Can I even handle a game like PE any longer? Well, I sure hope so!

[Bryy]

 

How should the difficulty of quests be indicated though? Borderlands style or what?

 

Dear god, I hope not. Leave the handholding to MMOs.

Borderlands had a fantastic way of telling you the quests difficulty that worked in the context of the game. 

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

There are a bunch of ways:

 

* The success or failure of fights often hinged on a single die roll for powerful abilities.  Besides metagaming hard and soft counters after a reload (which I'll get to, below), these were elements where the player's choices did not have a ton of impact; their success or failure mostly depended on the outcome of a die roll.  In some cases, there's really a tiny set of hard counters (e.g. Protection from Petrification for use against basilisks).  Most other tactics just shifted odds and asked the player to hope for the best and reload if/when the worst came true.  Reloading is a part of these games, but I don't think anyone wants it to be a core mechanic for success.

 

* There are many bad ways to build characters in virtually all of the IE games.  Leveling was a little easier pre-3E, but you could make an absolute garbage character in 2nd Ed. very easily.  Players should learn to play to the strengths of their characters, but with many builds, there was no strength to that character -- just a lot of suck.  6 characters * bad stat arrays = a slow but steady descent into a non-viable party near the late game.  This was mitigated somewhat in the BG games since they were balanced around the companions, but it was a huge problem in the IWD games.

 

* Pre-buffing alters the difficulty of fights enormously.  About halfway through IWD's development, a QA tester (who went on to become a pretty well-respected developer) came up to Black Isle and was furious at the difficulty of a fight in Lower Dorn's Deep.  He had been trying to legitimately get through it for 2 hours and hadn't succeeded.  Kihan Pak and I loaded it up and beat it on the first try.  He asked to see what we were doing.  Naturally, we were pre-buffing for 5-6 rounds before we even went into the fight.  Because there was no opportunity cost to using buffs, this was "the way" to get through fights, but it was tedious -- and for people who were not D&D veterans, it was not something they ever thought to do, which resulted in a full roadblock (see also: Burial Isle misery, which was also pretty easy for me and Kihan).

 

* Hit points make the world go 'round.  There are specific party and resource builds you need to maintain your hit points over several fights.  If you don't use those party builds, you suffer enormously or have to backtrack and rest very frequently.  This is one of the major reasons why we have a split Stamina/Health system for short term/long term damage (and why 4E uses healing surges).  In PoE, getting knocked out takes you out of the fight, but when the fight ends, you're still in the war.  In IWD, if you got super-slammed and weren't ready to devote your precious healing resources on getting that dude back into shape, you had to pack up and head back to a safe zone -- or rest on the spot and reload if you got an encounter, which isn't much better.  Along the same lines, almost all character resources that were limited were per-rest, so if you used any of them it was a big deal.  Per-rest resources are a big deal in PoE, but every class also has per-encounter resources as well.

 

* Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing.  There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing.  Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious.  And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for.  A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat.

 

* Stand-alone random rolls are pointless outside of an Ironman-style mode.  Random resting encounters, rolls to learn a spell, rolls to pick a lock, etc.  The player is better served by having those things be thresholds (or non-existent) and giving them tools to increase their ability to meet those thresholds.  Failure to make a stand-alone random roll is not a failure on the part of the player; they just got a bad roll.  You can get bad rolls in combat, too, but those are part of a big shifting soup of randomized results hat happen over time.

 

Now, these are all things that clearly a ton of people adapted to and worked around.  But it should be asked: was adapting to them interesting and enjoyable or just something that you did so you could enjoy the other parts of the game?  If the latter, we should really try to find ways to not repeat those things in PoE.

[Stun]

Now, these are all things that clearly a ton of people adapted to and worked around. But it should be asked: was adapting to them interesting and enjoyable or just something that you did so you could enjoy the other parts of the game? If the latter, we should really try to find ways to not repeat those things in PoE.

Wow, this is a really good question - One that I don't have an answer to since it's been more than a decade since my first play-through of each of the IE games. I simply don't remember the time before my "adaption" process began. Couldn't have been that bad though, since I ended up re-playing those games.... over and over and over....for more than a decade.

 

In any event....

There are a bunch of ways:

 

* The success or failure of fights often hinged on a single die roll for powerful abilities.  Besides metagaming hard and soft counters after a reload (which I'll get to, below), these were elements where the player's choices did not have a ton of impact; their success or failure mostly depended on the outcome of a die roll.  In some cases, there's really a tiny set of hard counters (e.g. Protection from Petrification for use against basilisks).  Most other tactics just shifted odds and asked the player to hope for the best and reload if/when the worst came true.  Reloading is a part of these games, but I don't think anyone wants it to be a core mechanic for success.

 

* There are many bad ways to build characters in virtually all of the IE games.  Leveling was a little easier pre-3E, but you could make an absolute garbage character in 2nd Ed. very easily.  Players should learn to play to the strengths of their characters, but with many builds, there was no strength to that character -- just a lot of suck.  6 characters * bad stat arrays = a slow but steady descent into a non-viable party near the late game.  This was mitigated somewhat in the BG games since they were balanced around the companions, but it was a huge problem in the IWD games.

 

* Pre-buffing alters the difficulty of fights enormously.  About halfway through IWD's development, a QA tester (who went on to become a pretty well-respected developer) came up to Black Isle and was furious at the difficulty of a fight in Lower Dorn's Deep.  He had been trying to legitimately get through it for 2 hours and hadn't succeeded.  Kihan Pak and I loaded it up and beat it on the first try.  He asked to see what we were doing.  Naturally, we were pre-buffing for 5-6 rounds before we even went into the fight.  Because there was no opportunity cost to using buffs, this was "the way" to get through fights, but it was tedious -- and for people who were not D&D veterans, it was not something they ever thought to do, which resulted in a full roadblock (see also: Burial Isle misery, which was also pretty easy for me and Kihan).

 

* Hit points make the world go 'round.  There are specific party and resource builds you need to maintain your hit points over several fights.  If you don't use those party builds, you suffer enormously or have to backtrack and rest very frequently.  This is one of the major reasons why we have a split Stamina/Health system for short term/long term damage (and why 4E uses healing surges).  In PoE, getting knocked out takes you out of the fight, but when the fight ends, you're still in the war.  In IWD, if you got super-slammed and weren't ready to devote your precious healing resources on getting that dude back into shape, you had to pack up and head back to a safe zone -- or rest on the spot and reload if you got an encounter, which isn't much better.  Along the same lines, almost all character resources that were limited were per-rest, so if you used any of them it was a big deal.  Per-rest resources are a big deal in PoE, but every class also has per-encounter resources as well.

 

* Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing.  There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing.  Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious.  And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for.  A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat.

 

* Stand-alone random rolls are pointless outside of an Ironman-style mode.  Random resting encounters, rolls to learn a spell, rolls to pick a lock, etc.  The player is better served by having those things be thresholds (or non-existent) and giving them tools to increase their ability to meet those thresholds.  Failure to make a stand-alone random roll is not a failure on the part of the player; they just got a bad roll.  You can get bad rolls in combat, too, but those are part of a big shifting soup of randomized results hat happen over time.

<gulp>

 

um.... I really, really, *really* see many of these things as humongous qualities, and not detriments at all, but since I'm not a developer who's making a game for 10s of thousands of different people, my only advice here, if you're dead set on "fixing" these things, is to approach them with a scalpel instead of a hacksaw and with the goal of "tweaking", rather than outright eliminating.

 

For example, the pyrrhic victories one. I see nothing wrong with the concept of winning a battle but suffering some casualties. Sure, basilisk/Vampire battles are cheese, and can be silly since there's no way to do them without hard counters, but do we have to eliminate the threat outright? Can't we have a middle ground? How about a punishing effect that forces the player to actually expend a valuable (and limited) consumable after the fight to reverse the effects?

 

 

Another example: pre-buffing. I'm sorry, but I expect it in my fantasy RPGs. And I expect major changes in difficulty if I spend time and effort and resources engaging in a long buffing session. In fact, a game where Prebuffing is trivial = a game not worth playing more than once. example: Dungeon Siege 1. You don't need to pre-buff in that game. And the consequence is that combat got boring (difficult or not). Therefore I played the game once then deleted it from my hard drive and never looked back.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Stun

[Lephys]

How should the difficulty of quests be indicated though? Borderlands style or what?

We could just actually have NPCs mean it when they say something like "No, it's so dangerous! No one's come out of there alive!", instead of just saying that about everything.

 

"A small boy got mauled by a single, regular wolf the other day... IT'S UNSTOPPABLE! Don't even TRY to hunt down this monster!"

 

 

Really, though. I think people could give you an assessment. "I dunno... Dwern's better with a sword than anyone else in town, and he had to turn back when he tried to do such-and-such. Of course, you do seem to be a lot better equipped than he was, so, who knows." Or "Uhhh... I saw that thing throw a tree. Not one of the little ones, either. You do as you please, but I wouldn't go anywhere NEAR that thing!"

 

They don't have to tell you stuff using overly specific, out-of-character game mechanic terms, yet they can still tell you. Of course, sometimes you just won't know, either because no one's really capable of giving you a good estimation, or because they think some demon's out there and it's actually just a disguised man (or vice versa... they think it's just some pretty-average threat, and it turns out it's something horrible). Basically, they don't know, but assume.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

 

* There are many bad ways to build characters in virtually all of the IE games.  Leveling was a little easier pre-3E, but you could make an absolute garbage character in 2nd Ed. very easily.  Players should learn to play to the strengths of their characters, but with many builds, there was no strength to that character -- just a lot of suck.  6 characters * bad stat arrays = a slow but steady descent into a non-viable party near the late game.  This was mitigated somewhat in the BG games since they were balanced around the companions, but it was a huge problem in the IWD games.

 

I think this is true for all games, including IWD2 and 3rd Edition. I posted my party in another thread and who would have thought you could take a level 1 Rogue right through to the end of the game and not have to level them up? And you could multi-class the Rogue into something else like a Mage and level up that Mage?

 

That a single level of Rogue was enough to search, disarm traps and open any locks in the entire game. All you have to do is level up their skills Disable Device, Open Lock, Search. While you levelled up the Mage levels as well as theirs skills in Concentration, Knowledge (Arcana) and Spellcraft. I'll have to check my save game but I think my Drow Rogue/Mage ended up being Rogue(1) / Conjurer(14) by the end of the game.

 

It does sound ridiculous as you couldn't do that with 2nd edition, but you can do it with 3rd ed in IWD2. I found 3rd ed quite inconsistent, being able to metagame with having a level 1 multi-class Rogue at the end and still able to get through it with ease.

[Robsidious]

Thanks for elaborating Josh

 

Generally speaking, even though I don't consider all of those things entirely problematic and could say I enjoyed some of them, I am not particularly attached to any of them either... except for random rest encounters. I loved the feeling of uncertainty and risk when needing to rest in a dangerous area while out adventuring. That feeling of hoping there wouldn't be an encounter and BOOM we're under attack (or phew, we weren't discovered!). If I managed to survive I felt awesome, and if I died I didn't care, just reloaded. Although this feature could force backtracking to town in ironman, I didn't find this annoying at all. To me it added more to the gravity of danger and to the vitality of my party's lives than it created tedium. I also enjoy the realism of such backtracking to some degree.

 

I do have trouble conceptualising how eliminating bad builds can still entail an interesting & challenging character system, yet as I say I'm not especially attached to bad builds, so am more than happy to see what you come up with ;-) Additionally, I would like to mention that I didn't just pledge for this game to get what I want (an IE spiritual successor) but also largely because I have respect for and faith in Obsidian, and so wanted to help you guys have the chance to create your own new game, at my expense. 

 

However, I echo Stun's point about tweaking as opposed to eliminating so as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think a good question to ask about each 'frustrating' feature is... what does this feature bring to the table that people might enjoy? Whether it is the sense of danger and strategic risk-taking of random rest encounters, or the exciting suspense and potent danger of powerful enemy abilities, it would be great if we could keep the value(s) of these features intact while reducing or fixing the perceived problematic aspects.

 

My apologies if you are already doing this (as you probably are), however you have described these issues here in purely negative terms without stating recognition of their potentially fun aspects.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Robsidious

[Stun]

It's true that you can easily make horrible builds in all the IE games... and even worse: You often times won't realize you've built a poor character/party until you're more than halfway through the game.... then you're screwed. LOLOL

 

But for god sakes. That's half the fun!

 

And what's the alternative? a system that makes it impossible to make a bad build? where every build choice is forgiving and powerful? How...dull. Why even discuss builds for such a system? It would be pointless. And what ever happened to roleplaying? What if I *want* to roleplay a character who's fatal flaw is combat and who's beverage of choice is potions of invisibility to get him past encounters he cannot win?

Edited January 14, 2014 by Stun

[Metabot]

 

 

How should the difficulty of quests be indicated though? Borderlands style or what?

 

Dear god, I hope not. Leave the handholding to MMOs.

Borderlands had a fantastic way of telling you the quests difficulty that worked in the context of the game. 

 

[Robsidious]

Yes, I too enjoy learning to make good characters through making mistakes. The feeling of being able to fall makes the flying all the sweeter and adds to my sense of accomplishment. However, this is not to say that a more forgiving character system can't be made as complex and compelling, I just personally can't conceptualise what that would look like.

[Metabot]

 

I do have trouble conceptualising how eliminating bad builds can still entail an interesting & challenging character system, yet as I say I'm not especially attached to bad builds, so am more than happy to see what you come up with ;-) Additionally, I would like to mention that I didn't just pledge for this game to get what I want (an IE spiritual successor) but also largely because I have respect for and faith in Obsidian, and so wanted to help you guys have the chance to create your own new game, at my expense. 

 

 

This is something I'm having a hard time with too. In order to make sure bad builds can't be made wouldn't you have to severely curtail freedom in character creation and thus eliminate the possibility for creative builds?

[Hiro Protagonist II]

This is something I'm having a hard time with too. In order to make sure bad builds can't be made wouldn't you have to severely curtail freedom in character creation and thus eliminate the possibility for creative builds? 

 

I think by curtailing bad and creative builds, it also curtails overpowered builds which is what Josh wants to eliminate. The 'degenerative' gameplay of munchkins which is only a small part of what made the IE games so enjoyable. The creativity of building characters that you wouldn't normally build, whether they be bad on purpose, good or overpowered. I get the impression all the characters will be pretty much the same with a small variance +/- in some skills.

[Lephys]

It seemed to me as though Josh's intent, in that whole elaboration of the old games' issues, wasn't to just say "So we're throwing all that out," but rather, to tweak. To change things, however much they need it, not to just change things for difference's sake.

 

Also, nobody wants there to no longer be good choices and bad choices. I think Josh just isn't fond of systems that are not only unintuitive but also provide a plethora of completely dead ends. There's a difference between "Oh, you're takin' your little sedan off-road there," and "Oh, if you go that way, THE BRIDGE IS OUT! MUAHAHAHA!"

 

I'm sorry, but I don't know of anyone who isn't insane who actually WANTS there to be a probability that, halfway through a 40+ hour game, they'll discover that making it through the rest of the game is pretty much infeasible, and that they need to start over. I'd MUCH rather see "Well, this gonna be kind of tough, but if that's what you want, then go for it."

 

If you want to make it tougher on yourself, use difficulty/game mode options, and try out quirky builds. There's no reason the class system should be designed to accommodate a bunch of terrible dead ends, just because that's occasionally amusing to some players. How's about a game mode (like Expert or Trial of Iron) in which you receive fewer character creation resources? There ya go. Now the system is still designed fine, and you have your challenge. It's just some simple math changes at the beginning of the game. No need to intentionally poke a bunch of holes in the system itself just to allow for potential challenges.

 

Decreasing the extremity of the worst stuff is not the same thing as making everything a good choice. Making things forgiving is not the same as removing consequences altogether. I'd rather have a system that says "well, you're going to have to use your weapons/spells differently than you wanted to, because of what you did with your points, but, you're still objectively capable, as characters go," than "you're just useless from here on out, LOLZ!"

[Metabot]

I can say that Final Fantasy tactics has some really bad design once you get to that battle with weigraf where you're by yourself. There is literally only one way to beat that. You have to have a very specific set of skills, start the battle with a speed of 10 I think, maybe 9 and run around for 60 turns using an ability that increases your speed and increases your attack. Otherwise you have to overlevel the encounter by a huge amount and I don't know if that is possible. That was just poor design in the encounter though rather than with the job system per se.

[Lephys]

I think by curtailing bad and creative builds, it also curtails overpowered builds which is what Josh wants to eliminate. The 'degenerative' gameplay of munchkins which is only a small part of what made the IE games so enjoyable. The creativity of building characters that you wouldn't normally build, whether they be bad on purpose, good or overpowered. I get the impression all the characters will be pretty much the same with a small variance +/- in some skills.

How can people possibly think that?

 

Look at the stats!

 

Dexterity: Dump it, and you'll suck at hitting things. But, boost your INT (as it stands) and Perception, and when you DO hit stuff, you'll hurt.

 

Every character is DEFINITELY not going to be blandly the same. There's plenty of variety.

 

I don't understand how what he's doing is ruining variety.

 

Pluck all the weeds from a crop field, and that doesn't mean all the crops become identical. It just means they're all valid crops, with no useless plants in the mix.

[Stun]

 

I do have trouble conceptualising how eliminating bad builds can still entail an interesting & challenging character system, yet as I say I'm not especially attached to bad builds, so am more than happy to see what you come up with ;-) Additionally, I would like to mention that I didn't just pledge for this game to get what I want (an IE spiritual successor) but also largely because I have respect for and faith in Obsidian, and so wanted to help you guys have the chance to create your own new game, at my expense.

This is something I'm having a hard time with too. In order to make sure bad builds can't be made wouldn't you have to severely curtail freedom in character creation and thus eliminate the possibility for creative builds?

 

Yes. For one thing, You won't be able to multi-class/dual-class in POE.

 

But there is still a way, potentially. If POE is going to have a system where you purchase perks/skills upon leveling up then the "solution" is to 1) have a giant pool of different skills/perks for every class to choose from and 2) make these skills/perks you've picked become increasingly more powerful as you level up. For example, lets say you're an idiot and you choose to give your Warrior infravision as a skill at level 1. Hey, don't despair, because once he hits 10th level, that infavision skill turns into True Seeing, allowing your warrior to see magically concealed creatures and rogues who are hiding in the shadows.

 

Still, unless the game is going to flood each character class with dozens of these different skills to choose from *and* all these skills become more powerful as you level, you won't see that much diversity. One player's fighter will not be that much different than another player's fighter. Whereas in the IE games, My fighter could also be a mage, while yours can be a rogue.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

 

How can people possibly think that?

 

Look at the stats!

 

Dexterity: Dump it, and you'll suck at hitting things. But, boost your INT (as it stands) and Perception, and when you DO hit stuff, you'll hurt.

 

Every character is DEFINITELY not going to be blandly the same. There's plenty of variety.

 

I don't understand how what he's doing is ruining variety.

 

Pluck all the weeds from a crop field, and that doesn't mean all the crops become identical. It just means they're all valid crops, with no useless plants in the mix.

 

 

The problem is from what Josh has indicated, there won't be any dump stats to dump things like DEX because the system is designed not to make a bad character.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Stun]

Also, nobody wants there to no longer be good choices and bad choices. I think Josh just isn't fond of systems that are not only unintuitive but also provide a plethora of completely dead ends. There's a difference between "Oh, you're takin' your little sedan off-road there," and "Oh, if you go that way, THE BRIDGE IS OUT! MUAHAHAHA!"

Well, if that actually IS his argument then it's a false claim he's making about the IE games. You cannot make a completely dead end build in the IE games. Even aside from the liberal loot dispensing (which alone will insure you can survive any battle, on any difficulty) there's the D&D rules themselves, which have built-in safeguards against such a thing (fighters automatically get at least 9 str; Rogues automatically get 9 dex etc.)

 

Hell, BG1 can be beat, with a solo level 1 rogue, without leveling up.

[TRoar]

 

* Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing.  There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing.  Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious.  And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for.  A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat.

 

The problem I found generally with status effects was their immediacy. In BG running across a couple basilisks unprepared was as good as game over for a low level party, because the effect was immediate if the saving throw was failed. If petrification, for example, initially slowed the character upon a failed save for 30 seconds before fully petrifying them, the player would at least have a window of opportunity to try counter it. I never found level drain that bad in comparison after the first few times I encountered it, because while it affected you immediately upon being hit, you still had time to dispatch the enemy before dying from level drain or casting a restoration spell. I think giving the player time to counter status effects would reduce the need for reloading and pre-buffing, and the game flow would be interrupted less often.

 

 

Now, these are all things that clearly a ton of people adapted to and worked around.  But it should be asked: was adapting to them interesting and enjoyable or just something that you did so you could enjoy the other parts of the game?  If the latter, we should really try to find ways to not repeat those things in PoE.

 

I would answer to a slightly greater degree the latter. I like a good story, and when I first started playing BG/BG2 I had never heard of AD&D. The system was unfamiliar, and getting to the next juicy bit of story was often frustrating.

Edited January 14, 2014 by TRoar

[tajerio]

 

 

* Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing.  There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing.  Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious.  And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for.  A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat.

 

The problem I found generally with status effects was their immediacy. In BG running across a couple basilisks unprepared was as good as game over for a low level party, because the effect was immediate if the saving throw was failed. If petrification, for example, initially slowed the character upon a failed save for 30 seconds before fully petrifying them, the player would at least have a window of opportunity to try counter it. I never found level drain that bad in comparison after the first few times I encountered it, because while it affected you immediately upon being hit, you still had time to dispatch the enemy before dying from level drain or casting a restoration spell. I think giving the player time to counter status effects would reduce the need for reloading and pre-buffing, and the game flow would be interrupted less often.

 

I agree with this wholeheartedly.  If an enemy is going to lay the hammer down on me with a massively debilitating status effect, one of two things is required.  Either 1) make it known to the player beforehand that here there be level drain, so that the player can be ready with a specific counter, or 2) have a generalist counter like Greater Restoration broadly available for multiple characters through spells and consumables.  On the whole I prefer option 2--I thought the plethora of D&D spells for neutralizing and countering this and that demanded a level of metagaming that signally detracted from entertainment value.

[MasterPrudent]

 

 

How can people possibly think that?

 

Look at the stats!

 

Dexterity: Dump it, and you'll suck at hitting things. But, boost your INT (as it stands) and Perception, and when you DO hit stuff, you'll hurt.

 

Every character is DEFINITELY not going to be blandly the same. There's plenty of variety.

 

I don't understand how what he's doing is ruining variety.

 

Pluck all the weeds from a crop field, and that doesn't mean all the crops become identical. It just means they're all valid crops, with no useless plants in the mix.

 

 

The problem is from what Josh has indicated, there won't be any dump stats to dump things like DEX because the system is designed not to make a bad character.

 

Firstly I think what Josh and others mean when they talk about eliminating dump stats is that every attribute will be potentially useful to every class - unlike DnD in which giving a fighter high charisma is almost always a dumb move. That doesn't mean that you can't dump stats to create a particular build. For example if you want a character that deals a lot of damage but is pretty squishy you might boost perception and intellect and dump constitution and strength.

 

Secondly the aim as I understand it isn't to avoid the possibility of creating bad characters so much as it is about avoiding nonviable characters. In DnD your wizard had better have a certain level of intellect; otherwise you're not going to be able to learn the high level spells that you all but need to succeed. In PoE not having a high intellect is not going to make a nonviable wizard but it is going to make a wizard that isn't great at directly damaging the enemy so you're going to need to invest in a different set of abilities (maybe she's got high resolve so you can focus on AoE spells and spells with status effects) to make a really effective wizard.

 

 

 

Also, nobody wants there to no longer be good choices and bad choices. I think Josh just isn't fond of systems that are not only unintuitive but also provide a plethora of completely dead ends. There's a difference between "Oh, you're takin' your little sedan off-road there," and "Oh, if you go that way, THE BRIDGE IS OUT! MUAHAHAHA!"

Well, if that actually IS his argument then it's a false claim he's making about the IE games. You cannot make a completely dead end build in the IE games. Even aside from the liberal loot dispensing (which alone will insure you can survive any battle, on any difficulty) there's the D&D rules themselves, which have built-in safeguards against such a thing (fighters automatically get at least 9 str; Rogues automatically get 9 dex etc.)

 

Hell, BG1 can be beat, with a solo level 1 rogue, without leveling up.

 

You can but you've got to have a really good understanding of the particular game and DnD in general. If you're a noob like me you're going to get very frustrated very quickly.

 

Edited for clarity.

Edited January 14, 2014 by MasterPrudent

[Wombat]

Guess I overlooked the direct question from TRoar, somehow but I wonder Im sorry since he/she got a reply from Sawyer.    
 

 

 

 

I totally get the gripe here, but the mask fragments and the Bronze Sphere are terrible examples of the phenomenon.

PS:T's Bronze Sphere is not "pixel-hunting". It's the first chapter's main quest, so it's not like you're ever going to miss it. Instead, it suffers from a different problem: The player isn't told of the true value of keeping it after chapter 1.

And the mask fragments... there's no hunting at all. no hitting "alt" (or Z in MoTB's case) to highlight and search the map. The fragments are given to you in dialogue. Now, one could complain that they're not handed to you during the main quest (although Bishop's fragment is) and therefore, you could miss them. But I think that's kinda the point. They're supposed to be a reward for someone who walked through all the dreams. and in MoTB, that means exploring everywhere.

And this brings us to the underlying question: In an RPG, Shouldn't the player be specially rewarded for all the exploration he/she took the time to engage in?

 

Well, I meant backtracking part in my original post-since there is a scene where Pharod dropping it.  I think you are just technically right as well as the z part.  However, some people failed to hover their mouse pointers on a certain object to initiate the so-called dialogue.  As for the other part, I don't think we disagree.  So, lets save our time from nitpicking each other.

 

Basically, my point was something in line of Nonek wrote-such things should stay out of main quests.  Not all the players are kinds of players who enjoy exploration and thus, basically, the designers shouldnt put someting important in main story in the subcategory, which ends up with diminishing experience of other types of the players.  That said, if players invest their time on a certain activities, they should be rewarded within the scope of the game.  I know Im repeating myself here but Ive gotten an impression that I may not have been enough clear to some people.  Any case, Sawyer put better words in his post which I refered in the beggining of this post.

 

[TRoar]

Guess I overlooked the direct question from TRoar, somehow but I wonder Im sorry since he/she got a reply from Sawyer.    

 

 

Owe you one, Wombat.

[PrimeJunta]

Exactly, I'm not sure what other indication there could be other than MMO style color coding and then of course we'll exclamation points and question marks over npc's heads.

Uh... dialog?

 

Take Firkraag, for example. What if there was a level check on the quest, and if your level < design level, and you had accepted the quest, someone approached you as you were exiting the inn. Dialog:

 

"Psst... I noticed you talking to that guy earlier. Want a piece of intel? Cost you 10 GP but might save your life."

"[Give 10 GP] Done. What you got?"

"The Baron is a bastard. He's done this before. No-one who took that job ever came back. If you do head that way, you better be prepared for the fight of your life."

[Hiro Protagonist II]

 

There are a bunch of ways:

 

* The success or failure of fights often hinged on a single die roll for powerful abilities.  Besides metagaming hard and soft counters after a reload (which I'll get to, below), these were elements where the player's choices did not have a ton of impact; their success or failure mostly depended on the outcome of a die roll.  In some cases, there's really a tiny set of hard counters (e.g. Protection from Petrification for use against basilisks).  Most other tactics just shifted odds and asked the player to hope for the best and reload if/when the worst came true.  Reloading is a part of these games, but I don't think anyone wants it to be a core mechanic for success.

 

1. Any game that has a save anytime or check point option will always be used and most likely abused. It's just not crpgs. A lot of different types of games have it. Mainly due to you don't want to have to start the game from the beginning again. If you cut out the save anywhere option (like in the IE games) because some people look at it as save scumming, it won't stop people going back to a previous check point to restart that part of the game. If I stuffed up, I can always go back to a previous check point. All it will do is change save scumming into checkpoint scumming.

 

 

 

* Pre-buffing alters the difficulty of fights enormously.  About halfway through IWD's development, a QA tester (who went on to become a pretty well-respected developer) came up to Black Isle and was furious at the difficulty of a fight in Lower Dorn's Deep.  He had been trying to legitimately get through it for 2 hours and hadn't succeeded.  Kihan Pak and I loaded it up and beat it on the first try.  He asked to see what we were doing.  Naturally, we were pre-buffing for 5-6 rounds before we even went into the fight.  Because there was no opportunity cost to using buffs, this was "the way" to get through fights, but it was tedious -- and for people who were not D&D veterans, it was not something they ever thought to do, which resulted in a full roadblock (see also: Burial Isle misery, which was also pretty easy for me and Kihan).

 

2. This game is presumably for a niche market. Not necessarily for casual players. It sounds like you want this game to be partially mainstream so all can play even if new players don't have any prior knowledge of the rules system or setting. I don't understand why you want to go out your way to make the game mainstream when it's a niche game for mostly serious crpg players. If people want a mainstream game without having to do in depth research skills, spells, tactics, and just sit back and relax, then there's always arpg's like Diablo 3.

 

 

 

* Hit points make the world go 'round.  There are specific party and resource builds you need to maintain your hit points over several fights.  If you don't use those party builds, you suffer enormously or have to backtrack and rest very frequently.  This is one of the major reasons why we have a split Stamina/Health system for short term/long term damage (and why 4E uses healing surges).  In PoE, getting knocked out takes you out of the fight, but when the fight ends, you're still in the war.  In IWD, if you got super-slammed and weren't ready to devote your precious healing resources on getting that dude back into shape, you had to pack up and head back to a safe zone -- or rest on the spot and reload if you got an encounter, which isn't much better.  Along the same lines, almost all character resources that were limited were per-rest, so if you used any of them it was a big deal.  Per-rest resources are a big deal in PoE, but every class also has per-encounter resources as well.

 

3. Even with 4E, you only have a set amount of healing surges which only heal 1/4 of your hit points and depends on class and modifiers. For instance, a Rogue, Wizard, Ranger, Warlock usually only get 6. And once you use them, they're gone. And it's very difficult to be healed once you have no healing surges. I think there's a special type of potion that can heal you, once you use up your healing surges. The only way to get them back is an extended rest. After playing 4E pnp for two years, one of the problems we faced was my level 16 Rogue (as well as some other players) would use up our healing surges after 2 or 3 encounters and we had to use a ritual (Comrade's Succor from memory) to transfer healing surges from one party member to another. It ended up becoming a metagaming tactic to get through the encounters. But at least you couldn't do it all the time because the party member who had the most healing surges would also run out by giving them to us. We found we had to use a lot of tactics and really work as a team for each encounter if we couldn't extend rest.

 

It would be good if PoE had something like Comrade's Succor that could transfer health. It's one option to avoid resting all the time. Otherwise, I can see a lot of people trekking back to a safe spot to rest, myself included.

 

 

 

* Many fights could end in Pyrrhic victories due to level draining, petrification, or character gibbing.  There's a fine line here between an interesting tactical/strategic element (i.e. how will I deal with this affliction in upcoming fights) and something that 99% of will simply reload after experiencing.  Some of these things can be toggled by player difficulty settings, but other elements can be redesigned to still be interesting without being obnoxious.  And again, many of these things that happen (especially with long/permanent durations) rely on raw luck or the use of hard counters that the player needs to reload and metagame to prepare for.  A Dire Charm with a long duration is (if you lack a hard counter) essentially an immediate KO for that party member and bolstering of the enemy ranks by a character of equal strength -- for the rest of the combat.

 

4. Isn't this with all games. You're playing any type of game (crpg, rts, fps, ... ) and you come to a point where you get your arse handed to you. You reload and change tactics.

 

 

 

* Stand-alone random rolls are pointless outside of an Ironman-style mode.  Random resting encounters, rolls to learn a spell, rolls to pick a lock, etc.  The player is better served by having those things be thresholds (or non-existent) and giving them tools to increase their ability to meet those thresholds.  Failure to make a stand-alone random roll is not a failure on the part of the player; they just got a bad roll.  You can get bad rolls in combat, too, but those are part of a big shifting soup of randomized results hat happen over time.

 

5. I agree that random rolls on learning a spell or picking a lock are pointless. Make them thresholds. If you have the ability to learn, search, pick a lock, then make it so. If you want random chance, make it an option in the settings. Just like toggle max level hit points, although I assume most people will have it on. But at least there's an option to turn it off if you want an ironman challenge.

 

 

Now, these are all things that clearly a ton of people adapted to and worked around.  But it should be asked: was adapting to them interesting and enjoyable or just something that you did so you could enjoy the other parts of the game?  If the latter, we should really try to find ways to not repeat those things in PoE.

 

 

6. I don't see them as mutually exclusive but rather integrated with each other. This is pretty much for all games imo. You adapt because it's interesting and enjoyable as well as wanting to enjoy other parts of the game. I haven't come across a system that you couldn't meta-game. If you've studied the rules and know how to tweak your character, it's hard to ignore the meta-gaming side of it if you're that way inclined because as a player, I want to have the best character to play with, not a gimped character. This goes with all games, pnp, crpgs, etc. Unless I want a gimped character on purpose.

 

I'm playing Traveller pnp at the moment and I did the same in meta-gaming a new character. My friends did the same. It's the DM's job to scale the encounters to our characters. And bad characters aren't so gimped that you can't play. Whether it's crpgs or pnp, I've had bad characters with poor stats and was still able to get through encounters. You just change your tactics so you can survive. 

 

As Stun said, a game system is set so there's a low and high range with starting stats and that character should be able to get through the game. Whether you have meta-gamed or not, an OP character will have different tactics to one who has a gimped character. A player should have the ability to get through with both extremes and still provide a challenge to both sets of characters.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[PrimeJunta]

This is something I'm having a hard time with too. In order to make sure bad builds can't be made wouldn't you have to severely curtail freedom in character creation and thus eliminate the possibility for creative builds?

Of course not. You could design a system where characters would just be good in different ways. An encounter that's easy for one is hard for another, and vice versa. Conversely, if you have a system where most builds suck, that means there's that much less variety between good builds, which is what counts.

 

Base D&D in any of its editions is really bad in this way actually. Most of the charcter-building variety is illusionary, really. There's really only one way to build a good fighter, rogue, cleric, or wizard. This is why you end up with the ginormous bloat of prestige classes and various variant classes. They wouldn't be necessary if the base mechanics let you build, say, an intelligent fighter or a wise wizard, without ending up with something that's totally gimped.

 

And while with all the extensions you've got a ginormous variety of classes and prestige classes to choose from, in any one of them you're still pretty much locked into the way it was designed. There's not a whole lot of freedom within them.

 

Of course, some enjoy the challenge of figuring out the right build for each class. I would prefer a system that gave me more freedom to design the character like I want, instead of trying to reverse-engineer the designer's template.