The Gaming Den

Turns out Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire comes with a starter guide for pen and paper Pillars of Eternity. Which I guess they want to release as a full RPG?

https://mega.nz/#!x2RUUS7Y!n7utudoqaBb2 ... MDzCWztRto

Do you know how closely the PnP rules adhere to the CRPG ones? The common criticism I saw of PoE's ruleset is that it was too much like 4E.

I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of goon orthodoxy.

Blicero wrote:Do you know how closely the PnP rules adhere to the CRPG ones? The common criticism I saw of PoE's ruleset is that it was too much like 4E.

I didn't read the PnP version, but I will say that Pillars of Eternity 2 majorly reworked the system. No more per-rest powers.

Is it better than Tyranny? Tyranny's combat was no bueno.

I'm curious, the system's math is awfully fiddly to transfer to a tabletop model. They did have the decency to differentiate resource mechanics to some degree though, which is encouraging.

The doc is willing to accept that kewl powers can be fueled by martial discipline, mana, faith or soul stones. While sparse, the Martial powers seem to focus on affecting position (ally or foe), damage redirection, recovery. Guile powers look like striker effects. Arcane, Berserker, Nature and Faith powers are titled but not filled in.

Super long list of skills (7 of 46 pages) with every weapon being it's own skill and 2 of those pages wasted on artistic endeavors alone: basketry, bookbinding and engraving. Given the backgrounds, the latter is something I expect from HarnMaster, back in the 80s.

Now that I mention HarnMaster, the wound scale (Page 39) is eerily similar to how the effects of being hit by a weapon are determined.

It's a 2d10 system apparently, with randomized d4 modifiers, but I'm not seeing any actual resolution numbers. Am I just missing somewhere the document lays out skill targets?

You can't search the document, but any text which includes things that are "like Call-On Traits in the Burning Wheel" is obviously missing a lot of needed context.

The most obvious influence is Ars Magica, at least to my eye. A lot of the individual rules are similar and it uses a similar... typographical style?

I just remember there being a lot of fiddly shit under the hood which is fine for a computer game but I can't imagine playing PoE on the tabletop.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I just remember there being a lot of fiddly shit under the hood which is fine for a computer game but I can't imagine playing PoE on the tabletop.

As far as I know all it borrows from the CRPG are some names and the setting. It's also an incomplete 45 page description of a game under construction, with a bunch of empty sections.

Sounds like Pistols are fairly sweet in this system, as you can start every combat with Dual Pistol Shots unless there's a TWF Penalty I'm missing so far.

Given this is Josh Sawyer, the guy who agreed that Unarmed was redundant in Fallout: New Vegas, I'm surprised he went so granular with skills. Repeating this design mistake not only with unarmed, but making it worse with even having axes & swords being different skills.

He also indeed seems to note in the first page that things are incomplete and he's aware of such.

Josh Sawyer in Author Notes wrote:In the next few months, we will use your feedback to update this guide to an alpha state for playtesting.

I wonder how concerned I should be of this, since it still lacks challenges to face, especially skill DC's for what numbers should mean.

Dividing weapon skills up finely is a defensible game design choice. It's not remotely realistic, which means that one of the primary arguments for doing that has no merit at all. But it has real effects on the way your game is played, and it's perfectly possible that those effects could be what you're going for.

When you split up weaponry skills, you make it so that there is a very strong incentive to have essentially (or actually) no ability to use many of the weapons. Each weaponry skill you invest in is worth substantially less than the one before it. The most optimal strategy is usually to just select a single weapon skill and take all your other skills and put them into basketweaving or stealth or something. Fucking anything at all that can be used at times when you either have your primary weapon in hand or aren't attempting to face stab someone at all. This in turn means that all other weapons are useless to you. This creates a situation where players are incentivized to use different weapons and where found weapons can only ever be used by one of the players.

So to see how that works, imagine that you're doing a typical D&D thing where you find various magical weapons of various qualities. The best axe is probably better than the second best sword, which means that the players are encouraged to have a sword guy and an axe guy so that one can use the best sword and the other can use the best axe. Now I know what you're thinking here - you can achieve that part just by getting rid of all the weapon specialization bullshit full stop. If the two best weapons are a sword and an axe, then the players can naturally just allocate the axe to one and the sword to the other. The difference with the hard coded weapon skills is that it is defined who is going to use the axe and who is going to use the sword before the relevant treasure chests have been opened - or even put on the map by Mr. Cavern.

Weapon skills are thus best looked upon as a means of enforcing Mr. Cavern's ability to give bonuses to specific underperforming characters through loot placement. If only the Assassin is going to use any found Crossbows, then Mr. Cavern can bestow blatant favoritism onto the Assassin by simply placing a high quality Crossbow into the loot mix.

Blatant favoritism is inherently unfair, but in a cooperative storytelling game there is often significant system mastery differences between players and the desire to have characters contributing roughly similar amounts over all is quite strong. Giving arbitrary bonuses to a character who is not pulling their weight is usually a positive thing on the balance. And having a means to do that without making it quite as obvious as the 3e Tiger Amulet that all Monks ended up getting is worthwhile.

There are in most cases easier means of doing this than having signature weapon use inflicted on every character by the skill system, but it's an understandable and effective means of accomplishing a real game design goal you could plausibly have.

-Username17

And, keep in mind that D&D already has blatant favoritism hardcoded in because some magic items are only usable by certain character classes by default - this is more apparent in AD&D than D&D 3, but it's still the case with Manual of Puissant Skill at Arms or Robes of the Archmagi and magic lockpicks and shit.

Shadowrun tried to get around the stupidity of being ace with a rifle and unable to successfully pull the trigger on a pistol by the introduction of Skill Groups, which let you advance in multiple related skills at once. D&D weakly tried some of that, but they retained Weapon and Armor Proficiencies and Specialization because they're rule-hoarding packrats, and even Weapon Group Feats were pretty stupid in design.

I haven't looked at the TTRPG notes, but in the Deadfire CRPG, AFAIK the only thing weapon proficiencies do are:

1. Offer you a second attack mode with your weapon (e.g.: "half-sword" is the ability for the standard "sword", and it gives you +2 armor penetration in exchange for -20(%) to "Deflection" (AC))
2. Determine which weapons are affected by a small number of fighter passives. (Most of the passives don't care if you're proficient)

File location: "${STEAM_APPS}/common/Pillars of Eternity II/Pen & Paper Starter Guide/"

Having just looked at the TTRPG doc... page 2 and page 3, which discuss the basic concepts of a TTRPG, look good, the rest seems very very incomplete.

Good points in the early pages:

• Instead of "rule zero", it contains the phrase "Every player (including the Game Master) counts equally" in the section on rules disputes.
• It insists that all of the PCs share a common overall goal, such as protecting something or supporting an organization (or, presumably, chasing down a giant crystal statue wading through the ocean).

The mechanics appear to be primarily a skill-based system based on XP allocation, but it looks like it's all still being figured out.

Character generation involves selecting one or more times from about a hundred backgrounds to determine starting skills from a list of over a hundred skills, in addition to selecting a paradigm for manipulating soul energy (probably your own) and figuring out attributes, reputations, equipment, race, and culture. A far cry from the 5 skills and 15? backgrounds of the first videogame or the 16 skills and the same number of backgrounds of the second game.

I think that having hundreds of backgrounds is fine, but hundreds of skills... that probably ought to be pared down. Weapon skills are narrowed into categories, unlike the videogame which has each weapon with its own skill, but the weapon skill is added to the die roll, so it's actually worse than the videogame because you actually need the skill as opposed to:


In conclusion, I believe the mechanics are looking bad, but the gaming culture associated with it looks hopeful.

Aryxbez wrote:Sounds like Pistols are fairly sweet in this system, as you can start every combat with Dual Pistol Shots unless there's a TWF Penalty I'm missing so far.

Given this is Josh Sawyer, the guy who agreed that Unarmed was redundant in Fallout: New Vegas, I'm surprised he went so granular with skills. Repeating this design mistake not only with unarmed, but making it worse with even having axes & swords being different skills.

He also indeed seems to note in the first page that things are incomplete and he's aware of such.

Sounds like the Gunslinger Merit. Christ...

Hang on a second, why is Unarmed redundant?

FrankTrollman wrote:When you split up weaponry skills, you make it so that there is a very strong incentive to have essentially (or actually) no ability to use many of the weapons.

Totally agree. Your use of word "defensible" is very apt, considering it's really bad modern design to do it this way otherwise.

Ancient History wrote:Shadowrun tried to get around the stupidity of being ace with a rifle and unable to successfully pull the trigger on a pistol by the introduction of Skill Groups, which let you advance in multiple related skills at once. D&D weakly tried some of that, but they retained Weapon and Armor Proficiencies and Specialization because they're rule-hoarding packrats, and even Weapon Group Feats were pretty stupid in design.

See that Skill Group thing never really worked because it defeated the point of having a very granular skill sub-system: why get a bunch 'o skills incl. Electronics and Hardware or Automatics and Longarms when you could just keep it simple and just have "Technical" and "Firearms". That tells me that stuff like Electronics etc... are actually pretty useless outside of highly specific scenarios and so would be better absorbed into a more broad skill or represent piecemeal as a Quality. I saw The Void do the massive wall o' skills thing too and Eclipse Phase as well and I still don't get it.

PrometheanVigil wrote:See that Skill Group thing never really worked because it defeated the point of having a very granular skill sub-system: why get a bunch 'o skills incl. Electronics and Hardware or Automatics and Longarms when you could just keep it simple and just have "Technical" and "Firearms". That tells me that stuff like Electronics etc... are actually pretty useless outside of highly specific scenarios and so would be better absorbed into a more broad skill or represent piecemeal as a Quality. I saw The Void do the massive wall o' skills thing too and Eclipse Phase as well and I still don't get it.

IIRC
1e and 2e had fewer skills. Firearms was one skill and was used for all firearms. Athletics was used for all types of movement forms. Stealth was used for all kinds of sneaking around. Computer included every action involving them.
Come 3e and the Fighting skills are split up. This meant that someone who was previously able to shoot all kinds of weapons now basically had to focus on one.
With 4e there were more splits. Athletics, Computer, Electronics, Biotech and Stealth were all split up into further groups. Why they did it? No clue, probably because 3e did it and so be it. But they realized (okay, some realized) that this would make creation far harder, so they introduced the option to buy the now split skills at a reduced price (reduced compared to now, not to the original cost)

Frank can probably expand on this

Skill Groups exist in SR4 because of continuing tension between lumpers and splitters. Obviously they are incoherent design and serve no purpose. Whatever your game is, there is a correct number of skills to have as a compromise between playability, granularity, and game balance. These things are in tension, where the game becomes less playable the more skills there are and less able to differentiate people and things the less skills there are. Game balance is an indifferent mistress, arguing to combine skills or divide them based on in-game utility rather than any questions of usability or in-world justification.

• Playability would demand us to lump skills together at all times, because any skill list with more than 12 entries on it is hard for players to remember the contents of and thus a drag on table resolution time.
• World Simulation would demand us to split Cardiology and Orthopedics up because medical specialists practically speak a different language from each other.
• Game Balance would like us to have cake making and ballerina dancing in one skill because fine arts shit isn't very useful in typical Scooby Doo mysteries or ninja show downs, so points spent on "trivial" tasks should give you several different trivial abilities in the hopes that they will summate into the equal of an ability whose utility is more directly obvious. Or it would like to take important skills like Stealth and carve them into several skills so that being stealthy costs as much in aggregate as ballerina dancing and gourmet cooking combined. And game balance doesn't give a shit which one you do, as long as it's consistent.

So over the editions, various people have tried various approaches to changing things whilst coming at this from different angles. You could reasonably state that in 1st edition the Sorcery, Stealth, and Firearms skills were too good, or you could say that Psychology, Military Theory, and Build/Repair Hovercraft skills were too narrow and shitty. Those are equivalent game balance statements, although the reality of the number of skill points you get mean that the second statement is correct and the first statement is wrong.

Regardless, it's factually true that in 3rd edition and 4th edition various designers took an ax to skills that they thought were too good and split them into component parts. Stealth, Firearms, Sorcery, Athletics, and Computer all got Balkanized because they were "mandatory" skills in 1st edition - skills so obviously better than other choices of equal cost that the disparity in utility was not debated, merely the appropriate actions to take.

But it's also true that splitting Firearms into Rifles and Pistols and shit is stupid and also way too fiddly, and also requires a number of skill points being thrown around that break the game in other ways once people realize that however "power gamer" it is to do so, you could just skill up with only one kind of firearm and spend all the freed up skill points on other paths of ninjatude.

Anyway, when 4th edition came around, the war between the lumpers and splitters had gotten so arcane and battle lines drawn so feverishly that skill groups were introduced as a form of truce between the sides - satisfying no one and not really serving a coherent game mechanical role. Yes, Sorcery and Conjuration are OP skills, but Spellcasting and Summoning aren't much different and any game balance benefits you get by making them into "groups" are immediately lost if you make people spend the same if they want to jump, climb, and swim.

-Username17

PrometheanVigil wrote:Hang on a second, why is Unarmed redundant?

In Fallout New Vegas: You had a Melee Combat, and an Unarmed combat skill, and you had to keep them both at the roughly same level in order to get Melee-specific perks later on, a cost that wasn't as shared among other combat specializations. You only get to max 7 of 13 skills, so it's kinda shoddy to force a "Skill Tax" on the melee character in a world of guns (7/13 assuming 35lvs as your max as the game's math breaks down past that point turning into padded sumo like in Fallout 3's expansions). Also Josh Sawyer has gone on record admitting as much, but I would be hardpressed to find it as it was part of his personal site blog that he answered questions from people on (which has changed seemingly a couple times).

In this game, it seems redundant because it's just a skill that you roll for attack rolls, and does the same thing. Except the "weapon choices" are going to be shoddier, because they're not dual-pistols, Greataxes, or whatever better weapon could be using.

FrankTrollman wrote:The difference with the hard coded weapon skills is that it is defined who is going to use the axe and who is going to use the sword before the relevant treasure chests have been opened - or even put on the map by Mr. Cavern.

Also seems like could also achieve this without screwing new players into picking more than 1-2 weapon skills. Such as via Class Roles, where if the Assassin is encouraged to stay back, with hit-run tactics, they're going to want a non-Firearm Ranged weapon anyway (unless once break stealth can't return to that state, which case may as well go big & loud with guns). I think I get the idea as to why, but it seems like a very weak one to upend an entire major part of the system to attempt this.