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Vault Dweller, when is Age of Decadence's "skill plateau moment"?

MF

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If I remember corectly, even 200 ( max in fal1 ) in outdoorsman doesn't give you 100% chance to avoid random encounter.
This is 100 % true in fal 2, i remember having 300 in outdoorsman and still be forced to fight with random navarro patrols.

No, in FO1 you can avoid them much more easily. You can also run from most encounters, but I'm not talking about Fallout 2. I don't consider FO2 to be a good sequel, or even a good game.

I love Fallout 1 and Age of Decadence because they are games with a consistent, well-executed vision.
 

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FO1 was pretty consistent. Most quests (or at least a really big part) had a stealth, a combat, and a talkan way to get through them. And the game was easy enough that you could use any of the three not too long into the game, reaching the "skill plateau moment". So that you could focus on exploration and roleplaying, choosing whichever approach you preferred, with your sneaking diplo-sniper. Which wasn't hard but it was perfectly fun. You could choose a more restrictive character build too, of course, if you wanted a challenge - or whether it was an actual challenge, or just a different experience, is up for debate.

All this of course didn't mean you could do everything in a playthrough - quest solutions were mutually exclusive, after all.
 

Jaedar

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So I downloaded the latest demo on steam. I noticed that you seem to get different starting weapons now depending on your skill, and even a buckler if you have block?

Still, would be nice with some materials/recipes/plants if you have the appropriate skills.
 

Tigranes

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What I said several pages back still stands. AOD's most inelegant aspects are that you do need to trial/error and that talking options can devolve into 'pick your skill from the list'. I consider the former an inherent and necessary evil in any truly challenging game (we don't reload in other RPGs because they're fuckshit easy, not because they are better designed), and the latter is mitigated by making many of those 'pick skill' options hilariously satisfying - the kind of tricks you wished you could pull in every RPG, but often couldn't, at least not to this extent. Nevertheless, those aspects remain inelegant.

The question is what would be 'better design'. This topic comes up time and again with AOD, and nobody's really able to explain how you would have challenging combat, challenging non-combat checks, and avoid trial/error, short of spending another 50 years building in an infinite set of contingencies to every skill check and success/partial success/failure (beyond what AOD has already, which is a set of alternatives and contingencies beyond most RPGs). Nobody's really able to explain, either, how you would have a 'pure talker' option that isn't a series of dialogue checks. Do you have minigames? Do you sprinkle in shit-easy fights just so talkers get to fight some? Neither seem any better.

Ultimately, AOD tries to use a very old school RPG system and then take its ideals to the max - in the process exposing the limitations of those systems. AOD shows you just how many cool non-combat options, how many nested skill checks, how much C&C, how much flexibility in skill-based progression, etc. you can have within this old school system. At the same time, AOD itself is unable to overcome the sheer limitation of a skill check system tied to scripted consequences handled through a tree dialogue system, or the problem of a "kill or die" combat system, or a character progression system where to be good at one thing means to be vulnerable in another.

P.S. Jaedar Alchemy materials are now quite easy - almost too easy - to get compared to a couple years ago. For 50 gold you will get a starter set from the demo alchemist (is he sticking around in the final, Vault Dweller ?), and then you can get more from the Boatman alchemist if you work with them, you can now harvest plants from a number of spots (e.g. in areas outside Teron), and you can buy plenty once you get to Maadoran. Since there are like ten fights, max, for even a gung ho character in Teron, you can literally use some kind of alchemical concoction at least every other fight.

P.S.2 Infinitron There are many occasions in AOD where hybrids can use non-combat skills to make the upcoming fight easier - e.g. Maadoran, working with Levir, where you can use impersonate/sneak or traps/sneak to trap and take out some of the boatmen before the fight... alongside the pure fight everybody option and the pure talkie 'persuade them all' option.
 

Vault Dweller

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I completely agree, which is why I want to continue experimenting (instead of reusing the AoD design) and try to overcome the limitations in the colony ship RPG without losing "cool non-combat options, nested skill checks, C&C, and flexibility in skill-based progression".
 

Jaedar

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P.S. Jaedar Alchemy materials are now quite easy - almost too easy - to get compared to a couple years ago. For 50 gold you will get a starter set from the demo alchemist (is he sticking around in the final, Vault Dweller ?), and then you can get more from the Boatman alchemist if you work with them, you can now harvest plants from a number of spots (e.g. in areas outside Teron), and you can buy plenty once you get to Maadoran. Since there are like ten fights, max, for even a gung ho character in Teron, you can literally use some kind of alchemical concoction at least every other fight.
This doesn't help during the vignette fights. I noticed this to be an issue especially for drifter, who for the first fight can get only shit bronze weapons and shitty armor from the shop. And before anyone points it out, yes it can be beaten. But it would feel a bit more fair if alchemists maybe started with a poison vial at the very least (if they had sufficient skill). And crafters with an iron weapon perhaps.

It feels inelegant from an RP perspective, how did my character get alchemy 3 and yet not own any potions or plants?

Does the beginner kit contain any good stuff? Because as you say, there is way more healing roots and poison plants (and berserker shrooms - that potions seems pretty weak to me -) than is needed in Teron.
 

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The question is what would be 'better design'. This topic comes up time and again with AOD, and nobody's really able to explain how you would have challenging combat, challenging non-combat checks, and avoid trial/error, short of spending another 50 years building in an infinite set of contingencies to every skill check and success/partial success/failure (beyond what AOD has already, which is a set of alternatives and contingencies beyond most RPGs). Nobody's really able to explain, either, how you would have a 'pure talker' option that isn't a series of dialogue checks. Do you have minigames? Do you sprinkle in shit-easy fights just so talkers get to fight some? Neither seem any better.
Minigames (wasn't there one planned for stealth at some point?) and combat are fine if they're fun. Combat with a talker character against a weak opponent isn't necessarily any lamer than a fighter character against soldiers, the fight isn't shit-easy for him.

One thing to tie the systems together would be to make more gear that helps in non-combat skills. High-quality lockpicks, charisma- or intellect-boosting drugs (temporarily, both buyable and craftable), high-quality clothing that boosts etiquette or stealth, bribing and hiring people, etc... IIRC gold is pretty useless outside buying arms and armor. Then you could also add system that makes it possible to convert the reputation points, or other extra metrics you might involve, into gold, equipment, or training as per your desires, instead of just getting fixed rewards.

Another thing I'd like, is to make getting SPs more front-loaded. You assign your skills at the start, you get more skillpoints there than in AoD, but get very few points to assign later from XP. So you have a more rigid PC right off the bat with less character growth, or more exactly the character growth would come from new gear, knowledge, and alliances you make during the game rather than from gathering XP. The stat points are already fixed, after all. Would feel more realistic to me, reduce saving skillpoints to trial-and-error skill checks, and lessen the incentive to do quests you(r PC) don't care about just for XP.
 

Tigranes

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Jaedar Agreed - a character with 3> alchemy at start it would make sense to start with one or two. That would be sensible, and help show people the power of alchemy, without making the drifter vignette fight (which is meant to be very hard) beatable.

The demo alchemist is found at the inn, and for 50 gold he gives you several each of several herbs, and it's quite generous.

Johannes Something like that is already performed by stat boosting items/rewards: e.g. breaking into Feng's back room (decent dex, 3 lockpick, and I think ~2 sneak) yields +1 Lore, which, if you're smart, means just 5 SP to get to 3 Lore, which is enough to pass a couple of Teron lore checks, or 15 SP only to get to 4 Lore, which is enough to pass the big lore check at the Mine. If you have high sneak, you can even get the +1 Lockpick bonus, meaning you immediately reach 4 Lockpick, which is enough for, I think, every Teron lockpick check. You also get +2 Trading, and maybe +1 Persuasion, as a reward from Feng if you have good cha/streetwise while helping him out. You get Hammer skill bonus training with Aziz as a thief, or Alchemy bonus (or Alchemy ingredients) from the Boatman alchemist as an assassin. There are other such bonuses sprinkled around the world. So it's all there - though sure, I think a couple of stat-increasing tools couldn't hurt, especially as consumables, as long as they're very rare (e.g. you'd only want 1 or 2 +lockpick tools in the world, since there are how many lockpick checks in the game total?)

Making SPs front-loaded would make sense 'immersion' wise but would make all the things people complain about a lot worse. That would make it easier for people to get fucked from the get go, and more people would - rightly or wrongly - blame the game saying they have to reroll entirely instead of having leeway to fix their character as they go.
 

Jaedar

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Jaedar Agreed - a character with 3> alchemy at start it would make sense to start with one or two. That would be sensible, and help show people the power of alchemy, without making the drifter vignette fight (which is meant to be very hard) beatable.
It's completely trivial if you go strength 10 con 10 hammer blocker :M

yields +1 Lore, which, if you're smart, means just 5 SP to get to 3 Lore, which is enough to pass a couple of Teron lore checks, or 15 SP only to get to 4 Lore, which is enough to pass the big lore check at the Mine.
I'm pretty sure that it either gives you lore 2 or 5 social SP now. I approve of changes that don't require sequencing to get the most of them.
 

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Ultimately, AOD tries to use a very old school RPG system and then take its ideals to the max - in the process exposing the limitations of those systems. AOD shows you just how many cool non-combat options, how many nested skill checks, how much C&C, how much flexibility in skill-based progression, etc. you can have within this old school system. At the same time, AOD itself is unable to overcome the sheer limitation of a skill check system tied to scripted consequences handled through a tree dialogue system, or the problem of a "kill or die" combat system, or a character progression system where to be good at one thing means to be vulnerable in another.

The only "semi-solution" I see to this is to abandon the logic of the setting of the game.

In other words, a setting where the character can both fight and do some non-combat solutions - aka, "the chosen one", following the same steps that Fallout and other classics did before it. AOD exposes the limitations of this system precisely because it isolates the two sides of the equation (combat vs. speech), and when you see both in isolation, their weaknesses are more visible. The only way to solve this equation is, again, integrating the two parts of the gameplay into a coherent whole: a character that can both solve the problems for combat, but also in other ways. AOD already offers an interesting way to keep balance in this kind of game: distinct characters/XP points for physical and social skills. Controlling the availability of character points for the player in any point of the game the designer can make interesting fights - as the game already is.

That way you would have the "normal challenge" in the combat, but would have the "easy mode" (as dialogue already is, in VD's opinion) to complete the quests, depending on where you've spent your points of social skills. Basically, a game that maintains the same level of difficulty in fighting that AOD already have, but offering more social points "outside" of it. That way, the game wouldn't create this rupture between its two aspects (since in this game you will either play through combat or through dialogue, mostly) with the only downside that its character would "technically" be special, like the "chosen one" that VD wanted to get away from in his game.

The basic mechanics of AOD is great. I think that its only limitation, ironically, comes from the "setting".
 
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Ismaul

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Pretty much. Papa Mole says that you can play the IG as a fighter or a diplomat (which to me is the very essence of role-playing) but he refuses to accept it because the fighter path in a military faction gets better reward and treatment.
I think you're confusing an important issue here. It's totally okay for the character to get lesser rewards and treatment in the story, but it's not ok for the player to be shortchanged playing the game. And who plays the character building and optimizing game, if not the player? If you want a player to roleplay a character doing suboptimal things in the story, at least reward him as much in terms of player resources (SP). Otherwise you're just training your player to play archetypical characters / characters for which you've decided the path was optimal. Conditioning, man. No carrot no fun.


[And... this made me jump in and try to troubleshoot AoD from a conceptual design perpective.]

There's another thing that follows from the player/character distinction. I understand the goal is to make the game as realsitic / believable from the character point of view, but that shouldn't come at the expense of the player experience. Requiring the character to have some level of competency to be able to do something is a great story/"in-character" goal, but you've to to think about the player here, because he's the one playing the game. A player needs to know what he gets for putting skill points in a skill, which is a system gaming / "out-of-character" decision, he needs to know what's the use. And one of the problems with skill checks and requirements is that the player never knows what requirements are coming, so he makes character choices blind, or instead he does a lot of trial and error, failing a lot and reloading so he can have that kind of precognition that allows him to plan his character build so it's viable for the character roleplay he wants to have. I don't know about you, but both options seem bad from the player experience point of view. Either I make choices blind, and find out eventually when I fail that my character build doesn't support the roleplay I had envisioned, or I reload a lot to get the character I want, making the game something tedious. That's really punitive. Sure, some will tell you it's all fine, but they're the players that will replay the game many times and want system mastery. But IMO system mastery should never come at the expense of player experience.


There's another way to show the problem. You have 2 design goals that in the way they're implemented work against each other: Skill competence and C&C. On one hand, you want that some options be only available for the competent, so you put in skill requirements. The consequence is that you've designed multiple paths in the game, but for a player playing it through, only a small number are available at a time, directly related to their character build. On the other hand, you want C&C, you want the player to try things, and for that you need a breadth of choice, and you need to facilitate experimentation with the character role. Yet the limited skill point availability make it so that you can't really experiment much, play out of type and slowly redefine the character, because the system is not forgiving.

So the design is working against itself. If roleplay and C&C are main goals, then the character build system must be subordinate to them, working as a facilitator to allow the player to make choices that define the character. The character build should be flexible, and react to the roleplay. But you've got it the other way around: the system dominates RP and C&C possibilites, by imposing limitations, with skill choices and skill requirements, that reduce the number of options available.

So, as a designer, what do you do, so that each part of the design complements the other, therefore making the player experience coherent instead of frustrating? You have options. An easy way to do some of it is the Blank Slate, and doesn't require changing your system. Start the character with 0 skills, and lower skill requirements. This way all paths are open to a player at the beginning, and he gets to choose how he wants to develop his character during the game after he's seen what it's like and can anticipate a little. Or make the development dependant on actions taken. Then the choices you make literally define your character.

But maybe that's unacceptable for the in-world believability and you want some level of competency at the start. That's harder. You need to keep options open for the player, so he feels good as a player about the choices he makes (the character can be miserable, that's cool), and at the same time make competent characters better at what they do. With a skill level requirement system, non-competence is punitive, options-limiting. To keep to your design goals, you either gotta limit the options-limiting impact of competence, or go for another way to make the character's competence relevant in the game, that is, instead of punitive, rewarding.

Let's start with the first way, less option limits. I'd chop the number of skill levels, and go for something simple: a layman-apprentice-master system. 3 levels of competence, so you can implement a consequence for each, making all levels relevant in the story and all character build choices useful for the player. A player will know that each point invested is significant, and 3 levels makes for a lot less guessing about future requirements. This also allows you as a designer to create non-total-fail paths for layman characters: the skills levels are in low number enough that you can design a satisfying result for each.

But there's other ways, aside from skill level requirements. Drop those, and instead, give something to the player for having invested in the skill, that way investing in a skill is a reward, yet non-options-limiting. How? The new Torment has Effort, so your skill is a resource you can spend to get more out of an interaction, but that's still tied to skill requirements, we'd need to uncouple it. Maybe something like this, for example: instead of having a Bluff skill to bluff more perceptive NPCs, instead make bluffing, intimidating, etc available to everyone, but add an Empathy skill that gives you more information in dialogues to allow you to better make your in-character choices/roleplay (spend Empathy for info, or just info depending on skill level), so your character has maybe a hint that bluffing won't work in this circumstance with this NPC. Maybe you can also combine with requirements, and a master in Empathy opens a way to bluff him. End result: options are still available to all, but the player gains something for his spent skill point, and the character is visibly more competent. Same for combat: instead of having a better combat skill making you have a better chance to hit (actually, being viable as a combatant), make the skill give you new moves and abilities. Hard and tactical combat doesn't require a skill level requirement system. It's boring for the player to not be able to hit, but it's not boring to not have a purchasable ability. There's the issue that more combat abilities makes combat easier, but if playing a combat character, you'll also get into harder fights. And sometimes the fight's easy and you get to show off your skill. It works out.

I could go on... but this is the line of reasoning I'd follow. It would also solve the problem of hybrid character builds, since instead of tailoring the game to certain character builds and gating content with skill level requirements that are either too easy for a specialist and too hard for a hybrid character, every character build point / resource can be used in a positive way, instead of having the design assume that not having the requirement limits your options.
 
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Vault Dweller

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I think you're confusing an important issue here. It's totally okay for the character to get lesser rewards and treatment in the story, but it's not ok for the player to be shortchanged playing the game. And who plays the character building and optimizing game, if not the player? If you want a player to roleplay a character doing suboptimal things in the story, at least reward him as much in terms of player resources (SP).
Why? A good deed is its own reward, no? Basically, not everything is measured in terms of SP and personal gain. Did you always sacrifice party members in Torment simply because you got more XP and cool spells?
 

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Why? A good deed is its own reward, no? Basically, not everything is measured in terms of SP and personal gain. Did you always sacrifice party members in Torment simply because you got more XP and cool spells?
Of course not. But I think it's important to distinguish between player and character rewards. Often character rewards are also perceived as player rewards (ex: items), but if you don't separate the two, you get some odd "degenerate behavior" (like Sawyer likes to call it) where the player makes his character do things that go against his intended character roleplay, only to get the player rewards like XP. For example you finish a quest pacifically, and then kill all the dudes for the extra XP. (That happens because the design has killing XP, instead of quest/objective only XP, and therefore encourages this behavior.)

I feel like character build resources (XP, SP, information that helps make in-character choices) are strictly in the domain of the player, and a player choosing to have his character get in a suboptimal situation shouldn't get lesser "player rewards", because as a designer I want the player to roleplay his character even if he ends up in a bad story position. Even more, I want to reward a player more for hosing his character if it fits with his character's personnality and background, because this is good roleplay. (I'm coming from a P&P background here). So even if the character gets in deep shit, and I expect the character to suffer according consequences such as losing friends, getting no material rewards, getting injuried, having to get out of a bad situation, etc., I still expect the player to not suffer the consequences of his character's choice, because those a two separate things.

Roleplaying well as a player is sometimes playing against your own character, because it makes for a good story / fun game. And I don't want to dissuade a player from doing that with a system that identifies character failure with player failure.
 

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Why? A good deed is its own reward, no? Basically, not everything is measured in terms of SP and personal gain. Did you always sacrifice party members in Torment simply because you got more XP and cool spells?
Otoh, you didn't actually need XP very much in Torment.

Of course not. But I think it's important to distinguish between player and character rewards. Often character rewards are also perceived as player rewards (ex: items), but if you don't separate the two, you get some odd "degenerate behavior" (like Sawyer likes to call it) where the player makes his character do things that go against his intended character roleplay, only to get the player rewards like XP. For example you finish a quest pacifically, and then kill all the dudes for the extra XP. (That happens because the design has killing XP, instead of quest/objective only XP, and therefore encourages this behavior.)

I feel like character build resources (XP, SP, information that helps make in-character choices) are strictly in the domain of the player, and a player choosing to have his character get in a suboptimal situation shouldn't get lesser "player rewards", because as a designer I want the player to roleplay his character even if he ends up in a bad story position. Even more, I want to reward a player more for hosing his character if it fits with his character's personnality and background, because this is good roleplay. (I'm coming from a P&P background here). So even if the character gets in deep shit, and I expect the character to suffer according consequences such as losing friends, getting no material rewards, getting injuried, having to get out of a bad situation, etc., I still expect the player to not suffer the consequences of his character's choice, because those a two separate things.

Roleplaying well as a player is sometimes playing against your own character, because it makes for a good story / fun game. And I don't want to dissuade a player from doing that with a system that identifies character failure with player failure.
This is going too far, though. There isn't intrinsically wrong with an option being straight up worse than another.
 

Vault Dweller

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Of course not. But I think it's important to distinguish between player and character rewards. Often character rewards are also perceived as player rewards (ex: items), but if you don't separate the two, you get some odd "degenerate behavior" (like Sawyer likes to call it) where the player makes his character do things that go against his intended character roleplay, only to get the player rewards like XP. For example you finish a quest pacifically, and then kill all the dudes for the extra XP. (That happens because the design has killing XP, instead of quest/objective only XP, and therefore encourages this behavior.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchkin_(role-playing_games)

So even if the character gets in deep shit, and I expect the character to suffer according consequences such as losing friends, getting no material rewards, getting injuried, having to get out of a bad situation, etc., I still expect the player to not suffer the consequences of his character's choice, because those a two separate things.
So you suggest to punish the character but reward the player because unlike the character the player is a fragile butterfly and his mood will be ruined forever if he gets 5 XP less?
 
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fuck I've only been reading forum shit about AoD for the last couple weeks and I'm already tired of people moaning about not being able to do everything with their shitty builds. I don't know how you dudes at IT have been able to talk reasonably about it with jerkoffs for years.
 

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It's always the same too. Only conclusion Ive gathered is that someone needs to make a dialogue conflict minigame that's as fun to try to beat as combat.
 

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So you suggest to punish the character but reward the player because unlike the character the player is a fragile butterfly and his mood will be ruined forever if he gets 5 XP less?
Come on! Either the player is a fragile butterfly or he must feel the stick? False dichotomy there. And you're dimishing the whole thing by attributing it 5XP (depends on the XP scale too), but the effect is compounded.

The point is that player behavior and enjoyment are things you must care for when you design the game, not because the player is a pussy, but because he's playing it for his enjoyment, and your job as a designer is in part to make the game enjoyable. I'm not saying "make things easy, give endless rewards", just that design and player experience go hand in hand. If you want your player to roleplay, design mechanics that reward roleplay. That's inherently a better design than punishing bad roleplay, because not only it is more enjoyable, but at the same time you teach your player that this is something the game cares for and he as a player needs to care for it, and makes him adjust his behavior and expectations for the game.

For example, having XP for kills means the game cares about killing things and is willing to reward it, and therefore encourages the player to adopt the preferred behavior of killing things instead of leaving them alone. Discouraging that led designers to switch to quest-based XP, so every type of solution/player behavior had an equal reward. That allowed players to feel free to use different paths and solutions to a problem instead of trying to maximize XP by killing enemies. In an game with kill XP, it might be 5XP lost each time a player doesn't kill an enemy, but over the whole game, it adds up to a lot, and the player then feels that the designer thought the combat path was the good way to play the game, if you're a skilled player. Take Deus Ex:HR for example; in it you gain Stealth rewards that are not accessible when going the fighting route, while the fighting rewards can be had with a stealth route (non-lethal headshots, non-lethal takedowns). Therefore, it feels like the designers meant for the stealth path to be optimal, which makes a player feel bummed about choosing to go with the fighting path, and makes him think the game is badly designed. You don't want that.

You'll then tell me that this "degenerate behavior" of, for example, going for XP instead of sticking to the roleplay is the player's fault, but it isn't. The designer set the win conditions for the player, and he's playing well. There's enjoyment to derive from that. But then that behavior goes against roleplay and character coherence, and there's lost enjoyment from that. As a designer, you want your game to harness both sources of enjoyment, you want the player win conditions to coĂŻncide with the behavior you want the player to have. If you want the player to roleplay, to try different options, reward him for doing that; or at least don't mechanically punish/limit him for it.

One thing you can't do is go against the basic behavior of a player, which is to play the game, be good at it, "game" it. What you can do is to design the system mechanics so that when a player "games" the game, he does the intended gameplay behavior that you designed for, and is deriving enjoyment from it. And for that, a carrot is much better than the stick.
 

Ismaul

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This is going too far, though. There isn't intrinsically wrong with an option being straight up worse than another.
I disagree. If you're roleplaying, story options can be worse than others, and that's fine, but system design should have as a goal to not have suboptimal options. If I spend 1 resource point on X, it should in theory and as a design goal be equally viable as if I spent it on Y. Sure, in practice, design is never that perfect, but that doesn't make it right. It might be harmless that X > Y, if there's abundant resource points or X and Y don't matter much, but that doesn't change the design goal.


fuck I've only been reading forum shit about AoD for the last couple weeks and I'm already tired of people moaning about not being able to do everything with their shitty builds.
The possibility of shitty builds is cool in a game where system is more important that roleplay, and the player goal is to find the best character build(s). But in a game where roleplaying is king, build takes second place to enabling roleplay, and the game win conditions shift from "find the best build" to "see where this in-character choice leads".

And, like it has been pointed out already, by making choices, you block off paths, therefore you can't do everything anyways. But with skill requirements AND choices that both block off paths, that's a lot of options that are off the table.
 

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So as opposed to having consequences to both your skill choices and in-the-moment (dialogue) choices, you propose watering down/eliminating the former, because having consequences to both your choices is too restricting.

This is what I meant by AOD pushing the system to the max. It tries to maximise consequences, but that now leads even to Codexians arguing for less consequences to your choices.

I'm not saying you're stupid, though. It's a sensible proposal insofar as it would lead to less AOD players feeling like they are restricted. But I don't agree - AOD is a game about those constraints. AOD isn't a game where you stare in front of a dialogue screen each time and decide 'what do you want to be?' AOD is a game where you make some choices about what you want to be, then later down the road, you pay the consequences for it, even if that means making hard choices, and doing things your character isn't really comfortable with doing.

In other words, AOD is an effort to say, be whatever you can be in a world where there really are a lot of consequences to your choices - as opposed to be whatever you want to be each moment. And despite the flaws that result from pushing that design, I applaud it, and more importantly, I enjoy it.
 

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The problem is that the "consequence" of it is having half of the gameplay of a 'normal' RPG.

Every other consequence is fine, tho. I'd say great, even.

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Edit: Imagine a C&C game where, depending on your choices, your character ends up deaf and you can no longer experience the music/sounds in the game. Well, it is a "consequence" of your choices, but what was cut wasn't simply "content" (AKA, solutions to quests), but part of the experience/gameplay of the game. This is the problem here.
 
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So as opposed to having consequences to both your skill choices and in-the-moment (dialogue) choices, you propose watering down/eliminating the former, because having consequences to both your choices is too restricting.

This is what I meant by AOD pushing the system to the max. It tries to maximise consequences, but that now leads even to Codexians arguing for less consequences to your choices.

I'm not saying you're stupid, though. It's a sensible proposal insofar as it would lead to less AOD players feeling like they are restricted. But I don't agree - AOD is a game about those constraints.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. :P

I'm not arguing against long term consequences, or consequences to choices in character competence, far from it. The design is improved by those.

What I'm saying is that choices made for the future (such as skill choices) must either come with information so the player can know what to expect / how they'll be effective and make his choices accordingly, or not be restricting but enabling instead, else the player will feel frustrated. Since in a dialogue heavy game you can't predict what's coming, what skill rank will be required, it's very hard to make well-informed skill choices (unless you've already played the game / save-scummed). Therefore, you would want to make those skill choices less restricting, as in less cutting off paths, and more as a "bonus" thing that gives more information, makes a path better (almost failure / half success vs great success), etc.

Some constraints are good, because they force the player to be creative with the limited tools they have (and have chosen), others are less good, especially if they come from something in the system design that the player couldn't have planned for and would have done differently if he knew how things worked. Trial and error about character builds, and system mastery is fun in a combat game, but is mostly frustrating in a dialogue game, if your build choices are implemented in the game as restrictions. A lot of long term consequences are fun, but the consequence of "my character build has been revealed to be unable to roleplay what I intended to because I put 1 less point in Bluff because I didn't know what kind of skill ranks would be required and put 1 more point in Lore instead but it's useless at this point in the game so I have to load a save from 4h ago" is less fun.

This is the reason why cRPGs usually err on the side of being forgiving, and give more skill points, balancing the game around the idea that the typical character is not specialized and not optimized, and hasn't forseen the skill rank requirements. But that makes it unfun for an optimizing player or specialist character, so we need better ways to have some flexibility, without either diluting the game with too many skill points or enforcing restrictions with little wiggle room; some I've suggested - but they require some design changes.
 
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Tigranes

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That's all fair.

First, as I think Elhoim clarified in this thread, AOD does broadcast to you the kinds of skills that mesh with each playstyle / job description / other skills. E.g. the pre-game warning makes it clear that running away from fights is a legit option and not a "pfft nobody does that" option in this game. The opening quests of each faction/class clearly show which skills often work with each other. Common sense also fills the gap (why would you take Sneak and Lockpick but not Steal? why would you take Impersonate but not Persuasion, Etiquette or Streetwise?). The broad strokes of your skill choices are laid out for you in the first 15 minutes of play. There do remain some idiosyncracies (e.g. how rarely Traps is used, and how Critical Strike is used in assassinations), but that is exactly the same as someone playing Fallout for the first time and not knowing it takes a while for Energy Weapons to roll around, or Arcanum and guns, or Underrail, etc, etc.

I do think AOD's pre-game screens should imply some of the stuff better. E.g. just by dividing social skills in the points screen into 'boxes' (e.g. lockpick-traps in one box, impersonate-streetwise in another), it suggests to new players what kinds of skills go together. The pre-set distribution of attributes for classes should extend to pre-set distribution of skills, so that a new player can see that the game has put 2-3 in Lockpick, sneak and steal for a thief and understands that 3 is a pretty strong value to start with and that those skills would be useful. (It's obvious, of course, but still.)

Second, this is the typical flaw of many "AOD is too harsh" arguments: they tell a story that makes sense in principle, but doesn't survive the actual number crunching. The position you describe, where "my entire character build is fucked because I wasted 1 point in some random skill and not on X", basically never happens, because (1) you will usually have several quests to complete, so you can always earn extra skill points from the ones you can complete; (2) each quest has so many different ways to complete it, it is actually hard for you to fuck up in such a manner that you can't complete any single one. Now, it could and did happen on rare occasions in the very early versions of the Teron demo, I recall. Teron was missing a lot of content back then - many smaller quests were not there, and most quests that were there had less options (and some checks that were not balanced). Playing through this month after a long break and looking at Teron now, I can't imagine it happening with any but the most retarded of characters (e.g. someone putting 1 point each in every weapon skill then the rest on, I don't know, Traps). And once you get to Maadoran - have you got that far? - you have plenty of SP and even a wider range of quests to take.

In short, I think AOD does provide a fair bit of info, especially in comparison to many old school RPGs that were similarly opaque, but that's no excuse and I do think AOD has always struggled to communicate the right expectations to a wide population of players. At the same time, I think way too many people throw out hypothetical scenarios (like missing just 1 point in bluff) that sound true in principle but in practice just doesn't happen.
 

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I haven't played AoD a lot since I don't want to spoil myself (I'm not much of a replayer), so maybe I will be fine with the final skill numbers, especially since I already know a lot about the game and to not spread my skills. But clearly the lack of flexibility is something that is still felt and discussed a lot, on the Codex of all places, so it must have some sort of basis of truth. Can't deny that the phenomenon is there.

So why do people feel a lack of flexibility? I think that this kind of feedback is very valuable, and says something about the game that points at what can be improved. You can say "the game wasn't made for you", but that's just abandoning the design challenge. Hell, as a designer, design choices where made, and those are the consequences. This is great! Now it's time to roll up those sleeves and think about solutions - unless you think that the people that want to play your game actually don't want to. I've provided my interpretation of why this is happening and proposed some solutions that followed from it, that's it. But my general position isn't new or anything, it's been developed by PnP designers trying to get away from D&D's mechanical shadow to create games that focused on roleplaying instead of character competence builds; it just hasn't gotten to cRPG design yet (Numenera might be the closest yet - and it might only be a small step).

Second, this is the typical flaw of many "AOD is too harsh" arguments: they tell a story that makes sense in principle, but doesn't survive the actual number crunching. The position you describe, where "my entire character build is fucked because I wasted 1 point in some random skill and not on X", basically never happens
I know my example wasn't really adequate, but it was to be taken as an example of the type of consequence that isn't fun: character build errors that reveal themselves late and can't be easily corrected. There's also the systemic problem of having so many paths closed off that the player is left with a breadth of options that seem too small to him, which is a direct consequence of skill rank requirements and a small pool of skill points.
 

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