Might is botched the same way as in PoE1

[Franknstein]

1. Realism.

 

Why do we have stats? Well, back in the time the guys who wanted to play their TT wargames wanted to express IRL soldier squads in the rules. So they gave them squad stats. Than demilich Gygax came and sad "Let's make this stuff personal!" Ditched the squads for individual combatants. Those individual combatants had stats that expressed IRL fighting capabilities AND the their capabilities to do magic stuff, and it was playable as TT game. Chainmail was born, we had our OG RPG.  So the legend goes. All praise Gary Gygax!

 

Point is – RPG character stats try to simulate reality. In a playable way. With magic. So, more realism is good, yet ain't crucial, and one has to do a good job explaining how the unrealistic stuff functions and has to be consistent about that.

 

2. Intuitiveness.

 

The dictionary tells me that's "based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive". So, I'd say, stats are counter intuitive. One has to explain, that the Strength stat does this and that, and one's expectations might be strongly contradicted (edge alignment and footwork have not so much to do with strength, but contribute to sword damage tremendously). Yet, this explanation has been done a lot of times by all the D&D games. And one's expectations about what's true about a stat without conscious reasoning might very well by dictated by that. All hail Gary Gygax! So, is PoE's Might intuitive in this way? I'd say no, it isn't.

 

3. Might in PoE is not strength!

 

But it is. It's in the description of the stat: "a character's *physical* and spiritual strength, *brute force* as well as their ability to channel powerful magic". It's just not only that, but also a lot more. Yup, in Eora one has to be strong as an ox to add that extra punch to one's fireball. Magic works that way in Eora. Physical power works that way in Eora. And that's OK, I say.

 

Side note about guns and strength and Might. One needs a steady arm to aim. Body weight is good to. The influence is more subtle than with a giant mashing stuff with a club, yet it's far less so with a decent sword fighter. There is so much more required to be effective with a sword than only strength. So, if we say strength governs melee damage, we might as well say strength governs ranged damage. The influence is there.

 

And Might being the expression of ones bloody raw will to destruction somehow reminded me of the King's gunslingers: "I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind."

 

And this tread is epic. Love you folks. Cheers.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Franknstein

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

might i add the stinger that im a lit grad who learnt to proofread and edit using glyphs on hard copy lol.

[Cartoons Plural]

yeah that always tickles me, i'm history grad with a good command of language and my own personal style guide when writing informally: no caps, very little punctuation, no stops, i find capitalizing the first person "i" to be very unnecessary and self-absorbed

 

language is organic. we create it as we speak & write it, being a grammarian is tiresome (and maybe even some ists) even if you're perfect let alone someone who actually is making dozens of mistakes

[Crucis]

yeah that always tickles me, i'm history grad with a good command of language and my own personal style guide when writing informally: no caps, very little punctuation, no stops, i find capitalizing the first person "i" to be very unnecessary and self-absorbed

 

language is organic. we create it as we speak & write it, being a grammarian is tiresome (and maybe even some ists) even if you're perfect let alone someone who actually is making dozens of mistakes

 

You call it style.  I call it laziness.

[Boeroer]

Well - we surely can't call you a lazybones with the whitespaces...

[Verde]

Well - we surely can't call you a lazybones with the whitespaces...

Whitespaces?

Edited February 17, 2019 by Verde

[Boeroer]

Yes, on the mobile version the background is white. So every space is a whitespace.

:tongue-in-cheek:

[Verde]

Yes, on the mobile version the background is white. So every space is a whitespace.

:tongue-in-cheek:

Brevity is the soul of wit

[Boeroer]

[Verde]

Boeroer, I'm the Joker to your Batman. Secretly, we enjoy each other

Edited February 19, 2019 by Verde

[Boeroer]

Secretly? 

[thelee]

 

 

"I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind."

 

that's a bloody good quote, had to immediately go look it up. Now i have a reading list, thanks!

[xzar_monty]

Even some ardent King fans have found The Dark Tower to be too much for them. So, good luck! (It's not that it doesn't contain excellent stuff, it's just the sheer amount and unevenness of material.)

[Boeroer]

It's a supertedious read in my opinion.

[bugarup]

It's a supertedious read in my opinion.

You hate Pratchett, Boeroer. Your opinion does not count.

 

Me, I loved them very much up to and including "Wizard and glass", but the third and second last were meh and the last one ugh,wtf.

[xzar_monty]

It's a supertedious read in my opinion.

 

I haven't even tried. King is a prodigious but very uneven talent. The quality varies enormously -- even within novels. Like, The Outsider, a very recent one, was superb for about 150 pages and then went rather steeply downhill, ending in a strangely disastrous homage to Tom Sawyer.

[bugarup]

I did not like any (save for short stories. Love most of them) of his post-accident stuff but I know a few purists who believe he didn't write anything good since "The Stand". Eh, opinions. 

[Franknstein]

King is very uneven of an author, that's true. I like the first three books of the Dark Tower opus magnum, and it's fun for me to find traces of the stuff in other King's works. Definitely worth a try, I say.

[asnjas]

 

 

 

Yea might shouldnt effect caster damage but gun damage is ok. Right....

 

And why would might effect melee weapon accuracy? When i hit an axe against a log, whenther or not i hit the spot i intend to has nothing to do with my physical strength.

 

I swear people cling to their anti might bias like nothing i ever seen. It makes sense. It aint perfect implemented in game thats all. The flaws have nothing to do with might. You dont have weak but powerful mages lifting boulders down a ladder unless you chose that option. You have physically powerful barbarians lifting boulders down ladders.

 

I mean really. Things are not perfect and go both ways. Just like the example earlier of aggression doesnt have to equal violent. The game offers many options to be aggressively violent but you dont have to chose them if you char aint the violent type. Jesus.

No, it shouldn't affect … AFFECT … gun damage either. Why would strength AFFECT melee weapon accuracy? Your strength would AFFECT your ability to wield a heavy weapon easily. Take a weak person and give them a greatsword and they'll be lucky to get it over their head, let alone swing it, let alone swing it with any degree of accuracy. Strength affects your ability to wield melee weapons and swing them at all and to swing them with some accuracy. And the stronger you are, the lighter some weapons will feel and the more dexterously you'll be able to wield them.

 

As for swinging an ax, if you don't have the strength to lift the ax, you're not swinging it at all. If you have enough strength to wield it with a degree of nimbleness, it most certainly will AFFECT your ability to hit where you intend. Obviously, skill has something to do with it too, but that's factored into each character's level.

 

As for "anti-might bias", maybe we cling to it because we think that it's stupid. (Right up there with not knowing the difference between "affect" and "effect".)

Giving me more and more strength isnt going to enable me to hit a baseball with more and more accuracy. I can hit the ball farther because of my increased strength but not with more accuracy. The strength to wield the bat is secondary while my perception and hand eye cooridination is the primary cause for accuracy. Kind of like how grammar is not what you need to figure this stuff out but logic and reasoning is the primary cause.

 

Maybe you cling to it because you cant accept logical change.

I disagree. If someone gives you a bat that you can barely lift off the ground, you're not hitting anything. On the flip side, if you have the strength to whip a bat around like a toothpick, you will be able to manipulate it with ease, thus greatly increasing your chances of hitting your target.

 

You may not need grammar to figure out stuff like this, but you sure as hell need it to communicate effectively and for your comments and opinions to be taken seriously.

Disagree all you want but do yourself a favor and stop thinking and go try it. Your accuracy in hitting the ball with a bat is not physical str but hand eye. I said that earlier. In fact you dont even need to be strong to do this. Go find a very lightweight stick instead that you can manipulate very easily. The ease in your manipulation doesnt mean you going to hit a ball comin at you. You can even find lighter and lighter sticks with ever increasing levels of manipulation and your accuracy does not go up.

 

Lacking the strength to lift the bat is not inaccuracy. You can have the world's strongest man try to hit a fast pitch and he will not be the most accurate at hitting the ball. If strength governs accuracy then the worlds strongest man must be the worlds most accurate batsman.

 

 

In video game terms, if a sterotypical rogue with sharp eyes and keen ears lacks the strength to wield a heavy 2 handed mace then he is not inaccurate at wielding weapons. Why, because you can give him a lighter weapon like a dagger and suddenly he is now an accurate striker. The rogue is accurate but not strong. He is not to be considered inaccurate because he lacks the strength to wield particular weapons. Duh.

[thelee]

Lacking the strength to lift the bat is not inaccuracy. You can have the world's strongest man try to hit a fast pitch and he will not be the most accurate at hitting the ball. If strength governs accuracy then the worlds strongest man must be the worlds most accurate batsman.

It's worth highlighting that I thought Fallouts NV handled this strength/accuracy conundrum that you all are going on about reasonably well.

 

In that game (also in Fallout 1/2), all weapons had a minimum strength. For weapons like handguns or a sword, the strength is really really low. but for something like a gatling gun it's pretty high. If you have anything less than the minimum strength, you get a huge accuracy penalty (and in first-person mode there's visible weapon sway as you are apparently struggling to hold the weapon). Once you have the minimum strength though, strength doesn't matter one bit. If a weapon needs 5 strength, then 10 strength does nothing for you that 7 strength or 5 strength couldn't already do.

 

In my mind, F:NV is closer to "reality" than what crucis is talking about, or what you're talking about. Strength is a threshold. If you can barely hold that rifle up, you're not going to be doing any precision shots with it (but you probably will be able to do some shots with it, even if they go wild). But once you have the upper body strength just to hold it in place, the difference between benching 100 lbs versus 300 lbs isn't going to matter at all, and after that it's your specific skill with the weapon and whatever accuracy stat you want to add in here (perception for fallout and deadfire). Strength might matter for repeat shots or swings or thrusts (e.g. fatigue), but really that's endurance or constitution, and again this is why I argue that "realism" is not a good metric for assessing a game mechanic because it's a hole with no bottom and you have to make some cutoff at some point, so why not just prefer a mechanically fun abstraction rather than being fetishizing realism as an end unto itself.

 

(In terms of game play design, though, strength requirements for weapons were definitely a case of murk. Probably most people didn't notice that weapons had strength requirements, and the weapon sway and reduced VATS accuracy probably got lost in the action.)

Edited February 19, 2019 by thelee

[Franknstein]

so why not just prefer a mechanically fun abstraction rather than being fetishizing realism as an end unto itself.

 

Did you play Kingdom Come: Deliverance? They built a whole game out of it! =)

[Boeroer]

 

It's a supertedious read in my opinion.

You hate Pratchett, Boeroer. Your opinion does not count.

Did I say that I hate Pratchett? If so then that was extreme hyperbole. I just think his Discworld stuff is not very funny or entertaining - I mean when it has the length of a whole book.

 

I like some King books very much. Also partially because of nostalgia. "The Dark Half" was the first book of him that I read (iirc) and I liked it very much, same as "It" "The Last Stand" and "Christine". Also "The Eyes of the Dragon (The Napkins)".

 

The Tower however... nay.

 

It's like with Tad Williams: some of his books I really liked (Osten Ard stuff: very nice) while some othes were very ehhh for me (Otherland - jeez).

 

Of course I was quite young when I read all of that. Maybe I would judge differently today.

 

I wouldn't have guessed I would like anything from Brandon Sanderson after torturing myself with his Mistborn stuff. But I found myself enjoying his Stormlight books. Until now at least, the newest one is kind of tedious to read, too.

Edited February 19, 2019 by Boeroer

[Cartoons Plural]

i'm the one who likes cormac mccarthy he said eyes narrowing

 

perhaps his lack of punctuation especially quotation marks is lazy hmmmm nope

Edited February 20, 2019 by Cartoons Plural

[Verde]

i'm the one who likes cormac mccarthy he said eyes narrowing

 

perhaps his lack of punctuation especially quotation marks is lazy hmmmm nope

Can we at least get commas?