Sawyerism Distilled - an interview with Josh Sawyer at Iron Tower Studio

[Elerond]

Uh, that's why many of the game's spells will in fact not be rest-restricted. Lower level spells will be on a cooldown.

 

Which is good example how you can reduce of ammount of resting by modifying gameplay system so that benefits from resting are reduced. As you see they didn't go way of restricting resting there, but make it not so worthwhile thing to do. And it is the desgning philosophy that I would like their use in future too.

 

I think you misunderstand. The point isn't to reduce the amount of resting. The point is to make the game flexible enough that you can restrict resting without making the game too punishing, because if you don't restrict it, people will abuse it no matter what.

 

My point was that if you make gameplay such that there is little to gain from resting then there is no iniative to abuse it and therefore there is then no need to restrict it.

Edited December 6, 2012 by Elerond

[Jasede]

What about "If I do badly I just can't proceed until I get better or lower the difficulty"? That's what video games used to be like. I miss those days. All this healing spell nonsense is giving me a tummy ache.

 

Nobody is entitled to beat a video game; it's still a test of skill, not a chose your own adventure book. Though that's a bad comparison, those books used to be far more difficult than modern RPGs.

[Quadrone]

I'd like to marginalize the speech skills into the dust bin, personally.

 

Boo! Hiss! Boo, I say.

 

Ditto!

I thought this was an "old school CRPG"? So, why are we stepping away from skill and attribute checks in dialogues and instead are making it "E for Everybody"?

[Infinitron]

My point was that if you make gameplay such that there is little to gain from resting then there is no iniative to abuse it and therefore there is then no need to restrict it.

 

lol, if there's little to gain, why have resting at all? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Edited December 6, 2012 by Infinitron

[High Octane 881]

Ditto!

I thought this was an "old school CRPG"? So, why are we stepping away from skill and attribute checks in dialogues and instead are making it "E for Everybody"?

 

It does appear however that they have the intention of including speech skills to an extent. From what Sawyer said it appears they are wanting to divert from absolute outcomes via speech and head more in the direction of controlled chaos that verbally hashing out a conversation with someone (particularly those that don't share your viewpoints) really is. A conversation typically can't be controlled with one perfect sentence. It takes effort and balance.

[Tsuga C]

Although I'm somewhat leery about not having any significant healing spells available on a regular basis, I'm withholding judgment until we know more about the resting system. Assuming there are four levels of difficulty (Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare), I'm hopeful that the resting mechanic will change with the difficulty level.

[Hormalakh]

I've never liked this whole idea that speech is a skill and you should pick the best answer to win the scenario. That's what these skill checks ultimately do. Usually, the skill check answer doesn't really fit the character I'm playing anyway. In PnP you'd first make your dialogue line, and then the DM would ask for a skill check. It didn't work the other way around. I'm glad Sawyer is "getting rid of it" and rethinking these games for the PC and not rehashing straight from PnP.

 

Edit in regards to stamina/resting, I have some ideas that I wrote up in a new thread for those interested. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/62931-an-idea-regarding-restingstaminahealth/

Edited December 6, 2012 by Hormalakh

[morrow1nd]

The "dual-bar" or two resource system allows the player to have separate tactical and strategic resources for their characters' survivability in combat. In most versions of A/D&D, you have hit points that determine how much damage a character can take before he or she can no longer perform actions in combat. If you're playing in a more forgiving edition, you also have "Death's Door" rules that allow the character to dip into negative hit point values without being killed outright.

 

Many A/D&D adventures have an expectation of periodic healing, so if your party members have a rough fight, the party cleric, druid, or maybe paladin has to spend resources to make you viable for the next fight. This leads to the "healing battery" expectation, where someone in the party has to devote strategic resources to healing between fights -- or you're stuck walking back to a resting location with high frequency. Neither of those options are particularly enjoyable for many players.

 

With Stamina and Health, Stamina represents short term damage (shock, impact trauma, initial pain) and Health represents "the bad stuff" (burns, cuts, bruised ribs, etc.). When you take damage, you lose Stamina, but you also lose Health at a fixed ratio to the amount of Stamina damage you took. Currently it's at 1:4 Health:Stamina. When you run out of Stamina, your character gets knocked out, just like hitting 0 hit points in most editions of A/D&D. You're effectively out of the fight and you're not going to get back up without outside assistance.

 

If you're conscious, Stamina will regenerate quickly. "How quickly, Josh?" I don't know, man, but... pretty fast. It's the thing you're most likely to run out of in combat, but you'll probably get most or all of it back before you start another fight. You can also recover Stamina through the use of spells or class abilities, so it's something you can choose to tactically manage in combat. Between fights, it's really not an issue. No one has to cast ten healing spells in a row to get characters back into fighting shape because the Stamina will return in short order.

 

Health damage doesn't regenerate and you can't get it back with magic. You have to rest to recover Health. If your Health hits zero, you'll either enter some form of maimed/critically injured (and unconscious) state or, optionally (and all the time in Expert mode), be killed outright. If you explore far away from rest locations and keep getting your faces pounded in, you can have characters with very low Health and high Stamina. That's a dangerous circumstance to be in because even one or two blows could lead to a character being maimed or killed.

 

Ultimately, the mechanics are present to allow "hit points" and unconsciousness to be a real threat in individual combats without necessitating the presence of a healer or resting to allow for more exploration.

 

 

 

I have to say i really liked the sound of dual-bar system which will bring more realistic and more tactical combat on the table. I would like to see more of the Sawyer-effect on PE in the future. Even tho he is always calm ( at least from my POV) he got the clever spark on his eyes. Keep up the good work guys..

 

This game has the potential to overshadow BG series

Edited December 6, 2012 by morrow1nd

[AwesomeOcelot]

I've never liked this whole idea that speech is a skill and you should pick the best answer to win the scenario. That's what these skill checks ultimately do. Usually, the skill check answer doesn't really fit the character I'm playing anyway. In PnP you'd first make your dialogue line, and then the DM would ask for a skill check. It didn't work the other way around. I'm glad Sawyer is "getting rid of it" and rethinking these games for the PC and not rehashing straight from PnP.

 

The way the "speech" skill works a lot of the time in the Fallout series, especially in New Vegas, it's something your character really should have already had access to either with intelligence or charisma, but intelligence and charisma checks can be used really well in dialogue, they have been used really well in dialogue. There's also nothing wrong with technical knowledge checks, in Fallout it's medicine or science, but in middle age-like settings it could be lore or herbalism. I don't see how the skill check answers would fit a character less than the other answers provided. Obviously the original Fallout and Bloodlines do this the best, results may vary, it's not a fundamentally flawed system, it's a brilliant system, sometimes implemented badly. It's hardly a "best answer" to "win", it's use skill or don't, just like any other part of the RPG.

Edited December 6, 2012 by AwesomeOcelot

[Hormalakh]

The way the "speech" skill works a lot of the time in the Fallout, especially in New Vegas, it's something your character really should have already had access to either with intelligence or charisma, but intelligence and charisma checks can be used really well in dialogue, they have been used really well in dialogue. There's also nothing wrong with technical knowledge checks, in Fallout it's medicine or science, but in middle age-like settings it could be lore or herbalism. I don't see how the skill check answers wouldn't fit a character less than the other answers provided. Obviously the original Fallout and Bloodlines do this the best, results may vary, it's not a fundamentally flawed system, it's a brilliant system, sometimes implemented badly.

 

It was a good system, but it wasn't PnP so we can't say it's Classical RPG. It's one way of doing speech. It's not the only way. We're too stuck in one mindset that we're not willing to look at other possibilities and see how they play out. There may be better ways of doing speech. I hope that OEI iterates on the design idea and comes up with something that's intuitive.

 

Edit: As for FONV, I haven't played that game, but from the Let's Plays that I saw, it was always so obvious which dialogue choice you should pick and everything else was just "filler" for the hard-core RPGers/LARPers.

 

Edit 2: One place where I really liked the way this was implemented was in Arcanum, specifically in two places. One of them was with the dwarf king and learning about the philosophy of dwarves. The dialogue became something that allowed you to learn about the details of dwarven philosophy and later on you were able to utilize that information, if you learned it, to your benefit. Arcanum did it in several places and they felt more alive. (Obviously I can't remember the second palce). Instead of a science check, I'd like to learn that "science" in-game from another NPC and then if I have learned it, to utilize that knowledge later on. Not just have a "dice-roll" telling me I know "science." I'm a science (biology/chemistry) student. That doesn't mean I know physics, it also doesn't mean all biologists know all of biology. Now I'm rambling...

Edited December 6, 2012 by Hormalakh

[High Octane 881]

The "dual-bar" system is definitely starting to grow on me. At first I was skeptical but as there is more light shed on it this system makes a lot of sense. As a bonus it seems that is may make some of the more tedious mechanics obsolete. No more resting between every fight? No more strings of healing spells after healing spells just to get my main fighter to full health? I'm all for that. I'd prefer to avoid breaking immersion as much as possible.

[Elerond]

My point was that if you make gameplay such that there is little to gain from resting then there is no iniative to abuse it and therefore there is then no need to restrict it.

 

lol, if there's little to gain, why have resting at all? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Are saying that game should not have any features that players can't abuse?

 

In my opinion it's not any worse way to add feature game that gives player little benefit, but player is forced to use it sometimes than add feature that give so much benefits that players will abuse it, if it is not very restricted. In my opinion game should be balanced so that any of it's features don't take dominant role. As I see it, less player gains benefits from one feature more s/he tries other features to find "best way" to play game and so better features are balanced more players try different feature mixs to find that "best way" to play.

Edited December 6, 2012 by Elerond

[Ieo]

I'd like to marginalize the speech skills into the dust bin, personally.

 

Boo! Hiss! Boo, I say.

 

Ditto!

I thought this was an "old school CRPG"? So, why are we stepping away from skill and attribute checks in dialogues and instead are making it "E for Everybody"?

 

Why? Did you read?

 

I'm interpreting Josh's interview comments (the entire thing, not the conveniently reduced sentence above) to mean they want to shift away from skill/att points controlling initial dialogue checks to actual roleplay dialogue choices with long-term consequences. Which sounds better. That was certainly an unbalanced weakness in PS:T, as much as I loved the game.

 

Josh: I don't think it's correct to say that I want dialogue choices to be flavor only. I want the player's choices from node to node to actually be more mechanically significant that they have been in most RPGs. That consists of two parts: the immediate reaction within the conversation and the long-term effects of how that choice feeds into your reputation. Sometimes the short-term effects are minor, but the reputation system won't "forget" what you've done.

[Jasede]

That's a problem with the implementation of the system, not with the existence of the speech skill. We know for a fact Obsidian can do this kind of thing: NWN 2's trial, certain dialogues in NV and MotB for reference.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Edit 2: One place where I really liked the way this was implemented was in Arcanum, specifically in two places. One of them was with the dwarf king and learning about the philosophy of dwarves. The dialogue became something that allowed you to learn about the details of dwarven philosophy and later on you were able to utilize that information, if you learned it, to your benefit. Arcanum did it in several places and they felt more alive. (Obviously I can't remember the second palce). Instead of a science check, I'd like to learn that "science" in-game from another NPC and then if I have learned it, to utilize that knowledge later on. Not just have a "dice-roll" telling me I know "science." I'm a science (biology/chemistry) student. That doesn't mean I know physics, it also doesn't mean all biologists know all of biology. Now I'm rambling...

 

That's definitely an important part of the game, and I miss that part, it's rare in new games, but I also want role playing in my dialogue, that means skill checks against my characters attributes, it makes sense in the same way combat does. My character is not necessarily going to know everything from the conversations in game that I'll need them to know. If it's multi-choice they tend to be pretty easy to game and you can't exactly set conversations up as a quiz. You can't implement that into a system without knowledge flag checks which some adventure games use, they tend to be annoying. Yeah, it's a bit of simplification to just have "science" as a skill, but then again some people have a wealth of science knowledge across disciplines, maybe not focused or expert knowledge. If you're a biochemist it's a fair bet you know quite a bit about physics, and maybe electronics and programming. In the Fallout series I never thought the knowledge that comes from the science skill was out of the question, I didn't think it was ever that specialized, only that perhaps hacking and science knowledge should be separated, as repair and science are.

Edited December 6, 2012 by AwesomeOcelot

[Hormalakh]

^With all that was said, I don't think that Sawyer has said specifically anywhere that he would move away from this. These things should give flavor, not be a win/lose scenario. When you have the extra information, it gave you advantages, it shouldn't "win" the scenario for you. I think we can agree that with or without a skill check this would be better.

[J.E. Sawyer]

I want to say something about my high-level approach to design, whether the systems being described are dialogue, rest mechanics, or how you gain experience: the bottom line for any mechanic is how it affects the ways in which players play the game. I.e., after all of the theorizing, all of the speculation, and all of the strong statements of feeling on a mechanic, what matters is how people play the game.

 

So when I write that what Tim and I want to do is use quest/objective/challenge XP as the primary (if not only) methods of achieving XP, that means "want" will give way to "reality" if they are in conflict -- conflict in practice, not conflict in a forum discussion. When changing the system requires relatively little effort, there's not a ton of benefit to being absolutist over a year in advance. Moving from a class-based to classless system -- that's a big deal. That's something you decide and pretty much stick with. Deciding whether to give XP for monsters or not give XP for monsters -- that's not a big deal. That's easy to address, even late in development. Deciding whether people can rest at certain locations or they can rest anywhere is also pretty easy to address.

 

These things exist on a sliding scale of difficulty, implementation/adjustment-wise. We plan things so we can make the simple changes easily later on. Generally that means creating simple base layers of mechanics and adding in "adjustment" or tuning mechanics when the metrics/gameplay we see demands it.

[High Octane 881]

I'm really glad this got posted. Seeing a lot of "well this was mentioned once, so it's definitely going to happen" being thrown aroudn right now. Everything is changing at this point so let's not start burning witches just yet.

[Infinitron]

My point was that if you make gameplay such that there is little to gain from resting then there is no iniative to abuse it and therefore there is then no need to restrict it.

 

lol, if there's little to gain, why have resting at all? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Are saying that game should not have any features that players can't abuse?

 

 

Do you mean no features that players can abuse?

 

In that case, no, but I think that's what Josh aspires to. I personally am undecided as to whether that is a good thing.

Edited December 6, 2012 by Infinitron

[Agelastos]

I was half-expecting to find something to be displeased with, but everything sounded awesome. Every change is in the right direction IMO (at least on paper).

[Keyrock]

Damn your flexibility, practicality, and logical approach, Josh. Rash speculation and overreactions are the bread and butter of internet forums. Now what will I have to rage about?

 

 

[rjshae]

Damn your flexibility, practicality, and logical approach, Josh. Rash speculation and overreactions are the bread and butter of internet forums. Now what will I have to rage about?

Never underestimate this forum community's ability to overreact.

[Hormalakh]

Never underestimate this forum community's ability to overreact.

 

What's that supposed to mean?!?!

[WorstUsernameEver]

I thought this was an "old school CRPG"? So, why are we stepping away from skill and attribute checks in dialogues and instead are making it "E for Everybody"?

 

The most famous IE titles, the ones that most backers have been very vocal about wanting to see followed in spirit with PE (Baldur's Gate 1&2) had very little in the way of skill checks in dialogue, and had very rudimentary reputation mechanics.

 

BTW, I'm not a fan of Sawyer's proposed solutions. If a solution isn't better than the original mechanic, then I don't see the point of it, and I think Project Eternity overall would benefit from having at least attribute checks/unlocked options with dialogue, rather than reputation-based options and dialogue puzzles.

[BobbinThreadbare]

Well, you've got regenerating stamina. That gives you a small tactical buffer to try to survive with until you get to the next rest spot. And there are plenty of "Internet Tough Guys" who are mad about that too.

 

Sure, but its a case of diminishing returns. With a 4:1 ratio (stamina/health) youre going to quicky reach a point where your party members are limping along with full Stamina but only a few Health points. Meaning the next blow, even at full stamina, will kill you. So what do you do? Park that NPC outside the room so there is no possibility of dying, thus effectively removing them from the game? Let half your party get wiped by the next pack of Xvart's? No, you will have to stop progressing and walk the party back to the "safe spot" to heal up. Oh, and you better not let anyone die or its game over for that NPC what with there also being no way to resurrect.

 

Guess Ill have to see how it plays but on face value it just sounds like a total pita.

So you're saying that you should always be able to advance without ever having to rest no matter how poorly you play the game?