Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Infinitron]

:balanced:

 

[Chippy]

Hey Josh Sawyer: what was up with stealth in IWD2?. It didn't work.

 

[Latro]

In case anyone here isn't following the deadfire thread

he's looking more and more rabbinic lately

 

[Drax]

:balanced:

Fuck you sawyer, I got filthy rich at vegas with my 10 luck build and bought half of the NCR farmland as a retirement plan. What did you do with your 10 AGI, breakdance?

 

[Orma]

 

[2house2fly]

He really needs an anon account so he can make posts without people replying "surely that number should be 24-41"

 

[Sentinel]

is josh ok

 

[Sailor Woedica]

That adidas top would be such a cute sporty lewk to wear to field hockey training! (You'd have to obvi change the ball to a field hockey one first though!)

 

[Roguey]

That adidas top would be such a cute sporty lewk to wear to field hockey training! (You'd have to obvi change the ball to a field hockey one first though!)

Gonna need some pictorial evidence before I click the agree rating.

 

[frajaq]

 

[Infinitron]

Context: https://forums.somethingawful.com/s...56099&pagenumber=469&perpage=40#post492075261

 

[Beastro]

such as how Nazis also incorporated stories such as black company of Florian Geyers.

The Nazi's had Black Geysers!?

he's looking more and more rabbinic lately

It's the sleeve tattoos, isn't it?

 

[Orma]

 

[Orma]

 

[Orma]

 

[Roguey]

Luck wasn't even a stat in Chris Taylor's P&P system and Tim "never designed a good system in his life" Cain was the guy who demanded its inclusion.

 

[Butter]

I actually really like multiple attributes feeding into the same ability. It makes it harder to min-max. I've done this in my own homebrew games and the result is more normalized/balanced builds.

 

[Roguey]

I actually really like multiple attributes feeding into the same ability. It makes it harder to min-max. I've done this in my own homebrew games and the result is more normalized/balanced builds.

Ancient Sawyer philosophy:
http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/3/entry-121-tunin-tips-and-tricks/

Avoid allowing a base value to be modified by more than three inputs. That is, if you have a base damage value for something, you should ideally allow it to be affected by no more than three things. The fewer inputs you allow to modify a value, the more significant the effects of those inputs are. Additionally, the range is generally more constrained and predictable for a player. In turn, this makes tuning content easier.

E.g. how long you can hold your breath underwater. It's affected by your Constitution score, your Swim skill, and your Breathing Bonuses (a catch-all of non-stacking bonuses specifically for holding breath). As long as you know the max Constitution score, max Swim skill, and the highest Breathing Bonus, you know exactly how long a character can hold his or her breath underwater at any given point in the game. Because you only have three inputs to worry about, it's easy to track everything that goes into this system. Player attempts to min-max the system are limited to those three categories, which means that non-min-maxers can still be "competitive".

Now let's say you decide to expand this system. You allow all Breathing Bonuses to stack. A player can have a Breathing Bonus from up to three different perks and Breathing Bonuses on any/all equipment he or she can wear, up to eight "slots" worth. Even if the values used on these perks and pieces of equipment were relatively minor, the spectrum of minimum and maximum have increased dramatically. It becomes more difficult to predict where a character will be on this scale at any given point in the game, and the min-maxer has an extreme advantage over the casual player, making content tuning difficult.

* From a single value, avoid deriving multiple values in different subsystems. When you do this, you have created a complex balancing problem for yourself. The classic example of this is the ability score system in pretty much all editions of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons. Ability scores affect skills, the use of class abilities (e.g. a paladin's lay on hands), and various class-neutral statistics (hit point bonus from Con, AC bonus from Dex). Every time you adjust one of these skills, abilities, or statistics, you affect the value of the stat that has an input into them. Logically, any time you adjust inputs into the value from which these other values are derived, you affect the expected range of the derived values. The fewer things a single value affects, the easier balance will be for you.

 

[Sacred82]

Luck in FO 1 & 2 was just fine. Luck is supposed, I'd argue, to be an "a little bit of everything but not much of anything" stat. Especially in a system like Fallout's where you can just slap perks with prerequisites on attributes that then do awsum stuffz instead of hardcoding it into the attribute.

It raised your crit chance... whatever that actually exactly meant, high Luck probably had more of an influence on crits than the very few percentage points you see on the char screen would indicate. Also influenced dodging IIRC. And then you had those perks with a Luck prerequisite which gave 100% crit chance, and looting and exploration perks.

I actually really like multiple attributes feeding into the same ability. It makes it harder to min-max. I've done this in my own homebrew games and the result is more normalized/balanced builds.

Ancient Sawyer philosophy:
http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/3/entry-121-tunin-tips-and-tricks/

Now let's say you decide to expand this system. You allow all Breathing Bonuses to stack. A player can have a Breathing Bonus from up to three different perks and Breathing Bonuses on any/all equipment he or she can wear, up to eight "slots" worth. Even if the values used on these perks and pieces of equipment were relatively minor, the spectrum of minimum and maximum have increased dramatically. It becomes more difficult to predict where a character will be on this scale at any given point in the game, and the min-maxer has an extreme advantage over the casual player, making content tuning difficult.

Yeah. Mhm. Spending 3 perks on increasing your lung volume for breath holding purposes specifically Maybe in a Waterworld RPG. And players who want to collect/ buy and then stash a complete set of "breathing bonus" gear somewhere, then backtrack there and put that shit on and go back as soon as they encounter anything that remotely looks like a submerged area are the kind of people who cannot/ should not/ don't want to be helped. And they also cannot/ should not/ don't want to be hindered. Why even bother with people somewhere on the retard end of the autism spectrum?

Wanting to deliver a balanced experience and being actively hostile towards people who want to waste lifetime on exploiting systems are two different things.

 

[Orma]

 

[Nutria]

Multiple attributes feeding into one is fine, but as he says, if you go crazy with it everything just ends up muddled. It's like you're 7 years old and you're mixing up water colors and you put everything together into one blob and it just ends up being shit brown.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

It's only a problem for P&P.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[pomenitul]

The Greek φάρμᾰκον [phármakon], whence stems the English word 'pharmacy', means both poison and remedy. Drugs are a continuum.