Status effect examples are a bit pissy compared to 2E/3E counterparts

[Sensuki]

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the BG and IWD games (and Knights of the Chalice) was inflicting status effects upon enemies / having it done to me. That's one thing that I think makes many modern RPGs such as the KotoR series, Dragon Age etc rather boring is they lack any of the really awesome types of effects & abilities available from the old IE games (and their predecessors).

 

I am talking about stuff like Fear, Charm, Stun, Hold, Sleep, Paralyze, Petrify, Freeze - the really gnarly stuff.

 

However I am seeing a distinct lack in anything of the sort from ANY examples given in Pillars of Eternity, there are status effects, sure, but they are mostly pissy ones like Blind, Slowed, nothing really nasty. There are only two examples that I have seen - one is a Wizard spell that has a random chance to paralyze for a short duration, and Stunning Blows were mentioned sometime for Monks.

 

I have seen NOTHING that does any of the proper status effects from the IE games that take away the control of a character/disable characters from moving or acting.

 

This is kind of disappointing because this is one of the things that I really enjoyed about the IE games. 

 

I believe status effects like this should have a place in Eternity, and I believe that they can be done properly without being too overpowered. Effect Duration is obviously the biggest issue as they lasted for a very long time in the IE games (BG1 especially) and getting a successful Fear or Hold on an enemy pretty much meant they were out for the count.

 

I can understand why Freeze and Petrify wouldn't make it in - but I would still like to see Charm, Fear and Hold/Stun effects with shorter durations in PE (eg somewhere between the 3-7 second range for stuns/holds etc). 

 

 

[Silent Winter]

My only problem with things like petrify or imprisonment was that it was game-over if it hit your PC (in BG) whereas you could keep going and rescue your party members if it happened to them.  If it hadn't been instant game-over, and your party could rescue you, I'd have liked it a lot more.

As for fear - yeah, it could really make a fight tough but that was part of the challenge.  (I rarely used it on enemies as I'd then have to chase them all over the map to kill them )  Really got tough when your fleeing party member ran into another fight and brought them down on you.

You had your protection from fear spells, but those could be dispelled by an opponent.

 

Hold/Stun should be in too.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

That's one thing that I think makes many modern RPGs such as the KotoR series, Dragon Age etc rather boring is they lack any of the really awesome types of effects & abilities available from the old IE games (and their predecessors).

 

I am talking about stuff like Fear, Charm, Stun, Hold, Sleep, Paralyze, Petrify, Freeze - the really gnarly stuff.

 

I would still like to see Charm, Fear and Hold/Stun effects with shorter durations in PE (eg somewhere between the 3-7 second range for stuns/holds etc). 

 

DAO had stun, hold, paralyze (and even petrify, but that was pretty crappy), with about 3-7 second durations. Didn't make the game any better. (Actually made it worse. Having to hack and slash away a completely defenseless enemy's HP without any kind of critical or damage bonus - coup de grace would be even better - just completely shatters verisimilitude, especially if said non-boss enemy still has about half of its HP when the effect goes away.)

[Infinitron]

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Arkemyr%27s_Capricious_Hex
 

Description: Targets are randomly subjected to one of several afflictions, each with an equal chance of appearing, although at different durations: Dazed, Sickened, or Paralyzed. 

 
http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Dimensional_Shift
 

Description: The caster and one ally are able to immediately switch locations, leaving a shockwave between them. Anyone caught in-between may be briefly Stunned.

 
http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Overwhelming_Wave

Description: Creates a rolling wave of water that smashes everything in its path, causing Crush damage and a Stun.

 
http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Mind_Wave

Description: The cipher violently intrudes into an enemy's mind, Stunning the target and generating a cone of concussive force behind the target that can knock down anyone in its path

 
Also, there a bunch more if the "Terrified" status effect is similar to "Fear" in D&D.
 
See also here: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Affliction#Affliction

Edited April 11, 2014 by Infinitron

[Lephys]

I think Josh gave a list (if not a "this is all there will be" list) of a bunch of afflictions somewhere... I'm gonna go hunt it down.

 

*flees*

 

*returns*

 

Hmm... I think this is what I was thinking of:

 

• Sneak Attack - Sneak Attack applies bonus damage to the rogue's ranged and melee weapon attacks when the target has any of the following statuses: Blinded, Flanked, Hobbled, Paralyzed, Petrified, Prone, Stuck, Stunned, or Weakened.

I'm sure that's not all of them, but... I'm sure there are more than that (more "magical"/elemental ones like frozen/chilled/burned, etc.). Also, methinks a couple of those are simply circumstances, and are not really "ailments" on the target (flanked, prone).

Edited April 11, 2014 by Lephys

[Zeckul]

I sure hope the system is more adapted to a CRPG than D&D was. In BG2 it was too often the case that if you failed your save - which you had no control over -, you basically had to reload, because the effect was totally or partially irreversible. The game rules shouldn't rely on the existence of save-and-reload to work.

[teknoman2]

I sure hope the system is more adapted to a CRPG than D&D was. In BG2 it was too often the case that if you failed your save - which you had no control over -, you basically had to reload, because the effect was totally or partially irreversible. The game rules shouldn't rely on the existence of save-and-reload to work.

the system is made specifically for a CRPG. it is not an adaptation of a PnP system

[Volourn]

"which you had no control over -"
 

Actually, you do.  (outisde of the unlucky '1' roll"). Through choice of race, class, equipment, and spells. Not to mention the multitude of spells and equipment that made you immune to special attacks.

[Lephys]

"which you had no control over -"

 

Actually, you do.  (outisde of the unlucky '1' roll"). Through choice of race, class, equipment, and spells. Not to mention the multitude of spells and equipment that made you immune to special attacks.

That's taken a bit out of context, to be honest. You have no control over the roll itself.

 

For example, if you needed a 15 for a successful saving throw, then whether or not the roll came up 15-or-higher or lower-than-15 was out of your control. You, yourself, just pointed out the unlucky 1 roll. That's part of any roll, is it not? Or is there a die that doesn't start with 1?

 

You can influence odds, sure, but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure. And, when you're immune to something, you simply don't roll. Not functionally, anyway. It's the equivalent of rolling a D20 to see if it comes up 21.

 

Also, you can't really be expected to immunize yourself against every single status ailment attempt on your party, ever, so you're going to have to deal with rolls against status effects. At which point, you really have no control over the result of your roll.

 

I will say that at least in PoE, all that odds-influencing actually translates into control over the end result: You don't just make yourself less likely to be hit. You also can eliminate the chance of things like a critical hit happening, or a miss (if it's your own attack). It's a nice level of control between full immunization and mere wishes.

[Volourn]

"but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure."
 

What's the fun in it?

[Ffordesoon]

"but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure."

 

What's the fun in it?

There isn't. That's his point. The fun is in dealing with adversity, and the most fun is in recovering from adversity as it happens, rather than putting on the Special Robe Of You-Can't-Touch-This after a death and a reload. That's what Sawyer is trying to prevent; he's making the game more difficult while making the systems less obtuse and removing the exploitable loopholes. It boggles my mind that clearly intelligent people don't understand that his intent is to make the game consistently difficult instead of having it spike up and down wildly due to factors beyond the player's control.*

 

Nor do I doubt that there are people who like that level of randomness, but any delusion that it's the majority of players who feel that way is exactly that - a delusion. Having talked with many of those folks, I think they will end up being pleasantly surprised by how much fun they're having with PoE. And if I'm wrong, us beta backers will fix it, believe me.

 

* - And yes, I'm aware that sounds like "He's making it easier," but that's only because people have been lied to about balance and what balance means in recent years. Balance for a mass audience is in no way balance for a hardcore audience. They're wholly separate. We're looking at Dark Souls-style balance, not Dragon Age-style balance.

Edited April 12, 2014 by Ffordesoon

[aluminiumtrioxid]

Dragon Age-style balance.

 

 

Isn't that an oxymoron?

[Lephys]

"but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure."

 

What's the fun in it?

Ffordesoon said it pretty well.

 

There are plenty of games in which one hit or one wrong move kills you, but they're generally platformers and/or action games. In Megaman, you can die VERY, very easily. But, you're also actively controlling Megaman and his jump timing and aiming and shooting and dodging. It would be horrible if, in playing Megaman, all his actions were left up to dice. "Oh, I needed a 17 to jump that chasm, and I only rolled a 15? He fell in the pit."

 

So, yeah, dice and luck are involved with pretty much any attack or damaging effect in combat, whatsoever, and playing with odds is a factor. But, the thing is, combat isn't "okay, just don't get hit at all, ever, to win." In fact, the game's pretty much assuming you're going to take damage and fall victim to things. So, the challenge is "how can you take your hits and mitigate things efficiently enough that you still win before you die?"

 

When a dice roll results in just some negative detriment, you can react and adjust. "Aww, crap, that player's slow now... do I take the time with another character to get rid of that effect, or do I adjust my strategy to use other people to make up for the fact that that character cannot close on foes as well as I wanted him to?" Or, "Aww, he's poisoned now. Do I take the time to heal it, or do I mitigate the damage somehow, or do I just go all-out with that guy to take down other people before he dies?"

 

The roll, while uncontrollable, affects the player's continued approach to combat. When that roll is just "you're out," even at full health, no matter how slim the chances, there isn't really any recovering from that. "Oh, he's petrified? I'll just... do nothing, 'cause he's dead."

 

That's the thing. And how do you prevent it? You can tweak odds all day, but, if they're still there, you're still running on hopes and wishes. One player's gonna get hit with that effect, against all odds, 25 times in his whole playthrough, while another (with the exact same odds) is going to get "lucky" and only get hit with it like 3 times. Even though they both did "the exact same things." And, again, if we were talking about a single attack, or poison, we wouldn't be talking about something that warrants a desire to reload, or a probably loss of the rest of combat.

 

And if you tweak the odds as far as immunity, where's the fun in that? "The challenge here is for me to either will the dice to not land on a hit with this petrification, OR, to cast 'You Shall Not Pass!' versus that particular effect roll, and not even worry about it."

 

If you were to make a game that played just the same -- tactical, party-based cRPG combat -- but everyone always just had 1 hitpoint, you'd see the relationship there. There's a lot less significance to player choices when things are all-or-nothing. You can't make an attack any MORE effective if the enemy doesn't even have more than 1 hitpoint. Your attack either does more than 0 damage and you win, or it does 0 damage and you don't win. Throw in immunity/protection spells, and that's all fine and dandy, but it's still just not as deep as the same system with multiple hitpoints, and critical hits, and varying levels of effectiveness from many an ability, all highly affected by the player and his choices, as well as circumstances, etc.

 

"Don't let this effect one-shot you" isn't much of a challenge, really. Because it's either impossible (i.e. "I can get it down to a 5% chance to work, but I still just hafta hope for a non-unlucky roll"), or it's easy (i.e. "I just have to push the odds all the way to a 0% chance, and/or immunize myself, and/or the only viable strategy is to prevent that guy from even being able to cast his spell, which eliminates all other strategies that don't do that.").

 

It's not that it isn't a challenge. It's just that, a challenge that goes a bit beyond one thing is a bit more interesting. "Dodge this one arrow" isn't as amazing as "run through this entire obstacle course, all while being fired at, and don't get hit by more than 5 arrows." I'd much play through the latter challenge than the former, and not because it's any easier.

[Jarrakul]

I am not a fan of "dead and hasn't noticed yet" status effects, like long-duration stuns and holds. Hold Person might as well be save-or-die for all the difference it makes, except that it's slightly more merciful to the player. If you're gonna have long-duration hold spells, you might as well scrap them and just replace them with save-or-die effects, because it'll accomplish the same thing.

 

Not that I'm advocating that, mind. I hate save-or-die effects with a passion in RPGs. It's just worth realizing that some status effects have, in the past, been functionally the same thing as save-or-die.

[Zeckul]

We're looking at Dark Souls-style balance

An apt comparison. Dark Souls is really freaking hard, but it's also extremely fair and transparent. When you die, it's your fault and you know exactly why, and you don't have to read 200 spell descriptions to figure it out. This is kind of thing that modern games do better than the old, and I'm practically quoting Sawyer at this point.

[Kjaamor]

As inevitably tends to be the case in these discussions, people start describing these situations in absolute terms, rather than how they apply in reality.

 

In BG and IWD, your party (and others you were fighting) were frequently stunned and feared, but I reject the notion that these things were "save or die".

 

When you set up your party, the amount of status protection you use is a tactical choice.

When the mage starts casting, your efforts to disrupt him is a tactical choice.

When Minsc gets "Held" at the front, this means you have to adjust your future AoEs and decide who is going to tank now (and whether to heal Minsc or kill his aggressor).

With all this being the case, you now have a look at what Spells your party have memorised, and you reflect on whether or not those are truly a useful collection to be strolling around the wilderness with.

 

PC Petrification aside (for it is the exception rather than the rule), if you view those effects as being something you have to reload spam to avoid then I think the problem is that you're looking for a gameplay that isn't there and ignoring the one that is.

 

For PoE, it depends to what extent they wish to recreate the feel of the IE games and to what extent they wish to "solve" perceived problems with the IE games. It very much feels that Josh is significantly within the latter camp.

[Lephys]

For PoE, it depends to what extent they wish to recreate the feel of the IE games and to what extent they wish to "solve" perceived problems with the IE games. It very much feels that Josh is significantly within the latter camp.

It's not even so much "problems" that must be fixed. It's just mutually exclusive decisions. We could just make every even mildly similar game adhere strictly to the style of the AD&D ruleset, or we could sometimes actually try a different approach, in consideration of things that could be different and still good.

 

Obviously, the IE way of doing things worked, or we all wouldn't be here backing this Kickstarter in anticipation of a new game built upon the idea of those games. But, it's not like there's absolutely nothing about them that wasn't perfect, or that any alternative design choices are ruining things.

 

Look at attack resolution in PoE. It "solves perceived problems" in the IE games' attack resolution system, which consisted largely of misses. Now, there will be a lot fewer misses, but a wider range of effectiveness on hits. And the chance-to-hit scale is a lot more intuitive. It barely changes anything, functionally, from the way the IE games did it. Yet, it makes a whole lot of sense.

 

And yet, decisions like that instantly produce "I find absolutely no reason to even CONSIDER changing anything about that system, whatsoever, u_u" from some people, as if anyone was claiming it's got 0 value, and now it'll be perfect when replaced with something entirely different.

 

This status effect change feels the same way; it's really a pretty subtle change. And yet, people want their reasons for liking the previous system to be acknowledged, but want to act like there's nothing at all to like about the proposed changes.

 

It's like Obsidian says "this part of this song was a bit loud... we're gonna turn the volume down on that from 10 to 9," and people are all "OMG, THEY WANT TO MAKE THE WHOLE SONG A WHISPER!". Something can't quite screw you over as absolutely as it could before (when the effect lands), and suddenly the game is "dumbing everything down" and making everything easy instead of at-all difficult.

 

As if having a really tough time finishing a much-prolonged fight and still managing victory is so much easier than simply being definitely defeated by the same effects and having to reload, only to basically ensure that you don't get hit by them at all, then achieving a much easier victory because the brunt of the fight's difficulty was in not having your party members drop like flies to effects of extreme incapacitation.

[Mr. Magniloquent]

One thing people needs to keep in mind, is that within BG--death meant game over. Even if you had the option to be resurrected, the plot would still end for you. This is not necessarily the case for PoE, and I doubt it will be. I see no reason why someone can't "Stone to Flesh" a petrified PC within this game.

 

I am imagining that most status effects within PoE are going to be brief to the point of pointlessness, like most modern cRPGs. People don't like dealing the ramifications of magic in a magical world. Use a spell-slot to hedge against the risk of a magical combat in a magical setting? Nah. That's asking too much. After-all, high-rolls are good build design by the player, while low rolls are uncontrollable punishments of inferior system design by the developers. This is largely why hard-counters faded away. Spells became mediocre first, protections against them simply became unnecessary afterward.

[Zeckul]

In BG and IWD, your party (and others you were fighting) were frequently stunned and feared, but I reject the notion that these things were "save or die".

Spells that caused you to lose control of one or more characters were very common, and losing control of a character in a difficult battle usually caused that character's death very quickly. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 sorta worked because they made mages extremely dumb in general; the enemies you fought didn't use 10% of what they could really do. The mod SCS illustrates what happens when they don't pull any punches, i.e. it makes the game so hard that only expert and very patient players can complete it, without changing any stat. I think this clearly illustrates how broken the system was.

 

Also, character death in BG was common yet means of resurrection were very expensive and tedious, so the logical option from a gameplay perspective was to reload - nevermind PC death which didn't even give you any option. The availability of resurrection spells in BG2 mitigated the issue, but then BG2 added disintegration, imprisonment and maze  

[Ffordesoon]

 

Dragon Age-style balance.

 

 

Isn't that an oxymoron?

Heh, well, you use the examples people hate when you put the word "not" before anything, not necessarily the most apt examples. Bit of a rhetorical trick, but I find it works.

 

As inevitably tends to be the case in these discussions, people start describing these situations in absolute terms, rather than how they apply in reality.

 

In BG and IWD, your party (and others you were fighting) were frequently stunned and feared, but I reject the notion that these things were "save or die".

 

When you set up your party, the amount of status protection you use is a tactical choice.

When the mage starts casting, your efforts to disrupt him is a tactical choice.

When Minsc gets "Held" at the front, this means you have to adjust your future AoEs and decide who is going to tank now (and whether to heal Minsc or kill his aggressor).

With all this being the case, you now have a look at what Spells your party have memorised, and you reflect on whether or not those are truly a useful collection to be strolling around the wilderness with.

 

PC Petrification aside (for it is the exception rather than the rule), if you view those effects as being something you have to reload spam to avoid then I think the problem is that you're looking for a gameplay that isn't there and ignoring the one that is.

For what it's worth, I have no problem with Stun or Fear effects as ideas, and I don't think the tweaks even need to be that significant. The problem I have with the spells is not that they're too powerful on their own, it's that AD&D's systems are designed for a turn-based multiplayer tabletop game rather than an RTwP single-player computer game.

 

And, let's be clear, the AD&D ruleset was hardly perfect. While a certain silly part of me rather likes that the player has to be versed in arcane (read: excessively obtuse and overly specific) knowledge in order for their character to dabble in the arcane (read: magical), the fact of the matter is that AD&D is as needlessly complicated as a document written in legalese in some areas and frustratingly vague in others, and putting all the die rolls and rounds and stuff under the hood of a game with fundamentally different pacing than the rules were designed to accomodate exacerbates that to an occasionally intolerable degree.

 

The point of the changes to PoE as I see them is not to make the game "casual" or "modern" or "accessible" or whatever word that's somehow been turned into a hateful slur by embittered grognards, nor even is it to decrease the level of complexity appreciably, as Dragon Age did. The point is to make the ruleset transparent and intuitive (and yes, I know those are used as slurs too) while hewing to the spirit of the old games as closely as possible. The changes so far announced are akin to the decision to concatenate the various unconnected "Save vs." saving throw effects into Fortitude, Will, and Reflex saves in 3E.

 

I'm not naive enough to believe there isn't someone on here who didn't like that change, but can you really argue with it? It kept saving throws in the game while making their inner workings transparent and getting away from the disconnected and obtuse "Save vs." list. Likewise, doing away with THAC0 made the game far more intuitive without changing the game into something unrecognizable. I believe Sawyer's changes are of a similar bent.

[Lephys]

I also think a lot of folks are forcing one very specific meaning of "don't like."

 

Show me a cake, and I'll probably like it. Put a spider on it, and I suddenly dislike that cake. Why? Because there's a spider on it. If I'm more specific as to why I don't like the cake, my answer will be "because there's a spider on it."

 

A lot of the things Josh points out that he doesn't like, he accompanies with a specific "because it creates cases such as (example here)." But then, I see people quoting those snippets, and saying "See?! HE HATES THE VERY IDEA OF THAT!"

 

Like the BG2 thing. He says there's not a whole lot he did like. But, then he cites very specific things that made him not like something. Not just "everything about the entire system was bad. Damage? Don't like damage, 'cause it used damage. Numbers? Don't like numbers... we're gonna hafta make PoE's system NOTHING like that."

 

No. Look at his quests complaint. He very specifically said that he didn't like how many quests the player got pelted with all at once. So, what would he do with quests in BG2? He wouldn't throw them all out the window and design nothing but entirely new, completely different quests. He would just spread them out a bit more.

[Sensuki]

You are all a bunch of pussies who don't like disabling status effects.

 

Dark Souls is also a 3rd person game where you control a single character. In that style of game, disable is a big deal, in a party of 6 - not so much.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Sensuki

[Tamerlane]

Death spirals or bust, mother****ers.

[Ffordesoon]

You are all a bunch of pussies who don't like disabling status effects.

 

Dark Souls is also a 3rd person game where you control a single character. In that style of game, disable is a big deal, in a party of 6 - not so much.

What about when it disables four of your party members? Five? Including the only characters who can make it stop?

 

Also, "I m 2 1337 4 u L0L" is not really a valid argument, and "Dark Souls balance" doesn't mean "This game should be exactly like Dark Souls in every concievable way!" Would you like me to expand on what I mean by "Dark Souls balance?" I'm more than happy to do so.

[Suburban-Fox]

 

When a dice roll results in just some negative detriment, you can react and adjust. "Aww, crap, that player's slow now... do I take the time with another character to get rid of that effect, or do I adjust my strategy to use other people to make up for the fact that that character cannot close on foes as well as I wanted him to?" Or, "Aww, he's poisoned now. Do I take the time to heal it, or do I mitigate the damage somehow, or do I just go all-out with that guy to take down other people before he dies?"

 

The roll, while uncontrollable, affects the player's continued approach to combat. When that roll is just "you're out," even at full health, no matter how slim the chances, there isn't really any recovering from that. "Oh, he's petrified? I'll just... do nothing, 'cause he's dead."

 

Well, when a character is petrified in Baldur's Gate, you can still get them out of it with a Stone to Flesh scroll (as long as it's not your main character - I never really liked that either; the fact that the game ended as soon as your main guy 'died', even though everybody else could be raised).

 

But yeah, I agree. I'd love to have the more nasty, grittier things able to happen to you, but there does need to be a way of countering or reversing them. Imprisonment needs to have a thing that can free people from the imprisonment, even if it does involve going to a high level cleric and paying a shed-load of money. Petrification needs to have a "unstatuify person" spell that can reverse the effect. Poison needs to have an antidote. Level/ability drain needs restoration. Etc.

 

That's actually another thing I don't like about modern RPGs...the fact that none of this stuff happens anymore, and you're all basically immortal - or might as well be, because you can never die, or suffer any kind of long term effect beyond "oh no, I've lost a few more hitpoints than I would have lost normally! TEH HORORZ!!". If such effects exist, they are very short term, and can be easily waited out. Give me a brutal, gritty, nasty world where people can die, suffer horrible injuries, and generally have nasty things happen to them that last forever if not countered, but make it possible to reverse the effects.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Suburban-Fox