Health & Stamina, failed design?

[Captain Shrek]

I have a query:

 

Can some one distinguish the two possibilities:

 

1) High HP + ability to heal + no stamina

 

2) High Stamina + HP + ability to heal stamina

 

I feel they are practically equivalent. The second one just has more failure states and rest spamming potential. Why? Because as long as the total HP in the scenario 1 equals the total Stamina in scenario 2, the disability condition can be met equivalently. Can anyone contradict?

[Razsius]

The health/stamina system is a degenerate game mechanic plain and simple.  Another poster in another thread stated that it basically reduced your party adventuring resources into individual resources.  The reason being you could dump healing onto any character that was taking damage and transfer the party's total resources to the correct individuals.  There's no way to do that in this system.  The fact that even one poster wants DoTs to completely ignore the health mechanic is basically the poster child argument of why the mechanic is degenerate.  I mean what about traps?  If they are even equally as deadly as the IE games they should do a metric ****ton of damage.  Should they ignore the health mechanic as well?  What about dragon breath?  High lvl ticking AoE spells?  The list can go on... A system that needs "band aids" in place is a crappy designed system.

 

There's really only two things you can do with the system:

 

1) Nerf the health/stamina ratio down to an amount where it feels "right" (which would mean it becomes trivial).  But that's simply covering up the fact that it's there.  It simply doesn't fix the problem and begs the question "Why have it in at all?"

 

2) Redesign it so it's not the health/stamina mechanic we know.  I saw another post that suggested "flipping" them though the funny thing is it reminded me an awful lot of the mp bar....

Edited September 4, 2014 by Razsius

[Elerond]

Answers to that so far have been

1) Lore: "there is no healing magic, injuries and disease matter"

This is the easiest to disprove: you can go from "1 inch of total death" to "completely fine" in 8 hours and nobody even bothered to provide any "lore" reason as to why camping supplies are limited in any way shape or form and time is clearly not something that matters from what we can see now. It's cool in theory, but that's just a silly excuse in practice.

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/328976

Common Mortality

Project Eternity's world is one with limited medicine and medical understanding. Unlike many fantasy settings, there is very little access to curative magic. Remedies for health problems often have only a palliative or placebo effect at best, owing their continued use more to folk beliefs and tradition than any basis in scientific methodology. Though soul-based magic has helped the great exploring cultures from suffering massive pandemics and has helped some individuals overcome illness over the long-term, there is no quick magical "cure" for disease or illness. Most people go through life and death in the ordinary way -- unless they put themselves in harm's way, that is.

 

Stamina and Health

In Project Eternity's combat, players need to be concerned with two elements of a character's vitality: Stamina and Health. The majority of damage a character takes is subtracted from his or her Stamina. Stamina represents how much general abuse a character can take before falling unconscious. Characters lose it quickly and regain it relatively rapidly, even without assistance. Soul-based abilities are able to help replenish or regenerate Stamina and are often used on the battlefield to turn the tide of combat. If a character hits 0 Stamina, he or she is knocked out. Intervention from another character can bring an unconscious character back into a fight.

For players, the Health of their party members is a tether that makes them consider how far they are willing to venture from a safe resting spot. Though Health is typically lost at a lower rate, when the PC or a companion hits 0 Health, he or she is maimed (in standard play) or killed (in Expert mode or as an option in standard play). Magic may help mitigate damage to Health and slow the tide, but once characters have died (in Expert mode), there is no known magic that can bring them back.

[Luridis]

It's also a question from someone not in beta and therefore posting from what he's noticed so far without first hand experience with it. And so far, I've mainly seen comments about "moderating" it, while I find the concept itself to be flawed at it's core.

 

What exactly does it add to your experience? Why is it even there?

Doesn't change the notion that alarmist reactions are usually... counter-productive.

 

I didn't mind it as it did just what they explained, stopped me from rest-spamming. Instead, I took a real hard look at how far I could push the warriors before resting. I never rested to recover spells specifically, but it has worked as advertised so far, except that in some cases I've done some very mild save scrubbing when I thought an encounter was too expensive, supplies wise.

 

Answers to that so far have been

1) Lore: "there is no healing magic, injuries and disease matter"

This is the easiest to disprove: you can go from "1 inch of total death" to "completely fine" in 8 hours and nobody even bothered to provide any "lore" reason as to why camping supplies are limited in any way shape or form and time is clearly not something that matters from what we can see now. It's cool in theory, but that's just a silly excuse in practice.

It's a game...

 

2) To prevent abuse: "no more rest-spamming abuse"

Also very easy to disprove: You can still spam-rest, it's just more frustrating to do so. The entire game system still pushes you to spam-rest if you want to, still based on per rest abilities. Heck, it's even worse now because that's the ONLY way to actually heal...

The current system is like putting "camping supplies" in the IE engine, artificially limit how many are available to the player based on arbitrary reasons (difficulty setting? really?), and say: problem solved.

Nothing's solved really. People who liked using it will keep using it and just be more frustrated because they have to "zooom" through maps back to the inn at max speed then come back. People who didn't like using it will be frustrated because of that completely abstract and illogical mechanic punishes them at the slightest mistake! Who is the winner here exactly?

The game becoming more frustrating when you play in a way a mechanic has been specifically designed to discourage sounds like it's working as intended. People seem to manage resources fine in other genre's, like RTS... I've never understood why managing food, supplies, water, daily abilities and encumbrance is looked on with such disdain in RPGs.

 

Wins by the-skin-of-your-teeth are very rewarding. I went in without everything I probably should have, I gambled on a lackluster ability and it paid off... I won a battle where the odds were better that I would fail than walk away.

 

Can you really not see that?

 

 

3) To make the game more challenging

Challenging for what? for who? how? You do not make things more challenging with completely arbitrary game mechanics but by actually designing proper challenges then let the players tailor their own reaction to these challenges.

In single player games, all challenges are a compromise by the player between his belief of "fairness" and his desire to "overcome" a given challenge. Some, like myself, rarely spam-rest in IE games for example, or max/dump stats. Others dump stats and bee-line for easy to get magical items. Others just hack save games to give infinite gold or XP or whatever. There is no "good" or "bad" way in a single player game. Each of us make that compromise to some extent, each of us adapt to a given challenge differently and there is no right or wrong way!

That said, there is the "intent", the "vision" of the people who designed the challenges in the first place. That's what matters on their side: what is their intent in a given challenge, what do they want to focus on. Going the other way around and designing on what they want to limit or prevent is completely wasted I think.

Someone who makes crappy challenges and then makes them more difficult because of completely artificial mechanics isn't making good challenges, they're still just making crappy ones.

 

I mean, sure you can tweak the system all you want, but at the end of the day, it adds nothing of value at best and makes things frustrating otherwise and all that tweaking is just wasted manpower on nothing.

Have you ever considered that hardcore RPG just may not be your thing? For a long time I tried MMO's and had a love-hate relationship with them that drove me insane and then one day I finally realized: It's not multiplayer I hate, it's not PvP, its massively multiplayer that I just loathe.

 

If working your way through intricate mechanics like party resource management in RPGs is nothing more than a burden to you then perhaps action RPGs are more your style. Games where there are powerups and no down time. There's nothing wrong with them, I like them too. But hardcore is supposed to be a game where adventuring itself requires tactical analysis.

[Infinitron]

The truth is that all strategic health concerns are "frustrating". Running out of limited supplies for resting? Frustrating. Areas where you can't rest and have to run back to town? Frustrating. Resting in the wild and getting ambushed by random encounters every time? Frustrating. Imposing a time limit on the quest or the entire game so players don't waste time resting? As the reactions to Fallout and Mask of the Betrayer showed, definitely frustrating. Heck, even waiting for your health to slowly regenerate in a game that does that is frustrating.

 

So, what exactly is the alternative other than going full Dragon Age? At least having supplies that you can buy or find lets you mitigate things to some extent, instead of imposing a hard limit on you.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Infinitron

[Seari]

I haven't had the time to read this thread but I'll say this. I wish they would remove it, for it only complicates and makes things harder to balance.   It's confusing and kind of silly, it's one of those reinvent the wheel ideas.

 

Unfortunately I think they've spent too much time implementing it to remove it.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Seari

[Infinitron]

I haven't had the time to read this thread but I'll say this. I wish they would remove it, for it only complicates and makes things harder to balance.   

 

What's easier to change, the health/stamina ratio or the distribution of healing potions throughout the entire game

[Seari]

 

 

 

What's easier to change, the health/stamina ratio or the distribution of healing potions throughout the entire game

 

I have no idea, but since I like health pots, I'm gonna go with the latter.

[Shimrod]

My vote would be for both healing spells and the ability to rest anywhere. Clerics should be for buffs, rez and heals, if I bring one along I should expect a melee party to have less downtime and tank better with buffs. If I don't bring a cleric then I'd want to fall back on buff/healing potions and the ability to rest anywhere to regain health.

 

Fair enough that rules and locations need to differ because it's not a AD&D. I've accepted I won't be able to see Icewind Dale, Menzoberranzan, Mithril Hall etc. On the plus side at least crenshinibon won't be surfacing again. But I don't see why we therefore need to have a radically different RPG forumla, with wizards that need to weightlift and clerics that can't heal.

 

Regarding resting to regain health, if I find some cubbyhole to rest in a cave system and I didn't pack any firewood I should still be able to rest there, bandage up and make with the magical healing poultices. Surely resting requires only being sleepy and not being chewed on by a bear. In fact I didn't want to light a fire in the cave system anyway as the smoke would give away my position, and I'd probably asphixiate.

 

Yes there should be an element of danger with resting and the party members needs to take watches. The risk should be based on the situation the party is in and be mitigated by locking doors, being undetected, finding a safe cubbyhole, carrying an expansible wizards tower, pocket plane, or having mark/recall spells to pop home for a nap. The only game I recall that prevented me resting iirc was Storm of Zehir and I thought it sucked that I couldn't rest in a sheltered cave I'd cleaned out, while being forced to go sleep out on a mountain with biting winds and monsters roaming about.

[Elerond]

Game seems to need "I am not casual but..." challenge mode that makes health resource to be infinity, removes limit from camp resources and changes all spells and abilities to be per encounter and adds potions that recover stamina. Also every kill probably should give xp. 

[Volourn]

K.

[Luridis]

The truth is that all strategic health concerns are "frustrating". Running out of limited supplies for resting? Frustrating. Areas where you can't rest and have to run back to town? Frustrating. Resting in the wild and getting ambushed by random encounters every time? Frustrating. Imposing a time limit on the quest or the entire game so players don't waste time resting? As the reactions to Fallout and Mask of the Betrayer showed, definitely frustrating. Heck, even waiting for your health to slowly regenerate in a game that does that is frustrating.

 

So, what exactly is the alternative other than going full Dragon Age? At least having supplies that you can buy or find lets you mitigate things to some extent, instead of imposing a hard limit on you.

 

Not having all of your possible abilities at level 1 is frustrating. Losing a fight is frustrating. Having your tank one-shotted by RNG 10 seconds after the fight starts is frustrating. This loot sucks is frustrating. All the fights required to get from here to over there is frustrating. Extreme difficulties are very frustrating.

 

So, let me ask you... What specifically is different about the frustrations of strategic health concerns than everything mentioned above that warrants it being a serious issue, while those other frustrations are more or less expected and accepted??

 

Is it because it's just a new frustration, or is it something else?

[Gfted1]

Game seems to need "I am not casual but..." challenge mode that makes health resource to be infinity, removes limit from camp resources and changes all spells and abilities to be per encounter and adds potions that recover stamina. Also every kill probably should give xp.

No, potions should restore Health. The rest, hell yeah!

[mutonizer]

 

 

Have you ever considered that hardcore RPG just may not be your thing? [..]

Man, don't even go there. My "casual" go to games are Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm DDA and my bedside reading currently is GURPS Bio-Tech.

 

This has nothing to do with casual/hardcore and whatnot

[Zansatsu]

 

The truth is that all strategic health concerns are "frustrating". Running out of limited supplies for resting? Frustrating. Areas where you can't rest and have to run back to town? Frustrating. Resting in the wild and getting ambushed by random encounters every time? Frustrating. Imposing a time limit on the quest or the entire game so players don't waste time resting? As the reactions to Fallout and Mask of the Betrayer showed, definitely frustrating. Heck, even waiting for your health to slowly regenerate in a game that does that is frustrating.

 

So, what exactly is the alternative other than going full Dragon Age? At least having supplies that you can buy or find lets you mitigate things to some extent, instead of imposing a hard limit on you.

 

 

Not having all of your possible abilities at level 1 is frustrating. Losing a fight is frustrating. Having your tank one-shotted by RNG 10 seconds after the fight starts is frustrating. This loot sucks is frustrating. All the fights required to get from here to over there is frustrating. Extreme difficulties are very frustrating.

 

So, let me ask you... What specifically is different about the frustrations of strategic health concerns than everything mentioned above that warrants it being a serious issue, while those other frustrations are more or less expected and accepted??

 

Is it because it's just a new frustration, or is it something else?

I'm speaking for myself here, but it seems like over complicating a system that I personally think could have been fixed more easily and intuitively. Want to prevent rest spamming? Fine limit the number of rests one can perform without going back to town. Want to limit the fighting day, fine add a fatigue mechanic that kicks in and applies debuffs to your party which stack if you choose to go on until you rest. Why this? That's all I'm wondering. Why add another mechanic instead of just polishing combat. Just because I think this was a strange decision doesn't mean I can't hack challenging RPG's. Half these forums are all posts about the mechanics of the old games being poor design choices. Does that mean the old IE games where not challenging and those people aren't ment to play CRPGs. Come on now.

[Luridis]

 

Have you ever considered that hardcore RPG just may not be your thing? [..]

Man, don't even go there. My "casual" go to games are Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm DDA and my bedside reading currently is GURPS Bio-Tech.

 

This has nothing to do with casual/hardcore and whatnot

 

 

Out of all the questions in my reply... This is the one you decided to answer?

 

Hmmm....

 

Did you think some slight was intended? Because, that was not my intention at all.

[Monte Carlo]

Luridis, I'm not being confrontational, but your post could be taken as a wee bit patronising.

[Luridis]

 

 

The truth is that all strategic health concerns are "frustrating". Running out of limited supplies for resting? Frustrating. Areas where you can't rest and have to run back to town? Frustrating. Resting in the wild and getting ambushed by random encounters every time? Frustrating. Imposing a time limit on the quest or the entire game so players don't waste time resting? As the reactions to Fallout and Mask of the Betrayer showed, definitely frustrating. Heck, even waiting for your health to slowly regenerate in a game that does that is frustrating.

 

So, what exactly is the alternative other than going full Dragon Age? At least having supplies that you can buy or find lets you mitigate things to some extent, instead of imposing a hard limit on you.

 

Not having all of your possible abilities at level 1 is frustrating. Losing a fight is frustrating. Having your tank one-shotted by RNG 10 seconds after the fight starts is frustrating. This loot sucks is frustrating. All the fights required to get from here to over there is frustrating. Extreme difficulties are very frustrating.

 

So, let me ask you... What specifically is different about the frustrations of strategic health concerns than everything mentioned above that warrants it being a serious issue, while those other frustrations are more or less expected and accepted??

 

Is it because it's just a new frustration, or is it something else?

 

I'm speaking for myself here, but it seems like over complicating a system that I personally think could have been fixed more easily and intuitively. Want to prevent rest spamming? Fine limit the number of rests one can perform without going back to town. Want to limit the fighting day, fine add a fatigue mechanic that kicks in and applies debuffs to your party which stack if you choose to go on until you rest. Why this? That's all I'm wondering. Why add another mechanic instead of just polishing combat. Just because I think this was a strange decision doesn't mean I can't hack challenging RPG's. Half these forums are all posts about the mechanics of the old games being poor design choices. Does that mean the old IE games where not challenging and those people aren't ment to play CRPGs. Come on now.

 

Maybe it could have been done more easily and intuitively. But, limiting the number of rests before returning to town is... exactly what the mechanic is doing. Also, I reasonably sure they considered debuffs for not having rested in x amount of time, but decided to go with what they did. I don't know why, but perhaps there's a narrative through mechanics element later on that leverages it. I expect Od Nua progress to be heavily tied to this at the very least.

 

BTW: Discussing mechanics, suggesting alternatives and trying to offer some perspective is not inherently a way of saying, "You guys just can't hack hardcore." That's got nothing to do with what I posted at all. In my book, it's up to each person to decide if hardcore is something that they find rewarding or not. I'm not the one sitting in front of your computer.

[Luridis]

Luridis, I'm not being confrontational, but your post could be taken as a wee bit patronising.

 

I'm getting that now and I really don't understand why... Action RPGs have hard core difficulties too, in fact I've seen rarely a genre where that didn't exist somewhere. Maybe I should have used the term classical RPG instead of hardcore RPG... I guess the fault lies with me there, but I never actually meant anything along the lines of, "you can't hack it." I'm often sarcastic as can-be, but I'm not a big one for being snide in the process.

 

I'm sorry if it was taken that way, I wasn't trying to belittle anyone...

[Zansatsu]

@luridis, ya your right it does limit the rest, it just feels like it does it in a way that punishes the player for using the characters how the seem to have been design specifically to function. Thus there is a disconnect in the way I feel they have set combat up. Perhaps tweeking the ratios will fix it all.

[mutonizer]

 

 

Have you ever considered that hardcore RPG just may not be your thing? [..]

Man, don't even go there. My "casual" go to games are Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm DDA and my bedside reading currently is GURPS Bio-Tech.

 

This has nothing to do with casual/hardcore and whatnot

 

 

Out of all the questions in my reply... This is the one you decided to answer?

 

Hmmm....

 

Did you think some slight was intended? Because, that was not my intention at all.

 

 

Sorry, felt a bit passive aggressive, my bad. That seemed to be your conclusion so I grabbed it and tried to put a stop to that train of thought right there. In retrospect, probably could have done it a bit more diplomatically or something.

 

All in all, I'm with you with all the management of resource and whatnot, really, I LOVE that stuff IF it's done in a logical and interesting fashion and it's core to the entire game, sweating from it's pore everywhere.

This is not at all what we have here. Here, we just have a game mechanic there...just to be there...to be there really. It's something you could comment at one place in the code and make disappear 100% because it has no repercussion anywhere else in the game whatsoever and yet it shapes your entire game experience because this is your ONLY game over mechanic in the entire game!

 

But really, at the end of the day, I know it'll be modded out instantly upon release. I just think it's resource and man-hours wasted to try and balance something that's useless in the first place.

[Luridis]

@luridis, ya your right it does limit the rest, it just feels like it does it in a way that punishes the player for using the characters how the seem to have been design specifically to function. Thus there is a disconnect in the way I feel they have set combat up. Perhaps tweeking the ratios will fix it all.

 

Thanks... I can wrap my head around the perspective now and see exactly what you're talking about. I'm using infantry as such but that's forcing the whole rest mechanic to revolve around a bar, a timer, I have no real control of. I can see how that would feel punishing to someone, even if it didn't effect me that way.

 

What if priests or druids had protection spells that shifted the ratio more towards stamina damage? Not so many that you could use them wanton, as part of the standard buff cycle, but there they're when you know the tanks are going to be standing in a Cuisinart.

[Razsius]

There's already a fatigue mechanic in play right now in the beta.  I'm not even sure why there's an argument about this.  The health mechanic adds nothing but frustration to the game.  The "frustration level" being how much damage an enemy can do to you before you have to start worrying about a health pool you currently can't interact with in combat.

 

Edit: You know now that i think about it.  This thing is *very* similar to the frenzy mechanic on WoW raid bosses.  Only this frenzy timer follows you everywhere, isn't attached to a set time limit, dictates how you "should" play and only resets when you rest.  What a god awful mechanic.

 

Why does this game feel so streamlined and why am I so annoyed by that .

Edited September 4, 2014 by Razsius

[Luridis]

Sorry, felt a bit passive aggressive, my bad. That seemed to be your conclusion so I grabbed it and tried to put a stop to that train of thought right there. In retrospect, probably could have done it a bit more diplomatically or something.

 

All in all, I'm with you with all the management of resource and whatnot, really, I LOVE that stuff IF it's done in a logical and interesting fashion and it's core to the entire game, sweating from it's pore everywhere.

This is not at all what we have here. Here, we just have a game mechanic there...just to be there...to be there really. It's something you could comment at one place in the code and make disappear 100% because it has no repercussion anywhere else in the game whatsoever and yet it shapes your entire game experience because this is your ONLY game over mechanic in the entire game!

 

But really, at the end of the day, I know it'll be modded out instantly upon release. I just think it's resource and man-hours wasted to try and balance something that's useless in the first place.

No apology necessary. I have ADHD you see... Not as in I'm a little scatter brained and think that's the case. More along the lines of exact same diagnosis across multiple professionals across decades. We spend our entire lives learning that we worded something poorly in retrospect and, unfortunately, the very nature of this beast prevents us from proactively preventing such things. Things often come out... so badly that it's unnerving looking back. Can't tell you the number of times I've said something and they've looked up and asked, "Asperger's?" Because they were perceptive enough to see that my expression didn't match the harsh sound of what I just delivered. On top of that, I grew up in Chicago, where casual speech is loaded with sarcasm and jokes often ride the fine edge of good taste. Someone saying, "while you're down there..." as you lean down to pick something up is just about expected.

 

[Captain Shrek]

No seriously. Is there a reasonable argument as to why Stamina/Health mechanics exists?