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Mr.Pibbleton
Feb 3, 2006

Aleuts rock, chummer.

Disco Infiva posted:

If Obsidian ever implements mounted combat in one of PoE expansions, bear cavalry should be a thing for rangers and druids, with rangers also being bear archers.

Monks should get in on this action too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgg_fukbvU&t=22s

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Mymla
Aug 12, 2010
If an elf druid shapeshifts into an elfbear, are its ears round or pointy?

marshmallow creep
Dec 10, 2008

I've been sitting here for 5 mins trying to think of a joke to make but I just realised the animators of Mass Effect already did it for me

Mymla posted:

If an elf druid shapeshifts into an elfbear, are its ears round or pointy?

It is in a quantum state of both and neither, superior yet not. For the elf druid, the secrets of the universe are laid...bear.

LogicNinja
Jan 21, 2011

...the blur blurs blurringly across the blurred blur in a blur of blurring blurriness that blurred...
Elven druids are actually just too insufferable to turn into bears, though. They're unbearable.

unlimited shrimp
Aug 30, 2008

Jackard posted:

What. I don't remember any of the old games PoE is based off of failing give you direct control over companions.
Maybe it's handled via AI scripts but I know in BG & BG2 the AI had a bad habit of moving to and attacking hostiles even if you tried to move them away from combat.

Dav
Nov 6, 2009

bathroom sounds posted:

Maybe it's handled via AI scripts but I know in BG & BG2 the AI had a bad habit of moving to and attacking hostiles even if you tried to move them away from combat.

Yeah, I tended to play with the AI off during interesting fights for that reason. Fortunately there was a convenient button to toggle the AI right there on the main interface, so it wasn't terribly inconvenient or anything.

Edit: Oh, and clerics would stop turning undead to attack things. That was annoying too. But again, toggle-able.

AnonSpore
Jan 19, 2012

"I didn't see the part where he develops as a character so I guess he never developed as a character"

LogicNinja posted:

Elven druids are actually just too insufferable to turn into bears, though. They're unbearable.

You should've left the pun unspoken and merely implied. As it stands, it barely gave me paws.

User0015
Nov 24, 2007

Please don't talk about your sexuality unless it serves the ~narrative~!

Jackard posted:

What. I don't remember any of the old games PoE is based off of failing give you direct control over companions.

Are you seriously going to say that you've never seen an IE game or recent RPG like NWN2/MoTB, DA:O, etc... where a companion has gotten trapped on level geometry, hung up on a monster or game object, fell behind the party, got lost or pathed inappropriately (through a trap, through spell effects, through the enemy defensive line)? That's ignoring all the other complaints that accompany pets, minions and guardians that I mentioned.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Gyshall posted:

I think the most important question - will I be able to mod boobs and anime hair onto my pet if I'm playing a hunter?

e:


Seriously, rope kid, even if you did Josh Sawyer presents Josh Sawyer's Pillars of Historical Combat Unfantastical Game I'd back it.


We still need gently caress You: Suck My Dick: Josh Sawyer's Personal Dream RPG Experience first :colbert:

rope kid
Feb 3, 2001

Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Unrelated, but Seth is redoing our reloads and firing animations right now and they are cool. The arbalests wouldn't have windlasses on them when you actually fire them and the firearm reloads are much faster/smoother than they would be in reality, but it's nice.

rope kid
Feb 3, 2001

Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Lotish posted:

Maybe after the rousing success of the Kingdom Come kickstarter as a interest check in historical, explicitly unfantastical games, that attitude will start to change.
Thanks for reminding me about this project; I heard about it but never followed up on it. I really like both strict historical and historical fantasy settings.

I was really bummed when Black Chicken Studios' Ars Magica kickstarter burned out. I'm currently playing in one AM campaign (Normandy Tribunal) and running another (Rhine). I have some serious issues with some of the mechanics and book layouts, but it doesn't really matter. Mythic Europe is a cool setting and the Hermetic lore that's layered on top is really cool to explore.

Masonity
Dec 31, 2007

What, I wonder, does this hidden face of madness reveal of the makers? These K'Chain Che'Malle?
We'd better meet a ranger who quit after finding out her bear companion was actually a creepy childhood friend who was a Druid and had a crush on her.

Furism
Feb 21, 2006

Live long and headbang

J.E. Sawyer on 2/4/2014 7:01 PM posted:

The difficulty level issue is going to be less about how you manage your resources fight-to-fight and more about figuring out how to get through fights, period. Some of the optional fights we have in right now can only be beaten by a few people on the team, and that's with a mostly-fresh party.

It's cool that they have these optional nerve-wrecking hard fights. I hope the difficulty comes from the creativity you have to put into the tactics, and not the right party composition/luck. From what Obsidian said so far I think they go for the former, though. Must be a bitch to design these encounters, if that's the case.

Also I'd really like to hear about the game mechanics around weapons and the effect of their range. I suspect it'll help Engage enemies that are farther, but I wonder if there's more to it.

And we know RK loves wielding talking about weapons.

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer

rope kid posted:

If you want Obsidian to make a classless skill-based game, I certainly won't object (especially if it's a historical game -- classless skill-based games are what I make and prefer to play on my own time), but those proposals always seem to go over like a lead balloon. The IE games were class- and level-based and I think most of the people who backed the game want classes. The trade-off is that there's no way for us to structure classes in a way that everyone likes. I have known that for as long as I've been working with class-based games.
Fallout New Vegas was more or less classless and skill based no?

But if you guys want to make Dark Souls, the historical RPG, I'd be all in on that too. :allears:

CottonWolf posted:

An incredible game, but sorely lacking in one-on-one word battles. I want to skewer someone with a reductio ad absurdum, dammit!

Sand in the courtroom scene in NWN2's original campaign.

Great stuff.

User0015 posted:

Are you seriously going to say that you've never seen an IE game or recent RPG like NWN2/MoTB, DA:O, etc... where a companion has gotten trapped on level geometry, hung up on a monster or game object, fell behind the party, got lost or pathed inappropriately (through a trap, through spell effects, through the enemy defensive line)? That's ignoring all the other complaints that accompany pets, minions and guardians that I mentioned.
In those latter games you are kinda not in control of the animal companion, since they spawn in as NPC's, but this game isn't paying tribute to those games or trying to emulate them. I must say I don't recall having many problems with summons or animal companions in a IE game, because I can just click to take control of my familiar/animal companion and control them as normal party members and it is confirmed PoE works the same way.

I get your worry, but I think those are worries unique to the 3D realms of games.

Mormon Star Wars
Aug 13, 2005
It's a minotaur race...

bathroom sounds posted:

Gonna go ahead and wager that 90% of PoE's players will not have been influenced by ancient video games or recognize "archer + animal companion" as anything but a WoWism.

AD&D 2e had rangers that got bonuses with a bow and animal companions in like, 1989. This isn't a new-fangled "video game" invention.

edit: And it had melee pets that took / did a bunch of damage back then, too! You could get stuff like wolves and even unicorns.

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer
It's even stranger to consider a nostalgia project will somehow have a 90% audience that are not influenced by "ancient video games", when that is exactly what it is celebrating.

Also, until this point, I did not think there was a single person who thought World of Warcraft did anything original in terms of classes, content, design or gameplay.

It was a tight, well-designed package, but mainly because they took everything that worked with theme park MMO's and adapted it for their own. Nearly everything is borrowed from other games. I have a hard time thinking of anything really original in WoW. Maybe the advertisement campaign?

FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting

Mordaedil posted:

I have a hard time thinking of anything really original in WoW. Maybe the advertisement campaign?
Their biggest achievement was a refinement in screen-based variable reinforcement.

Furism
Feb 21, 2006

Live long and headbang
The made tanking more fun and not all about positioning a boss in a corner.

It takes some talent to figure out the best things in previous games and build on that. I don't like where WoW is now, but when it was released, it was a pretty great MMO. They took away a lot of the bullshit from previous games. I say this as someone who played EverQuest in a tier 1 guild for many, many years.

They also took away important things like a sense of community on the server, what with instanced bosses etc.

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer

Furism posted:

The made tanking more fun and not all about positioning a boss in a corner.

It takes some talent to figure out the best things in previous games and build on that. I don't like where WoW is now, but when it was released, it was a pretty great MMO. They took away a lot of the bullshit from previous games. I say this as someone who played EverQuest in a tier 1 guild for many, many years.

They also took away important things like a sense of community on the server, what with instanced bosses etc.

Yeah, they took old ideas and made them better (still not my kind of game, I kinda prefer either more personal experiences or sandbox style games)

Were instanced bosses a new thing with WoW? I think some games before used it too, but I must admit to having not played every MMO out there and I can't rememeber if any had it before.

FRINGE posted:

Their biggest achievement was a refinement in screen-based variable reinforcement.

They had plenty of experience with that from their strategy games, so not really a new-found idea.

Also, I think most of the screenbased variable crap you see people run with are from mods that allow them to better grant them information in a method that ends up looking completely alien once you're not in the element any more.

peak debt
Mar 11, 2001
b& :(
Nap Ghost
They made encounters fun, period. Earlier MMORPGs had nothing of the fight gimmicks that are nowadays standard like voidzones, pie slice attacks, interrupts, and the various movement based gimmicks. All you generally did was face the boss to a corner, queue up heals and maybe have some very simple add offtankings.

Ragnaros outclassed every fight done before that. And that fight looks boring now compared to what they did with later raids and expansions.

Same thing for leveling. In earlier games you leveled by finding a spot with reliable mob respawns, then you killed one, waited for your mana to regen and the monster to repop, then repeat until you outleveled the zone.

FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting

Mordaedil posted:

Also, I think most of the screenbased variable crap you see people run with are from mods that allow them to better grant them information in a method that ends up looking completely alien once you're not in the element any more.
I meant this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Simple_schedules

:v:

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer

Oh.

Well, it got that skinnerbox incentivisement development really well down, but I can't really class it as an innovation.

peak debt posted:

They made encounters fun, period. Earlier MMORPGs had nothing of the fight gimmicks that are nowadays standard like voidzones, pie slice attacks, interrupts, and the various movement based gimmicks. All you generally did was face the boss to a corner, queue up heals and maybe have some very simple add offtankings.

Ragnaros outclassed every fight done before that. And that fight looks boring now compared to what they did with later raids and expansions.

Same thing for leveling. In earlier games you leveled by finding a spot with reliable mob respawns, then you killed one, waited for your mana to regen and the monster to repop, then repeat until you outleveled the zone.
I find "fun" difficult to categorize as an innovation too, but I understand where you are coming from, even if it is a completely different kind of fun than what I am even remotely interested in.

The Moon Monster
Dec 30, 2005

Can I spec a ranger so their animal companion is a giant robot animal? And if I have a party of 5 such rangers can the animal companion robots combine into one super robot? Can you do this for me Rope Kid? Because that's what I think of when I hear "ranger".

Also the rangers know martial arts.

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer

The Moon Monster posted:

Can I spec a ranger so their animal companion is a giant robot animal? And if I have a party of 5 such rangers can the animal companion robots combine into one super robot? Can you do this for me Rope Kid? Because that's what I think of when I hear "ranger".

Also the rangers know martial arts.

A Power Rangers RPG would be amazing.

DatonKallandor
Aug 21, 2009

"I can no longer sit back and allow nationalist shitposting, nationalist indoctrination, nationalist subversion, and the German nationalist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious game balance."

Jimbot posted:

I liked the Archer kit for Rangers in Baldur's Gate 2. The bonuses were super great.

For Rangers, I always thought of them as outdoorsmen more than anything. Able to track and fashion implements using basic materials found on the land. If you wanted something tracked, trapped or killed from afar you asked for a Ranger.

Storm of Zehir did the whole utility stuff incredibly well and I'm hoping PoE will take inspiration from that. A Ranger in felt like the best party leader you could have in the wilderness. Being able to use survival skills (and all the other usually useless skills) for real practical gameplay stuff. Salvaging supplies, ambushing monsters, finding secret locations. The dialogue system that lets the entire party talk was also awesome.

fuck off Batman
Oct 14, 2013

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!


I was once chilling in a park with some friends as a teen, and some little kid ran up to me and gave me a little figurine of yellow ranger. Out of the blue, he never said anything. It was made from rubber, with a hole in the middle so that you can put it on the tail end of a pencil. It stood perfectly on its own and was just the right size for 5 square feet in D&D maps, so my ranger became a power ranger :black101:

Furism
Feb 21, 2006

Live long and headbang

Mordaedil posted:

Were instanced bosses a new thing with WoW? I think some games before used it too, but I must admit to having not played every MMO out there and I can't rememeber if any had it before.


:words: incoming. Sorry.

Kind of, yes. EverQuest had started playing with instances by introducing randomly generated dungeons, which was an efficient way to level up. But they were rather bland (which is the case of anything not handcrafted).

What changed most in WoW was that raid bosses became instanced. In EQ they were on a 7 days timer, for the whole server. So people would come up with "rotations" (guild A had a shot first week, build B the week after, etc..) on civilized servers. On other servers, it was first come first served. What it created was a sense of community were your reputation - as a guild or as an individual - mattered much more than in WoW.

Also since only a few guilds had a shot at bosses at any given time, the competition was much tougher than in WoW where anybody can take all the time in the world in their little instance. We had cases where another guild of jerks was amassing themselves behind us just to make us lag and wipe. Another instance where a nice Japanese guild (servers were worldwide) helped us recover from a wipe and let us give the boss another shot (proper e-bushido, I guess).

Anyway, great times. I'd never go through all that bullshit again because I'm 15 years older now and with a job, but those are very fond memories that only Eve Online came close to reproduce. Adversity is what makes great memories, and WoW avoids all that in favor of intant-gratification.

unlimited shrimp
Aug 30, 2008

Mordaedil posted:

Fallout New Vegas was more or less classless and skill based no?
All the Fallout games are like that.
I remember in Fallout Tactics I made a "medic" character by focusing on the medicine skills, but there wasn't an actual class for it.

Nickoten
Oct 16, 2005

Now there'll be some quiet in this town.

bathroom sounds posted:

That sounds more like a bad DM and/or bad friends problem than a game design problem.
I mean I guess games should be designed to minimize people's shittiness but if you're in a group that's actively cockblocking you then that sucks for reasons beyond game mechanics.

I disagree, because a lot of people want to run pre-made campaigns and choose starting packages to minimize the number crunching while they're still learning the game or due to a lack of time. If your game has a lot of rules and pre-made content, it is absolutely bad design if that content naturally leads to situations like this.

A rules-heavy game like D&D is not really serving its purpose if you also have to play the part of designer for the mechanics themselves rather than just the scenarios and story as a DM.

If I'm DMing a game and I get four guys who never played with each other before, and they want to be a Monk, a Fighter, a Cleric, and a Druid respectively, I now have to create scenarios that allow people with little to no experience to play effectively while not making the first two guys worthless. I have to find a way to give them more magic items and what not to make fights where everyone is important. And forget using the estimated challenge ratings to figure out what encounters to employ - I have to take into account the powerful poo poo the Druid and Cleric will have that will trivialize encounters supposedly appropriate for the party level.

In other words, a lot of the rules and balancing work done become useless to me because I have to re-do a lot of it anyway, and because D&D 3.5 is relatively complicated as a role-playing system, I'd have to spend more time making sure I take into account all the numbers required just to make one monster. The optimal solution becomes making up numbers on the spot once I know the exact numbers for each party member, and estimating, say, how high of a chance I want them to have to hit the boss or whatever in my head and adjusting numbers accordingly. Now I'm basically playing D&D while ignoring the rules because they're a burden rather than something there to simplify this process for me. That's bad design.

Granted I still enjoy 3.5 and a group of experienced players will know how to make the game work for them. That doesn't really excuse these problems though.

Nickoten fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Feb 5, 2014

uaciaut
Mar 20, 2008
:splurp:

rope kid posted:

They should be pretty good in PoE. If you dual-wield you're attacking much more frequently. If you wield a single weapon with nothing in the off-hand, you'll gain a good Accuracy bonus.

People like dual-wield (or weapon + shield) over wielding an single one-handed weapon mostly because of bonus stats the second weapon/shield give, i suspect this will be the case for PoE as well unless you let stat bonuses get a slight increase when the weapon with said stats is used alone.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

uaciaut posted:

unless you let stat bonuses get a slight increase when the weapon with said stats is used alone.

Uhh that's exactly what he's saying in the second sentence of the post you quoted?

pun pundit
Nov 11, 2008

I feel the same way about the company bearing the same name.

Nickoten posted:

If I'm DMing a game and I get four guys who never played with each other before, and they want to be a Monk, a Fighter, a Cleric, and a Druid respectively, I now have to create scenarios that allow people with little to no experience to play effectively while not making the first two guys worthless. I have to find a way to give them more magic items and what not to make fights where everyone is important. And forget using the estimated challenge ratings to figure out what encounters to employ - I have to take into account the powerful poo poo the Druid and Cleric will have that will trivialize encounters supposedly appropriate for the party level.

In other words, a lot of the rules and balancing work done become useless to me because I have to re-do a lot of it anyway, and because D&D 3.5 is relatively complicated as a role-playing system, I'd have to spend more time making sure I take into account all the numbers required just to make one monster. The optimal solution becomes making up numbers on the spot once I know the exact numbers for each party member, and estimating, say, how high of a chance I want them to have to hit the boss or whatever in my head and adjusting numbers accordingly. Now I'm basically playing D&D while ignoring the rules because they're a burden rather than something there to simplify this process for me. That's bad design.

And that's not even going into how much systems knowledge each of these four players have. A 1st level human druid with Augment Summoning is an entirely different beast from a 1st level half-elf druid with Animal Affinity who memorises Goodberries, Speak with Animals, and Pass Without Trace. And the differences only get larger with increased levels.

I've found DnD 3.5 a deeply unsatisfying game to GM, because even if two players have the same class, their power levels can vary so wildly based on feats, stats, items, and other player options that it is basically impossible to balance encounters based on anything else than a thorough and comprehensive read of the individual character sheets. And once you start down that road it turns into a fine balancing act between making encounters trivial to overcome (due to, for example, overlooking a single spell a character has access to) or making the players feel like they're running into level scaling of the sort you find in Oblivion (or boss design of the sort you find in the original release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution).

I don't envy the Pillars of Eternity encounter designers their jobs, but at least they don't have to deal with DnD's particlar brand of balance issues.

rope kid
Feb 3, 2001

Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Mordaedil posted:

Fallout New Vegas was more or less classless and skill based no?
Yes, and anyone who pitched a game in the spirit of Fallout would be expected (by most of its backers) to make it classless and skill based with levels, perks, traits, and SPECIAL. We deal with the same type of expectations on this project.

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters

Furism posted:

:words: incoming. Sorry.


Anyway, great times. I'd never go through all that bullshit again because I'm 15 years older now and with a job, but those are very fond memories that only Eve Online came close to reproduce. Adversity is what makes great memories, and WoW avoids all that in favor of intant-gratification.

This seems a bit close minded, especially since your average raid is anything but instant gratification. Cutting out the insane logistics doesn't make Omnitron Defense System any less likely to wax you over and over again, it just means you can enjoy collaborative problem solving without scheduling your life around it.

Speaking of WoW infecting our favorite games, I read in the AD&D player's handbook that Paladins can get unicorns and even young silver dragons as their mount! Will the WoWification of all we hold dear never end?! :argh:

Blotto Skorzany
Nov 7, 2008

He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip
Sort of OT, but do people really still roll for stats in their PnP groups instead of using point buy? The first group I ever played with in 7th grade realized rolling was stupid.

citybeatnik
Mar 1, 2013

You Are All
WEIRDOS




Otto Skorzeny posted:

Sort of OT, but do people really still roll for stats in their PnP groups instead of using point buy? The first group I ever played with in 7th grade realized rolling was stupid.
The last two groups I've been with have done that.

Both of these are also 3.5 games that focus heavily on the rules and rather limit spontaneous stuff in favor of "whack it with a stick" and "be Batman, just cart around all these things but getting at any of these things count as a move/standard action wait where are you going come back".

marshmallow creep
Dec 10, 2008

I've been sitting here for 5 mins trying to think of a joke to make but I just realised the animators of Mass Effect already did it for me

My wife and friends still like to roll because it gives them a sense of nostalgia and excitement when you get an interesting combination, but we always use methods to push numbers to the upper end of the bell curve, so we don't end up with guys who drag down the team and have to roleplay their way around being an anchor.

Part of why that works for them is because they almost never have the time to do games that are more than one shots, and rolling random stats can make that random guy more memorable if you're only going to use him the one time. I once made a fighter whose best physical stat was a 13 but drat was he pretty, so he ended up just being the party mascot (not the same as a leader, because despite the good charisma he didn't have any social skills as a fighter) and looking good before getting his pony-tailed rear end nailed to the floor.

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013

Otto Skorzeny posted:

Sort of OT, but do people really still roll for stats in their PnP groups instead of using point buy? The first group I ever played with in 7th grade realized rolling was stupid.

During my first D&D game I was forced to roll stats, but every single other game I either mastered or played used point-buy.

Fair Bear Maiden fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 5, 2014

Clever Spambot
Sep 16, 2009

You've lost that lovin' feeling,
Now it's gone...gone...
GONE....

Otto Skorzeny posted:

Sort of OT, but do people really still roll for stats in their PnP groups instead of using point buy? The first group I ever played with in 7th grade realized rolling was stupid.

As long as you let people reroll if they get an absolutely abysmal stat spread it works out fine. I don't think I've ever not rolled for stats.

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rope kid
Feb 3, 2001

Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

We rolled for the 3.5 game we're playing at work because our DM loves rolling, but we did it all as a group. That experience, rolling as a group, is definitely more exciting than everyone sitting around and allocating points. He also does random rolls at the table for treasure that we find, which is also a lot of fun. Our characters are all over the place, balance-wise, but the ability scores are only a small element of that in the campaign.

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