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^^^ Gotta love that old fashion phrase-based combat.  But looking at some other forum definitions of phase based, I think what I meant was turn-based. Phase based seems to be what final fantasy was using before XII where everyone dictates their actions at the beginning of a round and the game plays out who does what based on initiative.
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Mar 24, 2013 05:46
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Drifter posted:Phase-based combat meaning like what Fallout 2 was? My terminology is wonky, this thread only recently taught me about WeGo. And a googling of phase-base directed me to a strange discussion over at the NMA forums from 2005. Fallout 2 was turn-based. Phase-based is like the old blobber games or Frozen Synapse. RTwP, phase-based and turn-based have all been mentioned as candidates for Torment. I was recently reading Adam's work on the phase-based system and it looks p good. I don't know what final systems we'll seek backer feedback on tho, all I know for sure is there won't be any "real-time action!" option
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Mar 24, 2013 06:39
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Brother None posted:Fallout 2 was turn-based. Phase-based is like the old blobber games or Frozen Synapse. Huh. Frozen Synapse is loving great, but I'm not sure how great that would translate over for a game like this. I'm intrigued, though. What are you thoughts on how that would be managed? If you had your druthers, what would you prefer?
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Mar 24, 2013 07:00
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Xaziel posted:To anyone who played with Vhailor until the end: what's his ending dialogue just before you depart? As specific as you remember it. quote:ARISE, VHAILOR.
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Mar 24, 2013 08:18
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drat I miss Vhailor, too bad he wasn't so useful in combat
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Mar 24, 2013 09:06
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Brother None posted:Fallout 2 was turn-based. Phase-based is like the old blobber games or Frozen Synapse. Sorry, maybe I'm being thick skulled here, but what do you mean by blobber games? Could you go into any more detail about the preliminary ideas for the phase based system?
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Mar 24, 2013 10:54
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Planescape: Torment looses some of its impact when you remember that the hell TNO gets sent to is just another physical location with a more reddish landscape. There could plausibly be a post-credits cutscene of him stepping out of a portal in Sigil a few days later, covered in demon guts and wielding some god's jawbone as a weapon.
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Mar 24, 2013 12:33
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Shadeoses posted:Planescape: Torment looses some of its impact when you remember that the hell TNO gets sent to is just another physical location with a more reddish landscape. There could plausibly be a post-credits cutscene of him stepping out of a portal in Sigil a few days later, covered in demon guts and wielding some god's jawbone as a weapon. I have the feeling it changed in later editions(?), but for a lot of the 2e era the Real Big Powers were nearly omnipotent (or close enough) on their home ground. The listed stats were just their incarnated avatar puppets. If TNO actually submitted to some Contract and gave up his ability to hide from it ... its not a small thing.
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Mar 24, 2013 12:42
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Shadeoses posted:Planescape: Torment looses some of its impact when you remember that the hell TNO gets sent to is just another physical location with a more reddish landscape. There could plausibly be a post-credits cutscene of him stepping out of a portal in Sigil a few days later, covered in demon guts and wielding some god's jawbone as a weapon. Planescape is a ramshackle setting in lots of ways, but it does not have that big of a plot hole.
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Mar 24, 2013 12:50
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Did TNO ever make a demonic bargain or contract to sell his soul? I thought he just had a massive crime weighing on him that ensured he'd get drafted into the Blood War. Still, his chances are better than most. He's got demi-godlike powers, and is bedecked in all manner of artifacts. He's got the combined experiences of uncounted lifetimes and has either dominated or killed his own mortality, so he should do better than the random cretins and scum that land alongside him. e: So no TNO fighting his way out of hell? 
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Mar 24, 2013 12:51
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Shadeoses posted:e: So no TNO fighting his way out of hell?  MASSIVE GAME DESTROYING SPOILER - ABORT ABORT! The Nameless One's origins have been lost through time and as a result his history is shrouded in mystery. The Nameless One was once human. He sought the advice of a man named Morte, who ended up tricking him into committing the most terrible crime imaginable. The nature of the crime itself is unknown, save that the planes are still slowly dying because of it. At the same time, The Nameless One was contracted to a lifetime of servitude in the Blood War. In order to escape his punishment of being damned to an eternity in the Blood Wars, and perhaps to atone for his crime, he sought the help of someone powerful enough to make him immortal, so that he could spend the rest of his life doing nothing but good. Morte, also trying to atone for his actions, directed him to the Gray Waste, where he would find the night hag, Ravel Puzzlewell. The Nameless One traveled to the Gray Waste, to find the "Greatest of the Gray Sisters". Ravel tells him that he must pay for her services, and the Nameless One presents her with the challenge of answering the question: "What can change the nature of a man?". He manipulates her with the challenge of making him immortal and seduces her to bend her to his will. Ravel agreed and performed the ritual, out of love and succeeded in making the Nameless One immortal, but the ritual was flawed, for every time he died, he forgot his memories and became another person. Ravel, in order to perform the magic, split the Nameless One's essence in two, and stripped his mortality from him, which turned into "The Transcendent One". The Nameless One's immortality comes at the terrible price of suffering the torment of not bearing his mortality with him and he will pull tormented souls towards him because of it. In order to test that her spell had worked, Ravel stabbed the Nameless One to death and when he awoke, without his memories, she realised that she had not entirely succeeded in her spell. From this point onwards, the Nameless One's many incarnations travelled the planes, trying to gather together information on who he was from the fragmented memory of past existences. For TNO to get out, someone would have to stage a plane-shaking rescue somehow. Forcing/tricking the Power that held it into releasing him, outright seizing it... or something even trickier. He's dead-dead. And his afterlife boss is not a forgiving sort. FRINGE fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 13:05
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So like how he grabbed Morte and walked out with him?
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Mar 24, 2013 13:11
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Shadeoses posted:So like how he grabbed Morte and walked out with him?
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Mar 24, 2013 13:12
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What I mean is that Morte was post-death and in the throes of his eternal lower plane-based afterlife, and TNO was able to pick him up and walk through a portal with him, cheating his punishment.
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Mar 24, 2013 13:17
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Shadeoses posted:What I mean is that Morte was post-death and in the throes of his eternal lower plane-based afterlife, and TNO was able to pick him up and walk through a portal with him, cheating his punishment. If someone were to find TNO's soul in its eternal punishment and rescue him, he might have gone through a transformation such as the following: being traded as inanimate currency by devils, turned into a semi-sentient oozing larva useful only as cannon fodder, then if he's very very lucky climbing his way to sentient minor devil and then up through the ranks of Hell. The mere memory wipes he suffered during his immortality would be like a night's sleep in comparison to that. (That was the Lawful Evil afterlife, by the way; other afterlives have other processes, but the complete rebuilding of the person is a constant theme, even in the paradisiac planes. There's a Neutral-Chaotic Good plane that's basically the garden of Eden, and you turn into a beautiful and happy animal when you go there.) The ending cinematic where he just walks through a portal and picks up a weapon contradicts all of this, of course, but that's what Planescape lore says and if we want to answer the question that's pretty much all we can refer to. NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 13:57
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2house2fly posted:Mass Effect is a space RPG, and it's pretty much the only space RPG, so that's why I play it. I don't mind elves and post apocalyptic wastelands, but they get old after a while, you know? I recommend Anachronox, although you only get the first part of the trilogy because Ion Storm went bust.
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Mar 24, 2013 14:20
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BigFatFlyingBloke posted:I recommend Anachronox, although you only get the first part of the trilogy because Ion Storm went bust. Anachronox comes with the caveat that it plays like a PS1 JRPG, for better or for worse (though the writing is very well done to the point where it's not even comparable in that sense). Rinkles posted:Sorry, maybe I'm being thick skulled here, but what do you mean by blobber games? Think like early final fantasies where you declare everyone's action at the beginning of the turn and then it all plays out according to speed or whatever.
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Mar 24, 2013 15:37
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I can't think of any isometric phase-based RPGs... Has there ever actually been one? I think it would be an interesting concept though, faster than turn-based, but keeping most of the tactical complexity.
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Mar 24, 2013 15:41
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The thing I've always (and by always, I mean going back to the original Bard's Tale) disliked about phase-based combat is that selected actions often become impossible due events unfolding before that action occurs. This problem could be exacerbated in a party-based third-person view because positioning and movement are important. Some of that can be ameliorated with separate move and action phases. In a Fallout tabletop game I ran, there was a move phase and an action phase (with a charge phase in between). Moves were performed in reverse initiative order, which added a nice element to the system. People still took individual turns as they came up, but the "wasted" move situation didn't come up often.
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Mar 24, 2013 15:52
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CottonWolf posted:I can't think of any isometric phase-based RPGs... Has there ever actually been one? I think it would be an interesting concept though, faster than turn-based, but keeping most of the tactical complexity. It doesn't actually have the speed advantage unless you're taking out the positioning component, because you have to make sure things are going to be where you want them when you want them there. It's basically the IE AoE spell problem writ large. rope kid posted:In a Fallout tabletop game I ran, there was a move phase and an action phase (with a charge phase in between). Moves were performed in reverse initiative order, which added a nice element to the system. People still took individual turns as they came up, but the "wasted" move situation didn't come up often. Reverse initiative as in you declare in reverse order so better initiatives can use everyone's already declared actions as a template? That sounds pretty cool.
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Mar 24, 2013 16:30
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Yeah. A character who could move farther could still outpace someone, but the character acting "faster" (i.e. effectively reacting to the others) had more control over where he or she went relative to other characters. That combined with the charge phase prior to other actions allowed melee characters to be pretty well-balanced with the ranged characters.
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Mar 24, 2013 16:51
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I'd loved to hear that one spelled out if you've got it saved in a doc somewhere, to maybe use in my friends' games. It sounds like a neat way of doing things.
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Mar 24, 2013 21:16
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CottonWolf posted:I can't think of any isometric phase-based RPGs... Has there ever actually been one? I think it would be an interesting concept though, faster than turn-based, but keeping most of the tactical complexity. 1989's Knights of Legends, by Origin. Frozen Synapse and Knights of Legends are two games almost three decades apart that use top-down phase-based combat. rope kid posted:In a Fallout tabletop game I ran, there was a move phase and an action phase (with a charge phase in between). Moves were performed in reverse initiative order, which added a nice element to the system. People still took individual turns as they came up, but the "wasted" move situation didn't come up often. Does that mean people can change their declared action based on declarations or actions taken by others? That seems like it's bringing elements of turn-based into phase-based (not that that's a bad thing)
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Mar 25, 2013 00:00
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coyo7e posted:I played the poo poo out of the SSI gold box D&D games, Bard's Tale, Wizardries, etc, and I cannot recall the name of anybody in my parties, or in any of the games' NPC cast. It's still what some people like about their favorite RPGs, and focus on characters and story have definitely been on the decline, no matter how hard misguided designers try to include "emotional impact" or whatever. Drifter posted:I may be very wrong but I think there is a lot of external characterization in games because they're being sold as spectacles. As well as also writing to and reinforcing standard stereotypes because they're the least effortful to write. I wasn't talking just about the characterization, or it being more "external." I don't mind obvious, exaggerated characters at all. Some people in real life are like that, and it works well in a story. The problem is when they're all the same character, and all the games aesthetics and themes and values are exactly the same as the one that came out a month before. CottonWolf posted:EDIT: I will admit that Bioware focus on sex itself to an unhealthy degree, but I don't buy that that's a general trend in RPGs outside of that company. That started with Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Before those, Bioware games would just have a fade to black. Lord Lambeth posted:
NihilCredo posted:The punished Morte that was found in Hell had very little left in common with the living Morte. He has no memories of his life at all, other than a vague awareness of his sin and the occasional pang of recognition, and we can only speculate as to how much going from a probably humanoid living creature to a skull trapped for centuries in a pillar of mind-shared knowledge and torture must have changed his personality and (dun-dun!) nature.
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Mar 25, 2013 02:46
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Is there any chance Torment is gonna have a Daggerfall-style option for choosing what tone of voice you want to say things in? As far as I know no other game has had that option and I don't think Daggerfall itself even made that much use of it, but I think it's a really cool idea.
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Mar 25, 2013 03:34
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While the Paypal money already had them over $3M, Torment did just pass that point on Kickstarter alone. That means they've hit the stretch goal for your top 2 tides determine your ending. Next goal is another new cult.quote:Dendra O’hur. Followers of the Great Queen Sar'lavun, the Lady of Maggots, the Dendra O'hur are a nomadic cult of cannibals and devourers of the flesh. They draw power from their victims, the strength of the fallen meat passing to their limbs and the command of the numenera to their minds. Recognizable from their tattered and moth-holed cloaks and their sharp-but-rotting teeth, the Dendra O'hur have no friends... but they command fear, and this is enough for them.
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Mar 25, 2013 04:03
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rope kid posted:The thing I've always (and by always, I mean going back to the original Bard's Tale) disliked about phase-based combat is that selected actions often become impossible due events unfolding before that action occurs. This problem could be exacerbated in a party-based third-person view because positioning and movement are important. Some of that can be ameliorated with separate move and action phases. I wonder how much it would help to add a D&D-style readied action. "If someone comes through that door, I shoot them", etc.
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Mar 25, 2013 12:11
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Granting higher-initiative types a later place in the action order pre-empts most uses of the readied action, I think.
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Mar 25, 2013 13:01
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Brother None posted:1989's Knights of Legends, by Origin. Knights of Legend's combat system, for all of its clunkiness, had some neat features. The game had a stat called Foresight. It made high foresight, high speed characters very valuable, because they could sometimes see what an enemy was going to do in the round (kind of like what ropekid is describing). I haven't played the game in a while, so I don't remember if you can use one character to peek and then go back and set the other character's actions based on that. I guess that'd be the rough equivalent of having your tactical genius archer calling out advice to the other party members while shooting things, or something. The game also used character size and height well (short characters couldn't hit high up on huge monsters, armor weighed more the bigger the character was), but it was definitely hampered by all of that detail. Combat was slow and even improving characters was a chore, find trainer, eventually have to fight in the arena to train further. Still, it's one of my favorite old RPGs, mostly because it was a Christmas present from my Grandfather, who always bought me computer games even though he had no idea what they were. I've got a soft spot for the old Hobbit text/graphic adventure for the same reason.
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Mar 25, 2013 13:54
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Brother None posted:Does that mean people can change their declared action based on declarations or actions taken by others? That seems like it's bringing elements of turn-based into phase-based (not that that's a bad thing) If I understood correctly, yes. doomfunk posted:Granting higher-initiative types a later place in the action order pre-empts most uses of the readied action, I think. Yep, that's the idea.
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Mar 25, 2013 16:46
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Currently a bit above 3 million and ~55k supporters. At this pace, it looks like we'll get another level to the labyrinth and make it to the $3.25 level, but I'm skeptical of making the $3.5 million goal and getting Avellone on board. Have to say that I'm surprised that it's done as well as it has. I thought the fanbase for Torment would be substantially smaller than Baldur's Gate, but ToN is pulling similar numbers.
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Mar 25, 2013 17:26
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Zeroisanumber posted:Currently a bit above 3 million and ~55k supporters. At this pace, it looks like we'll get another level to the labyrinth and make it to the $3.25 level, but I'm skeptical of making the $3.5 million goal and getting Avellone on board. Usually there's a big rush near the end, I'd expect ~4 million at the end. It helps that this came third of the "big" RPG kickstarters so that everyone's already ginned up about Wasteland and P:E, and have had the desire for another Torment game rekindled by those kickstarters' successes.
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Mar 25, 2013 17:30
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01011001 posted:Usually there's a big rush near the end, I'd expect ~4 million at the end. I'd love to see more, but I'm mostly satisfied with reaching the $3 million goal and getting the big boost in extra gameplay. Right now I'm most anticipating the extra big boost in gameplay from the $3.25 million mark. Patrick Rothfuss being tossed into the mix also seems like a nice goal because even though I've never read his books, other people really seem to like them and he looks beard-y enough to make a good addition to a Fantasy RPG development team.
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Mar 25, 2013 17:37
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I think that $3.25M is a bit pessimistic. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjRsTwF0aHv6dFVwaTF1WTI5b24tbGxpQUdQNU1TSHc#gid=14 I think somewhere about $4M is the minimum to be expected at this point.
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Mar 25, 2013 19:00
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fermun posted:I think somewhere about $4M is the minimum to be expected at this point. Depends on inXile really. If we just coast it out then the 3.4-3.5 million range including PayPal is a likely ending point. But we don't plan to, obviously, got some more stuff in the works I really hope pans out that should help push us up to 4.
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Mar 25, 2013 19:28
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I'm thinking 4.5 million personally. PE made over a million in it's last 3 days. I expect Torment to do similar It is possibly though that Torment was just more front-loaded than PE, in which case a little over 4 might be the end.
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Mar 25, 2013 19:37
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At this point I'm just hoping for 3.5 million. Anything more is pure icing on the kickstarter cake. The game already promises to be expansive, entertaining, and time consuming. Once they get Avellone what more could I possibly want?
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Mar 25, 2013 20:24
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theblackw0lf posted:I'm thinking 4.5 million personally. I think 4.5 million is entirely reasonable. Tuesday, April 2nd is the next Patrick Rothfuss StoryBoard and he's sure to mention his involvement in that. Torment has more backers than PE did and the lead in backers has been growing. Torment's backers have also maintained a $55 average backing, higher than PE's average backing.
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Mar 25, 2013 21:20
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A lot of it is just going to come back to what the next stretch goals are. As of right now, everybody really wants Chris Avellone on the project, so there's going to be a huge push to get it up to the at least $3.5 million. But they'll need something really interesting/exciting between now and the last few days that will convince people to keep pushing beyond that goal, I think.
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Mar 25, 2013 22:18
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Great Rumbler posted:As of right now, everybody really wants Chris Avellone on the project, so there's going to be a huge push to get it up to the at least $3.5 million. This isn't how stretch goals work. Stretch goals don't provoke individual backers into upping their pledge in order to reach the goal, nor do they convert people who were previously undecided. The purpose of stretch goals is to keep people interested and keep people talking, and that leads in an indirect way to new backers and increased $/backer.
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Mar 26, 2013 01:31
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