What is the point of low lethality?

[Wunderbar]

Low lethality is good in number-crunching games with inflated stats because it allows devs to make players feel good about levelling-up.

High lethality system example: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 15 health, you kill him in 2 hits. You deal 12 damage after level-up, same enemy has 15 health and dies in two hits -> your level-up ended up not mattering at all.
Low lethality system: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 150 health, you kill him in 15 hits. After levelling you now deal 12 damage and kill the same enemy in 13 hits. 13 is clearly lower than 15, player feels progress.

 

[Tyranicon]

Low lethality is good in number-crunching games with inflated stats because it allows devs to make players feel good about levelling-up.

High lethality system example: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 15 health, you kill him in 2 hits. You deal 12 damage after level-up, same enemy has 15 health and dies in two hits -> your level-up ended up not mattering at all.
Low lethality system: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 150 health, you kill him in 15 hits. After levelling you now deal 12 damage and kill the same enemy in 13 hits. 13 is clearly lower than 15, player feels progress.

Despite codex's protests to the contrary, many posters here prefer more simulation-minded combat over the rampant insanity that is JRPG-style level creep. Which explains why many here prefer high lethality and small numbers.

 

[Cryomancer]

Low lethality system: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 150 health, you kill him in 15 hits. After levelling you now deal 12 damage and kill the same enemy in 13 hits. 13 is clearly lower than 15, player feels progress.

Actually, most low lethality games makes you deal less damage in percentage to the enemy at higher levels. For eg, on 5e a Mage from lv 5 to 11 on 5e goes from 8d6 damage(fireball) to 10d6(freezing sphere), while his hp goes from 5 (d6 + con mod) to 11(d6 + con mod), that is just 2d6 damage gain and ludicrous 6(d6 + con mod), with no con mod, he got 3x more hp than damage. I an not saying that 5e is low lethality as 4e, 5e is in the mid ground of 2e and 4e in this aspect(lethality), but is rarely played at high levels and many DM's say that is hard to challenge a high level party. And 4e is actually worst and far worst in this aspect.

Is a tabletop wow clone in low lethality.

I honestly don't know any low lethality game where high level gameplay is quicker than low level.

How to take something with flavor and make it another boring "it does damage" spell.

Yep. This is why spells on his games are awful. I mean, there is any reason to pick any specialization besides evokation on pillars 2??

Note that on 2e, most iconic mid level spells, does far more than just throw damage numbers. Stoneskin, minor sequencer, wall of ice, polymorph Other, polymorth self, chaos, cloudkill, animate dead, teleport, enchant item, domination, disintegrate, tenser's transformation, death spell, teleport, flesh to stone, control weather, all of this spells are much cooler than any pillars 2 spells. Not mentioning the summons spells, allowing you to use a fire elemental to tank a fire creature.

high lethality and small numbers.

Is that generally JRPG's don't try to make the game mechanics a "translation" of things and IMO, numbers needs to be small to have meaning. Ultra inflated numbers is just silly, like ultra inflated currency. I like 2e D&D cuz a lv 0 commoner has d4 hit points and Vecna, a demigod lich has 150 hp. Meredoth, a lv 20 necromancer? 50 hp. Even dragons rarely goes on lower 3 digit hp. And is easy to grasp what the numbers means, 10 of a attribute is average. 7/8/9 is bellow average, 11/12/13 is above average and anything above 18 is superhuman.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

So is this Sorcerer Victor's alt, or did he just rebrand? That aside, the loss of potent magic is a real problem in CRPGs. Balancefags have held sway for 20 years. Outside of making your own game, I wouldn't expect change.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Because Sawyer doesn't understand fun. His whole gripe with Disintegrate or spells like it is dumb. If you're just going to make it another damage spell and take away the possibility of straight up reducing someone to ash, then don't put the spell in to begin with because at that point it's needless bloat that adds nothing. The feast or famine aspect of the spell is what makes it enjoyable to use. It's how the player comes to form some sort of attachment to the spell because you're likely to remember that time it did pull through and completely remove some high level monster from existence than the Sawyerized fire and forget shadow of itself.

It's why his homebrew will be shit and why POE games are shit. Josh Sawyer is a really retarded dog that you need to put on a leash that has an established ruleset he has to abide by and respect. If you let the retarded dog off that leash then it'll run around being, well, a retard. And that's how you get the boring slogs that are his games.

 

[Pink Eye]

So is this Sorcerer Victor's alt, or did he just rebrand? That aside, the loss of potent magic is a real problem in CRPGs. Balancefags have held sway for 20 years. Outside of making your own game, I wouldn't expect change.

Nope. That's still Victor. He's got a kewl sorcerer name now. He is:
>Meredoth the darklord of Nebligtode, an Island of Terror.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Because Sawyer doesn't understand fun. His whole gripe with Disintegrate or spells like it is dumb. If you're just going to make it another damage spell and take away the possibility of straight up reducing someone to ash, then don't put the spell in to begin with because at that point it's needless bloat that adds nothing. The feast or famine aspect of the spell is what makes it enjoyable to use. It's how the player comes to form some sort of attachment to the spell because you're likely to remember that time it did pull through and completely remove some high level monster from existence than the Sawyerized fire and forget shadow of itself.

It's why his homebrew will be shit and why POE games are shit. Josh Sawyer is a really retarded dog that you need to put on a leash that has an established ruleset he has to abide by and respect. If you let the retarded dog off that leash then it'll run around being, well, a retard. And that's how you get the boring slogs that are his games.

Yes games which can't be broken and abused by creative players are boring, makes me think about ATOM RPG where one of the way to get pass the greedy door guard aside from huge bribe, hard as f.... fight and lenghty quest from another town was... to give him smokes till poor bloke got heart stroke and keel over, Smoking Kills!

Some player noticed and combined fact that cigs damaged health and could be given to NPC and voila. When Devs where informed about this exploit they laughed and refused to patch it out like Soyer would do.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Nope. That's still Victor. He's got a kewl sorcerer name now. He is:
>Meredoth the darklord of Nebligtode, an Island of Terror.

Meredoth and his island domain of Nebligtode were introduced into Ravenloft in adventure module RA2 Ship of Horror, by Anne Brown, in 1991:

 

[octavius]

Consider a hypothetical game in which everyone dies in one hit. Your healing spells are completely worthless, and melee fighters always die before getting in range. You want a goldilocks zone of medium lethality that allows for more strategic variation but isn't mind-numbingly boring and tedious.

There is any CRPG where it happens?

Aleshar: World of Ice is a bit like this. There's no saving in dungeons, and every hit in melee is a potential critical hit. So you need to rely on magic for damage or to stun your enemy. Even spell casting can be too exhausting and make your character die from a heart attack.

 

[Cryomancer]

Because Sawyer doesn't understand fun.

I agree with Sawyer excessive focus on balance? No.
I hate Sawyer? No.

Liking Sawyer or not, he is responsible for the resurgence of the tactical CRPG. Without him, we will probably not have games like Pathfinder Kingmaker, since everyone would believe that this type of game is dead. He also made Icewind dale 2. He is not good in designing magic, but firearms on new vegas, despite the low lethality are very satisfying to use. The sound, the impact, and design of weapons are amazing. Best firearms that I saw in a good RPG. And the fact that "repeating/bolt action" firearms are great on new vegas makes it even more interesting. The "karma table" of New Vegas was his idea. He has far more good things than bad things for the RPG industry.

Everyone makes mistake. Just look to my grammar. It is full of mistakes. He tried to "make old school but fix the problems of old school games" and as a result, he made a decent game, not a masterpiece, nor a awful game and allowed a lot of new RPG's on "IE style" to come.



PS : I agree that his TT game will fail. I mean, will probably not please the casual 5e fans nor the "old school" fans which are playing retroclones/2e/3e/pf1e.

Aleshar: World of Ice is a bit like this. There's no saving in dungeons, and every hit in melee is a potential critical hit. So you need to rely on magic for damage or to stun your enemy. Even spell casting can be too exhausting and your character dies from a heart attack,

I will check it. Seems interesting.

 

[Nortar]

Before the balancegs say "it is op", no it is not. Enemies use it against the player.

Low lethality just takes out all of the tension of the game.

Don't be a menace to low lethality while drinking your juice in savescumming non-ironman runs.

So what would you do, when an epic lich's epic servant disintegrate your ass?
Would you hit the reload button and try again until you survive?
Yeah, so tension, much danger, real thrill seeker you are!

Sawyer is right about one thing.
If you have a one-shot spell that has a limited chance to work, but there is an unlimited number of chances (just reload and try again),
it will encourage savescumming and turn casters into one-trick-ponies.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Would you hit the reload button and try again until you survive?

That's usually how it goes in a video game, yes.

 

[Cryomancer]

So what would you do, when an epic lich's epic servant disintegrate your ass?
Would you hit the reload button and try again until you survive?

Nope. If I an fighting a lich, I will cast spell mantles, spell immunity(alteration), deathward and buffs to make my saves better. The enemy caster would need first to dispel my defenses, then try to OHK me.

Also, on DDO for eg, you can't save scum in that game and there is a hardcore league. Or look to Tolberti in M&M VII. He insta disintegrate your party members which is worse than insta killing as in the game, you have unconscious, dead and eradicated and disintegrate eradicate you and is pretty hard and expensive to revive when there are no corpse to be revived. He also is immune to dark magic and light magic spells, and mind magic spells.

That's usually how it goes in a video game, yes.

Not in all video games. This is an mmo where you just can't save scum. As you can see, wail of the banshee can OHK enemies. And yes, my first death in this game was vs phantasmal killer. After 30 minutes in a quest, which has points of no return, puzzles and a lot of optional enemies, I got OHKilled by a single spell and din't reloaded cuz I could't. I just tried again with a death ward scroll; was my mistake, I was dumb and entered a place full of undead with no protection to this spells.

 

[Tacgnol]

Disintegrate was designed for TT. In a CRPG where people can savescum you should design your systems differently. Save or die is completely retarded in that context, and that has nothing to do with high/low lethality.

Disintegrate is also a spell on the TT that is very often resisted when used against living targets. At the level you'll be casting disintegrate, most enemies will have decent fort saves.

It actually ends up being useful far more often against inanimate objects.

 

[Parabalus]

Lots of whining about classes other than wizards getting to play the game.

Even is PoE wizards are still a step up from the plebian classes.

lso, on DDO for eg, you can't save scum in that game and there is a hardcore league. Or look to Tolberti in M&M VII. He insta disintegrate your party members which is worse than insta killing as in the game, you have unconscious, dead and eradicated and disintegrate eradicate you and is pretty hard and expensive to revive when there are no corpse to be revived. He also is immune to dark magic and light magic spells, and mind magic spells.

You can keep up PfM and then he doesn't.

 

[Nortar]

Would you hit the reload button and try again until you survive?

That's usually how it goes in a video game, yes.

So cut the crap about lack of tension and missing dangers of high lethality. There is none, if you're not playing in iron-man mode.
I thought you of all the dungeon dwellers would appreciate higher chances of survivability btw.

Nope.

Nope what?
You won't reload on death?
Funny how you brought in the MMOs, where the characters are immortals.
Just admit it. You don't care about actual lethality.
What you want is "I win" button.

 

[Cryomancer]

You won't reload on death?
Funny how you brought in the MMOs, where the character are immortals.
Just admit it. You don't care about actual lethality.
What you want is "I win" button.

If I was dumb enough to try to kill a lich with no defense, yes, I would reload and try a different strategy.

And your chars aren't immortals on hardcore league on DDO. I played it on a hardcore league until lv 13. But was so cautious that was getting no fun and ended deleting my char. The high level quests aren't easy to get trough without dying, I doubt that I could reach lv 20 on hardcore... And again, it is not a "i win button" cuz you rarely fight against a single enemy. Is taking just a single enemy out of a encounter. A domination spell like "dire charm"(which is tier 3 not 6 like disintegrate), not only takes a ally from the enemy team but also adds the same ally into your team, but you don't see people who worries about balance complaining about it. Imagine if disintegrate revived the monster to serve you, that is how a lot of enchantment spells works.

The same applies on 3e. Charm monster can be cast at a much lower level on than finger of death and disintegrate on 3e just dishes massive damage...

Even is PoE wizards are still a step up from the plebian classes.

Ciphers are much better. They can transform enemies into allies which is much more powerful in a low lethality game.

At the level you'll be casting disintegrate, most enemies will have decent fort saves.

That depends. On 2e, as a specialist mage, casting greater malison and two disintegrate in a "sequencer" can be pretty nasty since the enemy would have to do 2 saves at -6 penalty to not be reduced to dust.

 

[Parabalus]

A domination spell like "dire charm"(which is tier 3 not 6 like disintegrate), not only takes a ally from the enemy team but also adds the same ally into your team, but you don't see people who worries about balance complaining about it.

Enemies rarely use it low-level, since it is so powerful designers avoid it. As a player you are always outnumbered so it's not as impactful as when used against you.

Illithid and variants are hard enemies because of this.

That depends. On 2e, as a specialist mage, casting greater malison and two disintegrate in a "sequencer" can be pretty nasty since the enemy would have to do 2 saves at -6 penalty to not be reduced to dust.

Just use CC with 3x ADHW instead for your mage fantasies.

 

[Funposter]

Dragon's Dogma as a good RPG with low lethality and very lenient with how many consumable you can have

Yep. But IMO Dragon's Dogma is much better on the hard mode. Where a cyclops with a flaming gigantic club can OHK you at mid levels with no problem. My greatest problem of DD is that consumables takes no time to eat, I can press the menu, the game's time freezes and insta eat a lot of things to heal my hp and stamina instantly, The game should require a eating/drinking animation.,

DD is only better on Hard Mode because it's not really all that hard and enemies in the early game drop 10k Gold all the time which means you're never struggling for money like you would be on Normal.

 

[Yosharian]

Oblivion's just incompetently tuned.

On many modern games with disintegrate spells, it only deals damage in a beam. On Arcanum it was right. It could be used even to disintegrate objects in the world, like doors, windows and safes. Imagine if in a Star Trek or any SCI FI series, they develop a weapon who launches a "disintegration beam" and that weapon is said that can disintegrate steel like it is nothing, only to hit multiple times the MC or a villain without disintegrating him with no explanation. Silly right? Why people accept this on video games? 2E also did it right. Or the target resisted the spell or is dust. Ghosts and other incorporeal creatures has no "matter" to be disintegrated hence are immune to the spell. If cloudkill insta kill weaklings on D&D novels, it should OHK on D&D games(computer or not). Before the balancegs say "it is op", no it is not. Enemies use it against the player. For eg, players on M&M can do shit like cast meteor shower, fly and cast finger of death to OHK enemies? Yes, but enemies uses this spells against the player. Every "non worker" demon is a master of fire magic and can cast meteor shower and similar high level fire spells in the player while he is immune to his damage; I OHKilled my own party by misjudging the distance when casting Dragon's Breath and it was cool. There are a dungeon full of undead cyclops and with traps that casts cloudkill and finger of death on kingmaker. Every spell, weapon, superpower or wathever that a PC can cast, a NPC can cast.

Take something like the classic spell Disintegrate from A/D&D. In older editions, this was a total win/loss spell. If the target failed the save, it died, flat out. People effectively used this as an effective degenerate tactic against many difficult enemies in Infinity Engine games. The first spell cast would be Disintegrate. If the target made its save, the player would just reload and try again.

With Disintegrate reworked as a spell that does a large amount of damage on a failed save and a decent amount of damage on a successful save, it's no longer an all-or-nothing spell that encourages save scumming. The effects are still variable, the results of the save still matter, but it's one check that's normalized with many others during combat. The more the randomized checks of combat are normalized, the more the player's specific character strategies and tactics matter.

Sawyer is actually a fucking retard, who knew

 

[Wunderbar]

I agree with Sawyer here.
Though nerfing Disingegrate's damage is just a band-aid solution, I would've made it deterministic instead.

 

[lukaszek]

make small numbers matter again

in reality though it is again about evil rng. Players dont want to be killed randomly. Bloating numbers paired with low lethality is lazy way of dealing with problem.

 

[Hag]

One possible problem with high lethality is that you have to design for tactical engagements, ie to be able to surprise or be surprised, or to use the environment to your advantage. Even if you can kill in one hit, it makes no sense to run straight to an opponent that can do the same, you have to make sure beforehand it won't attack first. This is a whole different game design compared to classical "I'm walking in the country/dungeon oh no some mindless monster is attacking me roll for initiative". See the difference with some FPS where you have to use cover, dodging or hit and run tactics.

 

[Galdred]

Encounter time inflation and balance between offense and defense at higher level are scaling problems(especially HP inflation), not low-lethality problems.
The problems of high lethality with a low character count of painful to replace assets can be illustrated by NuXCOM:
It focuses too much on not letting the opponent act at all, either by killing them first, or disabling them, because you certainly cannot afford to let too many of them get a single shot, because once one of your characters is dead, you cannot really do much to fix the issue, and you have lost a significant part of your firepower for the remainder of the engagement.

So high lethality works much better with numbers close to the older X-COM, where you would deploy 12-16 characters per mission.

Also, low lethality in a medieval settings involving armored fighters does make sense (In Field of Glory 2, units stay locked for quite a long time in melee) . Most of the casualties in ancient combat comes from one side having routed and the other butchering the fleeing side, or prisonners getting executed instead of ransomed (which would seem badly out of character today for Swiss people), because armor and shields do really work..

High lethality can also dumb down the combat: Compare the more recent total wars, in which an unit will break before you have time to flank or bring reinforcements to the earlier ones in which keeping reserves made sense.
Moving to a higher lethality just made the game more "arcadey".

I know both exemples are about larger scale battles than your typical RPG, but having a limited character pool just makes lethality all the more problematic.

I think a middle ground works better than going to any of the extreme. Something like 3-6 hits to kill someone instead of 1-2 or 256+

 

[Norfleet]

Imagine if in a Star Trek or any SCI FI series, they develop a weapon who launches a "disintegration beam" and that weapon is said that can disintegrate steel like it is nothing, only to hit multiple times the MC or a villain without disintegrating him with no explanation.

That's exactly what happens in most such games, yes.

Of course, you probably shouldn't give such weapons to players to be casually firing in such a setting. As a wise man once said: "Stop! No shoot fire stick in space canoe! Cause explosive decompression!"

Low lethality just takes out all of the tension of the game. Believe or not, I had a fight on BG3 which took 1 hour and 13 minutes. It is slow as Wizardry 8, another turn based game with low lethality and very slow animations. Watching the same animation over and over and seeing over and over the same animation is just boring.

I think the issue isn't necessarily low lethality, but low impact. Shooting a guy repeatedly and getting absolutely no real reaction until he suddenly runs out of hitpoints isn't satisfying. Shooting a guy and having him collapse on the floor to the tune of "MY LEG!", still has impact, even if he doesn't actually die.

Extreme lethality, may, in and of itself, be a crutch for bad or lazy design. People die because the developers don't want to deal with the consequences of people NOT dying. It's messy to deal with what happens when enemies decide to rout from the battle. It's clunky to have to add situations where people DON'T fight each other to the death. Therefore, let's just have everyone fight each other to the death.

Some games are great DESPITE the low lethality like Fallout New Vegas, but FNV would be better with 4~5x more lethality. If a securitron with 25mm grenade launchers was actually dangerous.

The only reason a securitron even HAS grenade launchers is because of the low lethality, because they couldn't equip it with lesser weapons and still retain any sense of impact in their model.

All of this stems from the entire low lethality = low impact design. Consider that a lot of real life actually IS low lethality: How many people actually die in a real battle? Weapons we make today are, on paper, deadlier than ever, capable of spewing thousands of bullets per minute. The result is that the actual lethality of battles is decreasing rather than increasing.

It focuses too much on not letting the opponent act at all, either by killing them first, or disabling them

That part is actually surprisingly realistic, although the tools for doing so are somewhat less so.