Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[2house2fly]

He probably doesn't need to be on site to send a quick message to the programmers on Slack saying "make there be a time limit on the main quest please"

 

[Infinitron]

People here will laugh at this question (it's about the gameplay not the setting dude!!!1), but it shows you that not everybody sees these things the same way.

 

[FreeKaner]

And it shows you why we can't have nice things.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

People here will laugh at this question (it's about the gameplay not the setting dude!!!1), but it shows you that not everybody sees these things the same way.

I mean, while it may be beside the point, the premise isn't really wrong. Everyone bitches about the lore dumps in POE. Imagine how much of that could've been cut if they'd used a standard fantasy setting instead of a standard fantasy setting but a little different. Kingmaker never needs to explain what halflings or half-orcs or aasimar are, while POE had to tell us all about Orlans and Rauatai and Godlikes. Plus, POE's companions needed to do double-duty as tutorials for "new" races and classes. "I'm Kana, let me tell you about being a chanter and a rauatai" versus "I'm Linzi, let me tell you how I got run out of Pitax for illegally printing subversive books. Because you already know what a halfling bard is, Owlcat can use my dialogue to foreshadow some really cool stuff from much later in the game."

Some of this probably boils down to different priorities--Pathfinder doesn't give a fuck about explaining itself even when it probably should--but I bet POE's writers would've felt less compelled to explain the world in great detail if it were a straight Forgotten Realms ripoff. Or, if Sawyer really wants to tell the player about his intricate worldbuilding, he should build a world with some novelty. To be fair, I guess that's exactly what he did with Deadfire.

 

[2house2fly]

The lore dumps in POE aren't there because anything needs explained (you can summarize most of the races and concepts easily in a few words) they're there because the writers lack confidence, and they'd lack confidence if they were just doing Forgotten Realms or whatever rip off as well.

 

[MRY]

he should build a world with some novelty

Years ago, in one of my early jobs, I had to review huge numbers of requests for case review (petitions). An issue du jour involved overturning a decision based on the ground that its premises had been eroded and the majority of the court didn't think it was rightly decided. Because there was a chance that the court might actually do this, and if they did, it would affect a huge number of prison sentences, everyone being sentenced would request review on this basis ("overrule such-and-such") so that if the court actually did so in one of the cases, all of them would get the benefit. The result was that we got hundreds of these petitions, and they were all very short (since the petitioners knew the court knew what they were talking about) and very easy to handle. Since I came into this process in media res, all I knew was that "overrule such-and-such" had a form response ("oft denied").

One day, after writing two dozen oft-denied memos, I get this petition that is glorious. It lays out the long history of sentencing law, its developments, the current justices' votes on the issues, etc., etc. I'm reading through it and as I am, I'm carefully detailing its arguments in a memorandum. I finally reach the end, put the last touches on my memo and realize, "Wait ... this is just an overrule such-and-such petition." All of that effort on both sides (the petition and the memo) was a total waste.

So, yeah. I'm with you on this. If you've got nothing materially different to say, just call your dwarves dwarves and skip all the backstory.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

RPG Codex: Oh, the good old days, when to play the game you were required to chew through a 100 page manual. Ah, such joyful era. How I miss it.

Also RPG Codex: what the fuck, 2 sentences of race description? Are you nuts?

 

[santino27]

RPG Codex: Oh, the good old days, when to play the game you were required to chew through a 100 page manual. Ah, such joyful era. How I miss it.

Also RPG Codex: what the fuck, 2 sentences of race description? Are you nuts?

That's a bit of a specious argument though. Nobody's* complaining about reading 2 sentences of race description. (Hell, Kingmaker has them too.) They're complaining that a lot of the text dumps in POE got in the way of actual character and story.

*other than kyl, and I agree with 2house2fly that the lore dumps were rarely about races/classes and more about 'here's the history of everything that ever happened anywhere.'

 

[Beastro]

RPG Codex: Oh, the good old days, when to play the game you were required to chew through a 100 page manual. Ah, such joyful era. How I miss it.

Also RPG Codex: what the fuck, 2 sentences of race description? Are you nuts?

There's a difference between the joy of readinf Arcanums manual and how it goes into detail about suchs and having all of that that was kept in the manual and hinted elsewhere shoved into the game.

Play the game to discover that wizards fuck with trains; read the manual to learn exactly why.

POE instead has dialogue akin to you running into NPCs who randomly decide to explain the natural and supernatural little experiments the manual contains.

 

[Quillon]

Play the game to discover that wizards fuck with trains; read the manual to learn exactly why.

Why do wizards fuck with trains?

 

[Beastro]

Play the game to discover that wizards fuck with trains; read the manual to learn exactly why.

Why do wizards fuck with trains?

Because trains run on natural law and wzards supernatural magic distrupts natural law.

The game mentions it and there's consequences due to it, but doesn't go into the details as to why it happens, which comes down to magic being an unnatural force which makes the two exclusive.

Makes me wish I'd gone through it before my first playthrough of Arcanum.

 

[MRY]

RPG Codex: Oh, the good old days, when to play the game you were required to chew through a 100 page manual. Ah, such joyful era. How I miss it.

Also RPG Codex: what the fuck, 2 sentences of race description? Are you nuts?

My problem is a little different. It's not two sentences of race description, it's the huge swaths of text throughout an entire game spent trying to confuse the fact that fa'lakthjjavu'k'q't'ians are actually dwarves, so that if you actual engage with the story sufficiently to care, you are left with dwarves whose name you can't pronounce, and if you don't put in the effort, you are left with a pointer you can't pronounce pointing to a value you can't detect.

There's a further problem that most not-quite-Tolkien settings are like the manuscript in A Canticle for Liebowitz where the monks "embellish" mechanical diagrams to "make them more interesting," thus making them nonsensical. (Maybe I'm misremembering the book; it's been many years.) As I've written about in connection with FG, cultural symbols tend to fit together a certain way, and if you just want to do, "They're like dwarves only rather than having deep love of their ancestral homelands, from which they have been wrongfully evicted, they love to explore, and also they're Inuits," then while I admire the plagiarism of Tad Williams, whose Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn I too found inspirational, I think you've kind of screwed up Tolkien's gloss on Northern folklore. (Hint: the dwarven diaspora is not because diaspora peoples love exploration.)

I have no objection to the wacky Planescape factions and races, which are great, because first of all they are not ~dwarves, and second, the setting is deliberately a quilt, and third, even being a quilt, some real effort went into make it fit together with its own laws. Sufficient distance from Tolkien makes me intrigued.

Again, my objection is not that I don't want to read your complicated petition, it's that I don't want to read and puzzle over your petition only to discover it's an "overrule such-and-such" that has added nothing other than distractions and obfuscations.

That said, it's not fair for me to pick on POE, because I didn't get past the campfire scene at the start, as the setting's names, the starting scenario, and the boring to-do list expectations on me were so off-putting that I was unwilling to try to overcome my computer's poor performance. Everyone says it gets way better, so the flaw is with me, not the game.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

RPG Codex: Oh, the good old days, when to play the game you were required to chew through a 100 page manual. Ah, such joyful era. How I miss it.

Also RPG Codex: what the fuck, 2 sentences of race description? Are you nuts?

My problem is a little different. It's not two sentences of race description, it's the huge swaths of text throughout an entire game spent trying to confuse the fact that fa'lakthjjavu'k'q't'ians are actually dwarves, so that if you actual engage with the story sufficiently to care, you are left with dwarves whose name you can't pronounce, and if you don't put in the effort, you are left with a pointer you can't pronounce pointing to a value you can't detect.

There's a further problem that most not-quite-Tolkien settings are like the manuscript in A Canticle for Liebowitz where the monks "embellish" mechanical diagrams to "make them more interesting," thus making them nonsensical. (Maybe I'm misremembering the book; it's been many years.) As I've written about in connection with FG, cultural symbols tend to fit together a certain way, and if you just want to do, "They're like dwarves only rather than having deep love of their ancestral homelands, from which they have been wrongfully evicted, they love to explore, and also they're Inuits," then while I admire the plagiarism of Tad Williams, whose Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn I too found inspirational, I think you've kind of screwed up Tolkien's gloss on Northern folklore. (Hint: the dwarven diaspora is not because diaspora peoples love exploration.)

I have no objection to the wacky Planescape factions and races, which are great, because first of all they are not ~dwarves, and second, the setting is deliberately a quilt, and third, even being a quilt, some real effort went into make it fit together with its own laws. Sufficient distance from Tolkien makes me intrigued.

Again, my objection is not that I don't want to read your complicated petition, it's that I don't want to read and puzzle over your petition only to discover it's an "overrule such-and-such" that has added nothing other than distractions and obfuscations.

That said, it's not fair for me to pick on POE, because I didn't get past the campfire scene at the start, as the setting's names, the starting scenario, and the boring to-do list expectations on me were so off-putting that I was unwilling to try to overcome my computer's poor performance. Everyone says it gets way better, so the flaw is with me, not the game.

No, I get the argument that it adds extra workload and effort on the developers, for a benefit that at best is barely tangible.

But I can't agree at all that it requires similar effort from the player. The races are still Tolkenian types. And we are all familiar with those types, to such an extent that we instinctively recognize them, regardless what the name is.

Small and quick dude is a hobbit , small and strong dude is a dwarf, strong and tall dude is an orc, average but resilient dude is human, charismatic but kind of gay is an elf. You can name them however you like and people will effortlessly recognize the type.

Admittedly there are things in Pillars that were simply, plainly stupid. Fampyr instead of vampire? Just don't.

But overall I have to commend Sawyers herculean efforts to have a world that has its own distinct linguistic footprint. Even if it sometimes produces complete sillyness.

Best example is probably Deadfire, where NPCs from foreign cultures occasionally slip up and use terms from their native tongue. At first it feels absolutely ridiculous - multilingual people just don't do that, ever. They will stumble, they will pause, but nobody just effortlessly mixes up languages without missing a bit. But stupid as it is, it eventually grows on you and makes the world feel more colorful and vibrant and alive. A lot of players loved it and many of these expressions became a bit of Deadfire memes.

 

[santino27]

many of these expressions became a bit of Deadfire memes.

I feel like they become memes because they're so ridiculous and out of place. It's a case of them laughing at the game not with it. Maybe that's just my take though... I have to admit I haven't dived too deeply into Deadfire-friendly waters like (presumably) the obsidian boards.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

many of these expressions became a bit of Deadfire memes.

I feel like they become memes because they're so ridiculous and out of place. It's a case of them laughing at the game not with it. Maybe that's just my take though... I have to admit I haven't dived too deeply into Deadfire-friendly waters like (presumably) the obsidian boards.

Don't be such a postenago.

Seriously though, you might be right, I can't speak for other people, but my impression was that reception of this stuff was very positive. It's completely, utterly stupid, but it does the job it was meant to do.

 

[Quillon]

I didn't like when Josh changed "per complanca" to "per complancanet", first version was rolling off the tongue a lot easier

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah that's another thing, many of those phrases are quite catchy.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I'll happily read walls of text all day—I didn't even dislike Pillars—but there's something to be said for economy of effort.

Here’s my gripe in a (very large) nutshell: normally when you work with an incredibly derivative setting like Eora, it has some upsides. It may be boring, but it’s also familiar and easy for the audience to connect with. MRY puts it better than I could: when we see an elf or a dwarf, we think we know what they signify. When you make changes (“actually some of our dwarves live like the Inuit,” or “actually most of our elves live right alongside humans except for some backwards holdouts in the forest,” or “we call our halflings Orlans and they’re an oppressed minority”) these symbols don’t resonate with the audience the same way.

POE has lots of these minor differences that cut against the feeling of familiarity. They’re not really large enough to make the world feel distinct, but they create enough unfamiliarity that it’s alienating for the player. Orlans aren’t quite halflings and Rauatai aren’t much like orcs, even as they serve the same function in terms of gameplay. Everything is written in Welsh. You’ve got your normal wood elves camped in the forest, but your only elvish companion reveals that for the most part his people are no longer culturally distinct from humans—what’s the point? Rather than a medieval world it’s a late renaissance world. What does this stuff bring to the table, other than primitive firearms (which could easily be finessed into your standard late medieval fantasy setting)?

It’s like Obsidian wanted to put its own stamp on everything without changing it too much. I think it would’ve been easier to immerse yourself in the world—and the story—if they’d simply leaned into some of these stock fantasy cliches rather than trying to hold them at arm’s length. Or they could’ve tried to make something genuinely different (one reason Deadfire is an improvement).

That said, I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing for rigid adherence to some really tired old tropes. I love weird settings. Just looking at Obsidian’s recent output, Tyranny does a much better job with its setting. But POE falls into a kind of worldbuilding uncanny valley.

If you want to create a setting that’s “the same but different,” you take the Arcanum route: make a bog standard fantasy world with one very big difference, not scores of little ones. That way you get the benefit of both familiarity and novelty: elves are still elves, dwarves are still dwarves, gnomes are still gnomes, but the context is different.

 

[aweigh]

tldr: PoE is second-hand d&d and feels like it.

 

[Sacred82]

PoE's problem is it dips in its toes without getting its feet wet. You have Silly Elves and Silly Dwarves, you wanna go deeper down that rabbit hole. Make it crazy. Make it fun. Don't be like 'ok so we've got the elves and dwarves box checked, now it's time to get all srs'. But it was a fanservice product to begin with so this kind of thing is par for the course, not a strong vision.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

tldr: PoE is second-hand d&d and feels like it.

Honestly, PoE would be better if it were second-hand d&d (that’s pretty much Pathfinder and it’s great). PoE tries to improve on d&d—the thinking man’s Faerun—but ends up being too clever by half.

 

[Moth Man]

tldr: PoE is second-hand d&d and feels like it.

Honestly, PoE would be better if it were second-hand d&d (that’s pretty much Pathfinder and it’s great). PoE tries to improve on d&d—the thinking man’s Faerun—but ends up being too clever by half.

To be honest Pathfinder also has a problem with an obsession with novelty, which has made the setting fairly incoherent. People playing Kingmaker presumably haven't run into that because it focuses on one of the most straightforward parts of the setting, but I remember playing the tabletop game and realising it was probably best just to homebrew.

 

[FreeKaner]

PoE setting is one foot in D&D unable to leave and other foot is trying to find a flat surface to stand on. It would be better if they just made a generic Tolkien-derivative or made something actually unique (low fantasy Renaissance with occult, superstition etc.)

 

[AwesomeButton]

In many (quite many) instances PoE is at odds with what Josh wanted to do, and instead of submitting to the requirements he thought he would sneak his ideas in through the back door. He would have preferred a low-fantasy Renaissance setting but the Infinity Engine games legacy required epic fantasy with lots of magic. Same with TB vs RtwP, etc.

 

[2house2fly]

Admittedly there are things in Pillars that were simply, plainly stupid. Fampyr instead of vampire? Just don't.

They did this because they didn't want people trying to apply traditional vampire solutions which in this setting wouldn't necessarily work, eg eating garlic before combat or using sunlight themed spells. Besides, fampyrs aren't exactly vampires. Pillars also has dragons, trolls, dwarves and elves all present and correct and pretty much as anyone familiar with fantasy would expect them. People always pick on the fampyr thing because that's one of the few notable examples of them doing that