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Eternity Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Pre-Release Thread [BETA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
The level reset means that isn't so much of a problem.

That doesn't matter to us as players, we've already killed 2 of the spoilers, 5 dragons and what-have-you, so it's going to feel like a do-over if we systematically start killing all the spoilers and more dragons and etc. It becomes routine. The most powerful thing we killed in BG1 was Aec'Letec, it was level 12 and a single entity. Dragons, archmages/liches and demon princes didn't come until much later, so they felt like a natural ramp-up. Now we are going to start with kobolds again and spoilers, and probably dragons, who knows. I suppose it's going to feel different if they invent more creatures that are close to the dragons in power, but are not them.

Yeah, it was one of my first and biggest concerns.
I'd rather have them start over with a different party, not connected to PoE 1. But they had to do the "BG thing".

Wait and see I suppose.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
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Sep 23, 2015
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Pathfinder: Wrath
Not really. Why would the gods be the source of the "mystery of the world"?
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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...that doesn't make any sense.
Well i do play games to go in a interesting world that is different from our own.It is like people behind warhammer coming out and saying that all the demons and the eldar gods are just a bunch of buggy software.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
the gods are computers

No they're not. They're amalgamations of souls made from masses of extremely dedicated people volunteering for apotheosis. There's nothing to suggest that they're mechanical, lacking in self-awareness, or free will. They're entirely real, only their origin differs from the usual.

(My interpretation is that their brief and personality comes from the massed convictions of the souls that were merged to create them, not a "program.")

The gods are mystery in any world.

Not canonical D&D, to pick one. They talk directly to their priests, people travel the planes to have a nice cup of tea with them, people die, get resurrected, and tell all about how it was on the other side, and so on.
 

Rivmusique

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Scorchy posted:
Barbarian/Berserker kit makes your Carnage inflict friendly fire
emot-golfclap.gif

Only when under Frenzy, but a berserker's Frenzy is more powerful than the standard barbarian's.
Every class has a base version and at least 3 subclasses with bonuses and penalties. Priests, paladins, and wizards have more than 3. Priests and paladins have the number needed to support the gods and orders from Pillars 1 and wizards have school specialists that are lower impact than most other subclasses.
 

Iznaliu

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and wizards have school specialists that are lower impact than most other subclasses

I wonder if spell schools will be a feature outside of this?
 

Prime Junta

Guest
and wizards have school specialists that are lower impact than most other subclasses

I wonder if spell schools will be a feature outside of this?

Indeed. They would be very easy to do with their keyword system. Just make school another keyword, and bind some mechanical effects to it. For example you could have a high-level Dispel Illusion spell which would dispel all ongoing effects with the Illusion keyword.
 

Iznaliu

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Indeed. They would be very easy to do with their keyword system. Just make school another keyword, and bind some mechanical effects to it. For example you could have a high-level Dispel Illusion spell which would dispel all ongoing effects with the Illusion keyword.

It would also be interesting to have vendors who only sold certain scrolls, etc.
 

Sentinel

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Ommadawn
Will PoE2 have a stats randomizer at character creation? Recently started a D&D 5E campaign with a couple of mates and I got my stats from rolling the dice. It made me realize I actually miss having the game dictate what character I get and then I build a personality/background around it.
 

fantadomat

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Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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Will PoE2 have a stats randomizer at character creation? Recently started a D&D 5E campaign with a couple of mates and I got my stats from rolling the dice. It made me realize I actually miss having the game dictate what character I get and then I build a personality/background around it.
Yeah it was really fun to spend a few hours rerolling dices until you get that 18 in all stats.
 

Sentinel

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Will PoE2 have a stats randomizer at character creation? Recently started a D&D 5E campaign with a couple of mates and I got my stats from rolling the dice. It made me realize I actually miss having the game dictate what character I get and then I build a personality/background around it.
Yeah it was really for to spend a few hours rerolling dices until you get that 18 in all stats.
I'm assuming you meant "all it was really for was to spend a few hours rerolling dices until you get that 18 in all stats."
1) That's wrong
2) That wouldn't even work in PoE's system
3) Even if it did, so waht? It's my game to break
 
Last edited:

Fry

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https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...07509&perpage=40&pagenumber=239#post476040013

<<Obsessing over "balance" in a single player game is kind of silly. Every class should have a purpose, and every class should be fun (for at least a decent chunk of players). Multi-classing makes this way harder, since usually the result is you either get, say, a fighter/wizard who is bad at fighting and bad at magic, or a situation like 2nd edition dual classing. I'm intrigued to see how Deadfire handles this.>>

The more general the effects of multiclassing are, the easier it is to predict the trade-offs and design/build for them. A MC fighter/wizard in 2nd Edition was actually pretty good for the most part because the mechanics just split the XP in half and the way the XP tables scaled meant you were probably going to be 1-2 levels lower than a comparable single-classed character. A MC fighter/wizard in 3E with an even class/level split was much worse off because the traditional caster classes weren't trailing by 15-20%, but by 50%, which is why prestige classes like the Eldritch Knight and Mystic Thaumaturge were more-or-less required to be viable.

Personally, I don't think approaching it from the equipment angle works well. In part, this is because post-2nd Ed. AD&D's mechanics don't consistently present "heavy" weapons or "heavy" armor as fundamentally superior to their lighter counterparts. You could, but in so doing you are implicitly suggesting that using anything but the equipment in those categories is mechanically inferior. The lightly-armored swashbuckler in leather with a rapier becomes an entertaining concept/roleplaying choice, not something you can realistically keep pace with in combat because the system's mechanics make plate armor and a great sword better in most circumstances.

E.g. The Complete Fighter's Handbook for 2nd Ed. introduced the Swashbuckler kit. You specialized in stiletto, main-gauche, and rapier; got a whopping +2 bonus to AC when in light armor (i.e. leather or lighter) or no armor; and a bonus to interactions with the opposite sex. But ultimately you were a bad fighter, mechanically. +2 to AC could't make up for the fact that leather's base 8 is in competition with plate's base 3, field plate's base 2, and full plate's base 1. Being able to gain +1 to Parry with a basket hilt was in competition with a two-handed sword doing 1d10/3d6 damage. You could contrive situations where the heavily armored fighter with a massive weapon got into trouble, but it was just that: a contrivance.

Once you moved to 3E, heavy armor no longer had the sense of being strictly superior. It had inherent movement penalties, inherent max Dex bonuses, etc. If you had a high Dex and no arcane caster classes, going with chain shirt was the de facto good choice. If you had low Dex, heavy armor. And medium armor was pretty much ignored. You could say, "Ah, but isn't it good that light armor is now more viable for fighting classes?" Sure, but heavy armor proficiencies are things that cost resources and heavy armor is a thing that arcane casters have penalties to use, implying that there's something inherently valuable about them -- when in reality, most classes have one or two optimal types of armor they can wear based on their classes and stats (i.e. Strength and Dex).

In 4E, armor and weapon choices ossified even more. IME, if you were in hide armor at 6th level, you'd be in hide armor at 16th. You were just picking what type of hide armor you wanted to be in, which feels pretty boring, IMO.

All of this is to say that you can't really have these things both ways. Either certain classifications or armor and weapons are designed to be fundamentally better than others or they aren't. If they are, you can design MC mechanics around limiting access to them, but those categories are always the optimal categories and selecting anything else is inherently bad unless you're restricted. If the weapons and armor are designed to have situational or build-specific trade-offs and not to be inherently superior/inferior, limiting access to categories only works if the restrictions are extremely tight, i.e. more is excluded than included. Otherwise you just build for the equipment you can use, which is designed to be on-par with what you can't use, and you have access to enough choices to adapt to any situation you come across.
 

Iznaliu

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Will PoE2 have a stats randomizer at character creation?

Dice-rolling intimidates the more casual players PoE2 needs to succeed and needs to be balanced well, but a "Randomise Points" option might be doable quite easily. You could actually ask Sawyer on Tumblr or something.
 

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Well, it can always randomize the static pool of points...

Not sure about the point, though. Better to just have a "Recommended" button.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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Randomized stats is stupid.Most people play to make some bad ass hero,and after they replay the game at least once they begin playing as some wacky characters.It is really annoying to reroll 100 times until you have some ok stats,and save scumming before levelling for a decent health.
 

Mynon

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
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Apr 28, 2017
Messages
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the gods are computers

No they're not. They're amalgamations of souls made from masses of extremely dedicated people volunteering for apotheosis. There's nothing to suggest that they're mechanical, lacking in self-awareness, or free will. They're entirely real, only their origin differs from the usual.

(My interpretation is that their brief and personality comes from the massed convictions of the souls that were merged to create them, not a "program.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
 

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