The main issue I have with the attribute system in P:E (I admit we don't know much about it) is that it limits a player's ability to "role-play" a certain type of character (i.e the dumb brute). Any plans on expanding RP opportunities outside of LARPing
It doesn't at all -- conceptually or the specific example you gave. You can very easily make a dumb brute fighter character in PE and role-play him or her as such. You can also make a brilliant weakling fighter character and role-play him or her as such. The difference between doing this in PE and, for example, D&D, is that in PE this is a fully viable character concept who emphasizes different elements in combat.
I have to say I think it's an odd complaint considering that to even arguably have ability score-based role-playing opportunities against type with A/D&D, you are required to build a character that is bad at his or her class. It's better in later editions of D&D because they put more effort into providing some universal values for ability scores, but there are still fundamentally horrible builds. A decent number of feats allow for viable Int-based fighters (for example), but a Cha-based fighter is flat-out bad at being a fighter.
You can find ways to work around it, but they're almost all splat book-based prestige classes and feats that try to put a band-aid over the fundamental problem, which is an imbalance of class-specific and universal benefits provided by the ability score array.
Thank for your response. I’m actually not concerned about the combat implications of your attribute system (no dump stats? Great!), but rather what the proposed implementation implies for PE as an RPG: attributes are nothing more than modifiers for combat. It takes away what little cRPGs COULD have in terms of mechanically interesting chars to RP, e.g. low int chars in Arcanum had worthwhile dumb convo options (yes, it was gimmicky, but it has potential). Do P:E's stats also help "define" our chars?
Yes, of course they do. All attributes are used in both scripted interactions and standard conversations to unlock options -- as in PS:T, but with a heavier emphasis on equal use of the attributes.
One of the reasons we don't have a dialogue/speech skill is so a character's attributes can be used as dialogue prerequisites with greater frequency.
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Separate from the actual mechanics of the PE attribute system, will you make sure that the advantages of the system are communicated in the final game and dressed up in enough "fluff" justification? IE don't make the messaging mistakes of D&D 4th ed.
Yes. It's always been hard for me to determine what in A/D&D is intentional obfuscation vs. unintentional oversight. I am a firm believer that players should be able to easily deduce the intended, practical effects of a design through simple observation.
Talking about attributes, what in your opinion is obfuscated and/or incoherent about D&D's dexterity or strength, for instance, compared to an attribute that increases your damage from all sources (both magical and physical) and improves healing?
Strength in A/D&D is consistently treated differently than other ability scores. Even in 3E/3.5, it's given double weighting when calculating racial bonuses. E.g., half-orcs gain +2 Str for -2 Int and -2 Cha because the latter two are both easy dumps.
This same weighting is not consistent when you look at ability score bonuses provided by a) leveling b) spells (e.g. bull's strength isn't 3rd or 4th level) c) items. So, is Strength twice as powerful as other stats or equal value to other stats?
And why does Str affect physical damage but (with rare exceptions) no other stats have any direct effect on magical damage? Even Int has avenues to affect WEAPON damage (e.g. the swashbuckler). So A/D&D's abilities come off as quasi-simulationist, but not consistently, and the internal rules don't paint a clear picture if even they consider the ability scores to be balanced or imbalanced with each other.
Do you think that the point of using different mechanics for physical and magical combat in the older editions was to make magic 'feel special' or something like that? even if the implementation wasn't perfect I always liked the distinction
Which is why my heart sort of slumped when I saw bonus damage came from one stat only in the current P:E attribute design
I'd say it's almost impossible to ascertain intent from the first edition of AD&D since it was one of the first of its kind. The ones that followed have largely just carried on what the original did.
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How do you respond to this: "A few playtesters built a party that couldn't survive BG2 13 years ago? Everything was wrong with that game. People more or less universally detest 4th Edition? Well, I don't care about people's opinions when they're wrong."
That's a lot of different stuff to respond to. The main thing I would say is that PE's Attribute system isn't based off of 4E. A lot of stuff in PE is not based off of 4E because I don't think it would work well for the game. As an example, PE fighters are WAY lower-maintenance than 4E fighters (though a little higher than they are in 3E and certainly more than they are in 2nd Ed.). PE wizards are much closer to 3.5 sorcerer/wizards than they are to 4E wizards (though their power curve doesn't match 3.5's).
I *generally* like the mechanics of 4E (e.g. the unified defense system), but I think the classes lost a lot of their unique feel between 3E/3.5 and 4E and it still has a lot of flaws that are shared by other RPGs and editions of A/D&D.
I played 4E for about 2.5 years and I'm still playing 3.5 (and DMing a Pathfinder game). None of the rules in any edition of A/D&D are perfect and I'm not using a specific edition as a "goal". I want to use A/D&D-like mechanics when I can because I believe that's the sort of experience that our backers are going to enjoy.
No blend of rules is going to make everyone happy, but I do try to keep this idea in mind: a player saying, "I want to make this type of character and play through the game with it." I know that's not important to all players, but I do think it's important to many of them -- and it is important to me.
"I think the classes lost a lot of their unique feel between 3E/3.5 and 4E". So I take it you've changed your mind? http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/362774131134983616
"I also don't think the classes feel that similar -- outside of each class possessing the same number of abilities/powers/etc. Even at low levels, my warden and my bard felt very different from each other and very different from the other PCs."
The classes definitely *play* differently from each other, but in terms of the number of powers and how they are acquired, they are almost identical. A 4E wizard has (barring rituals) about as many powers/abilities as any other class.
Tactically, the feel very different. When you look at them on paper, they advance in a very similar fashion.
And a 4E wizard (and fighter) certainly do not feel like they did in any previous editions of A/D&D, regardless of how differently they play from each other within the context of 4E.
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What's more important: a system being intuitive, or a system being balanced?
Ideally, both, but I prioritize balance between a player's options -- whatever they may be.
Intuition varies a lot from person to person, especially when it comes to RPG mechanics. If you've played enough RPGs, you find commonality between systems, but also a huge amount of divergence. Pendragon is not like D&D, GURPS is not like FUDGE, and Burning Wheel is not like Cyberpunk. Someone coming to one of these systems from another may find the rules unintuitive simply based off of their past RPG experiences rather than from any sense of verisimilitude.
If a mechanic sacrifices intuitiveness for balance, even if the player makes a choice from the basis of an incorrect assumption, their "wrong" choice may very well wind up being a viable one. If a mechanic sacrifices balance for intuitiveness, it may point the player toward the viable solutions, but it's implicit in the sacrifice that we're knowingly including sub-par (or worse, trash) options in the game's content.
I don't think the player gains much from the inclusion of options that are designed to be bad. It means the designer is including things that take resources to make and display in the game, but really aren't ever made to be taken.
In the long run (and most RPGs have a fairly long run), the internal logic of the game's rules become the lens through which the player looks at choices. You can fit your playstyle to rules as you learn them. And on subsequent playthroughs, if the player's options are well-balanced, you can genuinely play with a completely different character. If the options are intuitive but not balanced, your long-term potential for different playthroughs is diminished because only a subset of options are viable -- or rather, many options inherently come with a difficulty penalty that you may or may not want to experience.
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I have a friend who is concerned that all you do is make remarks about how the Infinity Engine games were flawed, and that you don't seem to even like them. Can what describe what you liked about the IE games and how they will inspire PE, to reassure him?
Most of what I dislike in the IE games has to do with specific elements of content or rules, not the games overall. This probably won't be surprising to anyone, but I even think my three favorite RPGs of all time (Fallout, Darklands, Pool of Radiance) have a ton of problems and I would want to significantly revise aspects of their mechanics or interface if I were handling a game made in their respective spirits.
What I like about the IE games (not content-specific):
* Allow for a lot of large, beautiful areas that promote and reward exploration. There's plenty of 3D art that I like, but I love using 2D art when we can because we can make some amazing environments. Laying those areas out and thinking about how the player will move through the environment to uncover rooms, encounters, etc. is a lot of fun as a designer. As a player, it's always fun. The feeling is not the same in first-person or close first-person game, and it's also not quite the same in 3D. We didn't always use this well (e.g. some areas in IWD and HoW were very linear) and I think those areas suffered because of it.
* Responsiveness. I've always felt that the IE was very responsive to player input and AI state changes. Selection, movement, and execution of commands were all very "crisp" in the IE games, probably owing to its roots as Battleground Infinity (an RTS). Other than pathfinding, controlling characters felt good in the IE (IMO, anyway) -- better than it does in a lot of other RPGs.
* Tactical combat. I disliked some of the specific rules or rule implementations, but I always enjoyed the tactical combat in the BG and IWD games. I loved designing it and I loved playing it. In particular, "symmetrical" battles with parties or other class/level characters were a lot of fun. I like the more scripted feeling of those fights even if I didn't like the rock/paper/scissors nature of some of the hard counters. I enjoy turn-based combat a lot, but I had already been introduced to RTwP 6 years before BG, so I also enjoyed/had no problem with BG's fundamental style of RPG combat.
* General party control. You can access and arrange (almost) everything about your characters, shift them around relative to each other, use formations (though I like ToEE's better), advance and equip everyone individually, etc. Even when I didn't always like all of the companions' personalities, I liked that they *had* personalities and would interact with you/each other. And in the IWD games, we liked that we could make all of our own characters.
* The huge variety of characters/parties you could make. Overall, just lots of options that created great variability in strategic and tactical options -- and different role-playing opportunities.
For content-specific things:
* I loved the scope and variety of areas in all of the IE games, but especially BG1 and BG2. As a former BIS guy, I'm always going to prefer the *style* of areas we developed for IWD (and, just before my time, for PST), but the BG games had a ton of huge areas to explore and an enormous amount of content. I still think BG2's early-game content could have been paced better. Even though BG had a lot of dead space, I still loved exploring the Sword Coast.
* The tactical combat in BG2, IWD, and IWD2. My main complaint with BG2 combat is the hard-counter wizard fights. I don't think hard-counters belong in a game where you can easily, unintentionally, build a party that lacks the hard-counter. I also don't think save or die effects belong in a game with save/reload, but that's a larger issue with 2nd and some elements of 3rd Edition A/D&D. Notably, it's mostly absent from 4E and I think that aspect of the game is better for it.
* How PST handled dialogue from the perspective of making it more than literally just saying words to another character. PST's dialogue allowed you to do much more in conversations and helped the player feel like they were *doing* things. Of course, PST's level of player agency in the story and with companions is fantastic.
* The overall volume and varied responses/plotlines of companions in BG2 and PST.
* The music of all of the games. They were all great.
* The style of interfaces. They' were weighty and solid and the sound effects that accompanied them made them feel even weightier. Do I prefer the "across the bottom" UIs of IWD2 and PST to the wrap-arounds of BG and BG2? Yep. There you go.
I think that covers most of it. I worked on four of the IE titles (IWD, HoW, TotL, IWD2). I hope people understand that I didn't come out of that experience thinking that either the engine or games were anything close to flawless. I watched dozens and eventually hundreds of designers and players interact with these games for years. When I'm critical of them, it's because I think they can be even better, not because I don't think they were good in the first place.