Should martial classes in RTwP RPGs have active abilities?

this results in a dull and idle autoattack gameplay for martials. maybe give em very few abilities + a bit more from equipment so they keep a semblance of versatility

 

I shouldn't need to explain to you why this comparison doesn't fly.

 

Because you exclusively play casters and don't want to manage your meatshields?

 

No, it's so much more fun clicking buttons and using active skills - "here is my second Kick To The Balls for the day, then I'll have to rest at camp before I can kick people in the balls again."

 

Because wizards getting a ranged attack isn't the same as wizards having Magic Missle for example. Because there are spell slots, which are themselves a limited resource, etc. etc...

 

That's just balance bias towards casters.

They ain't limited since rest is spammable.

 

Don't worry, we can abstract all that away with their new ranged magical attack.

 

This I agree with, but that's a fault with the CRPG, not with the system, isn't it? PnP is always superior, at least when played by/along with people who have imagination and good general culture.

Agreed.

Depends on many other variables in the videogame. In PoE, it felt too much like playing a caster. Also, when you have a party and you have to click everyone's magic buttons, and your tactics vary very little between combat encounters (like in PoE) having many actives on a fighter doesn't improve the experience but the opposite - it gets extra dull.

 

It's possible to spam it in a videogame. But "possible" doesn't mean it's adviceable. Resting and restspamming is an old argument.

And then we would have Dragon Age Origins? I'd rather not.

 

Very much this.

Probably my first comment on PoE's combat during the beta was that it overflows the player with information. I would have thought this to be obvious to anyone, especially an experienced game designer, but apparently it either was not obvious or was not perceieved as a problem. Well, the punishment eventually came, when the second game in the series went unnoticed, even though its combat pacing was improved.

 

reminder:
storyfags are the worst

 

Well, if you want to meet people who appreciate good RPG combat, don't look for them in the RtwP field.

 

And gameplayfags are utterly dull and unimaginative individuals. Being somewhere in the middle is best, I think. A game needs both parts to be great.

 

Depends on the game IMO. Battle Brothers would have been an excellent game even with zero story - you just play and make it up as you go. On the other end of the spectrum, Witcher 3 seems to be doing great with next to no "game" to itself.

 

battle brothers is a dice rolling simulator

 

I guess I am a hidden compulsive gambler, because the most fun for me in IE games'/BB/PKM combat was watching my character swing and hoping for a hit, and conversely watching the enemies swing and hope for a miss.

 

It (still) has better/deeper combat than most RPGs.

 

Well, when it has no story, what else is left there to have?

 

That we are, that we are

 

And he is still wrong whichever way he turns, which is pretty hilarious.

For the record, NWN is harder at high levels with a pure caster than with a fighter type. There is an entire level in HotU that is anti-magic. A fighter type would easily rip through there with no problems, but a caster would get his ass handed to him. I got through with a pure druid simply because of fire elemental form.

 

I certainly agree that POE struggled to achieve sufficient fidelity for everything it needed to convey to the player, but it was interesting to see a game try to make good on what was a very popular Codex design wishlist item during the post-NWN, pre-Kickstarter 'barren years': how to make fighter classes more interesting? There were plenty of posts wondering how cool it would be to give martial classes more active abilities, perhaps around grappling, disarming, aimed blows, etc., and how this would produce a more tactical combat system.

I'm not saying the Codex wished for something stupid, because there's obviously other ways to implement that than what POE did. (I actually think AOD/DR's single-character-oriented system implemented some aspect of this in a successful way.)

 

They were damn near with the mod tools of D:OS2, god damn if they invested more time making the damn Adventure Toolkit more friendly like the GM Toolkit was, we could have a lot of adventure quests mods in the workshop right now for D:OS2.

But no, they placed all their bets in the fucking GM Toolkit that only like 10 people use 1 day in the weekends and the workshop is filled to the grim with GM Maps that nobody uses.

 

I think the issue with micromanagement in RTWP is more its pausing frequency. PoE's more numerous skills just meant pausing a lot more often per battle to be efficient with their use. Autocast helps but it isn't intelligent use of skills. BG was micromanagement heavy on only half the party usually. If the main downside of turn based is that it is slow, RTWP weakens its advantage by also being slow with frequent pausing. If they want to pace micromanagement across a party it might be best to iterate on a system that limits player pausing to some amount per unit of time or provides incentives to not pause for periods of time. That also means extensive AI is a must.

 

We should probably take a step back and ask whether they need to be made more interesting, mainly in the context of RTwP. I think we can all agree that PoE went too far in the other direction, not only because of micromanagement, but also because many abilities became superfluous in the end. That's why PoE's combat worked the best up to 9ish level (i.e. 33% of the game), depending on class; everything after that was a clusterfuck of enormous proportions and, on top of all that, very easy even on PotD. I think martial classes work best when they have very few active abilities, but useful ones. Knockdowns, grapples, disarms, stuns, etc. Distribute these around the martial classes and there you go. It feels like every class in PoE was designed in a vacuum, without consideration that there are other characters in the party. Well, I'd argue the whole game is designed as if there's only 1 character that you control.

 

The person who wrote this isn't arguing in good faith.