Speaking of the BG legacy there’s $10M-$10B+ worth of IP to be had for anyone willing to sit down with 5-10 people who really understand/appreciate the 2-3.5/PF ruleset (a group that includes Soyer and Sven themselves ironically) to come up with an industry standard easy-to-use prebuffing interface along the lines of the Deadfire AI config or Wrath rest menu.
You’d just need a default similar to a spellbook that lets you tweak the specifics in three categories (Hr/lvl, min/lvl, rnd/lvl) depending on situation.
Should quickly become as routine as the Gold Box Fix button. Would transform the genre and remedy Soyer’s most grevious error.
I'm sure you realize this just removes the need to think about prebuffing. Just remove prebuffing entirely and the result will be the same with one less click to boot.
I dunno, pre-buffs allow for a higher ceiling. What I mean is, if you think of lower levels without pre-buffing, the enemies can be fairly weak, suitable for jumped-up farmboys. Then as the enemies get stronger, more eldritch, more evil, godlike, etc., pre-buffing starts coming into the arsenal to match that increasing strength and fearsomeness of the foes. If you don't have that, then enemies have got to stay pretty much at the same flat level, without a lot of incline -
or (if you want to keep the enemy progression) you have to do the buffing in combat, which (unless it's just like one special buff) is perhaps even more tedious than doing it before combat (in the sense that you're doing that kind of support job at a time when you feel you should be getting into the thick of actual fighting, and using damage or debuff spells).
The way it's done at hr/lvl, min/lvl and rnd/lvls (weak and general to strong and specific) is quite right too - the closer the time-frame to impending combat, the fewer but more powerful and more specific-to-encounter the buffs can be.
There's also the question of immersion and virtual world. When you start with only a few pre-buffs, it feels part of the virtual worldeyness of the thing: psychologically (to me at least) it feels
good, it feels like you're providing a magical support service to your teammates, and you're also building a sense of anticipation and apprehension re. what's to come. It's only when you start to layer on lots of prebuffs at the various timing levels that it starts to feel tedious at the meta level (the level of the player sitting in front of the computer) - IOW it's just a case of too many clicks - but the sense of it as being an important support job for the caster doesn't go away.
It doesn't have to be a meta thing either (i.e. it doesn't have to be just a UI thing), it could be incorporated into the virtual world - e.g. you charge an imp with the task of providing a "package" of pre-buffs, or you use a special magical stone for the job, or you have a special page in the grimoire or whatever, and you can adjust the "package" as you go.
I do actually like what Sawyer dd wrt RTwP - especially wrt the time-frames of how long abilities work for, and their strengths, relative to the typical amount of pausing one does in combat, etc. It's all very nicely done, very finely-tuned, and feels good in use, flows better than just the plain old D&D system; it's more tailored to the computer. But the idea of getting rid of pre-buffing feels to me more like a pet obsession which led to magic use feeling that bit less special in the Pillars games.
