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Development Info Project Eternity Kickstarter Update #39: Classes, Cooldowns, Attacks, Damage vs. Armor, and Tilesets

In My Safe Space
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DraQ, with a physical system you'll get seriously derpy results unless you can create a very precise emulation of martial artist movements. Also, creating an AI would be a nightmare. It's much easier to get realistic results using an abstract system.

Yeah, I like it for turn based. I was thinking it would get annoying in a RTwP context - it would basically guarantee that to effectively allocate each d20 you would have to pause it so frequently that the game would effectively be a shitty turn-based one.
You could pre-allocate bonuses/maluses to certain types of actions in the beginning of the round.
I did something like this in my defunct BG2 TC and it worked pretty well with auto-pause.
Here's a screen:
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/3360/baldr132.png
Red button is attack number bonus.
Yellow button is damage bonus
Blue button is defence bonus
I don't remember what the Green button is for, it may be a grapple.
Then there are combined uses. They give a basic bonus to stat, while single buttons give higher bonus, depending on level.
 

Moribund

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Villain you don't duel with a fricking halberd either. You also don't duel in the middle of a mass melee.

You need to figure out what character/use a weapon has in regards to a small party of adventurers and find a way to make that work gameplay-wise. The fast/slow thing is not a great way, though. Like I said you need to make it feel like using them requires different way of doing things.

AoD does a good job of this with spears, best I have seen in a game. DnD does a great job too for the games that implement reach and 5 step and all that jazz. But you can't move around 5 guys in complicated patterns all at the same time to make things work if you are rtwp.

So the best answer would have been for this KS to fail in the first place, then they come back with TB proposal. Only thing to make BG series tolerable was DnD spells and monsters. We know those won't be as good, they took decades to perfect. Now we can see even the basic melee is going to go from mediocre to full on retardation.
 
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Villain you don't duel with a fricking halberd either. You also don't duel in the middle of a mass melee.

Duel or mass battle, fundamentals don't change. You don't suddenly go full swing like Hollywood would have you believe just because it's a mass battle. If you do, you die because when you do, you open yourself up. The main difference is that you'd do with a more limited selection of moves in a mass battle. However, mass battles are irrelevant to us because in our RPGs, almost all fights are on squad scale. Which is at worst half way between a duel and the dynamics of a mass battle.
 

Moribund

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The entire point of a poleaxe is to come down past a shield and right on top of someone's head. You'd never lock it to a sword. With a spear you'd simply keep the swordsman at bay the whole time. Saxon axemen would have a large shield the sword would stick in allowing them to finish swordsmen with ease. Are you getting the picture yet that swords were not the greatest weapon for medieval combat? They were just the cheapest. easiest to use sidearms everyone had in addition to their real weapon.

You'd almost never be locking swords in a battle, period. Arming sword is just for finishing people who are down, and it's useless for anything else against an armored opponent. Even in Roman times that was its purpose, a handy weapon that can slice a throat when an enemy gets knocked down by the weight of the legions from bhind the safety of a tower shield.

In medieval times people seldom got outright killed on the battlefield, they were very well protected. It was a test of endurance more than anything else. Until your teeth cracked and your mouth filled with blood you weren't a knight, they used to say.

There's the issue that small party encounters aren't quite the same as a pitched battle but at the same time most the medieval weapons have zero use in a duel or when used on foot so you can't be 100% true/realistic. But for armored foes it's always going to be closer to a pitched battle than a duel.
 
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Also just went through the previous two pages. Reading the talks about twitch muscles, "laws of physics" and all this "recovery" and "set-up for next attack" made me give off a huge facepalm.

The twitch muscle discussion was really about whether large muscles inevitably meant slow movement, not weapon speed per se. And recovery doesn't necessarily refer to recovering from a bad swing, rather the idea that an attack means you have to commit to a sequence of movements, which includes things other than simply swinging a weapon. Slower weapons would have a sequence of movements that takes more time, even if the swing itself wasn't necessarily slower.

But I would agree with your point generally that equation based modeling etc. is far less useful than actual records of fighting techniques used for the various weapons.

"Footwork" deserves to be a skill or perk, by the way, or "Stealth/Sneak" skill incorporated into general fighting.

:bro:

Yeah, this is something that really should be included, since its kind of the basis of all fighting techniques. I would imagine it as a skill, where various melee oriented feats/abilities have minimum footwork requirements. Having different training costs in footwork across classes would be a great way to differentiate combat classes from non-combat classes without having hard, class-based eligibility requirements. For example, in a d20 system, if footwork is a "cross-class", achieving dependent feats will come at a high cost in skill points and happen at a higher level.
 

Mother Russia

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Any news on the crunch about the Paladin? Have they improved him from the shit concept they had earlier in the pitch?

Also What about emotional engagement? Will that be in?
 

DraQ

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Ancient or medieval people didn't build weapons based on physical calculations. They built weapons to kill other people with weapons.
But they did so obeying laws of physics even if they didn't have them laid out and formalized.

Given that we need to lay out a very formal system to implement any sort of mechanics in a cRPG... you know the rest.

There is no such thing as a "slow" or a "fast" weapon. Weapons are fast because people have developed the right techniques to use them fast.
No. Weapons are fast because they were made to be used with reasonable speed.

Obviously, there will still be marginal "speed" discrepancies based on different weapons of same types or physical characteristics of wielders
Not so marginall, but most importantly there would be tradeoffs. If a weapon is slower, but still a pratical weapon it might be because of reach or some other characteristic like ability to bypass shield.

What you wouldn't get is weapons that are cumbersome and slow as fuck but deal a lot of "damage".

Damage and DPS are derpy notions anyway.

You either drag the edge across target or hit it with it.

In first case momentum and energy transfer is going to be small and tangential to point of contact. You generally can't hope to inflict any actual damage via blunt force trauma, what you want is your sharp edge to gradually (well, relatively, compared to total speed of your weapon) burry in the flesh, cutting it. Weapons designed for this attack will have curved blades, to facilitate cutting with realistic movement on part of the wielder, and sharp edges. There will be no remote tissue disruption, and the cut itself is likely to be narrow, hopefully passing through important or numerous enough stuff to kill or incapacitate. The attack will generally fail to damage anything it can't cut.

In second case you hit the target with edge, hoping to concentrate force in single line and cut or break stuff along it. You will have considerable energy and momentum transfer, so there will be remote wounding, like fractures, bruising and internal bleeding, and damage may occur even on failed penetration. Blades designed for that will be robust and either straight (like in typical western swords), or shaped according to other purposes, rather than swing geometry (like various pole weapon cutting edges, flanges or axe blades).

tl;dr:

Cutting would still damage you if it was done slowly.

Also, shouldn't there be a distinction between "slashing" and "cutting/chopping"? You can "slash" with spear and sword alike. It's the tip of the blade that matters. Minimal kinetic transfer due to the small surface on contact but still lethal and perhaps harder to perform due to the precise distance you need to manage. You attempt to cut/chop with the expectation that the blade will go through or will penetrate deep and if it doesn't, kinetic transfer can be substantial.
Actually that's a fair point. Mechanically slashing is a bit similar to cutting analogue for piercing weapons, though of course attack geometry is different, and so are techniques.

It's similar to cutting, except even more, because there is no hope at all for deep wounds so attacker must concentrate on targetting important, but shallowly located stuff, like some blood vessels and tendons, or simply causing pain and bleeding while keeping target at bay.

These niggers talking about bigger is not slower are just fucking retards. In a "no metal armor situation" the deadliest sword made by man is the fucking rapier, with the katana as a close second.
Just to nitpick, lethality of slender piercing weapons actually varies a lot depending on many situational factors.

There were even cases of people getting ran through the heart, surprising the opponent by lethally counterattacking, and then surprising everyone else by getting better instead of croaking.

It's similar to the matter with small calibre FMJ rounds. They may penetrate and even hit vital organs, but even though vital organs are generally not very resistant to tissue disruption, the resulting wounding may still be too limited to incapacitate the target in reasonable time or kill it when proper medical aid is applied afterwards.

Katana sounds more reliable, because it spreads its limited tissue disruption volume across large plane that's guaranteed to cut through lots of important stuff.

DTs (...) DPS system
Does not compute.

In DT based system notion of DPS iss effectively meaningless.

If your DT is a massive 3 and I hit you with 1000 1 point attacks you won't feel it, if I hit you with one 100 point attack you get 97 points worth of ouch in single neat package.

DraQ, with a physical system you'll get seriously derpy results unless you can create a very precise emulation of martial artist movements.
Or wild swings.

In any case, the derp should be pretty evenly distributed across possible situations as long as they don't involve something seriously exotic, and thus visible in basic testing.

Whereas in an abstract system you will get derp concentrate in every situation you don't account for and therefore cannot test for.

It's a valid point, but I would rather go for the type of derp that plays nicely with emergent gameplay and devs not being experts on every subject covered in their game, than one that doesn't manifest if and only if player is clueless and does everything according to the script.

It's better to have something reliably half broken, than something that's reliable most of the time, but when it fails, it goes in completely unpredictable direction and with catastrophic magnitude.
 
In My Safe Space
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It's a valid point, but I would rather go for the type of derp that plays nicely with emergent gameplay and devs not being experts on every subject covered in their game, than one that doesn't manifest if and only if player is clueless and does everything according to the script.
Combat is a central part of almost every cRPG, not "every subject".
 

DraQ

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It's a valid point, but I would rather go for the type of derp that plays nicely with emergent gameplay and devs not being experts on every subject covered in their game, than one that doesn't manifest if and only if player is clueless and does everything according to the script.
Combat is a central part of almost every cRPG, not "every subject".
Quite the contrary.

Setting is pretty much the central part of almost every RPG and it consists of myriads of things that can turn out jarring. Combat is just one of many conflict resolution mechanics.
 
In My Safe Space
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Quite the contrary.

Setting is pretty much the central part of almost every RPG and it consists of myriads of things that can turn out jarring. Combat is just one of many conflict resolution mechanics.
Maybe in PnP RPGs. Not in most of cRPGs that I have played.
 

DraQ

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Quite the contrary.

Setting is pretty much the central part of almost every RPG and it consists of myriads of things that can turn out jarring. Combat is just one of many conflict resolution mechanics.
Maybe in PnP RPGs. Not in most of cRPGs that I have played.
What you can do in combat is dictated by the setting, what you fight with is dictated by the setting, where you fight and how is dictated by the setting, what and who you fight is dictated by the setting, why you fight is largelly influenced by the setting.

And then there is all the non-combat stuff.
 

tuluse

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I could just as easily say setting is dictated by what you can do in combat, setting is dictated by what you fight in combat, setting is dictated by where you fight and how you fight. Setting is largely influenced by why you fight.

What came first the chicken or the egg?
 

DraQ

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I could just as easily say setting is dictated by what you can do in combat, setting is dictated by what you fight in combat, setting is dictated by where you fight and how you fight. Setting is largely influenced by why you fight.

What came first the chicken or the egg?
Derp.

Of course the egg came first (as biology confirms :smug:) without the setting to unify them and give them sense in context of each other all those elements are just a disjoint mess. Not to mention the fact that there is usually more to an RPG than combat.
 
In My Safe Space
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What you can do in combat is dictated by the setting, what you fight with is dictated by the setting, where you fight and how is dictated by the setting, what and who you fight is dictated by the setting, why you fight is largelly influenced by the setting.

And then there is all the non-combat stuff.
Almost every setting has adventurers fighting humanoids using renaissance-level technology.
 

Zeriel

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I could just as easily say setting is dictated by what you can do in combat, setting is dictated by what you fight in combat, setting is dictated by where you fight and how you fight. Setting is largely influenced by why you fight.

What came first the chicken or the egg?
Derp.

Of course the egg came first (as biology confirms :smug:) without the setting to unify them and give them sense in context of each other all those elements are just a disjoint mess. Not to mention the fact that there is usually more to an RPG than combat.

Well, hold on. It's mostly a semantic argument--biologically speaking the egg does come first, but the proto-chicken that is not actually a chicken comes before the egg.

22938887.jpg
 

DraQ

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I could just as easily say setting is dictated by what you can do in combat, setting is dictated by what you fight in combat, setting is dictated by where you fight and how you fight. Setting is largely influenced by why you fight.

What came first the chicken or the egg?
Derp.

Of course the egg came first (as biology confirms :smug:) without the setting to unify them and give them sense in context of each other all those elements are just a disjoint mess. Not to mention the fact that there is usually more to an RPG than combat.

Well, hold on. It's mostly a semantic argument--biologically speaking the egg does come first, but the proto-chicken that is not actually a chicken comes before the egg.

22938887.jpg
So the combat comes before setting except it isn't actually combat yet?
22938887.jpg
 

Moribund

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I love how DraQ just makes shit up then says it with great force and authority like he's not a semi-retarded teenager but some kind of RPG expert.

Alternate, obvious explanation: you are a highly confused person who has no clue what an RPG is and the fact you only like about a hndful of them says you are on the wrong forum. You will always be disappointed because that word doesn't mean what you think it means, inconceivable as it is. :lol:
 

Zeriel

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but the proto-chicken that is not actually a chicken comes before the egg.
proto chicken is created in the egg, therefore...

Which is a different type of egg. If you go back far enough through this process, you end up with a species that isn't egg-laying at all.
 

St. Toxic

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Kind of like how turn-based combat evolved into the more realistic realtime 3rdperson shoulder-mounted cam combat before we really got to the golden egg-stage of cRPG's.
 

Delterius

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I could just as easily say setting is dictated by what you can do in combat, setting is dictated by what you fight in combat, setting is dictated by where you fight and how you fight. Setting is largely influenced by why you fight.

What came first the chicken or the egg?
Derp.

Of course the egg came first (as biology confirms :smug:) without the setting to unify them and give them sense in context of each other all those elements are just a disjoint mess. Not to mention the fact that there is usually more to an RPG than combat.

These aren't even contradictory points.

What's the primary, most present and, arguably, most important mechanic of most RPGs? Combat.

What's the first concern of a developer that prizes itself with storytelling? The Setting (as well as the. broadly, physical laws that govern it: largely conveyed through combat). Designing both how combat plays out and the fundamentals of the setting is precisely the first thing we've seen from Obsidian.

Which is more important? The answer to that question can't be generic because A) It only makes sense if Lore and Gameplay mechanics contradict each other, which isn't always since they may as well as be intertwined; and B) Because each developer deals with the matter in a particular way.

Obsidian itself is probably going to deal with Lore X Gameplay in a much more flexible fashion before the Setting is estabilished, whereas once the setting's context is written, it might as well as be in stone - otherwise the company's quality as a writer declines almost entirely. Retconning is a sin for fantasy writers and, I believe, the biggest of them all. In another hand a developer that doesn't care completely submits Setting to whatever plans they have for Gameplay - one good example is Blizzard.
 

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