New health system - poll version

[Karkarov]

Ah, so your argument is that enough people didn't like a split health system that the designers are changing to a slightly different split health system? Huh.

I am not making any argument at all, I said I would be happy with whatever they choose.  That said, the health system of Eternity 2 is not a split health system.  You have 1 HP pool, your hp drops you get "injuries", you get enough injuries you die. 

 

In Eternity 1 you could have injuries out the wazoo, and as long as you had 1 hp left you were still good.

 

And yes, based on Sawyers own comments from a live stream, a lot of players did not like Eternity 1's system and found it too complicated.  That is why they made this update.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Karkarov

[rjshae]

 

Ah, so your argument is that enough people didn't like a split health system that the designers are changing to a slightly different split health system? Huh.

I am not making any argument at all, I said I would be happy with whatever they choose.  That said, the health system of Eternity 2 is not a split health system.  You have 1 HP pool, your hp drops you get "injuries", you get enough injuries you die. 

 

In Eternity 1 you could have injuries out the wazoo, and as long as you had 1 hp left you were still good.

 

And yes, based on Sawyers own comments from a live stream, a lot of players did not like Eternity 1's system and found it too complicated.  That is why they made this update.

 

 

Presumably you mean this:

 

"Right now, what we are experimenting with is a system that uses injuries as the main way of gating players needing to rest. At least in terms of damage taken. We're not using the Health system, we're using just the—well, we now have, whether you want to call it hit points or health, we have essentially what was Stamina in the first game. If you get knocked out you'll get injuries, and injuries are a thing you want to rest to get rid of. We're keeping all the injuries. Fatigue can be one of those injuries, we abandoned the sort of time-based fatigue a long time ago. The idea is that when you rest that's how you get rid of those things. You can also get injuries from things like scripted interactions, if you miss a check when you do a jump or something like that; you can hurt your knee or your elbow or your shoulder. Things like that. All that stuff is still in place. We're experimenting with a healthless system using injuries primarily as the gating mechanism for it.

 

Personally, I really liked the Health mechanic. A lot of people found it confusing. We tried various ways of communicating it...I think that injuries do a pretty good job, and so I'd like to experiment at least with using injuries as the primary means for driving resting.

 

We'll see. Like I said, I was the person who proposed and pushed for that mechanic, but I also don't want a bunch of people to not really understand what the hell is going on."

 

There's no mention of "dislike" as the reason, only an apparent lack of understanding by a "bunch of people".

[pm675]

I almost never post, but I wanted to mention that I liked the system from PoE 1 and would be disappointed if it was lost for the sequel.

 

Perhaps if people like me (who rarely post) are coming out of the woodwork, it might mean that this poll is actually fairly accurate and not representative of a vocal minority. Hopefully Obsidian takes note

Yup, I also liked the Poe 1 system.

Of my problems with Poe, the health/endurance  was, well not one of them. Perhaps the people who says that was confusing could link to posts  that say so? Should be easy if a bunch of people had problems, hated it, were confused. 

But I doubt it 

[PizzaSHARK]

I'll chip in my own thoughts as I play through PotD again (after several months since my last playthrough), and with some recent Pathfinder tabletop experience to freshen my memory of how tabletop systems handle things.

 

- I don't think that HP and END need to be separate.  I like that END and HP are linked.  I do, however, think that HP is a little too limiting on harder difficulties.  Either reduce the amount of damage that gets transferred to HP, increase total HP pools (especially for the squishy classes), or something else.

 

- I do think that Wound Binding and Field Triage are incredibly underpowered for their cost.  At bare minimum, the two abilities should be combined into a single feat.  Better yet, they should be default abilities (heal yourself OR heal an ally, 1/rest) and you can take a feat to improve them in some way (multiple uses per rest AND improve the amount healed, maybe.)

 

- An alternative to the above might be allowing players to craft potions or other consumables which restore HP.  Even on PotD I don't find myself using consumables all that often, besides a few potions and scrolls which are drastically better than the others.

 

- The focus of HP/END is to limit how far players can go without resting, but that makes limiting how many times the player can rest an odd choice.  There is no penalty whatsoever for resting, and all quests are stymied by the mighty if/then block; the entire planet waits on the protagonist and apparently pauses while they're sleeping and praying.  Additionally, there is absolutely nothing stopping the player from leaving a dungeon, fortress, or whatever and returning to town to rest at the inn and restock before going back.  As a result, the system in Pillars (particularly on PotD, which restricts you to just 2 rests) just wastes the player's time more than anything.  There is no tactical or strategic element to deciding when and where to rest - you rest when someone is about to die or when you're out of spells, and that's basically it.

 

Another option might be to just chill the hell out on how much raw damage is spammed at the player (and vice versa.)  The player deals and receives an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage on higher difficulty levels, which is basically completely opposite of how most tabletop systems handle things.  Maybe Obsidian were aiming to reduce the "save or suck" element that plagues tabletop games, but if so they didn't do a very good job of it considering how common "hard" control methods like stun, prone, etc are in Pillars.  PotD, in particular, is crammed full of "save or suck" encounters, especially early in the game due to how front-loaded giving all creatures a flat +15 defense/accuracy boost makes it.

[Lord_Mord]

What Pizzashark said.