Codex Preview RPG Codex Preview: Disco Elysium

[Zombra]

is it possible to play germaphobic?

Sure. Just put on gloves before you boot up the game.

 

[Lhynn]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

 

[Zombra]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

Uh you know we've been draining our brains about this game for the last 3 years already, right? The preview looks delicious but there are no surprises there. Really what else is there to say?

 

[Lhynn]

The attention its getting is pathetic, what are you on about?

 

[StaticSpine]

The attention its getting is pathetic, what are you on about?

Everybody wants the game already or at least the release date.

 

[agentorange]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

Everyone realized the game is gay shit.

 

[Jenkem]

What's even worse is now it's insidious. When it was called "No Truce With The Furries" you absolutely KNEW what kind of degeneracy you were getting into. Now? Unless you are an avid reader of the RPGCODEX you might mistake this game as some sort of edgy leftist detective story instead of the yiffing eroge it actually is.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

I'll care when it releases and isn't shit, getting "hyped" for new cRPGs is a good way to pop some veins.

 

[Tigranes]

What's even worse is now it's insidious. When it was called "No Truce With The Furries" you absolutely KNEW what kind of degeneracy you were getting into. Now? Unless you are an avid reader of the RPGCODEX you might mistake this game as some sort of edgy leftist detective story instead of the yiffing eroge it actually is.

the first npc you meet is a woman that you can try to hook up with

 

[you know what time it is]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

It's one of those games that one would rather play than read about. It will live and die by narrative and atmosphere, there's nothing to sperg about in terms of stats and such (not yet at least), it's not a follow-up to a series or a 'spiritual sucksessor', it's made by unknown devs with no big names attached to the project - so all of the usual discussions, fan club catfights and other pre-release bullshit is out of the window. Not much else to do but wait.

 

[Drax]

Very nice preview Tigranes

 

[aweigh]

Seems like a good adventure game for one to play between playing real RPGs. The original game title was much better though... don't know why they changed it.

 

[Egosphere]

Tigranes Was pregame character creation as simple as you describe? "You pick 4 numbers" and that's it? Or did you not go through the creation process?

They have 24 'skills' listed on their site. I doubt it'd be just 4 numbers you're picking.

 

[Kasparov]

Tigranes Was pregame character creation as simple as you describe? "You pick 4 numbers" and that's it? Or did you not go through the creation process?

They have 24 'skills' listed on their site. I doubt it'd be just 4 numbers you're picking.

You get to choose between a couple of archetypical character types or create your own from scratch. The latter includes fiddling with your four stats and specializing in a skill.

 

[Egosphere]

Tigranes Was pregame character creation as simple as you describe? "You pick 4 numbers" and that's it? Or did you not go through the creation process?

They have 24 'skills' listed on their site. I doubt it'd be just 4 numbers you're picking.

specializing in a skill.

Just the one?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Tigranes Was pregame character creation as simple as you describe? "You pick 4 numbers" and that's it? Or did you not go through the creation process?

They have 24 'skills' listed on their site. I doubt it'd be just 4 numbers you're picking.

specializing in a skill.

Just the one?

You guys should read the dev blogs and familiarize yourselves with the METRIC System if you haven't already.

http://zaumstudio.com/2018/05/29/meet-the-skills-motorics/

You have four attributes (intellect, psyche, fysique, and motorics) that go from 1-6. Each attribute governs six skills. So if you put 6 points into Intellect, all of your intellect skills start out at 6. If you have 1 Intellect, they all start out at 1. You also invest points into skills as you level up. However, the number of points you can put into a given skill is limited by your attribute score. So with 6 intellect, you can invest up to six points in each INT skill. With 1 intellect, you can only invest 1 point, so outside of bonuses, your base INT skills can't go above 2.

Witness this (probably gimped) character sheet:

Spoiler

With 3 Motorics and 3 points in Reaction Speed, he's got a Reaction Speed of 6. With no points invested in Hand Eye Coordination, it's still worth 3 because that's the base number for all his Motorics skills.

This specialization thing is new to me. Maybe one skill gets a boost from the beginning? Either way, when you set your four base stats in character creation, you're also effectively putting points into skills.

 

[Egosphere]

You guys should read the dev blogs and familiarize yourselves with the METRIC System if you haven't already.

http://zaumstudio.com/2018/05/29/meet-the-skills-motorics/

You have four attributes (intellect, psyche, fysique, and motorics) that go from 1-6. Each attribute governs six skills. So if you put 6 points into Intellect, all of your intellect skills start out at 6. If you have 1 Intellect, they all start out at 1. You also invest points into skills as you level up. However, the number of points you can put into a given skill is limited by your attribute score. So with 6 intellect, you can invest up to six points in each INT skill. With 1 intellect, you can only invest 1 point, so outside of bonuses, your base INT skills can't go above 2.

Witness this (probably gimped) character sheet:

Spoiler

With 3 Motorics and 3 points in Reaction Speed, he's got a Reaction Speed of 6. With no points invested in Hand Eye Coordination, it's still worth 3 because that's the base number for all his Motorics skills.

This specialization thing is new to me. Maybe one skill gets a boost from the beginning? Either way, when you set your four base stats in character creation, you're also effectively putting points into skills.

huh. So 4 base stats and then 24 skills which can be individually boosted, but with the maximum being twice the appropriate base stat? So 12 is the absolute maximum you can get in any skill?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

huh. So 4 base stats and then 24 skills which can be individually boosted, but with the maximum being twice the appropriate base stat? So 12 is the absolute maximum you can get in any skill?

Pretty sure you can get plenty of bonuses on top of that from clothing, drugs, and ideas in your thought cabinet. Before applying those and whatever specialization means, 12 would be the maximum. But 12 is a lot given that this is a 2d6 system--on every skill check you'd be getting 12 + (1 to 12).

 

[Kasparov]

You'll have a lot of control over your character as you progress: directly assign points to your skills as you level up, mess around with Electrochemistry for benefits and penalties, tweak things "under the hood" with Thought Cabinet and to top that off your sartorial decisions will impact your performance in the field (or in the sack).

 

[Strange Fellow]

This is a surprisingly quiet thread, does nobody care?

You're right, Tigranes deserves better for a job well done
What Zombra says is true, though.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

You have four attributes (intellect, psyche, fysique, and motorics) that go from 1-6. Each attribute governs six skills. So if you put 6 points into Intellect, all of your intellect skills start out at 6. If you have 1 Intellect, they all start out at 1. You also invest points into skills as you level up. However, the number of points you can put into a given skill is limited by your attribute score. So with 6 intellect, you can invest up to six points in each INT skill. With 1 intellect, you can only invest 1 point, so outside of bonuses, your base INT skills can't go above 2.

The next question is: what do the numbers mean? If I want my guy to be stylish, is a 3 in Savoir-Faire okay? Do I have to have 8 points in Authority before anyone will listen to me? Etc. And how many points do I have to spend on stats at the start of the game? Can I put them all into a single stat? E.g. 1/1/1/15?

The attributes definitely cap out at 6. I don't know how they're balancing them, but given the emphasis on replayability I'm guessing you'll have a lot of incentive to specialize.

From the blog: http://zaumstudio.com/2016/09/30/design-ethos-role-playing-system/

Spoiler

5) Small numbers
Congratulations, you just got +1 of something. It’s a big deal. Six is the maximum. You don’t get 28 experience, you get ONE POINT to put into a skill. That one point gives you the aforementioned +1 bonus. You don’t suffer 76 damage, you lose TWO LIVES. The smaller a number, the less you have of it, the more dramatic it will feel. We large mammals have two to three offspring. We have one home. We have two eyes. Our numerical values are large and chunky, losing one is tragic and gaining one is a triumph. Our system reflects that.

What do these numbers mean in practice? One of the images shows DC 12 as Challenging. I think somewhere they said DC 10 was a task of normal difficulty. So if you have 3 Savoir-Faire, you need to roll a 7 or above for that normal task (assuming you need to meet rather than beat the DC), which I think is about a ~58% chance.

Give yourself 6 Psyche and you start with 6 in all the Psyche skills, which means you only need to roll a 4 or above (91% chance) to accomplish those normal difficulty tasks without any skill point investment. You'd need to roll a 6 or above for challenging tasks (~72% chance).

 

[Zombra]

Now you're talking my language. Thanks Kyl Von Kull

 

[Kasparov]

I just typed in a few examples in the grand old Disco Elysium/No Truce With the Furies thread. Copied it here to add to this discussion that things you do in the world and gameplay choices you make also affect certain rolls.

It’s not always just about the mechanical character sheet and inventory shuffling.

There’s more of an element of surprise every now and then. Yeah, you could fail something that had a “Pfft piece of cake” as the estimate for success, but this is where the design and writing differs from most other games and hopefully you’ll see the difference when you play. You could also succeed when you really needed it where the odds were stacked against you.

As to how it plays in-game, there’s an example where you use Savoire Faire (a kind of acrobatics/sneak skill) to pull off an acrobatic stunt. Before you attempt it you could estimate how likely you are to succeed. If you do see that it is unlikely, what you could do is rifle through your inventory and see whether you’ve brought along something that could give your reflexes a temporary edge or maybe you’re simply wearing something loose fitting (check our concept art for fashion tips, boys) that could make you trip and fall on your face (read: gives you a penalty on said check). Maybe comfortable and springy sneakers are better suited for that particular action that, say heavy leather cavalry boots.

In a different situation someone could have offered you pointers (in a dialogue) to better your odds for a specific situation and check. The adverse could also be the case - if you want to persuade somebody, but annoy them beforehand... you get where this is going.

So essentially you don’t have to save-scum, you might have to adjust your body chemistry, your dress for the occasion or your mindset instead. If it’s a red check you do not want to fail - you better prepare for it. If the challenge asks for a white check - you could try tour luck and if you fail just return when you’re better equipped for the challenge.

Hope this was verbose enough.

 

[Tigranes]

Looks like attrib/skills has been covered. Yes, I could pick a single skill to 'tag' at the start. Attribs appear to be relatively set in stone after chargen, skills obviously far more amenable.

As to the skill checks, in my limited experience, I felt like skill checks were 'involved' enough - i.e. you're not just clicking one thing and it goes ding or bzz, there's different things to try and you're judging mechanical skill checks in tandem with the good old dialogue tree question of how you might want to talk to someone or approach a problem. In those cases, failure feels less arbitrary and savescumming is less tempting. People will savescum if they want to, of course, but my impression is that ZA/UM doesn't want to over-worry about that and try to force them otherwise, just to encourage people to enjoy the failure states.

It's a bit different from how AOD does it with, say, the benchmark Lorenza dialogue, but you can see these are two different takes to try and improve dialogue tree style skill checks by enriching the information the player gets and the things he can try to do.

 

[Kev Inkline]

So is Disco Elite a direct sequel or a spiritual successor to No Trust Within Furiae?