Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #39: Adam Heine Explains Effort

[Infinitron]

Tags: Adam Heine; Brother None; InXile Entertainment; Torment: Tides of Numenera

We know from previous Torment: Tides of Numenera updates and interviews that the game will be implementing the Effort mechanic from the Numenera PnP rules. Effort allows you to actually spend your character's stats to aid in overcoming difficult tasks, in dialogue, combat and elsewhere. In the latest Torment Kickstarter update, Adam Heine gives a more detailed explanation of this mechanic, and describes how it will be implemented in the game in practice. Oh, and there's a new screenshot, too - a WIP render of an area we've seen before. Here's that, and an excerpt from Adam's treatise:

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In TTON, we handle tasks with an Effort dialog. Because Effort is a new mechanic—and a key mechanic at that—we decided to display the Effort dialog every time the player attempts a Difficult Task.

"What?!" I hear you say. "You're telling me I have to click away this annoying pop-up every time I try anything?" Yes, that's what I'm telling you. But it's not annoying at all—the opposite, actually. Part of that is there aren't as many Difficult Tasks as you might think. Each task is uniquely crafted (that is, you won't be picking twenty generic locks in a row), so when there is a difficult task, the Effort dialog adds import to it, making every task a potentially significant event. You don't click the pop-up away. You make a real decision, every time.

("But can't I just reload until I beat the task without Effort?" You could, but in some cases you'd be missing out on content that is only available when you fail some tasks. And anyway, as I've said in the past, savescumming isn't technically any easier, it's just a different way to play.)

What do you see when the Effort dialog appears? This:

The difficulty of the task. By default, this difficulty appears as one of eleven abstract labels (e.g. Routine, Challenging, Impossible, etc.), but you'll be able to change this in the Game Options to show the actual target number (i.e. the Task Difficulty multiplied by 3) or to not show any difficulty at all.

The adjusted difficulty of the task. If you have any skills or assets that apply to the task, then the initial difficulty will be visible but crossed out, and the actual difficulty (what you're trying to beat) will appear beneath it. Note that it's possible to have penalties, such that a task is harder than the base difficulty for some characters. That will be reflected here as well.

When you mouse over the difficulties, a tooltip will display showing you what skills and assets you have that are adjusting the difficulty (if any). This way, we don't have to clutter the dialog with a bunch of text, but you can have access to all the information if you want it.

An icon conveying which stat applies to this task. This determines which Stat Pool the Effort cost comes out of. Most tasks will only allow one stat: Might, Speed, or Intellect. In special cases (usually when the PC has certain abilities), a PC might be able to choose to replace the original Stat Pool with a different one. For example, a Jack with the Brute Finesse ability can choose to apply either Speed or Might to non-combat Speed tasks.

An Effort slider. This allows the player to choose how many levels of Effort he will apply to the task. As he increases the slider, the Effort dialog will show him how much Stat Pool will be deducted and the adjusted difficulty will change to reflect the Effort he's applying.

Sidebar refresher: The first level of Effort costs 3 from the applicable Stat Pool. Every level of Effort thereafter costs an additional 2. If the PC has any Edge in the applicable Stat Pool (another thing you gain each Tier), then his Edge is subtracted from the overall Effort cost. So if a player has 1 Might Edge and purchases two levels of Effort, it will cost him 4 Might (3 for the first level + 2 for the second level – 1 for his Might Edge).

If the PC has 3 or more Edge in the applicable Stat, then the Effort slider will automatically be set to however many levels of Effort that PC can get for free.
​

Sounds cool. I'd worry less about save-scumming, and more about how resting to recharge your Stat Pools could trivialize the mechanic entirely. Though it seems like inXile already have some ideas about how they're going to deincentivize that.

 

[Scruffy]

i started out as very excited for PoE and moderately excited for ToN. Now I almost don't care for PoE and love everything i hear from this.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

Me too, in regards to loving what I'm hearing about this.

This is the kind of game I've been waiting for for an... eternity.

 

[Sensuki]

Probably obvious but that render needs some ambient maps and color grading/lookup table / lighting tweaks - Obsidian have spent considerable amounts of time tweaking both of those things in post-production. Is that the plan for TToN as well?

 

[Goral]

i started out as very excited for PoE and moderately excited for ToN. Now I almost don't care for PoE and love everything i hear from this.

I didn't care about PoE from the start but was very interested in TToN. PoE looks like Baldur's Gate clone with not much effort from developers to add something interesting and new (not to mention that BG isn't that good in the first place so I can't imagine that a clone will be much better). TToN on the other hand, while clearly inspired by P:T has many, many changes and very interesting new ideas that distinguishes it.

 

[Athelas]

I'd worry less about save-scumming, and more about how resting to recharge your Stat Pools could trivialize the mechanic entirely.

You won't need to rest if you can save-scum through the random checks, and apparently you will be able do that for most of the task difficulty levels:

(1) A Task Difficulty determined by the GM. This is a number ranging from 0 to 10, where zero is an automatic success (no roll). All other Difficulties, 1 to 10, are multiplied by 3, and the player must roll a d20 to try to beat that number in order to succeed. This means that any Difficulty of 7 or higher is impossible without help.

 

[Adam Heine]

Probably obvious but that render needs some ambient maps and color grading/lookup table / lighting tweaks - Obsidian have spent considerable amounts of time tweaking both of those things in post-production. Is that the plan for TToN as well?

The render doesn't include visual effects or in-game lighting. And yes, so long as the game is still in-progress, anything can and will be tweaked.

 

[Jaedar]

I was hoping they wouldn't be so faithful to the source material. The effort dialogue sounds like it could get plenty annoying fast.

I hope they scrap the Numenara mechanics completely implement some quick selection where you can just scroll the mousewheel or something to set effort.

 

[Infinitron]

I'd worry less about save-scumming, and more about how resting to recharge your Stat Pools could trivialize the mechanic entirely.

You won't need to rest if you can save-scum through the random checks, and apparently you will be able do that for most of the task difficulty levels:

(1) A Task Difficulty determined by the GM. This is a number ranging from 0 to 10, where zero is an automatic success (no roll). All other Difficulties, 1 to 10, are multiplied by 3, and the player must roll a d20 to try to beat that number in order to succeed. This means that any Difficulty of 7 or higher is impossible without help.

No, you won't, but at least save-scumming requires you to make the effort of loading up the save, whereas resting after every check where you've splooged your entire stat pool to make sure you passed it requires no such artificiality.

Adam Heine My suggestion for reducing the psychological instinct towards save-scumming still stands:

Allow the player to spend Effort points to pass a skill check AFTER he fails it the first time without spending Effort. So, for example, if a player rolls 5 when he needed to reach 8, you tell him that he's now incurred a penalty of 3 Effort points, and that he needs to pay up or fail the check.

By doing this, you shift the semantics of the dice roll's randomness. Instead of "random chance of success, reload until you win", it becomes "random number of Effort points I needed to spend in order to win"

It's like how you wouldn't save scum to lose only 1 hit point in a battle instead of 3.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I hope they dont fuck this up as they did with the WL2 skill checks, the system in the latter is a badly designed time waster that only serves to annoy the player and not add to the gameplay.

Torment's skill checks and effort mini-game should be sparsely used and not something you will be doing every 2 to 5 minutes.

 

[GloomFrost]

The new "screenshot" looks amazing as always but the "effort slider" system sounds unnecessary confusing.

 

[hiver]

Why is the task of difficulty 10 named impossible while the explanation says its a task humans cannot consider doing but doesnt break the laws of physics? If it doesnt break any laws of physics then it is a possible task.

What im worried about the most is people taking on something that should be science fiction - that dont have proper understanding of how science part works at all, but instead just pile up any fantastic idea at all and excuse it by saying "oh this is sci-fi where everything is possible because nine civs blah, blah, blah" - and we end up with an incoherent mess.

Of course, the target audience wont mind because they wont be able to understand any of it, but thats not the point here.

"What?!" I hear you say. "You're telling me I have to click away this annoying pop-up every time I try anything?"

No, thats not what i am saying or thinking but thanks for the strawman insinuating i am an idiot Adam. Surely there are such imbeciles in the audience, one above already, but its hardly possible all your audience is so stupid, is it?
I dont give a flying fuck about how many icons will be clicked or how "hard" that might be.

What i would like to know is whats the deal with this:

It doesn't take careful analysis to see that Effort quickly becomes more important than skills in terms of succeeding at difficult tasks (though skills allow a player to succeed at certain kinds of tasks more often).

So skills have a secondary cosmetic role? Thats just fucking great.

Shouldnt you instead try to explain how skills and effort are actually working together (i presume they do according to the example gameplay given), and have similar or equal role?

However, the player's character is trained in healing and quick fingers, both of which (the GM rules) are applicable to the task, lowering the difficulty to 4. Now he only needs to roll a 12 or higher to succeed.

Like this?

The player also decides that he really, really doesn't want to accidentally kill this poor creature, so he spends four levels of Effort on the task (costing him 9 Speed—we'll talk about how that is calculated later).

What does "costing him 9 Speed" really mean at all? I dont care how its calculated, i care what the fuck does it mean at all? Is that decrease permanent, (i really doubt it), how long does it last, how much is 9 speed at all, how do i get it back, do i pay anything for it and so on.


The render of that area has too many items and smaller various pieces of "things" and "furniture" unnecessarily heaped all around the area. Several new structures are added (also unnecessarily since instead of one structure we now have four or five in the same place) that only completely clogs the scene.

Now it just looks like chocking in rubbish and piled on unnecessary structures.
Loss of atmosphere compared to the first illustration is very noticeable.

 

[Jaedar]

The decrease lasts until you rest. This is also the only thing stats do. At least in the pnp iirc.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Allow the player to spend Effort points to pass a skill check AFTER he fails it the first time without spending Effort. So, for example, if a player rolls 5 when he needed to reach 8, you tell him that he's now incurred a penalty of 3 Effort points, and that he needs to pay up or fail the check.

By doing this, you shift the semantics of the dice roll's randomness. Instead of "random chance of success, reload until you win", it becomes "random number of Effort points I needed to spend in order to win"

It's like how you wouldn't save scum to lose only 1 hit point in a battle instead of 3.

Not sure if that comparison holds up: in most crpg's, whether you lose 1 or 49 HP for a 50 HP character over the course of a battle is irrelevant as you more or less automatically regain it after the battle. The difference between losing 1 and 5 effort might mean the following task becomes far more difficult/impossible (at least I'd assume regaining effort is a far more difficult thing than regaining HP in most crpg's otherwise the whole mechanic is a bit silly).

edit: oh right, expending effort drains a stat temporarily, what I said still applies I think.

 

[Infinitron]

Allow the player to spend Effort points to pass a skill check AFTER he fails it the first time without spending Effort. So, for example, if a player rolls 5 when he needed to reach 8, you tell him that he's now incurred a penalty of 3 Effort points, and that he needs to pay up or fail the check.

By doing this, you shift the semantics of the dice roll's randomness. Instead of "random chance of success, reload until you win", it becomes "random number of Effort points I needed to spend in order to win"

It's like how you wouldn't save scum to lose only 1 hit point in a battle instead of 3.

Not sure if that comparison holds up: in most crpg's, whether you lose 1 or 49 HP for a 50 HP character over the course of a battle is irrelevant as you more or less automatically regain it after the battle. The difference between losing 1 and 5 effort might mean the following task becomes far more difficult/impossible (at least I'd assume regaining effort is a far more difficult thing than regaining HP in most crpg's otherwise the whole mechanic is a bit silly).

Like I said in the OP, you regain it by resting.

Anyway, even if the analogy isn't completely accurate, it's still an improvement. Having to guess ahead of time what number of Effort points you should spend incentivizes save-scumming until you pass with the minimum number of Effort points spent, because you're not being told up-front what number of points you "should" spend.

In my way, the game basically tells you "OK, you tried doing this, spend N Effort Points to succeed". You can save-scum that too to get a smaller N, but there's a far greater chance the player will read that and say to himself "OK, that seems fair, I'll do it".

 

[hiver]

The decrease lasts until you rest. This is also the only thing stats do. At least in the pnp iirc.

And of course you can rest anywhere anytime....

godamnit.

Adam Heine My suggestion for reducing the psychological instinct towards save-scumming still stands:

Allow the player to spend Effort points to pass a skill check AFTER he fails it the first time without spending Effort. So, for example, if a player rolls 5 when he needed to reach 8, you tell him that he's now incurred a penalty of 3 Effort points, and that he needs to pay up or fail the check.

By doing this, you shift the semantics of the dice roll's randomness. Instead of "random chance of success, reload until you win", it becomes "random number of Effort points I needed to spend in order to win"

Thats completely idiotic, but nothing else can be expected from a cheap nonsensical idiot like infinitron.
I would hope that this kind of feature would depend on the task we are attempting, instead of being globally available for every single thing we do. I can imagine any number of tasks where failure would not allow any kind of additional attempt. Im sure everyone can, except infinitron.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Like I said in the OP, you regain it by resting.

Anyway, even if the analogy isn't completely accurate, it's still an improvement. Having to guess ahead of time what number of Effort points you should spend incentivizes save-scumming until you pass with the minimum number of Effort points spent, because you're not being told up-front what number of points you "should" spend.

In my way, the game basically tells you "OK, you tried doing this, spend N Effort Points to succeed". You can save-scum that too to get a smaller N, but there's a far greater chance the player will read that and say to himself "OK, that seems fair, I'll do it".

game design as phenomenology: don't change the mechanic, just the way the player perceives the mechanic .

I'd say there's not really a compelling reason not to switch from random stat check rolls to thresholds, or at the very least towards a 3d6 type roll so as to remove most of the randomness.

 

[Infinitron]

I don't disagree with that.

 

[Zed]

I'm too tired to grasp all of this, but it sounds pretty cool. New, if nothing else.

I really want to see combat in action. I hope that's next on the teaser list.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I don't disagree with that.

Then argue that. I never got the appeal of huge randomness when it comes to stat checks: why would an expert lockpicker have a non-negligible chance to fail at picking a lock which a complete amateur has a chance to pick, under identical circumstances. In combat, success never/very rarely depends on a single roll, and thus even the most non-deterministic combat systems (wide damage ranges, huge ultra-crits, etc.) even out over the course of battle to a certain extent. Adding multiple rolls to stat checks (e.g. with a 3d6 a la GURPS) would already be a huge improvement, if only because it makes the chance of failure for experts negligible (e.g. instead of 5% for a 1 on a d20 less than a 10th of that for 3 in 3d6). Introducing soft fail-states with something like Effort is nice, but it doesn't "solve" the problem of the excessive randomness of single stat check rolls.

 

[Infinitron]

Then argue that.

I could, but Adam Heine seems to like his random rolls, and I respect his desire to stay as faithful as possible to the rules of Numenera PnP.

 

[Kalin]

It all sounds like a bunch of handholding crap for sub-human scum! Planetscape didn't have any magick tool tips or displays of "difficulty levels" for "tasks", that's the kind of shit you see in games like Oblivion.

Dialogue checks and "tasks" should be based on stats and skills and all their requirements should be hidden, anything else is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

 

[tripedal]

I thought the design of skill checks in WL2 wasn't particularly good and I'm getting similar vibes here. IIRC (for WL2) they said at some point that the RNG seed would be fixed at the start of the game to make savescumming impossible, but I guess they scrapped that idea.

Especially if resting is free and always available then the entire thing is meaningless. This post suggests that quests will be time limited and the world will react to time passing (and time progression is triggered by resting)...hopefully they can implement that in a way that limits resting and makes it an important choice.

 

[Roguey]

Having to click twice for every attack during combat sounds like it'll get old fast, why not just make Effort part of the UI instead?

They nailed the aesthetics of the dialogue box but it looks like inXile still has no clue wrt functional UI design.

 

[Athelas]

No, you won't, but at least save-scumming requires you to make the effort of loading up the save, whereas resting after every check where you've splooged your entire stat pool to make sure you passed it requires no such artificiality.

Rest-spamming can require some effort in the form of backtracking to a safe place (the original Torment had such resting restrictions). You pointed out that resting should be penalized. The same thing applies to save-scumming for random rolls - in both cases you're artificially gaming the system for maximum benefit.

And yes, they could penalize resting, but given that the time/resting 'limits' for Fallout and Mask of the Betrayer were absurdly lenient and they still draw massive fan complaint, I'm skeptical that'll be the case. And if they did, it would encourage save-scumming even more.

Regardless, I simply don't see random skill success as something to get excited about. The most fun I had using skills was in a game where the outcomes where wholly deterministic - Deus Ex. Random skill chances also go against the idea of RPG's being ruled by character skill (RNG in combat is fine because it's balanced out by the huge amount of variables present). I remember facing the Master for the first time with a 100%+ speech skill and only afterwards discovering that I was supposed to get special dialogue options, but that I didn't through an absurdly unlucky roll. They're already introducing variability through being able to adjust the difficulty level of challenges through skills, assets and effort - there is no need for randomness.

It's like how you wouldn't save scum to lose only 1 hit point in a battle instead of 3.

Their explanation for having random skill outcomes was for there to be unpredictability and surprise - this does the exact opposite. Getting a second chance for every challenge (presumably including stuff like attempts on your life) also sounds rather contrived.