Development Info Tim Cain at Reboot Develop 2017 - Building a Better RPG: Seven Mistakes to Avoid

It should be impactful in some way. Like I want this skill because it's actually useful and not because it will give me a handful of different text strings on a replay where I can afford to assist borderline useless skills with metagame knowledge.

 

I have a Yuge desire that those retards would just pack their bags and leave muh codex.

 

DraQ blah blah blah why the long post?

i) you appear to know what i imagined; amazing! When half your argument is based on what you think -i- was imagining or wasn't... or even worse, what i should be imagining.. seriously dude?

ii) no one advocates for a game without some background system of measuring and comparing/contrasting. I don't appreciate strawman arguments, nor seeing my ideas twisted into something more convenient for another to disprove. Don't do this with grown ups please; or at least, not with me. Doesn't work.
There can be more verisimilar, organic ways to depict character growth or development. Outside the starting stats page and the +1s and -2s. You are free to condemn them all, but spare me the theories. Most especially when said theories (which you picked on purpose) derive FROM a stats page startup system ^^

There is no one way in this. You've picked your side and all well and good. Now please broaden your scope and come to terms with the fact that there could be other ways. In addition to what we know mind you; no one said to the exclusion of what's come before.
Am willing to wait now and condemn later; apparently you're not. See how simple that is?

 

Metagame knowledge shouldn't be considered when designing a game/system, though. And it's something that unfortunately too many consider.

Also, what kind of impact? I'd say that if you get some extra xp or can solve some quests you couldn't otherwise, or even just as alternative solutions then it's enough. It offers more build options and I think it's rewarding enough when you get to use these "underused" skills.
Unlike say, stuff like NV where there's some lock or computer thrown around in the wasteland every 10 meters just to make that skill supposedly useful but instead turning it into a fucking boring routine and looking stupid in the process as well.

 

Stats and skills are models that represent real attributes in a fictional world.

Developers try to provide a complex skill set.

Developers try to provide a plausible fictional world.

There is no way to make every skill equally useful if you want either a plausible fictional world, or a complex skill set.

The usual way to solve this problem is by making a more artificial fictional world (e.g., W2), or by making a less complex skill set.

I know that no developer is reading the stuff we are posting, but how about this: you divide skills in the main and secondary group. Main skills are the more useful ones. Secondary skills just add some flavor to roleplaying. The points you have to allocate to each group are different. That way you can have different skills and an interest game world.

 

Regarding the argument that trap choices in character building add challenge:

Having to reload because you failed at a skill check that you could not possibly anticipate does not provide you with an interesting challenge. It doesn't require any short of intelligent planning, it is a case of trial and error. You didn't put enough points on strength, the game throws a giant golem at you and you die, because you couldn't guess the mind of the designer. So you load a previous save, you increase your strength more and the game lets you procede.

Imagine being trapped inside an underground dungeon. And you see a variety of paths, but you can't possibly know which is the one that leads to the surface. So you just randomly take one, and if it turns out to be wrong, you reload and try again. That's not real "challenge", it's blind guessing.

 

This is how it will be in Deadfire.

 

Metagame knowledge is the cornerstone of every challenging game.

 

Trap builds are bad choices in character building. There is no good choice without bad choices. Ergo, trap builds are necessary.

 

They are also tools you use to solve problems in the game. And that's what matters.

This in the context of CRPGs made me laugh.

Ok good thing nobody here is asking for skills to be equally useful because we actually play RPGs. You can't make swimming as generally useful as shooting outside of some very specific game concept. However you can question if your game actually needs a swimming skill.

absolutely disgusting. This is why CRPGs are shit.

 

Traps is a very useful skill for laying powerful traps, and can be crucial for some builds, especially for advanced players. Noobs will probably think that it is a useless skill, just like in most RPGs.

 

No. Trap builds as the name implies is something that unknowingly fucks you over.

 

They have Leonard. He's not over-the-hill until he's proven himself such.

 

I'm sure his time at blizzard had great effect.

 

Some choices are not apropiate for your character bro. A lot of times it isnt that the skill is useless, its just that it doesnt work with what you did with your character.

Other than that, Just hide the numbers, informed decisions are very easy to make, therefore pointless.

 

We are assuming a context where the player isn't a fucking moron.

 

Speaking of Traps...

 

The problem isn't the traps themselves, it's that games with less and less of that kind of extreme don't have the other extreme, overpowered builds that stand out from the rest and are rewarding and fun to discover.

When you go that route you get games like PoE, where you could pick and build your character blindly clicking and still beat the game without any sort of challenge, since that baby always seems to get thrown out with the bathwater.

In the end I'd rather live with the existence of traps than have ones where everyone can be a winner without investing more of themselves in the game beyond what they feel like LARPing that go around.

 

ah the PoE is balanced meme ;^)

I'll have neither thx.

 

switch out the right side faces

 

It's the worst kind of balanced where everything is made simply playable instead of finding a functional balance between extremes.

 

Wasn't the problem of useless skills already pretty much solved by almost every single Fallout-like game that followed? Most skills were useful in Arcanum, safe for the almost pointless beauty stat. Almost every skill in AoD was useful in some scenario except for Etiquette which IIRC is about as useful as science in FO. New Vegas made all former useless skills from useful in one way or another, and in Underrail every skill had some practical application.

 

Why?

So trap builds result from choices that later on will prevent you from moving forward because you lack a particular skill or stat.

This complaint is strange because 99% of cRPGs are very easy combat centric games that consider skill checks fluffy.

The only game that does that to the player is AoD, but even this is debatable. The main quests always follow a specific pattern.

 

Because it's a game.

 

PoE was horribly unbalanced and full of trap builds and overpowered builds. It's just that combat was also very easy so it generally didn't matter.