Why did obsidian make the changes to the casting and rest system?

[PizzaSHARK]

 

- Multiclassing works fine in d20 systems.  Spell level progression and number of spell slots are tied to class levels.  If you're multiclassing Fighter/Wizard, you will have fewer spells and progress in spell level much slower than a pure Wizard (based on when you take Fighter levels instead), but you'll have more HP, have the bonus combat feats, better accuracy, the proficiencies, etc from the Fighter levels.  In practice, though, it's almost never worth sacrificing caster levels and progression for being a half-assed martial class unless it's via a purpose-built class (like Pathfinder's Magus, for example.)

Doesn't that mean it's actully not working fine?

 

[shameless RoC's Legend ad here]

 

 

No, it works fine if you're just doing a campaign that's something like core rules only.  Later splatbooks often add prestige classes or new classes that fill the function of previous multiclass characters much better, so it makes more sense to use them.  A Magus, for example, is basically already a Fighter/Wizard... so why bother making a Fighter/Wizard?  Of course, you can still do a Fighter/Wizard or Fighter/Sorcerer and then take the Eldritch Knight prestige class - worse than Magus in some ways, better than Magus in others.

 

Multiclassing works fine.  There are fewer design issues from a system where you level one class at a time than a system where you get everything at once.  Pathfinder even has optional rules for Deadfire-style multiclassing.  They're called gestalt characters, and they're overpowered as ****.

 

It does, in BG2 a Fighter/Mage eventually turned out to be an improvement over single class Fighter in every way. You basically had a Fighter who can buff himself to immortality and still do huge damage with hasted weapon swings. And if you wanted to powergame a bit, and went dual class instead, after mastering the weapon on Fighter levels.. oh boiiiiii **** just explodes.

 

That's because Fighters in 2E were quite literally just "walk up and hit it with a stick," particularly as implemented in the IE games.  It wasn't until 4E that Fighters really began to come into their own, rather than as a class you dipped 1-4 levels into to get proficiencies and bonus feats, especially in CRPGs using 3E/3.5E rules (Fighters are garbage in NWN, for example, due to its very limited feat selection.)

 

Pathfinder sidestepped the issue by both making a lot of extra feats that Fighters can take advantage of, adding optional rules such as the Combat Stamina mechanic (including a variation where ONLY Fighters get it, to make them distinct from other melee martial classes), and adding extremely powerful class features like Armor Training and Weapon Training to make "maining" a Fighter actually worth it.  Archetypes further flesh this out and are probably the biggest element in Pathfinder "fixing" the problems associated with the Fighter class in 3.5E.  A Pathfinder Fighter will typically do less DPR than a Barbarian or a Paladin that's fighting Evil creatures, but they have unparalleled flexibility compared to either of those two and are often more consistent to boot.

[TheMetaphysician]

I mean I've never played a game where it was implemented well, but make sure to tell me if such a game ever exists. As far as I can see it, it is a fundamentally flawed concept (at least in video games, which makes sense since it was a mechanic built for tabletop) because no matter what you do, there's a problem with it.

 

- If you create a vancian system where the player has, without exception, a chance to rest at any point of the game (even if it requires tedious backtracking), then it inherently has no purpose because if the player ever runs into any difficulty, they can just spam everything and than take advantage of that resting mechanic.

- If you create a vancian system which flat out denies the play from resting after amount of times rested, then you will eventually create a situation in which it becomes literally impossible for a player to complete the game (opening up the potential to flat out break their saves completely if they aren't diligent).

 

Modern game design philosophy finds extreme distaste in both outcomes. The first outcome encourages players to intentionally bore themselves to death in order to complete the game if they aren't very good at it (which is what happened at POE1's higher difficulty levels, and why they removed the concept of resting supplies), and the second can create customers who will never touch your product again. Neither are very great outcomes, especially because any vancian system naturally results in combat which is not consistently engaging for anyone. Because, well, that's kind of the whole point of vancian magic in the first place.

 

This is a very interesting and plausible argument -- an in-principle argument against the very possibility of a good implementation of a Vancian system. I like it! It advances the conversation helpfully!

 

It makes me sad, though, because count me among those who much prefer a system that requires you to manage resources over a series of fights rather than spending them all on one fight. Having to manage resources allows more interesting intra-party synergy (classes like fighters without limited resources carry the party through smaller fights, limited-resource casters carry through bigger fights), and make it possible for a fight to be challenging (because of its membership in a longer series of fights) without being just as challenging on its own as the biggest fights. That is my biggest beef with Dragon Age Origins -- the first fights with like 4 orcs are just as hard as the boss fights at the end of the game. Blah.

 

So I want to take a closer look at your argument. Upon closer inspection, I think I'm not persuaded by either horn of the dilemma. That is, I think that you could implement Vancian systems in two different ways -- one by avoiding your first problem, and a second by avoiding your second problem.

 

(1) Regarding your first horn: I think you underestimate the power of "tedious backtracking" to signal failure to the player. There is a thread buried in the original PoE forums that made a fascinating distinction between hard and soft failure. Hard failure is death and a reloading screen. Soft failure is having to do something tedious or perhaps immersion-breaking (like backtracking out of a dungeon) as the result of less-than-optimal play. At the end of the day, both can be helpfully thought of -- and interpreted by an alert player -- as a kind of failure. After all, what is the cost of a reloading screen? A few seconds of tedium and some immersion-breaking (coming magically back to life). That is really the same cost as the cost of soft failure. And the fact that players complain about having to backtrack shows they realize that they have failed. (They just don't react to it properly.) This is my own reaction to the first PoE, by the way; I thought it implemented Vancian stuff fairly well, though of course it could be improved. The principle of the thing was correct; only the details needed work. (For what it is worth, this matches my own experience playing these games. I always feel an ineffable sense of shame when backtracking out of a dungeon -- running from the monsters! how shameful! And obviously they could get reinforcements, so if they don't, I've broken immersion -- and so I basically don't do it. The resting system in PoE 1 therefore works perfectly for me. I think I'm roleplaying more seriously than the compulsive backtrackers, and that's what the game is designed for, right? Roleplaying?)

 

(2) Regarding your second horn: this is the one perhaps most interesting to me. It seems that this is the way the new Pathfinder: Kingmaker game is going. They are doubling down on the Vancian system by making resting quite a bit more challenging (involving a mini-game of cooking, hunting, posting sentries, checking skills), and also have limited resting supplies and an overarching time-constraint associated somehow with the kingdom-building mechanics. I don't know all the details, but let's do a thought experiment. Couldn't we just make it so that you can always go rest, but that you have to travel far enough, or lose enough time, that the costs (though not a total game-over) are so high as to be prohibitive? Perhaps something like permanently lost opportunities to develop your kingdom the way that you want, or missing quests because they are on a timer, or some other severe penalty that is not identical to a game-over? That would be a design that would grasp the second horn of the dilemma.

 

Moreover, why not, in higher difficulties, include the possibility of mismanaged resources that result in a game-over and reload long before? Perhaps combine it with forced autosaves at chapter transitions, so that saves aren't totally broken. And include sufficient warnings on that difficulty mode. I agree that such a game won't have mass-market appeal, but it might appeal to rpg genre fans, which have been shown to be numerous enough and rich enough to support games with decent budgets.

 

Have I successfully responded to both horns of your dilemma? I think maybe I have.

Edited July 24, 2018 by TheMetaphysician

[Amentep]

I've deleted posts that directed arguments towards individuals. This is not allowed. If you find yourself unable to engage another without making things personal, you can click your icon and pick "my settings", click "ignore preferences" and add the user to your ignore preferences.

[Novem]

I assure you, making things personal was never my intent. I merely responded to the way in which I was addressed. I'm certainly not going to get emotional about the issue, that doesn't accomplish anything. I'm just here to talk about video games. I have no problem with my opinion being challenged, I would just like it to be challenged respectfully and tactfully. That was not the case here. The tone was made very confrontational and emotional from the outset for no real purpose whatsoever, which I find distasteful. I try to stick to attacking the argument, but I'm not going to take clear and obvious provocation lying down.

 

Anyways, @TheMetaphysician...

 

This is a very interesting and plausible argument -- an in-principle argument against the very possibility of a good implementation of a Vancian system. I like it! It advances the conversation helpfully!

 

Thank you, that is always my intention.

 

It makes me sad, though, because count me among those who much prefer a system that requires you to manage resources over a series of fights rather than spending them all on one fight. Having to manage resources allows more interesting intra-party synergy (classes like fighters without limited resources carry the party through smaller fights, limited-resource casters carry through bigger fights), and make it possible for a fight to be challenging (because of its membership in a longer series of fights) without being just as challenging on its own as the biggest fights. That is my biggest beef with Dragon Age Origins -- the first fights with like 4 orcs are just as hard as the boss fights at the end of the game. Blah.

 

I'd just like to note that I'm not saying a vancian system is intrinsically bad, but rather that it's probably not the best fit for video games as a medium. Or at least tightly linear, story-driven games like CRPGs tend to be (that's certainly what I enjoy about them). I can see why you'd like that whole resource management aspect, but I think that at least the way that games have done them thus far too closely mimics what tabletop is doing. If they want to do resource management, they need to find a format for it that fits video games. And it's not necessarily going to be in the way tabletop games do it, because they're just different types of games.

 

Though I will say I personally enjoy games which maintain a relatively consistent level of difficulty, so I don't really like the instability at least the current vancian systems have introduced to fights, which may or may not bias me towards being against them. Some fights should be harder than others of course, but I don't like it when some fights are just entirely on rails. Where I'm not doing anything or really engaging with any mechanics and yet still winning the fight. I just find that to be wasting my time.

 

I think you underestimate the power of "tedious backtracking" to signal failure to the player.

 

I don't think I do actually. I just don't think tedious backtracking will ever be an appropriate or fun punishment for failure. We've been punishing players with loading screens for decades, but in the end do those add anything to the experience? Not really. I'm pretty sure most people prefer their loading screens short, so they can get back into the action. I don't think wearing down the player's patience as a punishment is particularly good game design. Games should be fun (and not that fun does not necessarily mean happy go lucky, it may just mean you're still engaged), and there are ways to make failure fun (or at least I believe that to be so). Tedious backtracking is certainly not one of them. Mostly because it's tedious.

 

Though I think some backtracking can be fun. I like the balance of it in Pillars of Eternity at least. It makes dungeons feel a bit grander, and it forces you to get more familiar with the environment.

 

At the same time I don't really believe this is the most elegant possible solution. Surely we can do better than this.

 

To break down this argument a bit more basically, I'll say this. I think that designers should avoid game mechanics which frustrate the player in a way that's not satisfying to overcome. Running back to town and running back to your starting point is not really satisfying, it's just a waste of your time. It doesn't challenge you to engage with why you failed or give you any feeling that you've overcome your failure, it's just made the game longer for the sake of punishing the player.

 

So maybe what I want to say is that punishing the player isn't really what I believe to be a very good goal. Instead, you should provide the feeling that they are overcoming their failure, rather than mindlessly frustrating the player without any particular goal in mind other than making them feel bad. Failure in video games should maybe be a bit more constructive and rewarding than that.

 

Haha sorry this argument is very stream of consciousness, I'm kind of piecing it together as I type.

 

They are doubling down on the Vancian system by making resting quite a bit more challenging (involving a mini-game of cooking, hunting, posting sentries, checking skills), and also have limited resting supplies and an overarching time-constraint associated somehow with the kingdom-building mechanics.

 

By the way, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Why not instead of purely thinking of failure as a punishment, we make failure a part of the game experience? What if failure in a game is just a path to new opportunities for engagement? Punishment needn't be frustrating or tedious if failure is, in it's own way, a bit of a reward. Because you can make that failure an interesting part of the experience, and really make it feel like playing more effectively next time is a satisfying experience. The camping mechanics of Pathfinder look really cool and like a step in that direction. Because instead of wasting your time, it wants you to think about what you did wrong, and how what you're doing now that you've failed can prevent it from happening next time.

 

I don't know all the details, but let's do a thought experiment. Couldn't we just make it so that you can always go rest, but that you have to travel far enough, or lose enough time, that the costs (though not a total game-over) are so high as to be prohibitive? Perhaps something like permanently lost opportunities to develop your kingdom the way that you want, or missing quests because they are on a timer, or some other severe penalty that is not identical to a game-over?

 

And these ideas are the opposite. Instead of engaging the player more, you're either wasting the player's time for no reason or basically telling the player "you suck, tough luck, there's no better next time, it's over". That just makes a game unsatisfying to play, and in the long term, unsatisfying to finish. Because even when I've finished the game, I reflect on those lost opportunities and feel like I've not really completed anything. I never really reach that final point that makes me feel like I've had a satisfying experience. Failure should be an opportunity for building the player up, not slapping them down just for the sake of doing so.

 

Moreover, why not, in higher difficulties, include the possibility of mismanaged resources that result in a game-over and reload long before? Perhaps combine it with forced autosaves at chapter transitions, so that saves aren't totally broken. And include sufficient warnings on that difficulty mode. I agree that such a game won't have mass-market appeal, but it might appeal to rpg genre fans, which have been shown to be numerous enough and rich enough to support games with decent budgets.

 

Instead of higher difficulties, it should be a mode. Including those as modes satisfies fans without excluding everyone who isn't a masochist. Like Expert Mode in Pillars of Eternity.

 

Have I successfully responded to both horns of your dilemma? I think maybe I have.

 

Responding, yes. No resolution in sight though, and that's what makes it fun.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Novem

[Arddv]

I don't think cRPG implimentation of vancian casting is limited to a binary fork.

 

Another option can be making game designer defined rest spots a la Dark Souls bonfires, and I'm sure there are other ways more talented designers than I am can imagine. Myself I'd prefer some opportunity cost to replenishing resources, like timing out best resolutions to quests, closing side brances ie imitating the DM. 

 

Also I don't quite get why modern gaming industry is absolutely terrified by the very notion of player failure. All these 'trap choices' talks etc. Making player unable to fail robs of significant chunk of experience, makes it less memorable. This is the way human psychology works that solving some problem after several subsequent failures is much more satisfying than breezing through on the first try. Nobody values things that took no effort.

[PizzaSHARK]

stuff

 

You're missing another major option - divorcing the narrative from the protagonist.  Make the game world progress whether or not the player is there to witness it - although you're going to want to make damn sure the player is informed of this in tutorials, since it's not very common in CRPGs.

 

Say you're hired to go retrieve a macguffin from some monster-filled ruins.  Dude needs to sell the macguffin to buy medicine for his ailing aunty or something, or having the macguffin will make it clear that he's the rightful heir when the issue is decided in five days.

 

It takes time to travel to the ruins.  It takes time to travel back from the ruins.  It takes time to fight your way through the ruins and retrieve the macguffin.  Time spent resting is time not spent making progress on your quest.  Take too long, dude can't get the money to get the medicine for his aunt and you FAILED.  Take too long, the succession issue is decided without you and your guy can't succeed without the macguffin to prove he's the rightful heir and you FAILED.  A lot of CRPGs, Deadfire included, are utterly terrified of letting the player fail unless it's by the player's direct actions (you let the thief go because you're developmentally disabled, the thief robs people, you FAILED - but it was because of your direct, stupid actions), and yet that's a huge ****ing problem for games that owe a majority of their design concepts and mechanics to tabletop games where a good DM will quite happily let their players fail, because failure means story branching and opportunities for character development.

 

I mean, think of a typical tabletop module, if there's no kind of pressure involved in resting.  If the world is effectively in stasis while the players are elsewhere... why WOULDN'T the players rest at every opportunity?  Mechanics like limited supplies (Pillars tried that, it's not very fun), and the fact that tabletop play doesn't have a quicksave or autosave function (not very fun if you're playing a mode that's pretty much designed around failing a lot of times before you get it right) help, of course... but the narrative is often the key ingredient that makes it all work, even if your table is full of glorified murderhobos like my table tends to be and like most CRPGs are built around.

 

See, I prefer this third option.  The first option is basically saying, "punish your player with tedious busywork for being bad at the game."  How is that fun?  The second option works really well if the entire game is designed around resource scarcity and having to make conscious, careful decisions around what to bring, when to use it, etc... but that's a very specific, very niche kind of product; rules for such things exist in most tabletop systems, and most tables I've played at either ignore them outright or handwave them (if you can come up with a simple explanation for where you're getting your food and water and how it's being transported, don't worry about the nitty gritty) because that ****'s just BORING unless the module or campaign uses scarcity as a narrative or mechanical focus (worrying about where to find food and water would be relevant and important in a module where surviving on an island or in a desert or whatever is the primary narrative, for example.)

 

The problem, of course, is that this third option is BY FAR the most complicated to design for and you really need to design the game around it from the start.  What's weird, though, is that this kind of "narrative urgency" would work PERFECTLY with the "giant green Eothas is stomping around wrecking ****, figure out what he's up to and stop him before it's too late" narrative angle Deadfire operates under... but they didn't do it.  Similarly, "gloriously evil Irenicus is doing mean things to your little sister, you need to save her from him!" narrative angle in BG2 worked perfectly for this sort of thing, but they didn't do it.

 

I think it's a problem with CRPG design in general, this belief that you cannot let the player fail unless it's by their direct actions.

[Novem]

I don't think cRPG implimentation of vancian casting is limited to a binary fork.

 

Neither do I, but those were the only implementations I can think of, and while there is an "in-between" (or at least I think there is), what's in-between them all suffer from the same problems.

 

Another option can be making game designer defined rest spots a la Dark Souls bonfires, and I'm sure there are other ways more talented designers than I am can imagine. Myself I'd prefer some opportunity cost to replenishing resources, like timing out best resolutions to quests, closing side brances ie imitating the DM.

 

An interesting idea and one I considered for my own game, especially because in Dark Souls it respawns the enemies so it's not just backtracking for the sake of backtracking.

 

However I don't think imitating a DM in a video game is a very good idea myself. Video games need to stop imitating the tabletop format and start coming up with their own ideas. Tabletop is a completely different experience, you need to design around the format you're actually working with.

 

Also I don't quite get why modern gaming industry is absolutely terrified by the very notion of player failure. All these 'trap choices' talks etc. Making player unable to fail robs of significant chunk of experience, makes it less memorable. This is the way human psychology works that solving some problem after several subsequent failures is much more satisfying than breezing through on the first try. Nobody values things that took no effort.

 

I think it's probably because they want to make money, and while I think you're larger point is valid, trap choices are never a good thing. Trapping the player into making the wrong choice isn't a failure on the players part, it's a failure on the designer's part. You're frustrating the player through something they aren't responsible for. Punishing the player for something they didn't do. If the designer presents a bad choice as equivalent to others when it's not, then they are just lying to the player. That's not good game design. It's directly contradictory to your larger and more valid argument that the player needs to fail in order to make success satisfying, because as I said, it's not the player's mistakes that led to that outcome. If anything robs parts of an experience, trap choices certainly do.

 

Anyways, like I said, your larger argument is totally on point. The player needs to fail in order for the outcome to be satisfying. But we need to be thinking about how we illustrate to the player that they failed without actively sabotaging their experience. Failure should be a lesson, not a punishment.

 

@PizzaSHARK

 

You're missing another major option - divorcing the narrative from the protagonist.  Make the game world progress whether or not the player is there to witness it - although you're going to want to make damn sure the player is informed of this in tutorials, since it's not very common in CRPGs.

 

Personally I prefer RPGs driven by their story and characters, but your suggestion is very interesting. It'd certainly be different. Probably not a game I'd personally enjoy, but it'd be a creative game for certain.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Novem

[Arddv]

I kinda understand WHY developers don't go the 'imitating the DM' route - because it involves creating tons of content that the average player will never see. This average player must be hooked from the start and dragged through the theme park of sensations, preferably frontloaded, so that he won't jump off the hook with his pretty short attention span. And this is the reality developers can't ignore. These aren't 1990th where devs could spend years perfecting their vision and creating a work of art, because they knew the starved public would immediately consume anything thrown at them.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Arddv

[Novem]

I think it's more that it's not an effective creative choice for games. First of all, you'll never be able to perfectly imitate an actual human being and will be creating an intrinsically inferior experience. Second of all, tabletop games have social elements that video games do not, and are paced completely differently to video games.

 

There's no point in imitating an experience that you'll never be able to perfectly replicate. You should focus on the different, but equally valuable experiences granted by the finer degree of control you have over the environment the player is in. Give the player freedom only to the degree the game's systems permit without infringing on the quality of the experience.

 

And to be honest (this is a bit of a tangent, admittedly), I don't really mind being railroaded in any medium if what I'm being railroaded to is worth the loss of freedom. If I am being railroaded for an actual purpose that adds to the overall work. Funnily enough, Pillars 1 is actually both a great and terrible example of this. Pillars 1 lightly railroads you throughout the game so that the plot never loses focus, and yet at the end of the game it railroads you hardcore into working with characters you might not like or agree with in a way that adds nothing to the overall story. It's super funny though, because there's a character in Act 2 that railroads you similarly to the game's ending and in a way you might not like, but that's actually railroading that adds to the overall story of Pillars 1.

 

Deadfire avoids railroading you at every possible experience and it feels remarkably empty as a result.

 

So the concept of linearity or limiting the player's freedom is not necessarily a bad thing, it just needs to be used properly.

[Arddv]

 

 

You're frustrating the player through something they aren't responsible for. Punishing the player for something they didn't do.

 

 

How is it bad? Things usually tend to happen regardless of your agency and your mind is evolutionally conditioned to the decisionmaking in constantly changing enviroment. In the 'living and breathing world'. Of course it is unrealistic to demand such complex simulations from the devs, but they should at least create a beleivable illusion. It's no coincidence that people more and more often talk about immersion-beaking as the brain immediately marks such experience as 'fake'. And noone wants the fake experience.

[Novem]

How is that not bad? Just because something is realistic doesn't mean it's fun. If we designed games to be realistic in all cases regardless of how they affected the experience, we'd have a lot of tragically boring video games on our hands.

[Arddv]

Did you notice the 'illusion' part? Games don't need to be realistic, they need to succesfully pretend being such. 

 

Here we may witness the 'sphere of knowledge' effect when the more we know (volume of the sphere) the more the contact surface with the unknown is. The same with videogaming - the more complex system developers try to create the harder it is to make them beleivable. This is partially why railroading works.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Arddv

[PizzaSHARK]

I kinda understand WHY developers don't go the 'imitating the DM' route - because it involves creating tons of content that the average player will never see. This average player must be hooked from the start and dragged through the theme park of sensations, preferably frontloaded, so that he won't jump off the hook with his pretty short attention span. And this is the reality developers can't ignore. These aren't 1990th where devs could spend years perfecting their vision and creating a work of art, because they knew the starved public would immediately consume anything thrown at them.

 

This is actually why I'm not a big fan of big-budget CRPGs, and every single one of my "top CRPGs" released in the past 10 or so years has been what you might describe as small-budget.  I think games like Pillars, Deadfire, the Original Sin games, etc are all lovely but they don't really whet my appetite.  UnderRail, for example, was a much more satisfying experience than any of those games despite being on a shoestring budget and having intentional gameplay mechanics that some might describe as frustrating or unfair - they AREN'T unfair, but the game definitely doesn't hold your hand.

 

I think there's room between the two extremes, but the closer you go to the old-school side of things, they less mass-market appeal your game is going to have.  That's probably less of a concern for a small-budget niche title than for a massive juggernaut like Deadfire.  Like... Original Sin 2 had everything voice acted, so Deadfire needed to, too.  That **** costs a ton of money, and at least for me, it didn't really make any damn difference to me and made it worse in some ways (I really dislike the narrator they chose for Deadfire, her voice and cadence just doesn't suit the word choices and theme, IMO.)  But it also makes the games a lot more marketable - OS2, for example, received a ton of praise for the voice acting, even though I would have preferred those resources have gone into iterating on some of the combat mechanics that I felt were frankly incomplete.

[Tigranes]

The sad thing is that in the wider scheme of things, POE1/2 are small budget niche games. The problem is that the budget and scope keeps getting larger; fans demand more content, devs feel the need to provide cool bells and whistles, it all leads to the games getting too big a budget for their own good - i.e.they need too many sales to remain viable.

 

It would be nice if we could just have 8 different POEs all with a different focus, each of them made on a small enough budget that they only need to sell 100k to celebrate rather than a million. The tradeoff is we won't get full VAs or POE-quality backgrounds or other such things, but that's better than every single medium-budget CRPG being an improbable tightrope that has to knock it out of the park in order to not drive the developers into bankruptcy.

[Ancelor]

 

I prefer per encounter casting.

I hated having to save my spells in original POE just because I didn’t want to rest every 10’ (felt really immersion breaking to me).

In the end I ended up almost never using my best spells since I wouldn’t know which fight would be the most difficult one.

On the other hand a system that lets you use spells/abilities per encounter needs to be more balanced between spell levels and resource usage otherwise it risks lower level abilities becoming totally obsolete.

You didnt have to save your spells you could just rest and get more

 

well for obvious immersion breaking reasons I wouldn't want my party taking naps all the time

[Tigranes]

Doesn't it break your immersion that most of your powers magically regenerate after every fight, such that fighting 80 waves of orcs in a deep underground dungeon is functionally the same as fighting them in a carefully controlled lab experiment with Powerade breaks in between?

 

I guess that's why it's so tricky. You never know what breaks people's immersion and what we accept in favour of gameplay.

[PizzaSHARK]

Doesn't it break your immersion that most of your powers magically regenerate after every fight, such that fighting 80 waves of orcs in a deep underground dungeon is functionally the same as fighting them in a carefully controlled lab experiment with Powerade breaks in between?

 

I guess that's why it's so tricky. You never know what breaks people's immersion and what we accept in favour of gameplay.

 

At least for me, I don't actually care much about immersion - just quality gameplay.  Pillars 1.0 had a lot of problems, but Pillars 3.0+ is about as good as you can reasonably expect that game to get.  I'm hoping the same is going to be true for Deadfire... and modders will probably make it work even better... but I don't really understand why there needs to be a "Deadfire 1.0" when we could've started at, like, at least "Deadfire 1.5" using lessons learned from previous mistakes.

[Baldiedash]

I don't pretend to know the intention behind the design decisions that went into making Deadfire, but so far when I played Pillars (to get a pristine save import   ) and gone back to Deadfire, I have to say there are quite a lot of gameplay improvements. And to direct my comment the title and the OP, I think Deadfire is more fun to play, so I'm guessing that's why they made the changes.

 

I quite enjoy the change to per-encounter abilities and powers since it encourages me to use them. The Empowerment feature I don't use that much, mostly because I don't really enjoy the type of grinding gameplay you employ in a PotD run, which requires spamming empower and rest. I'm sure it isn't actually required to complete a PotD run, but from what I read those that do do such runs use it a lot. And quite honestly even if kiting and infinite rest makes the game easier it also makes playing it a lot duller and time consuming.

 

I personally think that the easiest way to restrict resting, and therefore per-rest abilities, would actually be to limit the access to the infinitely large party chest to only be accessible on the ship, and limit both the food stacks you can carry and require camping to use only food you brought along with you. If you included malnourishment injuries sustained after resting without food, you would, I think, get a reasonable restriction while keeping roleplaying immersion. You could add such features as an optional challenge perhaps to allow for people who relish a challenge to use it, if you don't want to inflict such changes on all who play.

 

In fact changes to camping, like the ones I suggest, I would like for the roleplay immersion even if they nerf empower. Especially since it wouldn't change how I play the game much anyway 

 

If you think it wouldn't be a restriction because you can always return to the ship, you are equipped with a far higher threshold for boredom than I.