Thoughts from a casual gamer

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hmm, for me that means COH2:

-Disengaging means moving away, thus no longer damaging the enemy

-Disengaging means leaving cover, thus becoming an easier target

-Disengaging means, sometimes, losing your set-up, thus no attacking on your behalf possible

-Disengaging means turn on "attack-move" if available, else no damage to enemy you are moving away from

-Disengaging means, if near machine gun, a higher risk of getting suppressed, since it takes time to move

Edited November 11, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Sensuki]

PE isn't a cover/environmental interaction game though, think Warcraft 3 or something instead. Mountain King -> Storm Bolt, surround, gg.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

See "The Ogre with the Girdle" from BG and (and this is absolutely unforgivable in my eyes) "Saverok from BG".

I have never done this against either of these opponents either. To beat the Ogre I found out that Imoen for some reason never dies to him in one hit (this is vanilla BG, btw) so I always send her in to take the single hit that he gets off and kill him with PC, Khalid and Jaheira.

 

If I send my PC in first he/she always dies in one hit every time haha

[Sensuki]

Okay guys I've figured out what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a mod that changes some of the PE class abilities into the ones I describe. Might take me a while to figure out, but I'll come back with a Paladin slow aura and some similar stuff like that with removed Engagement, and demonstrate how much more fun it is.

 

Will probably write something about it too (already am) but yeah, that looks to be the best non-pessimistic way of doing it, like how I got recovery time pause while moving removed.

[Doppelschwert]

 

Would you mind sharing your conversation with josh with us sensuki?

I have already.

 

All or most of the replies are in here

 

If not they're here

 

separate recovery time per enemy

 

That would be a programming and UI nightmare.

 

 

Thanks for the information.

 

Why would it be an UI nightmare? There is no need to know that stuff, IMO.

[Kjaamor]

Ideally classes would have some things that can stop you or slow you down. Rogues have a Crippling Strike, that hobbles you. Druid AI already casts CC stuff that hobbles you as well. Ciphers could have a ranged stun/knockdown ability (actually they already natively have truckloads of CC). Paladins could have an AoE slow aura, that would allow them and their allies to catch up to you (and would actually make you cast movement speed increasing spells to counter it).

 

There's lots of possibilities, all you have to do is look at non-RPG real-time games for the answers.

 

Rogue hobbles weakened mob - mob tried to get away but can't, and the rogue gets at least one if not multiple hits in while mob is trying to tactically retreat.

 

This sounds familiar somehow...

[Sensuki]

Only the player will tactically retreat, and Crippling Strike is already in the game. Currently it's a always use at the start of encounter ability - that would at least give a reason to save it, to stop enemy movement in melee / save a char that is retreating.

 

That's tactical.

[Guest 4ward]

instead of the melee mechanic, the enemy could have slightly higher movement speed (e.g. vampires in BG2), crowd control abilities, summoning, charm (all of that also from a distance like e.g. mindflayers or i think also vampires from BG2), ranged units (like simple archers). Not sure if the enemy AI can be scripted so that on first sight when they see one of your chars they wait but when they see more of you they (not just one of them) go into attack mode.

[IndiraLightfoot]

4ward: I like your suggestions, but higher combat speed on baddies, no thx. They are all faster than the albino ghost twins in Matrix as it is (even slimes). For the BG2 vampires that made sense, but it is not a good solution for a CRPG of this sort, methinks.

[Cubiq]

Well a lot of monsters already do have a faster running speed than the player. Like beetles, lions, spiders.

Ghosts are slower but they have ranged attacks.

As for the humanoids they can use the same CC against you.

The ogre can be kited though. Maybe they can gave him a roar that can aoe stun?

[Sensuki]

Off-hand sling

[Cubiq]

Or just throw boulders

[Seari]

Fling poo?

[Sensuki]

If he was a Cyclops he could do a laser beam out of his soul eye I guess

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[IndiraLightfoot]

Vomit mini-mes?

[nipsen]

@ Nipsen

 

Keep in mind that disengagement attacks currently posses an accuracy bonus, damage bonus, operate without a recovery time, and ignore weapon reach. Essentially, engagement attacks function entirely outside of all normal combat mechanisms. If disengagement attacks were to respect weapon reach, possess a recovery time, have their damage bonus removed, and an accuracy penalty (more reasonable) than a bonus, do you really think disengagement would be broken or abusive?

..that's a good observation. And sure, with a flat bonus for all party-members, this begs to be exploited. So looogically, if Obsidian wants to keep the attribute system they have now, they would obviously need to change the disengagement mechanic. If the disengagement bonus was made lower, and we ended up with perhaps some sort of penalty as well, it would be less broken -- and identical to NWN and the IE games, with all the problems that system had. It's not my preferred solution.

 

And I just wanted to point out that if you wanted attacks of opportunity with any sort of consistency - in the earlier variant - then you would have to sacrifice something else. And the engagement limit would be important, and so on. You would then have powerful interrupt penalties for some specialists, and the engagement block that Josh described with how a wizard would actually be defended by a skilled fighter, instead of being swarmed by mobs running past the fighter while blowing raspberries, like in the IE games -- would actually work.

 

For example - an almost supernaturally perceptive priest, that isn't very physically impressive, and wields basic weaponry.. is a character type that would then get attacks of opportunity often. But because we'd have to choose between spell-power, weapon damage, perception and constitution, and so on, it's likely that this high perception character would use buffs to become extremely powerful for a short time. And then only be useful against fighters and well-armored targets for a short time. And depending on your build and the buffs, you could then use that character for a short while as a defender, or even as a striker. For example against soft targets such as spell-casters with magical damage that punch through the dt.

 

While the fighters that would be built towards actually making solid defensive positions, who didn't dump perception, and so on, would then potentially become extremely valuable to control larger groups. Since their engagement limit, as class and through abilities and perks, would be high. And these characters - only those - would be the type of defenders that would draw in attackers and occupy them while the other party-members move in on the flank or prepare spells, and so on. Since the math doesn't have to be done on paper either, longer range weapons could easily preempt ability triggers and spells from incoming characters from longer ranges very dynamically. Same with action speed - a fast character with high perception (a rogue? A ranger?) would have all kinds of options to stun and crash a heavy fighter - but might be punished seriously if the initial attacks don't succeed. It fits together.

 

A fighter designed to simply hit really hard at a single target would still be possible to make, of course. And properly buffed, it would still be stronger than most classes at stopping mobs. But without perception and accuracy from dexterity, the probability of landing an opportunity hit would be low. Even if the direct damage when homing in on a specific target would be high.

 

The converse situation with the barbarian rushing through mobs is exactly as intuitive - he or she avoids a risky maneuver with a short desperate move, into a situation that hopefully resolves before the adrenaline rush wears off.

 

This system makes a lot of sense, it would let designers easily tweak encounters on the high level, it avoids the "disengage and get an attack of opportunity landed by fifteen goblins" effect from NWN and the IE games. And I think that if the presentation of that system was made differently, and the variables and abstractions were hidden a bit better from the player - people would (and did, with ones I had test it.. people who would never, in a million years, post anything on a forum of any kind) think it would feel very natural.

 

And that it would reward you and give you proper feedback when attempting to do something you think makes intuitive sense. Such as having that fighter defend the group. Instead of that the system is simply doing the usual video-game thing: telling you to throw all reason out the window, and learn the mechanics and obey them slavishly.

 

The criticism against that system: it is complicated and casual people don't understand it, sadly also applies to the new variant. Perhaps to an even greater extent.

 

But yeah, I you're absolutely right that the current system could be made less obviously exploitable, by reducing the bonus from disengagement attacks. And that it would just make the payoff from exploiting it lower - not actually "fix the system". It would still be broken.

 

Meanwhile, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason why that "problem" now exists, and that the engagement system is broken, is that all classes have gained bonuses that didn't exist in the earlier variant of the rules. And that this is the direct cause of why it is at all exploitable.

 

Like I said before the entire spat we had, and I had OE refund the kickstarter pledge (money that I donated away on OE's behalf) -- the insistent wish from "the community" has been to include IE and NWN-specific mechanics, specially the bad ones, for no reason other than that those specific mechanics are "known" and "familiar". While ignoring the overall goal of making an "IE-like" game that actually works, or at least hangs together in some way. And that the result of forcing in those mechanics - while it will give Paradox Q&A the boost in positive feedback they want to see on the forums - is going to break the game in a million little pieces, if any trace of the original design is left in the end. Said differently, it simply forces Obsidian to reimplement the entire game from scratch, throw out all their designs, and replace it with the very simplistic and unsatisfying set of abstractions we know well from the IE games.

 

So when you know that - that this is where the extra development time went into, and how the internal testing led Obsidian - I don't think I'm unjustified in at least asking if it was worth it. Either for Obsidian, or for people who want to play the game later on. I mean, I've been part of programming projects that have had a similar turnover, where we scrapped parts of the program, bit by bit, until the foundation of the project couldn't be used. And ended up with a last-minute ditch effort towards a "working" solution that in the end no one were happy with. The project still fulfilled the overall goals (according to napkins in a lunch-meeting), but failed abysmally at being anything like what it was initially sold as, and what a technician could easily read out of the design documents.

 

It's just my opinion - but I think the way Obsidian has gone about implementing things in the beta reeks of that conclusion to the project. From looking at it, I also think it's highly unlikely that they will retread anything, because the new implementations seem so intertwined with the rest. So I really don't think it's actually doable for them, technically, to go back, even if they wanted to. Doing so would also essentially admit that they've wasted several months for no reason, while then potentially decide to remake a solution that "the community hates". And I don't think anyone at Obsidian has the balls to do that now. *shrug*

Edited November 12, 2014 by nipsen

[Lephys]

Regarding engagement:

 

These games already have limited-use active slow/stun/snare/charm/(insert CC here) abilities. Relying on those for engagement = simply removing engagement.

 

What engagement does is put in a standard rule/allowance for at-the-ready melee peeps who don't want to watch everyone else jog past them, LOLing all the way, just because the melee peep doesn't want to use up all his CC ammo JUST to get some kind of advantage against someone who's in no way actively defending against his attacks at all, which he really should already get.

 

That's pretty much it. I mean, that's basically the premise of any instance of attacks of opportunity in any game/ruleset, ever. All it's trying to do is say "Umm... wouldn't you have the opportunity to attack in this situation?" And, mechanically it prevents people from simply jogging around and switching targets all willy-nilly, ignoring people actively attempting to tackle them whilst twirling sword-chucks about.

 

So, yeah, like Kjaamor said (I think? Man, losing track of all the responses I just caught up on), it doesn't even HAVE to be direct extra damage. It could be a chance to trip, slow, stun, knockdown, etc the foe who's attempting to ignore you. And, coinciding with what Sensuki's been saying, CC effects would suffice. However, they'd need to be separate from your regular arsenal (at least in quantity limitation/availability), because all you're doing is exploiting a passive advantage. "You're just going to jog past me, within arm's reach? Then I'm going to trip the CRAP out of you!"

 

If there's something wrong with that concept, what is it, and how would we fix it without arbitrarily giving up on the idea that someone sprinting full-speed right past someone else, whom they're ignoring, wouldn't be easily and immediately clotheslined with a longsword for their horrible, horrible decision-making?

[Mr. Magniloquent]

 

@ Nipsen

 

Keep in mind that disengagement attacks currently posses an accuracy bonus, damage bonus, operate without a recovery time, and ignore weapon reach. Essentially, engagement attacks function entirely outside of all normal combat mechanisms. If disengagement attacks were to respect weapon reach, possess a recovery time, have their damage bonus removed, and an accuracy penalty (more reasonable) than a bonus, do you really think disengagement would be broken or abusive?

..that's a good observation. And sure, with a flat bonus for all party-members, this begs to be exploited. So looogically, if Obsidian wants to keep the attribute system they have now, they would obviously need to change the disengagement mechanic. If the disengagement bonus was made lower, and we ended up with perhaps some sort of penalty as well, it would be less broken -- and identical to NWN and the IE games, with all the problems that system had. It's not my preferred solution.

 

And I just wanted to point out that if you wanted attacks of opportunity with any sort of consistency - in the earlier variant - then you would have to sacrifice something else. And the engagement limit would be important, and so on. You would then have powerful interrupt penalties for some specialists, and the engagement block that Josh described with how a wizard would actually be defended by a skilled fighter, instead of being swarmed by mobs running past the fighter while blowing raspberries, like in the IE games -- would actually work....

 

...The criticism against that system: it is complicated and casual people don't understand it, sadly also applies to the new variant. Perhaps to an even greater extent.

 

But yeah, I you're absolutely right that the current system could be made less obviously exploitable, by reducing the bonus from disengagement attacks. And that it would just make the payoff from exploiting it lower - not actually "fix the system". It would still be broken.

 

Meanwhile, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason why that "problem" now exists, and that the engagement system is broken, is that all classes have gained bonuses that didn't exist in the earlier variant of the rules. And that this is the direct cause of why it is at all exploitable....

 

....It's just my opinion - but I think the way Obsidian has gone about implementing things in the beta reeks of that conclusion to the project. From looking at it, I also think it's highly unlikely that they will retread anything, because the new implementations seem so intertwined with the rest. So I really don't think it's actually doable for them, technically, to go back, even if they wanted to. Doing so would also essentially admit that they've wasted several months for no reason, while then potentially decide to remake a solution that "the community hates". And I don't think anyone at Obsidian has the balls to do that now. *shrug*

 

 

You are absolutely correct in that having changed the fundamentals of their system, that layers which were dependent on them have suffered. I'm not entirely sure what bonus you are referring to though. The item I can think of is that disengagement attacks guarantee interruption, whereas it was initially dependent on Resolve. Am I understanding you correctly?

 

I do think it has a place though. Engagement makes formations practical by providing better blocking and can subdue kiting shenanigans that the IE games were rife with. I do not think creating a dozen or two contrived ad-hoc abilities would solve tactical movement. That's one of my major criticisms for this game. Abilities, spells, the classes themselves...they are all kind of "boot-strapped" in to satisfy one particular issue. There is no cohesive structure to many of them, and it is largely responsible for any asynchronous nature in PoE's combat. Then there is the issue of creating the AI to handle using these abilities under sensible parameters, which somehow act timely without being preempted by recovery, and cause the player to pause even more often than they currently do.

 

Engagement provides a unified mechanism that will occur automatically and therefore, predictably. First, disengagement needs to respect weapon reach. Anything else is nonsensical. Second the bonuses to damage and accuracy need to be removed. If it is an opportunistic action, then it is reflexive and impulsive. There is nothing about such an action that rationalizes extra damage and/or extra heightened accuracy. Third, due to its split-second nature, there needs to be an accuracy penalty. This will cause it to hit less, and when it does--much more likely be a graze. That is far more representative of the nature of the action. Finally, having disengagement incur its own recovery would do much to keep it under control. At the worst, I see this kind of disengagement attack as much less evil than the alternatives--even its absence.

[Sensuki]

If there's something wrong with that concept, what is it, and how would we fix it without arbitrarily giving up on the idea that someone sprinting full-speed right past someone else, whom they're ignoring, wouldn't be easily and immediately clotheslined with a longsword for their horrible, horrible decision-making?

It's pretty simple man, player input. If you don't react to the enemy running past your unit and you didn't position yourself to stop him in the first place, then you should have to live with the consequences of that decision. If you're in the middle of a sword swing against another guy and some guy runs past you - bad luck.

 

For the player it's pretty easy to do this by pausing and mousing over enemies at the start of combat to see who they are targeting and then work out a strategy to thwart it.

Edited November 12, 2014 by Sensuki

[nipsen]

I'm not entirely sure what bonus you are referring to though. The item I can think of is that disengagement attacks guarantee interruption, whereas it was initially dependent on Resolve. Am I understanding you correctly?

The bonus was from perception, and some classes had better base values, or something like that. I'm trying to put a pnp version of PoE down on paper, but I'm not completely sure how I'm going to sort this out...

 

Engagement provides a unified mechanism that will occur automatically and therefore, predictably. First, disengagement needs to respect weapon reach. Anything else is nonsensical. Second the bonuses to damage and accuracy need to be removed. If it is an opportunistic action, then it is reflexive and impulsive. There is nothing about such an action that rationalizes extra damage and/or extra heightened accuracy. Third, due to its split-second nature, there needs to be an accuracy penalty. This will cause it to hit less, and when it does--much more likely be a graze. That is far more representative of the nature of the action. Finally, having disengagement incur its own recovery would do much to keep it under control. At the worst, I see this kind of disengagement attack as much less evil than the alternatives--even its absence.

Right, that's a very good approach. I'd do something like that too if someone asked me to come up with something right away. Even though I know that the "slice time even thinner" approach isn't really going to be all that great, even if the individual steps are logical enough. And its how you always do it in role-playing games, right - and then you have a computer to do the maths, so you just add fifteen thousand more variables. Success!

 

Thing is that the idea Josh sketched up turns this on the head. Instead of calculating instances of mobs in range, and then whacking them in turn depending on a random roll - which is pretty sketchy anyway, also in pnp. Instead of that, you create a combat bubble where the fighter can punish mobs that turn their back on them, or cast a spell, or trigger an ability. But you're only engaging up to a specific amount of mobs this way. And range of the weapon and so on really only becomes about placement - so the actual number of actions and calculations you need to maintain this stuff actually drops. There's a huge number things like that that are sheer genius, and it's why I'm sketching up the pnp version right now.

 

But it wasn't implemented extremely well in the first part of the beta - the AI didn't make a call on whether or not to risk attacks of opportunity when breaking through and then getting stabbed in the back by the fighter for free the next turn. No flanking attempts, or retreats. There was no mechanism for choosing which specific mobs that would be included in the engagement limit (even if the active attacker and the nearest few targets seemed good enough). And the severity of the hit typically was one normal attack (which can be really powerful in pnp, not so much in PoE against some 1000 stamina mob that can take 50 injuries and not flinch, and so on). And most classes at level 5 seems to have had an engagement limit of 1. 

 

But the basic things were there, and it worked reasonably well, it just needed tweaking. I don't know... Was I the only tester who made an int/perception/dexterity based fighter, so no one else in the beta got to see it or something like that? I don't know. The most common builds simply dumped perception, maxed might, and people complained about attacks of opportunity not working - or not working consistently. Even though these might-maxed characters would consistently hit extremely hard whenever they would actually hit, and at the end of their turns, and so on, which was their strength. 

 

Now that perception and any other stat essentially has no bearing on how frequent the attacks of opportunity are, it's consistent. It's too powerful. And now it's also broken, etc., etc. The other variant wasn't actually broken, but the presentation of it all wasn't perfect. But.. you know.. never going to see that in the game now.

Edited November 12, 2014 by nipsen

[Lephys]

It's pretty simple man, player input. If you don't react to the enemy running past your unit and you didn't position yourself to stop him in the first place, then you should have to live with the consequences of that decision. If you're in the middle of a sword swing against another guy and some guy runs past you - bad luck.

 

For the player it's pretty easy to do this by pausing and mousing over enemies at the start of combat to see who they are targeting and then work out a strategy to thwart it.

You cannot input a situational advantage. You can pause all day long, and click "attack this dude who isn't even actively worrying about me," and you might just miss or graze. You can't shove him down because he's not paying attention, or murder him to death because he's not even making it hard for you to, etc.

 

That's the whole point. And yeah, it is simple. Engagement simply begs the question "Are you going to actively ignore this combatant who is trying to do horrible things to you within arm's reach, or are you not?" Thus, once you've entered the zone o' murder, you have to actively disengage. It's the PoE version of Windows' "Are you sure you want to close this document without saving?", except it's more like "are you sure you want to let this guy rock your face?"

 

Yes, with player input, you can use every ounce of your power to one-shot the things that run past you, I suppose, and somehow pretend that, "Yayyy! The game represented the fact that it was easier for me to kill that thing because it was ignoring me!" But that's all it would be: pretend.

 

Simply put, and as I stated before (which you didn't address), even WITH player input, there's a gap for something beyond just the exact same actions you would normally perform that can reasonably be filled by a mechanic. Look at it this way: If your Fighter only has 3 Knockdowns per Encounter, then he can use his "player input" up to 3 times to teach people not to idiotically run within 1 foot of him whilst ignoring him. If 7 people run past him, the other 4 just LOL their way past. Okay, so let's solve the problem. Give him 10 Knockdowns. Well... now he can just jog up to even people who ARE paying attention to him and actively engaging him, and freely knock them all down. That's a bit overboard. Just running around, "THIS IS SPARTA!" kicking peeps into cisterns.

 

So how could we possibly remedy that without having to worry about giving him too many or too few free-use "player inputs" to deal with foes nonensically jogging around, ignorant of their surroundings, without suffering for it any worse than if they were super-prepared and attentive of the Fighter? Via some other mechanic specifically designed to tackle those specific situations, and nothing more. Behold, engagement.

 

Tweak it, change it, tune it... but removing it would just be silly. Again, that's why there are attacks of opportunity in D&D and the like (except, I think they happen every time you move more than 1 square [5 feet] within a certain distance of something.) But, there's already a "flanked" status in the game. So you're already representing the fact that someone can only actively address so many opponents at a time in combat, and that those he's not currently "engaging" should probably gain some advantage in attacking him.

 

That, and you don't want to play "chase the foe" every single time you encounter some enemies and there's no reason for all of them not to just charge your lightly-armored back line of party folk. OR, play "use all our active abilities up just to inhibit the foe, even though really I could just hold out my sword and he'd gut himself on it because he's not even trying to go around me or attack me in any way, shape, or fashion."

 

Third, due to its split-second nature, there needs to be an accuracy penalty. This will cause it to hit less, and when it does--much more likely be a graze. That is far more representative of the nature of the action. Finally, having disengagement incur its own recovery would do much to keep it under control. At the worst, I see this kind of disengagement attack as much less evil than the alternatives--even its absence.

This is the only thing I don't agree with in your suggestions regarding engagement. The whole point of it is to make non-tactical disengagements something you DON'T want to take lightly. "Don't just turn your back on this guy, because he'll then get a worse-than-normal free attack on you!" isn't really very spooky. The fact that he's getting an attack of opportunity is that an opportunity has arisen for a free attack. It's not an attack of desperation, or an attack of "impulsively fling your weapon in that direction in the hopes that it will hit him." I realize the whole "instantaneous" aspect of these attacks isn't very realistic, and that seems to suggest they're split-second things and all, but I don't think that's the case. It's really just more that the timing of them is abstracted away, because it would be really tricky to represent with code/animations, OR would, again, render these attacks far less threatening than they're supposed to be. If you had to wait for when your character could actually take an action, then you could just freely disengage from anyone right after they've done anything, 100% of the time. "Oh, he can't swing again... so I'll just let him swing once, block it if I can, then run past."

 

That being said, maybe they DO need to not be as involved with damage as they are now. Especially when it comes to multiple foes all making these attacks on you at the same time. BUT, they should still bestow some advantage. Increased chance to knock you down, or an increased chance of something very undesirable happening to you.

[Sensuki]

snip

There's a lot of pointless talking and superfluous examples in that post, have you even read a single post of mine on this topic before? You could save yourself a lot of time by just saying "yes I prefer automatic mechanics that don't require me to do anything".

 

In every single RT game that isn't a Neverwinter Nights, stickiness is either handled through aggro mechanics, or status effects and disables. Guess which is more fun and tactical? It's the latter.

 

No RT game uses mechanics that give free invisible attacks, because that is just a laughable concept.

[Lephys]

There's a lot of pointless talking and superfluous examples in that post, have you even read a single post of mine on this topic before? You could save yourself a lot of time by just saying "yes I prefer automatic mechanics that don't require me to do anything".

There's a lot of not-even-addressing-any-of-my-point in that response. Yes I've read oodles of your posts. And a passive engagement mechanic is no more an "automatic mechanic that doesn't require me to do anything" than any passive bonus in the entire game. By that claim, it's folly to not remove all passive Talent bonuses in the game and replace them with active effects and bonuses. Paladin auras? Obviously people who play paladins just want everything automated.

 

Also, how does engagement automatically take care of anything for you? "Ah-HAH! You have to actively choose to flee from me if you want to!" Oh no. Combat over. Obviously there's nothing left to do. That's the "I Win" button. Someone has to choose between giving me an advantage, or staying and fighting me and denying me that advantage. FOR SOOTH!

 

Come on, Sensuki. I know how smart you are. I don't claim to be the most eloquent poster in the world, and I'm perfectly open to being wrong, but at least pay me the respect of actually countering my point with something substantial. See, above, I just pointed out how passive mechanics aren't evil. But I didn't dickishly respond with "clearly, you just don't want any passive anything whatsoever in the whole game," because I know that's not the case.

 

In every single RT game that isn't a Neverwinter Nights, stickiness is either handled through aggro mechanics, or status effects and disables. Guess which is more fun and tactical? It's the latter.

AKA "Plenty of other real-time games completely ignore a mechanic that was built-in to the PnP ruleset upon which they were founded." Great, so those games are more fun than NWN? Obviously that's a controlled experiment, and comments upon the sheer idea of any possible representation of melee engagement.

 

And I'm not really concerned with "stickiness." I just think that, much like the idea behind backstabbing, there should be passive rules for the status of someone's eligibility for an advantage in melee combat. Don't want to get backstabbed? Don't turn your back on someone. Decide to turn your back on someone? Have fun getting stabbed in the back for extra damage. I don't know if that's facing-stickiness or what. *shrug*

[Kjaamor]

There's a lot of pointless talking and superfluous examples in that post, have you even read a single post of mine on this topic before? You could save yourself a lot of time by just saying "yes I prefer automatic mechanics that don't require me to do anything".

 

In every single RT game that isn't a Neverwinter Nights, stickiness is either handled through aggro mechanics, or status effects and disables. Guess which is more fun and tactical? It's the latter.

 

No RT game uses mechanics that give free invisible attacks, because that is just a laughable concept.

 

See, you make so many references to your interpretations of the maths, and write these long-winded papers and suggestions, but ultimately it is posts like these that make up your argument. "Guess which is more fun? That's right, it's the one I prefer. Case closed."

 

I know it's the internet, but there seems to be an increasing amount of posts from many parties that are set out like they're factual analysis, and are in fact no different from all the other opinion-based posts here on the forums, however well-typed they might be.

[Sensuki]

Feel free to reference my post history against Lephys' and see which one contains less superfluous content.