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bongwizzard posted:Well then that guy was either an idiot or someone with no imagination, just play the class that mechanically fits your idea and call it whatever you want? A charismatic, talky fighter in 5E is much more viable than in 3E in part because Charisma has a slight defensive application and skills don't scale off into outer space.
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Sep 4, 2017 04:11
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bongwizzard posted:Sure, but what I don't understand about your anecdote, it's like why did no one tell this guy that there was a character class that fit his idea vastly better? Again, it's a collaborative game, I would think if one player had a more advanced level of system mastery they would share that info with everyone else. The bold part is important, because in the original example of the 2e fighter it means "the player playing the full plate/greatsword fighter will show another person playing any other type of fighter why they can't do that and have to play a full plate/greatsword fighter". That's the opposite of what you want. You want every player to be able to come up with a character they want to play and then have that character be effective mechanically so that it's actually fun to play.
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Sep 4, 2017 04:14
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The balance problem PoE 2 is going to have seems far more likely to be degenerate combos that are so overpowered they trivialize content, especially because it's hard to draw the line between "degenerate combos" and "innovative neat combos." I strongly suspect 90% of the dev team's time after the beta hits will be spent quashing weird degenerate combos (example: berserker carnage barbarian cipher combined with an AoE party heal generating infinite focus or something). It's going to be really really difficult to find the balance between "removing degenerate combos that trivialize content" and "allowing powerful innovative builds to flourish".
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Sep 4, 2017 04:21
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Balance is only useful inasmuch as it serves fun. For non-competitive games it's a pointless design cardinal by itself.
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Sep 4, 2017 04:22
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rope kid posted:If you took Pathfinder's modification to class vs. cross-class skills and removed the 3E/3.5's myriad synergy bonuses (or just capped the max bonus), the gulf between maximized and viable characters would shrink dramatically. Diplomancers are a known joke in 3E/3.5 because it's so easy to stack a zillion bonuses if you know where to look. I just typed a bunch of stuff but I deleted when I realized that I was more less making an argument for classless systems, which is only for the cemented my conviction that I want dramatically different things from a table top game vs a video game. Also is that Pigeon dating game funny or creepy? I had heard of it before but I never really considered it as like a actual game.
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Sep 4, 2017 04:24
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bongwizzard posted:I just typed a bunch of stuff but I deleted when I realized that I was more less making an argument for classless systems 
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Sep 4, 2017 04:45
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bongwizzard posted:
Only one way to find out.
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Sep 4, 2017 04:55
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Balance is only useful inasmuch as it serves fun. For non-competitive games it's a pointless design cardinal by itself. This guy gets it. Wanna go to the park after work and pick up birds? If you make a classless fishing sim I will back it at the highest level, I promise.
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Sep 4, 2017 05:36
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rope kid posted:The more general the effects of multiclassing are, the easier it is to predict the trade-offs and design/build for them. A MC fighter/wizard in 2nd Edition was actually pretty good for the most part because the mechanics just split the XP in half and the way the XP tables scaled meant you were probably going to be 1-2 levels lower than a comparable single-classed character. A MC fighter/wizard in 3E with an even class/level split was much worse off because the traditional caster classes weren't trailing by 15-20%, but by 50%, which is why prestige classes like the Eldritch Knight and Mystic Thaumaturge were more-or-less required to be viable. quote:Personally, I don't think approaching it from the equipment angle works well. In part, this is because post-2nd Ed. AD&D's mechanics don't consistently present "heavy" weapons or "heavy" armor as fundamentally superior to their lighter counterparts. You could, but in so doing you are implicitly suggesting that using anything but the equipment in those categories is mechanically inferior. The lightly-armored swashbuckler in leather with a rapier becomes an entertaining concept/roleplaying choice, not something you can realistically keep pace with in combat because the system's mechanics make plate armor and a great sword better in most circumstances. quote:E.g. The Complete Fighter's Handbook for 2nd Ed. introduced the Swashbuckler kit. You specialized in stiletto, main-gauche, and rapier; got a whopping +2 bonus to AC when in light armor (i.e. leather or lighter) or no armor; and a bonus to interactions with the opposite sex. But ultimately you were a bad fighter, mechanically. +2 to AC could't make up for the fact that leather's base 8 is in competition with plate's base 3, field plate's base 2, and full plate's base 1. Being able to gain +1 to Parry with a basket hilt was in competition with a two-handed sword doing 1d10/3d6 damage. You could contrive situations where the heavily armored fighter with a massive weapon got into trouble, but it was just that: a contrivance. quote:Once you moved to 3E, heavy armor no longer had the sense of being strictly superior. It had inherent movement penalties, inherent max Dex bonuses, etc. If you had a high Dex and no arcane caster classes, going with chain shirt was the de facto good choice. If you had low Dex, heavy armor. And medium armor was pretty much ignored. You could say, "Ah, but isn't it good that light armor is now more viable for fighting classes?" Sure, but heavy armor proficiencies are things that cost resources and heavy armor is a thing that arcane casters have penalties to use, implying that there's something inherently valuable about them -- when in reality, most classes have one or two optimal types of armor they can wear based on their classes and stats (i.e. Strength and Dex). Even today heavy armor provides an amazing combat benefit. The infamous North Hollywood shootout shows just how effective heavy armor is. It has disadvantages too, but a lightly armored person is going to get demolished in a straight up fight against a heavily armored person. I know that's not the standard modern RPG trope, but it is true. I'm not trying to harp too hard about realism here because game design comes first, but it presents an interesting narrative challenge. If we use reality as our basis and take that as a given, then we can come up with some interesting story-telling reasons for why heavy armor isn't widely used. After all you rarely see people wearing level 3 body armor even in the most violent places in the world. quote:All of this is to say that you can't really have these things both ways. Either certain classifications or armor and weapons are designed to be fundamentally better than others or they aren't. If they are, you can design MC mechanics around limiting access to them, but those categories are always the optimal categories and selecting anything else is inherently bad unless you're restricted. If the weapons and armor are designed to have situational or build-specific trade-offs and not to be inherently superior/inferior, limiting access to categories only works if the restrictions are extremely tight, i.e. more is excluded than included. Otherwise you just build for the equipment you can use, which is designed to be on-par with what you can't use, and you have access to enough choices to adapt to any situation you come across. That sounds right to me. If we look at the history of medieval weaponry, it really is largely a story of increasing specialization, where for the most part that means increasingly longer sticks with increasingly funny looking knives attached to their ends. This is something D&D has never managed well. Why exactly do I want my character to use a halberd instead of a guisarme voulge or bec de corbin again? Why would I ever want to carry one into a dungeon? And yet there they are in the PHB. rope kid posted:That is how most groups play IME, but being (effectively) forced to remake a character because the fundamental concept isn't viable isn't particularly fun. Yes, GMs and groups should allow it, but it's certainly nice when the mechanics aren't full of traps/mechanically bad concepts. It's great to have a system accessible enough that a player can realize their concept in a way that doesn't mechanically suck without having lifelong experience. In tabletop that means a helpful DM. In computer games... well that's your job! User fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Sep 4, 2017 |
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Sep 4, 2017 06:41
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I think you're talking past me. I wouldn't dispute the effectiveness of armor historically or today, nor the limitations of armor. You can certainly model those elements out. Doing so would create a game that feels wholly dissimilar to A/D&D, mechanically. Chainmail and D&D were never all that simulationist, anyway. I think one of A/D&D's weaknesses is to straddle that line ambiguously, which is why I erred on the side of more viable options. On a side note, I've studied Agincourt and the Hundred Years War pretty heavily since I was about 15 and read a variety of books on it. Heavy cavalry didn't die out or really adapt much at all immediately after Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. The circumstances of Agincourt were extraordinarily bad for the French heavy cavalry, who were literally sitting behind their infantry ranks as they funneled into a muddy strip while being pelted with arrows. The cavalry broke their own infantry ranks to charge forward, which threw everything into chaos and left their horses in that same muddy strip running up against stakes. Good plate armor is incredibly strong and while a fresh knight (as the vast majority of them were) would be unnerved by a hail of thousands of arrows, the chances of the arrows penetrating the plate itself was pretty low, even with a 100 lb.+ draw weight. Their armor and terrain fatigued them immensely and many of them were beaten in hand-to-hand combat (e.g. the Duke of Alençon by Daffyd Gam) pulled, exhausted from the muck and held for ransom (e.g. the Duke of Orléans) or taken prisoner only to be executed later when the remaining French cavalry rallied. Heavy cavalry with an unobstructed route to archers were incredibly powerful, even after mercenary crossbowmen were supplanted by skilled longbowmen. Gendarmes were the crown jewel of French fighting forces into the early sixteenth century. It took tercios and Reiters to actually bring an end to the dominance of heavy cavalry.
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Sep 4, 2017 07:20
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Fair point. My taste in RPGs has always run toward what you might call narrative realism rather than simulationist realism. For example I quite enjoyed when my players set up a franchise business to have local villagers loot denuded dungeons of all the second rate crap they couldn't carry. Is that realistic? No, not really, but it makes a kind of sense, and it's a nice example of what could strike one as an unfun restriction, namely carrying capacity, becoming an opportunity for players to gain influence in the game world. Interestingly enough, the tech level in PoE is right about when tercios might start showing up. Do the Vailians have something like them? I'm personally far more interested in the narrative side these days, although I'm enough of a gamer that it's way more fun for me when the storytelling and the system fit together. For example I really like how firearms are mage killers in Eora.
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Sep 4, 2017 07:45
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Think I said this before but since in PoE you play a party of characters instead of one, I think that would make balance easier - you don't need to make sure the fighter is just as good and has as much to do as the wizard since you are essentially playing both anyway. In PoE terms a balance problem would be if a party of 6 wizards was optimal and there was never a point to bring a fighter.
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Sep 4, 2017 07:47
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But you also don't want a system where you need a wizard, since maybe I don't like Aloth and I'd prefer to have Eder around.
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Sep 4, 2017 08:03
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Avalerion posted:Think I said this before but since in PoE you play a party of characters instead of one, I think that would make balance easier - you don't need to make sure the fighter is just as good and has as much to do as the wizard since you are essentially playing both anyway. In PoE terms a balance problem would be if a party of 6 wizards was optimal and there was never a point to bring a fighter. Yeah but in Pillars and Baldur's Gates etc you aren't making a squad where everyone contributes, you make "you" and meet up with some pals who come along on your quest. Players are almost always going to focus on their own dude, prioritise upgrades for them over companions and want them to be the MVP. As much as Eder and Aloth's Excellent Adventure would own as a game, that's not what this game supposed to be. If you make a character whose class isn't that great and are worse at both tanking and doing damage than they are, it doesn't feel good. I know you can make your own squad of faceless NPCs for a balanced team but that's just an extra option, not the intended way to play.
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Sep 4, 2017 08:18
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The value of balance - more accurately, having some actual rigor and honesty in design - in any system is that you don't have to lean on system mastery to paper over the cracks. A properly robust system doesn't need a helpful DM to contrive advantages for the swashbuckler, or a veteran player to quarterback a character design for the new guy, or a gentlemen's agreement to rewrite rules and refluff fiction... a properly robust system just works, straight out the gate. It also doesn't end up collapsing because the DM didn't have enough experience to know to disadvantage certain builds through circumstance, there wasn't a veteran player at the table that night etc. etc. D&D was always very reluctant to provide clear guidance on how to play at least partly because of the designers' intent to foster system mastery, even if the result was player frustration and boredom. Players shouldn't have to waste time and effort fixing the gaps in the game. They're not paid to be designers.
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Sep 4, 2017 09:02
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Pwnstar posted:Yeah but in Pillars and Baldur's Gates etc you aren't making a squad where everyone contributes, you make "you" and meet up with some pals who come along on your quest. Players are almost always going to focus on their own dude, prioritise upgrades for them over companions and want them to be the MVP. As much as Eder and Aloth's Excellent Adventure would own as a game, that's not what this game supposed to be. If you make a character whose class isn't that great and are worse at both tanking and doing damage than they are, it doesn't feel good. I almost enjoyed my PC+5 custom adventurers more than playing with the pre-made NPCs, since imagining running with a squad of professionals that beat the crap out of all the various (dis)organized groups you meet was such a fun experience. I do kind of wish the there was some way of having the game acknowledge you as e.g. a mercenary group instead of PC + followers, but that really would be another game, writing-wise. (I want a game somewhere between PoE and Battle Brothers, please make this)
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Sep 4, 2017 11:28
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User & rope kid posted:History Chat And on top of all this, you have to take into account all the ways that D&D-style fantasy conceits deliberately break from the historical record, such as the very existence of bare-fisted kung fu monks who can punch through armor and suplex dragons. This is a big reason I prefer design with an attitude toward balance: so you can approach character generation with an eye for style first and foremost and know that you'll still be viable, because if wrestling sea monsters out of the sea like Beowulf is wrong then I don't want to be right. bongwizzard posted:Also is that Pigeon dating game funny or creepy? I had heard of it before but I never really considered it as like a actual game. It's one of those games that's funny and silly and has lots of entertainment value and then hits you right in the feels.
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Sep 4, 2017 17:08
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Thesaurasaurus posted:It's one of those games that's funny and silly and has lots of entertainment value and then hits you right in the feels. Can I be absurdly cruel to the bird-boys? My irl feelings about birds are p close to this:   
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Sep 4, 2017 17:59
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bongwizzard posted:See, I entirely disagree. What you call a contrivance I call the essential nature of a tabletop role-playing game; A living breathing DM is sitting there to react to all the off-the-wall stuff players insist on doing. For a video game sure you're never going to get that level of reactivity so systems need to be designed differently, which is why I don't think much about the design of what makes a good collaborative tabletop game translates over super well to what makes a good single player video game. I think they are fundamentally different beasts. The issue is that it shouldn't be the DM's job to start putting fights in cramped conditions and giving enemies touch attacks, which were pretty much the "contrivances" in 2nd edition. First it's a dick move towards the fighter in plate who has now had his choices nullified because the swashbuckler needs a chance to shine, and second the swashbuckler, as a class, shouldn't need the DM to give him specific conditions to be useful or valuable. The answer would have been to give the swashbuckler a significantly higher bonus in light armor, and bonus attacks while wielding a light weapon so that the damage of the greatsword is no longer on a one swing to one swing comparison. It would have been simple to balance the swashbuckler in 2e, they just didn't bother because the design philosophy of 2e was that the "DM will fix it if it doesn't work," which is not what I was paying TSR for.
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Sep 4, 2017 18:03
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Thesaurasaurus posted:And on top of all this, you have to take into account all the ways that D&D-style fantasy conceits deliberately break from the historical record, such as the very existence of bare-fisted kung fu monks who can punch through armor and suplex dragons. This is a big reason I prefer design with an attitude toward balance: so you can approach character generation with an eye for style first and foremost and know that you'll still be viable, because if wrestling sea monsters out of the sea like Beowulf is wrong then I don't want to be right. And this is part of what it makes it great. It's "realistic" by the conventions of pulp fiction and similar entertainments. Edit: I personally prefer when designers at least consider history (they don't have to follow it) because I think it leads to more interesting systems and settings when there is some distant core of realism that the fantasy is spun around. Beowulf is a great example of that. It's a mix of plausible viking type people acting how they might have historically acted and dragon fights. The stories we tell with these silly games are part of a tradition that goes back to people sitting around a fire spinning yarns and I think that's a huge part of the magic. TheAnomaly posted:The issue is that it shouldn't be the DM's job to start putting fights in cramped conditions and giving enemies touch attacks, which were pretty much the "contrivances" in 2nd edition. First it's a dick move towards the fighter in plate who has now had his choices nullified because the swashbuckler needs a chance to shine, and second the swashbuckler, as a class, shouldn't need the DM to give him specific conditions to be useful or valuable. The answer would have been to give the swashbuckler a significantly higher bonus in light armor, and bonus attacks while wielding a light weapon so that the damage of the greatsword is no longer on a one swing to one swing comparison. It would have been simple to balance the swashbuckler in 2e, they just didn't bother because the design philosophy of 2e was that the "DM will fix it if it doesn't work," which is not what I was paying TSR for. The 2E swashbuckler belongs in an urban campaign, where for narrative reasons heavy armor isn't practicable. Like, say, for example, the local Lord only permits his own men to wear armor that makes them unstoppable in a straight up fight against anyone who isn't similarly equipped. Or alternately, if you really want the lightly armored man with the pinprick sword to be a match for a knight in full plate with a longsword (because rule of cool), then you can have your swashbucklers adhere to some pseudo mystical discipline that somehow evens the odds or whatever else. But the kit as it exists in 2E is meant for people who want to roleplay urban campaigns, not fight dragons. User fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Sep 4, 2017 |
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Sep 4, 2017 18:34
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Should I keep my rogue in lighter armor or does it matter?
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Sep 4, 2017 18:50
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bongwizzard posted:There are gonna be some deaths from nerds locking up with indecision and starving at their keyboards. Quoting this for future me restarting/replaying the game a trillion times. I'm really a sucker for details like this, like how PoE and expansions had different forms of currency like fish bones, diferent coins (and even the fluff for those) and valuables but at the mean time convinenetly pooled them into coppers. I wonder if you get different class names based on your primary choice or they are all the same for those combinations. I mean, if you get a Barb primary and Paladin secondary you get a Fanatic but wonder if it is the same in case of Paladin primary and Barbarian secondary. In both cases, that makes a shitload of class names, yo.
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Sep 4, 2017 19:10
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Nostalgia4Murder posted:Should I keep my rogue in lighter armor or does it matter? Nothing matters. Heavy armour looks cooler in this game though.
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Sep 4, 2017 19:10
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Nostalgia4Murder posted:Should I keep my rogue in lighter armor or does it matter? With Sneak Attack rogues can do some serious damage per attack, so an option could be that you want to dual wield and wear lighter armor to keep your attack speed high and get that sweet DPS. But on the other hand, I have a breastplate wearing rogue wielding a sword & shield in my party and they do just fine. Go with whatever you think looks cool. PoE's strength is that you can make a lot of character concepts and builds work.
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Sep 4, 2017 19:23
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Sorry to interrupt all the balance talk, but it looks like Pillars 2 has a mode where the camera follows the PC / group, Diablo style. That's really cool. Is this possible to do in Pillars 1?
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Sep 4, 2017 19:36
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bongwizzard posted:Someone who insist on playing a collaborative game "optimally" is actually probably a douche bag as well. This is an insane and annoying idea that I would like to see die. Using the tools presented in a game, in the ways they were intended, does not make you a bad person. bongwizzard posted:If you make a classless fishing sim I will back it at the highest level, I promise. That said, Rapala Pro Bass Fishing already exists. I doubt obsidian can improve on perfection. funmanguy fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Sep 4, 2017 |
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Sep 4, 2017 19:48
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GreatGreen posted:Sorry to interrupt all the balance talk, but it looks like Pillars 2 has a mode where the camera follows the PC / group, Diablo style. That's really cool.
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Sep 4, 2017 20:28
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rope kid posted:No. It's a feature Roby Atadero implemented for fun and it's still buggy in Pillars 2. Cool, thanks for the reply! And also, please thank Roby for adding the feature. For players like me who love the idea of getting more into this style of "pure" RPG but has never really been able, it looks like a huge QoL improvement that will make the transition from action-RPGs to deeper games like this a lot more palatable and intuitive. GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Sep 4, 2017 |
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Sep 4, 2017 20:57
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RockPaperShotgun has a feature on some of the technical features that goes onto PoE, Tyranny and PoE 2. From what I can understand, a theoretical PoE 3/Tyranny 2 would have an anamazeballs engine.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:36
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Parenthesis posted:RockPaperShotgun has a feature on some of the technical features that goes onto PoE, Tyranny and PoE 2. I still think it's really impressive that the team managed to backsolve the renderer from that example image.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:46
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Is PoE2 going to be less bleak and depressing than PoE?
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Sep 4, 2017 23:30
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sassassin posted:Is PoE2 going to be less bleak and depressing than PoE? From the stories in PoE1, the Deadfire Archipelago didn't exactly sound like the greatest place to live
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Sep 4, 2017 23:37
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Parenthesis posted:RockPaperShotgun has a feature on some of the technical features that goes onto PoE, Tyranny and PoE 2. Here's what they were talking about with the 3D objects casting shadows from 2D objects. https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/900537408348864512
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Sep 5, 2017 00:27
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funmanguy posted:This is an insane and annoying idea that I would like to see die. Using the tools presented in a game, in the ways they were intended, does not make you a bad person. You are that guy, congrats.
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Sep 5, 2017 01:02
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bongwizzard posted:You are that guy, congrats. lmao To elaborate I'm not a power gamer. In ttrpgs I usually play a Druid, maybe a ranger or barbarian, because I like the flavor. I'm not very good at the whole system mastery thing, and I don't try to be. That said, calling a player a douchebag for enjoying that sort of thing is incredibly stupid. If you have to balance a game yourself, in your own group, then why play it? If you want to play a lovely game that you have to impose arbitrary limitations for to make it fun, that's fine. Just don't be smug about playing a lovely game. funmanguy fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Sep 5, 2017 02:00
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Why is there always that one idiot who demands to be able to play brokenly-bad character builds ~for the sake of roleplaying~? You can roleplay well and play a functional character. They are not mutually exclusive. I will never understand why some dumbasses think that playing a mechanically bad character is a badge of honor for roleplaying or some poo poo. Said another way: gently caress off, bongwizzard.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:21
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My face when I realized who was voicing Zahua 
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Sep 5, 2017 03:29
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Nostalgia4Murder posted:Should I keep my rogue in lighter armor or does it matter? Early on the heaviness of armour should correspond to how much melee combat the character is going to be doing. Once you get more powerful and start finding higher quality gear you can go lighter. Rogues are very squishy in PoE. It's also a good idea to swap around your armour to counter the damage type of the critters in the area. Scale vs ghosts, breastplate vs xaurips, brigandine vs sporelings etc. Again, once you get more powerful and better gear you can stick with what you like. Ratios and Tendency fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Sep 5, 2017 03:39
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Dick Burglar posted:Why is there always that one idiot who demands to be able to play brokenly-bad character builds ~for the sake of roleplaying~? You can roleplay well and play a functional character. They are not mutually exclusive. I will never understand why some dumbasses think that playing a mechanically bad character is a badge of honor for roleplaying or some poo poo. If the game lets me pick my class and then allocate my stats in any way I wish then I can logically assume that all these stats are useful to my character in some way and I can make things work. This often does not turn out to be the case and actually you were supposed to take these stats. Oh you are using a mace, sorry swords are actually the only good weapon in this game. You didn't know that? loving chump. You're a Paladin? Lmao should have been a Fighter/Paladin because now you are a useless piece of poo poo who can't do anything.
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Sep 5, 2017 04:08
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Dick Burglar posted:Why is there always that one idiot who demands to be able to play brokenly-bad character builds ~for the sake of roleplaying~? You can roleplay well and play a functional character. They are not mutually exclusive. I will never understand why some dumbasses think that playing a mechanically bad character is a badge of honor for roleplaying or some poo poo.
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