[Merged] Cooldown Thread

[J.E. Sawyer]

Josh has decided to cleverly sidestep me or he has missed my post.

 

I think the reason there is a failure to convince him that Cooldowns are not good for tactical gameplay is coming from the need to so in one post or with one example or with a few lines of text.

I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).

[Hypevosa]

Actually, I'd like to propose a dungeon.

 

The dungeon detects the current number of consumable items on your characters, and does not allow you to rest. As you go down deeper and deeper and deeper, the spiders get bigger and bigger and bigger, and harder and harder and harder to beat, and this only stops once you've used up all the consumable items on your character, whereupon the final spider bursts into confetti and gives you a chest containing all the consumables you used and some extra treasure.

[el pinko grande]

I had no idea people actually

Wow, I had no idea people actually liked Vancian magic; I thought everyone merely tolerated it. I'm ambivalent towards cool-downs, but the five minute work day is absolutely terrible game design.

 

How old are you?

 

Old enough to have been playing D&D for twenty years or so. Which, it turns out, is plenty of time to develop a deep-seated hatred of Vancian magic.

 

Okay. Just curious. In the early 80s I dont recall too many alternatives for PnP fantasy RPGs. So if you hated them then you pretty much hated PnP RPGs.

 

just because he says he's been playing for 20 years don't make it true. people may lie on the internet don't you know.

 

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

[ogrezilla]

Dragon Age on the other hand went the other way, the party was fully restored after every fight. It made weaker fights meaningless, encounters as a whole became repetitive and completely lacking in tension unless there was a genuine risk of a total party wipe. Is this the direction you favour?

 

dragon age's system is really only good if they remove trash fights. In a game like final fantasy tactics, every fight was designed to be significant, so being fully healed for each fight was fine. But when dungeons and caves are designed to have a level of attrition to them, fully recovering easily makes them completely trivial. At the same time, being able to walk to camp and heal at any time has the same effect. Its just less convenient.

Edited October 2, 2012 by ogrezilla

[J.E. Sawyer]

I think it's important to back up in this sort of discussion and ask the question: "What is it that makes cRPGs fun?" or "What is it that makes the spell casting aspect of cRPGs fun?" Because that's what one is monkeying with. The fun aspect. I'd rather have more tedium in backtracking back to camp then eliminate all the fun of the game entirely for a whole class of players. Again, playtesting.

That's reasonable, but we are in a thread where people are demanding that I have a comprehensive design of the spellcasting system spelled out in the forums three weeks into a Kickstarter campaign.

[BobbinThreadbare]

Do you just disagree with the whole concept of managing resources across fights then? I'm curious as to what your stance is on healing potions.

No. I haven't though a tremendous amount about healing points, but that brings up an interesting parallel resource management behavior in RPGs. I've seen (and talked to) innumerable gamers who say they end games with inventories full of consumables: potions, wands, scrolls, etc. The most commonly cited reason they give is that they don't know when is/isn't a good time to use them. Also, because they often have no idea when they might get more, they don't want to run out. It's sort of the inverse problem of rest spamming.

Shouldn't getting into a fight have an effect on the next fight?

 

How big of a jump is it from "having to walk 3 minutes through empty rooms to rest is boring and annoying" to CoD style hide behind a wall for 5 seconds to regen health?

[evdk]

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

 

A thought occurs that it might have been prudent to change the system for a different one long ago. GURPS, maybe?

[metiman]

Fair enough.

[J.E. Sawyer]

Shouldn't getting into a fight have an effect on the next fight?

 

How big of a jump is it from "having to walk 3 minutes through empty rooms to rest is boring and annoying" to CoD style hide behind a wall for 5 seconds to regen health?

It's a big enough jump that the question isn't rhetorical.

[GordonHalfman]

Actually thinking about it another game that tries to mostly eliminate resource management is Age of Decadence. However it only really works because the game is made of fairly small number of set piece encounters, it's not a dungeon crawler at all.

 

(And in fact in spite of that they have had significant issues balancing encounters, partly because they have to make every encounter deadly in order for it to be meaningful.)

[Captain Shrek]

Josh has decided to cleverly sidestep me or he has missed my post.

 

I think the reason there is a failure to convince him that Cooldowns are not good for tactical gameplay is coming from the need to so in one post or with one example or with a few lines of text.

I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).

 

I which case Josh kindly consider this:

 

As I understand (correct me if I wrong you) your issue with resting is stemming from the tedium of pausing in combat and wasting time between battles to do nothing. The solution you suggest is to instead allow for a cool down time which will replenish ALL your spell outside of combat, so that you can carry on to the next battle.

 

The obvious question should be: why even a cool down? Make the regeneration instantaneous! There is a very popular example of this model named Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. They make it even less tedious! The health (sadly only meaningful resource in that game unlike RPGs) regenerates instantly. Why not do that with project eternity as well? I mean that is the least amount of tedium right?

[Osvir]

If it's a party game then let the party work together, instead of the mage or figther single-shotting an enemy they work together by the mage removing defenses before the fighter swings the sword.

 

This. In Dragon Age: Origins on Nightmare difficulty I experienced this. I managed to make a party that if I lost one, it was like loosing an arm. With a Mage it feels like you are loosing an arm every time he is depleted of his spells. He does this quite often, and even if I am conservative with my spells, it would be a limp arm at most. Every party member should be a strength in themselves, but they would never survive without their team.

 

I've also experienced this in Baldur's Gate, the dream team. Where one goes down, the rest of the party goes down, but together as One they can tackle Dragons. The difference between DA:O and my BG experience is really in one we have a participating active Mage, and in the other a more passive conservative Mage.

[alanschu]

There's not a lot of encounter scaling in BG2

 

I was pretty surprised how much there was.

[Jon of the Wired]

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

 

A thought occurs that it might have been prudent to change the system for a different one long ago. GURPS, maybe?

 

See, the problem is that PnP games are a social activity. If you want to play something other than D&D you can either find another group, or try to convince your current group to try something new. Neither of those is always easy. I have played a lot of other games (lots of Champions, GURPS, a bunch of White Wolf crap) but a lot of the time the choice is between D&D and nothing. Despite everything, I still prefer D&D to nothing (though you couldn't pay me to play a spellcaster).

[Jasede]

Josh has decided to cleverly sidestep me or he has missed my post.

 

I think the reason there is a failure to convince him that Cooldowns are not good for tactical gameplay is coming from the need to so in one post or with one example or with a few lines of text.

I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).

 

Thank god

[andreisiadi]

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

25 years but you never played a spellcaster. kind of narrow minded don't you think ? how do you know you hate it if you never tried it. I hear the first time is painful but then it gets better...gotta' pop that cherry eventually.

[AlexAB]

That's all well and good but since it's a video-game there's really no harm in making the player game over (because of the spell selection) and having him try again from the beginning, armed with the knowledge of what's ahead. It seems you'd prefer the player can keep going even if he happened to select the wrong spells at the time.

No. The punishment is that they do poorly in combat. Assuming they survive the combat and have learned that they used poor tactics (or strategy), why does the player need to be punished again? This is pretty much the sequence of how this goes down from a player's perspective:

 

* Player selects a number of spells for any number of reasons, thoughtful or thoughtless.

* Player enters combat with enemies that are poorly matched to his or her spells.

* The player realizes that a different group of spells would be better for these monsters.

* The fight is rough, but the player survives.

* The player decides to switch his or her spells to something more appropriate.

 

If the fight is hard, they already suffered for the choices they made. When the fight is over and the player has made a decision to switch spells, why should he or she be punished again?

 

Sorry for replying to this post only now, but this thread is moving faster than I can keep up.

 

The reason I want the player to be "punished" again, is because I don't want set challenge pieces in my game. Like, I don't want each combat to be a self contained challenge, having little effect in the world around you. This has been something most modern games have moved to, using regenerating health and other measures to make each combat a well defined challenge, with the designer having a good idea of what the player looks like when he runs in, what he will do, and how he will look like when he comes out.

 

For example, look at Half Life 2. Valve seems to have taken special care to make sure what kind of weapons you would have at each point in the game. This is specially clear (and comic) with the rocket launcher, as you would only ever find ammo for that when a chopper was nearby. D&D 4e takes a lot from this philosophy too. But that is not at all how things were done in 2e. Oh, people always bemoan the trash encounters and how older dungeons had wacky balance. But that is how they were supposed to be played. The game wasn't about a series of disconnected, discrete challenges. It was one big challenge, with lots of pieces that could fit together in different ways.

 

So, that player, he did something more impacting than simply playing a combat poorly. He may have doomed a few of the villagers, as they will now need to go back to replenish their resources. Or maybe he has asserted that, when the final fight comes in the dungeon, instead of crushing the opposition, the party will need to negotiate some resolution. Maybe they will let the orcs keep the slaves who used to be convicts in exchange for the rest and their safe passage. Or maybe they will need to spend a whole lot of gold to bribe the orcs.

 

And that kind of thing is, I think, awesome in games. Having the small parts connect themselves in a bigger whole. The game's stories, its combats, the actions the players can perform, it all comes together in a single big whole when you play things like this. And this big whole is far more fun and interesting than the little bits of pieces that form them. Sure, this usually mean that the game is a lot fuzzier, a lot more chaotic. You don't rightly know what kind of party will walk in each combat, or how they will look when they walk out. But that is part f the fun, the game stops being a roller-coaster ride and starts being a kind of interactive world.

[el pinko grande]

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

 

A thought occurs that it might have been prudent to change the system for a different one long ago. GURPS, maybe?

 

I play lots of different tabletop games. GURPS is my favorite, specifically with the Ritual Casting option for magic, though I also play lots of White Wolf games, HERO, and Savage Worlds. There's a specific kind of gameplay that works best with D&D, though, and I don't think any other game really comes close to capturing it. Unless you count Pathfinder as a different game, of course.

[dlux]

Josh has decided to cleverly sidestep me or he has missed my post.

 

I think the reason there is a failure to convince him that Cooldowns are not good for tactical gameplay is coming from the need to so in one post or with one example or with a few lines of text.

I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).

Yeah, now that you said that it has quieted down quite a bit in here. ^^

[ogrezilla]

Josh has decided to cleverly sidestep me or he has missed my post.

 

I think the reason there is a failure to convince him that Cooldowns are not good for tactical gameplay is coming from the need to so in one post or with one example or with a few lines of text.

I must have missed your post. A large number of the people in this thread are talking about a type of spell cooldown I've never suggested for PE (cast a Fireball, unable to cast Fireball again for 30 seconds).

Yeah, now that you said that it has quieted down quite a bit in here. ^^

I took that as pretty much confirmed sometime around 11 AM today from his comments in this very thread.

Edited October 2, 2012 by ogrezilla

[Shevek]

Its a cooldown system that is not a cooldown system.

 

[el pinko grande]

I've been playing D&D for 25 years. I also hate Vancian magic.

25 years but you never played a spellcaster. kind of narrow minded don't you think ? how do you know you hate it if you never tried it. I hear the first time is painful but then it gets better...gotta' pop that cherry eventually.

 

Who says I never played a spellcaster? Hell, my second character when I was playing Red Box as a kid was an elf. My dislike of the Vancian system specifically comes from my experience of having used it with my characters.

[J.E. Sawyer]

The obvious question should be: why even a cool down? Make the regeneration instantaneous!

Locking out access to an entire level of spells once you have exhausted the castings you have available to you at a given level (as a 3E sorcerer would) means that you have to use spells from your other spell levels. This creates a tactical challenge during combat, especially for spells at levels where you do not have many castings available (i.e. typically your highest). Allowing them to regenerate literally instantly means that there is not a tactical consideration; you should just use the most powerful spell for the situation over and over again for the duration of combat.

 

There is a very popular example of this model named Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. They make it even less tedious! The health (sadly only meaningful resource in that game unlike RPGs) regenerates instantly. Why not do that with project eternity as well? I mean that is the least amount of tedium right?

The feeling of challenge is a balance between enjoyment and frustration. It is not the same for every player, but it is almost always at some midpoint between those two emotions. My goal is to use a variety of mechanics to find balance points that appeal to this specific audience, varied as it is. I think that instant health regeneration errs too much on the side of ease for this audience.

Edited October 2, 2012 by J.E. Sawyer
typo in "too"

[BobbinThreadbare]

Shouldn't getting into a fight have an effect on the next fight?

 

How big of a jump is it from "having to walk 3 minutes through empty rooms to rest is boring and annoying" to CoD style hide behind a wall for 5 seconds to regen health?

It's a big enough jump that the question isn't rhetorical.

Thanks for the response. It is really cool to get to talk to the devs like this.

[Blackstream]

Personally, I hate the Vancian magic system with a flaming passion. There's absolutely nothing about I like. I think we've also settled that it's not going to happen at this point and that the devs are looking for a system to fix its shortcomings. My first instinct would be some kind of mana system, maybe with d3 style cooldowns where some of the more uber abilities have cooldowns. But they've clearly got a concept in mind. Honestly I think if they had realized that just saying the word cooldown would provoke this response, they probably would have avoided it until further down in development when they had a more concrete example/system to show you guys, because clearly right now it's more of an idea, an idea that's in flux and they can't really give examples of until they do some design, playtesting, and iterations.

 

Personally though, I pledged so that the developers could do exactly what I hope they'll continue to do, finally make the game they want to make. I'll make suggestions and such, but ultimately I want to see what they make when they're unfettered by publishers and people making demands on their creative processes. Maybe this system or others won't do as well, but they shouldn't be pushed out of taking a chance at an idea they've got before we even have a chance to see it. I mean, there's a LONG time until this game comes out, and they're gonna be fairly transparent the whole way. We're gonna see gameplay videos and plenty of dev talks, and there's even gonna be a beta in there somewhere (which I plan on upgrading my pledge to get access to). There's time for them to realize some of their systems are flawed if that is indeed the case. And personally, I want to see what they do with cooldowns (even though I've always been on the fence about them), because they clearly have a unique idea beyond attaching a 2 second cooldown to magic missile and a 10 second cooldown to fireball, and a 2 hour cooldown to meteor swarm.