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The point is, that a wizard with 8 int / 18 str should be equally effective as an 18 int / 8 str one. There is some difference in the details, but the DPS should be about equal.
How could they both have equal DPS when one of those stats determines damage for all spells?
1) Characters and character classes will never be equally effective in practice, because different encounters call for different tactics. Your 8/18 wizard? Maybe he kicks ass against orcs but sucks against trolls.
2) Even if they were, "equally effective" doesn't mean "equal DPS". What about crowd control, what about buffing and healing, what about defense/tanking?
Your analysis assumes a very simplistic system where combat consists of identical characters standing in place and hitting each other. In other words, Fallout.
You mean that two of the mechanics don't make sense, Intellect and Might, while the four other attributes nobody complains about - Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, and Resolve. Clearly since the majority of attributes are fine, all the mechanics of the game don't fit together and none of it makes sense.
Yeah, but they are not using it like that. Remember, Sawyer wants players to be able to build "brawny stupid mages" as viable characters, so they are treating "might" as "strength" AND raw power. If you want your mage to have a lot of raw power, he HAS to be strong and vice versa.
In other words, it's not "different kinds of raw power" it's EVERY kind of raw power at the same time.
also, I missed this quote:
We use souls, your own and other peoples’, as a justification or a reason as to why powers work the way that they do.
I was nitpicking nitpicking because nitpicking doesn't lead to answers. I like discussion that leads to answers, not circular discussion that goes nowhere.
Plus I make an honest attempt to address a person's entire post. Unless I'm trolling.
So again, the constructive part of my post is:
I had wanted to discuss how to make positive changes to what exists right now in PoE. My post detailing this washttp://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-in-combat-discuss.93285/page-10#post-3416244
Mainly I came up with a bunch of possible complications as I thought about how to making Intellect work for a Barbarian. These led me to questions I couldn't answer (at the time), so I sought answers from the rest of you. And if a method can be somewhat achieved, then the same method may apply as well to Might.
The other thing I realized from Hobo Elf (but not directly related to what he said) is that while I still don't think Sawyer's design philosophy is wrong, I think he is could be taking it to an unnecessary extreme. And that stubborn extreme is alienating a certain fangroup. The idea that you can have multiple types of Barbarians, Wizards, whatever is a good idea. In D&D you do have several options, but for the most part you have 2 builds that work, and often with an obvious main stat. Based on this line of thinking - that Sawyer's ideas may be more palatable in a more moderate implementation - why not design a system that allows something like 1-3 dump stats? Compared to the typical D&D CRPG which is more like 3-5 dump stats. I may be unintentionally exaggerating but please understand the point. Instead of having 2 builds as in D&D, or 6 builds as in PoE, why not have 4 builds? This kind of relates to the first part of this reply where I already digressed before going back to my original argument, lol.
Agree? Disagree? Then, please add to what is being said rather than just saying, no you are wrong, even yes you are right. If a game is flawed I want to improve it, or at least try. If the game is perfect, well, I disagree, no game is perfect lol.
Because doing stuff - having to do stuff - is more tactically interesting than not doing stuff.
Those fights in low level D&D that your mage can "sit out"? There's nothing monocled about those. You know what they are? They're easy fights. Because you could manage them with a smaller party than the game allowed you - the mages didn't need to be there at all, you were just babysitting them because "D&D Grognard 101" says you're supposed to have a mage.
Play mage/fighter with blind on low level and watch everything dies. Or mage with fighter or mage with ranger.
Also low level thaco of mage is not that bad as later so with staff he can hit warrior as sub to fighter.
Or he can just lure enemy to him running away from him where ranger will be dealing damage from affar.
I think the best question to ask here is what exactly would it mean to have wizards (specifically) do more stuff in combat.
It would mean individual actions of a wizard become relatively weaker, so either it would imply wizard turning into a piddling magic archer (or dude spamming buff/debuffs), or every other class becoming magical animu warrior. Both options are shit.
Moreso, wizard doing wizardly stuff with frequency similar to a warrior swinging their sword would reduce this wizardly stuff to mundane which is antithesis of what wizards are supposed to be about as class archetype - wielding powers beyond the comprehension of mortals, that are nevertheless capricious and not to be squandered on everyday shit (those powers *would* benefit from being subtler than the usual fireball barrage, though).
The good way to deal with wizards sitting out most battles would be reducing HP attrition (making the act of sitting anything out less noticeable and jarring) and reducing the amount of filler.
I haven't read the entire thread yet, so I maybe repeating what has already been said.
Yeah, but they are not using it like that. Remember, Sawyer wants players to be able to build "brawny stupid mages" as viable characters, so they are treating "might" as "strength" AND raw power. If you want your mage to have a lot of raw power, he HAS to be strong and vice versa.
I do see that concern. All I'm saying is that the issue isn't nearly as fundamental as it is with Intelligence. For an example: physical prowess in this game is going to be a composite of feats, attributes and class features. As Wizards lack the latter, they must pick some of the former in order to serve in melee. Maybe one of those could be 'Battlemage -- You have trained your body for martial combat. You can use your Might bonus for melee attacks' >> a simple way to fix the problem. But Intelligence? Things are much worse.
Nonetheless, there's still the issue with other raw bonuses, namely weight allowance. Now, what exactly does that mean in PoE? In IE you could tell very clearly how strong your character was because the stat was tied to weight allowance in pounds. In PoE its how many items you can carry in combat, something that isn't as measurable. Having Might or not isn't so much the difference between a bodybuilder and a sheltered scholar, rather the latter versus someone who merely isn't weak. The character only becomes a bodybuilder as he gains class features and feats that causes the game to respond adequately.
Blowing my entire repertoire on any remotely challenging fight and then resting to get it all back again for the next part of the dungeon doesn't sound fun to me at all.
A bit of logistics goes a long way to mitigate exploits.
Same with healing when resting - either force players to stock up (and pay for) healing supplies or disallow/limit healing when resting to non-serious injuries. Also allow dungeon/whatever hostile territory the party is in to react and recover while the party rests - only the party benefiting from downtime is neither logical nor fair.
Early on, and this isn’t going to happen now, we had some ideas that people might still be interested in. We use souls, your own and other peoples’, as a justification or a reason as to why powers work the way that they do. But ultimately, many of the ways that those powers work, mechanically, are locked into existing ideas. They’re not necessarily executed exactly how you’ve seen before but we are a little limited in how we can build our classes because we want them to be understood by a D&D audience. We can’t go too heavy on the souls.
I think the best question to ask here is what exactly would it mean to have wizards (specifically) do more stuff in combat.
It would mean individual actions of a wizard become relatively weaker, so either it would imply wizard turning into a piddling magic archer (or dude spamming buff/debuffs), or every other class becoming magical animu warrior. Both options are shit..
Both options are certainly shit, but this is where I think a different conclusion can be drawn; the answer lies outside the box. PoE's 'Blast' example mentioned above is a decent example of tactical variety.
It doesn't always have to be direct damage, either. For example, 'stacking' debuffs applied through wands (or free cantrips) which reset after a certain mount of time and culminate in an additional minor effect after X stacks, can be interesting if well-tweaked (and simple to compute in a real-time setting). A Wizard's contribution outside of spellcasting doesn't have to be binary or particularly strong, it just has to be useful and balanced; possibly short-ranged so the Wizard is put in harm's way, but rewarding and properly paced to minimize tedium and keep it meaningful once you toss your fighters a little helping hand.
Realize this might come across as shitposting to roleplaying purists, but take a squad-based action-strategy game with RPG mechanics like DOTA. The tactical depth & mechanic progression in that game have merit if you disregard the stagnant competitive scene. Characters have an auto-attack, sure, but most 'spellcaster-type' heroes don't rely on them and instead have to spend fights concentrating on tactical/optimal ability+item usage or you (and potentially, your 'party') will die, horribly. Mana cost and cooldown balance is nailed pretty well (the challenge lies in earning gold/items and XP). In many cases, playing those heroes is exactly like playing a heavily-specialized wizard in a party-based game where the enemy creatures are controlled by a good AI. If you look at it from a bird's eye view, I think it's possible to drawn inspiration from that.
A balance between gamey mechanics, intuitiveness and roleplaying authenticity can be reached... it's just short on precedents. I think that with the indie boom we're getting there, though.
You know an awesome way to implement wizards that will a) do them justice as wielders of the arcane and b) make them fairly balanced? Have spells fail in various ways, and have spell success tied to int - while making spells more powerful. Spells can fizzle out, they can backfire on the party, etc., but the higher the int stat, the higher the success rate. It even has a built in internal logic to it - smarter wizards will be better at casting spells.
Maybe somebody already suggested this because it seems really simple and obvious to me, or maybe I don't understand the problem correctly, but why not just make INT important to other classes by making the number and/or power of skills increase with INT. This could be useful to a barbarian because then maybe he could learn more skills, and skills could be something battle field tactics, increased dual wielding ability, or any number of things.
A dumb barbarian could just be really strong and swing his axe hard and hurt people but a smart one could have more flexibility. Also INT could be tied to magic resistance which is obviously useful to front line fighters so they can not be held, charmed, etc..I don't see the need to make INT do things that make little sense simply because 'BALANCE' when there are so many ways to use INT in ways that DO make sense and can make sense foe any character type.
I am of the vein that balance is not a good design choice in and of itself because it makes things boring. Level scaling is balance for instance. Level scaling sucks dick. AD&D 1st edition was so fun IMO because it was NOT balanced. increased specialization directly equates to increased tactically choices which directly relates to interesting gameplay which is fun. Take American football (gridiron), one reason it is such a compelling game strategically and tactically is due to the warlike specialization of positions which in turn leads to unlimited tactical choices. That is cool and fun. I don't get the balance fetish, it ruins gameplay IMO. I think people obsessed with balance perhaps do not even know why they themselves enjoy games, or why other people do. Balance is often the opposite of interesting and fun IMO.
The real game making skill to me is making a unbalanced group of rules turn into the only type of balance that is needed, the balance of interesting total gameplay, not balance in each and every decision or stat. A good game designer should strive for difference and specialization, but then try and give each side a fighting chance in total when they combine these varying specializations into a whole strategic plan. Anybody can make a balanced game, that takes zero imagination. Balance is in many respects the opposite of imagination, its the homogenization everything. A 10 year old can make everything balanced, that is not a challenge or a good goal to have in general, it sucks. Checkers is balanced, checkers is super boring.
I like Mangoose's idea of giving constructive feedback but as they seem to be polishing/balancing now I can't help feeling that it's probably too late for feedback for PoE. Once we've all played PoE there will be a lot of feedback for them to hopefully fine-tune things for PoE2.
I'm still looking forward to PoE, haven't played a game of this style for a while and I'm sure it'll be enjoyable. But like many here I do find some of the design decisions a bit strange:
I think most people agree that Sawyer is obviously a smart guy who knows a lot about game design, but I sometimes wonder about his priorities. He's played so much pnp and spent so much time working on game design that I'm not sure he can relate to the tastes of the average gamer on the Codex, let alone the wider audience who will play IE-style games. His comments on not liking the mage duels in BG are an example, most people I know who played a bit of BG seemed to have fun with them, a designer like Sawyer looking in detail at possible system flaws and the effectiveness of different builds would probably view them differently.
I have to agree with Hobo Elf here, this whole debate on the Intellect / Might attribute obviously stems from his fixation with making viable builds of 'smart but relatively weak' fighters and 'physically strong but mentally deficient' wizards. So we end up with might affecting spells and intellect affecting all AoEs. Is enabling someone to play a retarded bodybuilding mage and not feel underpowered worth ending up with a system like this? Just because a couple of people in his pnp sessions wanted the build?
I'm sure there are other ways to make an INT Barbarian "viable" if it really had to be done, not that I'm bothered with sub-optimal characters anyway if I insist on designing them that way. It's too late to change PoE but a few random ideas:
- There's the option of intellect affecting weapon specialisation and skills, as you can quickly mentally adapt to different fighting styles. Have a very low int fighter? Chances are he's going to go through most of the game just with his battle axes or face penalties with other weapons. Meanwhile a 'smart' fighter with more focus on intellect than strength could master many weapons quickly, easily load and use different missile weapons and would be the goto guy when you need to use eg: a halberd with huge bonuses against dragons. Yes, this would mean a more detailed weapon specialisation system than PoE currently has.
- It could also make sense for Intellect to help you level-up slightly quicker, as you learn new skills faster.
- PoE and many other systems make mental abilities relevant for defense against magical charm/domination or psy attacks. So using Intellect as a dump stat would mean you often ended up fighting your own barbarian. PoE already does this as intellect affects will, just mentioning it in terms of the 'dump stat' argument.
I don't have much sympathy for the idea of a physically strong, mentally challenged character who decides to become a wizard. Let him become a pack animal with a couple of spells who swings a quarterstaff quite powerfully. But even there you could perhaps have a school of spells which take a physical toll on the body and require a minimum amount of strength to start with. (eg: necromancy spells, maybe each cast would drain a few points from strength/might until rest).
These are just a couple of random ideas of the top of my head, not saying they're perfect. I just really can't understand how this current system is favoured by someone like Sawyer. I guess his system is clean and balanced in a mathematical / structural sense, with everything affecting the same number of stats, every possible character equally awesome. Perhaps that was the priority.
I should have read this post before I wrote mine above, it says exactly what I was thinking but better. One thing I DO agree on with JS is that I hated the BG2 mage duals, I could not finish the game because of them in fact, I stopped playing and have not gone back. I dislike almost every high level RPG experience I have ever had, mostly because magic weapons, spells, arrows armor etc. become tedious and mundane trash you have constantly micromanage. You lose all sense of wonder or specialness. Finding treasure and opening chests should not feel like dumpster diving, and every high level RPG I have ever played ends up feeling like this..
They aren't mutually exclusive, and ideally a single-player crpg should have build options for both.
I refuse to play unfinished products, so I can't comment on what the PoE mage combat is actually like, but one thing that is sometimes overlooked is the enormity of the difference between a single player controlling an entire party v a group of players controlling one character each in a PnP session. It's not necessarily a problem in a single player crpg for fighters to have no options other than auto-attack + meatshield positioning, so long as the player always has options and challenges. Now I'm not arguing for a return to IE fighters, but it's worth emphasising that this is in no way comparable to a game (computer or PnP) where you're only controlling one character.
I don't play BG2 thinking 'oh no, here's some boring fighter non-options, oh goody some fun mage options, damn my thief isn't pulling his weight in combat..). So long as one of my characters has options and challenge, that has largely the same effect as all of them having it. It doesn't matter that my thief is useless in most fights until dualled - because I control the whole party, weakening the party's combat effectiveness in return for greatly increasing its non-combat flexibility, is the kind of tradeoff that I want to be considering.
Obviously for the purposes of encouraging tactical combat, having each character be capable of complex actions is preferable. But my strategic unit is always the party as a whole. One of the things I really liked about the IE games (and the Wizardry series) is that creating a strong party often required a sub-optimal party structure earlier on - you'd get to judge how many characters to dual-class, knowing each one will be a powerhouse eventually, but that you'll lose their functionality for some time (which you might then cover with a multiclass, sacrificing long-term power for party utility). This makes balancing different party styles more important than balancing different classes - a class only exists as one piece of my party build, but I need to feel like I'm making strategic choices about whether to go melee-heavy or magic-heavy, to use a character that can swing between multiple backup roles or to use that slot for an extra 'primary role', combat v non-combat utility, front-loaded damage v dps, etc.
One part of that should be the choice of whether to build a party in which everyone contributes to every encounter, or to take a party build in which the individuals with the appropriate skills for that encounter carry the others. This is another flexibility v power tradeoff - it's also a decision about whether you want hard counters, but by letting the player choose, those like Roguey who think that any hard counter is terrible can choose against it.
I think people are significantly exagerrating the importance of the issue, though - especially those on the 'mages should always have a backup combat ability' side. Just because one character in your party has few options in an encounter, that doesn't mean that the party itself has few options - a party with a mage that sits out of the fight is essentially the same, in terms of gameplay, as a party in which the mage can constantly deal out a low-damage ability (as the monster's hp will need to be adjusted to take account of the extra dps). Sawyer himself seems to overlook the fact that you're playing the party, not the individual characters, as do most other developers (and even many Codexers) - perhaps it's been so long since PC-oriented crpgs (in which the controls encourage 6-8 person parties) have been a regular product that we've forgotten what it's like to play them.
But why not let the player choose? Have one class/build that has that backup dps ability, but in return they have slightly less spike damage, and less access to encounter-dominating spells (AoE root/snare/save-or-die, hard counters, etc). Have another class/build that has to factor in the risk of being out of mana/spells at an inopportune time, and consequently sits in reserve for many combats, in return for having greater access to devastating-but-costly spells and a bonus to non-combat functionality. Even gives you a multifaceted strategic choice - the former will have a greater total combat contribution over the course of the game, so it's combat v non-combat utility, while simultaneously providing a dps v spike choice (are you trying to win by doing the most damage, or instead by limiting the enemy's opportunity to do damage (by having the option of taking the most dangerous enemy out of the encounter very early) hence putting less strain on your healers, possibly so you can gamble on a party with less healing functionality in return for an extra dps or non-combat function.
But the wizard doing something is not the player doing something. A player should only need characters to do the really useful stuff, not have all the characters do "fairly useful stuff" all of the time. That really is a beauty of a RtwP game as you don't have to give everyone new orders all rounds. Have everyone fullfill their share, fullfill their role.
I am worried that forcing in everyone to be able to make equal contributions all of the time would only be bland and boring. Soon they all do the same stuff, only by different name.
Who said anything about equal? Pillars of Eternity is actually being explicitly designed with a notion of classes that can developed to be more passive or active.
But none of them will feel as shitty as low level wizards in a kobold dungeon crawl. (Or low level AD&D characters in general, TBH, but wizards especially.)
I spoke about the topic. and I would say the risk about making sure everything have something to do and always be "useful" will be a risk of watering down all differences and making all classes do the same thing.
its funny how this makes me think of the strategy games I play and how boring I think they are when different factions play the same. Same go for classes, I want them to be considerably different and that the game have mechanics, quests and a world that makes it interesting having and using the different classes.
I'd agree on low level problems. Its not like there are plenty of games were level progression feels realistic. Late levels often have a similar problem as by then it is one ability/spell that beats them all.
I always like to have consequences of everything that happens, and I like split party. Forcing them to do stuff nearly simultaneously, that can be done only when they split party and two to three go to one event, and another two to three into another event.
Or stuff like, your mage was chosen by draw as your fighter on sumo tournament, train him a bit and don't hurt him. It would be bad if he would be hurt before he would be hurt by his opponent. Everyone knows he didn't fought with hands last few years, thus there wouldn't be any shame if he easily loses in the first round when he spends the effort.
TRADITIONALLY, Charisma served two purposes.
1) Random Monster reaction roll, to see if you fought or not
2) The number of henchman you could command
Both of which purposes affected combat, #2 especially.
But as D&D switched to high fantasy, epic heroes, and narratives, both of those aspects of the game got chucked out the window. So, then, that left Charisma with no purpose. And ever since, D&D has been struggling to backfill a purpose onto Charisma. But the purposes to which it is always assigned are all situational, rather than constants, and CHA has been a dump stat ever since.
The point is, that a wizard with 8 int / 18 str should be equally effective as an 18 int / 8 str one. There is some difference in the details, but the DPS should be about equal.
How could they both have equal DPS when one of those stats determines damage for all spells?
1) Characters and character classes will never be equally effective in practice, because different encounters call for different tactics. Your 8/18 wizard? Maybe he kicks ass against orcs but sucks against trolls.
Might = intensity, intellect = splash damage? Is might only "on target"? Is intellect radius and/or splash intensity? Is intellect like "blast", i.e. no damage on target? Can you target the ground and/or party members? Is it much simpler than that?
2) Even if they were, "equally effective" doesn't mean "equal DPS". What about crowd control, what about buffing and healing, what about defense/tanking?
According to JE, PoE is "combat heavy" and "all classes and each attribute distribution is equally effective in battle". Or did I get that wrong?
Your analysis assumes a very simplistic system where combat consists of identical characters standing in place and hitting each other. In other words, Fallout.
What sorts of missiles? Weaksauce, thematically inappropriate, lame-excuse-to-do-something sling stones, or something that's actually interesting to use like this game's novel Blast ability?
Magical pewpew isn't thematically appropriate, if only because it makes arcane mundane and sucks the magic out of it.
Of course, sling isn't exactly the best fit either, if only because it isn't exactly a low-skill weapon, so it should be more of a low-power special circumstances weapon for agile types, rather than something for shit-tier combatants to default to. Thrown weapons also require significant accuracy to be used with *any* degree of effectiveness, and if not poisoned (or magical) they are unlikely to kill or seriously wound anyway, so they are more along the lines of distraction/auxiliary weapons.
If anything, some light crossbow or pistol should be "default" ranged support weapon for characters that haven't honed their ranged combat skills, because they are designed to be point and click weapons (of course, skilled combatant should get much better accuracy and RoF with such weapons, while dedicated ranged fighter could afford carrying much heavier and more powerful versions of them).
Also, it has already been novel in HoMM3 (Frost Ring), can't be novel twice.
If you insist on wizard doing wizardly shit in between his awesome, then he might provide insight be observing the enemies while idling, be divining enemy's true name or whatever it is in your fluff that will give him some massive edge in combat, keep up some subtle anti-magic protections, or, yes, inflicting status effects in melee, provided the quality of this melee itself isn't exactly top-notch.
That's my point. And it is different from a sling based on what I bolded. Between this and the INT barbarians, I really don't like the trend of designing a ruleset using only numbers and theories on what might be "balanced", but without a view to verisimilitude we're seeing. :/
Though, I wouldn't mind seeing proper INT barbarians - who should make absolutely hardcore trackers and herbalists, maybe with a tiny pinch of some primal magic - motherfucking scary if you'd have to go against them in the wilderness.
Why do you try to make your argument by presenting a blatantly false dichotomy?
Both choices are patently wrong and stupid, and they hardly exhaust available options.
Why should intelligence... sorry, "intellect", have anything to do with AoE?
How about making intelligence affect damage/minimum damage (to simulate character attacking smarter and seeking/making openings), or multiplying chance of all inflicted status effects (again, simulating character hitting for the best possible effect)?
