out-of-whack. Where, I can't say. But you'll note that the IE games did not have this problem (in general). And the reason is not because their XP rewards were perfectly tuned for where the player should be at any point in the game - that's nearly impossible to do. It's because their leveling curve is exponential. In Baldur's Gate, you need to double your XP every time you level up. Straight-up double it. Different classes had different curves, but this trend was the same. So for a fighter, you'd need 2000 for lvl 2, 4000 for lvl 3, 8000 for lvl 4, 16000 for lvl 5, etc... all the way until lvl 10, where it switched to a flat XP amount per level. PoE, on the other hand, uses a linear growth formula - each level needs 1000 XP more than the previous level needed over it's previous level. So it's more like 1000 for lvl 2, 3000 for lvl 3, 6000 for lvl 4, 10000 for lvl 5, etc... (don't crucify me if I got the starting point wrong, the trend is what's important). The implications of this difference are staggering. In Baldur's Gate, even if the difference between a completionist and non-completionist playthrough led to the completionist having 4x the amount of experience as the non-completionist... that translated to 2 levels. Only. So they didn't have to worry about balancing XP rewards perfectly, because the system was robust enough to handle players having a wide range of XP-gaining tendencies. In the PoE system, on the other hand - if you get even 2x the amount of experience as a non-completionist, that's a lot more levels. Assuming the critical path puts you at level 9, doubling your experience from 45000 to 90000 would put you almost at level 13 (91000)!! That's 4 levels difference.. from just double the experience in PoE. Versus 2 levels difference... from quadruple the experience in Baldur's Gate (or a single level from double the experience). You cannot balance an encounter to be fun for people on both ends of a 4 level spread. Not in a game like PoE. So you can see that conceptually... fundamentally... even if they fix bounties giving craptons of XP... the PoE leveling curve is fundamentally very sensitive to the differences in XP we might expect completionist vs non-completionist players to have. About 4 times as sensitive in the area we care about right now (the high end of PoE's levels). Josh Sawyer and co. are welcome to try and balance the sidequest XP in PoE such that the game stays fun for both completionists and non-completionists. But the only way to do so (literally the only way mathematically), to replicate the BG leveling "feel", while keeping the current PoE level curve is to make sidequests give a pitiful amount of XP compared to the critical path (please no) or to make individual levels much less meaningful (please no). The PoE leveling curve has to go. I don't know why they decided on it in the first place - but it's fundamentally incompatible with a game with the amount of side content (and side quest XP) we would expect in a game like PoE. No matter how well you balance things, you can never get past the limitations imposed on you by the leveling curve. If you want a game in which completionists and non-completionists can be within a few levels of each other at any given points (and where side quests are still meaningful), you have to bring back the exponential leveling curve of BG. I expect they'll do something to fix this issue, and I expect it won't be what I'm suggesting (because that's hard to do). I think what they'll end up doing is just toning down side quests to only give about a fourth of the XP of the critical path. That'd replicate the results of BG's system - at least for this game. But as they move into the expansions and sequels, this problem will rear its ugly head again. The exponential leveling curve would fix it where it's broken. I suspect we'll get a band-aid instead (which would still be better than the current system)... but I hope they'll at least consider adopting a more robust leveling curve. EDIT: As some have pointed out, doubling the requirement each time might be a bit much. Fair enough. The actual coefficient isn't that important - what's important is that the mathematical formula for "next level's XP requirement" changes from XP_n = c*[(n)+(n-1)+(n-2)+ ...] to XP_n = c*a^n. The base, a, was 2 in the BG games. It could be whatever you want it to be in PoE. Just use that formula instead of the current one.

Okay, so I know that we get up to six talents. Level 1 Level 3 Level 5 Level 7 Level 9 Level 11 Which, in my opinion, is great with the types of talents there are to choose from. It makes sure that no one PM (party member) is overpowered, and makes you think long and hard about specializations. If you are going for a straight bruiser, you would go straight down the Weapon Set tree. Snipers would want to go straight down the Marksman tree, picking up Gunner and Interrupting Blows. Deep Wounds, too. But what else about leveling am I missing? When do they offer new abilities? New spells? Is there a site that has all this information, because I've been searching?

I notice that upon trying to level from 7 to 8 on Kana the chanter companion, any phrase I choose does not show up in his phrasebook when I go in to edit. In picking from either 1st or 2nd level chants, nothing chosen during levelup shows up in the phrasebook. Is this a known issue, or am I missing something mechanically? Thank you. EDIT: I'm sorry, don't know how to delete this post/thread. I figured out I was confusing more than a few things about the class.

Old thread. In the red corner, we have people who want to stick with the tradition of Infinity Engine games. Over in the blue corner, the wide eyed idealists who want fair XP distribution for all players regardless of playstyle. And apparently there's a few people who lept in and started painting another corner yellow advocating for learn-by-doing. Still have plenty of corners in this ring, it's not a triangle. So give your feedback. But I want a nice clean discussion, no low blows or personal attacks.

As I understand they've said they just want combat to be for the fun of it. Taking away experience rewards from enemies just seems like it will leave the combat a bit unrewarding. I feel like I will skip even trying to get in fights because there's not much benefit and mostly detriment. You risk your characters getting hurt/knocked out/killed for what, beating enemies juts for the fun of it? There's always a balance of risk vs. reward in these kinds of games and it seems that balance has been upset. Sure some enemies may drop items, but that'll be the only reward of combat? I think it's a mistake for them not to give any exp. Perhaps cutting the exp gains from enemies down so that you don't gain a ton, but none? That means the only point of the game is to just grind through quests as fast as you can with no reason to kill enemies and skip all unnecessary stuff. It pigeon holes players into playing one specific way. What if players don't want to do many quests? The only way to play if you want to get anywhere is by questing now. There's no just going out and adventuring around killing things as a form of progression. Let's face it, players want to be rewarded and they want to get that reward via the fastest means possible. That means is going to be skipping unnecessary combat and leaves combat in general feeling like a chore that you must do along the path to grinding out these quests. I haven't played the beta myself so this is just as I understand it from what I've heard and read. Just wanted to get my thoughts out about this.

Okay, I can tell I'm going to make a fool of myself and my limited knowledge of the DnD system used by the games that have inspired Project Eternity, but oh well. Traits and statistics. The qualities and numbers, respectively, that define our characters. What would we like to see in Project Eternity? It might be intuitive to think that Project Eternity will mirror the classic cRPGs in this regard, but there is always room for innovation. ============================================================================= Statistics broadly fall into two categories: basic and derived. Basic statistics tend to be ones that you the player can directly change during character creation or leveling, whereas derived statistics are things like Hit Points, Fatigue, Mana/Magicka, saving throws, and combat statistics like attack/to hit and armor class/defense scores. I'll admit, I'm not an expert on the latter in the DnD system (though I generally find the trifecta of Hit Points, Fatigue, and Mana to be sufficient), and this post is primarily concerned with the former. Among the most commonly used statistics in video games are those concerning fundamental attributes/ability scores; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma in the familiar DnD system. This scheme is tried and true, but there is no reason I see why it cannot be deviated from. It's not as simple as coming up with words that sound nice, though; if one attribute is less utilized than the rest, it will inevitably become a worthless dump stat. The current system works because each ability score is equally integral, and I like to think they can be further broken down to reveal their true essence. Evidently one could probably decompose "attributes" endlessly in this manner ("what is running speed but the combination of leg muscle and reflexes?", etc.), but at some point we must draw a line and ultimately ask whether the groupings are logical. Here is a likely incomplete list of what these actually measure in my opinion, or rather things that an ideal system could possibly measure: Physical: Raw physique (which influences melee damage, ability to perform physically demanding tasks, and maximum encumbrance), endurance (the attrition rate of fatigue), balance, speed (in the form of acceleration and agility), "dexterity" (as I describe manual skill and/or hand-eye coordination), reflexes (reaction speed, dodging), "constitution" (innate resistance versus poison and disease), sensory acuity, and physical attractiveness. Mental: Willpower (volition), concentration (focusing of attention, and I suppose discipline is also related), creativity (use of the imagination), memory (though this is typically not included in video games), reasoning (including all high-level cognitive function), wisdom (for the sage archetype just as reasoning is for the tinkerer), awareness (by which I mean perceptual awareness of surroundings), intuition (which I suppose is social awareness), charisma (persuasive ability), and I suppose something that represents degree of attunement to magic or whatever. Obviously I have just included magic as a mere afterthought, so the system isn't perfect, but I think that touches on quite a few things the DnD system leaves out, or perhaps includes in the form of traits instead of statistics. Is there some way we can better group these characteristics, that will give us more precise control over our character, or open up new possibilities? Do we really need separate derived statistics like saving throws, or can ability scores be rearranged to render them obsolete? Historically, some aspects such as memory and creativity have gone completely ignored, in theory left up to the player I suppose; is that how it should be? Is character movement too neglected, and we should actually add agility separate from manual dexterity (which would still be useful for ranged attack and trade skills). Or perhaps add an Awareness attribute (I can hear the hardcore DnD crowd wincing)? Are balance and concentration best left as passive skills, and sensory acuity best left as trait modifiers? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The other predominant form of statistic is the "skill", which can denote combat skills, trade skills, survival skills, social skills, among others. This is one part of the DnD system that I find particularly deficient, with little distinction made between the very different types of skills. Typically, at any rate, these skills contain some kind of ability check (reflecting the above attributes) and are leveled up through experience. So far I believe we know that Project Eternity will contain trade skills unlike some of the other cRPGs we know, but we don't know much else. I'm not going to go into detail regarding which skills I'd like to see as that deserves its own thread and this one is long enough, but there is one thing I wish to harp on with regard to skills. Skills in real life are the result of knowledge and experience. Disappointingly, however, I have yet to see a game really get this right. Many games just forgo knowledge altogether, and ultimately become a game of how quickly you can collect X experience orbs to level your character, or at least their skills. While I can see this for overall leveling, for individual skills it just makes little sense to me; I think leveling all manners of skills should have a knowledge component and experience component. To this end, there should be teachers/trainers throughout the world along with a wealth of books or another medium by which knowledge is transferred, which is just as important to character advancement as grinding. That's something I'd really like to see with Project Eternity. Also with regard to skills, in particular practical skills, I'd like to see some kind of profession/occupation field on the character sheet if the trade skill system is as good as I'm envisioning (which for one thing would be better than vanilla Skyrim's). Most tradeskills should involve multiple steps of transforming raw materials into finished goods, but each of these steps doesn't necessarily need its own skill for leveling. In fact, some steps of the process could have no skill check (yet still give experience), but complexity is immersive. Just as a brief overview, I could see various DnD-esque skills but a wider variety. Individual combat maneuvers (parry, disarm, shield bash), mercantile skills (appraise, haggle, bribe), stealth skills (pickpocket, sneak), various persuasive tactics (bluff, intimidate, charm, deceive, etc.), leadership skills (rally and other things to make up for lack of bards), survival skills, along with trade skills. Perhaps movement skills like swimming, climbing, and jumping, or perhaps those would be best left as derived statistics. ================================================================================== Whereas a statistic is quantitative, a trait is qualitative (though it often has a numerical impact on a relevant statistic). However, traits can range from racial bonuses and penalties to feats, and also conceivably include physical and personality traits. Notably, keenness of the senses has usually been relegated to trait status, which I suppose makes some sense since they can't be readily improved. On a side note, why limit it to race? Perhaps we should choose our characters age, height, and weight during character creation, and those should confer certain physical and mental bonuses and penalties. More importantly, I'd personally like to see the use of traits widened substantially in Project Eternity. I know this would be quite difficult to implement and nigh impossible to perfect, but perhaps have us select from a list of traits in character creation that merely influence what kinds of dialogue options are open to our character? Things like attractiveness (if that doesn't become an attribute), sense of humor, body language, etc. ================================================================================= Even with all the traits and statistics in the world, there are some aspects of characters that can't be captured in numbers or single words (here I maybe reveal that I sort of come from a roleplaying angle), and it would be cool if there were various ways to define one's character and some aspects of their past outside of "We choose your character's story, and you put a name and a face on them". Perhaps things like socioeconomic status, level of education, religious beliefs, etc. or am I asking too much? What character creation/progression system would you like to see in Project Eternity? Does the classic DnD system cut it for you? Should attributes be rearranged? Should skills be grouped in any way, or should they all draw on the same allocation pool? Should skills in Project Eternity reflect both knowledge and experience, or should they stick to experience? Do you wish for more freedom in defining your character's various non-quantifiable traits? Did you actually read this whole post, or did I waste my time writing it?

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this before, so apologize in advance but, will your companions / adventurer's hall characters get to level up with you even when they're aren't in your company? Let's say you've been adventuring with Aloth for the last 10 levels and suddenly you decide to use Forton instead. Will he have gained extra levels or still the same ol' when you first met him? Since different companions have different skills, if you decide to change companions after playing into the middle of the game it'd make switching NPCs for certain quests/skills kinda tough.. it'd be more like an escort mission for said companion. Thanks!