The loss of Vancian casting?!

[Merany]

quick clarification:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66081-united-states-claims-at-being-a-democracy-seriously-threatened/?p=1441976

 

HA! Good Fun!

 

Cool stories there! Had no idea about those

If you don't mind me being curious, what then, if not half-orc?

[FlintlockJazz]

 

quick clarification:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66081-united-states-claims-at-being-a-democracy-seriously-threatened/?p=1441976

 

HA! Good Fun!

 

Cool stories there! Had no idea about those

If you don't mind me being curious, what then, if not half-orc?

 

I was wondering that myself!

[Ineth]

With the new proposed system, you don't rest to get your spells back, but they will surely have a low per-encounter usage compensate. You got four level 1 spells, but can only cast one of them in an encounter which one do you choose?

 

So you guys prefer spamming the same spells every encounter? With the vancian spell system you can't just spam the same spells because you run out of casts for that level, with this you will just do the same thing every time.

 

If it is as morhilane described, I think it can actually make Wizards less repetitive than in PoE1.

 

In PoE1, Wizards (after a certain level) spam their few low-level per-encounter spells in almost every single battle, simply because they're "free" - even if they might not be the most ideal thing to cast in any specific situation.

 

If all their spells become per-encounter, Wizards will be able to actually cast whichever spell is most ideal in any given situation (based on the types of enemies and the battlefield situation), or even alternate between similarly good choices just for the fun of it, without having to waste per-rest slots.

[illathid]

 

 

Is Gromnir the resident troll? Seems a bit annoying for him to roleplay while endeavoring to soundly debate people lol...

 

Edit: I'm all for fun and games btw, but there's a time and place for everything and it seems a bit selfish to get his in this convo derailing way. It's important to keep in mind that someone "roleplaying" as a bully is still being a bully, just as someone roleplaying a fallacy-spouting curmudgeon is still being a fallacy-spouting curmudgeon in a place where fans of Obsidian are genuinely (to varyingly, obviously subjective degrees) trying to make the game they like/love the best it can be via discussion.

 

Gromnir isn't a troll, he's a half-orc. Also, it's bad form to post multiple times in the same thread without intervening posts.

 

 

quick clarification:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66081-united-states-claims-at-being-a-democracy-seriously-threatened/?p=1441976

 

as an aside, folks does realize how repetitive this thread has become, yes? 

 

HA! Good Fun!

 

 

Of course. Didn't mean to steal your thunder, just found the Troll/Half-orc comparison to be pretty funny.

[Pel]

 

I'm not a fan of all these "speaking for other people" blanket statements regarding people being extremely upset and ragequitting from having to replay the same areas after dying, etc. We only have to look at the success of the Dark Souls series and other very challenging games to see that there are many different types of gamers, some of whom absolutely love a great challenge, as it tests and improves their reaction times, memories (pattern recognition), willpowers, work ethics, and/or mental acuities, etc, depending on the game.

 

Edit: So what I'm saying is that sure, these hardcore mechanics may make some people dislike the game more, but you can't deny that it will make other, different types of people like the game more, and just because you side more with the "dislike the game more" crowd in this instance or that technically it will decrease profits by a minute amount, doesn't mean the decision is objectively bad if it fits within the developer's vision of making a great game. And it's important to note that most great games usually aren't at odds with themselves. For example, you can't really want your players to be happily engrossed in a dangerous fantasy world which was supposed to be at least as immersive as the Infinity Engine games, and then have a ton of hand-holdy, unpunishing mechanics that allow said players to soundly rest in the WILDerness or not have to deal with resource management - you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 

And yet PS:T, BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2, PoE and Tyranny did that just absolute fine (and I'm going to deliberately exclude NWN and NWN2 from that list, let alone DA:O, KotR 1/2 and ME trilogy-apart-from-the-last-fifteen-minutes-of-3, which didn't even have any "rest"-like abilities) and collectively, all of the above are the most immersive games I've played (well maybe not NWN 1 so much). PS:T, in fact, is still, in my opinion, the best RPG of all time (and among the top three best games period of all time, alongside TIE Fighter and Dungeon Keeper 1) and in that game in was actually required some effort to actually DIE.

 

If I wanted to play Dark Souls (or equivilent), I would play Dark Souls (or equivilent). I emphatically do not want to play Dark Souls (or equivilent). PoE was the first game of its type - my favourite sort of game - in literal decades and it was exactly the game I wanted. So I am afraid I am going to have to politely draw my line in the sand here and say: no, no, I do not want PoE to be made into a different sort of Dark Souls. That genera is still getting plenty of (popular) support, so I don't feel that by saying so I am denying people the chance to have the sort of game they want made by anyone - which is what the shift of the last few years was doing to me; until Obsidian came to the rescue with Pillars of Eternity. I'd like to keep at least one or two companies* making games for MY type of gamer, thank you.

 

(*And it is pretty much literally two at the moment,  Obsidian and Paradox Development, plus some potentials kickstarted (but for those, the proof will be in the pudding as always.))

 

And one final retort to the "game: a thing that is supposed to be fun" claim. Games don't have to be fun to be popular, engaging, and more. They just have to give something worthwhile to the player: give some amount of emotion (sadness (story-driven games about death/cancer/etc), fear (horror games), thrill (first person theme park games), etc), learning experience, benefit, or if you are a masochist, make the player suffer as a sort of life lesson, etc. But yes, fun games are awesome.

 

None of that is "tedium," which was the gist of the point I was making with that comment. (I would aso question why, given subjective nature, it is not "fun" to be subjected if one is so inclined, to any of your aforementioned criterion. Perhaps "entertaining" would have been a better fit, I will grant you, but my point was "tedium" is not any of that.)

 

I mostly agree and I don't want a rogue-like or rogue-light experience either. I was just giving an example that there IS an audience for hardcore, challenging games (and this audience or subaudience or individual gamers or whatever you want to call them usually do play multiple games from multiple genres), therefore I don't think it should be out of the question to make the game a bit more difficult in the resource management side of things, as this will make the world feel much more dangerous and unforgiving, thus more organic and immersive.

[Mygaffer]

The removal of Vancian casting, while beneficial for helping smooth out balancing and pacing issues, does also unfortunately remove a lot of the great immersive excitement and power one feels while playing a Wizard (or other Vancian-magic caster). Obsidian already acknowledged that most people really didn't like how weak fireballs felt in Pillars 1 compared to the Infinity Engine games, and now I'm assuming that virtually all spells will be like this while using them without the contrived "Power-Up!" empower mechanic. As someone whose favorite class has always been Wizard, I am greatly saddened by this choice.

 

I just hope Obsidian veritably remembers that this is a single player game before its too late, ergo balancing should not be their number 1 priority - a cool, fun, organic, nostalgia-inducing world should be ahead of balancing imo.

 

Edit: And I apologize in advance if someone already mentioned the same stuff because I haven't had time to read all 13 pages of this thread yet, but what about making camping supplies cost A LOT more on higher difficulties instead of limiting the max number of possessable supplies as a solution to rest spamming? I truly believe this would greatly reduce the amount of annoyance us Hard/PotD players faced when having to sporadically traverse back to an inn through multiple loading screens to re-up on our measly 2-max supply limit while still keeping the game challenging. Having extremely expensive supplies on the harder/hardest difficulties will give us more choice in the form of economic decisions and breathe more organic life into the game, imo, while still enabling us to keep Vancian casting. But I do know how headstrong the leads of Obsidian are when it comes to changing these seemingly already set-in-stone mechanics, so sadly my plea (and the pleas of other similarly minded Infinity Engine fanboy/girl gamers) seems like a pipe dream at this point.

Actually spells are getting more powerful. They will be balanced out through casting time and if they are interrupted they fizzle and you have to start again. To compensate for the increased time you can now re-target right before the cast actually goes off.

 

It will not only solve all the issues around per rest spells but wizard players complained about spells not being powerful enough, now that will remedied.

 

I think we've got to have to some trust in this team, Pillars was a great first effort and these dudes are really smart and knowledgeable about design, we're going to like what they do. I wouldn't say that about any dev, cough*Bethesda*cough.

[demeisen]

I think we've got to have to some trust in this team, Pillars was a great first effort and these dudes are really smart and knowledgeable about design

 

Agreed.  It's a good point.  They did do justice to the genre with PoE1.

 

Talking about things that sound troubling though isn't such a bad thing; they do take player opinions into account when designing the game.  That of course has to stop short of "design by committee", but still, it matters.  I am usually on the minority side for the desired future direction of almost any game I play, so maybe I'm grumpier than I should be .  Not many games even do as well as POE1 did, so I'm leery of it wandering back over to mass market dynamics.

[Lord_Mord]

 

I am usually on the minority side for the desired future direction of almost any game I play

 

I know what you feel like.

[Guest 4ward]

 

while some things i believe are an improvement over PoE1, in comparison to BG2 i think Obsidian is trying to be different for the sake of being different. BG2 uses a simple health system where the player can use healing potions/spells as a strategic and also tactical measure. With an injury system the player only has a strategic component to consider and on top it‘s outright punishing the player in his abilities. In per-rest the player can decide which spells to use up and with which to go for further battles, that‘s not punishing, it‘s a player‘s decision. And while in PoE2 the player can replenish his abilities during battle with empower this isn‘t such a great resource consideration as there‘s other possibilities in combat in this kind of game. I can e.g. use ranged weapons or items to overcome the loss of spells. By clever placement of resting places and design of encounters in terms of difficulty there‘s nothing tedious for the player. In Firkraags dungeon the player can rest just before the final fight if he chooses so. And while the change in engagement is also an improvement, why not simply give creatures different abilities to hurt the player with different possibilities of countering that? Instead, PoE2 simply says ‚hey, you‘re engaged in melee now‘. And instead of giving weapons that give the player an engagement slot, why not let the player find a weapon or enchant a weapon with say a stun ability? Different for the sake of being different...

[Slapstick87]

Granted I haven't read every single post, so the point may already have been made, but I think a risk with removing per rest abilities is this: If you have all tools available all of the time, all encounters must either push you to the limit to be exciting (making balancing difficult, multiple fights tedious, and optimal composition more important), or most encounters will be boring "trash" pushovers because you can go all out, all of the time.

 

I actually think PoE nailed it with its current design. You have to manage when you use how many of your abilities to avoid losing too much health, yet save enough to cover your behind if a fight turns against you or you run into something genuinely scary. You can't rest between every fight, but must consider when to proceed or when to retreat. It just nails it bang on in terms of immersion, balance, strategic and tactical decisions. I don't think it's broken, and I don't think it needs to be fixed.

 

If I were to change anything it might be a) wandering/hunting monsters interrupting you when resting in non-secure areas making it more important to push forward, and b) if you start clearing specific areas (like dangerous inhabited dungeons) but retreat, monsters will respawn and even FORTIFY their positions in defense against the invaders.

[blotter]

With an injury system the player only has a strategic component to consider and on top it‘s outright punishing the player in his abilities.

 

 

No more than a character's steady decline of health after taking damage over time as in Pillars 1. Less so at the moment, actually, since it sounds like you'll only gain injuries when you get knocked out, whereas health would diminish in response to any damage.

 

 

 

And while in PoE2 the player can replenish his abilities during battle with empower this isn‘t such a great resource consideration as there‘s other possibilities in combat in this kind of game.

 

That's not what empower does at all. Empower increases the character's effective power level while using a given spell by +3, increasing damage and anything else about the spell that's tied to level. Standard ranged attacks will not be comparable and most likely won't serve as a viable replacement during battles where you actually need the power boost that the empower mechanic provides.

 

 

 

And instead of giving weapons that give the player an engagement slot, why not let the player find a weapon or enchant a weapon with say a stun ability?

 

Because there's a significant difference between making a target temporarily incapable of taking any actions whatsoever and making it risky for them to move away from whatever's engaging them? Further, to be balanced, a weapon that stuns a target would need to be able to do so only sparingly, likely several times per rest, once/twice per encounter, or only when it inflicts a critical hit, for example, whereas an engagement property can be continuous since it does not shut enemies down as completely.

Edited February 28, 2017 by blotter

[Varana]

You can't rest between every fight, but must consider when to proceed or when to retreat. It just nails it bang on in terms of immersion, balance, strategic and tactical decisions.

But as a designer, you have absolutely no way of predicting whether the player comes to a fight well-rested, or not. Unless you block off areas and prevent resting, which has its own problems. In the end, encounter design doesn't change that dramatically - you always have to tailor it to a well-rested party if you want to make it challenging. And while most player won't rest-spam or extensively backtrack, in most cases it's impossible to make sure that the player didn't even "accidentally" rest just before. And that's not even taking replays into account - when you know that there's a big fight ahead (often doesn't even need a replay, you can often suspect that the boss fight is near and rest just in case), it's even more guaranteed that the player won't come half-broke to the party. Edited March 1, 2017 by Varana

[Guest 4ward]

 

the idea is that per-rest is an encounter that is e.g. a map, x days of adventuring, or whatever the player sets for himself because the player has an advantage over the enemy due to being smarter than enemy ai, having more options through progressing in the game (levelling up, picking up cool items), being able to fail&learn&try again.

[demeisen]

​

 

Unless you block off areas and prevent resting, which has its own problems.

 

 

​Perhaps it does, but I prefer those problems to the excessively simplistic world of per-fight regen.  And much of what people argue are "problems" are really just things that make you consider beyond the single fight you happen to be having at the moment.

​

​There's a long tradition in CRPGs of extremely limited resting, going back to BT1 and perhaps even earlier.  Once you set foot outside the inn, you weren't going to be resting until you got back in again.  You had better think about how to deal with that. Yes, it's less predictable.  Yes, it makes you think about things you don't have to worry about in auto-regen games.  It becomes less about individual encounters, and more about how you handle yourself when your party is ground down to virtually nothing by the accumulated weight of them, and you are still half a gameplay hour from safety.

​

​I understand why it's a dying dynamic in CRPGs though.  Most players want to nuke enemy group A into ashes, move to the next room, and repeat on group B with a fresh set of health and spells and abilities, until they finish the area, comfortably assured that they'll never start a fight at less than full strength.  You're never more than one fight from safety, if the game gives back everything you use each time, Diablo style.  You never have to think about how to beat a group efficiently: use whatever you want!  Everything will pop right back up again for the next fight.  What could be more convenient?

​

Now, it doesn't sound like POE2 is going 100% hard over to that side, but it does sound like it's moving in that direction.  It probably makes good business sense for them.  For every person like me alienated by it, perhaps they pick up 5 others who prefer auto-regen.

​

​

Edited March 1, 2017 by demeisen

[Varana]

"Excessively simplistic" - sure. Why should I take that argument seriously again?

 

You not only have to prevent resting outside of inns - you also have to prevent returning to said inn, meaning you'd have to block off entrances ("you see, doc, all stairways tend to collapse behind me!" - "I know, protagonist syndrome."), or repopulate areas excessively, or similar measures that make the world much more game-y and a lot less "realistic".

It's not about "harrr, hero smash!" If I approach a boss fight, I know that this was designed for rested parties unless resting has been completely cut off for a specific time. Which makes me look for the closest possible rest, except I'm confident that I outlevel the fight anyway. It's not about how to deal with limited resources, it's about how much inconvenience I'm willing to submit myself to in order to avoid boring backtracking. (I dimly remember that argument came up somewhere before. )

[Ninjamestari]

Somewhere in this very thread, several times if I'm not mistaken ^^

 

That is the problem; you can't really make a working compromise properly, you either go all in and enforce hardcore resting restrictions, or you do away with the whole mechanic. Inconvenience isn't necessarily a bad thing though, but I prefer the inconvenience of slow regeneration to the inconvenience of returning to an inn every other fight.

[demeisen]

​

You not only have to prevent resting outside of inns - you also have to prevent returning to said inn, meaning you'd have to block off entrances

 

​You don't, because that's up to the player.  I played through POE1 and ignored 95% of the camping supplies scattered around, and didn't backtrack to inns.   It was more fun not to do those things.  But if the game is going to regen everybody's health and spells after each fight, there's nothing the player can easily do about it.

​

[Aotrs Commander]

"Excessively simplistic" - sure. Why should I take that argument seriously again?

 

You not only have to prevent resting outside of inns - you also have to prevent returning to said inn, meaning you'd have to block off entrances ("you see, doc, all stairways tend to collapse behind me!" - "I know, protagonist syndrome."), or repopulate areas excessively, or similar measures that make the world much more game-y and a lot less "realistic".

It's not about "harrr, hero smash!" If I approach a boss fight, I know that this was designed for rested parties unless resting has been completely cut off for a specific time. Which makes me look for the closest possible rest, except I'm confident that I outlevel the fight anyway. It's not about how to deal with limited resources, it's about how much inconvenience I'm willing to submit myself to in order to avoid boring backtracking. (I dimly remember that argument came up somewhere before. )

 

Exactly. Because unless you absolutely dictate when people can refresh their abilites (and that sort of thing is can push people straight to looking at the guides/forums/wiki to plan ahead), per-rest can never be more than a self-imposed limitation for the player where the cost is "tedium" vrs "have all my stuff." Which makes it very hard to balance for a computer game dev not personally there to oversee things.

 

Make resting in the wilderness dangerous and the players will go all the way back to the inn. Make there be no save points except at the inn and the players will either grind tediously to the point they can breeze through the next dungeon or give up (like I did with Dragon Quest 8...) Make the jounrey to and from the inn dangerous, see last point.

 

It sort of half-works on the table-top, because you don't know what's coming and the events won't be repeated and there is an intelligent individual,* who, if competant, will invisibly adjust the difficulty to the party - or is prepared to kill the party and basically write-off the adventure and/or characters. (I do not agree with this latter philosphy, since what it mostly does is add more work for me the DM and I do a RIDICULOUS amount of work already.,.! Which I should probably get back to,..) Or the PCs with disposable abilities will twiddle their thumbs for some combats, because they're saving the for "something important."

 

(This all goes hand-in-hand with the issue of trash mobs in the other recent thread, by the by, it's part and parcel of the same issue.)

 

So, unless you are willing to TPK on a regular basis (which then just makes your players paranoid and rases other issues, not least of which is DM-vrs-player mentality), it largely doesn't work. Whe the PCs decide they need to rest, they'll rest. Punishing them for it with random encounters only works a few times (before the start to take counter-measures) unless you want to go that far.

 

 

 

As a final anecdote on what happens if you try to aim to apply pressure to stop resting force th sort of "husband your resources thing" and COMPLETELY frack it up:

 

I ran the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth's official 3.5 conversion once, which was a straight (and kind of lazy, honestly) conversion of the AD&D module. It was supposed to encurage the PCs not to rest and to fight on or get corrupted, but it utterly failed by having useless monsters. (The end-boss was a Complete Warrior Samurai for frag's sake and anyone who has some inkling about 3.x mechancs should have some idea how bad that is). My party broke that module in half- part it was having access to a particular couple of characters whose unforseen interaction have them unlimited out of combat healing (which would be one thing), but the more importat half rendered even that barely an issue because the party's Crusader pulverised the module by having level-appropriate equipment. Which meant her AC was almost impossible for anything to hit. (It was not even a mega optimised or something. She had, like, magic armour and a magic shield and maybe a ring and that was it). So what you got was a long slog of utterly boring, trivial encounters, based on a false premise. (I mean, though it's not like it would have mattered anytway, because the PCs would have just rested further away if they'd had to.)

 

There was literally teo combats that I remember: one with an Abysal Basiliks that petrified the Druid (who spent 75% of the module turning into a bear and forgetting he had spells, that's how hard they were pressed) - which was the end of one session, and by next week they realised "wait, all we have to do is close our eyes and take a 50% miss chance and this is easy" and it was (because the monster wasn't smart enough to do anything with the advantage. The second was just about the one and only time I landed a hit on the Crusader, in midcharge. "Fifteen damage," says I.

 

"Great," says my sister. "with my damage pool class derature, now I get +3 to attack and damage on my charge!"

 

I skulldesked.

 

 

 

 

*Even most bad DMs tend to have some level of intelligence. This does not make them any less bad, of course. (Nor does "most" by all means comprise "all.")

Edited March 1, 2017 by Aotrs Commander

[Mygaffer]

while some things i believe are an improvement over PoE1, in comparison to BG2 i think Obsidian is trying to be different for the sake of being different. BG2 uses a simple health system where the player can use healing potions/spells as a strategic and also tactical measure. With an injury system the player only has a strategic component to consider and on top it‘s outright punishing the player in his abilities. In per-rest the player can decide which spells to use up and with which to go for further battles, that‘s not punishing, it‘s a player‘s decision. And while in PoE2 the player can replenish his abilities during battle with empower this isn‘t such a great resource consideration as there‘s other possibilities in combat in this kind of game. I can e.g. use ranged weapons or items to overcome the loss of spells. By clever placement of resting places and design of encounters in terms of difficulty there‘s nothing tedious for the player. In Firkraags dungeon the player can rest just before the final fight if he chooses so. And while the change in engagement is also an improvement, why not simply give creatures different abilities to hurt the player with different possibilities of countering that? Instead, PoE2 simply says ‚hey, you‘re engaged in melee now‘. And instead of giving weapons that give the player an engagement slot, why not let the player find a weapon or enchant a weapon with say a stun ability? Different for the sake of being different...

I will say that I deeply *hate* the idea of an injury based health system. First of all I really like the endurance/health mechanic. It was a great mechanic that balanced short term and long term health management. I also am one of those players who almost always reloads if one of my characters even gets knocked out in battle, which doesn't happen very often. I hate that a character got knocked out, it feels like failure.

 

But of course for the injury system to work characters are going to have to get knocked out a lot more. Out of all the things I've heard about the design changes for Deadfire this is the only one that has me gritting my teeth. Not only do I hate the idea of characters being knocked out, not only do I hate the idea of playing with negative effects on my characters, but I also thought the existing system was a really good one, and to see a really good system get thrown out for one that seems onerous and punishing to the player... well it doesn't excite me.

[Boeroer]

I will say that I deeply *love* the idea of an injury based health system. Because this will allow me to abuse all sorts of healing like in PoE. Add healing bonuses from survival, items, chants and combine it with Veteran's Recovery and/or Ancient Memory, Moonwell and so on and you won't go down. Now that the health is gone and injuries only happen when you go down it's going to be much easier to break the game. Hahahaha!

Edited March 4, 2017 by Boeroer

[Hertzila]

I will say that I deeply *love* the idea of an injury based health system. Because this will allow me to abuse all sorts of healing like in PoE. Add healing bonuses from survival, items, chants and combine it with Veteran's Recovery and/or Ancient Memory, Moonwell and so on and you won't go down. Now that the health is gone and injuries only happen when you go down it's going to be much easier to break the game. Hahahaha!

 

I really hope that if this is actually the case, the devs will chalk the injury system up as a failure and go back to health / endurance split. The lack of granularity in the injury system seems like a big step backwards in strategic depth.

 

On topic: I don't really like Vancian casting in CRPGs, so I'm just fine with per-encounter abilites and a rest-based "mana" pool that can boost them.