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Gort posted:Yep, that sounds like a terrible monster. At least in XCOM you've got a squad to play with rather than your one player character being out of your control.
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Sep 6, 2022 13:21
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XCOM 2 does a good job of working through both of those issues, pods feel more fluid and you don’t conga line around like in 1 (because you usually start stealted) & most mission types have degrees of success or secondary objectives that often pay out as good or better than the primary reward depending on your campaign status.
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Sep 6, 2022 13:42
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XCOM 2 tried to fight against the "careful movement one Overwatch trap at a time" impulse by introducing timed missions and other plot gimmicks that push you to move forward faster than you might otherwise want to, though this didn't always go over well with the fans somewhat ironically, one of the best additions to the game is the Reaper character class, which is basically a unit that stays cloaked/concealed no matter what, unless you deliberately take them out of it. This lets you run far ahead as much as you want safe in the knowledge that you won't trigger a pod, and indeed lets you spot pods so that you always control how the engagement begins
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Sep 6, 2022 13:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:somewhat ironically, one of the best additions to the game is the Reaper character class, which is basically a unit that stays cloaked/concealed no matter what, unless you deliberately take them out of it. This lets you run far ahead as much as you want safe in the knowledge that you won't trigger a pod, and indeed lets you spot pods so that you always control how the engagement begins Yep. Without firing a shot, the reaper turned xcom2 from "kinda cool kinda tiresome" to "play to completion repeatedly" for me. The interaction with environmental hazards, and the ability to set up some of your own, only enhanced this.
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Sep 6, 2022 13:54
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Chakan posted:XCOM 2 does a good job of working through both of those issues, pods feel more fluid and you don’t conga line around like in 1 (because you usually start stealted) & most mission types have degrees of success or secondary objectives that often pay out as good or better than the primary reward depending on your campaign status. Pods were basically a solution to the original x-com's design problem where aliens were scattered and acted entirely individually. Since the AI was so rudimentary, this generally resulted in a bunch of encounters with one alien at a time that you just pounded easily. With pods, now you can ensure, it's always a firefight- it's a fairly simple way of having aliens work together as squads without having to give then an enormously complicated non-combat movement AI. 2 definitely improved pods over 1, eliminating the teleportation for the most part, but yeah, pods are just kind of an important part of that paradigm- the same way you'd never make an enemy encounter the way aliens worked in old-com.
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Sep 6, 2022 14:14
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Gort posted:The thing that kills Firaxis' XCOM games for me is how aliens are deployed in packs which do nothing until one of your characters can see them. This means that your most important concern is to ensure that you never activate more than one pack at a time, as otherwise combats are much harder. It encourages the player to creep around the map slowly, and often punishes character classes like the melee-focused "ranger" class for using their abilities since they have to get close to use them, which can often trigger off another pack. If you can spot them without aggroing them, like a few view range items/abilities allow you to do, you can see them just sort of teleporting from location to location while maintaining their formation. It looks incredibly goofy and it's surprised no one in dev realized there was a good chance players would get to see this, and it's also why they have the aliens "cheat" and get free movement to cover when you spot them, because since they aren't using their movement AI they aren't moving from cover to cover already. Which is kind of like... a missed opportunity. X-COM 2 wanted to present you as being the partisan freedom fighters(completely sabotaged by having a flying loving battleship. Let me operate out of the slums and the sewers, caved and disused warehouses, goddamn), by having the aliens patrol properly in areas they feel in control of. Walking down the street, maybe hassling a few civilians as they go, and if you catch them out in the open... you catch them out in the open, no cheating, they have a chance of getting wasted without raising an alarm. If you raise the alarm? Other squads in the area now start moving from cover to cover, moving towards your position, but reward the clever player who manages to ambush their way through a fight in an urban environment or some such.
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Sep 6, 2022 14:42
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Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is the best x-com ripoff I've seen made so far and something interesting I thought it did is when you trigger an enemy pod while not already in combat it refreshes all your squad's action points to full. It really helps fight against the incentive to slowly creep your squad across the map a half move at a time so you don't get caught out in the open with no moves left. And on a similar note, when finishing combat it also refreshes your action points to full and reloads your weapons. Which is just nice from a saving time doing busywork standpoint.
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Sep 6, 2022 15:34
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Colonel Cool posted:Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is the best x-com ripoff I've seen made so far and something interesting I thought it did is when you trigger an enemy pod while not already in combat it refreshes all your squad's action points to full. It really helps fight against the incentive to slowly creep your squad across the map a half move at a time so you don't get caught out in the open with no moves left. Yeah, the challenge with pods is basically, you don't want to reward the player too much for stumbling on someone- that's how old-com worked. Once you realize that the active turn is still far superior in old-com, even with the reaction fire that just requires 'do nothing', you just hold one turn and then rush out on turn 2 and hit the enemies you stumble upon like a shooting gallery. At that point the only threat is enemies stumbling on you and using their 'squad sight' to hit you on their turn. But then you don't want to make it so you feel awful about activating a pod at the end of your turn and then have the AI get to make a move before you've had a chance to respond. It's funny how much work goes into making the latter just not happen any more in modern design.
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Sep 6, 2022 15:46
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that just loops us around to the D&D model, where there's a split between the "roving around the map" mode, and then once you hit a "pod" of monsters inside the dungeon, you roll initiative to see who gets to go firstColonel Cool posted:Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is the best x-com ripoff I've seen made so far and something interesting I thought it did is when you trigger an enemy pod while not already in combat it refreshes all your squad's action points to full. It really helps fight against the incentive to slowly creep your squad across the map a half move at a time so you don't get caught out in the open with no moves left. this sounds incredibly interesting and I've added this to my wishlist on the strength of your post
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Sep 6, 2022 15:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:that just loops us around to the D&D model, where there's a split between the "roving around the map" mode, and then once you hit a "pod" of monsters inside the dungeon, you roll initiative to see who gets to go first That was what I've been thinking - many, many D&D (and PF2) adventures depend on this idea that monsters are in fixed formations and only activate when you enter their room. It's easy to say that's unimmersive and generally awkward but the alternative in practice is that the PCs make one error and then potentially the whole level's worth of monsters descend on them in an encounter that's either unwinnable or, if they do somehow win it, removes all the tension from following play.
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Sep 6, 2022 16:27
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Yes, absolutely, 100%. I'm just about to run the Lost Mines of Phandelver and there's absolutely no reason the goblins in the cave wouldn't rally to oppose the heroes once the first fight breaks out other than that the game can't balance it mechanically. It's a quite small area, and there's no good reason most/all of the inhabitants wouldn't hear a multi round brawl anywhere in the complex.
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Sep 6, 2022 16:30
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Which itself goes back to how much of dungeon design in both video games and tabletop is about making it seem like there's more going on than the game can model. Because if you design and run a dungeon well enough, your players are never going to realize every enemy's just sitting in a monster closet waiting to be deployed into an interesting encounter.
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Sep 6, 2022 16:48
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another bit of design that this calls to mind is that Doom has a rudimentary system of allowing "sound" to carry across a level, in order that monsters can "wake up" ahead of the player stumbling onto them, and can even join an on-going battle in another room... ... but part of level design is knowing when to place [invisible] walls that cut off this sound, at the level designers pleasure, in order to structure the fights in a way that conveys the appropriate pacing
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Sep 6, 2022 17:04
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I do think that comparing how things work in x com to how things work in an RPG is not particularly fair to the x-com critique, or to be honest to x-com. People aren't playing x-com to find out a characters motivations or express themselves in a way they find difficult without the artifice of a game or to enjoy the company of their friends or indeed generally to figure out the edges of the mechanics. They're playing x-com for a challenge. The complaint about pod activation is a complaint of the genre of "cheese," that is to say a complaint that the game encourages and rewards and therefore funnels players seeking a challenge through an unsatisfying to use tactic. What's kind of interesting is that the gameplay loop of xcom (I'm basing this off of having watched, I never played because everybody made it sound unsatisfying) of having to do stealthy aggressive takedowns of enemies before they can spread alert, is pretty well trod. Commandos for example does that, and its not necessarily the intended way to play Metal Gear Solid but its certainly how I default to beating those games. And of course its an element of a lot of classic RTS missions such as in Age of Empires. So the complaint is really that x-com has poorly executed something that other games have executed. And its actually not even necessarily hard - just having enemies move on patrol routes is how the missions I'm thinking of from AOE tended to do it, and its surprising how effective the illusion becomes vs having the units just wait for the player to show up and activate them. And of course part of the unfairness is that RPGs are responsive in a way that a video game isn't. If you have a loop that suggests players could be alerting an entire dungeon, the GM can just...dial it back. Have the monsters try to negotiate a surrender ("This is the Goblin Bureau of Investigations, we have you surrounded, come out with your hands up!"). Take a page from Wicked Ones - the PCs are terrifying to the monsters and so when the monsters realize that they're being invaded by PCs they take up defensive positions rather than going on a sally. Or just reduce the number of monsters. Or tell the PCs "uh you're blown you should get out of here." Because RPGs are not generally designed to be win or lose propositions like x-com is. gradenko_2000 posted:another bit of design that this calls to mind is that Doom has a rudimentary system of allowing "sound" to carry across a level, in order that monsters can "wake up" ahead of the player stumbling onto them, and can even join an on-going battle in another room... Doom is so good.
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Sep 6, 2022 18:02
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Tulip posted:I do think that comparing how things work in x com to how things work in an RPG is not particularly fair to the x-com critique, or to be honest to x-com. People aren't playing x-com to find out a characters motivations update: they were "not get murdered by aliens" and "I hope I don't get murdered by aliens". Well maybe if your motivations have been "shoot straight" things might have turned out better for you bernard
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Sep 6, 2022 18:32
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Tulip posted:People aren't playing x-com to find out a characters motivations or express themselves in a way they find difficult without the artifice of a game or to enjoy the company of their friends or indeed generally to figure out the edges of the mechanics. I figured that's why people are comparing it to DND instead of a real RPG.
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Sep 6, 2022 18:34
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There's actually an interesting tension that is never resolved by Xcom: it wants to be an engaging tactical game where units are lost, setbacks occur, and you come back from defeats, but also it wants you grow attached to an rpg like party of customized heros that you'll probably load a save to keep alive. That's two very different directions and you can play the game either way, but not so much both ways at once unless you're going to mentally commit yourself to enjoying a narrative of defeat and loss. Like, when I played the more punishing "long war" mod I also modded every Xcom soldier to be a Half Life 2 combine trooper, because it made losing them "feel" better. I didn't play dress up and I didn't learn their names.
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Sep 6, 2022 18:38
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I basically reloaded if I lost a dude in Firaxis' XCOM games. Wasn't that way in the old Microprose games.
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Sep 6, 2022 18:53
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Jack B Nimble posted:There's actually an interesting tension that is never resolved by Xcom: it wants to be an engaging tactical game where units are lost, setbacks occur, and you come back from defeats, but also it wants you grow attached to an rpg like party of customized heros that you'll probably load a save to keep alive. That's two very different directions and you can play the game either way, but not so much both ways at once unless you're going to mentally commit yourself to enjoying a narrative of defeat and loss. Many RPGs have that problem, too. Even in games where the PC can't die, they can be character assassinated by the system. A bad run on the dice can make the encouraging warlord into an annoying blowhard, the graceful acrobat into a klutz, and the playful wild magic dabbler into an active threat to themselves and everyone nearby.
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Sep 6, 2022 19:04
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Jack B Nimble posted:There's actually an interesting tension that is never resolved by Xcom: it wants to be an engaging tactical game where units are lost, setbacks occur, and you come back from defeats, but also it wants you grow attached to an rpg like party of customized heros that you'll probably load a save to keep alive. That's two very different directions and you can play the game either way, but not so much both ways at once unless you're going to mentally commit yourself to enjoying a narrative of defeat and loss. Wildermyth does a really good job of getting around this: if a PC drops to 0hp, you get a few choices for what happens to them and only some of them mean the character's permanently dead.
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Sep 6, 2022 19:04
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Wildermyth is so drat good and yeah it has a lot of useful things to say about narrative in a tactics rpg that are useful even in TTRPGs. Everyone try Wildermyth!
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Sep 6, 2022 19:07
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Jack B Nimble posted:There's actually an interesting tension that is never resolved by Xcom: it wants to be an engaging tactical game where units are lost, setbacks occur, and you come back from defeats, but also it wants you grow attached to an rpg like party of customized heros that you'll probably load a save to keep alive. That's two very different directions and you can play the game either way, but not so much both ways at once unless you're going to mentally commit yourself to enjoying a narrative of defeat and loss. I exclusively played on classic/ironman difficulty and part of the issue is on that difficulty you're basically walking on a razor's edge for the first three months of gameplay where losing a single soldier can touch off an unrecoverable death spiral. And random chance means that sometimes a loving thin man piece of poo poo will blow your dude away in full cover before you have access to the equipment to prevent that from happening. Which is, incidentally, another issue that Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters fixed! All of your troops have a resilience score which is the number of times they can be killed but survive well enough to be patched up and returned to combat duty.
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Sep 6, 2022 19:13
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Jack B Nimble posted:Wildermyth is so drat good and yeah it has a lot of useful things to say about narrative in a tactics rpg that are useful even in TTRPGs. It's a very good concept and core system held back by lack of content. You've got three incredibly basic classes, a few abilities that can be tacked onto them by random events, and that's it. It's especially bad in multiplayer where you're only going to be controlling 1-2 of those characters instead of all of them.
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Sep 6, 2022 19:24
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Well yeah I should say I completed the first campaign, started the second, and by then the limits of the content and systems was starting to show and I haven't played it since - but I still say it's a great game, just more one you'll play to your satisfaction and then put down, which is fine.
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Sep 6, 2022 19:27
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Jack B Nimble posted:Wildermyth is so drat good and yeah it has a lot of useful things to say about narrative in a tactics rpg that are useful even in TTRPGs. There's a LP going on right now for anyone who wants to see the game in action: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4009384
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Sep 6, 2022 19:28
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Colonel Cool posted:I exclusively played on classic/ironman difficulty and part of the issue is on that difficulty you're basically walking on a razor's edge for the first three months of gameplay where losing a single soldier can touch off an unrecoverable death spiral. And random chance means that sometimes a loving thin man piece of poo poo will blow your dude away in full cover before you have access to the equipment to prevent that from happening.
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Sep 6, 2022 20:35
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's a very good concept and core system held back by lack of content. You've got three incredibly basic classes, a few abilities that can be tacked onto them by random events, and that's it. It's especially bad in multiplayer where you're only going to be controlling 1-2 of those characters instead of all of them. For better or worse, Wyldermyth seems to be leaning hard on its moddability.
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Sep 6, 2022 21:09
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Splicer posted:Hmm... how is chaos gate on the whole "Well we lost three men and also the mission and also the town, but their deaths were worth it because the guys who bugged out bugged out with a plasma rifle and a backpack full of clips" Honestly it has a different vibe than I think X-com has. X-com very much captures the feel of a desperate resistance operating on a shoestring budget against an overwhelming foe and trying to scrounge up everything they can get their hands on. Chaos Gate has the feel of your squad of superhumans being more than match for any individual battle, but getting overwhelmed on the strategic level because of how badly outnumbered you are and the scope of the conflict. Gameplay wise it's definitely inspired by the Firaxis X-com, not the 1994 one. Which is to say all of your soldiers are quite important and actually losing a battle is really bad.
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Sep 6, 2022 21:48
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Darkest Dungeon helps to mitigate the badfeels of losing really high level dudes to random bad dice by having a few ways that occasionally bring back a dead adventurer, having a way to retreat that mostly works in most encounters, and of course limiting encounter size to a particular maximum. It is much less "realistic" in that it's not simulating scenery of course, but it injects tactical depth through variety of abilities, the party order, enemies that can summon reinforcements after losses, the morale system, etc. One other nice thing I guess is that the party's inventory isn't dependent on the whole party surviving, if even a single adventurer escapes you get all the inventory slots so you can dump treasure and torches etc. to grab all the expensive items your three dead adventurers were wearing and bring them out. And there's no total game over condition. Even if you lost all your adventurers, there's always green missions available for you to grind up some new ones. It can get very tedious if this happens and you don't especially want to put fresh characters through like 12+ missions each to get them up to level 6, but you don't have to restart the game if you don't want to. It's still a very difficult game (for me) and I don't think I'd want to play D&D the way I play Darkest Dungeon (or X-COM), but with D&D you can for example resurrect your really good characters so PC death is only permanent if the GM decides it has to be, and good GMs make that decision with their players so it's a mutual consent thing.
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Sep 6, 2022 22:06
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Gort posted:I basically reloaded if I lost a dude in Firaxis' XCOM games. Wasn't that way in the old Microprose games. Ah, memories. When the high-end armour was significantly more valuable than all but the best soldiers.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:10
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How do you handle wars / revolutions and the associated us vs them attitude that develops in societies engaged in the conflict? Do you just note that the townsfolk are talking about how close the Stark forces are getting and maybe an overzealous barkeep exclaims that the only good wolf is a dead wolf? Do you emphasize the misery of burned fields and destroyed crops? Or is it glossed over as something that is taking place offscreen and thus unimportant? Just curious how people handle larger world-shaping events.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:18
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Nystral posted:How do you handle wars / revolutions and the associated us vs them attitude that develops in societies engaged in the conflict? Depends if it's sandbox-heavy or plot-heavy. Sandbox-heavy, lots of flavour from recent events, because that's a big part of the player stimulus/action feedback loop. Plot-heavy, depends. If it's plot-related, lots of mention. If it's not, only enough mention to avoid notice of its absence.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:22
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Jack B Nimble posted:Wildermyth is so drat good and yeah it has a lot of useful things to say about narrative in a tactics rpg that are useful even in TTRPGs. Ok I just got it. Party died at the 3rd site on the 2nd attempt. I have never played X-Com. I am very bad at this game. I do not understand what infusing actually does or why I need 2 non fighters in a 3 person party.
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Sep 7, 2022 02:07
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In addition to what Atopian said, it also depends a lot on the tone of the game. I’ve had lighter games where people are getting updates from what was basically Magic Twitter, I’ve had games where it’s part of exploration and interacting with NPCs, or someone in the setting inventing broadsheets has happened a lot…. Or one really heavy game basically turned into Come And See but with (very sad) elves. I’m a big believer in tone and how the table needs to always be keeping that in mind. The tone doesn’t have to be dogmatically consistent, of course, but when you’re breaking the tone it should be consciously and for a reason. (Note : “needing to blow off steam and have a light note and gently caress around” is a great reason and I always put some into my horror games, but I know I’m doing it and it’s not just Fart Jokes O’Clock in the Spooky Mansion.) Knowing what kind of tone you’re going for is an important part of portraying information to players cause it governs both the what and the how.
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Sep 7, 2022 02:26
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Comstar posted:Ok I just got it. Turn the difficulty down. There's no such thing as a wrong difficulty, and if you've never played X-Com you need to start with just a bit more buffer because it was defintely marketed as Xcom the RPG, so there's some assumed knowledge. Infusing is like, if it was a d20 system I'd say: "Spend a move action to "infuse" an object - a camp fire, a table, etc. Then, spend an attack action to make a magic attack, originating from the infused square, with an attack profile based on the infused object." There are three classes - a Warrior type that is very good at being up front and being the person who's getting attacked, A rogue type that is high DPS but doesn't really want to be the center of attention (and could be ranged), and the Wizard type that infuses for a mix of Control and DPS. The wizard is good for picking the right object to infuse at the right time. Need to remove enemy armor points? There's an infusion for that. Need to lock down a square with an ongoing dot? There's an infusion for that. Edit: Remember that infusing originates from the infused object's square. So infuse objects that "flank" with your team mates, and then the infusing attack will be a flanking attack. Edit2: Lots of little things coming back to me. Rogues often get a flat damage bonus or something, maybe it's that they flank a lot? Anyway you can hold a small weapon like a dagger or throwing knife in your off hand and make extra attacks with it, with a slight range. You use these by waiting until the attacks will be crits and then maximizing how much work you can get done in those circumstances. I don't recall what all the circumstances would be but imagine that you've surrounded an enemy and also debuffed it to take more damage, that's the time to throw the dagger as an extra attack. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Sep 7, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2022 04:18
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Ok I got a party on the 3rd attempt able to live long enough to get a 4th party member fighter which helped a lot. One of my party is turning into a crow. Am I supposed to be worried about the timers? I was up to mission 3 and went straight to the location the Gorgon's wanted to search...and that was it, chapter ended. The whole game is telling me PUSH PUSH HURRY HURRY TIME but I finished the chapter in 2 moves? I dunno. The game's tutorial isn't really telling me things like I would expect - it feels like a game in early access.
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Sep 7, 2022 04:29
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The timers are real, but they also aren't binary win lose conditions; IIRC I also felt a bit confused during chapter one, and also highly put-upon. I bet you'll find the second chapter makes a lot more "sense".
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Sep 7, 2022 04:36
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I have never DMed but love worldbuilding. Am currently working on a very extensive homebrew world and was wondering what you guys thought of the idea of hiring a paid dm to run a campaign for my friends in my homebrewed world. Do you think it would be worth the money if the dm was good enough at it? I want to introduce my friends to my homebrew lore/setting when is ready and I want their first experience in the world to be go well.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:52
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I think that's the kind of thing you'd have to discuss with a potential DM, really? Nothing wrong with hiring a pro, but asking them to DM in your world instead of from their own prepared material might not be something they're comfortable with, especially if they'd have to prep their own campaign content to fit the world.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:55
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Antivehicular posted:I think that's the kind of thing you'd have to discuss with a potential DM, really? Nothing wrong with hiring a pro, but asking them to DM in your world instead of from their own prepared material might not be something they're comfortable with, especially if they'd have to prep their own campaign content to fit the world. I'm not really familiar with how paid dming works. Do they usually have pre-planned settings and campaign stories that they then run for people who hire them out?
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Sep 7, 2022 05:58
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